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and useless; she giggled, imagining herself as a giant Barbie doll, speechless and concupiscent, sitting there with Mick.
    The ducks had gone and the river was slack and tired, its treacle surface broken by an occasional ripple. Mick hunched over the table, twisting his face away, his spine like a knife beneath his shirt. The silence between them stretched. She lit another cigarette, the last one in the packet.
    Mick reached across and pulled it out of her mouth.
    â€˜You smoke too much, girl.’ He crumpled the cigarette in his fist and scattered it, stinking and smouldering, on to the grass at their feet.
    Christy’s mouth gaped as the wires suspending her hysteria snapped.
    â€˜You’re crazy. Didn’t that hurt?’
    Mick wouldn’t look at her. His scar stood out across a fat vein and she stared at him, hairs creeping on her bare arms, willing him to look up and smile or take her hand. He didn’t. He rose, stiff and taller than she thought he could be, and picked up the car keys.
    â€˜I’m tired. I’ve got to start early tomorrow, I’ll take you home now.’
    Christy sat small in the car, pressed down by silence. When she tried to say something Mick turned loud music on, bouncing his palms on the steering wheel, turning his car into a cube of sound too dense for Christy to penetrate. He didn’t say goodbye when they reached her house. He paused long enough for her to get out then spun away before she could close the door, jerking down the track so the door cracked shut by itself. Christy didn’t cry until she got to her room.
    She thought that was it. She had blown it because she had been drunk. By Friday she had taken down the photograph Mick had given her and started wearing glasses again because her eyes were too cried out for contact lenses. She felt so ugly she was relishing it; Frank was sick of asking if she was all right and had gone fishing. Christy locked the office after work, balancing two plastic trays of mutant smoked prawns as she struggled with the keys. One batch of pinkstumps slid to the ground and she stepped back on to them, grinding deformed commas into the gravel.
    â€˜Christy, you’re killing the wildlife, or was it dead already?’
    Mick was behind her. Before she could turn round he was hugging her and the rest of the prawns slithered between them and hung lewd and rosy on their clothes.
    â€˜These are for you. I’ve missed you, sweetheart.’ He gave her a bunch of pink roses; they were a better colour than the prawns and their scent soared above the dried-out smell of bloodless fish. He had never called her sweetheart before.
    She should have been cool and said she was busy, but he disarmed her, whispering, ‘You’re beautiful,’ which could never have been further from the truth than then.
    Rushing to her bedroom to change she stood a moment in front of the mirror, her eye sockets puffed like ring doughnuts, the eyes themselves washed out and red-veined. Christy took off her glasses and threw them on to the dressing table. Her hair had separated into strings, dark at her scalp revealing grey glimpses of skin; brushing it was useless, it would lie dank and heavy down her back.
    She yelled down the stairs, ‘Mick, I’ve got to wash my hair. Will you wait?’
    She put on a pink dress, giggling to herself in her bedroom, wondering if Mick would notice she was continuing the rose and prawn theme. He was taking her to his house tonight. She knew it even though hehadn’t said so; and he was nervous. He had not told her much about where he lived and Christy preferred to guess than to ask. He drove fast, all the car windows open to dry her hair. They turned off the road and slowed to follow a tarmac track winding through pasture and woodland, neat fences dividing kempt cows from sheep and horses. It was so orderly it could have been a calendar photograph. It did not seem a likely place for Mick.
    â€˜The