BLURRED LINES
Hannah Begbie

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Hannah Begbie 2020

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photograph © Shuttershock.com

Hannah Begbie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008283261

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008283278

Version: 2020-08-13

Praise for Hannah Begbie:

‘Compelling, fierce and all too believable … a heart-stopping portrayal of what it costs to speak out’

Clare Empson, author of Him

‘Deeply compelling and gripping, with characters so realistic you feel as if you know them, I couldn’t put it down’

Isy Suttie

‘A fast-paced, tightly-wound thriller with great dialogue and compelling characters. A brilliant page-turner perfectly designed for the #MeToo era’

Viv Groskop

‘Beautifully written, very timely, very honest – I read it deep into the night’

Emma Freud

‘Important and perfectly paced, this is one of the best books I’ve read this year’

Zoe West

Dedication

For my sons, Jack and Griffin

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Hannah Begbie

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Hannah Begbie

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

She feels the sales assistant looking her over, appraising her against the wine that she has delivered to the counter. It is a Burgundy, priced at sixty-five pounds, its provenance declared in elegant loops on a simple label. She couldn’t pronounce this château, and she suspects this man knows that perfectly well. Look at this woman, with her dull, errant hair and the catalogue-bought black trousers that reach for but never quite achieve a tailored fit: at how her slouch and the crease to her brow clash against the pin-straight, darkly varnished floorboards of this wine shop.

He wraps the bottle in crisp crepe paper, one finger cocked like he is taking an elegant tea, as if to tell her: this is how it is done. Granted, her wardrobe, her hairstyle, her whole life cannot be salvaged by a moment of his time, but perhaps the act of witnessing his precision and professionalism and his good taste might, in some small way, chip away at her roughness.

She has pulled this bottle from the shelf because a hand-written card describes it as ‘a classic example of the type’. Now she wishes that she had been bolder. That she had chosen something without a ready-made approval, to state firmly that she knows better than this man, than any man, how her desires are best met by grapes, and terroir, and time in the bottle. Imagine asking if they had the same wine but from another year. A better year, or worse. Knowing what the sun or the humidity or the rain had done to that corner of France in that year.

Why should she know? Who is asking her to know these things?

‘Any tips for drinking it?’ she asks, her demeanour easy and friendly, like she’s only really filling a spare minute while he wraps the thing. Like she has no need of his opinion, but chooses to seek it anyway. A generous gesture that allows for him to know more about this bottle than simply how to wrap it.

‘Are you drinking it straight away?’

She shrugs. She won’t be drinking it at all, unless she’s asked to share it. And even then, she’d only take a few sips.

‘Well don’t let it get too warm,’ he says. ‘Won’t hurt to decant it, but it won’t struggle straight out of the bottle either. Cash or card?’

Becky hands over her debit card. It is the same colour as when she was at school. The first-savings-account hue of somebody who agonizes over whether sixty-five pounds, which she really cannot afford, is enough to spend on wine for a man who might consider it midweek drinking, a bottle to open mindlessly before rushing off to a weekend away, leaving it to idle and spoil on the kitchen island. Is it enough, a bottle like this, for a man like Matthew?

Matthew pays her pretty well. She can’t complain. She knows there are others who make less and are worth far more.

Stop it, she tells herself. You are good at your job. You are.

‘Enjoy it!’ says the man behind the counter as he hands her the bag. Did he see the dismay in her eyes as the card receipt chattered through? Surely he knows that this is a gift, one meant to impress; a wine that she does not understand, intended for someone whose world she only fleetingly visits.

And yet, his smile seems sincere. Perhaps he is honestly grateful for her custom, even if the wine is wasted on her. The money is real enough.

Matthew taught her that, like so much else about their business: everything is only talk, only a possibility, until somebody writes you a cheque, or cashes one you’ve written them.

As she exits the shop she holds her head high. Today is a good day. She has come to West London to deliver a gift and the gift has been well-chosen. It will suffice.

Becky passes the wedding-cake white houses of Portobello, takes in the scent of freshly cut stems from an elegant pink-and-orange-painted boutique floristry and the steam-whistle of a barista’s coffee machine through lacquered café doors flung wide-open. The weather has finally turned a corner. Her skin actually feels warm for the first time in months and she cannot help but stop for a moment, right there on the street corner, and turn her face to the sun, smiling even as she hopes that no one catches her in the act.

It’s a small miracle, she thinks, how an idea can turn into a series of meetings, and then a screenwriter’s draft, and now – or at least soon – will become actors and cameras and lights, and conversations in the edit suite. Like watching a foetus growing across a series of ultrasound images.

Tomorrow her yellow brick road takes her to the Cannes Film Festival where she will meet the people who can really make it happen. Those who can write cheques, or accept them. Her small idea, gathering supporters, players, financiers.

‘We could be shooting this time next year,’ Matthew had said at that very first meeting, within a minute of her giving him her seedling of an idea. ‘Produce it. I’ll back you.’

‘But I don’t know how,’ she’d said, hating herself for confessing her weakness so quickly.

‘Nobody does, the first time.’

And with that statement, he’d made it real.

She steps over the cracks in the pavement. She doesn’t want to jinx it, not now. Not when everything is so close.

She can see Matthew’s terraced stucco villa in the distance, its pilasters and columns all whiter than white against the leafy green health of the pavement trees. The early evening sun reminds her so much of that party night, when she walked this road, on that occasion without wine but with a Jiffy bag of contracts from the office for him to sign, not expecting to leave with a plan for her future.

‘Stay,’ he’d said to her as he signed the last of the Post-it-marked pages. ‘Come and meet some people.’

She’d been the one to order the canapés and the watermelon martini ingredients for this party, and now she was invited to share in them. To accept them as easy gifts from the waiting staff who circulated in crisp white shirts and black trousers.

Of course she should network. Wasn’t that how the world worked? A pretty assistant, charming her way around a beautiful garden, making a name for herself, evading both men’s hands and the scrutiny of their wives’ tracking gazes.

And yet, despite the fact of her canary-yellow dress candy-striped with orange, and the fact that she’d washed her hair that morning with a shampoo that promised gloss and hold, her head itched and she felt out of step and out of place. Here, the rich looked rich, and the nonconformists wore their asymmetric fringes with confidence. In one corner, a famous actor in shredded jeans and Debbie Harry T-shirt made conversation with an elderly critic turned out in linen suit and white Panama hat and both seemed entirely at ease. Where were the people stuck in between? Uncomfortably halfway to somewhere? Unfinished, barely done with being utter imposters?

She had been relieved when Matthew had interrupted a conversation between her and a grey-haired, mildly known actor – not so much a conversation, really, as a lecture – by asking her to step away with him, into his study. She had felt eyes on them as they vanished back into the house together. There was always that question, for some people, concerning what a man and a woman stepping away together might mean, especially when she was his, an employee, and just about still young, and unquestionably ambitious. Despite Matthew’s wife and children being there. Despite the way he kissed his wife readily and easily. Of course somebody would make a sly comment, win a cruel quick laugh. Why else go to a party like this?

The walls of Matthew’s study were tessellated with black-and-white photographs of his beautiful family playing cricket on a beach in Cornwall. Smooth custom-made oak shelves held his BAFTAs and BIFAs and Oscars and a galaxy of other awards in glass, bronze, Perspex, silver and wood.

‘I’ve got the Universal contracts here as well,’ he said. ‘Won’t be a minute.’ He glanced up from the paperwork and caught her looking at his statuettes.

‘Pick one up, if you like? The Academy one’s pretty heavy,’ he said. ‘You don’t want that kind of thing to take you by surprise on the night.’ And then he laughed and she really wasn’t sure whether he was mocking her or if he was expressing some kind of belief in her and so she chose, for once, to try to believe the latter. And as a small, rare bubble of confidence grew in her, no doubt lubricated by three glasses of good champagne, she had told him, ‘I’m ready, I want to make a film. And I have an idea.’

Approaching his house a year later she still marvels at that moment. How did she do it? It had been like pitching to God, but at least prayers go unanswered. No voice from above outright tells you, No. You’re at least allowed to keep your hope. Her heart was in her mouth, she feels sick just remembering it, thrumming its beats through her, telling her to be ready for anything – so afraid was she that Matthew would declare how bad her idea, how shameless her decision to pitch now: at a party, of all times! Becky had fought every natural instinct in her body to flee, and pressed on, talking to her boss, this movie producer whose life was stuffed to the gills with box office smashes and blockbuster hits. He had listened to her talk about the Greek tragedy ‘Medea’ and how it might be remade to speak to modern women, and he had said yes, and then told her to make it for £4 to 5 million, give or take a million for their lead actress who would do it for the prizes, not the payday.

‘It’s about revenge,’ she had told him excitedly, not realizing that you can stop once somebody has said yes. ‘Medea sacrifices everything to help Jason achieve his goals. Then, when he’s taken all she has to offer, he gets bored and leaves her for another woman. And so Medea gets angry.’

As she spoke, something scalding had coursed through her, with the rush of a furiously filling lock. It didn’t take much to connect with this feeling, not really, it was close to the surface wherever she was. ‘He believes a woman’s anger isn’t ever something to worry about,’ she said, ‘but he underestimates her. Medea takes her revenge.’

It didn’t matter that Matthew would never know what had lit that touchpaper inside her. She could see from his half-smile that he was interested in her, and proud of her, and she was already addicted to that feeling.

Becky steps into the road to cross it and a car swerves to avoid her, blaring its horn. Its headlights catch her shins. She steps back, a stomach-twisting jolt of adrenaline waking her up.

On the opposite side of the road an old woman takes pleasure in shaking her head at Becky’s near-fatal mistake as a new story sweeps away red carpets and lofted award statuettes: Becky, mother of one, a development assistant with no produced credits, dead in the road. A head full of dreams, but not enough blood left in her veins to keep them there.

It is an old feeling for Becky, the idea that her waking life might be parted from her body. That her body is sometimes simply a place where things happen, sometimes with her, sometimes without.

These are not helpful thoughts.

She feels small and foolish now. She is a woman without real power. A woman who can barely cross a road. She has the favour of a powerful man, and that is all. For all the cocktails and glamorous lunches, it hasn’t happened yet, the film hasn’t taken off, hasn’t been made. It’s all just words and expressions of interest. Who on earth does she think she is?

She crosses, safely now, passing the old woman who wants desperately to catch Becky’s eye.

Smaller and weaker, she arrives at the side entrance to Matthew’s house, electing to take a route she has taken a dozen times before, stepping down a flight of double-height steps to a wooden door, barbed wire all curled at the top like a helix of DNA. The air smells of fresh creosote and good maintenance and charred meat and through a small side window she can see that lights are on deeper inside the house.

She pushes at the door and it opens easily. Why doesn’t he worry about crime? All that barbed wire and the door still unlocked; a contradiction, a statement, a dare. People seem to come and go here, drifting into Matthew’s home like it’s an exclusive private members’ club. If you turn up and they’re having a family meal, a place is set for you straight away – no trouble, no problem. Becky has eaten like that on half a dozen occasions, smiling along with every family joke until her jaw ached with tension.

She pads over a paved area and pushes at another door into the house, stepping through the dark utility room, rehearsing her lines. No, she can’t stay. It’s a small thank you for Cannes, a token really. If she stays for a drink, will she be so bold as to propose a toast to their forthcoming trip? Is that hopelessly gauche, wishing aloud for success that Matthew has no need of? Siobhan’s laser-guided words hit her again: this is a very expensive kind of work experience. Said to her face, to Siobhan’s credit, as Siobhan booked two hotel rooms and two sets of flights. Chosen and not chosen. Emboldened by Becky’s example, Siobhan is developing her own idea to pitch to Matthew, while also printing up the Cannes travel itineraries.

There is music playing in the kitchen. The lights are on in the hallway, but not in here, where the downlighters are set to low. Becky pauses on the threshold of the room. What if he is home alone? What if he has fallen asleep and now she’ll wake him? She regrets not ringing the front doorbell but Matthew is always at pains to say it’s only ever the builders and delivery men who do that, and she’s more than that to him. Isn’t she?

But this is an imposition. What if she walks in on him getting undressed or even, God help her, masturbating? In the kitchen? she asks herself. Surely not.

She steps over the threshold into a room that is kitchen and dining room and living room all in one, and each area is generously apportioned. The overall footprint is larger than her entire flat.

The retractable glass wall is closed to the garden but its formal raised beds are tastefully under-lit. The kitchen features navy walls and a distressed copper breakfast bar with matching taps. Soap in big blue apothecary bottles and stripped, white-painted floorboards. There are half-full wine glasses on the marble worktop.

Becky sets her own wine down on the kitchen island and looks around for paper with which to leave a note. ‘Popped in?’ ‘Sorry I missed you?’ Or is she right that it’s an imposition, this stealing into a person’s home, even if it’s allowed, encouraged even?

As the music changes track, in the silence between beats, she thinks she hears something – a breath, or a moan, something like pain perhaps. She can’t put a name to it, but her mouth dries and her skin prickles, the fine hairs on her forearms rising.

She wants to flee, but what if it’s him, dying? An olive caught in the throat. An allergy he hasn’t told her about (not that, she’d know). And in the end, she has to check. Of course she does.

She pads quietly around the wood-burning fireplace that part divides the room. Another noise – this time male and urgent. And, horrified, Becky realizes that she is in proximity to sex.

There is movement. On the floor, on the rug that softens the sofa grouping, their bodies mostly hidden by the furniture. Becky cranes her neck a little. She sees a woman’s head, and Matthew on top of her, and the woman is not his wife, cannot be unless Antonia has gone blonde. She notices a tall-heeled foot, black shoe with a red sole, sliding off the rug, onto the flagstone, like a calf’s leg slipping outward as it takes a first step.

The woman says something to the man. Her arm goes up – pushing him or reaching for him? He catches her by the wrist and moves that arm back onto the rug – and his breathing, his grunting, deepens. The woman’s face contorts. Perhaps close to orgasm. Perhaps uncomfortable.

The woman turns her head and looks straight at Becky. And opens her mouth, as if about to speak – or call out – or warn him – or—

Chapter 2

That night in bed, restless under her covers, Becky goes from hot to cold, aggravated by the duvet’s shortness, its longness and finally its mere existence. Window up, window down, she cannot seem to find a simple point of balance between sweating and shivering. She lies on her front, her back, curled up, stretched out, grasping and un-grasping her wrist.

Matthew Kingsman. Oxford man. Family man. Film man. There is a waterlogged feeling in her. Perhaps it is disappointment, though that would be irrational. Matthew is a free agent in a free country. He can do as he pleases, and it is no business of hers.

She tells herself she has been naïve: that people do this all the time. Flings, dalliances, affairs, trust-bending, trust-breaking. There are of course open marriages whose openness isn’t advertised to one and all. People have sex with people they shouldn’t, all the time, particularly in her industry where everyone is looking at themselves, and if not at themselves then at each other, in the mirror or through a camera or on screen. Bodies attractive enough to sell tickets win easy lays, quick fucks, promotions. She gets it. It shouldn’t be news to her. She needs to loosen the fuck up.

Successful people are boundary-benders, boundary-breakers, and maybe it is Becky who should be taking a lesson from this rather than sitting here in judgement. She has so much to learn. She aches under the weight of it, aches at how childish she still is.

All these thoughts ricochet off the sides of her, like a ball in a pinball machine.

She considers for the hundredth time how, with the kitchen lights behind her, she must only have been a silhouette. How she turned and ran so quickly and quietly that perhaps if they were drunk she’ll be remembered as something that couldn’t have happened. A shadow in the corner of the eye, with nothing there on second glance. She was never there. If he asked – and why would he ever ask? – she would look blankly back and deny everything.

It is none of her business how two people have sex. Some people like to dress up. Some people play rough, hold each other down and tie each other up by the wrists, silence and hurt each other. She knows all that. She’s not completely naïve.

At five in the morning, and with just two hours left before it’s time to wake Maisie for school, Becky admits defeat and leaves her bed, padding quietly to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Maisie will sleep through the kettle whistle, through the smell of coffee, through all of it. Maisie rarely dreams. She sleeps like a child whose days are straightforward, which is precisely how Becky has laboured to arrange them.

Becky breathes in her home and the smell of washing powder and the ghost of last night’s chilli and tries to calm the thud-crack in her heart. She looks around her small kitchen and at all the boundaries that surround her in her old East London maisonette; at the low ceilings and narrow rooms, at the double-glazed, triple-locked door that leads out onto a paved patio. At the window grills that slide across and meet in the middle. At the moose-headed coat hook in the hallway that holds her black lycra running top and the pair of creased and dusty wide-legged trousers she’d once worn for weekly self-defence classes at the local gym.

At first, what she learnt there made her feel safer than any triple-locked door. She enjoyed making a fist in a boxing glove so her wrists didn’t snap and her tendons didn’t bruise, and how to deliver a punch with speed and precision. She had felt reassured and emboldened by the tight wrap of the gloves around her wrists and how they made her arms feel bionic, almost not her own. She had enjoyed the feeling of strength return to her body.

But she abandoned the lessons when she began using her new-found skills in unconstructive ways. There wasn’t a local gym class on earth that would teach her the skills she needed to defend her against herself.

Becky tries not to panic about how much she has to do, how she will manage a day’s work, a flight to Cannes and a couple more hours’ peppiness for all those new people who will need impressing. All on no sleep whatsoever? Back in her bedroom she lightly folds a dress and rolls up a cotton shirt and two T-shirts. Fills her washbag. Pulls out pants and socks and assembles it all in a pleasing jigsaw inside her carry-on suitcase: two carbon-scented copies of the Medea script at its base.

She makes notes on her Cannes meetings, banishing thoughts of that silken hair spilling out onto the kitchen floor, coming up with six ways to pitch her idea to six different kinds of people.

But she knows what she really wants to do and she knows that it is destructive so she fights it, at first holding her own hand lightly, reassuringly, like a friend. And then when the feeling does not subside, gripping her hand tightly, before grasping at the thin skin and raised veins of her own wrist, holding it tight, as if pulling herself back from a fight. She has agreed, in therapy, that standing up to this instinct is a good thing. Succeeding means she has taken her power back, or something like that; but without sleep all those rules are dissolving at their margins, her desires pushing away old decisions.

Surely if she just does more, the instinct will leave? She clears the washing basket. Cleans surfaces that already gleam. Lays out an array of jams and breakfast cereals despite the fact she never eats breakfast and her daughter’s favourites are firmly established and unflinching.

She means to make a cup of tea next, but somehow before the kettle boils she has opened Scott’s Twitter page and she is already on her way to losing the fight.

Becky has two Twitter accounts: one that is her. And one that isn’t.

The one that isn’t Becky is Melanie. Melanie has a line drawing of a face in the photo caption, all thick and twisty like the pen hasn’t been taken off the page. ‘Melanie Hasn’t Tweeted Yet’ but Melanie follows a few people – thirty-seven corporate accounts like BBC News, Sky News, Popbitch, and another dozen or so famous people, including a TV presenter who crossed the Gobi Desert on foot and whose dinner-party speciality is puffer fish. Then there are forty or so ‘ordinary people’, people who maybe said something funny once or do something unusual or are vocally for or against some issue or other. And she doesn’t check on anything they have to say, because all of them – the corporations, the celebrities, the nobodies – are padding to disguise the fact that Melanie is following Scott.

She knows it’s overkill, but Becky dreads the slip of a fingertip, an accidental ‘like’ or retweet of a Scott comment, anything that might tip him off that Becky Shawcross is monitoring him. Safer not to look directly at him.

Scott has changed his main picture again.

Now Scott is in fancy dress, dressed as Elvis in a maroon button-down shirt, the collar of a leather jacket pulled high around his neck and his hair styled like a whip of black treacle.

It’s not a picture she has seen before.

Perhaps he has been to a party.

She logs into Facebook, via another fake profile account. He friended her without asking questions. He already had 762 friends. Why not welcome another one? Somebody has tagged him at this party. Elvis lives! A grinning friend of his has slung an arm around Scott’s neck. Scott is pouting for the camera in aviators. Not for the first time, he has chosen a costume that allows him to wear sunglasses. He likes to hide his eyes, those giveaway windows to the soul.

She scrolls back through his timeline. She’s seen it all before, a thousand times. His whole life is in her head, or at least those parts that she can get at from the safety of her own flat.

Last year Scott purchased a large indoor fish tank. His colleagues appreciated the cupcakes he bought them one afternoon in Soho. He celebrated the birthday of his oldest house plant and 152 people put hearts by it.

Recently drank espresso Martinis with an old friend who’d flown over from Australia. You’d think he was Australian, with a name like Scott, but he’s English. Like Becky, he was brought up in Hounslow, where the roof tiles vibrate under the flight paths.

And there’s one picture of him that kills her every time now. Taken a year or so ago, it’s like he’s staring right back at her, without the usual sunglasses hiding his eyes, without a care in the world. Without remorse. You don’t get that icy-blue finish to the eyes without going into a shop and buying coloured contact lenses, without swaggering in there, your veins running cold with vanity. In the picture, he’s got an expensive haircut with bits of white blond at the ends. Becky reckons the colour is officially ‘ash blond’. Successful, good-looking, like a boy band member, his hair dipped in ash dye – the ashes of other people. Not a crack in that gorgeous fucking life of his.

She surrenders to it, the scanning and watching distracts her from her twitching hands, from thoughts of the kitchen floor. She’ll read him until Maisie stirs, she knows that now, so she scrolls to champagne glasses intertwined and fizzing. She surfs his flat, job, and the people who love him best (a sister in Belgium, some nieces and nephews). No sign of a significant other; that’s something, at least.

How easily he lives.

But she is breathing quickly now, the energy inside whipping itself into a hot storm with nowhere to go because it’s not enough to see him live his life. It never is. And yet, she has a daughter who relies on her. Everything she wants must be measured against that.

Enough, she tells herself. And so she dresses in jogging bottoms and threads the laces of her running shoes with trembling hands and closes the door behind her with a double then a triple lock. Silently, so as not to wake Maisie, a crackle of worry across her chest about leaving her, but knowing that there are two people to look after. Another edict from another therapist. Self-care. Making time for her.

Becky takes three quick steps, ordering everything inside herself to be quiet, and soon enough she has slipped into a good, quick pace and is running through the streets, heels slamming hard on concrete, landing so as to feel those shockwaves snake up sharp through fibula and tibia. And then, when her chest and muscles ache, she adjusts her gait to save her shin-splints and instead let lungs and thighs scream.

She runs down an alley – she’d never dream of taking it at night and even now, with just the weak morning daylight, she holds her breath in her chest and her keys in her hand like a dagger. Once she’s out the other end, she races for the park where round and round and round she will go, pushing herself faster on each lap.

She lets herself have one lap – only one – where she lets Scott fuck her before she cuts his throat.

Then she is so full of shame. It drums in her ears and leaks out of her tear ducts and flecks her mouth with spittle.

She stops running. Finds a tree. Stands with her back to the rough-edged bark and now she cannot stop what she does next. She curls her hand into a fighter’s fist, making sure her thumb stays on the outside of her second and third knuckles, exactly as she was taught. Then, at the thought of Scott’s flashing smile and icy eyes, at the thought of that woman’s hair shining so bright and gold, her arm stretched so long and thin across the rug, her wrist held, she pummels her thigh. Softly at first, like a drum. And soon enough she is thumping her leg, much harder this time, and imagining all her thoughts, all her feelings, being knocked out of her with every beat, like an old-fashioned washer woman pummelling the dirt out of fabric. Nice and clean, washed away and forgotten.

Soon her leg hurts so much she cannot thump it any more. Underneath her jogging bottoms she knows it will be pink where the flesh has been hammered, and that there will be a yellowish tea-wash stain behind that and that soon the pink patch will go purple and black before it too goes yellow tea-wash. She hammers and punches on the same spot because she is trying to stop something but it is a race she is losing and however much she tries to hold it back, she can’t: her mind ribbons out like it is being released into the wind, sharp claws at each ribbon’s end, thoughts and memories all searching for something, a clue and jigsaw piece, something to make her whole again.

Chapter 3

Hounslow, London

13 September 2003

Becky loves Saturdays. No school all day, and then another day just like it to collapse into after this one’s spent.

Today her parents have gone out to the garden centre and left her in peace to enjoy the high-pitched presenters of Saturday morning television as they leap about in front of butter-yellow and sugar-pink backdrops. When Becky is old enough to do this kind of thing, when it is her turn to interview people, it will be in her contract that she gets to choose the colour of the sofa – hot pink to offset her lime-green leggings, thank you! She will ideally graduate quickly from children’s television into a kind of late teatime, primetime Saturday slot just after the family game shows. And as a presenter she will have a habit of asking tough and yet elegantly emotional questions like, ‘But in the last analysis, how does that actually make you feel?’ Perhaps while reaching out a warm hand in genuine concern. It will sort of be her thing, so that after a while her guests expect it and people will talk about how she was the refreshing opposite of all the old men who do their chat shows.

Becky has a box full of diagrams of the set she will inhabit, drawing each one like a bedroom with four walls. It doesn’t occur to her that you need to put the cameras somewhere, so one wall has to be imaginary. She sees no trickery, no special effects. Just a bright, bubblegum reality that is kind enough to welcome her in, whenever she turns on the television.

Charred burgers and relish for lunch today, the classic Saturday meal in the Shawcross household, complete with Dad complaining about broken tongs and Mum saying he should bloody well do something about it then.

Becky goes to the local pool. In the changing room she watches other women’s bodies as they get in or out of their costumes. As she walks to the water, she is a catwalk model with all eyes on her. When she dives down, she is a dolphin or a jet-ski or a shark. When she returns home later that afternoon the house smells of hot dogs and frying onions: the conciliatory dish her mum offers her dad after a hard day’s arguing.

She calls out from the hallway. ‘It stinks in this house. Will someone please open the window? All my clothes are going to smell of gross oil and onions.’ Then she runs up the steps to her bedroom, two at a time, in a bid to rescue her party outfit.

Downstairs her mum begins a fresh diatribe on her favourite subject, which is ‘being blamed for bloody everything in this house’.

Becky stands at the mirror of her wardrobe in her underwear, wanting to look more sophisticated than she does in these baggy pink cotton knickers bought in bulk by her mum every Christmas. She needs to investigate alternative options. She hates the idea of a G-string, the notion that somehow you are a block of cheddar perpetually on the verge of being halved by a cheese wire. And then there’s the sheer hassle she’d get if she actually bought something nice (comfortable cut, bold-coloured lace) and her mother found them in the washing basket. The torrent of questions that would follow! Who was she thinking of impressing with a pair like that? Who the bloody hell did she think she was? Which boy exactly had she impressed so far? And the crowning glory: what precautions was she taking, and did she know that even condoms can’t prevent pubic lice from spreading?

Becky lays her outfit out on the bed and her make-up on her side table, so that everything is ready. She loves decorating herself: all that nipping and tucking and flaring and wedging, like taking a sharpened pencil and rubber to your outline and adjusting it accordingly.

She holds up a fluorescent-pink vest top with a spaghetti strap which, because it was bought at a flea market lacking a changing room, is too big and needs adjusting so the lace trim of her bra is not on display. She wreathes strings of beads and trails fake pearls about her neck until she is satisfied with how good the concentric circles look against a plain pink background. Then she takes her jeans – tight, low-slung, the fashion – and pours herself into them, ramming the zip closed twice before it stays put.

The next bit takes the longest. She outlines and flicks and smudges and colours in cheeks and eyes until she looks a picture: the best, most sophisticated version of herself, she thinks.

Just before she leaves, she stands a few feet away from the threshold of the kitchen rubbing moisturizer into arms that are dry and chlorinated from the pool, watching as her mum lays out a fresh cloth on the table.

Her dad turns to her and laughs, then says, ‘You look like you’ve fallen in the dressing-up box.’

Becky wants to say, Don’t be a dick, but she won’t risk being sent to her room and having her plans cancelled. Instead she settles for a sarcastic smile and a mumbled, ‘You’re not exactly setting Milan on fire with those Union Jack socks.’

They’re not the kind of parents who insist on collecting their child from a party at a set time. They don’t suggest it and Becky doesn’t ask them to. That’s one good thing about them. She’ll be home when she’s home.

Their party plans had nearly been abandoned because of Mary’s summer cold, which Becky would probably have been OK with, if she’s honest. But now that Mary is on the up, the only sign of her ailment a lower-than-usual voice, left gravelly by a week’s coughing, it’s all back on and they’re arm in arm, walking down the road from Mary’s house, with Mary pushing and pushing to see if Becky will do a pill with her tonight.

Mary is Irish and favours wearing pinafore dresses with band T-shirts rumpled up underneath. She is extremely persuasive. Her hair is terracotta red out of a packet which emphasizes the china white of her skin, which in turn emphasizes the rings of dark under her eyes which are there because she has to get up earlier than her body wants to, she says, which is one more crime that the education system has to answer for. Mary feels that the school week compounds the problem of weekends, which should ideally involve missing at least one whole night’s sleep.

‘So? Are you going to do one with me or not?’

Mary believes that, as friends, you go down together and you come up together. If it’s a good pill then you have a fellow traveller for the night, and if it’s a bad pill then you don’t die alone.

Today, Mary is disappointed about an unsupportive government and disappointed with the bags under her eyes, and Becky can’t quite bear to add to the tally, at least not yet, so she says: ‘Yeah, maybe I’ll take a pill. We’ll see. Yeah, go on then.’

Mary whoops because it is only a party when you are guaranteed to have fun and not die alone. Then she takes out two cigarettes, lights them both and hands Becky one as if smoking cigarettes together is the best way of sealing this deal of togetherness.

It is Saturday night and Becky is feeling good. Her skin feels lit with magpie-bright colours and sparkles, and it fits well. At this moment, walking arm in arm with her best friend, everything is as it should be.

Oh, to have a photograph of that moment, the time before the rest of it happened.

To have that to come back to, to tell yourself: you are still in there, that girl with flying hair and a newly lit cigarette and a whole weekend, a whole life, laid out for the taking. She is not lost to you. Imagine yourself back into that skin and feel the closeness of the fit. Persuade yourself.

But you are not watched by anything other than a fat, ginger housecat, which moments after you pass him forgets you for a rat-rustle in the bushes nearby.

Chapter 4

Becky sits at her kitchen table, skull resting in her hands, the sweat of her running kit rapidly cooling. Suddenly she shakes her head from side to side, like she is trying to unblock water from her ear canals.

Her hands shake as she reaches for her cup of sugar-sweetened tea. There are only minutes left before her daughter rises, before she must pack it all away, every messy part of herself, and instead shower and emerge into the office day clean and effective and capable of more than she feels. And in twelve hours she touches down in Cannes and will need to find yet more energy from somewhere to be extraordinary. Impressive. So much better than her ordinary self.

Her phone dings. Siobhan from the office.

Becky has known her for three years now and they have their taller-than-average heights in common, along with a history of photocopying, office organizing, script reading, and attending to the needs and wants of Matthew. All the things Becky is now shedding.

Something’s going down. Advise turning up on time …

Ding

… early. Ideally? M is in a weird mood. Wants to talk to us.

Becky’s body tenses instinctively, her stomach drawing in as if she is about to be punched there.

Immediately, she thinks: I am to blame for seeing something that wasn’t my business. There would be no point in telling herself that blame is an irrational response – what she feels in that moment comes unbidden, from a place that is fossilized in her bones.

I am to blame for entering his space without permission.

All that time spent preparing for Cannes: choosing and rolling and folding and packing things to decorate herself with: the pretty clothes and the jewel-toned make-up and the bangles and necklaces and perfume. The shameful, wasteful vanity of it all. He’ll cancel the trip, and then sack her from her job. All those years she worked, wasted. All the studying and handbook-reading between toddler meals and screaming baby put-me-downs and pick-me-ups. The evening courses and coursework threaded between hastily arranged pieces of childcare. Not to mention the hours spent reading novels, watching television programmes and films, not for pleasure but to educate herself: studying story construction and characters. Feeling surprised and comforted when some characters sunk into her bones, enough to make her laugh and cry and scream with frustration and sometimes, if she was really lucky, to feel their presence for days and months after … What did people call it? Characters that stayed with you, like a good friend, a true friend who holds your hand at a time of need.

One night, after watching a film about a woman who had fought against the odds to find happiness, all this feeling brimmed out of her and onto the page in the form of a well-worded letter addressed to the Soho townhouse offices of the film’s producer, Matthew Kingsman.

I want to work for you more than anything. I too want to bring stories to people that make them feel what you make them feel: less alone.

It had all been so hard-fought. And soon it would all be gone because she had put herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She slaps her own wrist. Stupid girl.

‘Hey, Mum.’ Maisie is standing at the doorway to the kitchen in bare feet and white and blue tartan pyjamas – brushed cotton, a Christmas present from Becky – the ropes of her bathrobe hanging down, brushing the floor gently, vines in the wind. ‘Are you all right?’

Becky wipes at her cheeks with flat palms, like she is applying moisturizer. ‘Yes, absolutely fine.’ Reassuring people was something she learnt to do many years ago. One trick amongst many.

Another one: fill a silence with a question of your own.

‘How long did you stay up revising?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Maisie. ‘Late?’

‘It’s important to get some rest as well. You can’t think properly if you’re not getting enough sleep.’

‘You want me to add resting to my already massive timetable?’

Becky smiles. She likes Maisie’s sharp edges. They’ll keep her safe, she hopes. Not an easy walkover, a girl who’ll puncture your feet as you attempt it. ‘What are you working on?’

‘I was doing my physics revision. How long have you been up for?’

‘Do you study the atom bomb?’

‘You mean fission bombs?’

‘I have no idea! If I’d studied them I might be able to answer that …’

‘Anyway, no, we don’t. In our school that’s probably more of an ethics thing than a science thing.’

‘I just always thought it was interesting. A tennis-ball-sized thing flattening a whole city.’

‘Morning, Mum! Can I have some breakfast before we talk about the end of the world?’

Becky smiles and sets about sorting Maisie’s breakfast.

‘I don’t want you to stress about your exams.’

‘Yes you do! I know I need a scholarship to stay at sixth-form and those ten A grades at GCSE aren’t going to magically achieve themselves.’

‘Just don’t let it get on top of you.’

‘I actually slept really well. Did you go to bed? You look rubbish.’

‘Really building my confidence before Cannes.’

‘It’s not like you’re an actress. You don’t have to look sexy for anyone.’

‘True. Well, I’ll cling to that, shall I?’

‘Yep.’

Maisie levels her out. She always has done. There have been times, many of them, that without a child to hold onto she might have fallen off the edge of the world. And here, like a miracle, is a smart-mouthed funny young girl, living under the same roof, loving her more or less unconditionally. Even when she first pushed a pram around the park, round and around, when she thought she could actually feel the gazes land on her soul, heavy with judgement – a feckless teenager with a mewling newborn, a mistake that’ll no doubt be paid for by the state – even then just looking down at her soothed her, pushed her agony to the sides, made space in her for her heart to beat.

Now teenager-mother and baby have morphed to become mother and teenager. And often they are mistaken for sisters – they are almost the same height, have the same long mousy brown hair, the same strong thin nose. Maisie’s eyes are darker and a little larger. Her skin tans in the sun where Becky’s burns. But these are small differences. ‘Cut from the same cloth,’ Maisie’s grandfather is fond of saying. ‘Not much of you in there, Adam, and thank Christ for that!’ Adam, adored by his father all his life, affects outrage before claiming that Maisie has his hairy arms. Becky watches on fondly as they all collapse into more laughter. The joke varies. Sometimes Adam claims she’s going to have his size twelve feet, sometimes it’s his sticky-out ears, but the form is unchanging. Sometimes as the shtick begins Adam meets Becky’s eyes and there is a private understanding before the lines play on. Maisie loves it. Sometimes she prompts it, asking Grandpa T who she looks like, feigning innocence but already grinning in anticipation of which mutant body part Adam will claim for her inheritance.

‘Sorry to have to be away,’ says Becky.

‘No offence, but it’s non-stop pizza when you’re gone so there’s not going to be many tears shed.’

‘I’m going to ask Adam to make a salad.’

‘OK. He can make it and then we’ll both sit there admiring it while we eat our pizzas.’

Becky smiles and her phone dings again. Siobhan:

Scratch that. He is in a really CRAP mood. Something is UP. How long does it take you to pack anyways?

‘Can I go to a sleepover tonight?’

‘Definitely not. It’s a school night.’

‘Mum.’

‘No.’

The silence that falls is plugged with the jet rush of the tap as Becky fills the kettle. She arranges tea bag and mug. Her clothes are stiffening with drying salt.

‘I’ve got to go, Mais,’ Becky says. ‘I only said I’d be half an hour late so I could get myself sorted for this afternoon and so far neither of us has showered or eaten.’

‘How come you get cocktails in the sun with little umbrellas and bits of pineapple and sexy people dressed in Armani and I can’t even go to a boring sleepover?’

‘School night. I admire your tenacity but you’re not going to magically persuade me that Wednesday is followed by Sunday.’ Becky smiles and ruffles her daughter’s hair. ‘Anyway, I thought you were working towards buying those trainers? Put in more revision time instead of going out and you’ll be a step closer to earning them. What are they called again? The Nike neon wattage …’

Maisie rolls her eyes. ‘Volt, Mum. Volt is the colour of the trainer, not its electrical charge.’

‘Great, the point is they’re so painfully hip that everyone will want to be your friend then you’ll never be short of an invitation so why not wait …’

‘Nice try but I’m fine with the invite I’ve got right now. Come on, Mum, please let me go? Only one boy is going to be there. He hardly counts.’

‘Definitely not. And it’s not about boys.’

A lie, but an easy one.

Becky takes some bread out of its cellophane bag and lines up two slices next to each other, all the while surveying the line of texts on her phone screen. Her stomach turns slowly at the slick of butter across the bread and twists in irritation at the congealed and messy blackcurrant jam refusing to spread tidily.

‘Who’s Scott?’

The question freezes Becky. How is it even possible that Maisie is asking it? Her laptop is closed. She’s always careful to log out and delete and tidy it all away. Becky is glad that she is facing away from her daughter. Even with years of practice, in moments like this she can be read.

‘He was an explorer. Died at the South Pole.’

‘Funny. Ish. Seriously, are you thinking about dating this guy?’

‘Which guy?’

When Maisie says his name – his full name – Becky feels like she has been cornered. Nowhere left to run.

‘Where’d you hear his name?’

‘You asked me to fix our rubbish Wi-Fi.’

‘And …?’

‘And so I logged into the router to see if anyone’s squatting on our connection and there wasn’t, but what there is is lots of visits to his Twitter and his Facebook and I was like, that’s a bit obsessive, Mum!’

Becky attempts to look calm. Blithe, she tells herself. Unruffled. Everything has to be weighed now. If Maisie asks Adam about Scott, any lie that she tells now will be easily unknotted. Something close to the truth is required.

‘He’s a guy I knew when I was younger. School days.’

‘He’s a sexy guy you used to know!’

‘Not my type.’

‘Why are you looking at him then?’

‘I was curious. He was one of those kids you wonder where he’ll end up. It’s a big bit of my job, taking real people and then making up endings. Sometimes I’ll think about someone I once knew and decide how their story ended and then look them up just to see if I was right.’

‘Oh my God, that’s so weird.’

‘I’m good at it!’

‘No, you need a better hobby than Facebook-stalking people to see if you’re good at making up stories.’

‘Fine. Get me a basketball for my birthday.’

Maisie looks up. ‘I actually thought for a moment you might be thinking of going on a date. And I was like … good! At last.’

‘I’m not against dating. I’m just really busy.’

‘Yeah, but soon all the women your age …’

‘My age? I’m only thirty-two!’

‘Yes, like I said, soon women your age are going to be getting married and having kids …’

‘Jumped the gun there, did I?’

‘Mum. You need to get in there before all the good ones get taken. Go on a date again.’

Maisie takes the plate of bread from her mum’s hands and kisses her cheek. ‘And don’t mess it all up by saying you’ve got a daughter. I know that’s a buzzkill. Get them hooked first, and then drop the clanger that is me.’

‘Begin with a lot of lying?’

‘That’s how online dating works! A lot of small lies, big exaggerations and some massive omissions, like: I’ve got a teenage daughter.’

‘And when I bring them over?’

‘Say I’m the maid.’

Becky laughs now, right from the gut. It feels like it has set off chemicals through her brain and soul.

‘I’m just saying, you don’t always need to be so honest from, like, the first minute.’

‘Thanks for the advice,’ Becky says. ‘You’re too wise.’

‘So.’ Maisie picks up a slice of bread and for a moment gets distracted by some sticky blackcurrants tumbling off the side. ‘I’ve given you excellent advice, cheered you up … quid pro quo.’

Becky knows exactly what’s coming and she can’t help it but she laughs again – all that confidence and persistence Maisie has. Armour against the bad things that will surely happen to her.

‘So can I go to the sleepover?’

‘Where is it?’ Becky leans against the kitchen cupboard and folds her arms, smiling.

‘Not far. Islington.’

‘Whose house?’

‘Jules’ house. Lily and Eva are going as well.’ Maisie is braiding a long section of hair now, eyes focused on her work and evading her mother’s searching gaze.

‘Is Jules a boy or a girl?’

‘He’s a boy from school.’

‘Is he someone’s boyfriend?’

‘Lily likes him.’

‘And who does Jules like?’

‘Oh my God. This isn’t healthy. You need to be dating.’

‘Don’t avoid the question.’

For a moment Maisie looks like she’s going to sulk like she used to when she was five or six. But perhaps sensing there is a battle still worth winning, she finds a way to let it go.

‘I think he likes me.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I think Lily’s one of my best friends.’

‘Could be quite a complicated evening.’

‘Not really.’

‘Can we talk about drugs?’

‘I’m not selling you drugs. You have to stop asking me, Mum.’

‘Are you going to do drugs?’

‘Do you mean, when I’m trying to get another scholarship am I going to wreck my cerebellum for the sake of what the kids are calling “a high”?’

It’s not what Becky means. She wants to ask: Will anyone drug you? Will you lose your sense of who you are? What if you’re attacked? Will you be unsafe? Who will prey on you? But instead she says:

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll have some wine and maybe a smoke but that’s it. I’m not really up for getting expelled.’

Maisie’s school is beautiful to look at, expensive to attend, and prides itself on a newly strict drugs policy brought in after a sixth-former got caught dealing coke to fifth years. It is a red-brick and sandstone confection of buildings with soaring arches and narrow windows and turrets curled skyward, like an Oxford college. There are playing fields for rugby and hockey, where a fete is held every summer. Every day there are three hot options for lunch, three cold, plus an extensive salad bar including vegan, dairy-free and gluten-free choices. Maisie is there on a full scholarship and, even so, the annual bill for uniform and extracurricular classes and school trips leaves Becky swearing in disbelief and saying things she never thought would come out of her mouth, like ‘There has to be a cheaper way to play lacrosse.’

Becky always feels the gulf between her and other parents, but Maisie seems not to notice it.

The last time Becky went to a parents’ evening at the school, someone mistook her for a sixth-former and asked her for directions.

Ding, Siobhan: Brace, brace

‘Mum, can I? I’ll have my own room. Jules is going to sleep in a different room.’

‘I don’t care whether he sleeps in Glasgow.’

‘His parents will be there. You can call his mum if you want to discuss my revision schedule with her.’ The veer into acid sarcasm. The assumption of disappointment. ‘Mum, come on, I’ll be the odd one out if I have to say my mummy won’t let me go.’

Siobhan, ding. Where are you? Seriously, BRACE.

‘Oh for fuck sake, Siobhan, I’m coming,’ Becky shouts at her phone.

Maisie is startled.

‘I have to shower,’ says Becky to Maisie. ‘I’ll talk to Adam about the sleepover.’

She wants to be bold and brave, a pirate queen of a mother who encourages her daughter to take risks and trust her friends and strike out for the horizon set on gathering experiences. But every map marks monsters where the known lands end, and how can Becky be there to unwrap every tentacle, to declaw and defang, to empty the new world of snakes and sharks so that her daughter can wander through it, imagining her own courage, but never having to test it?

Chapter 5

Hampstead, London

13 September 2003

Mary whoops a greeting to someone Becky has never met before which sends a curious surge of panic and betrayal through her: did Mary mislead her when she said that she didn’t know that many people going to this party? This is Hampstead, populated by a lot of North London private school kids. These are not their people, but Mary doesn’t seem to know that.

Everything around her feels too big, too wide, too loud or too high: oversized drum and bass beats tumble out of the amps, there are paintings on the wall bigger than her fridge and a curling staircase worthy of a stage set. A vase on a plinth: Becky has no idea of how to exist in the same space as a plinth, and then it occurs to her that perhaps the truth of it is that none of these things are too grand or too big. Rather she in fact is too lowly and too small – which is an irony, a conundrum, a conflict, a terrible clash in her mind, because when Becky looks around she knows she is far from small. She is, without doubt, the tallest girl there. She is always the tallest girl everywhere, never feeling as imposing as she knows she looks.

A girl with a tiny waist, goth-black hair and electric-pink lipstick turns to Mary and says in the sweetest sing-song voice that she loves her dress. Then Mary yammers on about the shop she bought it at and just like that the two of them are friends, moving on to name all the people they might have in common. Becky doesn’t quite catch every word and instead she just hovers and watches – watches how Mary’s confidence shines from inside her like a disco ball. She wants to stop time and take Mary aside and ask her flat out: How do you do it? How do you draw people to you like that?

Soon Mary and Becky are the girls hanging out with a group of five boys. The boys’ voices are louder than the girls’ and their volume makes Becky feel like they have more to say, even though there are times she listens to their name-calling and football scores and feels like this assumption might not prove true, in the cold light of day. There is, she notices, an asymmetry to every conversation. Mary always says things to get Brendan to listen to her, and Brendan wants his friends to laugh at his jokes. Becky soon realizes that the best things she could say will be things that are funny or interesting, making her a cool friend, or to tell stories that cast Mary in a favourable light. This realization makes it hard to say anything at all, so she settles for watching things play out.

Mary has been friends with Brendan a long time and in the last year Brendan’s currency has begun to rise, what with his new haircut (short at the back and a forelock at the front which he is able to jerk away from his eyes without having to touch it) and a subtle yet clear change in his choice of clothes (bomber jacket especially appealing). Mary has decided to explore the possibility that she and Brendan could be more than just friends. Tonight is about edging further in his direction while at the same time not having to make that attempt solo.

Becky is her Sherpa. There to hold the luggage when Mary summits.

It’s not that Becky doesn’t enjoy being part of this group of people who are increasingly the subject of scrutiny, what with their nice haircuts and confidence and how together they look like a sort of rock band. But there is a limit to how other Becky is prepared to become. She knows she isn’t girly and bubbly and entertaining, nor quite loud enough or tomboy enough or confident enough to be one of the lads. What then, does she bring to the party?

‘You look hot,’ Brendan says, and Becky is so caught up in her thoughts that she thinks he is talking to someone else. He is wearing black jeans and DM boots and a black ‘Lemonheads’ T-shirt. He jerks his hair clear of his face: there is something oddly flattering about the gesture, thinks Becky, like he can be bothered to clear the path for a conversation with her.

She realizes that Brendan has said these words too loudly, in earshot of the other boys – almost as if he needed one of them to hear him say it more than he wanted Becky to hear it. Is this how it’s done? Showing the world what you mean to do before you do it. Is this what confident boys do?

Very quietly she says, ‘Thank you.’

Brendan then turns away to talk to someone else and Becky knows that her subdued response hasn’t given him enough to get his teeth into. She has failed a personality test that she hadn’t chosen to take. Will he tell Mary? Will she laugh? What did he mean by it anyway? Was he just trying to be nice? Is hot a word that he uses ten times a day, for anyone, meaning anything?

Becky feels light-headed. She hasn’t eaten since lunch because her jeans don’t allow for anything other than a flat and therefore empty stomach, but until she can track down some booze to numb the hunger pangs, a cigarette will have to do. She slides one out of the box, suddenly feeling grateful for an action that allows her to bow her head and hide from Brendan and the rest of the room for a moment. She sparks it up, lighter metal scuffing her sore thumb pad, the smoke hitting the back of her throat. The unwelcome taste of coal. But she inhales deeply anyway, elbows bent in at the waist, one forearm slung protectively across her middle, watching Mary talk to the pink-lipsticked girl. The combination of nicotine and hunger is making her feel nauseous. Vomiting on the floor in front of everyone would be totally mortifying but at least it would give her a legitimate excuse to go home.

‘Having a shit time yet?’

She turns to find the speaker leaning back on the same bit of wall as her, grinning. Just the sight of Adam’s sweet smile and the radically diminished size of his otherwise egg-large eyes under the thick-lens glasses makes her feel instantly better. He is wearing a woollen sleeveless jumper, like he does whatever the weather, and the collar of his shirt is thin and un-ironed and poking out of the top. He is skinny and into computer programs and indie rock and there isn’t anyone else at their school much like him. Most boys at their school wear the same brand of everything, making choosing a different colour their sole mark of personality.

‘Sight for sore eyes and all that,’ he says.

‘And you. That’s a particularly thin collar you’re wearing this evening. I assume you’re on the pull?’

‘That’s a particularly large number of necklaces around your neck. Selling them for spare change?’

‘Bitch,’ she says, and they both laugh. ‘Seriously, why didn’t you tell me you were coming to this thing? You knew I was.’

‘Thought I’d leave you dangling over the abyss.’

‘The abyss sucks.’

‘Well here I am now. Massive party times.’ He says it deadpan and she laughs.

‘Who do you know here?’

‘Who don’t I know.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Natalie. We used to go in the paddling pool together. When we were five.’

‘And you swapped digits and stayed in touch?’

‘Actually we are still mates. She’s a gamer.’

‘Adam, you can’t use that word any more. She’s a homosexual.’

‘Well played, Shawcross. Got the gay/gamer gag in before midnight. Who did you come with?’

‘Mary.’

‘Yeah, I mean who does Mary know?’

‘A guy called Brendan.’

‘That prick?’ Adam nods toward Brendan, who is finding it a challenge to add an extra turn-up to the bottom of his jeans because his hair keeps getting in the way. ‘I don’t know why she bothers.’

‘You’re just jealous.’

She says it as a joke but a shadow passes across Adam’s face before his face breaks into a smile. ‘Yeah, you’re right. I want the floppy hair but sadly mine stays out of my eyes on its own.’

‘You can get hair products that’ll make sure it stays in your eyes.’

‘I’ve tried them all. They do nothing for me.’

Adam offers her a drink from a clear glass bottle. Becky sniffs it suspiciously.

‘It’s a bit of everything. A mongrel spirit, like myself.’

‘I’ll try anything once.’

Becky takes a swig, and then another. Any hunger, nausea and nerves dissolve like sugar in hot tea and soon she is smiling at Adam, thank God for Adam, feeling warmer, better, looser, so much more herself.

‘Technically you’re trying everything once, when you drink that,’ he says.

‘Did you put that orange one in there?’ She feels her fingers tingle and her spirits lift a little higher so she drinks more of this disgusting, glorious, magical medicine.

‘If it was in my mum’s cabinet, I decanted it.’

‘That’s genuinely the worst cocktail I’ve ever tried.’

‘That’s crushing, given you only usually drink in London’s finest cocktail bars. Another swallow? Go wild.’

‘I probably shouldn’t drink too much more. I said I’d take a pill with Mary.’

‘Oh my God, you’re so cool.’

‘Don’t be judgy.’

‘No, really, Becky. I was going to go home early but now I want to see you do the special MDMA dancing.’

‘Thank you for your support.’

‘Always.’

‘Do you want to do it with us?’

‘Obviously I’d join you if it didn’t mean associating myself with a group of people that look like a manufactured popular music band.’

‘Popular music? Your snobbery knows no bounds. Anyway, Brendan’s wearing a Lemonheads T-shirt. You two might completely love each other if you got to know each other.’

‘That’s my greatest fear of doing pills.’

‘Not dehydrating and dying?’

‘That’d be fine. But, no, it’s telling Brendan he’s actually a really great guy. Chills me to the core.’

Becky laughs again. They smile at each other, Adam holding her gaze a split second too long. Not long enough to necessarily interpret as anything more than a minor rest in their conversation, but also not short enough to be entirely sure that this is what’s going on. It happens between them sometimes. But it’s OK. It’s acceptable. Largely ignorable.

He breaks the spell with a change in smile. ‘You’ll be fine. Just keep the ambulance on speed dial. Ciao and all that.’ He swings on his heel to leave her.

‘Wait,’ she says. ‘How about a movie night next week? Back to the Future, popcorn, I can smuggle some beers from my dad. My house?’

‘Sure,’ he says, without turning round. ‘That would be fine. Enjoy the party and … just be careful none of them miss their footing and fall on you. Those are some beefy public school types you’re hanging out with now. Scrum down, Shawcross.’

Becky finds some beers on a side table, gets drunk, and watches other people get drunk. She grasps her bottle and tells herself that she can see how alcohol floods the systems of the people around her, making their movements looser, sloppier and more animated. One girl slams her palms against the chest of a boy far taller than her and although she looks angry and sad, he is laughing as he tries to bring her round to his way of thinking. He draws her to him and she thumps his chest with her fists until she gives up and curls into him, laughing.

A girl with corkscrew hair sways and gyrates like no one is watching, or something like that. Becky feels both embarrassed and jealous, watching her dance like she is at a warehouse rave, weaving her arms in between strips of blue and green light.

Mary is talking to Brendan who is standing over her – his arm positioned in a way that makes it look like he is bolstering the wall, as if he is as essential as a ceiling joist. Mary is waving her hands, clearly telling a story that means absolutely everything to her, and she is delighted, in her element, because Brendan is looking at her and laughing and no doubt appreciating her pretty Irish eyes.

As if she hadn’t already known it, this confirms everything for Becky. Soon it is extremely unlikely that she will see Mary for the rest of the night. Despite all their promises it isn’t practical for them to do everything together. They are not Siamese twins. Mary is fun, which is why she is laughing with a boy she really likes. Becky is more introverted, harder to like, she thinks. It occurs to Becky that after tonight Mary may not in fact need her around any more. Having played her role as wingman she will be made redundant, a needless adjunct once Brendan is at the heart of Mary’s life. And then where will Becky belong?

It is no good for Becky to have these thoughts – not at this party, in this house where she doesn’t know anyone. But what can she do? She can’t afford a cab home on her own. Should she find a corner and try to sleep?

She lights another cigarette as Mary walks out of the room holding Brendan’s hand.

How embarrassing to feel so sad about something so small, a friend going off with a boy. Instead of what?

She wonders about the night bus. She can afford that. What’s the route? And can she bear it, drunk and alone and, yes, quite close to crying now?

She feels a hand at her back and a pathetic sense of gratitude rises in her that someone wants to talk.

‘Hey,’ Scott says.

He is tall, blond, good-looking. A friend of Brendan’s. Not quite in his group but not out of it either. One of those people who move around and seem to know how to get along with everyone.

‘There’s a game of Spin the Bottle going on upstairs. Mary and Brendan sent me to get you. We’ve got all the “stuff” up there.’

‘Spin the Bottle?’

‘Yeah, it’s retro. No obligations. You could just do a pill.’

‘What if the bottle says I have to do heroin?’

He doesn’t get her joke fast enough to laugh at it. She wishes she could take it back.

‘So do you want to come?’

Suddenly she knows that, more than anything, she is fed up with standing here with her thoughts. She wants to climb out of her head and have some fun.

This will fill some hours.

To think that she could have chosen the arduous night bus journey. The chances are she’d have made it home uncomfortable and tired, but safe and sound and awake enough the next day to enjoy her mum’s Sunday roast. But then again, she could also have fallen asleep on the top deck and found herself at the depot miles from anywhere, lost and vulnerable.

Followed home.

Or worse.

As it is, she stays at the party. She drains her beer bottle to its last tasteless drop, looks at Scott and tells him, ‘I’m game.’

Chapter 6

The sky is blue in Soho this morning, and the sun casts a clear clean light across a street lined with fabric shops, one after the other, their fronts thrown open and piled high with rolls of cotton and acrylic, satin and lace. The food stalls are still skeletons, too early to be stacked with vats, rolls and wraps for the lunchtime crowd. Soho’s entertainment village is populated by film execs whose heads are full of the edit, TV producers whose minds are bending with budget cuts and the interns in Converse and skinny jeans feeling so hashtag-blessed.

Becky kicks through a messy pile of plane tree bark and fuzz balls on the pavement outside the office, a red-brick townhouse on a square just south of tourist-choked Oxford Street. Her tired eyes itch with pollen and pollution, her nerves still jangling after Maisie’s disgruntled departure for the school bus.

Over the years she has worked for Matthew, she has perfected the art of placating him, knowing whether his grumps are down to hunger or thirst or aggravation with a bullish agent who is fighting for more money and more rights. She takes satisfaction in the feeling that she is somehow unique, being both soother and gatekeeper for a man as special as he. But being the cause of Matthew’s problems? That’s new to her.

How will he raise it with her? ‘Last night, as I was shagging a young woman on my rug …?’ Will he take her aside and say they like rough sex? What is the etiquette here?

Siobhan is standing at the bottom of the staircase ready to greet her, clasping a telephone in each hand. ‘Am I glad to see you? Yes, I am,’ she says. ‘He’s been on my back and now he’s locked himself in his office again and I’ve got about forty things that need his attention. I’m going to make him an extra-milky coffee and slip a beta blocker in there.’

Becky likes to think that Siobhan is still mostly pleased for her about Medea going on the slate, because they went to the pub a few days after it happened and drank too many pints and Siobhan proposed a toast of congratulation before going on to say how much she needed to change her life so she didn’t feel such a failure. She came in with white-blonde hair the next day and that seemed to settle it.

One floor up, their office is painted white, with a little exposed brickwork to lend texture, and a nice long-leafed palm all tangled in fairy lights at the entrance to the fireplace, done for Christmas one year and then left because Matthew liked it. Only three of them are full-time but many more desks stand ready for production requirements. One such desk serves as a surface for stacked scripts and another as a place to lay out headshots of potential cast: long necks, long hair, high cheekbones, big eyes, soulful looks.

Matthew’s own office at the end of the floor is screened with glass walls and blinds. Becky looks at it anxiously. Matthew is inside it.

Siobhan grabs the phone on her desk before the door to the stairs has even swung shut. ‘David, I’m sorry, I did tell him you’d called. Yes, yes, I know … hold on.’ She presses her hand to the receiver. ‘It’s David Barraclough from Total Agents. Matthew’s been avoiding this call all morning. David is like, fever pitch angry.’

‘Really? But he’s so nice.’

DB, they call him: the linen-suited, salt-and-pepper-haired agent to a scrolling list of A-list actors whose careers he has launched and whose offspring he later calls godchildren. Becky recently took him for lunch at a tapas restaurant on Dean Street to discuss Medea casting ideas over half a carafe of red, chorizo and squid which she only occasionally sipped and picked at while he did most of the talking. He told lots of stories, some about the days he and Matthew were junior agents together, and she had encouraged it all by laughing along. Their lunch finished without any real business done but with DB feeling the warm fuzz of having been listened to, and that was everything that lunch needed to achieve. A success, by all accounts.

Siobhan throws up a hand as the voice on the end of the line rants on.

‘Hand it over, I’ll give it a go.’ Becky takes the phone from her, smiling. ‘Hello, DB! It’s Becky. I’m so sorry you’re having to chase Matthew. It’s crazy with Cannes at the moment. Is it anything I can help with?’

‘He needs to call me.’

‘He definitely will. And while I have you, in terms of Medea I think we’re closing in on our lead actress. Hoping to pin her down at Cannes, and then we’ll have someone for your men to cast against. You’ll be top of the list, of course.’

‘Matthew knows what I’m calling about. Tell him to stop avoiding my calls and get him on the phone to me.’

He hangs up and Becky holds out the receiver. She feels ants under her skin – scared, perhaps, that she may have somehow made things worse.

‘What’s that about?’ Becky says to Siobhan.

‘I dunno but he’s having a bad day about something. Maybe one of Matthew’s little lies about shooting schedules caught up with him. So anyway, listen to this. I emailed a new idea to Matthew over the weekend.’

Something feels off. It’s a small office and they are all aware of which calls need avoiding, delaying or returning within the hour. Aware of any conflict over contracts, pressure on production, egos, fallings-out, ground to be made up … And DB and Matthew have never had a falling-out before. At least not as long as she has worked there.

‘So it’s kind of Beaches but funnier, but really more like The Hangover only sadder, with really upbeat yet emotional music, actually probably more like if Watership Down was actually happy?’

‘Sounds good.’ Becky is biting her fingernails, one so much it stings.

‘Two female leads so, you know, on trend, pretty topical. I’m thinking Aniston. Go big, or go home. And then I’m thinking Emilia Cosvelinos. More classical, but she is bankable now with the Scorsese film coming out and I think she’ll add real weight to the crying scenes. What do you think?’

‘Sounds great.’

Becky has barely been listening, but Siobhan’s face fills with sunshine and she claps her hands together. ‘Exactly!’

At that moment, Matthew opens the door to his office and waves them in. ‘Let’s get started.’ The volume of his voice makes Becky jump and her heart shudders with the thought that this is it, the end.

The two of them take their places on the olive velvet sofa opposite Matthew’s desk, so low that he appears to be on a raised stage looking down at them. His office smells so faintly of whisky that it might not be whisky at all. And coffee, drying in the heat, at the bottom of the cup. The smell of the place, the way it looks, it could be a normal morning at the office, the stage set for the start of business: windows closed, blinds pulled down over the glass walls in preparation for a private meeting, books straightened and arranged in the cases so they descend in shapes like flights of steps. Apart from his computer, he keeps an entirely clean desk: blade, fineliner pens in one drawer, pending contracts in another. Scripts piled into a cupboard, titles inked onto their spines. Everything must have its place: stacked, stored, tidied and hidden away.

‘Travel arrangements for Cannes,’ he says.

Is this how he’s going to do it? Work through the list towards her? Siobhan rattles off flight names and departure times.

‘Calls,’ he says.

‘DB called again,’ says Siobhan. ‘He sounds fucked-off.’

‘Thank you. Noted.’ The subject is closed.

‘He’s called five times,’ says Siobhan.

‘And he can call again, if he likes. I’ll speak to him when I get round to it.’

Siobhan tucks the borders of her script outline neatly behind her notepad but recovers quickly, saying, ‘Did you manage to get to the Deal cottage this weekend?’ because this is always her strategy for deflecting the energy from a conversation that has caused him stress, like telling a child to think of nice things like beaches and sweets before they go to sleep at night.

Matthew is studying something intensely on his phone, glasses balanced at the end of his nose. He doesn’t reply immediately but when he does he says, ‘Yes. The weather was lovely. The jasmine is out.’

His gaze is nowhere near Becky. It is dissociated, disinterested, so far from her that she might not be there at all …

He looks up at her suddenly, as if he’s sensed the beam of her thoughts on him – his brow still furrowed, his eyes narrowed. He takes a deep breath and reorientates himself by saying, ‘Tux?’

‘Waiting for you at the hotel,’ Becky says, laying down the order confirmation sheet in front of him.

‘Accreditation passes?’

‘Waiting for you at the hotel,’ says Siobhan.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Becky, have you got yours? You’ll need them for all screenings and parties.’

‘Yes,’ says Becky, looking away from Siobhan instinctively, feeling uncomfortable that she is the one who gets to go to the ball.

‘Have you confirmed all our meetings with the actors tomorrow? You should get Jenifer Palmer and Sarah Pastor on the list. Both look the part.’

‘Yes, all set.’

‘On which note,’ says Siobhan, more quietly than usual, ‘I just wondered whether you’d had a chance to look at my film idea so you can, I don’t know, maybe give it to someone you know who might be visiting the festival and might sort of like it?’

‘It’s interesting,’ he says, which Becky knows means it’s not interesting enough, but before the conversation can progress further his mobile rings and without looking at either of them he waves them out of the office like he is directing traffic. He waits for them to step outside before he answers.

Becky is the last to leave. She hears him say, ‘Yes, David.’

The two wait outside. Siobhan sat at her desk, Becky perched on the edge, waiting to be called back in.

‘Fuck, he’s in such a bad mood.’ The door buzzes and Siobhan picks up on speaker, ‘Bonjour?’

‘Siobhan, it’s Antonia, can you let me in?’

‘Er, sure.’ Siobhan presses the buzzer and looks at Becky, shrugging.

Antonia sometimes calls the office more times in one day than she does her own child (a tall and gawky boy called Bart) and Becky knows this because Antonia tells her this. She calls Becky to co-ordinate stuff or just to remind her that she needs to usher Matthew out of the office on time because they are popping down to the Deal cottage for the weekend and want to miss the worst of the weekend traffic. Antonia gets Pucci scarves and spa weekends for her birthday from Matthew that have been researched and paid for on his credit card, by Becky, and Antonia knows this because Becky needs to check in advance that Antonia doesn’t have allergic skin reactions to mud wraps and whether she – discreetly, of course – would like Becky to secure her an appointment with that special Botox man everyone always raves about.

Antonia enters the room in a cloud of expensive perfume. Her black and silver hair is tangled in a bun and strands have escaped everywhere. The shape it makes, tested through time to work with the curve of her face, is both messy and yet impossibly stylish. Her hairstyle works with the linen dress (a tailored and loose cut, only a few crumples) which in turn works with her leather sandals (one gold strip across the place where fine foot bones fan) and buffed sandstone calves. She is expensive and lovely and perfectly curated for a warm spring day.

She is also, most definitely, feeling harassed. Her face is drawn and her words quick. ‘Becky. Siobhan. Where is he? He’s not picking up the phone to me.’

Becky answers. ‘He’s in his office. On a call. Won’t be long. Can I make you a coffee while you wait?’

‘No, thank you, I need to talk to him.’

‘I don’t think he’ll be long.’

‘I mean now.’

Becky feels an instinctive need to give Matthew the space and privacy for his call with DB. It’s what she’s paid to do. But Antonia is glaring at her.

‘OK, sure,’ she says. ‘Let me pop in and get him off the phone.’

Becky moves quickly, perhaps to get ahead of anything Antonia might be planning on doing, like bursting into the office. She pushes Matthew’s door open and hears the words, ‘She misinterpreted that. That’s not what happened at all.’

He looks up, cheeks flushed a deep pink.

Becky just has time to mouth the word ‘Antonia’ and for Matthew’s face to arrange itself in a way that Becky has never seen before. Something almost childish: both beseeching and perturbed. But before she has a chance to enquire, Antonia moves past her. ‘Thank you, Becky. I’ll take it from here. What the fuck are you playing at? In our house?’

Becky backs out quickly and sees the door is shut firmly behind her.

Siobhan whistles through her teeth like a bomb flying through the air. Then for a short time they listen to Antonia and Matthew’s raised voices behind the door, nothing distinct enough for them to understand exactly what the argument is about but enough for it to become clear to Becky that it might concern the woman on the floor of their well-appointed kitchen.

Becky fights the urge to cower under her own arms as if that were protection enough from the explosion that will surely come. And, as the net of aggravated people surrounding Matthew widens, Becky fears he will take his frustration out on her by frog-marching her out of the office saying she stepped over one too many boundaries. She saw him part-stripped of his clothes in his own home and part-stripped of his dignity and composure in the office and it’s too hard to maintain a professional façade after that kind of thing.

Becky finds herself googling her boss’s name, wanting to know the identity of the woman getting between such a couple.

She feels afraid of what might happen next and yet also relieved that someone other than her knows about the woman on the kitchen floor. Surely Becky can afford to forget what she saw now that it’s clearly just business between husband and wife?

She takes hold of her own wrist, lightly, instinctively, and bends the joint at small angles, back and forth, back and forth so that it aches a little.

Antonia leaves very suddenly and in silence.

Matthew appears in the doorway of his office.

‘Where were we?’ he says. ‘Siobhan. Yes. Your film outline. The idea doesn’t hold together. It’s muddled. But that casting idea you had. Emilia Cosvelinos?’

‘Yes?’ Siobhan’s eyes brighten with hope.

‘She’s a great idea for Becky’s film. She’ll be in Cannes promoting her Scorsese movie, we should get a breakfast booked in with her. I’m mates with the agent. I’ll put the call in. He’ll go out to bat for us if Emilia bites – but she won’t bite unless it’s fucking irresistible and if the Scorsese film’s as good as everyone’s saying it is, then she’ll want an Oscar for whatever she does next. It’s worth a shot.’

Becky squirms with discomfort. ‘Mightn’t it be better if you pitched it to her, Matthew?’ she says, trying to put some space between her and what is happening. ‘As your idea. I mean, you’ve won Oscars for actresses—’

‘No. I like the project. But you love it. It’s your baby. That goes a long way with actors. Pitch her like you pitched me and you’ll do fine. Right, that’s it. Siobhan, can you get our man from IcePR on the line.’ It’s not a request. ‘I need to speak with him as soon as possible. Tell him it’s urgent.’

Matthew used to be in PR. Telling a story, spinning a story, knowing when to take the heat off one character and put it on another: such a transferrable skillset for the film industry.

‘I’ll call him right away,’ Siobhan says quietly.

Becky’s house is on the way to City Airport so she plans a quick trip home to collect her things. She arrives to the sweet, steamy scent of pancakes on the skillet. It is the food that Maisie and Adam make together every time he comes to stay, their most enduring ritual. They mix it up in terms of the recipe – made extra fluffy with egg whites, coconut and banana added, criss-crossed with candied bacon – but always they have pancakes.

Adam’s chocolate-coloured leather weekend bag has been dumped at the top of the stairs next to a pair of unlaced Campers, worn in and bashed up to the perfect fit and level of comfort. She can hear Maisie and Adam talking in the kitchen, giggling their way through the rambling conversations they specialize in. Adam and Maisie are masters of mimicry together: if Adam is Kermit, Maisie will reach for her best Miss Piggy. Neither of them would ever say it, but clearly they don’t like it if Becky tries to join in. So that’s become the tacit rule when they’re all together. Becky speaks with just the one voice; Adam and Maisie are multitudes.

She doesn’t have long to get her things and catch her flight, but she still takes a moment to enjoy the sound they make together, then peeks in to see that Maisie is back in her pyjamas, school done with. Right now she is moving photographs around the surface of their fridge, like pieces of a jigsaw. Every few weeks she takes new photos, prints and sticks them here, leaving only a loyal few old-timers by the handle. A faded colour one of her being bathed as a baby in the kitchen sink at the Hounslow house, just before the two of them moved with Becky’s mum. Another favoured photo is of the three of them together, Becky and Adam standing at either end of a low mossy log while ten-year-old Maisie steps along using a stick for balance, her great high-wire act.

Adam tips batter from a metal bowl into the frying pan.

‘Is there one for me?’

Adam’s face lights up when he sees Becky, and that’s a lovely thing. Not for the first time the thought rushes in: how might it be to be smiled at that way every night? To come home, kick off your shoes, and for there already to be conversation in the kitchen and somebody else taking care of dinner?

‘These are genuine buttermilk pancakes,’ he says. ‘How many d’you want?’

‘They’re an eight,’ adds Maisie. They started ranking pancakes five years ago. To begin with they had a log book, but while that’s long since been abandoned, the need to allocate marks has endured.

‘Just the one, please.’

Adam may have aged – of course he must have – but to Becky his face is the same now as it was at school. Kind, curious and easy to read despite his efforts. His buttoned-up skinny-fit shirts give the impression of him being a well-turned-out kind of guy, but she knows the cupboards and drawers of his Shoreditch apartment are total chaos. His jeans, like his face, are unchanging, always bought from the same website in the same size, same shade of indigo, a replacement sought once the old pair has faded and thinned at the knees. He’s as loyal to his jeans as his friends.

‘Adam dumped Brooke,’ chirps Maisie. ‘She offered to get the cover of his favourite magazine, Men’s Health, tattooed onto her back to try to make him love her.’

Adam erupts into laughter. ‘Men’s Health isn’t my favourite magazine!’

‘She got as far as inking the title across her shoulder blades.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ Becky says.

‘About what? Brooke’s shoulders?’ Maisie loves being in the middle of any conversation when they are all together. She’s grown up that way, thinks Becky. It might have done her good to have a sibling. And then she thinks, it’s not too late for her to have a sibling, is it? Becky’s only thirty-two after all so there’s still plenty of time, a decade perhaps … And then she has to remind herself to put those thoughts down and concentrate on what’s in front of her. A pancake bubbling over heat. A plane to catch.

‘How did you do it?’ demands Maisie. ‘Gory details. Come on.’

‘I don’t find break-ups easy …’ Adam blushes.

‘No one does but come on, she was planning your interiors. You had to pull the trigger.’

‘I didn’t really read that as a sign she might want to stay,’ he says. ‘I thought it was handy because, you know, she had good taste. I thought she enjoyed picking out blinds.’

Maisie slaps her forehead in delighted disbelief.

‘Was she American, with a name like Brooke?’ asks Becky.

‘Tell her the surname!’ crows Maisie. ‘What was her surname, Dad?’

‘Waters,’ says Adam, sheepish, as if he’d named her himself.

‘Brooke Waters!’ howls Maisie. ‘Damn, girl! Headline for the week: Adam’s Waters broke.’

‘Hey, Maisie,’ says Adam. ‘Can you go into my bag and grab the blueberries I bought?’

‘Yep, I’ll be a minute OK? Got to get sorted for tonight first.’ She takes a few steps toward Becky and pecks her on the cheek. ‘You’re amazing, my hero, I totally love you.’ Then she wanders out, answering her phone on the way.

‘Thanks for keeping an eye on her tonight. I appreciate it.’ Becky stifles a yawn and looks round the kitchen trying to remember where she put her travel-sized sun cream. ‘What stuff is she getting sorted? Are you guys doing something fun tonight? Bowling …’

‘Well no,’ Adam looks up, perplexed. ‘The sleepover?’

‘At Jules’ house? I told her she couldn’t go to that until we’d discussed it.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you’d … the way it …’

Becky’s chest tightens. ‘I said no to her.’ Her whole body is tense now. ‘She’s playing us off against each other, Adam, she—’

‘Hold on a minute,’ he says. ‘When she said there was a sleepover I asked her questions like who’s there, what time are you going. I suppose I assumed she was already going … we were talking about other things at the same time: hash-browns and climbing walls.’ The two of them do go off on tangents. ‘I can’t quite remember how the conversation went but it’s possible she thought we’d already spoken.’

Becky is a combination of anxious and irritated. ‘Why did you assume anything? Didn’t you think I might have some concerns about her staying at a stranger’s house?’

‘It’s not that, the last thing I wanted to do was … I just thought you’d made a call on it already because, well, honestly? It all sounds fine to me.’

‘But I’ve never met this guy … Jules, or whatever. What if …’

‘I have.’

‘You have?’

‘Yes, he’s nice. He’s sweet. Totally unthreatening. I’d be more worried about him. He looks malnourished: Maisie could take him down in five seconds flat.’

There is a silence as Adam watches Becky’s fingers flick over her cuticles in quick and silent clicks then dart to the silk skin on her wrist and back again. He knows what she’s thinking.

‘She’s a sensible kid, Becky,’ he says eventually.

‘I know that. But I was a sensible kid before that night in the Hampstead house.’

‘That was different. You were … no one could have predicted … This is so different. Sober school night, parents down the corridor, the girls sharing a room. It’s not a party, they won’t even be drinking. It’s all good, I honestly think it’s all good.’

But he sees from her expression that she’s not convinced and so he continues, ‘She’s growing up quickly. If we box her away from what everyone else is doing she’ll do it anyway and then won’t tell us about it.’ Becky bows her head. Knows he’s right. ‘We have to trust her.’ He’s sweet to put it that way when what he means is that Becky is the one that must trust.

‘It’s not Maisie I don’t trust. It’s other people.’

‘So let’s make Jules wear a monitoring device?’ says Adam brightly, hauling them both back into the present. ‘With the capacity to shock him remotely?’

‘You really think he’s OK?’

‘He’s passionate about the polar ice caps and Dinosaur Junior. That makes him more than fine. Come on.’ He reaches out for her hand and then lets his arm fall by his side.

‘OK, OK, fine.’

He smiles. ‘I think it’s a good decision. For all of us.’

By us he means Becky. Good for her to let go, is what he means. Becky feels her stomach unknot with the feeling that Adam is the net under her tight-rope.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘I think the spare room is all made up …’

‘That’s OK, I won’t need it,’ says Adam casually, ‘I’ll go to poker if Maisie’s going to be out.’

Becky turns to face him, her stomach knotting all over again. ‘Where?’

‘Pete’s new place in Ladbroke Grove?’

She wouldn’t dream of travelling to the opposite side of London in the same situation. She’d get on with stuff at home to quell the anxiety that her daughter was staying in a house she had never before visited, as if knowing the colour of the wallpaper would somehow make Maisie safer. Becky would potter about, phone in her back pocket, just in case Maisie needed to speak to her.

As it is, Becky will be in France and Adam will be in West London. Her jaw tightens. Did he tell Maisie she could go to the sleepover so he’d be free to play poker with his mates? She banishes the thought. It’s not useful. He’s doing her a favour by being on call; what do they call it, in loco parentis?

‘But what if something happens?’ she says. ‘And she needs to come home and you’re not here? It’ll take you ages to get to her.’

Adam turns to her, smiling. ‘Lily’s mum is at the house and Zee can always call me.’

Part of her is scalded with panic: by that time, it will be too late to save Maisie from whatever has happened. And yet another part of her knows that what he’s saying is entirely reasonable. If only she were able to feel the same reasoning in her bones, just a fraction of his confidence, an iota of his assurance. She wishes she was more like him.

‘OK,’ she says quietly. ‘OK then.’

‘I’ll fix that shelf in the hall before I go,’ he says, ‘then the shelf gets to have a good night too.’

‘Thank you,’ she says, trying a smile. ‘And please, keep your phone on and close to you?’

‘Of course I will. And I’ll be here when she comes home from school tomorrow. Come on,’ he winks. ‘This really is fine. Go and have some fun in Cannes.’

Maisie lopes back into the kitchen holding a box of blueberries in one hand and an over-stuffed rucksack in the other.

Too late for Becky to change her mind now, she holds onto her daughter tightly and silently prays for her safety.

‘Be asleep by midnight,’ she says. ‘You’ve got school. And you can call your dad if there are any problems. Or me. I’ll have my phone with me in Cannes. WhatsApp, text, a call, it will all work …’

‘Yes, yes,’ she says quickly, and turns to face Adam. ‘You guys are the best.’

She catches the intense concentration and joy in Adam’s eyes as he flips a pancake onto her plate: the pleasure of a job well done for the people he most loves. So she can’t ask him for everything she might want, and he might not do everything exactly like her, but she feels so lucky for what she has. Things might have spiralled into a row without him there, with Maisie not feeling listened to and Becky the baddie, the mother who fails to trust her daughter.

Adam is her compass. Her confirmation person, her Call in Case of Emergency man. The man her daughter calls Dad. Her best friend. Joint custodian of the great lie at the heart of her life.

Chapter 7

Hounslow

Mid-September 2003 to mid-March 2004

In the weeks after the party Becky can wake in the mornings and for a few moments feel as if she has come to consciousness in her normal, untouched life. But then she remembers the badness, and it fills her heart and mind to the brim. She overflows with it.

It becomes a struggle just to get out of bed.

At first, she gets away with some mornings at home, complaining of a virus and, later, the flu. She insists she doesn’t need anything for it but her parents press paracetamol, tea and damp flannels in her direction. Weekends come and go but her usual trips to the pool are dropped and she can no longer countenance the bright and bouncy happiness of Saturday morning television presenters. She chooses to watch soaps instead, passively allowing their stories and characters to slide past her thoughts and feelings.

She hides her body in baggy clothes. She avoids the mirror, as if it might talk to her. She just wants to sleep.

After a fortnight of this her mum declares this period of supposed ill health as having gone on ‘far too long’. Becky is sent to a doctor who diagnoses glandular fever. This buys her another four months of staying in bed, watching television and avoiding food, until her mum begins to mistrust this diagnosis – having come from a generation that does not trust an illness with undefined edges and blurred duration and no brand-name pharmaceutical pill to cure it.

She insists on tests for Becky: blood and urine.

Becky goes to the GP surgery to get her results, alone. Just her and the doctor in his airless, disinfectant-scented, steel-and-chipped-Formica office. The words bend her reality. She thinks that she is losing her mind and that she is instead simply sitting in a maths lesson, studying a Venn diagram of symptoms for depression and pregnancy, looking where the circles bisect. Depression is the blue circle, pregnancy is the red circle, and there she is, all mixed up in the middle, as purple as a bruise.

Then, she cries a lot.

Time slips past her. The abortion clinic judges that she is well past twenty-four weeks pregnant. They offer to try to make an exception for her but they need to confer with their lawyers. She never goes back. She can’t talk to anyone.

In the end, Adam is the first person she tells about what is growing inside her. He hasn’t stopped coming round to her house, asking to see her, even though she always says no. Mary gave up weeks ago.

Adam holds her in his arms, asking nothing of her, simply being her friend.

Soon after, like it has been biding its time, waiting to be brought out into the open, the size and shape of Becky’s body betrays her and she becomes the example to be avoided, the beaming red sign for how wrong things can go.

People give her a wide berth in the school corridor, like she’s got a contagious illness.

Adam walks her to and from school and holds back her hair when she is sick on her shoes outside the school gates.

Sometimes he says that if she ever wants to talk, then he is there for her.

At home she eats very little and then goes straight to bed and watches television. It’s easy at first, when her dad isn’t talking to her and her mum is smoking a lot at the kitchen table. Becky just has to endure the times between when her dad makes tea and leaves the room, if she is in it, and the times he conveniently finishes eating as soon as she arrives at the table.

But it becomes less easy to shut herself away as her parents’ responses grow more vocal and persistent, like a cancer metastasizing. Her father, in particular, who has spent a lifetime calling pop stars and actresses in short skirts ‘harlots’ and ‘sluts’, becomes consumed with the idea of his daughter having underage sex as a leisure pursuit. He fills with rage and shouts things like: How could you be so irresponsible? Becky finds this response particularly unjust and excruciatingly painful, sinking further into a kind of listless, inward blame – the very worst form of rage. As if it wasn’t enough to watch her belly fill to the brim with her own shame, she has to add her father’s to the mix as well.

Then come the endless stream of questions – questions that sound more like accusations: Did it happen at home? In our home? How many of them have there been?

They receive a congratulations card from a neighbour and a helium balloon printed with the words: You’re going to be grandparents! Her father bursts it with the tip of a carving knife.

She stops going to school.

She can’t read. She just wants to watch those soaps on television, to be held in the soft bubble of other people’s mistakes, conflict and intrigues.

Her mum and dad stand in the doorway of her bedroom, faces pinched with anger. They ask her the same questions every day.

Who did this to you?

Who is its father?

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