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newspaper headlines warned of more earth tremors
mainly centred on Tijuana.
    Susan went across the hall to her
bedroom. Her grandmother looked up from her vacuum-cleaning with a hurt,
impatient expression, but Susan tried to ignore her. It wasn’t her fault that she had to live here, and
just as soon as she possibly could, she was going to move out. She briefly
glimpsed the dead girl’s face again, and somehow it became tangled up with her
mother’s face, crushed and lopsided after the accident. She opened her bedroom
door with the flat of her hand.
    Daffy was sprawled across Susan’s
divan-bed, her legs kicked up, engrossed in Cosmopolitan.
    ‘Oh hi, Suze, You’re early. Did you
read this thing about the sponge?’
    Susan went straight across to the
washbasin and brushed up her hair in the mirror.
    Her grandfather had been right: she
did look chalky.
    Daffy turned over and said, ‘It says
here that it’s only seventy per cent safe.’
    Susan frowned at herself in the
mirror. ‘What is?’
    ‘The sponge O deaf ears. Can you
imagine that? Seventy per cent! That means for every hundred times you make
love, you get pregnant thirty times. My God, I’ll have ninety children before
I’m eighteen.’
    Susan found that she was crying.
Silently, but bitterly, so that the tears ran down her cheeks and dripped down
the sides of her mouth. Daffy didn’t notice at first, and went on reading, but
then Susan let out a high-pitched sob.
    Daffy jumped off the bed. ‘Suze –
what’s the matter? What’s happened?’ Outside the door, the vacuum-cleaner was
still roaring, and banging at the skirting-boards. ‘It’s not her again, is it?’
    Susan shook her head. She dragged
two tissues out of the box beside her basin, and noisily blew her nose. Then
she dragged out another one and wiped her eyes. ‘I don’t know what it is. It’s
probably nothing, just my period.’
    ‘I was going to ask if you wanted to
come to my house. We’re having a barbecue, and some of the kids from Escondido
are coming over.’
    ‘I don’t know. I feel kind of
weird.’
    ‘Weird? Why?’
    ‘It’s – I don’t know, it’s something
that happened down on the beach. I’m trying not to think about it but it won’t
go away.’
    She sat down on the edge of the
divan-bed and Daffy sat down beside her. ‘Well?’ asked Daffy, with incandescent
curiosity.
    Susan dabbed at her eyes again. ‘I’m
not sure that I can tell you.’
    ‘Was it a boy? You weren’t raped,
were you? You definitely look like you could have been raped.’
    ‘It wasn’t anything like that.’
    ‘Then what, for Christ’s sake?’
    Outside the door, the vacuum-cleaner
suddenly whined to a stop. There was silence, even the television had been
turned off, and both girls listened in case Susan’s grandmother had heard Daffy
taking the name of the Lord in vain. Susan’s grandmother prayed in front of the
television every Sunday morning with Dr Howard C Estep, and Dr Howard C Estep
sternly disapproved of anyone taking the name of the Lord in vain.
    Susan whispered, ‘I saw a body, a
dead body.’
    ‘You’re kidding!’
    ‘No, I am not kidding. It was a
girl, she was drowned or something. The police were there, and the ambulance,
and everything.’
    ‘Oh, my God,’ said Daffy, shocked
and sympathetic but still desperate to hear all the details. ‘You must have
been absolutely paralysed! I mean, what was she like? I never saw a dead body
before.’
    ‘Daffy,’ said Susan, in an
uncontrolled voice, ‘she had eels in her stomach, where her stomach was
supposed to be, and they were eating her.’
    Daffy stared in shock. ‘Eels! You’re
kidding? Oh my God, that’s absolutely disgusting!
    What did you do? Were you sick?’
    Susan couldn’t even speak. She kept
thinking about those eels twisting and wriggling and sliding underneath the
dead girl’s ribcage; and then the policeman dancing in agony with the eel
whipping out of his face. She clasped her hands over her