Chapters (52)
- COVER PAGE
- DEDICATION
- PART ONE
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- PART TWO
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Attending the Notting Hill Carnival had been an annual outing since they first stumbled across the fair by chance a few weeks after relocating to London. It had been the first thing to really make the sad female members of the family feel excited about their new home, which up until that point had felt uncomfortably unfamiliar and grey.
‘Are you kidding? You’re obsessed with it! You’re all like, the pastel doors! The adorable knick-knacks! Oh, I feel just like Julia Roberts! La-di-da let me twirl for a whole two minutes!’ Meg trilled, in a not-so-flattering impersonation.
‘I do not twirl.’
‘You twirl.’
‘Meg, I’m really not in the mood. If Mum doesn’t want to go, I think we should just leave it. Plus, I have so much work to do.’
Meg was uncharacteristically quiet on the other end of the phone, then said, ‘Please, Evie. Please can we go?’
Evie sighed, suddenly understanding what her sister was really asking of her. It wasn’t the Notting Hill Carnival Meg was afraid of losing. It was the family as she knew it. And what Evie knew and Meg didn’t, was that these were the last few months Meg would have before their parents separated.
‘Okay, let’s do this. Let’s grab our Berry family tradition by the horns and make it our own!’
‘Whoopee! I’m wearing sequins!’
Evie laughed, Meg’s youthful warmth flooding through her. But then Hugo’s words, Can I trust you? came flying back into her mind and she suddenly felt cold again.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Twenty-seven
It felt as if Evie had acquired more secrets and questions in the last year than she had in her entire life. But today wasn’t the day for wallowing or researching time travel or stopping herself from texting Hugo to ask him to explain what his acknowledgement of Chloe meant. Today was about Meg. It was about trying to hold on to the past, while forging towards the future (again).
And if anything had a hope of distracting Evie, it would be the Notting Hill Carnival in all its rainbow-coloured, bejewelled, feathered, reggae-playing glory. Not to mention Meg, in all her sassy, dry-humoured, laid-back, sometimes incredibly annoying but nonetheless beyond-her-years magnificence.
Evie met Meg at the station, where they forced their way through the throng of people back onto Portobello Road. There they were fully immersed in a scene which, no matter how many times she’d attended, still took Evie’s breath away. The event was a vibrant, flamboyant and thunderous celebration of Caribbean culture, with hordes of performers and revellers wearing beaded bikinis and feathered crowns, wielding steel drums and dancing atop floats, all of which culminated in a chaotic and lively street party. These days a lot of the chaos was due to the hordes of wildly drunk tourists drawn to the event (many of them embarrassingly Australian), who swayed and yelled and sometimes vomited in public.