Every Woman for Herself by Trisha Ashley Page A

And
you
can have a good moan about Matt. We could get Freya to do something nasty to Matt, if you still have any of his belongings.’
    ‘I think I already did, killing his best friend, and I’ve cleared out everything to do with him.’
    ‘Purged,’ she agreed.
    ‘In every way.’
    We trudged up the hill in icy darkness, lit at irregular intervals by the small yellow circles grudgingly cast by three old streetlamps. The Black Dog looked terribly warm and inviting; Father and Jess were probably in there already. The last bus up from town stopped just ahead of us and decanted Inga and Godzilla before chugging slowly onwards.
    Inga gave me a sad, pitying smile as she passed us, but Godzilla lingered, pulling faces at me and capering, until she looked at Em instead, and suddenly ran off crying: ‘Mama! Wait!’
    Freya lived at the end of a terrace of old stone weavers’ cottages right at the top of Upvale. The bus passed us again on its way down, a brightly lit and empty
Marie Celeste
.
    The tiny sitting room, already full, became crammed to bursting point with our arrival.
    Freya pushed past us, gasping: ‘Ice, ice – I must have ice!’ in a parched voice, but she came back fairly soon with coffee, gin, and crackers smeared with something that probably only
looked
like road-kill hedgehog.
    All the time we were drinking and chatting heavy footsteps thumped about overhead, with muffled cursing. From time to time something bumped down the stairs and was dragged out.
    Then the footsteps and creakings from above were replaced by the sound of frenzied sawing, and flakes of plaster drifted down into my cup.
    ‘What’s he doing?’ enquired Madge.
    ‘Sawing the wardrobe in two,’ replied Freya calmly.
    ‘Isn’t that taking the “his half” business a little too seriously?’ I said.
    ‘He’s taking it to the letter, but I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to do with half a wardrobe. I’ll use mine for firewood. Mind you, if he’d asked I’d have given him the whole thing. I don’t want it. I was never big on white melamine.’
    ‘I know what you mean,’ I agreed. ‘My ex-husband liked angular modern furniture, all cream and white, with no colour or pattern.’
    ‘No wonder your aura is still faintly blue,’ Xanthe said, edging a little further away.
    ‘Sorry. Is there some way I can clean it off? Sort of Magic Flash?’
    ‘Are you joking?’ Xanthe asked, looking at me severely.
    ‘No, she’s serious,’ Em explained. ‘She just doesn’t know much about that sort of thing. I’m the only one who ever listened to Gloria Mundi.’
    ‘You have a natural talent for the Ancient Arts,’ agreed Lilith. ‘Far beyond Gloria, who is a mere wisewoman.’
    ‘Oh, nothing’s beyond Gloria,’ I assured her. ‘Em’s just gone in a different direction.’
    There was more frenzied sawing from upstairs.
    ‘The dressing table?’ suggested Lilith, and Freya nodded.
    ‘Yes – he’s taken it very hard; but then, so did I when he tried to slap me around.’
    ‘Your having already found a much younger lover seems to rankle particularly,’ said Xanthe.
    ‘Have you?’ I said with respect. ‘Who is it?’
    ‘He’s new – a teacher from the valley – but I’m teaching
him
one or two things. He lives on that new Mango Homes estate – Raspberry Road, just off Strawberry Street. You’ve just bought a house there too, haven’t you, Susie?’
    ‘Yes, but mine’s Galia Gardens, up Honeydew Hill.’
    ‘Fruity,’ I commented.
    ‘Well, I drew the line at Passionfruit Place, but otherwise I don’t mind,’ Susie said. ‘They renamed my old road Mandela Street, and every time someone forgot to put the town on my mail it went on a round-Britain tour. There’s a Mandela something in every town in the country.’
    The halved furniture descended the stairs in a series of crashes, and a few minutes of dragging and swearing later the van drove away.
    ‘I’ll just pop out and perform a protection spell for