Times of Trouble by Victoria Rollison Page A

have agreed if I asked him straight out. Maybe he just
made up that he needed to be in Adelaide, so he could make sure his
income was safe?
    Mum was happy to hear
Liam would be visiting in person the next day, but she also
admitted she was a bit worried that he would ask for his account to
be paid. I told her not to worry about it for now, but couldn’t
help feeling anxious myself. She hadn’t paid him for so long that
his wages now added up to thousands of dollars. The money I got
from Picasso was to be used to pay the mortgage, not be given to
Liam. He had been paid more than enough already.

    I had the rest of the
day to kill. I needed to busy myself with something, and not dwell
on my anger at Liam, my worry and annoyance at Sophie, and the
imminent departure of Picasso. Mum obviously didn’t want to discuss
the search for Sophie; it was so like her to avoid talking about
problems. And while it was understandable, what with how stressed
she must have been, it also made me feel really lonely, knowing all
this information and not having anyone to dissect it with. I wished
Liam was arriving sooner.
    I was tempted to sit
at Picasso and say my final goodbyes with our favourite Mozart, but
when I went into the living room, mum was taking her turn to bid
the piano farewell. She was carefully cleaning and polishing,
buffing and waxing each key, making his shiny black top sparkle
like glass. So I did something I hadn’t done for years; I went into
Sophie’s bedroom.
    Unlike Sophie, mum
preferred everything to be in its place, so the room didn’t look
anything like it did when Sophie lived here. Mum had packed up all
her things and put them away neatly in every possible storage
space. Her double bed was still where it always was, in the corner
under the window, taking up most of the room. But now it had a
plain quilt cover, suitable for the guests we never had. The only
other pieces of furniture were a large built-in cupboard, made of
dark wood, stretched across one wall, and a big desk and chair
which were bulky and mismatched. The posters of The Beatles were
gone; there were still chips in the paint where mum had peeled off
the Blue Tack. The room seemed bigger when Sophie was here, either
because I was smaller then, or because her things were always
strewn all over the floor and the bed, on top of the desk and
spilling out of the cupboards. Maybe a bit of both.
    I remembered the
closest mum and I got to talking about Sophie since she left was
about four years after we last heard from her. Mum was cleaning my
room and commented on how little space I had, not even room for
anything other than a bed and the built-in wardrobe. She suggested
I might like to move into Sophie’s room, since it was so much
bigger than mine. I quickly refused, hoping she wouldn’t mention it
again. Sophie’s room was her room; what would she think if she came
home to find me in it? I must have still been hoping she would come
back, not yet ready to admit she was gone for good.
    The cupboards were
still full of her clothes, and the shelves above packed with old
school books, novels and even toys. You only had to glance at the
rack of dresses, now hanging neatly, to see Sophie was a
‘colourful’ person. Not ‘colourful’ in the sense of using bad
language or being gay or whatever, but literally colourful. One of
the dresses had splashes of yellow on top of pink and blue flowers.
Another was white, with pinstripe lines of every colour imaginable.
Sophie always made her clothes look like they were the height of
fashion or she was setting a new trend. She mostly bought them with
her pocket money at op shops; mum certainly didn’t buy them for
her. And I had a recollection of her sewing, to make them fit, or
to take up a hem. She probably could have been a fashion designer
if she wasn’t so set on becoming an actress. I never asked to
borrow her clothes, even when we were still friends. I simply
couldn't pull them off.
    I sat down at the
chunky