Linda made a friend called Kerry, and the two of them would appear at the bar each evening, order glasses of vin blanc in parodically bad French. Meanwhile, John refused to wear any suntan lotion at all, despite being beetroot-coloured after his first day on the beach, and Ellen found it painful to look at him. He also insisted on walking around the site with his shirt entirely unbuttoned. Occasionally, she did imagine that she was writing her texts to Benjamin instead of Kate – though, some days, she realized she hadn’t thought about him at all.

Her eighteenth birthday passed without incident. There was a special breakfast of croissants and coffee. Her haul of presents included an Argos saucepan, a student cookbook and a pair of bed socks. They went to the beach and persevered with badminton, even as the clouds threatened, then went for an unceremonious steak frites before returning to the beach, where they all cooperated in an unspoken agreement not to mention the quite brutal easterly wind, until it blew Linda’s umbrella out of the sand, almost hit a German family, and they had to apologize. They hurried off the beach, Ellen and Tom trying hard not to laugh.

Linda had sourced a birthday cake for dinner, so they shared a bottle of wine, and then Tom and Ellen had a drink in the bar, which was fun until Linda and Kerry turned up.

The next day, Ellen woke up, feeling dispirited that she hadn’t even managed to get drunk on her eighteenth birthday. And that was that: she was an adult. After texting Kate a blow-by-blow account of the dreariness, her best friend promised her a proper night out when she got back to Gillingham.

Shots then Pulse then puke then home!!

There were worse nights, certainly.

And as was inevitable, she thought of Benjamin more and more rarely. Now she fantasized about confronting him, rather than getting him back. When the family returned after their holiday, she avoided MSN in favour of nights with Kate, who had quit her job at the old man’s pub and was now working at TK Maxx. Realizing they only had a few weeks left, they reminisced about their schooldays and eyed up the future. University was coming, though Kate had decided she didn’t want to go up to Leeds after all, so was taking another year to work things out.