Finders, Keepers - Sabine Durrant Page 0,3

of us deals with trauma in different ways. And after what she’s done for me, I’ll forgive her anything. I really will.

My fingers are still raw from scrubbing at the graffiti. I keep wondering who could posibly have done such a thing? What are they trying to tell me? It’s awful, but as she sleeps, and the night presses against the window, I feel scared for the first time. Have I made a mistake? It’s just one thing was missing from her outburst this afternoon, the one thing you’d expect to find in a tragedy of this kind.

Grief.

Chapter Two

Caran d’Ache Swisscolor watercolour pencils in metal box (pack of 40)

Anthropomorphism, noun. The attribution of human personality or characteristics to something non-human, as an animal, object, etc.

I am not the subject of this story, but I don’t want to be elusive, for curiosity about me to be a distraction. Possibly no one but me will ever read this – writing things down has always been a good way, for me, of making sense of the world. But in the event my words reach a wider public, I thought, while Ailsa is having a bath, I’d better record what I can about myself to get it out of the way. All narratives are unreliable; we all have our own axe to grind. It’s important to be transparent, that’s all.

My name is Verity Ann Baxter. I have lived at number 424 Trinity Road, SW17 all my life, give or take. One mother. One sister. My father left when I was four. My mother died five years ago.

I’m fifty-two.

I’m not a virgin. Sorry, if that’s TMI, as Melissa would say. But I don’t want anyone claiming I’m a bitter spinster of the parish or, as Maeve and Sue from my pub quiz team keep insisting, that my interest in Ailsa is sapphic. It annoys me, how our current culture bangs on all the time about inclusivity, but there’s still an implicit prejudice against those of us who are child- and partner-free, as if our views aren’t valid, as if we haven’t earned the right to comment, without jealousy or longing, on the behaviour of others who aren’t. I’m not at all prudish. I quite enjoy watching sex on television. Some of the happiest moments of my life were spent watching Love Island with Ailsa and her kids. Fact is, been there, done that. I’ve had enough sex in my life to know I’m not missing out.

Ailsa and I both had unconventional childhoods – it’s one of the things that drew us together. Not unconventional as in glamorous, hippy parents hanging out in Marrakech, but unconventional in nurturing a sense in us as children of not quite fitting in at school, of being a little odd. Ailsa’s mother was clearly an alcoholic – though her daughter is too loyal to say as much. Mine was an invalid, who suffered from fibromyalgia, a chronic condition characterised by widespread pain and a heightened response to pressure. It was unpredictable where it might flare, but her neck was a constant issue. She would need the support of multiple cushions, in a tier-like pattern around her shoulders, to sit at all comfortably. My sister Faith and I learnt from an early age to avoid any sudden movements, and to kiss her, when bidden, with a neat non-jarring purse of the lips.

Her illness may have got worse after my father walked out. I’m not sure. I have few memories of life before he went. Or of him. A certain aftershave pulls me up short, and fabric in a particular black and white dog-tooth check speaks to me in a peculiarly painful way. He worked for the gas board and I’m told he was from a lower social class to my mother, but family life, it turned out, wasn’t his bag. Or that’s the conclusion events have led me to extrapolate. One Saturday morning, when my sister and I were still pre-school, he went out to get a paper. The woman who ran the greengrocer – now a branch of Pizza Express – said she saw him getting on the 319. He was never seen again. That, at least, is the story my mother always clung to. I think she found the dramatic nature of it reassuring. I have a few memories that don’t fit: the sound of them arguing long before he left, empty hangers clanging in the cupboard, and then, after his ‘disappearance’, a trip with him to the fairground,