Read Threads for Free Online Page B

voice is muffled by a bunch of purple and green things in cellophane.
    I'm deeply regretting sharing the condom image with Edie. We were messaging each other and I was trying to give the full impact of the sheer awfulness of the maxi-dress disaster. For an instant, I forgot that Edie's cleverness and her reliability with embarrassing information are at opposite ends of the scale.
    But it's too late now, and anyway, we're busy. We're in a grubby building just off Gloucester Road, standing on the staircase that leads up to Crow's flat. Her Auntie Florence wants to meet us.
    The smell is the thing I notice most of all. I think something must have died in the flat downstairs. Possibly a mouse. Or maybe a family of them.
    ‘Perhaps on cold days it's not so bad,’ says Ediehopefully. She's lucky. She's holding the bunch of flowers we've bought with us and she can shove her face in them, like an Elizabethan lady with a nosegay.
    Crow says the invitation is to say thank you for the reading stuff and helping her out with the new fabrics. Edie suspects it's to make sure we're not a couple of slave-traders or child-molesters and I think she's probably right. So I've borrowed one of Edie's skirts and a top-thing to look respectable. The skirt is hanging off me and the top-thing is straining over even my modest boobage, so they're not having quite the effect I was after. I look more like a wild gypsy princess than a budding royal. Edie, as usual, looks as though she's dressed for tea at the British Embassy.
    The door opens and a tall, elegant but exhausted-looking woman lets us in. Edie offers her the flowers and she thanks us with a smile. I'm guessing she doesn't get them on a regular basis.
    ‘I'm Florence,’ she says. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ We shake her hand.
    Inside there is a main room with a couple of doors leading off it. The kitchen is in one corner. Another corner has a low table and a couple of chairs and a stool, where we are motioned to sit.
    ‘Elizabeth!’ the woman calls loudly, as if the sound might have to carry down a couple of corridors. A door opens about half a metre away and Crow appears. Apparently, Crow is Elizabeth. Confusing. Behind her, Ican see a tiny room, hardly bigger than the bed, hung from floor to ceiling with knitwear and dresses in various stages of design. How Crow can even breathe among that lot, I can't imagine.
    She comes through obediently and helps her aunt bring a couple of paper plates from the kitchen area. We're treated to crisps and biscuits and cups of super-strong tea. I notice the lack of anything on the walls. Coming from a home that is practically an art gallery, I find this physically painful. There are just two photographs in little wooden frames. One is of a tall, elegant man who looks like the male version of Florence, with a woman and a little girl – Crow's family, I assume. The other is a school picture of Crow, looking sullen and watchful and under-accessorised.
    Florence explains how grateful she is to us for providing some company for her niece. She doesn't seem to be worried about the slave trade thing at all.
    ‘I have two jobs. I work every day, unless I'm sick. I'm hardly ever here to talk to Elizabeth. She's a hard worker too. Every day she's always making something. She has Yvette’ – the woman ‘from Dior’ – ‘but she's an old, old lady. Crow needs people her own age. She needs children.’
    We smile respectfully. Fourteen-year-olds love being categorised as children. Yes indeedy. Totally with the programme.
    Edie picks up the photograph of the man, the woman and the little girl.

    ‘Your brother?’ she asks.
    ‘Yes. James. He's a teacher. A very responsible man. He's passionate about England and anything English, isn't he, Elizabeth?’
    Crow nods. I'm struggling with the Elizabeth–Crow thing. It's a strange nickname and not linked to her real name at all. Edie says she's asked and Crow won't talk about it. Clams up like Harrison Ford in an