I leaned back against the sticky kitchen counter. ‘Wow,’ I repeated, a slow smile spreading across my face. For the first time I was glad that Samantha was away. I wouldn’t have stood a chance if she’d been in the running. She looked like a red-headed Kate Bush, and her voice was just as good as mine. ‘Cool.’

I wouldn’t have had this if I’d stayed in Salisbury.

31

1984
Meredith

Two months later, on an impulse during one of my weekly calls home from the phone box on the corner of the street, I invited Pete to come and watch the band’s first-ever live gig. I was so excited about it, and I suddenly really wanted to see a friendly face in the audience – assuming there would even be an audience. We were playing in the function room of The Five Bells. Every time I’d been in that pub previously, the only clientele had been elderly gentlemen in raincoats hunched on bar stools, grimly sipping pints and ignoring each other.

‘Up to London?’ Pete repeated, as if London was a four-day camel ride away.

‘Yes, up to London. Don’t, if you don’t want to!’

‘Well, I could, I suppose. It’ll be half term. Can I stay on your sofa?’

I looked out of the phone box window and could see the pathetic excuse for a sofa that even we squatters had rejected as being too disgusting. It was languishing on its back in the front garden, looking drunk, stuffing spilling from its stained cushions. Fortunately, it was highly unlikely that any of the neighbours would complain – apparently the entire street, a once-handsome crescent of redbrick terraced apartment buildings, was a squat. Europe’s largest squat, we found out some years later when it was raided by the police and it was on the local news.

I hadn’t confessed to Mum and Pete that I was squatting. They thought I was in a flatshare funded by my job in the local leisure centre. I did have a job there as a receptionist, but only one day a week.

‘Um … yeah, you can crash at our place, sure. Bring the sleeping bag.’

I thought it would be better to let him see my current living arrangements when he arrived, rather than whip him up into a frenzy of stress about it beforehand. Pete could be a right old woman at times. But I was reasonably confident that once he’d seen how nice the boys were and how homely we’d made the place, he wouldn’t freak out as much as if I told him outright I was living in a squat.