A Hundred Pieces of Me Read Online Free

some dried lavender in it. There, but invisible, just filling a space.
    She sat back on her heels, feeling the weight of the glass. The vase had cost twenty-five pounds – a fortune in her student days – and had always been full of striped tulips from the market, left until they decayed in that pretentious student style, falling in tissue thinness onto the stone ledge of her windowsill. Kit had started it: he’d brought her flowers on his first visit, and she’d been unable to bring herself to throw them out. And after someone had said, ‘Oh, you’re the girl who always has flowers!’ Gina had made a point of keeping the vase full because she wanted to be the Girl Who Always Had Flowers.
    At least I don’t do that any more, she thought, with a twinge of embarrassment at how much she’d wanted people to like her at university. She wasn’t in touch with a single one of them now.
    Gina started to put the vase into the GIVE AWAY box; over the years she’d collected lots of different vases, for lilies, hyacinths, roses. She didn’t need one that reminded her of Kit, and of all the expectations she’d had at university of where her life would be by now. All her life, she realised, she’d been creating this paper trail of possessions, hoping that they’d keep her attached to her own memories, but now she’d found out they didn’t. The last years meant nothing. They were gone. All the photo albums in the world wouldn’t keep them real.
    But as she held it, she stopped seeing those things and instead saw a vase. A rather nice vase that made Gina think that, actually, she’d had a bit of an eye for quality even as a student. Its bold sculptural shape had got lost in Dryden Road’s collage of colour and detail, but it was perfect for this flat. The white background reframed it: it was still a beautiful frozen raindrop of glass, bright cobalt blue, ready for flowers to fill it.
    Gina edged around the boxes until she was in front of the big picture window, and placed the vase squarely in the centre of the windowsill, where the sun would shine through it as it had done at college, revealing the murky wet shapes of the flower stems, rigid below the papery petals.
    She stood for a moment, trying to catch the slippery emotions swirling in her chest. Then a cloud moved outside and the last light of the day deepened the blue of the glass. As it glowed against the blank white sill, something twitched inside her, a memory nudging its way back to the surface. Not of an event but of a feeling, the same bittersweet fizz she’d felt when she’d unpacked her belongings in her university room, waiting for the happiest days of her life to roar around the corner, despite her secret worry that maybe she’d already had them, anticipation sharpened with a lick of fear. Was that a memory? Was it just the same feeling in a different place? Because her life was starting again now too?
    Gina took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to keep the vase because it reminded her of college or because a visitor might be impressed with her good taste. She was keeping it because she liked it. And when she looked at it, it made her happy. It caught the light, even on a grey day. It was beautiful.
    She hadn’t bought it for her student rooms. She’d bought it fifteen years ago – for this flat.
    The blue glass vase glowed in the weak, wintry sunshine, and the white flat didn’t look quite so white any more. Gina stood for a long minute, letting nothing into her head except the liquid swoop and the deep, jewel-like colour.
    Then, with a more confident hand, she reached into the box for the next ball of bubble-wrap.

Chapter Two
     
     
     
    ITEM : a brown leather satchel, with GJB embossed on the front
     
     
     
    Hartley, September 1991
     
    Georgina is experiencing very mixed feelings about her new school satchel.
    This morning, on the kitchen table, it had looked all right. Shiny and conker-brown, with brass buckles and a corrugated section