The open fire spits sparks at the people huddled by it, the floor is sticky, the June wind, gusting up fresh from Antarctica, hammers fat rain against the windows. The music is grungy as fuck in a way that might actually be shit in its tuneless-ness, but here, in this context, feels edgy in a good way. Lucy’s a bit pissed already and knows that she’s gone slightly cross-eyed. There are four consecutive happy hours at this place, during which cheap-as beer is served in plastic jugs, and the kitchen is still a half hour off opening. Even then, it will only open for forty-five minutes, Kat has warned her, and it will only serve chowder. This place is known for its chowder.

‘Are you fucking kidding me you’ve never had their chowder? It’s the best chowder in the world. Even if you don’t like chowder you’ll love it. I swear, they put fucking crack in it,’ Kat had exclaimed last time Lucy was up in town—their second to last session—when she had revealed she’d never been to this place. ‘Well that settles it. Next time you’re up, let’s get chowder and then blind drunk to celebrate your octopuses.’

It seems Lucy’s doing it the other way around, but that’s okay.

Lucy didn’t tell Jem that her last two trips to town—spaced over longer breaks, so that the final patches of skin, which were dense and knotted with scars, had a touch more time to fade down—had only been for Kat. She doesn’t know why. Even though he obviously thought Suzette’s knitted knockers plan was as ridiculous as she did, she just felt like he would have been disappointed if he knew that she had cancelled those last appointments—those last chances to ‘sort out her thinking’, as he’d once referred to the psych sessions. But today had been her last session with Kat, and she had told Jem that it was her last session with Suzette too.

‘Kat wants to take me out for a couple of drinks,’ she told him. ‘So I might rent a room so I don’t have to drive, if that’s okay with you.’

He’d frowned in a way that suggested he felt a little uneasy about it, but a couple of weeks before he’d done the same thing when he went to a mate’s bucks party, which was arguably way more likely to end in debauchery.

‘I love you,’ he’d said, in answer, and kissed her on the brow.

That afternoon, Kat had inked in the last few gaps, and then, while Lucy was still topless in the parlour—so they could both appreciate the glory that was her chest—she and Kat had shotted gin and thanked each other profusely.

‘I just can’t tell you how much more real this feels,’ Lucy had said, not for the first time. She’d told Kat about the scared fish the last time she was in town; about how she knew, now, that she wouldn’t want any other body but hers.