There is something about the kitchen that is not right. A kettle has been left on the gas ring, a new kettle at that and the after smell of burned rubber. Then there is Eily’s purse, the medicine that Maddie has to take every four hours and Elmer propped on the dresser, all evidence of their leaving in a hurry. In a corner his purple Rolls Royce, his ‘Vintage’ as he calls it and a stack of wooden bricks. She thinks maybe that Eily has had to bring him to the doctor and considers ringing the surgery but stops herself. To be in Eily’s kitchen without Eily is quite unsettling. She misses the laughs, the smokes, the bit of bickering. In the basket are the several stones that Eily collected on her journeys, stones sometimes chosen in the vertigo of love. She picks one up - round, squat, grey, inscrutable, its stony life locked within it, so that it tells nothing of its former whereabouts. She is jittery, stroppy at moments, and in the tiny mirror her eyes are stricken as if someone had tried to scratch them.
