*

I spend the next four days talking myself into then out of going to the gig.

Finally, I march into Trafalgar Records.

“I want to go to the Reeba Shah gig tomorrow night,” I spit out as soon as Mal looks up.

Mercifully, I don’t need to say anything else.

“I’ll meet you outside at eight thirty.”

*

The night of the gig, I’m still not convinced that I’m going to go through with it, even when I’m standing in the doorway to the living room. It takes a moment or two for my parents to realize I’m there, but when they see me, wearing make-up with my hair straightened on a Friday night, they gasp. Actually Mum gasps and spills her tea, Dad just sits bolt upright on the sofa like someone’s put an ice cube down the back of his jumper.

I push my shoulders back and lift my chin. “I’m going to a gig.”

My parents look at each as if to say, What is happening? I’m not sure, either. I’m not like Meredith, I don’t go out on dates or to clubs, so this is a first.

My mother stands up so suddenly I take a step back and watch as she marches over to her handbag and takes out her purse. She marches over to me this time, pressing a twenty-pound note into my hand. “Don’t come home until at least eleven.”

*

Brighton on a Friday night is hideous, just packs of lads in football shirts cheering at hen parties carrying inflatable dicks, so all I can hear in my head is Elvis Costello singing, ‘This is hell, this is hell,’ as the 27 makes its way up North Street towards the clock tower. When it stops at the traffic lights, I can feel the throb of my heart in my throat and I have to fight the urge to stay on the bus, but Mal’s a Luddite and doesn’t have a phone, does he? I can’t leave him standing outside the pub, not when he’s only there because he’s doing me a favour.

So, I get off the bus.

I’m early and stand outside with the smokers. Mal’s late, which I kind of expected (he doesn’t have a watch, either), but when it gets to 8.45, panic begins to lick at my palms. I peer inside, hoping to see him, but it’s Friday night so it’s heaving and I’m not going in there by myself so I wait. Ten minutes later, a cab pulls up, and the muscles in my shoulders relax. I step forward, but a woman gets out and then the muscles in my shoulders clench again.

It’s Reeba Shah.

*

I’m staring, I know, but God help me, she’s beautiful. Not beautiful in a Gigi Hadid sort of way, but beautiful in the purest sense of the word, like when you hear a song for the first time and you know in the first thirty seconds that you love it. She’s taller than I imagined and dressed head to toe in black. Her hair is black as well, the colour of the sky when everyone’s asleep but you. She walks straight over to me and props her guitar case against the window between us. “Hey,” she says with a smile, as though it’s completely normal to talk to random girls standing outside pubs. I don’t say anything, of course, because, well, it’s me. I just stare as she reaches into the pocket of her leather jacket for a pack of tobacco. She starts rolling a cigarette and I can’t stop looking at her hands, at her long fingers and chipped black nail varnish. I wonder if she has blisters on them from playing the guitar and the thought of it, of holding her hand and grazing my thumb over them makes my legs weaken.