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one morning she woke up, and her life slid out in front of her like a silk gown. one morning she felt like a sock, moulded to fit something living and real and protect it but empty and pointless without it. there was no meaning to anything anymore. veronica twisted and coiled on her bed in her cold room feeling like a naked model on a circular revolving stage. the absense of anyone visible left her feeling like a hundred million silent eyes watched from every corner. head arched backwards like a koi carp, veronica lit a cigarette, because she thought that was what the eyes would want to see: girl so dishevelled, so disaffected, so ennui and chic.
the dinner had been a mistake. not that it's a dinner when it's at a restaurant that brings you a plastic bib with your lobster and sugar sachets with your coffee, but to all intents and purposes it was an evening meal. same difference she supposed. the transition into adulthood in the kessler family was marked with an event, a party or a meal. veronica's eighteenth birthday had been such an occasion. her parents and siblings had presided over a table laden with pots of relish, paper napkins, casual insults, rude questions. for a table that sat seven it seemed like six against one. one of veronica's elder sisters, diana, had spilt her plastic goblet of corky red wine across the tablecloth and the stain had spread like fire down veronica's white dress. the event, though minor, was representative of the whole evening.
veronica looked up at the clock; nine eighteen a.m. since moving into her university halls she had rarely slept through a whole night because of the surrounding post-adolescent cacaphony of dull bass, testosterone roars and general drunken howling. but last night she had lain straight down on her bed and soundly slept for ten hours. surely not to happen again, but pleasant. the sticky wine stain on veronica's dress peeled from the duvet while she twisted again to accustom her eyes to the hesitant morning sunshine. like shirley temple as a child, the world apppeared to be hidden behind a fine sheet of gauze that blurred the edges of everything. whether it was the skyline pulsing gently or veronica's head, she didn't know.