One of his favourites. I sat up. ‘We’ll both have one.’

Jack watched me rummage around for clean clothes. I was half out of the door on the way to the bathroom before he asked, ‘Will they catch the people who attacked Mel?’

He was still young enough to look for my reassurance that wrongs would be put right. He wasn’t quite grown up yet after all. ‘I should think so.’

He nodded and lay back against my pillows. The threads of life were tight. They might have unravelled or been torn into shreds, but this morning they were still intact and they knitted us all together in love and friendship.

I went on into the bathroom, and in my gratitude and happiness I didn’t even blink at the mess of smeared make-up and crumpled tissues that my Lola left in her wake.

NINETEEN

There were so many chairs crammed in round my table that they had to stand at slight angles to each other, like crooked teeth in an overcrowded jaw. People leaned on their elbows among the dishes and pressed their knees together between the table legs, shouting to make themselves heard above the rising noise. Caz and I passed more plates over their heads and room was made, somehow, to put them down.

Mel sat at the head of the table with Jasper opposite her at the foot. We were celebrating their engagement. It was five weeks since the night in the off-licence and she had been home from hospital for almost three. ‘I would have died if I’d had to stay in there any longer,’ she said.

She was much thinner and there were grey streaks among the tight coils of black hair, but most noticeably of all she had stopped wearing lipstick. Her mouth was its own colour now so that you noticed the curve of the top lip and the fullness of the lower one, rather than just seeing the bright crimson. When I mentioned it she considered and then shrugged, with a hesitancy that was new too. In the past, Mel had always been so sure of everything. ‘It’s not important, is it?’

‘No,’ I agreed. After what Mel had been through, after looking death straight in the face, it would be surprising if the hierarchy of what was and was not important were not completely overturned.

I thought she was more beautiful than ever, especially now in repose, as she sat listening and watching the faces around her. Once, she would have been talking louder and faster than anyone, without waiting for answers.

Then when her eyes reached Jasper it was like shutters opening to the inside of her skull. The look was so naked that I had to glance away, as if I had been caught spying.