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spineless stoners. The turning-point came when I was twenty-one and had a boyfriend called Brendan. He used to wear a badge saying
Wrong Place. Wrong Time. Be There.
I remember seeing him struggling to open a can of lager. As I gazed at his thin shoulders I felt a rush of desire so intense it took away my breath. Then I realized that this was purely maternal. What I really wanted was a baby.
    So I found myself a proper grown-up man with broad shoulders, got married and by the time I was twenty-five I had two children and we had bought the house in whose basement I had spent my carefree single life. When the marriage unravelled in a miasma of drink, recriminations and faithlessness I embarked on a series of disastrous relationships, blah blah, you don’t want to hear about them. It’s an old story.
    Let’s just say that I was like a drone missile in my ability to seek out Mr Wrong. And them with me. But with my advancing years even these have petered out. Men want young women. That’s the brutal truth. They want to cheat death, don’t we all? They want a reflection of their younger selves, not a wrinkled face that mirrors back their own mortality. That rush of renewal must be intoxicating, the bastards.
    Actually it’s a beautiful day today, summertime’s started. Outside, the trees are heavy with blossom. I live in a charming street of terraced houses now inhabited by bankers and adulterous politicians fiddling their expenses. This area has changed; the families whose children played with mine have long since departed. Opposite, the council flats have been sold to the young professionals whose faces I see illuminated by their laptops. The only person who remains is the obligatory mad-woman-with-cats who lives up the road and who, like all mad people, never seems to grow older. Ha! Maybe she’s thinking the same thing about me.
    I can’t rattle around this house for ever. I know I should sell up and move somewhere smaller but the idea fills me with panic. Where would I go? It could be anywhere, that’s the problem. I keep thinking that something will happen to jolt me out of my inertia. It’ll happen when I least expect it, and it will change my life for ever.
    I’m sitting at my laptop, scrolling through images of Prague. I’m researching illustrations for a biography of an actress called Fanny Janauschek (me neither). Ladybirds have arrived from nowhere and are crawling over the window-panes.
    Maybe I should get that dog and move to the country. Something’s got to happen. I’m pondering this when suddenly, startlingly, the silence is broken. It’s the phone ringing.

White Springs, Texas
    â€˜WHAT’S UP, HONEY?’
    Lorrie jumped. Todd was standing behind her on the patio.
    â€˜Nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘I was watching that bird.’
    â€˜What bird?’
    â€˜It’s flown into the bushes.’
    There was a silence as they gazed at the battered grass of their backyard. It was littered with kids’ toys – a football, a doll’s stroller. Cans lay scattered from Dean’s target practice.
    Todd squatted down behind her, his hands on her shoulders. Lorrie’s heart thumped. Her husband had been home for three days now. Whenever he appeared she froze, waiting for him to have discovered that their life savings had disappeared.
I just been online, sweetheart. There seems to be some mistake.
    Each morning she woke up and, just for a moment, thought it had all been a dream. Then the reality hit her. She had been living her days in a state of paralysis. It was terrible not to tell her husband but she hadn’t yet plucked up the courage. She simply couldn’t. One sentence and his life would be shattered.
    So she said nothing. A canyon had opened up between them and only she was aware of it. In his innocence Todd had become unreachable and she felt sick with loneliness. Her own husband, her best friend and confidant.