One Day in Cornwall
ZOE COOK

One More Chapter

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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016

Copyright © Zoe Cook 2016

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover design by Alex Allden

Zoe Cook asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for 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.

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Ebook Edition © July 2016 ISBN: 9780008194451

Version 2020-07-24

For James and Lara, the loves of my life.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

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

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 33

Chapter 21

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Acknowledgements

Zoe Cook

About the Publisher

Prologue

September, 2005

Can you believe that after all these years I have to write this in a letter because I can’t say it to you, can’t get the words out right?

I know you think I’m running away. You’re probably right. But what do you think I have if I stay here? There are too many ghosts here, Tom, too many memories. It’s like walking around in my own nightmare sometimes, and it will drive me mad.

I wish we weren’t fighting about this. I don’t know what I expected you to think or to say about it all, but I didn’t expect you to be so angry with me. I feel like you’re taking it the wrong way. It’s not you I want to leave; it’s this place.

If you knew how many hours I’ve spent thinking about what the hell to do – honestly, the thought of being without you is unbearable. But I didn’t want to put you in this position, to do what I’m about to do now. I didn’t want to ask you to come with me, to leave everything you have here. This place means so much to you, and you have so many reasons to stay.

But I guess I am selfish, like you say I am. Because I want you to come with me, Tom. I can’t do the London thing on my own, I don’t want to. I don’t want a life that doesn’t have you in it. I can’t really see the point in that. Is that pathetic? You are everything that’s good in my life.

I know you’ll need time, but can you think about it? About coming with me? Starting a life away from here? It would be the adventure we’ve always talked about, wouldn’t it? I mean I know it’s not exactly South America or Thailand, but you know…

I’m doing that jokey thing you get cross with me for, aren’t I? Trivialising things because I’m nervous and awkward.

I’m rambling now. And I don’t even know if I’ll ever give this to you. Part of me thinks I should just go and leave you here to live your life without me. I think you might be better off that way. I want you to be happy, Tom. I love you more than words. If nothing else, I hope you always know that.

Lucy

1

London, July, 2010

Lucy tipped the white powder from a carefully folded lottery ticket onto the mirror of her compact. She scraped it into a neat line with her credit card and took the rolled bank note from the back of her wallet. She sniffed quickly and quietly, pausing for a second to feel the immediate hit of energy. She placed the folded paper and card in the zipped section of her purse, straightened herself up and walked out of the toilet cubicle back to her desk.

It was 5:55pm before Lucy had time to check her personal emails on Tuesday. Work was manic, as it always was in the lead-up to an awards ceremony. For Spectrum, the Screenies were the event of the year, a real prestige project and a massive money-spinner. The grand-scale, live-broadcast awards show at the Metropolis on Park Lane, which celebrated all things TV, dominated spring at Spectrum, with a huge production team recruited, doubling the number of people in the office for the months leading up to the show. Emma had too many meetings to fit into each day and, as her PA, it was Lucy’s job to make them all happen – somehow. Emma’s mood alternated between manic happiness at the prospect of an evening of guaranteed attention, and sudden bursts of furious disappointment at the team she employed to run Spectrum TV’s events. Lucy had mostly escaped her wrath, instead taking the role of confidante, which she actually felt even less comfortable with. Every time she was called into Emma’s office she dreaded the instruction to ‘close the door’, which signaled an imminent verbal assassination. Lucy hated how Emma dragged her into her bitter inner world of hatred towards the production team, most of whom had absolutely no idea they had done anything to upset her. Already this week she’d heard how angry Emma was with Frankie, the lovely associate producer working on the awards, because she’d cut her long hair short so close to the event.

‘II would never have employed her looking so butch,’ Emma had spat.

‘We’ll have to reassign her role for the evening, she can’t be talent-facing now,’ she’d sighed, as if Frankie’s new hairstyle might prove too much for any delicate celebrity-type unfortunate enough to set eyes on her at the ceremony. Lucy hated herself for not standing up for anyone, for just sitting there listening to it all, making herself complicit by her inaction. She wanted an easy life with Emma, she’d seen what happened to people who dared to disagree and she valued her career too much to be the next person bullied out of their job. She needed it, needed the money. It had taken so long to earn a wage that meant she could afford her own flat, or near enough afford it, at least; she couldn’t entertain the prospect of having to start on a lower salary elsewhere. So she sat there, like the baddy’s little lap dog, being stroked and kicked alternately, depending on the day, Emma’s mood, the weather – taking whatever shit Emma threw her way and never standing up for anything or anyone.

Emma was having one of her good days today. Lucy had found it relatively easy to juggle her schedule, field her calls and keep her happy. She hadn’t sat down at her desk for more than five minutes at a time and her feet hurt like hell in her new heels, but that didn’t matter too much. The day was nearly done, Emma was due at an event at 7pm, so a car would be picking her up at 6:30pm and Lucy could get out at a reasonable hour for the first time in weeks. She scanned through her inbox, deleting junky emails and opening a couple of ‘funny’ round robins – was she the only person in the world who hated those cat videos? Her eyes were drawn to the email sent at 11:47pm the night before. Subject line: ‘Hello’, from: Thomas Barton.

Her first thought was that it couldn’t be him, that it was a coincidence. Tom never called himself ‘Thomas’, he thought it sounded stuffy and old. Clicking the bold ‘Hello’, her heart began to race at the possibility that it was him, and she ran her eyes over the long email that opened on her screen to the bottom of the page. ‘I still think about you and I hope you’re okay,’ she read. It was signed off ‘Tom’.

Emma called for Lucy to help her into her dress before she could read his words. She guiltily shut her MacBook at the call of her name, afraid of being caught reading something from Tom, something personal. Not that Emma would have had a clue who he was, no one in the office would, but Lucy felt exposed, made vulnerable, even, by his electronic presence. In Emma’s office, sounds and voices appeared as if she was under water and she remembered the sensation of noise bursting into technicolour each time she came up for breath in swimming galas as a young girl. She desperately wanted to get outside for some fresh air, or to the toilets for another line to sharpen her thoughts.

‘Anyway it just won’t do,’ she finally tuned in to Emma’s snapping voice, ‘You’ll have to tell her tomorrow that it’s not her job to do that.’ Emma had finished and Lucy had no idea what, or who, she had been talking about. ‘Absolutely,’ Lucy smiled at her boss in what she hoped was a normal manner.

‘How do I look?’ Emma spun around, her dress lifting far too high with the hideously girlish action, revealing her black underwear and cellulite at the tops of her thighs. ‘Fantastic,’ Lucy lied, ‘Really great.’

Lucy walked to the station too fast, she was breathless and clammy by the time she reached her platform. Her heart raced and she felt a familiar pang of fear about just how much damage she might be doing to herself with her habit. She forced the thoughts aside and focused instead on the rare victory of securing a seat, which she slipped into self-consciously. The drugs always made her feel a little paranoid. As they pulled out of the platform towards Scott’s flat, Lucy hovered over Tom’s email, debating half-heartedly whether to read it now or later. She opened it, unable to resist, and read his words, hearing his voice rather than her own.

From: Thomas Barton

To: Lucy Robertson

Subject: Hello

Lucy, hi, it’s Tom. How are you? It’s been a while. I hope you’re really good. I’ve been meaning to get in touch for a while. It’s hard to know how to after so much time has passed. I’m sure you understand that more than most. Nina tells me you’re doing really well up there. I knew you would be, good on you. You did it!

Everything’s good down here, same as ever, really, but good. Mum and Dad send their love. The café’s doing well, just starting to get busy now with the good old tourists. God bless them.

You should come here, come and see everyone, see how little it’s all changed. That’s why I’m writing to you, actually. I know you’re busy, Nina tells me you’re some kind of TV high-flyer, which sounds fun, but definitely busy, so I know it’s probably difficult. But you should come, Luce. Nina and Kristian are up for it, we’ve been speaking loads recently and we all want to get the gang back together again one more time. They’re coming for August, staying here in the house, and you should come too. The four of us, a summer on the beach, like old times. We all want you here for it. I want you here for it. It’s been so long since I saw you.

Just think about it, anyway. Promise me that much. Promise me you won’t just stubbornly decide ‘no’ and refuse to consider it. Maybe it’s a stupid idea – we both know I have plenty of those, but it would be fun, wouldn’t it? Humour an old friend?

I know we haven’t spoken in a really long time, but I still think about you and I hope you’re okay.

Tom

When she reached the bottom of the email Lucy took a deep breath and counted to ten; she’d done that ever since she was little when she felt like she might cry. It had been five years since she’d spoken to Tom, five years since she’d seen him. She knew he was still in Hideaway Bay; Nina had kept her vaguely informed with updates. But Nina had left too, with Kristian – travelled the world with him after university, and although those two were still in touch with Tom, they knew better than to talk much about him to Lucy.

The idea of going to Cornwall was preposterous, of course. She had a job, responsibilities, a flat, for Christ’s sake. The idea that she could take August off work for some nostalgic road trip to her home town and a reunion with her ex-boyfriend would almost be laughable if it wasn’t so bloody annoying that he’d even thought he could ask. Who the hell did he think he was, suggesting she just ditch all of her own plans to fit in with his pipe dream of a summer reunion? Asking her to promise him things. What did he actually want? To relive their happy summers before she’d left and he’d refused to come with her, the summers before he’d given up on them and let her leave without ever looking back?

How had Nina not told her about this? They’d only spoken a few days ago and seemingly she knew all about this stupid plan. Had Nina thought it was a good idea for Tom to get in touch, go for the weak spot and perhaps Lucy would just melt into a pathetic little puddle at the sound of his name all over again? She wouldn’t go. She’d ignore the email; maybe send a polite response in a couple of days to show that she wasn’t petty, that she was over it. She looked out of the window as the train doors bleeped shut and swore out loud, too loudly, judging by the shocked faces glaring at her from around the busy carriage. She’d just missed her stop.

2

Hideaway Bay, 2003

Tom took Lucy’s hand in his as they walked up the hill to her parents’ house. She could feel his eyes on her, but pretended she didn’t know he was watching her; he had a habit of observing her doing the most mundane things. ‘You look beautiful today,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek.

‘I’m sweaty,’ she replied, laughing. ‘You’re mad.’

‘You’re sweaty and beautiful,’ he said, lifting her arm and spinning her into him. She groaned and then smiled as she nuzzled into his chest, stopping now to kiss him properly.

‘That view,’ he said, turning towards the sea. ‘It still gets me every time.’

‘I know,’ Lucy said. She couldn’t imagine anyone failing to be stunned by the sight, the vast expanse of blue, soaring from a pale crystal at the sand’s edge to deep navy where it met the sky. You could still hear the buzz of the beach, the squeals of delighted children over the gentle roar of the pulling tide. It was the most calming sound in the world, somehow blending the magnificence of nature perfectly with the human pursuit of pleasure.

‘Are your parents in?’ Tom asked, as they began walking again.

‘I don’t think so,’ Lucy said, ‘Dad wanted to take the boat out to “make the most of the weather”.’ She did her best impersonation of her father.

‘Richie?’ Tom asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Lucy said, ‘Why, are you hoping we’ll have the place to ourselves?’ She nudged him gently and skipped ahead of him slightly. Tom reached out for her hand again and smiled at her. ‘Well, I could deal with that,’ he said. Lucy kissed him again, before opening the gate with a code on the keypad.

‘No cars,’ she said, ‘looks like you’re in luck.’

3

London, 2010

In the lobby of the glass and stainless-steel building, home to Scott’s very expensive waterfront flat, Lucy took the lift to the fourteenth floor and knocked on the heavy, dark door. Scott’s face was a more welcome sight than Lucy had imagined, and he held his arms out for her suddenly weary body as she leaned into his arms and let him kiss her hair.

‘Hello, darling girl,’ he said, ‘Come in, I’ve cooked for you.’

In his lounge Scott had set the table and put flowers in a silver-rimmed glass vase. She smiled at the gesture and leant down to smell the purple and pink hyacinths – her favourite.

‘Sit down, Luce,’ Scott called from the kitchen, ‘Dinner’s just coming. I hope you’re hungry.’

He’d cooked what looked like a very good lasagna, which Lucy’s heart dropped at the sight of. She couldn’t eat it. She knew immediately, her body filling with panic at the sight of all that pasta and cheese. She took a slice and filled her plate with salad.

‘This looks absolutely delicious,’ she said, looking at Scott and his lovely face, his chiseled jawline and cute, perfect nose. He was so bloody handsome. Lucy acknowledged this often, but he was just a bit too keen to be truly sexy. She knew this thought made her a bitch and she wished she was less of a cliché. The sad truth was that she knew she’d like him more if he didn’t like her.

She spent dinner cutting up pieces of lasagna and pushing them around her plate and under her salad, listening to Scott talk about his clients, the office politics at his city law firm and about the football match he was looking forward to at the weekend. When he went to get a second bottle of wine, Lucy reached for her handbag, took a tissue from a packet and wrapped as much of her lasagna as she could fit in it, and put it in her bag, praying it wouldn’t seep through. She was drunk, she realised now, her movements were clumsy and it felt like her hands were too big for her arms. It was a feeling she loved, that warm fuzz of wine running through her body, numbing all the sparking connections in her brain, dulling everything down enough to make life feel easy.

Scott poured her another glass of red before taking her nearly empty plate away.

‘You really liked that, huh?’ He kissed her on the mouth, hard, and Lucy realised he was drunk too. He put her plate back down on the table and kissed her again, stroking his hand through her hair, pulling her head back slightly and running his tongue down her neck. Lucy unbuttoned his shirt. He looked good in his work clothes; his body was beautiful. She put her hands on his smooth chest and reached for his jeans. Scott lifted her up from her chair and sat her on the dining table.

In bed, Lucy wore Scott’s t-shirt, her hair tied up, her neck still hot. She took her phone from her handbag and set an alarm for 6am. She had a missed call, from Nina, and the wine fuzz began to turn to more of an ache as she recalled the email on the train. She leant over to kiss Scott goodnight. ‘I love you, Lucy,’ he said, rolling towards her and putting his arm across her empty stomach.

‘Goodnight sweetheart,’ she replied, hurting at her inability to tell him she loved him too. Scott fell asleep with an immediacy that always made Lucy envious. Sleep was not her friend. She lay completely still, staring at the ceiling, trying to make out shapes in the plaster, trying not to think about Tom. This was the curse of her habit. Well, one of them. She needed to stop doing it so late into the evening. No amount of wine could totally take the edge off, and once things were quiet and it was dark, the fear could creep in. Her heart raced and she began to feel hot, as though someone was pressing down onto her chest. She reached for the glass of water on the bedside table and watched it shake as she pulled it to her lips. Lying back down, she tried to calm herself by breathing slowly and steadily. Eventually her heart seemed to settle, she felt her eyelids begin to become heavy, her thoughts start to spiral into sleep.

They came to her again in her dream. All of them, this time. There was always Richie, and this time he ran towards her, beaming. This time her parents stood quietly behind him, waving. She was so happy to see them, reaching out for Richie’s warm little body, his spindly arms and crazy hair. She kept looking up to check that her parents were still there too, so pleased that they looked happy. She began to realise that it was taking too long for Richie to reach her. She looked again and could see now that he was running almost as if in slow motion. His arms and legs were moving strangely, as if he was being pulled down, wading through something thick. She tried to call out to him, to move towards him, but she was suddenly sinking into the ground too, it had turned to marsh beneath her feet. She felt panic rising as she looked around for her parents now. They were further away than before and their faces were wretched with despair. They weren’t waving any more, they were desperately pleading for her help. But she couldn’t move. Richie was crying now and drifting further away from her. Lucy tried to scream for help but her voice wouldn’t come; instead the screams seemed to stab sharp pains through her chest. Her eyesight began to fail her, as if a thick fog had fallen on them all. She couldn’t breathe now, and she couldn’t see her parents.

She woke, sweating, out of breath. She reached to her side to feel Scott, still fast asleep, as if touching another human being would confirm that she was real and this was real and the dream was over. She felt sick and her heart ached. She pressed her fingers into her eyes to stop the tears that began to form. She’d been having this dream, or versions of it, for years. It never got any easier to cope with. It always knocked her more heavily than she felt was reasonable after all this time. Looking at her phone she saw it was 5am and decided that wasn’t too early to get up for the day. She’d only had around four hours’ sleep, but that was better than the prospect of closing her eyes and returning to her nightmares.

She stepped out of Scott’s bed quietly, still shaking slightly and cold now. It was the day of the awards and she felt like utter shit. It was going to be a long, long day.

4

Park Lane was as busy as ever, six lanes of traffic coughing out hot fumes into the hazy blue sky. Hyde Park was filled with the usual mixture of tourists meandering and office workers rushing on their way to work. As Lucy stepped out of her Addison Lee car in front of the Metropolis Hotel she had an unwelcome flashback of last year’s awards ceremony and the A-list – well, lower A-list, maybe B-list, really – celebrity getting papped, up-skirt, by the scummy photographer who lay on the floor as she got out of the car. The fallout from those pictures breaking in the red tops the next day had led to some seriously awkward calls from the agent about Spectrum’s ‘failure to safeguard’. Lucy entered the hotel, smiling at the doorman, and was greeted by the familiar smell of marble, dark old wood, and something she couldn’t pinpoint but which, judging by the surroundings, might well have been the smell of money. The atmosphere of the Metropolis still excited her, even after all these years of working on Spectrum’s televised events at the hotel. The bar was littered with small groups of ladies drinking tea, with fine china plates of pastel-coloured cakes decorating the tables, their feet obscured by an assortment of sturdy, ribbon-handled shopping bags from New Bond Street’s boutiques. It felt like a place full of possibilities, of secret meetings, and of a life she’d probably never be able to afford.

In the production suite people had dumped piles of coats and bags in the corner, and a rail of evening dresses was already nearly full. Lucy hung her black-lace dress, grabbed a copy of the running order, a polystyrene cup of grainy coffee from the machine and headed to the script meeting in the ballroom. It was Lucy’s third awards ceremony as Emma’s PA, and it became more and more difficult to concentrate during the longwinded script read-through. It was a point of pride for Emma that she ran this meeting in such a unique way. She insisted on a full run-through in which she took the role of both the main presenters, all of the individual awards’ presenters and every winner, often delivering Oscar-worthy acceptance speeches, which, it struck Lucy, seemed to roll off her tongue as if practised in advance. By the time the final award was played out, culminating in Emma’s impression of a middle-aged Swedish male winner (not one of her finest), Lucy’s mind had wandered and she was taken by surprise at the sound of her name.

‘I asked if there was anything I’d forgotten’, Emma looked at her with the familiar look of disdain and disappointment. ‘What was I meant to remember?’ she asked Lucy.

‘I think that was everything,’ Lucy smiled hopefully, trawling through her brain for anything she was supposed to be prompting her boss with. At that moment a commotion of suit carriers and blonde hair tumbled through the door, met with sniggers and a collective chorus of ‘Oh, Warren!’ from the Spectrum team sitting around the large table.

‘Oh my GOD, I’m so sorry I’m late!’ Warren did, in fact, look sorry enough that he might actually cry. A flamboyant, yet sensitive, character, Warren had been at Spectrum media for a couple of years before Lucy had joined, and had worked his way up to the coveted role of Entertainment Producer, meaning his job was to book celebrities to appear on the company’s shows. Being outlandishly emotional was apparently a necessary characteristic for anyone working on the Entertainment team, who dedicatedly lived up to their job titles and entertained the office with their many dramas, fallouts, reconciliations and public breakdowns. One of Warren’s particular character traits was to seek Emma’s approval at all times and at almost any cost. Arriving late to the production meeting of the biggest awards show of the year was probably up there with Warren’s worst nightmares, met only, perhaps, by an international Dermalogica shortage, or his cleaner accidentally machine-washing one of his ‘statement’ cashmere jumpers.

Emma cast her eyes up and down Warren’s body, from the toes of his gleaming patent loafers, to the highest point of his highlighted quiff, and Lucy recognised the flash in her eyes of something noted and worthy of comment.

‘Warren,’ she started, ‘I can overlook the late arrival, given the fact it is entirely out of character and, I’m sure, due to circumstances beyond your control.’

Lucy watched Warren half relax before sensing that the exchange was not over. ‘What I can’t overlook is the fact that you are the colour of an imitation mahogany table. What the HELL have you done to yourself?’

Now that she looked properly it was true that Warren had been a little heavy handed with the fake tan, but Lucy still cringed internally at the public remonstration, recalling their conversation a few nights ago in the pub, when he’d listed the many beauty treatments he was going to undergo in preparation for today. He had only wanted, Lucy remembered clearly, to look his very best for the occasion. She wanted to say something in his defence, but there really was no denying he looked totally, ludicrously brown the more she looked at him.

‘It’s developing,’ Warren explained, ‘I can’t stop it. I don’t know what to do. I’ve showered, I’ve exfoliated, but I’m sure it’s still developing. I wasn’t this brown an hour ago.’ His voice wobbled at the end of this statement, threatening tears. Emma had already lost interest in this conversation, however, and was piling papers and pens into her oversized Prada bag.

Warren took the seat next to Lucy as Emma left the room, his big eyes searching for comfort.

‘It’s okay,’ she lied. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not that bad.’

It was dreadful. Up close, particles of tan were sitting in each pore, line and blemish; his face reminded Lucy of those olde-worlde maps you made at school by staining a piece of paper with instant coffee and burning the edges.

‘I have the keys to make-up anyway,’ Lucy offered. ‘We can go and find some foundation.’

Warren held out his arms and grabbed Lucy in a bear hug. She patted him on the back and tried to wriggle down away from his face slightly to avoid any possible staining.

Awards ceremonies at the Metropolis were always fun; they had an atmosphere that Lucy never felt anywhere else. It was all about getting through the ceremony itself and then the party really began. Lucy had been allocated a role that only Emma’s most valued staff were trusted with on the night; she was to be, yet again, a spotter. A spotter’s job was perhaps the least dignified role you could be given at a glitzy event, consisting of crawling around on the floor with a camera crew, pointing out the beautiful people to be filmed. Each year when the roles were being handed out Lucy prayed that she might be spared, and each time she was painfully disappointed. In Emma’s eyes it was such an important role that it needed to be carried out by experienced, responsible people like Lucy who had spent years working fourteen- hour days in hope of one day being taken seriously in the TV world. As Lucy changed into her short, black, bodycon lace dress and tried to fix her hair up with Kirby grips and hairspray, she raged momentarily at the absurdity of the ‘cocktail dress’ dress code for all Spectrum staff, and realised that the only thing less dignified than crawling around on the carpet all evening was doing so dressed as if you were expecting to be sitting at a table drinking champagne.

Lucy was surprised each time at how quickly two hours of spotting passed; it actually became quite addictive trying to make it round to the next table in the twenty-second VTs played on screen between each award. She was quietly delighted to have avoided being yelled at over the headset each spotter was wearing. Emma’s scream of ‘Sophie, that’s NOT Paul Mulryan, that’s a short-haired WOMAN’, was probably a highlight for everyone on talkback except Sophie. In her defense, that woman did look a lot like crime writer Paul Mulryan; Lucy had checked afterwards when crawling past to get to the star of an International Series of the Year contender after the mishap.

The final award of the evening was the Lifetime Achievement award and the winner was Lucy’s to find and get a camera pointed at in time. She was already at the right table, with her target in view, hanging back until the last minute so as not to give the game away. As the music fired up Lucy moved in with the camera crew following behind waiting for her instruction. As she reached the side of Mrs Dorian Briar, ninety years old, an OBE, writer of over fifty novels and twenty adaptations for the small and big screen, Mrs Briar spotted her and turned away from the table towards Lucy. Lucy tried to make herself invisible, the presenters were about to announce Mrs Briar’s name and she needed to be looking up at the room, not down at Lucy on the floor. But Mrs Briar wouldn’t give up. ‘There’s a girl on the floor!’ she exclaimed remarkably loudly to the rest of her table, pointing at Lucy. ‘Excuse me, young lady, are you okay down there?’

Lucy felt her face burn with panic. ‘Fine thanks,’ she mouthed, and prayed that this would appease the legendary author about to be honoured with the most prestigious award of the night.

‘Would you like some wine, dear?’ Mrs Briar leant across the table, picking up a glass of, surely someone else’s, wine, and stretched down and sideways to try and reach Lucy on the floor.

‘THE INIMITABLE DORIAN BRIAR’, boomed one of the presenters, and Lucy felt the room around her, all 400 guests, getting to their feet with applause, as the big screen flashed to a live picture of Dorian Briar stretching away from the table, then falling off her chair clutching a glass of cabernet sauvignon, squealing in horror. The other guests at her table leapt into action, scooping her off the floor, horrified at the sight of this little old lady now drenched in red wine. Dorian was, to her credit, still smiling, but looked a little confused by the whole thing. Lucy moved, quicker than seemed possible on all-fours in a skintight dress, away from the scene, glaring at her camera crew with a look that she hoped conveyed ‘let’s never talk about what happened at that table’.

5

The production office’s transformation into a fully laid-out dining room marked the end of the Spectrum team’s working duties. There were already ten people scattered around the tables eating plates of roast chicken and vegetables, and pouring large glasses of wine. Lucy walked in with Warren and Sophie, fellow spotters, laughing about the Paul Mulryan confusion, and she placed a concessionary piece of chicken on her plate from the large silver warmer on the buffet table.

‘Is that all you’re eating?’ Warren asked, filling his own plate with potatoes, carrots and chicken thighs before drowning it in gravy. Lucy didn’t answer, but just smiled and took a seat at an empty table. Picking up a bottle of white wine that wasn’t quite as cold as she’d have hoped, I deserve this, she thought, and poured out three glasses.

‘What the hell happened with poor Dorian?’ Sophie asked, her little brown bob tipping quizzically to the side, like a Cairn terrier, Lucy always thought.

‘No idea,’ Lucy took a first blissful swig of wine. It had dawned on her very quickly after the incident that no one else on the production team actually had any way of knowing why ‘poor Dorian’, as she was quickly becoming known, had fallen off her chair. Anyway, Emma had already been overheard rejoicing about what fantastic television it was seeing a national treasure tumbling to the ground in a fountain of red wine, so Lucy didn’t feel too bad about keeping quiet about her role in the scene.

The room filled quickly with colleagues removing high heels and rubbing their feet between glasses of wine, and exchanging Emma stories in a sort of top trumps game of ‘well you think that’s bad, wait ‘til you hear what she did in the green room when I was working on Catch it, Cook it, in 2010…’

Lucy retrieved her mobile from her bag and read a message from Scott sent an hour earlier: Hey you, hope it’s all gone well. You coming to mine tonight? Lucy sent a quick reply saying she’d call him later; she half wanted to leave there and then and get back to his place. It would, she knew, be the most sensible thing to do; these nights always got so bloody messy. But the first two glasses of wine had slipped down easily and she was in that early wine daze, where everything felt slightly wonderful and it felt too early to leave.

Dinner was followed by the traditional ‘sweep’ of the ceremony room for bottles of wine that had been purchased by TV big-wigs to impress their tables, but which hadn’t been drunk. Emma didn’t like wasting money by, say, paying for wine for her staff, and the sweep was one of her ways of ‘winning’, as she saw it. Lucy hung back slightly after the incident last year where she and Natalie from the Entertainment team had swiped a bottle of champagne from the Sherbet TV table only to be stopped on their way out by the purchaser of the bottle on his way back to retrieve the fizz, who accused them of stealing: awkward didn’t really cover it.

Emma was already deep in the after-party – Lucy kept catching glimpses of her up the stairs though the glass doors. She was working the room like a pro. It was a quality you couldn’t help but admire; she was truly fantastic at making people listen to her and then give her what she wanted. She was also, Lucy knew, notorious for drinking far too much at events, and it looked like she was on her way already. She had changed into the red Donna Karan dress that Lucy had collected two days previously from Harvey Nichols and which Emma had taken great pleasure in telling the whole office the extortionate cost of. ‘I suppose you could say that £1,800 for a dress is too much…’ she’d mused loudly, before asking Lucy to bring it up on the Harvey Nicks website and show everyone just how beautiful it was. And it really was beautiful. Lucy had stroked it when she collected it from the store, before it was packaged with flair and precision into tissue paper, a box and then a bag for transfer back to the office. But Emma had a knack for making really expensive clothes look incredibly tacky. Lucy watched her move over to her next companion at the bar, clutching a glass of champagne in one hand and a fistful of the skirt of her dress in the other, struggling to work with the combination of billowing red fabric at ankle level and the high-heeled Prada shoes she’d opted for. It didn’t look to Lucy as if Emma was wearing a bra, which made the dress sit strangely across her chest and gape slightly at the side. Lucy could already see the potential for another breast-based moment later in the evening. These had become something of a signature for Emma, who had fallen out of more designer dresses in public than Lucy could remember. She recalled the time, a few years ago now, that Emma had conducted an entire conversation with an author at a book launch with her left nipple sitting proudly outside the ridiculously strappy low-cut dress she was wearing. The author’s eye had kept wandering down, and Lucy, standing next to Emma at the time, had wondered just how the hell Emma couldn’t, at the very least, feel the difference between the right side – cloaked in All Saints (God, she was far too old to be wearing All Saints), and the left side – hanging out free as a bird. It had never become clear at what point Emma had finally noticed, and later on everything was back in place, but nothing was ever mentioned.

It was impressive how much wine could be swept from a room after an awards ceremony; the team was laden with bottles and bottles of red and white, and a few had found the ultimate prize – unopened bottles of champagne. As it was strict hotel policy that no wine should leave the room after the ceremony, the smuggling out to the after-party had to be conducted with confidence and poise to avoid any suspicion amongst the Metropolis’s staff. Lucy considered herself an expert at this and took two bottles from Jenny, one of the runners, slipping one upright into her handbag, and the other under the flap of her black jacket before heading up the stairs and through the huge doors. Inside, the party was in full flow, a few merry authors and agents were dancing in the middle of the room while most people opted to continue their drinking and were gathered in groups around the edge of the dance floor, or sat in the crushed- velvet booths along the walls.

Lucy, Warren, Camilla and Katie stationed themselves at a booth at the far end of the room. Lucy skimmed across the plush fabric and sat next to the window, looking onto the twinkling car lights and street lamps of Park Lane. A stream of orange beams flowing one way, blinking red the other. An assortment of wine bottles was magicked onto the table and Katie passed around glasses. Lucy settled into the back of the cushioned bench, her back aching in appreciation of the support. Warren began his usual commentary on the scenes unfolding on the dance floor. A well-known screenwriter was performing an elaborate, and puzzling, finger dance, and an ageing agent, who Lucy had earlier seen stroking his neighbour’s leg as she crawled past their table, was now dancing up against her in what was presumably intended to be an erotic style.

More wine was poured and Lucy shut her eyes briefly, remembering she had promised to call Scott. It was nearly midnight and the drinks were filling her with a warm sense of impending fun, so she pushed away the thought of her boyfriend waiting at home and finished her glass. She’d pop to the toilets in a while with Warren, who’d brought a supply for a few of them who were always ready for a party. She fancied a little pick-me-up.

‘Dancing time?’ she suggested, and the group, which had now grown to eight of the Spectrum team, left their bags and coats in ownership of the booth and moved a few yards into the room to start dancing to the R&B set the DJ was playing.

The noise in the room was growing louder with each song, more and more bodies joining them on the dance floor. Camilla appeared with a tray full of glistening shot glasses and the team expertly applied salt to the base of their thumbs, downed the sour liquid and squealed for lemons, which Camilla had forgotten to bring. Lucy slipped back to the table and downed a large glass of wine to wash away the taste. Her head spun as she turned and made her way back to the group, who were having a dance-off, throwing her hands in the air and shimmying in to join them. She flung her head back, laughing at Warren’s moves, and feeling the rush from the alcohol.

6

Hideaway Bay, 2003

Nina and Kristian were on another break, and Nina could barely stand being in the same room as her on-off boyfriend of two years.

‘I hate him, Lucy,’ she whispered in Lucy’s direction, eyes locked on Kristian and loud enough for him to hear her across the table. They were sitting on the small terrace at the back of the Beach Café, Tom’s parents’ place.

‘I know, he’s been a prat,’ Lucy comforted Nina. She’d learned a long time ago that it wasn’t worth pointing out that they were both at fault.

‘I can hear you both,’ Kristian said, pulling away from his conversation with Tom, probably about surfing. Tom grinned at Lucy, who tried to make a face at him that told him to look like he was taking this seriously.

‘Oh why don’t you text your little girlfriend about it, then, poor little Kristian,’ Nina said mockingly.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ Kristian rolled his eyes. Not a good move, thought Lucy.

‘She is a friend,’ continued Kristian. ‘In fact, she’s not even a friend, she had a surf lesson. She texted me to say thank you. You’re out of your mind!’

This was not going to end well, Lucy realised. She made eyes at Tom to signify that they should extract themselves from the impending explosion.

‘Oh you are SUCH A GENTLEMAN!’ Nina shouted, causing other customers to stop their conversations and pretend not to look at them all.

‘Hey, calm it down, okay?’ Lucy tried to reason with them. ‘It’s not fair on Tom’s folks to make a scene here.’

The café was their regular hangout and they’d already pushed their luck this summer with Tom’s parents. Sarah and Neil were far more laid-back than any of the other parents, having recently forgiven them for breaking in one evening after a drunken barbecue on the beach. Tom had been instructed to pay for the broken glass by working an extra few shifts, and the embarrassment of Tom’s mum looking at Lucy and Nina with surprise and disappointment had been the hardest punishment they could have been dealt. Sarah was wonderful, especially to the girls. Tom was her only child and she made no secret of how much she had longed for a daughter. She’d swept Lucy and Nina into their family within a few months of year seven and their friendship with Tom and Kristian. Lucy had known Sarah and Neil vaguely for years. They owned a few places around Hideaway Bay: the café, the fish-and-chip shop and the pub across the bay at New Hideaway. They were friendly with her parents and she’d heard Sarah’s laughter ringing out over dinner-party chatter a fair few times. And then she’d met Tom. They had been at different primary schools; Tom at the private school half an hour away and Lucy at the village primary. Her dad didn’t see the need to pay for primary school. It was when she joined Davenport Heights Independent at age eleven that they first met. Tom had been instantly friendly: Lucy terrified of the new surroundings and at a real disadvantage to the children who were already familiar with the senior school from their primary days. They both got the number 121 bus from the top of the hill to school, and each day Tom sat next to Lucy and asked her questions while she blushed, laughed and eventually looked up at him and realised he was rather lovely.

At sixteen they were best friends and totally in love. They felt unbreakable to Lucy, unlike Nina and Kristian, who had a relationship so volatile that Kristian sending a message to another girl sent them into a tailspin. Lucy often wondered whether Nina, her best friend since they were five, had been almost forced into a relationship with Kristian because of their proximity to her and Tom. Kristian was a lovely, lovely boy, but he was totally hapless when it came to managing Nina’s fierce temper and tendency for jealousy. Even Lucy had fallen foul of Nina’s wrath when it came to Kristian, although she had surprised herself at the ferocity of her defence when Nina once tried to imply she had flirted with Kristian at a party. The idea was totally absurd and had shown Lucy how bloody hard it must be being Kristian at times. She looked at him now, the same look of disbelief and confusion that she’d see on his face a hundred times before as he watched his girlfriend twist herself into a venomous tangle of rage over almost nothing.

‘What are we doing tonight?’ Tom asked, trying to break the tension.

‘Can we come to yours, mate?’ Kristian asked. ‘A few beers, a game of pool, swim?’ Tom’s house was the largest not only of the group’s but also in the whole town. Neil and Sarah were widely considered to own Hideaway, their house sitting at the top of the Bay, overlooking their business empire. Their landscaped gardens sprawled out from the back of the huge property, gradually sloping down to a lower level with a huge infinity pool, which looked straight out across the sea.

‘Sure,’ Tom replied. ‘My dad will probably want us to help with something, though. You know what he’s like.’

‘That’s fine,’ Lucy said, perusing the menu on the table, wondering whether to order another coffee. ‘It’s the least we could do, really.’ She didn’t mind helping Sarah and Neil, and in fact she quite enjoyed folding napkins, helping Sarah to design sandwich menus, and deep-cleaning the pristine white coffee cups ahead of the impending summer high-season.

It was hot already in Hideaway, the sea just about managing to take the edge off the midday scorch. Lucy was tanned and happy; this was how she liked it. All of them together, good weather, lots of time and no school. GCSEs were done and she didn’t need to think about her results for a while yet. The summer stretched out ahead of them, full of promise. She looked across at Tom and met his eyes. He smiled and winked at her. Kristian was out of his seat and had moved close to Nina, attempting to cuddle her. Nina almost gave in to him, before standing up and storming off, tears in her eyes.

‘I’d better go and check she’s okay,’ Lucy said to Tom and Kristian. This was a familiar drill.

‘Tell her I’m sorry,’ Kristian called after her. Lucy stopped. ‘What for?’ she asked.

‘Whatever she thinks I’ve done,’ Kristian said, looking wounded. Lucy stepped back to the table and planted a kiss on Kristian’s cheek. ‘She’s being a twat,’ she said to him, quietly. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

7

London, 2010

Lucy woke to the sound of her alarm. She opened her eyes slowly, in anticipation of pain and suffering. Sitting up, she took in Scott’s meticulous apartment, the crisp, white sheets, which had been ironed and smelled of washing powder; the tasteful, understated mahogany furniture; the delicate scent of vanilla drifting in from the Jo Malone diffuser that his mum had put in the lounge. She switched off the terrible noise bleeping next to her head and held her temples to try and soothe the throbbing. Scott had placed a glass of water by her bed before he’d left for work and her thirst came like a tidal wave at the sight of it. She finished the glass in five clumsy swallows, water trickling down her chin. Lucy glimpsed the mirror to her left and opened her eyes widely in the hope of waking herself up to survey this sight of herself. She was still wearing the lace dress she’d been in last night, and her make-up was smudged into two grey circles around bloodshot eyes. She looked like an extra from a low-budget horror film. She glanced down at her pillow and took in the black streaks and tidemarks of what must be a mixture of sweat, fake tan and foundation, which had seeped up the now-greasy white fabric in a hideous rainbow of dark brown to dirty beige.

Out of the shower, and after three sessions of tooth-brushing, gagging at each stroke to the back of her mouth, Lucy found the outfit she’d folded over the back of Scott’s chair last week. She slipped on the black leggings, grey cashmere jumper and leather biker boots. She considered applying make-up, but her skin felt as though it was coated in some kind of hangover wax that no amount of scrubbing could remove and which make-up would merely sit on top of like scum on pond water. She sprayed herself with perfume from her handbag and looked again in the mirror. It was not a pretty sight, but it was an improvement, and probably passable for a post-awards day.

In the office, the people who had made it in on time were a scale of grey faces. ‘I was sick on the tube,’ Warren announced as he appeared at the top of the stairs, ‘And it was pink.’ Lucy’s stomach lurched at the image.

‘Oh God, Warren. That’s terrible, have some water and eat some food,’ she said. As a runner, the lowliest position at any production company, Jenny had been tasked with the early-morning breakfast run and had returned with a mammoth pile of greasy paper-wrapped baps and sandwiches, smelling of crispy fat and white flour. In a rare act of generosity, Emma paid for this post-awards ceremony tradition from her own wallet as she, like everyone else in the office, was always in need of fried breakfast items and carbs the morning after. Lucy cautiously took a bite from her bacon sandwich – white bread, buttered, brown sauce – offering it up as a gift to her stomach, aware it might be rejected. It tasted good, the salt kissed her cheeks and each chew released more and more smoky juice into her mouth. She could’ve cried at the pleasure of eating.

It was nearly lunchtime before conversations really started in the office. Everyone had made it in to work this year. There was normally one casualty who overslept, couldn’t move or had woken up in another town and couldn’t get in to the office. This was the ultimate crime at Spectrum. It was accepted, encouraged actually, to join in and party after a big event, to ‘let your hair down’ by drinking to excess. The only rule was that you made it in to work the next day. Regardless of what state you arrived in, you had to arrive, you had to be there, and you had to get on with it. Julia, an associate producer on Make My Dinner, Spectrum’s long-running ‘hilarious’ celebrity cooking show, had been sacked last year after calling in sick the morning after the Food and Drink Awards, Lucy remembered. Perhaps that had helped to motivate everyone to get in today.

Stories from the after-show party were beginning to emerge as the communal hangover level was reduced from a solid seven to a more manageable three or four post-feed. It emerged that Charlie had told Emma she loved her, which was mildly amusing but not really news, as she did this each year, as far as Lucy could recall. More interestingly, and depressingly, Teresa, one of the runners who had just been promoted to junior researcher on a baking programme, had been caught kissing a recently engaged production manager and was vehemently denying the incident. Lucy felt sorry for her, as she seemed so desperate to make it not true with her refusals and protests. That guy is a total creep, she thought to herself. Everyone who worked at Spectrum knew what Matt got up to, and he had cheated on his fiancée at least five times that Lucy knew of: once, classily, in the disabled toilet at a wrap party. His post-incident tactic, and perhaps this was what was inspiring Teresa, was to flatly deny every single thing, regardless of who had caught, seen, or heard him and his prey, until eventually everyone pretended to forget.

It annoyed Lucy how it had become something of a joke amongst the team, and how there was now an eye-rolling sense of ‘oh what’s he like’ about the whole thing. A sleazy prick, Lucy always thought, but didn’t ever offer up. He somehow remained a truly popular and powerful member of staff. It was the girls who became the laughing stock each time, and they were bloody stupid to get involved, Lucy thought. She couldn’t figure out how on earth he even managed to do it – what his appeal was. He was a balding, slightly overweight man, the wrong side of forty. She had concluded that it was simply because of the tiny number of men in TV and the huge amount of single girls. Nice odds for a midlife-crisis-wielding sex pest.

‘And what about YOU?’ Laura turned to Lucy with a devilish look of glee pasted across her wide, stupid, pale face. Laura, a researcher who’d really worked there long enough to have been promoted by now, was one of those terrible people who was always there on a night out, wouldn’t miss it for the world, but who, judging by her chronic lack of hangovers, never actually drank along with everyone else, choosing instead to sit back and observe. She collected stories from drunken nights and loved drip-feeding them the next day.

‘What?’ Lucy asked, trying to think back through the evening to what she had done.

‘You don’t remember?’ Laura trilled. This was the best-case scenario for a serial shamer.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just leave it, okay?’ Lucy replied, trying to sound casual and laid-back.

‘Oh, this is hilarious!’ Laura continued, and people from the other side of the office were listening now, sensing the shift in tone.

‘Do you honestly not remember? That’s amazing! You gave that guy a LAP DANCE!’ Laura exclaimed really loudly, unnaturally loudly, Lucy thought. Lucy’s face filled so quickly with blood she imagined she had turned purple.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Laura. Just shut up, will you?’ she snapped back, shocking herself with the force of her words.

‘Touchy, touchy,’ Laura sniggered, turning around to check her audience’s reaction. The office was quiet. It wasn’t just Lucy who couldn’t stand Laura. She’d made herself an unpopular figure many times over for snitching on people and generally stirring up trouble so she could sit back and watch the fallout. Lucy racked her brain for any memory involving anything resembling a lap dance. And then it came, an image of herself, wine in one hand, the other outstretched over the shoulder of a man, seated on the edge of a booth, and her laugh ringing out over the music as she wriggled her hips and rippled her body over him as people watched and laughed. She turned to Warren, who looked embarrassed for her and gave just the slightest head movement that confirmed her fears. Yep, you did. Lucy stood and walked quickly to the toilets. Locking the door, she felt the tears come: big, hot, heavy tears that ran down her face silently and blocked her sore nose – and just would not stop.

I’m a total mess, she thought. Why can’t I just drink like other people? Have a good time, have some fun, then stop. Why do I always get myself to the point where I can’t remember anything, where I do something stupid? Why didn’t I just go back to Scott’s, like he asked me to? Lucy gasped slightly at the thought of Scott, choking on her tears. She cared about Scott, he was good to her, looked after her when she was tired from work, took her out to nice places, tried to make her happy. And this is how I repay him, she thought, hating herself for being the kind of girl who behaved like that when drunk. ‘Making a spectacle of yourself’, her mum would’ve said. And God knows who saw – all those people in that room; people I work with, and work for, people who I need to respect me! That one image she had of herself leaning over the as-yet-unidentified man, made her feel physically sick, not least because she couldn’t finish the scene, had no idea of how it had played out. She didn’t want to find out from Laura; she didn’t actually want to find out at all. She’d never understood people like Warren and Charlie, who loved hearing about what they’d got up to on a night out. Lucy would rather never know, and wished there was some kind of code of silence about the whole thing. Laura was an utter twat for telling her, telling everyone, like that, but she, Lucy, was the biggest fool, she acknowledged painfully, because this wasn’t exactly a one-off. How many times had she drunk herself into this position? What, two or three times already this year? How did she forget this shame and terror each time?

What the hell is wrong with me?

She took her phone from her pocket and thought about calling Scott, before pressing cancel and letting more tears come at the realisation that he couldn’t comfort her, and that it wasn’t actually fair to expect him to.

Warren took her out for lunch on her own and tried to make light of the whole thing.

‘You were joking around,’ he told her, ‘It really wasn’t as seedy as Laura made it sound.’

But it didn’t matter to Lucy, who pushed her pizza around her plate, struggling to make eye contact, filled with shame and self-hatred.

‘What does this say about my relationship?’ she asked, quietly.

‘Nothing, babe,’ Warren said gently, ‘You were drunk; he was a hot guy. Really hot, actually… and you were just messing about. You didn’t even kiss him. It was just a friendly thing.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Lucy smiled at Warren, ‘Just your average friendly lap dance.’ She almost laughed, but Warren reached across the table and took her hand. The tenderness of the gesture shocked her and she thought she might cry again. ‘You’re a good egg, Lucy. You could do with giving yourself a break sometimes, you know. You’re not so bad’, he said, looking her into the eyes and squeezing her hand in his. ‘Chin up, missy.’

The pizza and a walk back to the office helped to ease the hangover and back at her desk Lucy made a deal with herself. Just get through the rest of today and tomorrow everything will seem better. She kept her head down, worked through a good chunk of her red-flagged emails and counted down to 6pm and home time. It was easy to keep a low profile as Emma was locked in her office all afternoon, which meant little conversation among the team, who were afraid she might be listening through the thin walls. It wasn’t as paranoid a fear as it sounded. When the team had relocated to this huge office from a smaller warehouse building in South London, Emma had enquired about the possibility of installing some kind of ‘listening tube’ that would enable her to hear people at their desks from the comfort of her own office.

Laura caught Lucy’s eye a few times throughout the afternoon and offered an irritating facial expression that Lucy thought was meant to suggest ‘I’m slightly sorry for upsetting you, but hey, you did it!’ She forced herself to smile back. This is the last time I feel like this, she vowed. I’m not going to do this ever again.

The office emptied at an impressive pace at 6pm. Lucy walked out of the door after a quick hug with Warren and the tiredness hit her all over again. The thought of getting on a bus felt like an epic mission and the black cabs driving past her with their orange lights on looked irresistibly enticing. Lucy put her arm out and a taxi pulled over. ‘Balham please,’ she said as she heaved her exhausted body through the door and onto the back seat. Her phone vibrated in her pocket; a message from Scott.

Are you okay? I’m working late, but I want to know if you are alright? it said.

I’m okay, Lucy typed, I’m so sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to get so drunk. I hope I wasn’t as terrible as I think I might have been x. She was relieved Scott was, firstly, still talking to her, and secondly, that he was working late. She didn’t want to go to his perfect flat tonight; she just wanted to go home, run a bath, put on her comfiest pyjamas and take her duvet to the sofa. As the taxi turned the corner onto her road, a wave of familiar, pathetic, realisation hit her, I want Tom, she thought, I just want Tom.

8

Her wardrobe was a mess. Clothes had fallen off their hangers into heaps at the bottom. She reached through fabric until she felt the box. The shoebox was covered in wrapping paper: a garish pink-and-orange print she’d picked when she was thirteen, thinking it was exotic. Lucy carried the box onto the sofa and cocooned herself inside her duvet. Opening the box released the smell of paper and ink she only let herself take in a couple of times a year. She’d thought about throwing the box away as many times as she’d opened it, but always ended up shoving it back in the wardrobe. Amongst the letters, scraps of paper, notes passed back and forth by her and Nina in lessons, postcards from her older sister’s travels, she found the wallet of photos.

There was Nina, all long limbs and beautiful long hair, running away from the camera towards the beach, being chased by Kristian. Then Lucy’s childhood dog, Spencer, a big, fat Labrador, lying on the sand looking happy as her brother, Richie, crouched next to him, all of two years old, bucket in hand and a mischievous grin on his face. Photo after photo showed the view of Hideaway from various high points across the Bay. From Tom’s palm-treed terrace, it looked almost Mediterranean, the sea a vivid greeny-blue. The photos from Lucy’s garden, with the rugged cliffs in view, looked more traditionally Cornish. Her favourite photos of Hideaway were those she’d taken from the café. In these you could really see how the bay had earned its name. Once you were in the town you felt totally cut off from anywhere else – as if you were in a secret cove, unreachable from anywhere but the sea. The steep, winding road that linked them to the real world seemed to give up towards the beach, and from there it was just cobbled streets of tiny shops and cafés with stripy awnings. The view from the café always reminded Lucy of something from a Famous Five book: Keeper’s Island sitting in front of them enticingly, but otherwise nothing but water and sand and the two cliffs either side closing them off from everywhere else, hiding them away.

She skipped past photos of Claire, feeling guilty about how long it had been since she’d seen her older sister. She didn’t live all that far away and when Lucy had first moved to London, Claire had tried to hard to help her settle, to be friends. Lucy should have made more of an effort, she knew that, but it felt like it had been too long now, like she’d made an issue out of nothing by her inaction. Claire would be angry with her, anyway, like she always was when Lucy did spend time with her in those first few months in London. Claire was so bloody sensible and collected, and together, and Lucy just wasn’t. The thing was, Lucy knew Claire’s intentions were good and that she cared, but it physically hurt Lucy to be near her. The reason she’d left Cornwall was to escape the memories and seeing Claire brought them all crashing back in. And Claire knew too much. She could always see when Lucy was struggling and could never stop herself from bringing it all up all over again. Sometimes Lucy just wanted to pretend things were fine when they weren’t. She didn’t want to try and work through the fucking pain all the time – she knew it didn’t work anyway. So she quickly shuffled the photos of Claire to the back of the packet of pictures, focusing instead on the hideous shots of her and Nina in some of their first trips into Plymouth, where they’d clearly tried to dress ‘fashionably’ but had fallen seriously bloody short of the mark. Nina was wearing an orange poncho with pom-pom trim and baggy jeans, Lucy didn’t look much better in what looked remarkably like a ski jacket and denim skirt. They looked ridiculous and she laughed to herself at the sight of them.

Then, inevitably, she reached the glossy photo she’d tried to deny she would find.

Scruffy brown hair swept to one side, in surf shorts and a ripped t-shirt, Tom smiling at her, his blue eyes looking as though he was thinking something naughty, Lucy thought. She remembered standing there, on the beach, taking the picture. She’d thrown the rest away, but she could never bring herself to destroy this one, it was too perfect. It had been taken the summer before she’d left Cornwall, just a normal day on the beach, he’d been surfing all morning and she had taken the mick out of him for his scruffy t-shirt. He’d pulled her into him, ‘You love it, Luce, I know you do,’ kissing her neck and hair playfully. ‘I love you,’ she’d replied, kissing him back, and then she’d asked him to stand for the photo. Wrapped in her duvet, on her sofa in London, she could hear the seagulls circling the beach that day hoping for tourists’ fish and chips. She could feel Tom’s wet, salty skin on her body as he held her waist. She could smell the sun on his hair as she pushed it away from his eyes and kissed him. Lucy put the photo down and tipped her head back to stop the tears. It was a long time ago, she told herself, a different life.

This was why she shouldn’t look at the photos, she remembered, as she put the box down on the floor and used the sleeve of her pyjama top to dab at the tears prickling the corners of her eyes. Why did he have to send her that email? Why did he need to bring it all back up again? She tried to blame the feelings on him reaching out to her about the summer, but of course she knew, really, that she was simply eternally trying to move on from him, from how much she had loved him. She loved him so much it had ruined anyone else for her, because no one was ever going to compare. And he was just a fucking memory, not even a real person in her life any more. He had let her leave; he had been fine with it. He had not spoken to her for five fucking years.

She tried to put him out of her mind and concentrate on her plan of action to make herself a better person. She decided she’d start running again, eat healthily, really focus on her career. She wasn’t going to spend her life in London thinking about summers in Cornwall years ago, and she couldn’t allow herself to think about Tom – it was just the tiredness – and that bloody email, that was all. You can’t be in love with a memory, she told herself.

Even you’re not that bloody stupid.

9

‘Lucy? Lucy! It’s Sophie.’

Lucy blinked slowly, her head throbbing with pain. She suddenly became acutely aware that she had no idea where she was.

‘Sophie?’ she asked. ‘What are you doing here?’ Her own voice trembled and sounded as if it was coming from someone else. Sophie was her next-door neighbour, a couple of years old than her – a primary school teacher who she sometimes had a cup of tea with when they bumped into each other. She outstretched a shaking hand and felt gravel. She tried to lift her head, but Sophie placed her fingers firmly on her chest and told her to rest. She was lying on the ground, she realised now, and the hard, stony surface beneath her felt suddenly uncomfortable.

‘You just fainted, I think’ Sophie said. ‘It’s okay, you’re okay. Just lie down and get your breath back.’

Lucy opened her eyes again and looked down at her muddy running legs and running shorts. She remembered jogging from her house, to the park, feeling good.

‘I was running,’ she told Sophie.

‘I guessed!’ Sophie smiled at her.

‘I’m okay,’ Lucy protested, trying again to sit up.

‘I’m not sure that you are,’ Sophie said, kindly. ‘Lucy, we need to get you home.’

‘Yeah, I need to go to work – ‘ Lucy started.

‘You’re not going to work, Lucy, I called your sister from your phone and she’s coming to look after you. She told me once when you first moved in that I could call her if you ever needed her. I thought she was just being an over-protective sister, but it turns out you did need her after all!’

Lucy was suddenly, fiercely angry with Sophie for calling Claire. It was a ridiculous over-reaction. She began to argue again that she was fine, pulling her weight up with her arms, as she felt her heart pound and her eyes fill with sparkles, her head becoming heavy.

Lucy woke this time on her own sofa, wrapped in her duvet as she had been the night before. From the kitchen she could hear the sounds of cupboards being opened and closed, someone boiling a kettle, fetching mugs. Claire appeared in the room with two cups of steaming tea and Lucy felt tears running down her cheeks at the sight of her older sister.

‘Hey you! It’s okay,’ Claire said, handing her a warm mug and sitting next to Lucy on the sofa. She smelled of expensive perfume. ‘Before you start panicking, I’ve called work, they’re fine. They know where you are and no one’s cross, okay?’ Claire blew over her tea to cool it. ‘Lucy, I’m worried about you, fainting like that. And you’re so thin. Is this why you’ve been ignoring my calls?’

Lucy knew she’d lost weight recently; her clothes were hanging from her collarbones and hipbones slightly, but, if she was honest, she liked it. She saw it as an achievement; she got a boost from feeling hungry and thin.

‘I can go in this afternoon,’ Lucy began.

‘It’s 4pm, Luce,’ Claire set her tea down on the stained wooden coffee table Lucy had picked up from a flea market in East London. ‘You’re not well. You need to rest now and later we’ll talk about everything else.’ Lucy didn’t know what Claire was referring to by ‘everything else’; she sipped her tea, closing her eyes as she drank.

‘Scott,’ she said, ‘I need to call Scott.’

‘Sophie, called him first,’ Claire replied. ‘After she saw you faint on the street, she came and helped you. You’re lucky she was there, that she saw you. Anyway, Scott couldn’t come, he’s too busy at work, so she called me.’

Lucy saw Claire look away as she finished her sentence and sensed there was more to this story. It felt, suddenly, acutely clear in her mind. Scott didn’t want to come. Scott had had enough of her dramas and wanted out. Her mind ran through the last few weeks and how badly she’d treated him. When she thought of his nice face and his sensible apartment, and his Jo Malone diffusers, she realised again that she didn’t truly want any of it.

‘He’s coming over to see you this evening,’ Claire said, and Lucy knew instinctively that it would be their goodbye. She thought about what things of his she’d need to pack up for him, ready for him to take away. Not much: a toothbrush, some clothes, a toy she’d bought him as a gift from her girls’ holiday to France in the summer. She felt a pang of guilt at the thought of that holiday and the night she had spent with the handsome Frenchman after too many champagne cocktails. How she’d bought the silly toy the next day with a raging hangover and a familiar sense of shame at what she’d done. She’d not been a very nice girlfriend to Scott; it was time to let him go.

When Lucy opened her eyes again, it was dark outside her heavy cream curtains, and Claire had turned on a lamp by her sofa, sending a warm orange glow through the room. Scott was on his way over. Claire had spoken to him and told him Lucy would be ready for him at 8pm. Lucy looked at her phone. It was 7:45pm and she had four text messages, which she couldn’t face reading. She got up from the sofa, her legs weak and her body aching slightly in a way she found strangely comforting, like proof of her own existence. In her bedroom she found a dress to pull over her underwear – Claire must have undressed her – and she felt momentarily embarrassed by the picture in her head of the scene. She pulled on thick black tights under the short, loose-fitting grey dress and pulled her hair up into a messy bun. She could see why Claire was worried: her face was drawn and gaunt and the hollows in her cheek, which looked pretty good with the right make-up, looked sickly now they were bare. Her eyes, she could see herself, looked sad, too big and grey. She swept foundation over her skin, then bronzer and applied mascara. The doorbell went and she heard Claire answer, greeting Scott as the stranger he was to her – they‘d been together for almost a year and her older sister had never met him, Lucy realised.

‘I can’t keep doing this,’ Scott said, after he’d checked she was alright.

‘I know,’ she said, plumping a cushion to avoid eye contact.

‘I’m really sorry, Luce,’ he reached out to put a hand on her leg. It felt unexpectedly patronising.

‘You really don’t owe me an apology,’ she said, meeting his eye now. ‘I just don’t think we’re quite right for each other.’

‘Yeah, well, I tried,’ Scott sounded bitter suddenly. ‘Nothing I did was ever enough.’

He stood to leave. Had he expected me to fight to keep him? Lucy wondered, too tired to really care. The relief she felt at the sight of him making his way to leave was proof that this was the right thing.

‘You’ll be okay,’ she said, hugging Scott at the door. She handed him the bag of his things.

‘I’ll drop your stuff off soon,’ he said, pulling away from her. ‘Look after yourself. Oh. And Lucy –’ his face changed. ‘It’s really time you grew up and quit all this drama and nonsense.’

He didn’t look back as he walked to his car.

Lucy knew that in time she’d miss him, miss the familiarity of his niceness, his solidness and his physical company – the guarantee of human contact when she needed it. Claire hadn’t asked questions after Scott left. She’d run Lucy a bath and tidied the flat. She had obviously taken time off her own work as a barrister to look after Lucy and hadn’t thought twice about coming to help her at a moment’s notice. She was so kind, Lucy thought. Kinder than me; I don’t think I would have done it for her. She found Claire in the kitchen, wiping the walls with kitchen roll and cleaner, a wisp of mousey brown hair fallen from her ponytail sticking to the back of her neck with the exertion.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for all of this, for everything…’

‘It’s nothing,’ Claire smiled at her, ‘You’re my little sister, it’s my job!’

Lucy tried, again, to convince her sister that she was fine now, that she didn’t need her to stay. But Claire wouldn’t agree and told her she’d sleep on the sofa and see how she was in the morning. Too tired to argue, Lucy made her way to her bedroom. Claire had clearly tidied it while she was with Scott in the lounge. The bed was made, her clothes folded away, and sitting on the chair at her dressing table was the box she’d been looking through the night before. On top of it there was an overturned photograph, which Lucy picked up. It was the image of Tom from the beach. Lucy thought back to the evening before and realised with plunging horror that she must have fallen asleep with the picture left out. Claire would have found it when she was clearing up and Lucy could imagine what conclusions she’d have drawn from that. She must think I’m pathetic, Lucy thought.

10

Claire stayed almost a week in the end. She took time off work as holiday and moved in with Lucy, cooking her massive carb-laden meals and watching her eat them. They drank sugary tea from Lucy’s vintage harlequin-coloured, gold-rimmed teacups and watched their favourite rom-coms in the evening. In the daytime, with Lucy at work, Claire cleaned her flat from head to toe, polishing the bathroom bin, dusting skirting boards – the works. Lucy protested that she didn’t need to do all this, that she should go home to her own flat, which she shared with her lovely boyfriend Tim in Harrow. Claire insisted, of course, that she wanted to stay. It was clear how worried she was, but she didn’t ask any probing questions, and instead left it to Lucy to get back to strength, hoping she’d start talking at some point.

As Claire packed the few things she’d turned up with after Sophie’s phone call on Wednesday morning, Lucy watched her and her meticulous ways with admiration. She was the most practical and careful person Lucy had ever known. She looked after everything properly, had bags that matched shoes and gave an impression of togetherness that Lucy envied but which made her feel chaotic by comparison.

At the front door, with Tim’s car engine running, Claire pulled Lucy in for a hug and checked for the fortieth time that she was going to be alright.

‘You are in charge of your life,’ she said to Lucy, seriously, ‘And it can be whatever you want it to be.’

Lucy smiled at her sister’s sentimental ideas and nodded in faux agreement. ‘Lucy,’ Claire implored, more seriously than before, forcing Lucy to hold her eye contact. ‘I really mean it. And there’s something I need to tell you,’ she continued, with an expression now that Lucy couldn’t quite place. Was it worry? ‘I called Tom,’ she said, matter-of-factly, but too quickly. ‘I know what’s happening this summer. I know he’s asked you to be there. And I think you should go.’

With that, Claire disappeared into the darkness. The passenger door shut and the horn beeped a goodbye. Lucy stood on her front step, heart racing, tears threatening yet again, and a surge of anger, fear and something that felt like excitement trembling through her body.

11

Hideaway Bay, 2003

‘Do you fancy a surf?’ Tom asked from his seat in the sun on Lucy’s decking.

‘Could do,’ Lucy said, considering whether she could be bothered with the walk back into town and trying to remember if she’d washed her wetsuit.

‘It looks like there are some great waves,’ Tom said, pointing to the sea as if Lucy needed the visual clue. She sat herself on his lap and kissed his hair.

‘We can go if you like, or I might just sit and watch you. I don’t think I want to get wet again and I need to write to Claire.’

‘How is she?’ Tom asked, slipping his hand around Lucy’s waist and taking a sip of orange juice. ‘Or where is she, more to the point?’

‘Thailand now,’ Lucy said, ‘then she’s off to New Zealand, though I’m not sure exactly when.’

‘I don’t really know why you’d need to go to Thailand when you’ve got this on your doorstep,’ Tom said. It was an attitude that grated with Lucy; his lack of desire to leave Cornwall, seemingly ever.

‘I think it’s pretty important to see the world, Tom,’ Lucy said, more sternly than she’d intended. ‘I don’t want to sit around here for the rest of my life.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Tom said, rolling his eyes. ‘I meant why would you go now, in the summer? You want to get away from this place in the winter, when it’s bleak, when everything closes and everyone’s miserable and there’s nothing to do.’

‘Oh, yeah, well, I guess,’ Lucy said, standing up and stretching her arms up to the sun. ‘It is pretty nice here at the moment.’

Tom and Lucy walked back down into town hand in hand, talking from time to time about the café and the season ahead. Bookings were looking good according to the hotel owners and the campsite was set to be busy. Lucy knew the café struggled over the early months of the season to cover its costs. It was a difficult call deciding when to open after the winter and plenty of days saw them make a loss. Lucy worked a shift there from time to time for a bit of cash and she felt guilty taking her wages at the end of a day when they’d only served half a dozen cups of tea and a handful of toasted teacakes. The summer itself was a different ballgame, of course. The whole town exploded into life from late June, especially when the weather was good. The campsite at the very edge of the beach brought in a university crowd, which spent plenty of money in the pubs and on surf-hire, while the upmarket hotels dotted along the cliffs, with their sweeping sea views and elegant furnishings, attracted the kind of guests that the town really needed, the guests that spent a small fortune on food and drink, souvenirs and clothes, hair and beauty appointments, and, well, just about anything. One of the most contentious issues in the town was that of development, with frequent proposals from huge corporations wanting to build super-resorts and massive hotel complexes in the green spaces that still existed around Hideaway’s cliff tops. The divide of opinion was pretty simply split between the businesses who would profit hugely from the increase in footfall year-round and the business owners who feared their own hotels, B&Bs and apartments simply wouldn’t match up to the new wave of developments. The latter tried to scare residents into believing that holidaymakers who came for the big resorts being proposed would simply sit in their complexes and spend all their money right there, that very little would trickle into the town. Lucy could see both sides. Tom was adamantly against the whole idea. His issues were more philosophical than the majority of the objectors’ issues. He simply didn’t want Hideaway Bay sold to the highest bidder. He didn’t want the feel of the place changed. Lucy was coming round to his way of thinking more and more this year. The spring they’d just had in Hideaway had felt so blissful and easy, the town was in good spirits, the weather was amazing and the whole place had just felt positive since the New Year. It would be a shame for anything to compromise that.

‘So has Claire met anyone?’ Tom asked. He was nosey about people’s love lives; it was a trait that always surprised Lucy.

‘I don’t know,’ Lucy said, ‘I doubt she’d tell me. Anyway, I’m sure she’s far too busy using her time more productively. You know what she’s like, she’s already done a yoga course and some kind of meditation retreat. She’s hardly living the gap-year dream, is she!’

Tom laughed. It was true that Claire was the more straightforwardly sensible of the two sisters. Even their mum wondered where her eldest daughter had inherited such a level head. Lucy’s family were go-getters. Her dad could seem like a straight-laced finance-type, but that was just how he made his money. And boy, did Steven make his money. When he was in Hideaway he was always on the go – surfing, sailing, windsurfing, kayaking. And their family holidays were legendary. They never seemed to do anything anyone might consider normal. They’d be hiking some mountain with Richie strapped to Steven’s back, or combining a safari trip with aid work in South Africa. Lucy, of course, considered this pretty normal – it was what she’d always known.

‘I wish she would meet someone,’ Lucy said, after thinking about it. ‘It might lighten her up a bit. Even her emails are written like A-level essays. It sounds like she needs to drink a few cocktails and let her hair down.’ She smiled to herself at the unlikely image.

‘Maybe she’ll surprise you,’ Tom said, as they reached the beach. ‘Talking of A levels, are you still sticking with your subjects?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Lucy replied, not wanting to talk about it. Thinking about going back to school in September did not fill her with joy.

‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it all, actually,’ Tom said, looking down at the floor. Lucy could sense his nerves.

‘About what? A levels?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were set on sciences in case you want to do marine biology.’

‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘It’s just, I’ve been thinking about it all and I don’t really think it’s right for me.’

‘Oh, right,’ Lucy replied. ‘You seemed so set, I’m surprised. What do you think you’ll do instead? I suppose you’re good at English, maybe you could wait until you get your results in a few months and decide from there –’

’– no, I mean,’ Tom hesitated, making Lucy nervous too now. ‘I mean, I don’t think I’m going to go back at all. I don’t think I’m going to do my A levels. I don’t think I need them.’‘What?’ Lucy said, raising her voice in disbelief. ‘That’s ridiculous. Good one. Good luck convincing your parents with that.’

‘They agree,’ Tom said, kicking a line of sand ahead of them. ‘I’m going to get more involved with the businesses. I’m going to help them out. They don’t want to do all this forever and it will all be mine one day anyway, so –’

’– so you’ll just give up on anything else at the age of sixteen and decide to stay here for the rest of your life? Are you fucking crazy, Tom? You’ll have no options at all.’

‘I know that’s how you see it, Luce,’ he said as she pulled her hand away.

‘This isn’t what we talked about,’ she said, quietly, feeling foolish now. ‘I thought we were going to get our A levels and then travel, you know, actually do something. Why did you let me talk about all that when you were planning to just sit here in Cornwall and work in a fucking café?’

‘We can still do that,’ Tom said, reaching for her hand again. She tugged it away from him.

‘Yeah, or we can say that we will and then end up not doing it, because you’ll never be able to tear yourself away from this place,’ Lucy spat at him. ‘You’re pathetic sometimes, Tom, a massive fucking let-down.’

‘Lucy!’ he called after her as she walked away, rage burning her cheeks.

12

London, 2010

Lucy examined her freshly dyed, chest-length blonde hair, curled from the midsection, and reapplied her peach lip gloss in the mirror of the ladies’ loos. The last show in this long-running series of Cook My Dinner really did feel like cause for celebration. The eighteen-week run had been a particularly stressful one, with fallouts between Spectrum and the broadcaster leading to plenty of unpleasant meetings and phone calls that Lucy was often caught in the middle of. The show was one of Spectrum’s trademark productions and they’d been making it at their onsite studios for almost six years, with a variety of different presenters. The current ‘talent’ was a particularly difficult character, Gareth Bell, a former Michelin-starred chef who’d fallen into disrepute years before following a tabloid scandal involving cocaine and prostitutes, and who Emma had whole-heartedly believed she could rehabilitate onto daytime TV. He was also incredibly cheap to book, which was always appealing to Emma, but the relationship hadn’t worked out quite as she’d hoped and his tendency for arriving on set half cut had caused some challenging production issues. He was sticking around for the wrap party tonight and Lucy had been tasked with checking this with him earlier in the day. From what she could tell, he was already halfway drunk and it was only 7pm. His speech would be interesting.

The show’s daily guest was also due to stay for the celebrations. Warren and Charlie had gone all out for the last show in the series and had found someone who wasn’t an obscure soap character, or someone Lucy needed to Google (you NEVER ask a booker who the name on the board actually is). Today’s guest was Lawrence Shield, a member of chart-topping boy band The Team, and the most famous one at that. Emma was embarrassingly excited that Lawrence was staying for the party and hadn’t left him alone. She was still fawning over him as Lucy left the toilets and headed to the bar. She ordered a pineapple martini, which came in a plastic glass, decorated in carnival-coloured circles and finished with an umbrella. She had hardly touched alcohol since the fainting incident and had expected to feel better for her abstinence. The lack of hangovers had been a nice break, but other than that, she just missed the taste of wine and cocktails; the pineapple martinis were going down well. Lucy felt a hand on her back and turned to see Helen from the edit standing nervously behind her.

‘Hey, Helen,’ Lucy smiled. ‘You okay?’ Lucy wasn’t sure if she’d spoken to Helen properly before. She’d said hello a few times whilst she was up in the edit running errands for Emma, but couldn’t picture Helen outside of the dark suites at all.

Helen had dressed up for the party and was wearing a calf-length leather dress and studded jacket. Lucy hadn’t noticed her gothic style before.

‘I’m, um, I’m a massive Teamer,’ Helen looked at the floor as she spoke.

‘Sorry?’ Lucy replied. ‘You’re a what?’

‘Oh,’ Helen laughed nervously, shifting her weight from foot to foot. ‘It’s what we call ourselves, ‘teamers’, The Team’s super-fans.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Lucy replied, bemused. ‘That’s cool.’

‘I wondered if you think it’d be possible to get a picture with Lawrence?’ Helen looked up at Lucy now, hopefully.

‘Oh, of course!’ Lucy replied. ‘I can’t see that being a problem. Just go and ask him, he’s lovely.’

‘I can’t,’ Helen’s eyes returned to the floor. ‘Please, would you ask for me? I’m too nervous.’ Lucy looked at Helen and felt a patronising pity for her. She was a large girl, probably the only girl at the party bigger than a size ten; Emma oversaw the recruitment at Spectrum and heavily policed what she called ‘the look’. Lucy wondered how Helen had slipped through the net and immediately hated herself for the thought. Helen had never been part of team drinks, team evenings out or any socialising at all as far as Lucy could remember. Maybe she’d never wanted to, but had she ever been asked? She’d probably worked there for a year now and Lucy had never spoken more than three words to her. She didn’t fit in with the group Lucy hung out with and so Lucy had never made any effort to include her. Never invited her to join them.

‘Of course I can ask him,’ she smiled at Helen again earnestly and hoped suddenly that Helen didn’t hate her for being the cliquey bitch she’d probably always seemed to her.

Lucy was used to politely interrupting Emma’s conversations and edged her way in to the group Emma was talking to, waiting for an opportune moment to get her boss’s attention.

‘Emma?’ she spoke quietly as the conversation continued among the rest of the group. ‘Helen from the edit would love a picture with Lawrence. Can I borrow him for a minute?’

‘Who?’ Emma replied at full volume, not taking her eyes off Lawrence.

‘Helen,’ Lucy repeated, ‘she works in edit one.’

‘I have no idea who you mean,’ Emma insisted, and Lucy recognised the rising irritation in her tone.

‘That’s her, over there, in the, er, black dress,’ Lucy gestured towards Helen, who was still at the bar, trying to look away.

‘Oh, dear God,’ Emma turned back and looked at Lucy. ‘How on earth did she get a job here? She doesn’t have the Spectrum look at all.’ Emma laughed at her own cruelty. ‘She’s a beast!’ she exclaimed, causing the rest of the group to stop their conversations momentarily before laughing awkwardly.

‘She is not to come anywhere near Lawrence,’ she whispered fiercely to Lucy. ‘She is not to speak to him, she is not to ask for an autograph. I will not have her embarrassing me. What the hell is she wearing? She looks like an S&M hippo!’ This line gave Emma enormous pleasure and she began laughing again.

‘Emma…’ Lucy began, but Emma’s attention had turned again to Lawrence, who she was giggling at now like a school girl. Fury burned on Lucy’s cheeks. How could she walk back to Helen now? What was she supposed to say? She ducked back out of the group and walked in the opposite direction, away from Helen, who she knew must be looking at her, wondering what was going on. Lucy ordered another two pineapple martinis at the mobile bar, downing one on the spot. Out in the cool air of the car park, she took a cigarette from Charlie’s outstretched pack. She told Charlie what had just happened with Emma and Charlie laughed, rolling her eyes. It wasn’t the reaction Lucy had expected.

‘It’s awful, Charlie,’ she said, seriously. ‘What do I say to the poor girl? It’s vile. I can’t bear it.’ Lucy could feel her pitch rising with frustration. ‘Lawrence is lovely. He wouldn’t mind at all,’ she went on. ‘Just because Emma is a nasty bitch, why shouldn’t Helen have a picture with him? Because she’s fat? Because she’s not ‘got the Spectrum look’?’ Lucy couldn’t contain the anger in her words. ‘Woah! Calm down,’ Charlie had picked up Lucy’s martini and was holding it out for her.

‘I don’t want a fucking drink,’ Lucy stood up, ‘I want to work somewhere where this shit doesn’t happen.’ She walked back into the party, slipping though groups of drunk staff and found Helen still at the main bar.

‘Lawrence,’ Lucy tapped him on the shoulder and he spun around with a huge grin on his face towards her, his nose stud glinting in the disco lights. ‘Juicy Lucy!’ he beamed and put an arm around her – he had clearly been making the most of the champagne top-ups. Emma shot Lucy a puzzled look, a nervous smile on her face. A mixture, Lucy imagined, of being impressed by her rapport with the celebrity, and jealousy that she was getting his attention. Then Lucy saw Emma spot Helen standing behind her before her face dropped to a thunderous look of disbelief.

‘This is my colleague,’ Lucy used her spare arm to pull Helen into the circle next to Lawrence. ‘She’s a massive fan, a ‘Teamer’, no less, and she’d love a photo,’ Lucy continued, pulling her iPhone from her pocket, waiting for Helen to speak. Lawrence took his arm off Lucy’s shoulder and turned to his super-fan. Helen was still looking at the floor and was now bright red and sweating slightly under the lights, her heavy black eye make-up smudged under her lower eyelashes.

‘Absolute pleasure to meet you, um–’

‘– Helen,’ she finally spoke in a tremble, ‘I’m Helen.’

‘Well, the pleasure is all mine, Helen,’ Lawrence took her hand and kissed it. Helen looked as though she might faint.

‘Right, let’s get that picture,’ Lucy stood back and Helen and Lawrence looked at her iPhone as she counted down and hit the button.

‘Beautiful, a keeper!’ she exclaimed, as Lawrence removed his arm from Helen and promptly turned back to the group, duty done. Lucy purposefully avoided Emma’s gaze, which she could feel burning into her skin, and walked away, heart thumping, with a giddy Helen.

Upstairs at her desk Lucy sat in her chair, her heart still pounding and her throat dry with realisation. She looked at her things on her desk and tried to work out how big a box she’d need for all her stuff. She couldn’t allow herself to think about what she’d just done, how she had defied and undermined Emma. She knew her career at Spectrum was over. Tears ran down her cheeks as she opened drawers and removed notebooks, make-up, flip-flops and piled them on her desk. What the hell have I done, she thought, and held her head in her hands, alone in the production office, as the party boomed and cheered through the floor beneath her.

13

Hideaway Bay, 2003

Lucy sat in her garden drinking a glass of her mum’s white wine; a crisp, cool chardonnay that helped immediately to take the edge off her anger. She glanced at the expanse of water on the horizon, glittering in the sunlight, and wondered if Tom had gone surfing after all. He probably had, she figured. Almost nothing could keep Tom out of the water, certainly not an argument with her. He’d surf right up until a minute or two before he was due at work in the café. It drove his mum crazy – though Sarah never really got angry with anyone and she would just tell Tom off affectionately. The issue of their future plans had been simmering for a while, really, Lucy knew that. She had always suspected he intended to stay in Cornwall for the rest of his life, but she’d never expected him to be so stupid as to write off any other prospects at all by not even getting his A levels. She tried to push the thought of it all from her mind as she felt her anger rise again, her heartbeat quickening. She took another mouthful of wine and reached for her phone to see the time. It was 3pm and she had an empty afternoon ahead of her now, with no Tom to entertain her. She wondered if she should call Nina, but remembered she was back together with Kristian, fully loved-up and therefore wholly unavailable to anyone else for at least the next few days – until their next argument. She put her phone down on the cushioned sun lounger and lay back, closing her eyes and feeling the sun on her eyelids. She wondered when her parents and Richie would be home. She remembered her mum telling her about having people over for dinner this evening and needing to cook. Lucy worried momentarily whether the wine she’d opened was meant for this evening’s guests, but sat up just enough to take another sip anyway.

The wine had calmed Lucy, as she’d hoped it would. A bead of sweat ran down her face from her hairline and she put her hand to her arm to check she wasn’t burning. The sun on her skin felt good, healing somehow. The campsite at the bottom of the valley was already starting to fill up, more and more colourful tents popping up each day. Lucy could see a corner of the site from the bottom of her garden. She remembered the nights the four of them had spent camping there, the fun they’d had lighting a fire and drinking cheap wine into the night. Her parents had never caught her out on those secret nights away, when she’d told them she was staying at Nina’s house. There was no way they’d have allowed her to stay with Tom in a tent when she was sixteen, and for good reason, as it turned out. Lucy remembered her argument with Tom all over again, but this time the wine fuzzed the anger and she felt something more like sadness. She picked up her phone to text him.

Sorry, shouldn’t have said some of what I said. I was upset. I love you x

A car pulled up in the driveway at the front of the house. Lucy heard the gravel crunch and the car engine switch off. Her parents must be back, she thought, hoping her mum wouldn’t try and rope her into helping with dinner preparations. She hated how her mum used her like a kitchen porter, only delegating the worst jobs and getting all shouty like a professional chef from TV cookery shows. She would make an excuse, she thought, say she had plans with Tom. In fact, she would go and see Tom. She’d apologise. She was more likely to convince him to stay on at college by being nice to him about it. She should have thought of that earlier. He was so stubborn once he’d made a decision; the more she fought it the more he’d stand firm. She was going to have to be cleverer than that.

‘Lucy?’ an unfamiliar female voice sounded from a few feet away, walking towards her.

Lucy sat up and turned around to see a man and woman in smartish office clothes walking towards her. She’d never seen them before.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Can I help you?’

She felt suddenly self-conscious in her shorts and bikini top and reached for her t-shirt to pull across her stomach.

‘Lucy, is your sister here with you? Claire?’ they asked, faces unsmiling. Lucy began to feel uneasy.

‘No, she’s in Thailand. Why?’ she asked, her own voice sounding strange.

‘We need to talk to you, Lucy,’ the woman said, standing close to her now, looking like she might sit down on the lounger next to her. ‘But we need to talk to you with an adult present.’

‘Well my parents aren’t home,’ Lucy explained. ‘They’ll be back any minute, I guess, but I haven’t heard from them.’

The woman glanced across at the man next to her, with an expression Lucy couldn’t place.

‘What is it?’ Lucy said. ‘I’m sixteen. What is it? You’re scaring me now.’

The woman sat on the lounger next to Lucy and up close Lucy realised she was younger than she’d first thought. She could only be a few years older than Claire. Lucy studied her as she tucked a chunk of her short blonde crop behind her ear. Then the man, too, sat down awkwardly on the lounger.

‘I’m Geraldine Slade,’ the lady said, quietly but firmly, ‘I’m a police officer and – would you like to go inside, somewhere a little more private?’

‘This is private,’ Lucy said, confused; their garden was huge, walled and not overlooked from any angle. What an odd thing to say, she thought.

‘Your parents and your brother were sailing today, from Newquay,’

‘I know,’ Lucy said, as her mind raced. She felt suddenly that she might be sick.

‘We don’t know exactly what happened yet but there was an accident, Lucy, I’m so sorry – ‘

‘What?’ Lucy’s voice shook, fear creeping through her body. ‘What are you saying to me?’

‘It was a very serious accident, Lucy. They’re in the hospital now; they’re doing everything they can for them.’

‘What the fuck are you saying to me?’ Lucy said, standing, her body shaking. This was the craziest, sickest thing anyone had ever done to her. She had no idea what was going on.

‘It’s a lot to take in,’ Geraldine said calmly, ‘ And you need someone with you. Is there someone we can call? An adult?’

Lucy couldn’t think. Everything was failing her; she thought she might pass out.

‘My parents, my brother?’ she said, slowly. ‘Are they going to be okay?’ The words sounded ridiculous. Of course they would be okay. There was no other option. The whole scene felt like an evil joke.

‘I’m so very sorry. We’ll know more at the hospital,’ the man replied. ‘We’re here to help you in whatever way we can. But the first thing you need to do is call someone who can come and be with you here; someone you trust.’

‘I need to speak to Claire,’ Lucy said, numb, the words hollow in her mouth.

‘We can arrange that,’ Geraldine said, softly. ‘Have a think about who I can call for you now, to come over here and travel to the hospital with you, or take you somewhere else – whatever you want.’

Lucy scanned through her brain for an appropriate response and found nothing. There was nothing in her that could cope with this. She couldn’t even process it. The words kept repeating over and over and over. In the pit of her stomach a sense of doom settled; a fear that she was never, ever, going to be okay ever again. Nothing could ever be alright if something happened to her family. They just needed to come home, that’s all that could happen. She just needed her parents and Richie to come home, like normal, and she’d be so grateful and it would all be okay. How could an afternoon so beautiful become such a nightmare?

She felt a hand on her arm and the reality crushed her all over again; her legs folded and she collapsed back onto the lounger.

‘Call Tom’s mum,’ Lucy said, tears pouring from her eyes, her body stone-cold in the scorching heat, her heart threatening to stop beating all together. She just needed to get to the hospital and find out how they were going to make this all better.

‘Call Sarah.’

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