Girls Who Play Guitars

•a gift from Ebeneezer Goode•

Ellie reached into the depths of her overflowing cupboard and pulled a battered suitcase from the top shelf, her mind full of Kim's buzzed hair-do and the hurt on her friend's face.

The rush of the cars speeding by and the dust settling around them flowed through Ellie like a messy, unrehearsed bass line as she went over and over in her mind what she should have done; what she should have said. And now Ellie knew she had to find something in her old Slider collection that would fix everything. Anything!

Her suitcase landed on the thick carpet with a thud and Ellie knelt in front of it, prising the rusty clasps open. Inside, her old notebooks, press clippings and articles from when Slider was just starting out piled in a disorderly fashion. Underneath all the paperwork were cassettes they used to record their songs on, along with a lone copy of that supposedly rare first demo tape Ellie had seen a lot of recently. This suitcase held everything Ellie had from the time before they signed a deal to record their first album. She pulled it all onto the floor and flipped through her old notebooks. Jupiter, the family's arthritic black Labrador panted as he lay on the floor beside her, his musty, dusty odour sticking in Ellie's nose.

Ellie's parents had arrived home.

Eventually.

They'd forgotten to tell her they'd joined a ukulele group and wouldn't be home when she got there. That left Ellie with an hour slumped on the porch, deep in her own thoughts as the sound of the waves and wind sighed around her. She thought she might use the time to write some lyrics, but the fight with Kim weighed heavily on her. All she could do was stare at her notebook without seeing it. She'd traced her fingers across the note Daniel had left in there a few days ago in his curling, over-embellished handwriting and thought about Kim's sorrowful eyes as they'd stood on the side of the road covered in dust.

When they pulled up in the driveway in their old dust-bucket of a yellow Ford Falcon station wagon, Ellie's mum Beth had greeted her with so much adoration in her glittering eyes she almost made Ellie cry, until she'd cooed into her ear, "Your hair needs a coconut oil treatment, darling."

Ellie's dad, Nelson, had tweaked her nose, then pulled her into a hug. "It's been a while, Elowyn," he'd said, calling her by her full name, which only he ever did because no one else could pronounce it. The familiar, homely smell of her father had engulfed her, and she'd stood back in the hallway as they bustled her inside, she took them in.

Ellie hadn't seen them for at least two years - since they'd last come out to visit her in London. Ellie's mum still looked like a gypsy with her long, curled hair and layering of skirts and shirts and scarves. Nelson Devine's Alpaca beanie perched on top of his head where it always sat. That good-looking ruggedness flooded back to her. Her dad was so hunky. At least Ellie thought so. But they'd aged, Ellie thought with a pang to her heart. Her dad's dark brown hair had greyed around the edges and her mum had more of those delicate crinkles in the corners of her eyes.

Ellie sat back on her knees and looked around her bedroom, trying to imagine what Daniel would think if he were here to see it.

Ellie had never been into teddy bears or disco or Madonna or Michael Jackson. She'd never been obsessed with Cabbage Patch Dolls or collected pet rocks. Her old posters of AC/DC, The Doors and Pink Floyd mingled with pictures of surf breaks and guitars she'd tacked onto the patterned wallpaper when she was in high school.

The room itself was enormous. The entire house was enormous. It was old; built when Port Lagan was a whaling town and money was made from killing the beasts that were now a draw card for tourists. It had thick, stone walls, vast ceilings, fireplaces and huge sash windows in every room. Ellie's parents had filled the entire house with antiques and second-hand furniture. Nothing matched, but everything worked together to create a warm, homely vibe.