The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls

‘What’s a blue plaque?’ Dixie asked.

‘It’s like a sign—they put them on buildings when a famous person’s lived or worked there.’

Dixie stopped. ‘Are you going to be famous?’

‘Who knows?’

Grace watched her younger sister cross the road with the Lollipop Lady, who gave her some sweets. When Dixie got to the other side she waved the sweets triumphantly in the air.

She gave a final wave before disappearing through the gates into the crowd of children and parents.

Grace could still hear the tap shoes. She waited until she couldn’t hear them any more before getting on her bike, preoccupied, thinking about what Ms Jenkins had said about the blue plaque, and feeling suddenly tearful.

As she stopped at the next set of lights, she heard somebody call out her name. ‘Grace! Grace!’ It was her Physics teacher and Form Tutor, Ms Webster, in the car that had pulled up beside her.

‘I didn’t see you at netball practice yesterday,’ Ms Webster shouted through the open window.

Grace played Wing Defence on the B team. She should have been on the A Team, but her commitments at home prevented her from going on any of the tours.

‘Sorry about that,’ she shouted back.

Ms Webster nodded, looking at her. ‘Anything wrong?’

Grace shook her head, her mind still on blue plaques.

The lights changed to green and she waved, moving instinctively forwards.

A few seconds later, Ms Webster overtook, calling out, ‘I’ll see you at school.’ She wiped at her face where something wet had fallen then accelerated past Grace, who kept her head down because she’d started—inexplicably—to cry.

15 (#ulink_23af7baf-8810-567a-9e46-2fe80da67b82)

Down in the basement gym at number two Park Avenue, Sylvia Henderson was listening to The World’s Greatest Arias and focussing on the weights because she’d noticed movement in her underarms recently—a lack of solidity that bothered her. She was used to working out with Rachel—who was still trying to get pregnant at the age of forty-four—in between Rachel’s miscarriages.

As she gasped and a whole host of sopranos sang, her eyes flickered over the garden, on eye level and bleak at this time of year in its early winter wash of browns. The garden was one of the few things in her Brave New Suburban World that frightened Sylvia. Even more so when she’d realised that in Burwood you weren’t only expected to spend time in your garden but with your garden.

At the Park Avenue Residents Association Summer Barbecue there was a large-scale trade in cuttings, which had alarmed Sylvia into drinking herself way above her limit and spending far too much time with a man with halitosis who kept chewing at his nails.

Despite having walls still papered in Laura Ashley and floors carpeted in dog hairs, Dr Fulton’s wife, Jill, had a social standing on the Avenue it was difficult to de-stabilise due to her horticultural reputation.

Sylvia enjoyed eating in the garden; she enjoyed getting Tom to light the fire pit when he was home—Bill was too depressed to be trusted with this task—and enjoyed sunbathing on her Plantation recliner. She didn’t enjoy anything that required her to kneel or wear old clothing, and anyway—lost interest once the summer was over.

She’d gone to a nursery just outside Burwood that was often on TV and spent vast amounts of money on plants guaranteed to give architectural effect, but still couldn’t make the garden come together. It overwhelmed her—and it knew it.

She could feel it now, in its winter nudity, taunting her—and wished the fog hadn’t lifted.

Shifting her eyes away from the garden, she continued pulling weights until the phone started to ring.

She answered it, panting.

‘Mum? Are you okay?’

‘Tom—’

‘You sound weird.’

‘I’m down in the gym.’

‘Is now a good time to talk?’

‘About what?’

‘The weekend.’

Tom sounded tense; stressed. His usual lightness—that herself and others found so endearing—wasn’t there.

‘Listen, mum—I don’t think I’m going to make it.’

‘Tom—’

‘I know.’

‘My poker party.’

‘I know—’

‘I’ve told everyone you’re coming.’ She indulged rapidly in the image of Tom in his Dinner Jacket moving through her guests. ‘What am I going to say to people? My God—’

In her distress, she’d inadvertently turned back to face the garden and was now staring at the randomly planted oleanders, olives, Dicksonia antarctica and eucalyptus trees looking like a band of horticultural misfits that had broken rank for the final time, never to re-group again under her command. She knew she’d seen Day of the Triffids