‘Yeah, I’ve got one.’

‘Well.’ Lenny clapped his hands together. ‘How d’you fancy a trip away?’

108

‘Angel?

It was Lenny’s voice. Angel opened her eyes and there he was standing over her, a dark silhouette blotting out the brilliance of the sun. ‘Here,’ he said, and held out her drink.

Angel sat up on her sunbed, feeling groggy from the heat. She’d never in her life felt sun like this in drab, grey England. She took the Pepsi from Lenny and he sat down on the sunbed next to hers and took a sip of his beer.

Angel looked around her. This was another world. All the time she’d been living in that shit-hole back in London with Dora out of it on drink and Donny lording it over the pair of them, this had been here. As the warm wind brushed her face and bikinied body like a caress, she stared around, taking in the villa’s private pool – and beyond that, the endless blue of the ocean. Palm trees danced and rustled in the breeze and the gentle swell and fall of the sea was a soft counterpoint to the trilling of birds up in the catalpa trees. Tiny lizards skittered across the grass. She inhaled deeply, feeling the weight of long, troubled years slipping away from her.

‘You’ve never been to Cyprus then?’ Lenny had asked her on the plane coming out.

‘I’ve never been anywhere,’ she’d said with perfect honesty. ‘I thought there’d been trouble here? Wasn’t it in the papers?’

‘Not recently,’ said Lenny. ‘Denktash declared the north Turkish and independent, and since then it’s been all plain sailing.’

So here she was, with him, in a five-star luxury villa near Paphos with maids and their own chef. They had to do literally nothing. Raise a hand, and you were brought whatever food you wanted. On the hour, you were offered cool damp scented face towels. You were fed iced green grapes and slices of succulent watermelon. It was like being royalty.

‘I can’t believe people actually live like this,’ said Angel, putting her glass aside on the table between them.

‘Well, they do,’ said Lenny.

Yeah, but what do you want in return? ran through Angel’s brain.

Well of course he fancied her. She knew that. Hidden behind her shades, she eyed him up. Lenny was wearing swimming trunks, nothing else, and he was exceedingly good-looking. Tall and tanned, lightly muscled; there was golden hair on his chest, arms and legs. He had a habit of running a hand through his thick sun-bleached overlong blond hair when he spoke. His face was sharp, all the features well-defined. His eyes were deep-set and blue, his eyebrows and lashes almost white. She remembered seeing him when she’d been fifteen, outside that pesthole school she’d wasted years at, talking to her cousin Tom. Even then she’d thought: rock god.

All the girls had watched him. All the girls had wanted him with his flashy red sports car and his air of mature superiority. And now here he was, sitting here in this paradise, with her.