‘You will cry but, for the sake of appearances, you will hide it in your sleeve. You will close your eyes and pretend to be elsewhere.’

‘But I won’t be elsewhere.’

‘No.’

‘Where will I be?’

‘You will be in the unemployment building.’

‘So be it,’ Natasha said, with great strength, as if facing up to a prophecy.

‘I will be alone here without you.’

Lucy and Natasha had grown so close over the last few weeks, it felt like they had become one fast and vicious animal. Natasha learned all of Lucy’s lines; Lucy learned all of Natasha’s lines. They knew when the other was going to move; they could predict it and they moved together. There was no impulse that was wrong. When it became dark, when the oak tree became slick and shiny with rain, they stayed inside and talked about growing up as unenlightened children; life on country roads, holidays on stony beaches under grey skies, their homes, the prison of their homes. They talked about everything, everything distasteful and rotten and shameful about their lives. They tore the skin off it. They found beauty in it; they put it all in the play. And they would laugh at it. They would reveal it and they would laugh at it.

‘I will come back and see you,’ Natasha said.

‘After this, Natasha, they’re not going to let you in the front gate.’

*

It was their last week and they were outside painting scenery when a boy pulled up beside them on a bicycle. He had sandy hair and a look of supreme disinterest. Natasha could see a single, waxy puppet hand poking out of his schoolbag.

‘Take it back,’ he said to Lucy.

‘No,’ Lucy said, without looking at him, ‘I will never take it back.’

‘Take it back,’ he screamed.

‘No,’ Lucy roared.

‘You cunt.’ He jumped up on his bicycle and they watched him wobble away. They watched him for a few minutes as he bumped over the cobblestones. There were several severe bumps.

‘That’s him anyway,’ Natasha said.

‘That’s him.’

‘What did you say to him?’

‘I told him he was never good enough for me.’

Natasha watched as he struggled to straighten himself on his bicycle. ‘That’s objectively true,’ she said, ‘you can’t argue with that.’

‘And I said something awful.’

‘What?’

‘Imagine the worst thing you can say to a man like that.’

‘You called him a mediocrity.’

‘Worse.’ Lucy whispered into Natasha’s ear. She spoke for a short time.

Natasha’s face broke out into a huge smile. ‘Let’s put that in the play.’

*

The night before Lucy and Natasha submitted the play to the student theatre, Natasha had a dream that her mother rang her up out of the blue. The phone she answered was not her own. She was in a long hallway with a lot of different rooms. She had no idea which room the call was coming from. When she told her mother she hadn’t had an absolutely brilliant childhood, her mother laughed and said, ‘Your father could have been better, yes.’ When she awoke, she felt sure it was a sign that the play was going to be a tremendous success. That morning, she and Lucy walked to the college together. Lucy wore a pair of huge sunglasses and kept bumping into things and apologising. They had to cross the campus to the theatre. It was the longest walk ever.