small and earnest boy, holding up a tin space shuttle, some-thing he’d made, telling her that one day he was going to invent a time capsule and he was going to go back and fix things. What sort of things? she’d said in the dream. Why, all the things that ever went wrong, of course—she could come with him if she wanted.
She did want.
The hospital doors opened with a whoosh and a pair of nurses burst through. One glanced at Laurel and her eyes widened in recognition. Laurel nodded a vague sort of greeting, dropping what was left of her cigarette as the nurse leaned to whisper to her friend.
Rose was waiting on a bank of seats in the foyer and for a split second Laurel saw her as one might a stranger. She was wrapped in a purple crocheted shawl that gathered at the front in a pink bow, and her wild hair, silver now, was roped in a loose plait over one shoulder. Laurel suffered a pang of almost unbearable affection when she noticed the bread tie holding her sister’s plait together. ‘Rosie,’ she said, hiding her emotion behind jolly-hockey-sticks, hale and hearty—hating herself just a little as she did so. ‘God, it feels like ages. We’ve been ships in the night, you and I.’
They embraced and Laurel was struck by the lavender smell, familiar, but out of place. It belonged to summer-holiday afternoons in the good room at Grandma Nicolson’s Sea Blue boarding house, and not to her little sister.
‘I’m so glad you could come,’ Rose said, squeezing Laurel’s hands before leading her down the hallway.
‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t.’
‘I’d have come earlier but for the interview.’
‘I know.’
‘And I’d be staying longer if not for rehearsals. The film starts shooting in a fortnight.’
‘I know.’ Rose clenched Laurel’s hand even tighter, as if for emphasis. ‘Mummy will be thrilled to have you here at all. She’s so proud of you, Lol. We all are.’
Praise within one’s family was worrisome and Laurel ignored it. ‘The others?’
‘Not yet. Iris is caught in traffic and Daphne arrives this after-noon. She’ll come straight to the house from the airport. She’s going to call en route.’
‘And Gerry? What time’s he due?’
It was a joke and even Rose, the nice Nicolson, the only one who didn’t as a rule go in for teasing, couldn’t help but giggle. Their brother could construct cosmic-distance calendars to calculate the whereabouts of faraway galaxies, but ask him to estimate his arrival time and he was flummoxed.
They turned the corner and found the door labelled ‘Dorothy Nicol- son’. Rose reached for the knob but hesitated before turning it. ‘I have to warn you, Lol,’ she said, ‘Mummy’s gone down-hill since you were here last. She’s up and down. One minute she’s quite her old self, the next …’ Rose’s lips quivered and she clutched at her long strand of beads. Her voice lowered as she continued. ‘She gets confused, Lol, upset sometimes, saying things about the past, things I don’t always understand—the nurses say it doesn’t mean anything, that it happens often when people—when they’re at Mummy’s stage. The nurses have tablets they give her then; they settle her down, but they make her terribly groggy. I wouldn’t expect too much today.’
Laurel nodded. The doctor had said as much when she rang last week to check. He’d used a litany of tedious euphemisms—a race well run, time to answer the final summons, the long sleep—his tone so supercilious that Laurel had been unable to resist: ‘Do you mean, Doctor, that my mother is dying?’ She’d said it in a queenly voice, just for the satisfaction of hearing him splutter. The reward had been sweet but short-lived, lasting only until his answer came.
Yes.
That most treasonous of words.
Rose pushed open the door—‘Look who I found, Mummy!’—and Laurel realised she was holding her breath.
There was a time in Laurel’s childhood when she’d been afraid. Of the dark, of zombies, of the strange men Grandma Nicolson warned were lurking behind corners to snatch up little girls and do unmentionable things to them. (What sort of things? Unmentionable things. Always like that, the threat more frightening for its lack of detail, its hazy suggestion of tobacco and sweat and hair in strange places.) So convincing had her grandmother been, that Laurel had known it was only a matter of time before her fate found her and had its wicked way.
Sometimes her greatest fears had balled themselves together so she woke in