‘Course I bloody am. You don’t want to fuck around with that crowd, believe me.’

‘He’s a good dancer,’ said Nula. ‘Terry.’

‘Don’t get no ideas, our Nula. I asked him to ask you to dance. He did it as a favour.’

Nula shrank into her seat. So Terry hadn’t actually wanted to dance with her at all. And why would he? She was fat, plain and short-sighted – although she refused to wear the NHS specs she was supposed to. She sighed over her dismal life. Their parents’d had both her and Jimmy late. Mum and Dad were Victorian in their attitudes, elderly in their ways. They were plain people; worthy, church-going, spectacled, cheaply clothed. Thick in their heads and around the middle. Jimmy was the same. None of them seemed to have an ounce of drive, none whatsoever. They were in the gutter and were content to stay there. Ambition was a dirty word to them.

But not to Nula.

Nula Perkins might be in the gutter, but by Christ she was looking at the stars. Her life had to amount to more than it did; she’d had a piss-poor education and was now in a sorry excuse for a job on the cake and biscuit counter in Woolies. Her big weekly treat was window-shopping in town with her mates around the market in Carnaby Street and looking longingly in Biba, because she could only look; she could never afford to buy anything and anyway nothing would ever fit over her fat arse.

‘Terry Barton’s sweet on Jill Patterson,’ said Jimmy. He’d plunged the knife in and now he was twisting it. Nula wanted to hit him because she knew it was probably true; she’d seen Terry and Jill in town together recently, holding hands.

‘I could get him off her,’ said Nula, stung; she knew she couldn’t.

‘What?’ Jimmy was laughing at her. Nothing new there. Nula was used to being laughed at. She’d been laughed at her entire fucking life, by everyone but particularly by Jimmy. Four years older than her and wearing an air of smug superiority, he loved nothing so much as taking the mick out of his little sister.

Like on one of their rare family holidays, when she’d been dancing the hokey-cokey with new-found friends: ‘You looked a prat doing that,’ said Jimmy when she came off the dance floor, making her glowing smile instantly wilt to nothing.

Or the time she’d been singing in the church choir, performing a solo for the first time ever; she’d been so proud – and then he’d grinned at her afterwards and said: ‘You were off bloody key, you should have heard yourself. You sounded like a cat caught in a mangle.’

‘You know her? Jill Patterson? Wasn’t she in your class at school? She’s a stunner,’ he was saying now.