‘I’ll tell you a story about my daddy, Sammi, some day. My daddy was a great revolutionary. A freedom fighter. He travelled the world helping the oppressed wherever he could. When you’ve got someone like that in your life, someone who’s a constant beacon of what’s right, you know; it all just comes naturally. I had no choice in this, in a way. I couldny just settle down and live a normal life when there’s fights to be fought for folk who canny do it themselves. You know? You know.’

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘But really, babe, I’m like you. I left home and school at sixteen too. Never looked back. We teach ourselves, you and me, right? We know we’re smart enough, so fuck their fancy university degrees and all that shit. People like us, we live by our moral codes, eh? A finely honed sense of what’s right.’

‘Yeah,’ Sammi said, and she shouted across the rooftops, across the city: ‘Fuck your degrees!’ They held each other tightly again, laughing as the sun started to rise.

SIMON

Bristol, 2008

It was not a wedding Simon had really expected to find himself at. It wasn’t that he’d ever really thought Jess and Greg were going to break up, it was just that the idea of marriage could have any interest for them. And yet, here they were, in a scuffed church hall decorated with paper flowers made by friends, drinking from a bar composed entirely of bottles the guests had brought, but married under the law all the same. At the end of the day, they were still a nice middle-class heterosexual couple, he supposed, raising his glass to the uneasy gathering of well-dressed friends-of-their-parents clustered in the corner of the hall, flecked by the sweat of a dance floor moshing to Chumbawamba.

It came to them all, though. All the straight couples from his little group had parked the sculptural prams bought by their well-off parents far away from the crackling speaker set up by Greg’s friend who organized raves; wheeled them home after an hour or two. Their places had been filled by the second-tier guests, colleagues and comrades in their twenties, invited in after 7 p.m. to make the dance floor look busy. No matter how ostentatiously they’d skimped on the trappings of what he remembered Jess once calling ‘the self-policing patriarchy of the matrimonial industrial complex’, they had observed the protocols. She even wore white, although the back had been cut out to show her tattoos. Within six months, there would be a pregnancy announcement. There always was – the way the marriage certificate seemed to give all these radical feminists permission to ditch their contraception had made him laugh at first. Now it just seemed grimly inevitable.