Then I sit down in front of the dressing table and study my reflection in the mirror. What happened back there under the fig tree? Did I doze off and dream the explosion and the boy with the angel face? Did I pass out – faint at the sight of my own blood? Surely not. I, Cressida Allenby, who can party all weekend and still arrive for work bright eyed and bushy tailed on Monday, ready to inspire even 4WZ with an interest in Macbeth or the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Behaving like a Victorian lady with an attack of the vapours? What was that all about? I examine my face. My mother’s doctor said I looked washed out. It’s true. I am pale. Pasty, Mother would have called it. There are blue shadows under my eyes. I run my fingers along my jawline, aware for the first time of a softening and loosening of the flesh – the first faint signs of inevitable deliquescence and decay. Twenty-eight. In just over a year I shall be thirty. Already there is a faint tracery of lines at the corners of my eyes.
What do You think about Aphrodite's Island (2014)?
