Wonder Women by Rosie Fiore

else said, London was just bloody freezing. Holly was cold all the time, even though people kept telling her it was summertime – the best summer they’d had in years. She wasn’t sure if it was the weather that made her feel like that, or the constant, icy knot in her stomach. Everything was so strange, such a wrench. It was ten years since she’d last lived here. So much had changed, both in the neighbourhood around her mother’s house, and in her. A crowd of teenage boys stood on the corner of the road, talking and laughing, and, as far as Holly could see, spitting incessantly. The old-fashioned corner shop she used to go to on her way home from school had been replaced by a Tesco Metro, and the pub up the road had closed down, to be replaced by a giant betting shop that was open till eleven every night. And what about Holly herself? The Holly who had climbed on the plane to South Africa, twenty years old, full of ideals and energy, couldn’t be more different from the thirty-year-old woman hunched by the radiator, staring out of her mother’s window at the suburban street. She’d been back to London in the intervening years, but onlyas a tourist, coming home for the odd Christmas or for family weddings or occasions. She always knew then that at the end of the week, or two weeks, she would be getting on a plane back to Jo’burg, to her large, sunny workshop, and the sprawling house she shared with Damon.
    But now she was back. Back for good? She didn’t know. All she knew was that she couldn’t be in Johannesburg right now. Not with all the memories, not with the constant possibility of bumping into one of Damon’s friends, or his mother. Not a chance. So she’d packed up her stuff, put most of it in storage in a friend’s garage and got on a plane. And here she was, back in Ealing, with nothing to show for the decade she’d been away.
    She’d kind of lost contact with the friends she’d had in London, and she didn’t feel like explaining to anyone why she was back, what she was going to do or how long she’d be staying, especially as she didn’t know the answers to the last two questions herself. As a result, she hadn’t seen anyone or gone anywhere in the week since she’d been home. Her sister had rung her every day and kept offering to come and see her. Until now, Holly had managed to put her off. She’d done some grocery shopping for her mum, finding the aisles of an English supermarket strange and confusing after so many years away, and she’d sat shivering on a bench in the park for an hour each day, mainly to avoid her mum’s constant offers of tea and overly sympathetic expression. She couldn’t do another day of it though. She had to get out and do something, so she decided she’d get on a bus and head for North London to see Miranda.
    Holly’s sister was four years older than her, but the agegap might as well have been three times that, their lives were so far apart. Miranda was married with two children, and keen to add at least two more to her brood. Her husband Paul did something with hedge funds in the City, and as a result they had a lovely big house and no shortage of money. Miranda didn’t need to work, didn’t want to work, and devoted every fibre of her being to her children.
    Holly sat upstairs on a number-83 bus, looking out of the window at the endless rows of houses and shops that made up suburban London. Everyone behind each of those doors had something to do: a job, a family, a purpose. She had sod all, right now. First of all, she was going to need to get a job … she’d brought what little money she had back with her, but the exchange rate was not kind to her savings at all. She knew it wouldn’t be hard to find work of some sort – she had transferable skills – but she needed to think about what she wanted to do. She needed to set some life