'Did you keep the bones..?'

When Guy gets home I’m in the spare room, stamping on a potted cyclamen. His head appears at the top of the door. He surveys the carnage passively.

‘Caught fire during the incantation,’ I explain, breathless. ‘It’ll be alright.’

‘Hm. Good luck spell?’

‘Anti-nightmare charm.’

‘Right. Much longer?’

‘No. Just the photos.’

He nods, at once disparaging and acquiescent, closing the door behind him. His voice floats back to me through the hall.

‘Hocus pocus one, two three. There’s wine and duck breasts for our tea.’

I do my best with the remaining blackened petals and place the plant at my altar, tactfully placing a few tea lights so that the scene glows prettily. I prop up grandma’s spell book next to it, open at the cyclamen charm with its soft watercolour illustrations. I hoist up the camera around my neck and take five photos. I’ll later edit them to within an inch of their lives before sending them to ClaraRusso_675, a Sicilian client who saw my profile in Elle last month. She is having recurring dreams about a beautiful vampiric creature who chases her and sucks her blood. Later she will transfer £60 into my Paypal account (tenner extra where fire is involved), and close her eyes, hoping to dream tonight of softer things.

            I pad into the kitchen. Guy has his back to me, tending two pans of spitting duck. He turns round lazily as I sit at the table.

‘Jack Nicholson’s not going to appear at the front door in a fucking dressing gown, is he?’

He’s used this one before, but I give him a benign smile and a kiss as he puts my plate in front me. he’s done a beautiful job of the duck.

‘So, Viv is on about Woolf again,’ he says, pouring the wine. ‘Or should I say, Wolves.’

Viv is Guy’s PHD tutor. I’ve never met her, but Guy has played her radio contributions to me a few times. I remember being distracted from what she was actually saying by the slack, lazy quality of her voice. Something about the gentle click in her throat when she said her cs left me vaguely nauseous. I suppress the memory and look up from my duck.

‘As in Women Who Run With…? Or Virginia’s potential offspring.’

‘Well, both. Always both. But mainly Ginnie’s bastard cubs.’

Guy’s face swims palely in the candlelight. I take a glug of my wine, trying to remember the exact point this brand of smug, conspiratorial ‘young academic’ conversation became the norm for us.

‘She didn’t have any, though, did she. Not really,’ I offer.

Guy glances at my wine and smiles at me, which is what he does when he’s trying to make allowances for my contributions falling below par.

‘Well, the Americans’ take on it was that Leonard felt she was too weak, mentally and physically, to do the childbirth thing. Anorexia, didn’t sleep. Heard voices. But that’s really just a blind rhetoric.’

‘You said that the other night.’

Guy frowns at me. ‘What?’

‘Blind rhetoric. Something Jon Snow said on the news. You said that was a blind rhetoric too.’

Guy eyes my wine again, and changes tack.

‘We talked about you, today, too.’

‘Ah?’

He nods, crunching carelessly on a breadstick. He lets the crumbs fall over his duck, using its remaining length to punctuate his speech, like a conductor.

‘She’s very interested in your really rather fucking lucrative cyber-witch project. She thinks it’s revealing that you’re making so much money casting love spells during what is arguably the most liberated period women have ever lived through. Sort of, you, know, ‘in public I’m updating my Facebook with some anti-male rhetoric, but in private I’m working out a way to extract hair from my co-worker’s head and then pay sixty quid for an Insta-sorceress to make him love me by setting fire to potted geraniums and taking photos of it.’

‘Cyclamen.’

‘What?’

‘If you’re talking about the anti-nightmare charm, it uses a cyclamen plant. Not a geranium,’ I say mildly.

‘…other interesting moral questions, too,’ Guy is saying.

‘Oh?’

‘Like, does it make it better or worse that you don’t actually believe in magic. Worse, probably. Because you’re earning money off the oh-so-very-dated notion that women need men to be happy.’

‘Is every woman who’s ever married a man anti-feminist? Or fallen in love with a man? because that’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s saying your life is better with the other person in it. Am I anti-feminist? For being with you?’
Guy surveys me for a moment, chewing coolly. 

 ‘No, because I acknowledge that you are a full, whole person in your own right. We merely compliment one another’s existence, but we are whole in ourselves.’

He smiles at me sweetly. I think about how very far from a whole person I felt the last time we had sex. I finish my wine and watch as he polishes off the food that I paid for.

‘Did you keep the bones, by the way? I need them.’

A new project is afoot...

Follow Cathy's story at www.briarheights.co.uk

'Sister Ruth' extract

Ruth lolled on the hot concrete of the airport car park and glared malevolently at her father. She felt he deserved it. He was wearing pink shorts with ducks on them and negotiating loudly with the bemused Portuguese man in charge of the Europcar rentals.

‘Run smoothly, does she? Built for the heat?’

Ruth’s mother Susan’s voice was the next to reach her on the gentle Iberian breeze.

‘Ohforfuck’ssakePete. Christ.’

Ruth hoisted herself vertical. Her brother Luca, eight years old and seven her junior, was close by, pulling a stranger’s discarded bubble-gum from a crack in the ground. 

‘How much do you hate dad? Look at his shorts,’ said Ruth, shuffling up beside him.

Luca remained silent, committed to his sticky task with uncharacteristic solemnity. His loyalty, Ruth knew, was based almost entirely on a pleading bribe extended to him on the plane by their mother. Mention had been made of a certain inflatable pool-toy from the resort shop, pined after fruitlessly by Luca on holidays gone by. Rendered in the (somewhat impractical) shape of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, it was red, it was Luca’s heart’s desire and - for the first time - it was within his grasp. All he had to do was ‘behave himself’ from plane to villa.

Luca was not sure where exactly Susan would pin his current business with the bubble-gum on the ‘behaving himself’ spectrum, but as it was a quiet preoccupation and his father’s own antics had once again taken centre-stage, he thought he was probably alright so far. At any rate, he was not inclined to destroy his chances by allowing his sister to draw him into one of her conspiratorial parent-bashing sessions. Luca knew from experience that being discovered as a participant in Ruth's vicious tête-à-têtes did not, in general, result in any T-Rex-based rewards... unless you counted the admittedly reptilian transformation of his mother when she reached peak anger zone.

And yet... The resort shop was not known for its consistency of stock. This year round, they could just as easily be kitted out with benevolent, Herbivorous, green inflatables. Herbivores would not do. Green would not do. Susan was on shaky ground with the T-Rex bribe, and they all knew it. As such, Ruth persevered with her provocations.

‘Look how annoying dad is. Just look at him. Even if you couldn't hear him, he'd be annoying. Mum’s about to lose it, look.’

Luca, thinking resentfully of Diplodocuses - the gentle, boring fools - allowed himself a glance in the direction of his parents. Sure enough, Susan was at breaking point, shifting from foot to foot, beetroot-faced as Pete bellowed on about air conditioning to the now rather alarmed-looking car dealer.

‘Imagine you were mum and you had to kiss dad,’ whispered Ruth in Luca’s ear. Luca screamed. She clamped a hand over his sticky mouth. To her astonishment, the kerfuffle went unnoticed as their father opened, slammed and re-opened the driver door for the final time.

 ‘Okay kiddos! All in order. Thunderbirds are go.’

To be continued…