Please note: this piece contains some strong language.
After she’d read it aloud to Grace, Lizzie thought she would throw the letter onto the fire, though the coals were down to a leprous skin of ash.
'You’ll not do that,’ Grace said, filching the paper like a gull. At nearly sixty, Lizzie had to unclench her mind to find words, words that weren’t pinned to their forebears in a conversation. She stared at Grace’s thin-stockinged ankles. Trumpet. Tamper. Slat. Picture fields, she told herself, lazy, golden August fields; let the word wander home.
Grace intended to hoard the letter, take it to her room and pluck the written words bald, before slowly wrapping each one in hate. But Lizzie’s arm snapped out and now the letter was back in the eldest sister’s fingers. ‘Slut,’ she said, over-pronouncing the consonants, as if the word were an item fingered in a shop.
Grace swayed a fraction, then smiled around her false teeth. Grace’s greasy grin Lizzie and Isabella had both called it. Even if there hadn’t been a war, Grace would never have found a man. Her skin had been enflamed – the oil and redness in conflict with the concavity of her cheeks – since adolescence.
‘Aye,’ Grace said, in the mock working-woman’s voice she kept for character demolition, ‘she’s that. Though she claims to have marrit the craitur.’
‘There can be no doubt that she married him.’
‘Why? Has she enclosed a certificate?’
‘No,’ Lizzie said, a better retort untenanted within her head.
While the years had stolen still more flesh from Grace, they’d clad Lizzie in bark, the pleatings of her skin today, and all days, packed with parchment-coloured powder. Her hair, nearly a yard-and-a-half of gleaming, wavy pewter, was twisted and pinned like a stolen hat above her puckered brow. Lizzie tried. She always had.
‘Why would anyone think to marry our little sister?’ Grace moved her legs apart under the taupe dress. ‘Let alone a man in Australia, and one with some prospects it seems. Our Izabee, always after adventure. Mad as a hatter, that one, and such an ugly wee woman.’