It’s ten minutes to nine in West Wickham and Catherine is praying.
She is about to go to mass in the local church when the telephone rings and her communication with God is interrupted by someone wishing to wish her happy birthday.
“It was yesterday,” she sounds terse. She isn’t, she’s just tired.
“Eighty?”
“Eighty–one.”
“Aquarius?”
“Ha! Bunch of dreamers! No. Capricorn, responsible and disciplined.”
“You sound well.”
“We’re resistant.”
“We?”
“Goats.”
“Goats?”
“Capricorn.”
The conversation seemed to be going in a circle so the caller-upper said goodbye to the picker-upper and the former went to put ice on a painful leg and the latter went to church.
And the tense being used slipped effortlessly into the past.
The one writing this refilled his cup with recently brewed tea and looked at yesterday’s sketch.
The writer is not an artist.
A trier.
Seeking impossible perfection.
Aquarian.
The phoner-upper suddenly appears in the present, walking into the kitchen where the writer is writing.
She is holding a medicinal ice-pack in one hand and a bag of frozen meat in the other.
“Protein.”
“You’re going to eat that now?”
“No it’s got to thaw first.”
“Which?”
She giggles.
Flexible.
Adaptable.
Great sense of humour.
Sagitarian.

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