Then the woman stepped away from the window and was gone, leaving Pip alone on the street.

23

23

Pip was just unlocking her bike ready to ride home when she heard someone calling her name. She turned and saw Jez in her father’s van on the opposite side of the road.

‘So this is what you get up to all day?’ he said, cocking his head towards Have a Heart and grinning at her as if it were a sex shop.

Pip left her bike where it was and, taking care to check for oncoming cars, crossed the road to talk to him.

‘I know. The glamour, eh?’ she said. ‘If my friends could see me now.’

‘Oi!’ replied Jez. ‘I’m your friend, don’t forget, and you look pretty good from where I’m sitting.’

Pip smiled, despite her best endeavours not to. ‘Flattery will get you precisely everywhere,’ she said.

‘Is that a promise?’

Electricity crackled between them for a moment and then dissipated into the evening air.

‘Listen, I’ve got half an hour,’ said Jez. ‘Fancy a quick drink? Then I can chuck the bike in the back of the van and give you a lift back up to the farm.’

‘Great. Why not?’

They went to a different pub this time. Pip wondered whether maybe Jez didn’t want to be seen out with her too often.

He bought her half a cider, her favourite tipple when they were teenagers, and a pint for himself, and they sat on a bench underneath the window. A silence rested between them, but it wasn’t awkward. They both sat, contentedly looking out at the other customers and enjoying their drinks.

‘Do you still see anything of the others?’ she asked after a while.

She had dropped her school friends almost as soon as she’d left for university, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t interested in what had become of them all. Jez rattled off a list of who was still in the town, who was married and divorced and other choice bits of scandal from the intervening ten years, and Pip listened and made appropriate sounds when the news merited it. Jez seemed to relish telling the stories as if he, like her, had no one to tell them to. She assumed that his fiancée Teresa would have little interest in stories about people from his past and so he was probably enjoying having a new audience for them. One or two of the names he mentioned meant nothing to her.

‘God, you must remember Robbo,’ he said, eyes wide. ‘The one with the twin sisters in the year below us. They were tiny and they had white-blonde hair. Looked like little ghosts wandering round the corridors?’

Even this description did nothing to bring Robbo, whoever he might be, back to her mind, and Jez shook his head in exasperation, as if she were defective in some way.