Lizzy pushed her fingers through her long hair and yawned. Joey lay beside her smiling. Both were naked. Lizzy looked around the room and blinked.

‘This place is a right dump.’

Joey laughed out loud. ‘Of course it is, it’s a squat.’

The walls were daubed with splashes of paint, and here and there large eyes were drawn, with daggers sticking out of them.

‘Who did the decorating, Joey?’

‘Oh, some bloke called Nipper. He fancies himself as a gutter poet and artist.’

‘Well, my advice to him would be, don’t give up the day job.’

The sour smell of the sheets was wafting up to her nose and she grimaced. ‘Why don’t you skin up?’

‘All right then.’

Joey sat cross-legged on the bed and proceeded to build a joint. Lizzy watched him languidly. She liked Joey a lot. He was exciting. He knew all the places to go and all the people to know. She had bunked off work all this week, Joanie had rung in and said she had flu, and every day had been spent like this. Lazing around in someone’s flat or car, just getting right out of it. Her mother was becoming suspicious at the amount of time she spent in her room, but Lizzie had told her everyone liked to be on their own at times.

Her mother was a pain in the ass. Always wanting to know where she was and what she was doing. Who she was with and what they had done. Her gran wasn’t much better. Lizzy’s butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth image had kept her in good stead the last few years, but soon she wanted to break away. Go her own way and enjoy life. If her father got himself a place she’d go and live with him.

She was like him in a lot of ways. He liked the good life, lived to enjoy himself. Her mother lived life in a vacuum. Waiting for things to happen instead of making them happen. That was the secret.

Joey lit the joint and drew on it deeply, passing it to Lizzy. She took the smoke down deep into her lungs and held it there for a while before letting it out slowly.

‘That’s the way to do it.’ She sounded like Mr Punch and Joey grinned at her.

He had never met anyone like her before. Lizzy Burrows was game for anything and everything. He watched her sit up and flick the ash on to the floor. She was not in the least self-conscious of her body. He grabbed a breast and squeezed it. His rough hand had dirt under the nails. Lizzy pushed it away. All she wanted now was to get really stoned and lie back on the mattress thinking good thoughts. She did this all the time at home, listening to Sinead O’Connor or Pink Floyd.