The Home Corner Read Online Free PDF

they’re querying the price on a till receipt. ‘Well, that’s cool, about your job: that you still get a chance to do arty stuff. Because you’ve always been arty, haven’t you?’ She glanced at my pink hair again. ‘You were always doing all those  . . . wacky pictures. In Art.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I was’; and at the mention of Art – that lost thing in my life – I felt something strange happening in the space behind my ribcage. A sensation of vertigo. A kind of closing in. It was the same feeling I got if I stood at the edge of a tall building or a cliff, or sat in the swinging carriage of a Ferris wheel at the fairground. And I recalled a paragraph in a school textbook that I’d queried once during a history lesson: ‘ Palaeolithic man was an accomplished artist’ , it had begun, ‘who, for leisure and enjoyment, would paint pictures on the walls of his cave . . . ’ ‘But excuse me’, I’d said, putting up my hand, ‘what about Palaeolithic woman?’Because I’d had more confidence in those days; and because maybe it was Palaeolithic woman who’d painted pictures on the walls of the cave! Maybe it was the women who’dbeen the painters, while the men had just gone out and dug traps for animals to fall into! Had nobody thought of that?!
    ‘Well,’ I said now to Stella, ‘I suppose Art was not to be.’
    And we both stopped talking and looked down at Stella’s wire basket, as if it might hold something more useful for us to talk about. But it just contained a circle of Coeur de Lion Camembert, some bottles of beer and a packet of John West prawns.
    ‘It’s funny,’ Stella said. ‘I never would have pictured you working in a school, Lulu. You’re the last person I’d have thought would end up teaching.’
    ‘Yes,’ I conceded. It was quite a ridiculous state of affairs. It would once have seemed about as likely to me as parachuting out of a plane.
    ‘I –’ I began.
    ‘Oh, there’s your mum !’ Stella interjected, looking over my shoulder. ‘Oh, that’s so sweet , Luisa, going on a shopping trip with your mum! I always liked your mum,’ she added rather wistfully. She seemed to have placed me into some kind of category now. Finished , perhaps it was called. Or History. And I realised how slight our friendship had been; how it had never really been a friendship at all. How it had probably been something else entirely.
    ‘I usually help with the shopping on Sunday,’ I heard myself saying. ‘My parents and I halve the bill,’ I added – a small, private fact I immediately regretted revealing. ‘Seeing as I’m still hanging around at home rent-free,’ I continued ( shut up! shut up! ), ‘it’s, you know, the least I . . .’
    ‘So the salary’s not bad then, at work?’ said Stella. She’d always had that ability: to cut to the chase.
    ‘Not bad, no. It could be worse. It’s an income. How about you anyway, Stella? How are things going at vet school?’
    Because Stella’s career, unlike mine, had gone according to plan after we’d left school. It had gone neatly in the right direction. While I’d spent the past year or so of my life selling wind-chimes or sitting at low tables grappling with glue sticks, Stella had been studying veterinary science at university. It was what she’d always wanted to do. It was a profession she had been working towards since the age of twelve.
    ‘Yeah, it’s great,’ Stella said, smiling at me – or rather, not at me, but at some unseen, unknown thing that was better. ‘It’s fab,’ she said. ‘It’s brill.’
    ‘Great, that’s . . .’
    ‘I’m just here buying stuff for dinner tonight, actually,’ she added, ‘for my body buddies.’
    I looked at her. ‘Your what?’
    ‘My body buddies. My dissecting team. That’s what we call each other.’
    Stella’s voice had adopted the slightly combative tone I remembered from school.
    ‘There are six of us,’ she continued, tucking a strand of hair around her left