She had resolved that starting today she would no longer think ungenerous thoughts. She had made this resolution, not because Ethan had told her she should, but to prove he wouldn’t notice when she did.
‘You haven’t said anything nice since 1992,’ he said, and that was another one of his tricks. To fake veracity with detail.
It had seemed, last night when she was planning to be resolved, that today was an excellent day to begin a resolution, what with it being the first of the month and everything, but tomorrow was Sunday which, in anyone’s language was just as good as the first as far as resolutions went.
And so, as early as half past ten on the first of May, she was free to think of the woman lying mound-up on the towel next door:
the space between her legs gives the lie to her unflattened, unspreadable breasts.
She must have tumbled out of Queensland, Lucy thought. Got lost on her way to Dubai, with nothing but a suitcase filled with bikinis and lipsticks in matching shades. Those fingernails, those tits, those lips, they had not been created here, not in this city of forty kilometre streets and sensible shoes.
If you’re wearing perfume, she wanted to say, it’s wasted on me. I woke up one morning in January and I couldn’t smell a thing. Not my perfume, not my coffee, not my toast. I burnt three pieces just to check.
‘Do you think I really lost it overnight?’ she’d asked Ethan when he came home for lunch. ‘I mean I couldn’t have lost it and not noticed it, could I?’
He had shrugged, then said, ‘Stranger things.’
‘You think I wouldn’t notice that I couldn’t smell?’
He had said, through a mouthful of cheese and ham, ‘Dr Johnson said, I stink, you smell, but Dr Johnson hadn’t met you.’ He hadn’t even stopped to swallow before he’d laughed.
Four months later and the memory of it made her scratch at her head and bite down hard on her lip
Next to her, the mannequin cleared her throat but didn’t speak.
Maybe there will be changes, Lucy thought. But it’s not gonna be my ungenerous thoughts. She used both of her hands to pull her fringe away from her eyes. Or my invisible tits.
undetermined 