Past Praying For by Aline Templeton

cobwebs festooned an ancient car roof-rack and a couple of rusty garden tools suspended there.
    ‘ What makes you say that?’ she drawled. Her accent wasn’t quite American, because she’d lived in England all her life and her Dad was English, but she had a hint of something more exotic in her voice which Paula admired enormously and tried from time to time to imitate.
    ‘ You wouldn’t believe how horrendous tomorrow is going to be. Mum will bang on about the Christmas spirit and insist on puke-making family traditions that she’s only just thought of, and the kids will squabble and Dad will get pissed.’
    She used the word with a sense of daring, and shot a sideways glance at Martha, to see how it would be received. But Martha, whose mother’s language had always been uninhibited, seemed not to notice.
    ‘ At least she tries. I like your Mum; she talks to me as if I was a human being instead of a teeny-bopper, which is what Hayley keeps calling me.’
    That was another thing Paula admired, calling your mother by her first name. She had rehearsed it secretly – Elizabeth, Lizzie, Liz – but somehow it hadn’t worked. She still thought of her as Mummy, which had to be some kind of brainwashing.
    Martha dragged the last puff out of her cigarette and ground it below her heel.
    ‘ Come on, we’d better get back. If Hayley finds me smoking she’ll go ballistic. She’s got this awfully American thing about it.’
    Obediently, Paula had ground out her own half-smoked cigarette, with secret relief, and followed her friend back into the house.
    She had managed to sound cool, talking to Martha, but she still felt sick when she let herself think about the feeling she had constantly these days, that something was dreadfully, dreadfully wrong. And putting it into words hadn’t helped at all. Perhaps nothing would.
    Now she had achieved her objective of outdistancing her mother and the kids without catching up her father. She reached the house only a few minutes behind him, but she saw the lights go on in the games room so she let herself in quietly. Her father had shut the door, which was a good thing. She could get herself upstairs and out of sight without anyone forcing her to help clear up their stupid party, or go through the toe-curling exercises of stockings and Santa Claus rituals.
    Just as she crossed the hall, she heard the ‘ping’ of one of the telephone extensions being lifted, and stood for a moment very still.
    Earwigging was no sort of taboo as far as she was concerned, but she could hear the rest of them coming up the garden path, Milla whining that she wanted to be carried up to bed. Swift as a lizard, she slid up the stairs and was in her bedroom with her own door shut tight and the comfort blanket of Capital Radio filling in any awkward silences.
    ***
    Hayley Cutler switched on the lights as she came in the door, looked round the open-plan ground floor of the cottage, and groaned. Sometimes she thought it would be easier just to quit and do it herself, but hell’s teeth, she wasn’t the only able-bodied mortal around.
    ‘ Would you look at this place? Mikey, go get some logs from the shed for the fire. And Marty, all that stuff in the corner is yours. Clear it, can’t you?’
    ‘ Don’t call me Marty.’ Martha went across to pick up the litter of wrapping paper and ribbon as her younger brother went silently out. ‘You only do because you like to sound really American instead of half-and-half.’
    ‘ So? That’s a crime, suddenly?’ Hayley went to switch on the coffee machine, her invariable first action on getting home. ‘I think Marty’s a really neat name, and if I’d known you aimed to grow up so prissy, I’d have never called you Martha in the first place. I had a great-aunt Martha once, and she died guessing.’
    Martha was moving purposefully round the room, picking things up and straightening the big Kelim cushions on the floor by the log fire, now cold and dead. The