It was ten minutes since Dasha had called her, and she couldn’t find her keys. She heard Luisa’s voice in her head, Turn on the lights, might be an idea. She wanted to cry, but the time for crying was past. At the Women’s Centre the charge doctor had sounded merely bored when eventually, an hour or so back, out of some last vestige of self-respect, Giuli had roused herself to call in sick. ‘Feeling rough,’ she had managed. ‘I think it’s something I’ve eaten.’ An excuse transparent through over-use, and they had both known it. ‘No problem,’ the doctor, a woman she’d never liked, had said. Giuli had heard the idle calculation in her tone: give her one more chance, maybe, we can get a replacement, plenty more where she came from. Ex-junkie, ex-hooker, waste of space. The worst of it was, she reminded herself of her own mother, a woman dead more than twenty years but when alive often to be seen lying motionless with self-disgust, face down on the bed. Mumbling incoherently.
