She pulled out a pen and wrote ‘Dinner with Max’ in the shared diary which lived on the kitchen table. As she looked down at the wet blue ink, a twisting, griping feeling formed under her ribcage.

Zadie

Zadie’s finger rested on the button for the electric window of the car. She pressed it down, then pulled it up, flicking the window a centimetre up, a centimetre down. She used to do the same thing in the car with her parents when she was a child on the way back to school on a Sunday night. She would wait to see how long her mother would ignore it before shouting at her. But the driver in the front seat, neatly dressed in a navy-blue suit, didn’t notice. Or if he did, he said nothing. She stopped pressing the button, just in case he could hear over the hum of the road and it was annoying him.

She watched the other cars passing, looking through their windows at the children, dogs, suitcases in them. Occasionally, a car filled with boxes and bags and rolled-up duvets would pass and she would wonder if they, too, were on their way to start university. Presumably with their parents.

Her mother had been apologetic about not dropping her off. ‘I would have done, darling,’ she had said, ‘but we’re away that weekend. And it’s not like you’ve never been away before. You know, other people who get dropped off by their parents, this is the first time they’ve ever left home.’ She’d clearly been trying to assuage her own guilt more than anything else.

It was true. Zadie had been leaving home for months at a time since she was eleven. This wasn’t the big sticking-plaster rip that other people found it to be. In fact, it was coming as quite a relief. A summer at home with her parents breathing down her neck, obsessing about whether she was eating, worrying about who she was seeing – it had been almost unbearable. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ was a maxim that suited the Lister family down to the ground.