We Are All Made of Stars by Rowan Coleman

for her keys. ‘You don’t need to worry about us. We’re fine. We do really well, actually.’
    â€˜I wasn’t questioning whether or not you are a good mother …’ As soon as I say the words out loud, I can see I’ve touched a nerve, frightened her somehow, and I don’t blame her. What a stupid thing to say. Why didn’t I just take him at his word and go inside ten minutes ago? This is what happens when you engage with the world at random – it starts engaging back.
    â€˜He’s fine, we’re fine. Mind your own.’ She fumbles with the keys and drops them. I am making her nervous, and I feel sorry. The best thing I can do is simply get indoors and we can all pretend we never had this conversation.
    â€˜Well, you’re home now,’ I say. ‘I’ll let you go. Goodnight.’
    â€˜Is he a pervert?’ I hear the boy asking just before she slams her front door shut.
    Jake is there sitting on the bottom stair, mercifully speechless.
    â€˜How was your day?’ I ask him. ‘Sex, drugs, sleeping on the radiator?’
    He looks like all three were entirely possible and follows me begrudgingly into the kitchen. I stop without thinking and check the answerphone, but there is no light blinking – just a dusty, empty faux-wooden box, not the portal to mysteries that I don’t understand at all. I don’t know what I was expecting, or hoping for, from that missed message last night. Or who I thought might have stood in a public call box trying to reach me. But it had given me something I didn’t expect: a sense of hope, of something different. Although what I think I might be missing escapes me. I have everything I want. A great job, my freedom, no financial or emotional tangles – everything is exactly how I like it. And that stupid silent-but-not-quite phone message makes me feel like I do when I’ve left the house and I can’t remember if I left the shower running. Some important piece of missing information that is just out of my reach. But it’s ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous. I’m thinking like a girl.
    Probably all this research into séances and spiritualism isn’t helping. Perhaps after spending so many days dissecting messages from ‘the other side’, I’d half hoped it was Dad, checking in to see how I was doing, if I had become a better fisherman overnight, or built that new rod stand we’d planned together. But it was probably just a wrong number, which led to a blinking light in an empty house. Which might be a metaphor for my life: the man at the end of the line that only a stranger might call by mistake. A man who is perfectly content, I remind myself, sharply.
    A knock at the door makes me jump, and Jake speeds out of the cat flap before I’ve even opened him a tin of tuna. I sigh. The last time I opened the door to strangers, it was to Christians who did not know the Bible as well as I do, and who certainly weren’t expecting to have every quote they gave me returned with one from
The Origin of Species
.
    â€˜If you’re a politician …’ I grumble as I walk down the hall, but I know the answer to that as soon as I see the distinctive outline on the other side of my bubbled glass. It’s my very short neighbour, in her large woolly hat.
    Oh, Christ, I hope she hasn’t come round to be confrontational. I hate confrontation. I am a person who is really happy to be dumped by text, or to be given negative feedback in an email. I don’t care for face-to-face angst at all, but it’s too late to pretend that I am not here: if I can see her, that means she can see me. Perhaps if I apologise as soon as I open the door, she will go away quickly.
    â€˜Hello, I’m sorry about before,’ I say hastily. ‘I realise that adults aren’t supposed to talk to kids any more. I didn’t mean to make either of you