I look up at him. Even though we’re sitting so close together and I know what he did for me this afternoon, I can’t help remembering the gleeful look on Bella’s face when she announced that Ed wanted to ask me to the dance. ‘You’re not joking this time?’

‘Meg, I was never joking! That lunchtime on the science trip I was planning on asking you out – Bella had even made me rehearse it because she knew how nervous I was – but you seemed so angry with me about the whole Mega Knickers thing that I couldn’t go through with it.’ He laughs. ‘Asking someone out is really difficult. It’s probably more difficult than understanding relativity.’

‘Relativity isn’t that difficult to understand,’ I say. ‘You just have to remember that the laws of physics don’t change and –’

‘Meg!’

‘Yes?’

‘Next Saturday. Date with me. Yes or no?’

‘Yes!’ I say, and I nod as well so he knows I really mean it and to convince myself that this is actually happening, that I, Meg Clark, am about to boldly go where I have never gone before: on a date.

Actually, scrap the ‘boldly’ …

But I’m definitely going on a date … and I might be going to Houston. I can’t quite bring myself to look at Ed right now, but I want to show him how happy I feel so I go with squeezing his hand back.

‘Oi!’ A shout from the back door makes us look up. Annie is standing there with Rose. ‘Are you two holding hands?’

‘Yes,’ says Ed, holding our linked hands up in the air and gripping tight so I can’t let go. ‘Yes, we are!’

FIFTY-SIX

And then the party moves to the garden, because that’s what it’s become: a party.

Mum gets fish and chips for everyone and we put Grandad on a deckchair in the sun. A combination of Diabolo, strong painkillers and the chips makes him fall asleep, and then Mum decides she should go home and have a shower.

Elsa’s loving having so many people give her attention and she’s walking around handing out presents like stones and screwed-up flowers. ‘It seems a shame to take her with me,’ Mum says, watching as Rose pulls Elsa on to her lap.

‘I’ll bring her home later,’ I say.

Mum’s tired face brightens. ‘Really?’

‘I might take her for a walk first,’ I say. For the past hour, Mum’s done everything for Elsa – fed her chips, picked her up when she’s fallen over and cried, changed her nappy. Although it’s been great handing over the responsibility, it’s been strange too. I feel like I want Elsa all to myself again, just for a while.

When Mum’s gone, the five of us just hang out in the garden, talking over Grandad’s snores and the distant sound of Nina Simone, and even though I could never imagine us doing this in school, right now, in Grandad’s garden, it seems like such a natural thing to do. Annie describes a conversation she had at the reception with a boy called Alistair. ‘He couldn’t stop staring at my crutches, and I thought, maybe he’s from a boys’ school and doesn’t get to talk to girls very often and doesn’t know what to say, but then he went, “Did you know that the memory foam on your crutches was developed by NASA?”, then he walked off!’