Olga McClure feeds the pencil into the sharpener, turns the handle. There’s the wood’s slight resistance until it yields to the blade and then the movement runs smooth. She repeats it with another pencil, and then another. It’ll need to be done thirty-two times. Olga knows who hovers at the door but she won’t look over. A pencil emerges with the lead broken. So do it again.
The bright voice: Olga! Olga, you haven’t forgotten our meeting?
I haven’t forgotten, she says, not lifting her head.
Well then, Olga, ready when you are. Just in the next ten minutes.
Ms Druggan sits not at her desk but on the comfortable orange seat in the corner. She wears running gear.
Take a seat, Olga, Ms Druggan says, indicating the comfortable green seat. Now, would you like a cup of tea?
No thank you.
Excuse my outfit, she says. I’m in training for a 10K race.
It’s for charity, says Ms Druggan.
For charity, says Olga. Very good.
So, Ms Druggan begins, I thought it was maybe a good time for the two of us to have a bit of a chat. You know? A chat about a few things here and there that need to be sorted out. Just a couple of things.
Right.
Yes, says Ms Druggan.
I see.
Ms Druggan sits up straighter. Uh huh, she says.
Tell me this, Olga, she says, when, and I want you to be completely honest, when did you last switch on your computer?
My computer?
Yeah.
Well, Olga says, let me see now. Hard to give a definitive answer. Maybe two weeks ago, possibly a little longer. I’m not sure.
Ms Druggan nods her head. More or less what I thought, she says. Do you feel, Olga, do you feel that you’ve been given adequate ICT training? Because obviously a computer that hasn’t been switched on in two weeks is really not ideal. You know what I mean? Now I absolutely realise that there’s a range of staff competence, particularly when it comes to some of the more senior members of staff. Well, senior members of staff in terms of age. I don’t underestimate how difficult it can be for some people to embrace new technology. So, maybe you feel you need further support in order to integrate ICT meaningfully.
No. I wouldn’t say I require further support.
Well that’s good, says Ms Druggan. I’m very glad to hear that. So, to recap, what we’re both in agreement on is that it is really really important that you start integrating ICT meaningfully into your teaching. For equality of experience.
Olga sighs. Equality of experience. What a ridiculous idea.
The children in your class, Ms Druggan continues, have not completed the LIN test, which should have been done at the beginning of last week. That’s when the children in the other classes completed the LIN test.
Oh. Well.
Yes, says Ms Druggan.
The LIN test is where the pupils have to give the monsters the different types of ice cream. I do know it.
It’s a computer-based, standardised cognitive ability assessment.
Well, I’ll perhaps pencil it in for next week.
It should have been done at the beginning of last week, if not earlier, says Ms Druggan.
Well, as I said, I will try to see if I can get it done next week.
Another thing, if you haven’t switched on your computer in two weeks, do you not feel you’ve missed a lot of communication?
Olga thinks. Not really, she says.
What do you mean not really?
This is a primary school with eight people working in eight rooms. It’s hardly a conglomerate. If anyone needs to speak to me, they know where to find me. And if I need to speak to someone the reverse holds true.
Olga picks up the handbag that has been resting at her feet.
Is that it? she says.
When Olga gets home, the dog is pleased to see her. It yaps as she puts out its food. The small brown thing is always busy, tussling with a rope or chasing a ball. Olga hadn’t cared what sort of dog she got. She’d just wanted a dog to take for walks because no one is loitering with a dog. Olga and the dog complete a familiar circuit most evenings so she knows well its favoured lamp posts and the clumps of weeds where it sniffs for whatever’s dank and compelling. On Tuesday and Thursday nights their walk extends further to the park, with its wrought iron gates and bandstand, miniature lake and shady paths. She lets the dog off the lead and it heads down the winding ways, always coming back when she calls Dog! She hasn’t given it a name. The park route takes Olga and the dog past the playground and the miniature lake but they keep going until they come to the pitches.
The others call Ms Druggan Angie. Angie displays her qualifications and certificates on the wall beside a montage of photos of her and her fiancé on various holidays. She’s keen that the staff go out for meals. At Christmas Olga made the concession to go to the dinner which was in an Indian restaurant. She ordered from the European section of the menu, the only one to do so. Old fashioned the others might consider her but there is order in her classroom. Over forty years teaching with well over a thousand children passing through her door. It’s the same pole that has been there for all that time, the one to open the high windows, the same cupboard, bleached by the sun, and filled with yellowing, spotted books. Children in the seventies and children in the eighties gazed out those windows longing for the deep blue air, only to be jolted to the here and now by Olga’s curt shout of their name. Her desk used to be wooden but the desks were all replaced a few years ago so now it’s a toughened laminate. More than a thousand children and she has secretly hated each one at least a bit. There was once a boy she could hardly stand to look at because his eyes were the same, the shape of them. He could have been Eddie’s son. The boy’s work was always marked too severely and she watched him, puzzled, when he opened the jotter. One day she needed a letter posting and she sent him out down the road in the heavy rain. But I’ve no jacket, Miss McClure, he said. I’ve got no jacket with me.
Did you hear what I said? Did you? Go right this minute and no more about it.
He came back shivering with his hair dripping. She could have wrapped her own coat around him. But she said, You’re not a sugar lump. You’ll live.
Ms Druggan has brought in initiatives which Olga has not embraced: children assessing their own work, children celebrating Chinese New Year, graduation ceremonies for pupils moving on to new key stages, Gaelic football training. Olga has never concealed her disapproval of these projects. She nibbled only the edge of a spring roll at Chinese New Year. When it came to Gaelic football she asked Ms Druggan if the parents had been informed about it because there would be plenty who would take a dim view. Ms Druggan said that yes, of course they’d been informed and not one had raised an objection. But that was probably because the letters from the school had turned to pulp at the bottom of the children’s bags, soggy with leaked juice and squashed fruit. Olga had taken it upon herself to bring the Gaelic issue to the attention of George Shields, a mass of muscle and tattoo taught by her when he was nine and skinny. A fortuitous meeting outside the chemist’s one day allowed her to ask if Mason, his son, was looking forward to the Gaelic football. George was pretty sanguine. Where was it happening? Only the school assembly hall? They weren’t going to be playing matches anywhere? He shrugged. Well whatever, he had said. At the Frampton-Martinez fight he had had his photo taken with Carl’s wife. She was lovely. And she was from the west of the city. It was only the school assembly hall, a bit of exercise. People needed to chill for Christ’s sake. It was 2018.
Olga’s evenings are usually segmented neatly into half hours: a half hour to read the paper, half hour to work on the pupils’ books, to walk the dog, half hour to clean the windows perhaps, half hour to watch a television programme. She sits on her usual seat to eat a slice of potato bread and butter, sprinkled with white sugar. That hand’s sweep is quick and smooth: not long until it’s half past six and time to go out. She forgot about the bin this morning. The length of her street still had plenty of empty blue bins sitting out when she returned home from school. Bright blue bins in the last dregs of pale light. But she’d forgotten and she knew that she’d forgotten because she’d been thinking about this evening, the park walk. She woke up looking forward to it. She could leave the bin out next week. What did it really matter? It was only ever a quarter full anyway.
It’s developed into a reasonable evening. On a night like this plenty of girls will be out on the road, those same girls who five, six years ago sat at a desk in her room, calculating angles and who now are leaning against the windows of the takeaway or the off-licence. Mostly they don’t acknowledge her. She’s well used to the imperious blanking, finding it almost amusing in its own way. The strained denim of their hot pants, worn even at this time of the year. The legs burnished with fake tan. They look down at their breasts as if to check that they’re still there. And then the love bites, those badges proclaiming carnal success, she sees them, those badges worn with pride. Don’t they just consider themselves the first to discover it all? The pioneers. You think I don’t know, Olga wants to say. You think I don’t know about love bites and not on my neck. And the purple and green thumb prints on that fine skin on my hips. A strong, sunburnt, sapling body poured into a tight dress. Well strong becomes stocky as time goes by and a tight dress is passed over in favour of a comfort cut. How could they think she ever knew?
The books are marked already, each with a three line comment in an elegant hand. She did it after school in her room, before sharpening the pencils. Olga wonders about her forgotten password for the computer. She must have written it down somewhere. Olga had thought the dog would shed hairs everywhere but it doesn’t. The neighbours she thought might complain about the barking but they don’t.
The first time that the Gaelic fellow, Cormac, appeared, Olga deliberately overran her lesson. It was only when Ms Druggan appeared that they had to terminate what they were doing. Cormac the Gaelic fellow had shaken her hand hard when Ms Druggan introduced them. His arms were covered in freckles. He said, I was wondering where yous lads were, if yous were ever going to turn up.
Well, they’re here now, Ms Druggan said.
Hey why you not got your trainers on, you not giving it a go yourself?
The question was directed at Olga.
I don’t think so, she said without smiling.
Well you better have them next week, he said. Try and find your old school PE kit as well, see if you still fit into it. Probably still knocking about the house somewhere.
Olga had considered going to see Ms Druggan because that was absolute insolence and she did not appreciate it: only in the place five minutes and the Gaelic fellow was already taking liberties. Futile though, Ms Druggan would say it was nothing more than a joke. Olga noted how the pupils enjoyed their session with him, and did what he said without complaint. Balls went bouncing down the hall. Balls went bouncing up the hall. The estate crowd who she’d thought—hoped—might be trouble listened to every word he said. What very little allegiance they had to her was reassigned to the Gaelic fellow within five minutes of flying footballs and beanbags.
She didn’t even have a pair of training shoes, never mind a kit. When the children did PE she stood at the side of the assembly hall in her neat, low-heel courts, calling out what they should do. A PE kit from school, the very daftness of it. There was little in the house from her younger days, apart from a few pieces of crockery that had belonged to her mother. On the mantelpiece she used to have that photo of where she grew up but not anymore. The newspaper clipping she had carried in her handbag, had been folded and unfolded so many times that it finally disintegrated into pieces. Snipped out forty-five years ago with the only scissors that were about at the time, the pinking shears with the zig-zag edges. She put the paper in the bin so no one would notice the hole, and query what she was doing. It wasn’t much of a photo, the way he stared out serious and startled, although the quality of the likeness was not the major concern at the time.
The day it happened was dull and hot. Olga wore the blue dress, the one he’d said he liked, although it was the kind of day, everything sticking to you, when you’d happily have taken off all your clothes. The hair at her nape was damp and dark. He had said where he was going to be, working in an outhouse, on the way towards the top brae. Going across the river would be easier and not that long way round, the whole distance up to the bridge. The racket of the crickets and all that spit on the long grass: her dress would be soaking with the stuff after going across the fields. Nobody would think anything of seeing her walking along the road, Olga thought, but Eddie had said to be careful even when you don’t think you need to be. That’s when you most need to be careful.
She had seen him just the once in the town with his wife when they were going into the shoe shop on the corner. The shoe shop. Olga would never have imagined him buying shoes. She couldn’t visualise him trying one on, then the other, walking up and down, saying they’re a bit tight, have you got a bigger size? But he hadn’t seen her in the town and she didn’t mention that she had seen him. She didn’t say that she waited behind a wall so she could see him and his wife come out of the shop again, with him carrying the bag. He was still wearing the same old boots the next time she saw him. His wife had hair folded up in into a pleat.
She had said to him one time when she was sitting on his lap, Why is it you like me?
Because you’re seventeen, he said.
No but why is it really?
Because you’re good looking and you’re seventeen. He stroked her head.
She punched his arm. Like you’re the old man. You’re not any more than about five years older. I can even remember when you were at the school.
The school, he groaned. I didn’t like the school and the school didn’t like me.
What is your new uniform going to look like? she asked. You’ll have seen the fellas wearing it.
Yeah, but what do you look like in it? What’s the hat like? Why even join? It’s not as if you don’t already have a job.
Money.
Do you not have enough money?
It wouldn’t seem so, he said.
Olga leaves her terraced street with its tidy gardens to head down the curving road, past the old mill converted into apartments. The dog trots along, pulling pleasantly on the lead. I know, Olga says, I know. We’ll be there soon. At the entrance to the park a group of kids sit on top of one of the picnic tables, pushing and shoving each other, sharing a bottle of something. Their shrieks and laughs echo in the silence of the evening. The tarmac of the path seems to gleam, the sky is pearly. Funny how she lived near the park for all these years without ever venturing into it. It was just something beyond the railings. She has a memory of someone, a politician, having an assignation in some shady corner there with another man. It was in the papers, she is sure. On some of the park benches people sit on their own.
The next time that Cormac the Gaelic fellow came, Olga ensured that she was there promptly in the assembly hall with the children.
Alright chief, he had said to her. You gonna be giving it a go today? We gonna see a bit of involvement from you today?
Olga said there were things that she needed to do back in the room. No point in getting too involved in case she had to leave.
He just nodded. Sure, he said. No probs. Next time though!
From the window she watched him leave after the session. He wore a top with the name of something on it. Those curving, tubby letters, that way of writing, she had never really liked it. Somebody had bought her a mug once that had ‘coffee’ written on it like that and she had put it in the back of the cupboard. Celtic Collection: that was the shop in the town with its sign written like that. She really wouldn’t wear anything green. Her least favourite sweet out of the pastilles was the green. Just the way it was. Ms Druggan had seen her in the corridor that afternoon and had asked if everything was going well with Cormac. Olga said that well, there hadn’t been any complaints, there hadn’t been any complaints so far. Just the way it was. That way of writing though, she’s become accustomed to it. That mug it might still be there, right at the back.
There wasn’t a person she could tell when it happened. Her mother might well have suspected something or other, Olga had sometimes wondered if she did, but nothing was ever mentioned. If only one soul could just have said well there now, there, or put a quiet hand on her arm. A look from someone, a look even without a smile, a look even half in judgment, it would have been something. She saw his wife again in the town and she despised her and the way she was allowed to have her hair all hanging lank as she went around with the sad old face. The wife didn’t know who she was, even though what they felt must have been the equal. The whitewashed wall of the old toilet down in the scullery, it always felt damp to the touch even in the summer; she used to run her finger along it looking for even just a tiny fleck of blood suspended in the wet that would make her breathe the sigh of relief that everything was fine that month. But then, once he wasn’t there any more, she was desperate to see it clear, that the finger run on the wall ran clear, so that he would still be with her in a different way. But there it was, rust against the whitewash.
She had thrown herself into her studies and moved to Belfast where the training college was nearly all girls. Most were religious and some had fiancés that they wouldn’t let touch them until they were married. Olga cut her hair short. Three brisk strokes of the brush and that was it done. Olga, the vestal virgin who they thought was saving herself for the right man although, they joked, he might be hard to find with hair like that.
Olga wonders, as she passes some majestic chrysanthemums, where exactly the politician met the man and if had they known each other before their meeting. He would have been well advised to choose somewhere down by the old entrance where the trees are thicker, where at some points it edges into total darkness. The park closes at nine o’clock but Olga has seen people climbing over the pronged railings, with shouts and laughter.
Cormac always has some joke or other. Well boss, he said to Olga, what club are you going to be hitting Saturday night? The pupils loved it. Miss McClure like. Going to a club. Don’t be so daft, Cormac, honestly, she said. But one week when Olga was in the city centre she looked at what was fly-posted on walls. There was someone or other called Jackmaster plus Jasper James @Sixty6 at the weekend. So when Cormac asked her again the next week, well boss what club are you going to be hitting Saturday night? Olga said, Sixty6. I’m going to listen to Jackmaster and Jasper James.
What? he said.
Jackmaster at the club Sixty6.
Right, he said. Okay. I’m not too sure I know where that is now.
It was only a joke, Olga said. I was just joking.
That’s funny, Cormac said. Good joke.
She had helped him put the footballs into the net bags when the bell rang for break.
There was a morning earlier in the year when one of the girls had said, You know who I seen the other night, Miss? I seen you coming into the shop and you bought a paper and a packet of biscuits.
A paper and a packet of biscuits? Olga said. Well now, that could indeed have been me.
One of the boys said, Know what, I saw Cormac the other night and he was doing the stuff that he does with us only there was a man telling him to do the stuff he does with us.
And where might that have been? Olga asked.
That park up near Ravenhill. That place away up there.
That evening, when she had everything done, Olga went to the park. She had to consult the graffitied map covered in burnt plastic to work out a route. It took several circuits past the bandstand before she realised that there were playing fields right at the top. Once there Olga took only swift and surreptitious glances in the direction of the people who were running about. She feigned an interest in the rose bushes near the car park.
A man said to her, Is it the Intermediates you’re after?
She hadn’t known what to say.
Sorry, he said, I thought you were somebody else. I thought you were somebody’s ma.
It took several visits before Olga had the idea about the dog. There was an ad in the local shop for one that needed a home and Olga, as soon as she went into the woman’s house and saw it, said, That’ll do. That’ll do fine. The woman had wanted to give her a cup of tea and tell the whole life story of this dog that used to belong to one of her neighbours. Olga politely said she couldn’t stay.
There are only a few teams training this evening. It’s getting chillier and the people watching hop from foot to foot to keep warm. There’s a van selling burgers and chips, the smell of fried onions in the air, but nobody is buying any. The man in the van is playing country music and it’s a song Olga’s heard many times over the years without knowing its name or who sings it, a plaintive tale of bad luck and regret. The man in the van looks maudlin as he looks at the burger baps, piled on a tray.
So many sounds, Olga thinks. She can tell within a second if a pupil’s cry is genuine or attention-seeking. Anyone can tell it’s country from the van within a couple of seconds without being able to say what country really is. No need to be a musical expert. Glass smashes and you know if it’s a bottle or a window. You don’t need to see. That day she was crossing the big field when she heard the noise, a sound assertive and dull at the same time. Had someone dropped pallets from a height? Little red weals were coming up on her legs from things that had bitten her, and she knew those freckles on her face would be out. Rub them with lemon juice all you want like it says in the magazines, but it wouldn’t make them fade. She fixed her dress around the neck so it sat nice, then smoothed down her hair, pressed her lips together. They wrote the songs about this feeling.
She couldn’t see him at first. She called his name but sure hadn’t he done this before: she’d go around searching for him, and then he’d creep up and catch her hard around the waist. Got you! She nearly wet herself that one time.
Olga shouted but there was no answer.
This was the place and this was the time, where he said and when he said. She wouldn’t have made a mistake.
Eddie! she shouted. Eddie! And then another time, even though she felt foolish.
Although he had never been late before, there was always a first time. Couldn’t he get held up somewhere, or find it difficult to get away? Stuck in the town, buying another pair of shoes. The shop assistant chatting away as she puts them in the bag and hands him his change.
But over there, by a heap of breeze blocks she saw his legs.
What in the name of goodness are you doing? Olga said. Get up, Eddie! What are you doing?
And then she saw it, the obscenity of an exploded head. A mass of red matter.
Olga began to run, she hardly knew in what direction, and although there was no one to hear she was saying over and over, oh my God oh my God oh my dear God please help me. The quickest way to get back was across the river and not that long way right around. She just jumped in, didn’t even feel the water cold. Just ten, twelve strokes across but the water was heavy, muscled, pulling at her legs even though she was kicking hard. She, frantic, and the current pushing her downstream slowly, casually, with no great fuss of noise or foam.
Cormac’s a giant in the assembly hall but here at the pitches he always seems slight. Even Olga can see that most of the others are more proficient at handling that ball. A couple of children standing beside her stop to pet the dog. It likes the attention and tangles the lead with twirling. What sort of wee dog is she? the girl asks. I really don’t know, Olga says.
These people around her are respectable people, solicitors and doctors most likely. She could go into the club house there, the St Columba’s clubhouse and she would probably get a nice cup of tea. The cars in the carpark aren’t old jalopies either. She had tried to imagine the man who killed Eddie, man or men. They never got anybody for it. Three weeks later in a town five miles away a boy who worked in the shirt factory was shot dead in retaliation and it was viewed with a sense of inevitability in Olga’s house. All sympathy was with the part-time RUC Reservist’s wife. Olga’s mother sent a stew up to her and a couple of boxes of shortbread, the sombre biscuit. He’d been found by two men who’d been working down the road. It was the day when Olga had taken the head-staggers and fallen into the river, a girl of her age falling into the river, would you believe it? She had turned up dripping at the Alexanders’ place, jabbering like a loon about a shooting. Somebody she met on the way must have told her. The Alexanders heard the shot too. Everyone heard the shot.
She’s glad she switched on the heat before she left. The coal fire’s gone, replaced with the feature heater and its facsimile of glowing embers. The dog sits at her feet. You don’t realise how cold it is outside until you come in. Olga wonders where Cormac goes after training. Does he just go home? One of the boys in the class said once, hey Cormac do you have a girlfriend? Olga said, That’s none of your business, Jonathan, none of your business whatsoever. But Cormac said, No I don’t, Jonathan, but I’m on the lookout. You know anybody decent? When they’d got back to the classroom she’d said to the boy, Don’t be asking anything like that again because I’m sure Cormac does not appreciate it.
But he didn’t have a girlfriend.
Everyone looks forward to Friday. The bell sounds melodic on a Friday. Olga comes in early in the morning to cut with the guillotine the thirty-two small squares of paper in three different colours that are needed for a maths exercise. She writes a paragraph on the whiteboard, ready for the children to correct its punctuation. They will look at leaves today, horse chestnut, oak and cypress. Some of the children wear trainers on a Friday and they leave their ties at home.
Please don’t run, Olga says, when she lets them out to the assembly hall for the session with Cormac. She follows behind them, never appearing eager. He’ll be with the class for a whole forty minutes, and then there will be the further five when she helps him tidy up at the start of lunch. She sees the blue and green tracksuit which says St Columba’s on the back and the children have gathered around, waiting for orders about what to do next. But then—
Sorry, what’s going on? Olga asks.
The young man shakes her hand. Tommy, he says.
But I was expecting Cormac! The children were expecting Cormac.
Well you won’t be seeing him for a while.
What do you mean?
That’s him away off now, Tommy says.
Where’s he away off to? What do you mean?
Now I’m not the best person to be asking, says Tommy. Cos I never pay attention to all the details. He did tell me now. Is it Germany? Or maybe it’s Holland. Got one of them engineering jobs.
Are you sure?
Pretty sure it’s Germany. If not it’s definitely Holland.
Two of the boys are starting to climb up the ropes that hang from the wooden apparatus.
But he was there last night, says Olga. At the training last night.
Yeah we all went out after, says Tommy. Hey, are you a St Columba’s woman yourself?
I need to speak to someone about this, says Olga. I actually think this is… this is outrageous.
She walks down the corridor to Ms Druggan’s office. There is a Meeting in Progress, Do Not Disturb sign on the door but she knocks anyway. And then knocks again.
What is it, Olga? says Ms Druggan when she opens the door. She steps into the corridor to whisper, Can’t you see? I’ve got people from the board here!
Cormac, you know, the Gaelic fellow, he’s been coming for a long time and now, suddenly, completely out of the blue he’s gone and there’s some other person down in the hall. It’s completely unacceptable. Absolutely and totally.
Ms Druggan stares at her.
It’s outrageous. The children have got used to him and then that’s it, without any notice, he’s not there. Did you know he was leaving?
Look, says Ms Druggan, Olga, the young people who come in, they’re just volunteers. They’re not being paid and isn’t it good they’re prepared to come at all, for whatever length of time? I have to go, she says, pointing at the sign on her door.
It’s atrocious.
That project’s coming to an end anyway. Three more weeks and then it’s street dance. The people from the board, Ms Druggan says. They’re waiting for me in there. I really do need to get back to the people from the board.
The children have fallen into the same groups they formed when they were with Cormac and they don’t notice her coming in. When the session ends, Tommy says that he’ll see everyone next week. As the children file out, he phones somebody. Over in the corner Olga watches him. She hears him speaking to somebody, yeah, yeah, no way, ha, yeah, no probs. The children are happy because Friday is chips.
In the afternoon the rain pelts against the classroom window. The children are squirming in the seats, bored by the slow crawl of another Friday afternoon. The room is too hot and the condensation steams up the windows. One of the children has drawn a face in it. A girl asks, Can we watch a DVD this afternoon because the other people get to watch DVDs, but Olga says no, of course not. No DVDs. She can feel the veins throbbing under the thin skin of her temples. The girl says no more, resigning herself to the photocopied arithmetic problems, numbered 1 to 24. With only three quarters of an hour to go, Olga takes the class to the computer room to do the test Ms Druggan had talked of. She doesn’t even need to know a password because the pupils can access the application without her input. The children silently feed the monsters different flavours of ice cream in various combinations and occasionally there is a peal of bleeps when someone unlocks a new level. In the computer room the blinds are always drawn. Then they go back to the classroom for their coats and bags and to wait for the bell. Put up your chairs, Olga shouts. Put up your chairs before you go. Although weary, she sharpens the pencils again, sorts the jotters alphabetically so that when she marks them later they’ll be in order. She wipes off the window the face drawn by the child.
When Olga puts her key in the door, she hears the dog, its excited, impatient barks. Her jacket is wet so she hangs it over the radiator. She’ll need to bring out the winter coat soon. Olga takes off her shoes, rubs her feet. You don’t realise they’re even sore until the shoes are off. In her bedroom she puts her blouse and skirt on the hanger, closes the wardrobe. Her dressing gown hangs on the hook on the back of the bedroom door.
The dog is hungry so she pours out the dry feed and sits at the table with a cup of tea, watching it finish its bowl, tail wagging. Street dance anyway, in another few weeks’ time. She could go upstairs and run a bath, both taps on full, the water stilling and thickening as it edges higher. She imagines the dog, its panic, its frantic heart as it fights against the water, and the impotent movement of its paws.