Read The Flavours of Love for Free Online Page B

garden, against the back, whitewashed wall, surveying, like a parent who has returned from holiday without two teenage children, the damage done by the slugs to my vegetables.
    *
    That’s a big one. Perfectly spherical, its clear skin glistening and swirling as it spins away. I dunk the long, purple bubble wand again and take it out, wave it through the air to release different size bubbles into the bright sunlight of this clear April morning. Today’s weather is perfect for making bubbles. Joel and I would, much to the mortification of our children, stand in the garden, one of us with the wand, the other giggling and laughing as we chased around after what looked like large, fragile crystal balls. Then we’d swap and carry on for as long as we had enough mixture. ‘You’re behaving like you’re three,’ Zane would say after fifteen minutes of watching us. ‘What he said,’ Phoebe would add. And we’d laugh even louder because we were their parents and embarrassing them was our job.
    I still buy bubble mixture refill, but this is the first time since that day I’ve glugged the yellow liquid into an empty bubble wand container, stood in the centre of the lawned section of our garden and done this. It’s another of those things I haven’t been able to do because it doesn’t work without my partner in crime. Except today, I need to feel close to him, I need to do something that reminds me of him and how we used to be, how I used to be, how I was once able to feel something other than numb. I am constantly numb, as though I am surrounded by swathes of cotton wool and gauze, as though life is filtered through those thick layers and I’m not actually allowed to fully experience anything. Maybe it’s too much for me, maybe, like the glimpse I got with yesterday’s news, engaging fully with the world, actually touching it by living in it properly would completely overwhelm me. If I do this, though, maybe I’ll connect with Joel. Maybe I’ll get some feeling back and I’ll know what I need to do next.
    I could do that with cooking something, but right now I need to be outside, I need to have the air on my skin, the sun in my eyes. I need to watch the bubbles rise effortlessly into the air, catch the light, and settle themselves on the wind to be carried away. I need to do all this and see if it can bring a smile to my face and feelings into my body.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Phoebe asks. She steps out of the kitchen door, which I left propped open, still in her silky blue pyjamas, her fluffy pink dressing gown tied firmly over the top.
    I dunk my wand, then slice it through the air to free the flawless spheres. ‘I’m making bubbles.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because it’s Tuesday. Because I’m not at work. And because a bunch of slugs have trashed my vegetable patch.’ I’ve got my green and white striped gardener’s apron on, and my gardening gloves, so I probably look either strange or eccentric depending on how you viewed these things. ‘It’s surprisingly calming,’ I add. I hold out the bottle to her. ‘Want a go?’
    She rolls her eyes and curls her lip in disgust. If I’d ever looked atmy parents like that, I think they’d have slapped my face clean off my head.
    ‘Can I have my phone back?’ she asks and shoves her hands into the neat square pockets of her dressing gown.
    I lower the bubble wand. ‘Not until we’ve talked a bit,’ I say.
    The eye roll and lip curl turn into a full-body sigh.
    ‘Come and have a look at what the slugs have done,’ I say to her. ‘It’s really quite impressive, if you’re not the person whose plants they’ve destroyed.’
    She has her trainers on, so drags herself across the patio, across the lawn, across the other part of the patio to the vegetable patch in the corner. It’s shaded a little by the overhang from the large oak tree that grows in next door’s garden. We stand side by side, looking at the leaves of my spinach plants, which look like badly