Diving Belles by Lucy Wood

answerphone has picked up, so that you start to leave a message then realise it’s been him all along. Tell her how he really, really likes to do that.
    ‘Home?’ Barnaby said when you told him your weekend plans. You were lying in bed, his lips grazing your ear. ‘Going home?’ he said again. ‘What do you call this place then?’ And you just shrugged, suddenly unsure, feeling yourself in-between: the empty corridors of it, the neither-here-nor-there of it.
    Once your mother has gone to bed, you prowl around the house. You have a few glasses of various drinks you find in the cupboard. You used to sit under the kitchen table for hours as a child, so you get in there and sit cross-legged with your head bowed down. It isn’t as relaxing as you remember so you unfold, crawl out and go upstairs to the bathroom. Your mother’s dressing-gown is on the back of the door and you put it on. The sleeves are too short for you. It is an old dressing-gown and it smells of that smell your mother has which you cannot place – some flowers you don’t recognise, or a perfume that she doesn’t seem to actually wear. Her things are scattered all around the bathroom and you look through them. There are shampoos and soaps and creams. This is your mother, here, in products. You rub her hand cream into your hands and you brush your teeth with her toothpaste. At one point, you take out that blue pot of cream and open the lid. You smell it, but it doesn’t smell of anything. You scoop some out and rub it over your eyes, hoping for the lovely blue shimmer it left on her lids. When you open them, there is a sudden sharp pain. Your eyes stream. Your eyelashes seem to be tightening. In a panic, you splash water all over your face and after a while the stinging goes away and you can open your eyes. They seem to turn pale green for a second, and then white again. You must be allergic to the ingredients; maybe there is orange extract in there, or walnuts. You look for the label but there isn’t one.
    You decide to go to bed. In the hallway, you pass one of her empty vases, except that it isn’t empty any more. The whole vase is bursting with bright leaves. You must have drunk more than you thought. Drinking has never agreed with you, and you keep telling yourself this when you check the other vases and see that they too are filled with leaves and flowers and that there is now ivy curling over the banister.
    The sheets on your single bed are your old favourites: Aladdin and Jasmine kneeling on a magic carpet. Their faces are faded and grey, the colours all washed out. You get underneath the covers and ring Barnaby on your mobile. The green light makes it look like you’re in an underwater cave. His phone rings and the answerphone beeps in. Wait for the beep and say hello and wait for him to reply. ‘Hello?’ you say. ‘Hellooo?’ But it’s his actual answerphone this time and your message will sound like you are lost, and somewhere very far away.
    In the morning, you resolve to tell your mother to throw out that face cream. It has probably gone off – your mother never throws anything away. Rifling through the medicine box early on to get some paracetamol, you find cough linctus that is seven years past its use-by date and an old, dry packet of foot powder with a price label that is pre-decimal. You go back upstairs and sit in bed, waiting for her to get up. You have never liked houses early in the morning when no one else is around. They all have that still coldness that reminds you of museums, or the bright silence of empty swimming pools. She comes downstairs and pads into the kitchen. She switches on the kettle and you hear the clatter of cups and teaspoons, her quiet, early morning noises.
    You pull on a jumper and go downstairs into the kitchen. You stop in the doorway. She is stirring tea with her back to you. There is a hand on her shoulder and it is not your hand. There is a man in the kitchen with his hand on your mother’s