‘Gonna put an ad in the Journal today, and I’ll do a sign for the window too. Now, could you unwrap those Heaven 17 albums and top up the bin? We sold out last week.’

He slurped his tea and turned away from me, while I cut open the box of records and wondered if Samantha needed a job. It would be so cool to have her working here too. I wished I didn’t have to do my A levels. I wouldn’t have minded a full-time job here myself, aside from the obvious downside of having to work with Werewolf Al.

Then I thought: Did I have to do my A levels? Who said? Everyone just expected it, that was all. Because I was bright, they expected I’d go to university and get a good degree, then … then what? I had no idea what I wanted to do. Until now, the future had always just stretched ahead of me in a fluffy cloud of vague non-specific achievement. But what my day at Greenham Common had shown me all too clearly was that there were people – women – out there making decisions based on their principles, not on some woolly sense of entitlement. Women to whom the expression ‘changing the world’ was not an aphorism but an actual goal. Women like Samantha.

My thoughts were never far from Samantha, mostly in the form of fretting, and almost certainly as a displacement activity – something to stop me dwelling on Dad’s illness. She had warned me she would be staying at Greenham for a bit and would therefore be incommunicado, but I worried constantly that I would never see her again. She had my phone number; she could easily have gone out to a phone box and rung me if she’d wanted to. I’d seen a little queue of women at the one on the road just outside the camp.

I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing her again. I relived our kisses over and over again, feeling the same guilty thrill as her soft lips pressed against mine and her tongue slipped inside my mouth. I couldn’t tell anybody about her, particularly not Charlotte and Julie, after their disgusted comments about lesbians being at Greenham. It seemed like such an embarrassing cliché, to have gone there once for a few hours and come away as a newly gay woman. They’d probably either take the piss out of me for it, or go weird on me and start assuming I fancied them or something. To my knowledge there were no lesbians at all in my school – amongst the pupils, anyway. We all knew that the PE teachers were ‘lezzers’: a word that I would never allow to cross my lips again.