‘I wouldn’t kick him out of bed,’ Mel said. ‘Just so long as he didn’t fart under the duvet and waft it in my face.’ She cackled before launching into a croaky rendition of ‘Deck the Halls’, her tongue slipping around modified lyrics – ‘Deck the halls with pints of lager, Fa la la la la!!’

Lou laughed and took a sip of her pint. ‘Where’ve Becca and Shelley disappeared to?’

‘‘Bogs. Becca’s spotted that Luke bloke she fancies. Shelley’s giving her an emergency makeover. Reckon she’s in with him. Lucky cow.’

‘Luke Smedley? He only split up with his wife a few weeks ago.’

‘Fair game, then, ain’t he. A butcher doesn’t put his meat in the window unless it’s for sale.’ She elbowed Lou in the ribs.

‘Is that all you think about?’

‘What else is there?’

Here it comes, Lou thought.

‘We haven’t all got the brains to be teachers, you know,’ Mel said.

Lou curled her toes in embarrassment. She should never have let slip to the girls at work that an Open University prospectus had landed on the doormat that morning. ‘Just because I’ve got the application form, it doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything with it. Anyway, it takes two years, and where am I going to find ten grand to pay for a PGCE?’

‘A PG-whatty?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Mel drained her glass and slammed it down on the table. ‘Are we having a whip or what? I’m spitting feathers here.’

Lou placed her hand over the top of her glass. Mel looked at her as though she had just refused a share of a lottery jackpot.

‘‘Ark at Einstein. Not even a teacher yet and already too good to be seen out with the thickos.’

Lou tore a ten-pound note from her purse and slammed it down on the table. ‘You win!’ God, she was weak. But what was waiting at home apart from an evening of Coronation Street, Family Fortunes and a soggy chicken pie?

At some point, just after nine o’clock, Becca and Shelley disappeared with Luke Smedley and his mates, heading for a bar in Northampton. An hour or so later, Lou stumbled into a waiting taxi. An unnecessary payday extravagance.

‘Don’t forget you promised to get your mum to make us some of those mini chocolate logs like last year,’ Mel said, hanging out of her own taxi. ‘She’s great, your mum is.’

‘You wouldn’t say that if you had to live with Mrs Christmas.’

‘See ya tomorrow, Piss Head!’

‘Laters, Lush!’

The cab pulled away, and Lou tried to focus on the orange strands of light from the streetlamps trailing across the dark night sky. She bloody loved those girls. They were the only friends she had left here since Katie had got herself hitched and moved away to Manchester. She fell back into her seat. Was she a cow, then, for wanting to escape: to break out of the shell she had constructed to hide who she really was? Because the Lou she was around her workmates – dumbing down her vocabulary, drinking in pubs with people she had gone to school with – wasn’t the Lou she knew. That Lou – the real Lou – had spent three years reading history at Sheffield, expanding her brain and her horizons, experiencing the world beyond this small town.