It was all so familiar. The gritty-eyed feeling of being up all night, dawn landing on us like a bucket of cold water. A woman – a girl, really – who hadn’t made it through the night unscathed. Except by the time the sun came up that day, Martha Rasby was dead.

‘Tell me this isn’t the same.’

‘What the hell are you saying, Ali? That was – some stranger who got in. I just – it was bad luck! Wrong place wrong time!’

‘And this is a stranger too?’

‘It has to be. What else could it be? Ali, please!’

The door was opening. Our time was up. I stood, as if in a daze. As I walked out the door he was shouting after me, ‘Do it for the kids, if not for me! Do it for Cassie and Benj!’

1996

My back was burning. I could feel it starting, the tingle on my pale skin, and knew I should have brought sunblock. It was so expensive though, and with only days to the end of term, money was tight. I shifted, trying to find a patch of shade on the lawn of the quad. Beside me, Karen, who’d been face down on the grass in tiny shorts and a vest, reared up on one elbow. ‘You’re turning red, Al.’

‘I know.’

‘It’ll clash with your dress.’

‘I know. Lend me your shirt?’

Karen obliged, and I draped the checked shirt round my raw shoulders, smelling my friend’s aroma of rolling tobacco and Charlie Silver. A flicker of excitement licked my skin at the thought of my dress. It was lilac silk, and when I moved round my room it rustled over my bare legs in a way that made me shiver. To pay for it I’d worked all Easter break in the Tesco near Mum and Dad’s house, patiently putting up with the supervisor, who was seventeen and had a chip on his shoulder about anyone going to university, let alone Oxford. The sneers, the fact no one ever invited me to their post-shift drinks in Wetherspoons. The fact Mike had only written to me once all holiday, a postcard from France where he was with his parents who owned a ‘little place’ there. As if this was a perfectly normal thing. I’d written back, pretending I was studying hard for Finals instead of stacking cans of beans and lying awake listening to Dad shout at Mum over Coronation Street. Trying to forget that I’d not even been invited to France, not that I could afford the flight. Wondering if that meant anything. Hating everything about life in my home town, the school friends who already had babies, the boredom of it, the fact there was no bookshop, no theatre. The only thing that made it OK was knowing it was my last holiday there. Because after Finals I’d be living in London surely, with Mike.