‘Yes, Linda says that end of the High Street is a bit dodgy these days …’ A pause. ‘My mum,’ Ellen added for Ben’s benefit.

‘I love Linda,’ Alexa enthused, seeing an opening.

‘Yes, and she prefers you to me.’ Ellen rolled her eyes exaggeratedly.

Alexa had been to visit Gillingham a few times when they were both at university and she had instantly loved Linda and John, who were warm and funny and formed a sort of double act that was fluent but not practised. Alexa envied this enormously, as she could not remember a time when her own parents had been any sort of double act. She could see why Ellen had turned out the way she had: warm, silly, funny. Alexa had envied Ellen, too, for growing up in a town where she could get night buses home instead of relying on the services of a single taxi. In rural Sussex, there were no clubs for Alexa to sneak into. She went to the pub all the time, but the owner was her neighbour and knew exactly how old she was. She always let Alexa have a shandy, but the granting of permission – and the fact her mother was usually there too, in the corner, with her glasses pushed down her nose – had rather taken the rebellion out of the whole ritual.

‘Oh, oh, oh –’ Ben sat up quickly and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Did you know Chris Barclay?’

Ellen looked a little abashed. ‘Not properly, but I definitely used to talk to him on MSN. Or tried to. Sometimes it was like getting blood out of a stone. I used to spend ages talking to guys from Rainham and St James’s on MSN – these meaningless conversations about coursework that I dreamed might blossom into true love.’ Ellen made a face.

‘I’d use the family computer in the living room and get really angry with my mum when she wandered past and read out something I’d just said to some girl I’d never met but had decided I really fancied.’

‘Oh but those were the most intense ones,’ Ellen said, sounding – Alexa noted – very intense. ‘The ones where you didn’t even know their real name but in your head you were already planning how to lose your virginity to them on the dance floor at Pulse.’ She added, a little more breezily, ‘Oh, and remember all those statuses you’d do’ – she screwed up her face at the thought – ‘song lyrics to show you were really deep and meaningful? I remember putting up a Kooks lyric and virtually thinking I was Nietzsche.’

Alexa had to laugh at that one.

‘I definitely used to do the thing where you’d type your status in a mixture of caps and small letters.’ Ben mimed typing on a keyboard with two fingers.