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“It’s okay, sweetie,” she says. “I’m a big girl.”

“Nobody is,” says Charis. “Not really.”

She gets lonely, why not admit it? She gets hugely, cavernously lonely, and then she eats. Eats and drinks and smokes, filling up her inner spaces. As best she can.

Anyway, what was true love if it couldn’t put up with a little boredom?

Another chance. Now that she knows what to do she will do it better this time. Tell me, God—why don’t we get rehearsals?

It’ll relax you, says Charis, though Roz, you have to help out! Don’t fight it! Go with it. Lie back. Float. Picture yourself in a warm ocean.

But every time Roz tries this, there are sharks.

Her tears are not tears of mourning, nor of despair. They are tears of rage. Roz knows the flavour well. But at her age, rage for the sake of rage is becoming less and less worth it, because every time you grind your teeth a few of them could break off.

“That is such horseshit,” said Roz angrily. “It is absolutely no use saying you should stop loving someone. It doesn’t work like that!”

“Well, you should, if you know it’s bad for you,” said Charis. “Bad for you has nothing to do with it,” said Roz.

“I like hamburgers,” said Charis, “but I don’t eat them:”

“Hamburgers are not an emotion,” said Roz.

“Yes they are,” said Charis.

She likes her job well enough as jobs go, but it’s a job, and every job has shackles attached to it.

“Listen, sweetie,” said Roz. “There’s just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they’ve got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time:”

She has never seen the point of lawns. Given the choice she’d prefer a moat, with a drawbridge, and crocodiles optional.

“Good egg,” he says. Small things like good eggs delight him, small things like bad eggs depress him. He’s easy to please, but difficult to protect.

Random sex would have done the trick once, but plain garden-variety sex hardly counts any more, it’s just a form of mood therapy or calisthenics, she’d have to go in for bloodthirsty kink. Or something else, something devious and archaic and complicated and mean. Seduction followed by slow poisoning. Treachery Betrayal. Cheating and lies.

So, God, she says to herself. That was some number. Fooled me! Proud of yourself. What else have you got up your sleeve? Maybe a nice war, some genocide—hey, a plague or two? She knows she shouldn’t talk this way, even to herself, it’s tempting fate, but it gets her through the day.

God is a good listener. He doesn’t interrupt.

She’s just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it’s not, it’s the worst, it’s the worst feeling there is—incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like the view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness. Which must be why it inspires so much murder: killing is the ultimate control.

At night she takes long baths, with lavender and rosewater in them, and she visualizes all of her negative emotions flowing out of her body into the bathwater, and when she pulls the plug they swirl down the drain.

“I wonder if my life would’ve been better if I’d had a real father,” she says to Tony.

“I had one,” says Tony. “It was a mixed blessing:”

“Don’t fret about motives. Attila the Hun didn’t have motives. He just had appetites. She killed them. It speaks for itself.”