She was always coming back with news for me, as I did for her. We were Marcia and Bea, Bea and Marcia. We did everything together, had done since we’d met that first day in secondary school. We shared all our discoveries: men, music, fashion, feminism, books, heroes or heroines to be admired or discounted as we pleased. We made all our decisions together; the most recent to decorate her room in the Zen style she’d got into. We’d painted her room white, took away the base of her bed and put the mattress on the floor, a bamboo blind at the window, a single poster in black and white depicting yin and yang in a circle on the wall, a small Buddha in the corner and books on Mahayana Buddhism piled up by her bed. I went for a more bohemian look. I liked the Pre-Raphaelites and we chose posters of Ophelia by Millais, Beatrice by Rossetti, Hylas and the Nymphs by Waterhouse for my walls. We bought vases and a chenille bedcover from an antique emporium in town, used embroidered silk shawls as throws on the sofa. Marcia said it had the look of a Victorian brothel. I was happy with that. I was the romantic back then; Marcia, ever the seeker, had just got into yoga and meditation, interests she tried to pass onto me but without much luck: I could never sit still for long enough. After years of friendship through school, it was great to be actually living together, and it was really thanks to her that I didn’t miss my family more in those early weeks after their departure. She more than made up for them.

‘It’s about Pete,’ she said as she handed me the joint. ‘He wants to take a year out to go travelling before university.’

I took a drag. ‘Oh Marcia, I am sorry,’ I said. She’d just met him at Glastonbury back in June where he’d been manning a food stall, and I knew she liked him a lot because he’d been staying at the house every weekend for the last month.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s me that’s sorry.’

‘Of course you are. Where does he want to go?’

‘All over. Cuba, Goa, Thai Land.’

‘Sounds wonderful. You must be gutted.’

She looked away. ‘No, you don’t understand. I’m going with him.’

‘With him?’ My heart sank and my head swam as the marijuana took effect. ‘But you can’t. Your place at college—’