Thankfully, someone had put a very loud Deep Purple track on the jukebox, so Pete didn’t seem to have heard my near slip. I was worried if I told him in advance, he wouldn’t come and stay.

‘So your mate Samantha is your flatmate too?’

‘Sort of,’ I agreed, suddenly not able to meet his eyes. ‘It’s us, and the boys in the band. They look after us. Not that we can’t look after ourselves,’ I added.

Matty and Marsh struggled through the doors from the function room, carrying a big speaker each from the PA. ‘Oi, just because you’re the singer don’t mean you don’t have to help us load out!’ Marsh called, his skinny legs bowing with the weight.

‘Coming,’ I said, taking a long swig of my drink.

33

1984
Meredith

I felt pretty annoyed with Samantha for bailing on me before the gig was even over, but I tried to swallow it down. After all, she had hitched all the way back from Greenham specially to support me; she’d mustered up a gang of friends to come and watch – without whom we’d have had almost no audience at all; she’d danced and looked proud and given me loads of thumbs-ups. I reminded myself that she was a free spirit. She never liked being in one place for long. She’d left a message for me with the barman. I’d see her back at the squat…

But where had she been for the past three hours? There was a worm of unease squiggling around in the pit of my belly when I realised that her friend, the girl with black curly hair, was also nowhere to be seen. The rest of their mates were still in the pub garden, smoking and laughing, but she definitely wasn’t with them.

I was so keen for Samantha to meet Pete; I’d talked incessantly about him to her, and she claimed to be fascinated that I was a twin. Keen – but simultaneously nervous about admitting the truth of our relationship. Pete did have a ‘live and let live’ policy – he wasn’t a prude – but he was quite old-fashioned, and innocent. And perhaps he might not be quite so tolerant when the ‘deviance’ – as my mother would call it – was so close to home.

For the first time ever, I felt a tiny bit glad that my dad wasn’t around anymore. I realised my lip was curling, even just thinking about his reaction. He’d have been completely appalled that I was gay.

It helped with the pain of his loss. Small mercies, and all that shit.