I noticed it the moment I stepped through the doorway, the change that is.  My presence was heralded by the ding! of a potential customer, followed by Mrs. Penny Tildesley’s fussing as she forced the drenched anorak from my back.  The room had that dank odor, the whiff of remorse and decay that inevitably succeeded a sense of former entitlement. Porcelain tiles clung battered to the ivy green plaster, a broom stood forgotten against a faded poster depicting a torn head of blonde hair. “For that fair shine”, read the caption, “Get the Mia Farrow look!” Commercial idealization. Unthinking, like lambs to the slaughter.  I bet she jumped right on the bandwagon, the poor cow. I glanced at Penny’s frazzled knots and tangles, punctured by grey wires as her compliments washed over me.  One thing’s for certain, she wasn’t Mia Farrow anymore. But then again, nor was Mia Farrow.

   “So what’ll it be?” she inquired, a comb in one claw and a jagged pair of scissors in the other.
I stared at her reflection in the mirror for sometime before answering,

   “Information, Mrs. Tildesley.”
   “Information?”
   “About your daughter.”
   “You should never have come back.”

Her cheeks were flustered now, her knuckles white.  I searched her face for clues, a betrayal of weakness.

   “This was a nice place you had once.”
   “You should understand something-”
   “Whatever happened to the aspidistra?”
   “It’s important-”
   “We used to talk for hours under that plant, I remember-”
   “She’s dead Michael.”

 Her voice had risen to a hoarse shrill, but now silence descended on the still grey once more.  I had been shot down, punctured, deflated.  The mirror swam, Penny’s lips rotated, poised forever on that single syllable: dead.  Snippets flashed overhead.  That picnic. The river. Her smile. A slender neck.  An inconclusive end, how had it happened?

   “You left”, she whispered, reading my thoughts. “She grew quiet, became ill. You know how these things are.”

I nodded slowly, far away. That picnic became that day of enlistment.  The river became awash with blood, strangers I had known for an instant in a crosshair.  Her smile became my sunken grief.  A slender neck became a guilty conscience.

  “So what’ll it be?”
  “Take it off.”
  “All of it?”
  “All of it.”