Chapter 4

Audrey

Audrey sipped her cup of tea and drew the curtains against the faded light. She looked around the room: only half a dozen boxes to go. Tearing off packing tape from the box at her feet, she found her jewelry, perfumes, and various trinkets, none of which she felt inclined to unpack. She opened the packing crate next to it, wedged between the dressing table and the wardrobe. Inside were dozens of diaries in a rainbow of colors, their hardback spines cracked and fraying.

She had always kept a diary, ever since her tenth birthday. Audrey could picture it now, the bright blue journal her mum had given her the day she’d entered double figures, all those clean white pages waiting to be filled with her hopes, fears, disappointments, and dreams.

She picked one up at random.

1969. The year she’d turned sixteen.

As she flicked through the pages, nostalgia leaped out at her in sprawling blue ink. There was her unmistakable looped handwriting, plump and eager, as though the letters were yet to lose their childhood puppy fat. And then the sight of a particular date caused her to pause.

December 9, 1969. Her sixteenth birthday.

She smoothed her palm over the page and then held the two corners between her fingers as if handling a prayer book, before allowing her eyes to cast down onto the writing below.

Had the best birthday. School was nothing special except Sandra and Val had clubbed together to get me a brooch we’d all been eyeing up in Woolworths last weekend, which I wanted to put on straight away, but I knew Mr. Gibbons would just confiscate it if I did.

When I got home, Mum and Dad were in the kitchen, waiting for me. I don’t know how Dad managed to get out of the factory early because they never let you out early for anything, but when I asked him, Dad just winked and said he’d told his foreman it was a very special occasion. Mum had cooked a steak and kidney pie for tea and she’d bought some white paper doilies to put the plates on so it all looked really pretty. And then they gave me my present, which was the best present ever—Nina Simone’s Silk & Soul. I’ve been listening to it loads round at Sandra’s house, but I never thought I’d have a copy of my own. Then Mum brought out a gigantic Victoria sponge she’d made and Dad reminded me to make a wish when I blew out the candles. I wished I’d get good enough O-level results to stay on at school for A-levels, and that I’d get good enough A-level grades for university, even though you can count on one hand the people from our school who’ve gone to university, and Mr. Gibbons is always pointing out that not a single one of those has ever been a girl. And I wished that one day I might get to sing on a stage like Nina Simone or Aretha Franklin, and that when I’m older I’ll go to America because New York is the city I most want to see.