IN THE HOURS BETWEEN • TC

2. Back and Forth, Back and Forth

Ten minutes of silence, the heat seeping in through her window, barely even fluttering the gauze curtains. Una drags herself through, paragraph after long, long paragraph. It's starting to bore her now, and she knows that she could simply stop reading. Just forget about the book altogether, but she hates leaving novels unfinished. Hates feeling like she's somehow betrayed the characters. They've shown her every intimate detail of their lives, every feeling, every mishap, and yet she's bored out of her mind; ready to toss them aside. (Only half of the plot isn't even plot, it's just essays by the author and it should be interesting but-)

A knock on the door and Una is grateful for a distraction. Fen pokes her head in.

"It's so hot, isn't it?" she asks, and Una nods as her mother comes and sits on the end of her bed, fanning her face with a tired hand. Silence for a moment or two, and Fen strokes a hand over the duvet. Over the bobbled blanket disregarded by the foot of the bed, banished in Una's attempts to keep cool the night before.

"What do you think about Timothée?" Fen asks softly, pronouncing it wrong, pronouncing the th too softly, too fondly.

Una knows that her mother isn't expecting oh, isn't he lovely? Oh, he's just so gorgeous! But Fen might be expecting something at least halfway amicable. She just shrugs.

"He's okay. He stinks, though."

To Una's surprise, her mother snorts at that. Runs her hand one way across the blanket, then back the way it came.

"Hmm. You may have a point. It could just be the plane, though."

Una's mouth quirks into a smile which matches her mum's - smooth, friendly. Something that lots of people don't get to see all that much.

"Although you could have let him go in the shower first," Fen says almost pensively, like it probably isn't the reason she came in here in the first place. Una wants to roll her eyes because here we go, but nothing else is said. Fen brings her feet up onto the bed and sits there with her knees tucked up to her chin, and sometimes Una forgets how young her mother is. Well, relatively. She was twenty when Frank was born, twenty two when Una graced everyone with her presence. Fen looks alarmingly small, hunched up like that.

"Is he in there now?" Una asks.

"Just got in," she replies, nodding, and Una puts her book to one side.

"Are you not enjoying it?" Fen glances at the novel.

Una barely manages to conceal the contempt on her face. "It's, uh..." she begins, "long. And half of it's not even-"

"The real plot, I know," Fen says. "You know that's my co-"

"Your copy, yeah," Una fills in. "From when you were my age." Her mum smiles absently.

"Well. Do you have anything for the dishwasher?"

Una looks around her room; spies a plate littered with crumbs from her breakfast, an empty glass of water with faint stains on the rim from a couple of nights ago.

"Just those two, I think," she replies. Smiles as Fen leans forwards, presses a kiss to her head, and leaves, taking the crockery out of the room with her. Una sighs quietly. Looks down at her book and flips to the front cover, tracing the inky blue copperplate of her mother's name. F. Xiao, Set 10B.

If she was her mum, she'd be having a baby in two years. The thought is alarming; Una can barely look after herself on a good day, let alone a child. Let alone her child.

She hears the water being turned off. Thinks about Timothée in the shower she's just been in, in her shower, all big feet and hairy calves and his hair, dark, plastered onto his head. He probably looks like some kind of drowned rodent, and Una smiles to herself. Almost thinks about going downstairs at the same time Timothée goes back to his room, just so she can see him looking stupid and know that she's right.