Once

One

When Elle was five years old her mother died.

It was, without doubt, the only interesting thing that had ever happened to her.

That is, she wouldn't necessarily have said that her mother dying had been interesting. She was too young to even really know what had happened at the time. She just knew what people told her, that her mother was gone and not coming back. She had accepted that fact the way all children accept everything that is told to them. She was too young to be devastated by it, the way she would have been if she was older, and over time she just sort of learnt to accept it as one of those things that had happened to her. Like when she'd had chicken pox when she was ten: a vague memory of it being painful and difficult, but now nothing remained but the moderately interesting fact that it had happened to her at all.

By the age of sixteen she never even really thought about it much. She had a completely different life by then, of course. Her dad was married to someone else, for one thing, and had been for nearly five years now. She had half-sisters. She wasn't a sad little girl with a depressed dad and no mum, and who everyone treated like a fragile little doll that might shatter if you didn't treat it carefully. She'd hated that, even back then. She was glad things were different now.

And the biggest change, of course, had been the move to Farway. Her dad had been offered the position of manager of Farway Bank, and he had told her it was a great opportunity that he couldn't pass up. She hadn't understood it at the time - as far as she was concerned her dad could be a bank manager anywhere, and she didn't see why it had to be in some stupid little town in the middle of nowhere.

Her dad had also told her that it would be good for her, that she would enjoy being somewhere more outdoorsy and that she would make lots of friends. She hadn't believed that at all.

The funny thing was, she had made friends. And she had hardly grown up to be outdoorsy, but she did sort of enjoy the fact that Farway had things like woods instead of municipal car parks, and on her walks to school she was more likely to see the occasional squirrel than the occasional stray dog. But the thing that bothered her, that always bothered her, was that Farway never felt like her home. It just felt like somewhere she lived. And it wasn't somewhere she planned on living a single day longer than she needed to.

But she loved her friends. She loved her sisters. She even loved Kaye - for the most part. And she loved her dad as much as she ever had. He was an unstoppable dork, and possibly on the shortlist for Most Boring Man Alive, but he was alright. And anyway, he was her dad. She had to love him. She wasn't getting another one.

And that was Elle's little life, in a tiny little town called Farway, and she had come a long way since the day her mother left home and never came back again.

She never talked about what had happened to her mother. She didn't really avoid it. She just never brought it up. She certainly didn't want sympathy or anything like that. The last thing she would have wanted would be people asking her about it all the time. She would much prefer to pretend it never happened. That little girl whose mother died just didn't exist anymore.

Besides, if people kept asking her about it, it would do nothing but stir up the guilty feeling that she sometimes had to suppress just before she went to sleep: the feeling that she didn't really remember even having a mother at all. Her mother lived in her as nothing but hazy wisps of memory - a smell of perfume, a sort of tinkling music to the way she laughed. No voice, no face, nothing tangible or real. She only knew what she looked like from some old photos, but the woman in those pictures might as well have been a perfect stranger. For all intents and purposes Elle Ashcroft might as well have never had a mother at all.

Except, on reflection, that wasn't quite true. If she'd never had a mother she wouldn't be quite the same person she had become at sixteen. Not having a mother would have been an ongoing thing she would have just dealt with her whole life, but losing her mother had changed her. Somehow, deep in her heart, she knew she was always going to be different to other girls. Not in, like, a manic-pixie-dream-girl sort of way. She just was different. She just was.

If she really forced herself to think about it, she might have come to this conclusion: somehow what had happened to Elle when she was a little girl had made her life sad. And not just the short term sadness of grief, which over time would numb and ebb away, like a pebble washed to nothing by the tide. It had literally given her a sad life. It meant that she would grow up never allowing herself to enjoy her life in the carefree, uninhibited way other girls did. She couldn't envisage any sort of happy ending on her horizon.

Maybe she didn't mind. Maybe happy endings were overrated anyway.

But that is what Elle would mean by saying her mother's death was the most interesting thing that ever happened to her. It was, quite literally, the only thing of any interest that had happened in her life. Aside from that one moment she'd had a very boring life. She was, she supposed, quite a boring person. Nothing remotely exciting had ever happened to her.

And nothing ever would.