These Days

viii

"I WON'T BE VERY LONG," CIARA BLUNTLY INFORMS A FROWNING MR WATERMAN, SLIPPING PAST THE TALL OAK DOOR AND INTO THE SHADOWY CORRIDOR. She sounds a hell of a lot tougher than she feels right now.

"Why exactly are you here?"

Losing his daughter hasn't changed him one bit, Ciara notices. He still wears the exact same pair of tortoise shell glasses tipped over the exact same ski slope nose (the same one that Hope both had and hated, she can't help remembering) accompanied by the exact same scowl that has been directed at Ciara McAdams ever since the day that Amy Waterman snitched on them after stumbling across an intimate Ciara-slash-Hope moment.

Ciara quashes the rise swelling in her throat. "I left some things here," she mumbles, studying the pattern of the bobbly carpet.

"It better not have been underwear."

Ciara holds back an amused snort. "No Sir," she assures him shortly.

Ciara hasn't set foot in the house since Hope died. Like with Mr Waterman, little seems to have. changed. There's a new photo of Hope that's been added to the collection on the mantelpiece, propped just in front of Amy's high school leavers' photos from three years ago. Ciara catches sight of it out of the corner of her eye. Hope looks happy - really happy, the kind of happy she always was around Ciara, the kind of happy that she infected into everyone around her. Ciara looks away quickly, shuffling towards the staircase.

She's always hated the stairs in the Waterman household. They're cold and bare, bright, shiny, mahogany screaming poise and discomfort. When Hope was very young she used to slide down the bannister and pretend that she was in Mary Poppins - at least, that's what she used to tell Ciara. She was full of stories, full of exciting experiences that she was only too willing to share.

Being here reminds Ciara of that. With every step she takes she remembers something new, something that seemed so trivial at the time but now, is utterly priceless.

Something as simple as walking to Hope's (old) room.

Ciara is unsurprised to find Hope's treasured teddy collection still perched on the end of her bed, caught in an infinite meeting that Hope will never interrupt again. She is, however, surprised to discover a neatly folded duvet spread out across the mattress. Never once in the four years that Ciara has wasted in this household has Hope ever bothered to tidy her bed.

It hurts being here, right in this room, because here is where the memories are the most alive. Here is where they sat browsing trashy YouTube videos during their awkward puberty years, here is where Ciara kissed Hope for the very first time and where Hope kissed Ciara back. And Ciara can still remember the taste of her cheap cola lip balm and the feel of her rough tongue and the fire that burned in between their lips.

She raises a hand to her mouth and traces the ghost of that very first kiss. It was the beginning of everything: the beginning of Hope and Ciara; the beginning of all of their hopes and dreams. The beginning of the end.

Ciara settles cross legged in the middle of the bed staring at the now-plain wall where a giant picture of Taylor Swift's face used to hang until Hope ripped it off one day when she was fifteen. Ciara remembers painting that very same wall the ripe blackberry colour that remains today and it's hard to believe that it was five whole years ago that they travelled to every paint shop in the vicinity in an attempt to find the perfect colour to match Hope's dream room.

Time went so fast back then.

It ran away from them.

It still smells like her in here, Ciara notes, though she's not entirely sure how. The duvet is still enveloped in her perfume scent, still dripping with the same smell that Ciara used to imagine that her amortentia might reek of.