Pandora’s Box. Giselle Green

       5 Rachel

      ‘Coo-eee?’ Annie-Jo’s special-edition turquoise Mazda Berkeley MXS just pulled up in the drive. I can hear her Josh and my Daniel clambering out, chasing after one another, laughing. They’ll be round the back in a minute, dark curls crashing against short blond spikes, racing up the new treehouse my old friend Sol has installed in the oak tree for Daniel.

      My hands are deep in the earth. I’ve been digging a trench so I can insert a palisade of sticks like a little fort; somewhere we can put Daniel’s tortoise Hattie so she won’t be able to escape. It’s seven thirty and the last rays of the sun are beginning to slope over the rooftops, bright yellow and a bit chilly now, the sky just getting shaded in with patches of grey.

      ‘You’re back early?’ I scramble to my feet, wiping earthy hands behind my back before hugging my old friend. She is looking far too nice for me to get soil all over her. I take her in a little wistfully: ‘You’ve been out celebrating something today?’ She’s dressed in an elegant skirt and a soft white blouse and she looks…radiant somehow. The thought that she might be pregnant again crosses my mind. She is five years younger than me; it is still possible, after all. Her new husband Bryan has adopted her two but they don’t have any children between them. Not yet.

      ‘Oh no!’ she laughs dismissively ‘Just been running around town doing errands, you know the sort of thing. Nothing special. We’re going to be “lunching” next week, though. Would you like to come? Say you will. My treat.’ For a moment she smiles at me and I catch a glimpse of the old Annie-Jo; the one who would have come to visit me wearing torn jeans and a faded T-shirt with baby-food stains still on it. That Annie-Jo would have flopped down beside me on the grass and we’d have finished off Hattie’s palisade of sticks together in no time. This Annie-Jo looks like she’s just had her nails done. She isn’t going to be up for any digging.

      ‘See what day you’re going. I might come. I’d like to.’ I do want to have lunch with Annie-Jo, but probably not with all her new friends. We’d see. ‘I suppose we’d better get you inside then. I can’t have you out here drinking tea in your finery.’

      ‘Where’s that old garden bench we used to sit on?’ She looks around, frowning.

      ‘I threw that away two years ago, Annie-Jo!’ I laugh at her, but it surely can’t have been two years since she last came and sat out in the garden with me? When our children were little we practically used to live in this garden. Her daughter Michelle is just a month older than Shelley, and she had Josh pretty much around the same time I had Daniel. In those days Annie-Jo was a single mum, struggling on her own in a bedsit. Now she’s married to Bryan and they live in what I can only describe as a mansion in the better half of town. How times change!

      Now that she’s noticed the missing bench, she’s looking around at other things, reluctant to go in, taking in all the modifications that have crept up on this garden over the years.

      ‘Where’s that orange rose “Maria Tierra” I bought you for your thirtieth?’ she asks suddenly.

      Heavens, we are talking about over a decade here; where is it?

      ‘Bill kicked a football into it repeatedly one summer and it never recovered,’ I recall at last. He broke my rose bush, I think, with an unexpected flash of irritation, and now he isn’t even here to help me with Hattie’s palisade, not to mention the children.

      ‘You’ve got a vegetable patch,’ she comments, ‘and a herb patch!’ For some reason the enthusiasm in her voice warms me right through. I don’t let on that I only put those in because I thought they might save me a few pennies. ‘I’ve been telling Bryan I want one of those put in, for ages, and you’ve got there before me,’ she accuses.

      ‘The vegetable patch is something Sol does with Daniel, on and off. The herb patch is mine, I planted it a year ago and I’ve managed to kill off even the mint. You remember I gave you a bunch of mint last summer?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ Annie-Jo is still looking around as if she’s never been in this garden in her life, ‘so you did. Sol helps Daniel with his vegetable patch, does he? Lucky you.’

      ‘How so?’

      ‘He’s a good-looking guy, Rach,’ she grins at me coyly. ‘There are plenty of women I know who wouldn’t mind having your boss around to help out with their gardens…’

      I figure I’d better not mention that it was him who installed the treehouse or there might be ‘plenty of women’ putting two and two together and ending up with five.

      ‘If you’re thinking of him as a potential partner for me, darling, I thought you knew, he doesn’t swing that way.’

      Annie-Jo laughs dismissively as if this is just a tinyweeny little blot on the horizon; some minor irritating male habit that any good woman could train him out of.

      ‘Last I heard, he’d broken up with his partner—Adam, was it? Maybe he’s not gay after all? It does happen, you know. Sometimes the right woman comes along…’

      ‘No,’ I laugh at her. ‘No, no, no!’

      ‘He’s got his own successful antiques business,’ she carries on regardless, ‘he’s delightful. He clearly likes your children. And he likes you. Maybe more than just a bit?’

      ‘Such a pity I don’t fancy him, though.’

      ‘Fancying is a luxury afforded only to teenagers and rich women!’ Annie-Jo scoffs. ‘You’re forty-two now, Rach. If you don’t want to be stuck on your own forever you’ve got to start getting realistic. Take what’s available, if you catch my drift.’

      Whatever makes her think that Sol might be available? He might have broken off with Adam (‘He’s getting so old, Rach, he’s really let himself go!’) but now he is besotted with Justin. Hell, I’m not even going there.

      ‘That smacks of desperation, my dear, and I’m not desperate.’

      Whatever