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been useful in reverse, like the negative of an old-fashioned photograph. The opposite of whatever she suggested worked best. She hadn’t pressed her published books on the others. They were prose writers, after all.
    “You don’t need to go on a course, Mum,” Donna had said when she told her about it. “You’ll be with real amateurs.” But they were serious people, intent on their work. Iain had set off down that long road to find a future. Marina, the nurse, returned to the comfortable past. Aritha! Who could tell what had driven her to leap on Iain that night? Or, come to that, why had Ilsa laughed as the Coke dripped down Aritha’s face? Clever and attractive, Jody had sat there, a spectator, as if this was a normal end to a writing week.
    So what had that few hundred dollars and six days of veggie meals and editorial care done for her, for Ella herself? “What did you get out of it?” was Graeme’s question, and it was hard to explain. Just the sense that life goes on? That people will never give up trying to interpret the world? “I met some interesting people” didn’t justify the expense of his Mother’s Day gift, so she added that it had refreshed her mind and given her many new ideas and had been a real holiday and she would certainly do it again.
    But she’d got a better idea from the dinosaurs and perhaps too from the man who denied the visible truth. There was, really, only now. Only this day, this hour. This particular hour, she was sitting beside Harriet Cherton, reading to her. Harriet, lying very still, might live for a week or a day. The nurse brought in tea and went out again. Ella wondered what kind of words she would ask for on the last part of her journey. It would be poetry. Some patients asked for books they’d loved as a child. For others it was the repeated comfort of an old friend.
    “‘The evening ended with dancing. On its being proposed, Anne offered her services as usual…’”
    “Do you think she was stupid,” Harriet asked slowly, perhaps her final question, “to let herself be persuaded and lose eight or nine years of happiness?”

    ~ • ~

    When Paul came on Wednesday at five, he brought Ella a guide to Seattle and returned the copy of Apparatus she’d lent him. She looked the man over and certainly he was, for his age, quite trim, quite mobile. His face was lined but not aged-looking and his eyes were clear and kind. His hands were mottled like her own, but they were soft hands, not at all skeletal. “Come and sit beside me,” she said to him, opening the guide. “So shall we go on the Clipper? Or we could take the ferry to Vancouver and drive.”
    ~ • ~
    It was never totally dark in hotel rooms. Streaks of light shone round the edges of the drapes and from under the door. Ella looked at Paul asleep now in the other bed. It would be better next time when he wasn’t so shy. She sat up and took a sheet of paper from the phone pad, and the pen, and finished the poem she’d begun to write last week. Syllabic prints on tiles Become pebbles. Cyrillic shapes bearing Positive messages Undermine wallpaper With hints of passing time.

Woman at the Bar

    Young woman at the bar, red dress covering breasts but bare to waist at back. Men perched on stools either side leaning in towards her. Hungrily? Not quite. Table near exit, older woman in yellow knitted vest, odd garment, wispy reddish hair destroyed by too many chemicals, sits alone with glass of red. Music loud enough to drive out thought. Hockey playoffs on three large screens. Loud groans as puck bounces off the post. Two women side by side at same table, eyes glued to laptops, not speaking to each other. One of them takes out cell and talks on it while still tapping keys. Mid-life Vancouver. This is me, now, here.
    Jody picked up her glass of Pinot Blanc, swirled the liquid round and poured some into her mouth. It was vacation time. There’d be another glass. Maybe two. One evening away from editing the latest