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knick-knacks that meant nothing to her anymore.
    She finished her soup, washed up the bowl and spoon and left them drying next to her mug on the draining board. Her mother would have made her dry them up and put them away. It suddenly occurred to her that she only ever used one set of crockery. The same mug, bowl and spoon, the same one plate. She shook her head. How had she let this happen?
    Photos of her at various ages hung on the wall along the stairs. Her parents had already been old when she arrived. Her mother in her forties, her father just past fifty. To them, she had been a late given gift. They had tried to document every bit of their happiness that they could. She had taken it for granted that everyone’s parents kept every single school photo and a folder full of every appearance in the nativity play, school poetry competition, whatever. They were a family. Wasn’t that what families did?
    Normally, she would have gone straight to her room, had a shower and gone to bed. Today, she paused. The door to her parents’ room was shut. She rarely went in here, apart from to clean it when it came up on her cleaning routine. She opened the door and turned on the light. She had cleared her father’s wardrobe out after his funeral, so that her mother didn’t have to do it, but there were still photos and bits and bobs of his around the rooms. There was a photo of him as a young man, skinny and fresh off the boat from Sri Lanka. A photo of him, much older, standing next to his pretty English wife, both laughing. Grace picked up the photo of the three of them, her parents beaming, despite the shadows under their eyes, and herself; a tiny bundle in her mother’s arms. She sank down onto the bed.
    She missed them. It was natural. Those last years had been such an endless treadmill of meals, medications, appointments, tantrums and frustrations, but she’d got used to that. So used to it, that she’d almost forgotten what it had been like before, when her parents were able. How sad to have lost all those trips to museums, bedtime stories, games of chase, where Daddy could never catch her because he was too wheezy after a few steps. Grace smiled. She missed them, but she didn’t have to preserve them in their old age. It wasn’t fair to any of them.
    She was about to replace the photo back on the dressing table, where it had always lived, when she decided against it. Instead, she took it with her. She would put it somewhere in her room and remember them as they were then.
    Later, in bed, she could just make out the shape of the photo on her bedside table. It made her feel better, somehow, as though a tiny parcel of weight had lifted. Grace smiled and closed her eyes.
    Sally remembered a party. The room had been decorated in rich reds and creams. There were chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. She had to persuade a man to give her a ticket and had to pay a fortune to buy the dress, even second-hand. Charity shop? Hah. Rip-off merchants more like. The prices they charged for something they’d been given for free! Sally had haggled, but that bitch that ran the shop had stood firm. Charitable? Bollocks.
    She checked the dress was clinging to her in all the right places and gave a little wiggle to make sure it swished properly. Excellent. Designer wear at high street prices. She supposed she couldn’t really complain. It was an investment. If tonight paid off, she could afford the real thing. She swept into the room and was marginally pissed off when heads did not turn instantly in her direction.
    She grabbed a glass of orange juice off the tray as the waiter went past. Sipping it delicately, she scanned the room. The trouble with rich men was that most of them didn’t make it big until they were middle-aged. She could do the sugar daddy thing again, she supposed, but really, if she had to sleep with a man, it would be a massive help if he was attractive. She spotted Maurice Kemp, the securities guy. Too old. Jeremy