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was standing (pretty vacantly, it has to be said, beside the cheese counter), and there she was.
    ‘Hi!’ Stella continued, in the bright, strangely accusatory way she had, ‘How are you ? What have you done to your hair ?’
    Which was a fair enough question, as my hair was quite a different colour from when Stella had last seen me. Generally it was mouse-brown, but I’d just dyed it. I’d dyed it the day before, in fact. Marron foncé , the dye was called: a lustrous auburn shade that will bring out the beauty of your natural colour .
    ‘Hi, Stella,’ I said. There were a lot of reasons why I was not pleased to bump into Stella.
    ‘So: Wow! I mean: God! Did you get it done professionally?’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘Your hair.’ Stella’s eyes were greener than I remembered, and her jaw more angular. ‘Are you going for a kind of . . . punk look?’
    ‘Oh,’ I said, putting my hand up to my hair. It felt coarse, like something lacquered. It did not have the subtle quality I had been hoping for: it was really a lot more pink than that. I could feel myself blushing, chameleon-like, to match it.
    ‘Well, I just thought it was time for a change,’ I said. ‘It’s OK having . . . colourful hair if you work in a primary school. People don’t mind you looking . . . bright.’
    Stella gazed at me. Her own hair was as naturally blonde as it always had been, I couldn’t help noticing, but now it seemed even smoother and more perfectly styled. Clipped prettily against the side of her forehead was a silvery hair slide; a hard, glittering rectangle of diamanté.
    ‘I thought you were working in a shop,’ she said.
    ‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘I work in a school now.’
    ‘A school? How funny.’
    ‘Hmm,’ I replied, regretting the new territory I’d just dragged us both into.
    ‘So, what are you doing there? In the school?’
    ‘Being a classroom assistant,’ I replied, in a strangely breezy voice.
    Stella didn’t say anything for a moment.
    ‘Well, that’s unexpected,’ she said finally.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Which school?’
    ‘St Luke’s.’
    ‘Really?’ Stella replied, in a remote sort of way. She seemed not to have an opinion about St Luke’s; maybe she hadn’t even heard of it. ‘So what’s it like there, then?’
    I glanced across at my mother, who was standing a few feet away from us, deliberating over the yogurt display. My mother, over the past year, had shown a lot of forbearance about the peculiar, altered course of my life. A lot of tolerance and kindness. She was a kinder, better, wiser person than I would ever be; which suddenly irritated me more than I could articulate. She was wearing her Scholl sandals that day because it was June and hot outside, and her blue flowery blouse. Oh, Mum. And I wanted to run across and hug her, and at the same time criticise her for her fashion sense.
    ‘Well,’ I said to Stella in a low voice, feeling, somehow, the need to whisper, ‘it’s OK. It’s not too bad.’
    ‘Cool. So things have worked out OK then? After . . .’
    ‘Yeah. St Luke’s is a great place to work,’ I interrupted, a curious tightness in my throat. ‘As it turns out. I mean, if you’re a classroom assistant you get to spend most of the time playing with plasticine anyway, and chucking glitter around . . .’
    I trailed off. This statement was not even true. I spend hardly any time , I thought, playing with plasticine or glitter. I spent a lot more time at St Luke’s filling in Mrs Crieff’s record sheets and answering strange questions about God and death and the colour of the sky. That was what little children asked you, I’d discovered. ‘ Miss McKenzie, when people die’, one little boy had said recently, ‘do they go to heaven in their minds? ’ ‘ In their minds ?’ I’d replied, intrigued. Do they go to heaven in their minds? And I hadn’t been sure how to answer.
    ‘So,’ Stella said. She looked oddly irked: she had the sort of expression someone has when