The Family Friend C. MacDonald (reading comprehension books .txt) 📖

of the joy, none of the sweet release from domesticity that have made her other Insta nights out so electric.

Anna shakes her shoulders to the beat of the music and indicates they go and sit at a booth in the corner of the seedy pub-cum-club that they’ve dragged themselves to with a couple of hangers-on from the event.

Erin settles herself into the booth and slurps her Tom Collins. She knows drinking is probably the last thing she should do, but it’s been her go-to in good times and bad for so long she doesn’t quite know what else to do. Anna Mai’s standing up at the end of their table, struggling to pull her gold-sequinned bolero jacket off and mumbling something off-key about paedophiles in relation to how much she’s sweating. Erin looks at her friend, with her Farrah Fawcett tumbles of golden hair and wonders what it is about her that’s so magnetic. She can’t remember the content of a single conversation they’ve had, only that they always laugh a lot. Which is surely a good thing, and yet now, even that feels meaningless. She has real friends, close friends from school and university, that she’s drifted away from in the years since she and Raf got together, because he thought that spending time with them with their success and ebullient contentment was making her sad, but this – however beautiful Anna is, however snappy her incessant wisecracks, Erin never feels remotely nourished by their time together.

Anna Mai sits down opposite and Erin notices a circle of beads wrapped around her upper arms. She pulls Anna’s arm closer and looks at them, they’re purple, translucent.

‘What the fuck? I’m not that kind of girl,’ Anna slurs with a laugh in her voice, but she clearly didn’t enjoy having her arm jerked across the table.

‘Who gave you this?’ Erin asks, attempting to still the tone of accusation. The beads are crystals, Erin’s sure of it. Has Amanda got to Anna Mai in some way? Is she here? Erin scans the room, a ragtag group of pissed-up students and ropy-looking Hackney locals standing, predatorily, at the side of the dance floor.

‘So,’ she says, leaning forward as if about to share a secret, ‘I’ve not been allowed to “Gram” it up yet, but I’ve been seeing this amazing healer, Cariad Bloom, I think she’s got like eighty thousand followers or something, she’s big, impossible to get an appointment, but my agent hooked me up with her and it’s been a bit of a game-changer. These are ametrine. From the Anahi Mine in Bolivia. The genuine ones have so many wonderful properties, focus, self-empowerment, but what Cariad really prescribed it to me for was trying to give up smoking, it’s meant to get rid of compulsions.’

‘Didn’t you have a cigarette outside with that awful Pete guy?’

‘Yeh, but that’s the first one I’ve had in three weeks, so I feel like it’s really working.’ Erin nods. She’s surprised Anna Mai’s into crystals. Her whole brand is based on being a sort of nineties-style ladette who happens to have kids. Hungover trips to Legoland, guilty looks to the camera as her children eat McDonald’s, and of course, sticking with her smoking habit, which, Erin has to assume, the ending of is soon to feature heavily on her feed.

‘Can I show you a picture?’

‘Your troll sending you dick pics yet? Has he got a big one?’

‘Look,’ Erin says, ‘crystals.’ She gets up the picture of Amanda’s collection of crystals from her studio. Anna Mai looks at it, one eye squinting a bit which Erin’s sure is more to do with the booze than her eyesight.

‘It’s a pretty standard crystal grid. Cariad has one in every room of her house and has designed one for me that, I have to be honest, I haven’t got round to getting all the things for yet. Because they cost a fortune – at least the ones I’ve been prescribed do.’

‘Do you know what it’s for?’

‘What, like, what healing properties?’ She tries to zoom in on some of the image but shakes her head. ‘Na, impossible to tell and I’m really no expert at all. The one in the middle will be a conductor of some kind and the light pink ones are probably rose quartz, just because rose quartz seems to be used for everything.’

‘And what are –’ Erin’s tentative to hear the answer – ‘the properties of rose quartz?’

‘You fucking name it. Friendship, love, kinship, warmth, peace, tenderness. All those sort of soft, warm, lovely bubbly ones. I think it’s used to heal trauma as well. You name it,’ she says, having no knowledge she’s already said that. ‘Send me this.’ Anna hands the phone back to Erin. ‘I’ll ask Cariad next time I see her.’

‘That’d be ace.’

‘What’s up with you?’ Anna slouches back into the cricket-green velvet of the booth, a snarl on her face.

‘Nothing, I’m fine,’ Erin says, taking the straw out of her cocktail and taking a big slug of it.

‘You’ve had a face like a smacked arse-piece since I’ve seen you tonight. Tell me. If it’s that nob following you around and putting pictures up, might help to call him a cunt a few times to someone that understands what it’s like. I’ve had all sorts. Jesus, some bloke DMed me the other day and said, “You’ve got a face that’s begging to be raped.” I mean, fucking hell. I’ve got a thick skin and everything but I just started crying. It’s not even the sentiment, what he’s saying, it’s just how can someone just casually be so fucking horrible to me for no reason? So yeh, tell me. Tell me what the fuck is bothering you because bottling it up clearly isn’t working.’ Erin looks at Anna Mai and she does want to talk. She does want to tell someone about what she did to Raf. She doesn’t know much about Anna’s relationship with her husband Tristan, but she’s certainly done stories where she’s talked