Rachel Weeping Read Free

laughter of a studio audience telling her that he was in the TV room. She switched the kettle on and opened the cabinet in front of her, taking out the remaining two clean mugs. Kitsch things only Chris would buy and which she would only use if they were alone. The purple one read ‘Drama Queen’ and the yellow one ‘The Man, The Legend’. She placed a teabag in each.
    â€˜More tea?’ she called out, her voice travelling past the four guest rooms, her study, the guest bathroom and into the TV room. The house had been built in the seventies when ceilings were high and rooms were spacious, very different to the new buildings that were cropping up in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg these days.
    This was the first property she and Chris had bought together, and to say that it had needed ‘a little TLC’, as had been advertised when it first came onto the market, had been an understatement. They had followed the age-old wisdom of buying the bad house on a good street, but with Chris being an architect by profession, this had been less of a challenge to him than an exciting project. On the day they were given the keys to 76 5th Avenue in Parkhurst, they began a year of renovations that Michelle would have preferred to forget.
    The faded carpets had been ripped up and replaced with large granite tiles, the old farm-style windows had been replaced by insulated, double-glazed ones, walls had been painted white and the divider between the kitchen and the living room been broken down. Each of the rooms had been decorated by a top designer, under Michelle’s tasteful guidance, and the blend of furniture and art, a palette of greys, creams and beiges, was amplified by the textures of wood and wool.
    The kitchen had been the worst and they had ended up gutting the entire thing and building it up from scratch. They put in marble counter tops, a gas stove, built-in cupboards, a corner pantry, a breakfast nook, a double-door fridge, a washing machine, a tumble dryer, a dishwasher and, in the corner, an industry level espresso machine.
    Life was too short for instant coffee.
    Michelle waited by the kettle for Chris to answer but heard nothing but the sound of channel surfing filtering through from the TV room. She took a breath to call out again but decided against it. She returned one teabag to its container and put the ‘Drama Queen’ mug back in the cabinet. She listened to the sound of the water as it boiled, staring at the patterns in the marble counter top. She still wasn’t happy with the shade of white they had ended up with but had chosen not to say anything on the day she walked into the kitchen and found them already installed. These counter tops had become a reminder that, in life as in home makeovers, when it came to the interiors if she wanted something to be done right, she could not leave it up to Chris. He had been in charge on the day the counters had been installed and, when she pointed out later that the tops were a different shade to the sample they had agreed on, he had smiled that smile he always smiled and said no one would be able to tell the difference.
    And now he was doing it again. Making decisions for her and then telling her that it wouldn’t be that bad. But this wasn’t a marble counter top; this wasn’t a shade of off-white that she could just look past and pretend wasn’t there. What added to her discomfort was that, unlike the counter tops, this was not Chris’s fault. She was the one to blame for the situation they were trapped in and, as much as she wanted to look past it and pretend that it had never happened, she knew that if Rachel continued to work for them, this was not going to happen.
    Michelle heard clawing at the door and turned to see Hugo, their small rescue dog of unsure origins, asking to go out into the garden. Michelle bent down to scratch the dog on its head before opening the door for him. When he’d finished doing