‘Do you remember if I ever asked you to put Dishing the Dirt flyers through the doors in Masefield Avenue?’ ‘Not a clue!’ came back the immediate reply. No thinking had gone into the response, that was obvious. Ellie didn’t do multitasking yet. If she had gone to clean her teeth then that was exactly what and only what she’d be doing. There was no spare compartment in her adolescent brain for anything else. It would be as much as her morning mind could take to remember what came next, as in brush hair, get coat, grab bag, go to school. The more time Jay spent with teenagers the more she understood that thinking about and doing more than one thing at a time was a skill acquired only in adulthood and perfected only by women. ‘I don’t remember asking her to do it,’ she commented to Rory back in the kitchen. ‘In fact I’m sure I didn’t. We haven’t sent any out for ages.’ Strange. The woman who had called had definitely said she’d had one through the door. These days new clients were usually word-of-mouth contacts, from ads in the local paper or from Yellow Pages.
