‘Yes, fine,’ she says, and when she’s calmer they end the call; he, reassured that she will go back to the hotel. But she is not reassured: his words are not enough, they never are, nothing is ever enough. She turns her back on it all, forming a fist, thumping her thighs in time with the crashing waves, harder and harder, the flesh humming with pain from the time before, and the time before that. There will be bruises tomorrow, and more, if she can help it, she thinks, crying, tears spooling down her cheeks, spooling back in time.

Chapter 11

Hampstead, London

13 September 2003

There is barely space to move in the house. People smashed and smoking and wandering and dancing and chatting, perched on sofa arms, five people crammed onto a two-seater. Scott is holding Becky’s hand, leading her through the halting, pushing, drink-spilling crowd, to the kitchen, and then to the stairs which they climb to join Mary, Brendan and the others. She has drunk more than she realized. Everything only makes sense in sections.

At the door to the bedroom Becky says something like, ‘After you,’ and then Scott says, ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ and they laugh and drink some more beer. When he smiles at her, she is pathetically pleased to be proved so wrong about this tall, handsome but lunkish man who has only ever been on the fringes of her world.

Scott takes the lead and pushes at the door into a vast bedroom – white-painted shutters closed tight to the outside world, carpets sprouting grey and soft underfoot, and a pale pink silk coverlet rumpled in a wave over the kingside bed so that it looks like the inside of a conch shell. A blanket chest, a side table, chairs, all pushed up against the walls to accommodate a big group of people – fifteen or twenty, perhaps – all sitting in a circle on the floor, all clogging up the otherwise sophisticated air of this room with their smoke-choked, pheromone-laden, alcohol-tanged teenage breaths.

Alcohol is everywhere. Six-packs, twelve-packs, boxes of beer. Lines of disco-blue and medicine-orange alcopops. At least two people are swigging from champagne bottles, holding the necks lightly and effortlessly as if this is what they do all the time.

This is how things are done here. Try to pay attention, Becky tells herself.

She goes from feeling shot through with delight and confidence – showing teeth and eyes, standing at her real height – to feeling smaller, shorter, duller, greyer, years younger as she looks at this circle of North London teenagers whose voices are perfectly pitched and cutting, whose laughs are elegant or flirtatious, or barks that fill a room. Becky feels the eyes of the room look her up and down, but she merits no more than a quick glance from anyone. Scott has left her side.

Brendan and Mary sit in a small huddle with two others she does not recognize.

Mary smiles.