What Have I Done? by Amanda Prowse

Phoebe and it is just too uncool to arrive at lessons with you.’
    ‘Uncool? I’ve never heard anything like it!’ He feigned hurt. ‘I’m a very hip and happening dad, I’ll have you know!’ He laughed at her scorn.
    ‘Oh my God, please shut up! If you were either of those things then you would know not to say “hip” and “happening” for a start! You are both so embarrassing, firstly snogging in public and then trying to be my mate; it is just so cringey! Why can’t I have normal parents? Just for once I’d like a boring mum and dad like everyone else’s, ones that didn’t make everything so awkward!’
    Her mother interjected. ‘It was hardly snogging, Lydia.’
    No one heard her.
    The head and his daughter disappeared around the corner. The echo of their playful banter drifted back in fragmented syllables, interspersed with squeals; it was all jolly good fun. Kathryn tucked in her lips and bit down hard.
    Left alone in the garden to continue with her chores, Kathryn wondered what it must be like to have a place that you needed to get to – an office, a shop, a classroom – and what it might be like to be the kind of person that people would miss if you disappeared.
    Aware of the flower in her hand, she squeezed the rose until the sap dripped from the petals and ran down her wrist, its heady perfume offering her a few seconds of joy. It wilted in the middle of her scrunched-up palm. Walking to the flower bed, where its siblings and cousins stood proud and tall, she scooped out a handful of soil, placed the rose in the hole, and buried it.
    With her hands now free and wiped clean on her apron, she turned her attention to the laundry. She secured one corner of the sheet, then pulled the other end taut and fastened it with another wooden dolly peg.
    The peg was one of a set that she had owned for ever, possibly since she was a little girl. She didn’t know for certain when they had been passed on to her, but she knew they came from her mother’s pantry. She could clearly picture the metal box in which they had been kept, with its image of straight-backed, marching toy soldiers on the lid. Her mother had in turn been given them by her own mother. For some reason Mark had allowed her to keep them; they were probably too insignificant to warrant his attention.
    Over the years she had acquired and discarded many aset of lurid plastic pegs with fiddly little springs which often perished before the end of their useful life, but these long wooden splints with their bulbous heads and precision, hand-cut splits would outlive them all. She would in time hand them on to Lydia. The thought made her chuckle; she could imagine Lydia rolling her eyes at the prospect of inheriting a set of pegs. As a little girl, Lydia had shown an interest in them once, carefully selecting a random peg and using a big, fat, black felt-tipped pen to draw two dots for eyes and the upward curve of a smile. Kathryn had named that particular peg Peggy, and it still made her smile on a daily basis. Maybe when Lydia was older she would feel differently; goodness knows, her own views were now so very altered from when she had been her daughter’s age.
    In the early days of her marriage, Kathryn remembered feeling comforted by the knowledge that she was probably the third generation to handle these funny little objects. She often considered the clothes that had been held fast; three generations of garments in which her family had slept, worked and loved. She would finger the end of the splint, wondering if it had touched her grandpa’s work shirt or her mum’s silk slip.
    She often wondered if her mother and grandmother had derived as much joy as she did from a line strung full of clean laundry. The anticipation of gathering it in huge armfuls and inhaling its fresh, blown-dry scent was itself a unique pleasure. The folding and smoothing of clean garments was satisfying and used to give her a feeling of great contentment. The washing and