Anusia Battersby

The bin is sensor-operated and says, Thank you, in an American accent.

The ghost snorts.

Dinner is things on crackers that smell like the sea.

There is fruit for dessert, eaten with forks that look like tridents, and Violet wonders abstractly if Poseidon had washed them after sparing whatever was on the crackers.

She also wonders, less abstractly, if the man with the chocolate is still around somewhere.

Sleep does not come easy, however many times she tells the ghost to stop pacing.

It won't make morning come any sooner, she says, recycling the line of her first nanny when she would spin in dizzying circles late on Christmas Eve.

You'll be like me again, it says.

The grandfather clock strikes two.

You'll be like me again, it says again, and she smiles into her pillow.

There had been pushback to Violet reprising the role.

Two years on, she was thought to be now too old, too tall, too sharp.

But her agent had slapped the press photographs onto the mahogany desk and gestured at them sweepingly.

In one, she was staring through a two-way mirror with a branching crack splitting her forehead in two.

In another...

She held a dagger with a gentle expression on her face, corn syrup and food colouring coating her fingertips.

A third, she stood on a bed of roses, crushing them beneath her clenched toes.

These were enough.

After that photoshoot, she had slipped silently into the wings.

A hand on her shoulder had whispered that she'd done a stunning job, and she smiled politely as she wrapped her arms around herself, the cool air of the theatre chilling her bones.