The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls. Sarah May

slept with a minor in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

      Richard took the same amount of cocaine most mornings to help him out of bed, out of the house and into the dark green Skoda that had been designed with Saabs in mind. He used to make people laugh—his ex-wife, Caro, included—at his Skoda jokes, but that was when he drove a Saab. Now, as a Skoda driver, he wasn’t entirely sure of his footing when it came to telling Skoda jokes, and didn’t know any jokes about Saabs.

      The fog was beginning to lift and the early morning world of Burwood shone through the diminishing grey as he drove the Skoda out of town towards the new bypass and Technical College.

      Once there he made his way to the far end of the car park and parked beneath a bank of Scotch pines where traces of fog still hung. This was where he always parked because nobody else ever did.

      He shunted his seat back, picked up the bag of cocaine he kept on the floor under the driver’s seat, and did another line from the Skoda’s dashboard. After this he got his phone out his bag and dialled the number he’d been thinking about dialling all morning. She didn’t pick up. He thought about leaving a message, but in the end decided not to.

      Still clutching the phone, he got out the car and headed towards the glass and steel college building. It wasn’t until he got half way across the car park that he realised how cold his legs were.

      Feeling suddenly sick with fear, he checked to see that he’d remembered to put on the suit trousers—he’d once got as far as the bypass before realising that he was only half dressed. Yes, he was wearing trousers; it was his socks that he’d forgotten to put on.

      Reassured, he passed through the automatic doors into reception where he saw Polly—who taught textiles and made her own clothes—standing waiting for him.

      ‘Richard,’ she said, coming towards him in one of her own designs, her voice long and mellow from decades of breathing exercises. ‘I was hoping to catch you—’ She paused, hauling her hair slowly back over her shoulders and laying a hand on his arm. ‘Everything okay?’

      He’d once made the mistake of crying in front of her when he gave her a lift home, and now she thought she had Fast Track Access to him.

      He stared at her hand, but it didn’t leave his arm.

      ‘I really need you to confirm re. the Transcendental Yoga Retreat.’

      Lost, he probed his mind for references to a Transcendental Yoga Retreat. Was this something they’d actually discussed? Her tone seemed to suggest so—at a worryingly concrete level. Her tone seemed to suggest that she was going to carry on probing his Chakra points until he caved in—and said ‘yes’.

      While waiting for a response, her hands started brushing at the shoulders of his jacket, dusted with fallout from his nostrils after the line he did on the Skoda’s dashboard.

      Could he tell Polly about his problem?

      ‘Look at all this dandruff. You’re stressed,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some wonderful oil for scalp conditions.’

      Their eyes met. ‘I just don’t know if it’s my thing—a Transcendental Yoga Retreat.’

      ‘Did you go to the site?’

      He shook his head.

      ‘Go to the site—have a look at it—then make your mind up.’ Her hand was still on his arm.

      ‘The thing is—I’ve got quite a lot of complicated personal stuff going on at the moment.’

      Polly nodded, interested.

      Richard looked around him.

      The college building was optimistically open-planned so ironically reception—the main thoroughfare into the college and usually crowded—was often the best place to have a private conversation.

      ‘I’ve been involved with someone.’ He broke off when he saw the look on her face. ‘Not seriously,’ he said quickly. ‘I mean—for me.’

      ‘I didn’t realise,’ Polly mumbled, upset.

      ‘I should never have started it.’

      ‘So—you’re breaking it off?’

      ‘Trying to.’

      ‘Why trying to?’

      ‘She’s not getting the point.’

      All this was good—what Polly wanted to hear—and she would have been reassured by it, exuberantly so, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Richard’s facial expressions were changing by the second and there were beads of sweat along his upper lip.

      ‘She doesn’t understand the…impossibility…I mean, it’s my fault for starting it in the first place, but the…impossibility…of it carrying on.’

      ‘So talk to her…tell her.’

      Richard let out a strange, high-pitched giggle.

      ‘I keep trying to, but she’s obsessed. It’s her age—’

      ‘Her age?’

      Richard nodded. ‘I mean, she’s quite young.’

      ‘How young?’

      ‘Young.’

      ‘How young?’

      He scrunched up his face. ‘Seventeen.’

      ‘Seventeen!’

      A group of students turned round and stared at them then swung away again, laughing.

      ‘For fuck’s sake, Richard.’

      He winced. ‘I know.’

      ‘No, you don’t know.’ Polly paused. ‘She’s not a student here, is she? Please God, don’t tell me she’s a student here.’

      He shook his head. ‘Look, I really need to talk -’

      ‘I’m no professional.’

      ‘I just need to talk—to somebody. Later? After school?’

      The bell sounded and she started to move off through reception.

      ‘Please—’ he called after her.

      She turned and looked at him before disappearing through the double doors leading to Art & Textiles.

      He shuffled over to the reception desk, feeling cold inside, and slid his elbows across the glass surface. ‘I don’t suppose—’

      The receptionist turned, in her headset, to look at him.

      ‘I don’t suppose you keep spare pairs of socks behind there, do you?’

      She carried on looking at him, sighed, and turned back to her magazine and the article on celebrity house foreclosures she’d been reading.

       14

      On the Meadowfield Estate—Burwood’s only council housing—Grace Cummings was tying a French plait in her ten year old sister Dixie’s hair while Dixie, who was going through a major Sound of Music phase, tried to pick out the tune for ‘Edelweiss’ on a mouth organ she got in a Christmas cracker the year before.

      Their mother—Nicole Cummings—had been working at Fleurs, the florist, for a year now. She used to have a job cleaning until Grace bullied her into applying for the one at Fleurs when it was advertised in The County Times. Despite the early start—which left Grace in charge of getting Dixie to school—working with flowers had changed Nicole in a way nothing or nobody else ever had. For the first time in her life, she had a career rather than a job, was sitting exams to get accredited and even—poised on patchy lino inhaling the green perfume of cut flowers on the threshold between life and death—nurturing a silent