Trigger Warning

The brazier waited, and she threw her medical information into the flames. She watched them brown and blacken and turn to ash on the November wind.

Eloise got up, when the last of the medical records had burned away, and she walked inside. The mirror in the hall showed her an Eloise both familiar and new: she had thick brown hair, and she smiled at herself from the looking glass as if she loved life and trailed comfort in her wake.

Eloise went to the hall closet. There was a red hat on the shelf she could barely remember, but she put it on, worried that the red might make her face look washed out and sallow. She looked in the mirror. She appeared just fine. She tipped the hat at a jauntier angle.

Outside the last of the smoke from the black snake-wound brazier drifted on the chilly November air.

December Tale

Summer on the streets is hard, but you can sleep in a park in the summer without dying from the cold. Winter is different. Winter can be lethal. And even if it isn’t, the cold still takes you as its special homeless friend, and it insinuates itself into every part of your life.

Donna had learned from the old hands. The trick, they told her, is to sleep wherever you can during the day – the Circle line is good, buy a ticket and ride all day, snoozing in the carriage, and so are the kinds of cheap cafés where they don’t mind an eighteen-year-old girl spending fifty pence on a cup of tea and then dozing off in a corner for an hour or three, as long as she looks more or less respectable – but to keep moving at night, when the temperatures plummet, and the warm places close their doors, and lock them, and turn off the lights.

It was nine at night and Donna was walking. She kept to well-lit areas, and she wasn’t ashamed to ask for money. Not any more. People could always say no, and mostly they did.

There was nothing familiar about the woman on the street corner. If there had been, Donna wouldn’t have approached her. It was her nightmare, someone from Biddenden seeing her like this: the shame, and the fear that they’d tell her mum (who never said much, who only said ‘good riddance’ when she heard Gran had died) and then her mum would tell her dad, and he might just come down here and look for her, and try to bring her home. And that would break her. She didn’t ever want to see him again.

The woman on the corner had stopped, puzzled, and was looking around as if she was lost. Lost people were sometimes good for change, if you could tell them the way to where they wanted to go.

Donna stepped closer, and said, ‘Spare any change?’

The woman looked down at her. And then the expression on her face changed and she looked like . . . Donna understood the cliché then, understood why people would say She looked like she had seen a ghost. She did. The woman said, ‘You?’

‘Me?’ said Donna. If she had recognised the woman she might have backed away, she might even have run off, but she didn’t know her. The woman looked a little like Donna’s mum, but kinder, softer, plump where Donna’s mum was pinched. It was hard to see what she really looked like because she was wearing thick black winter clothes, and a thick woollen bobble hat, but her hair beneath the hat was as orange as Donna’s own.

The woman said, ‘Donna.’ Donna would have run then, but she didn’t, she stayed where she was because it was just too crazy, too unlikely, too ridiculous for words.

The woman said, ‘Oh god. Donna. You are you, aren’t you? I remember.’ Then she stopped. She seemed to be blinking back tears.

Donna looked at the woman, as an unlikely, ridiculous idea filled her head, and she said, ‘Are you who I think you are?’

The woman nodded. ‘I’m you,’ she said. ‘Or I will be. One day. I was walking this way remembering what it was like back when I . . . when you . . .’ Again she stopped. ‘Listen. It won’t be like this for you forever. Or even for very long. Just don’t do anything stupid. And don’t do anything permanent. I promise it will be all right. Like the YouTube videos, you know? It Gets Better.’

‘What’s a you tube?’ asked Donna.

‘Oh, lovey,’ said the woman. And she put her arms around Donna and pulled her close and held her tight.

‘Will you take me home with you?’ asked Donna.

‘I can’t,’ said the woman. ‘Home isn’t there for you yet. You haven’t met any of the people who are going to help you get off the street, or help you get a job. You haven’t met the person who’s going to turn out to be your partner. And you’ll both make a place that’s safe, for each other and for your children. Somewhere warm.’

Donna felt the anger rising inside her. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked.

‘So you know it gets better. To give you hope.’

Donna stepped back. ‘I don’t want hope,’ she said. ‘I want somewhere warm. I want a home. I want it now. Not in twenty years.’

A hurt expression on the placid face. ‘It’s sooner than twen—’