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First published in 2017 by
Andersen Press Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
www.andersenpress.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

The right of Catherine Barter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

ONE

So I went to live with Danny. And that’s the end of a story. But it’s a story I don’t remember because I was three years old. I probably cried for my mother a lot but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember anything about that time except for when I try and think about it sometimes and I’ll remember a blue carpet. That’s it, a blue carpet – and then there’s nothing else, and then there was Danny. I was three, and he was twenty-two. It was twelve years ago.

‘Your brother is amazing,’ my friend Teagan says to me sometimes. ‘Don’t you think he’s amazing?’

I think he’s OK. I don’t think he ever had much choice in anything. I know there were long conversations with social workers and relatives and who knows who else, including the one where my aunt and uncle told Danny that I should live with them in Australia, and then he threw them out and then they called the police: that’s a pretty good story, even though Danny never wants to tell it. Apart from them, there probably wasn’t a queue down the street of people wanting to adopt me. So in one blurred memory there was a blue carpet, and next and always after that there was the flat in Hackney: wooden floorboards and the big, grey sofa and the lift up to the fourth floor where we lived; and there was Nick, as well, who apparently liked my brother enough that he didn’t complain that he now came with a three-year-old. He must have really liked him.

This is what I write for my English homework one day: the assignment title is ‘Family Portrait’. I get an A, and my teacher writes, Very experimental! and draws a smiley face.

TWO

When I was five or six or something my brother used to hold both my hands and let me run up his legs and I’d use the balance of his weight to do a backwards somersault through his arms. Then I’d hit the floor and say, Again, again, again.

Teagan is doing cartwheels outside the school gates. That’s what makes me think of this. I’m sitting on a bench with her violin case propped against my knees, waiting for her to stop. We had hockey last period, and Teagan hasn’t bothered to change out of her games kit, so she’s cartwheeling over the cold concrete pavement in her tracksuit. Teagan’s the shortest girl in our class and I think this is why she’s good at cartwheels, which I haven’t been able to do for years. I’m too gangly, all flailing limbs and no balance. Also, I don’t like being watched.

Oliver Cohen, sitting next to me, tells her: ‘I think you should stop, Teagan. You’re going to break your arm or something.’

‘All right, thanks, Dad,’ says Teagan. She stands up, face flushed, and starts brushing the gravel off her palms. ‘How many was that?’ she says to me, slightly out of breath. ‘The first one doesn’t count. I didn’t land properly.’

‘Six, I think,’ I say. ‘Here.’ I give her violin back as she sits down, and I start searching for my gloves, which are balled up somewhere in my bag beneath all my overdue library books. The sun’s out but it’s the end of January and still cold, dirty slush on the ground from when it snowed last week, and I came to school without my coat.

Ollie’s looking at some guy across the road, who’s sitting on a bench like ours, all on his own, just watching everybody leaving school. He’s got one of those bland, familiar faces, and Ollie says, under his breath, ‘That guy looks a lot like the East End Bomber, if anyone’s interested.’

‘Every old, white guy looks like the East End Bomber,’ Teagan says. ‘That’s the whole point. That’s why they can’t find him.’

This is true. They have one grainy photo of the East End Bomber. (‘I wish they’d call him something else,’ my brother keeps saying. ‘What if he decides to branch out?’) It’s from the CCTV outside a Tesco’s in Shoreditch where last week he left a brown paper bag, the kind they give you if you buy coffee and a sandwich to take away, but with a bomb inside, or an improvised explosive, or whatever you want to call it. Some home-made thing with a bunch of wires. Three of them so far, all left lying around supermarkets in East London, like litter. They say there’s no technical reason why they don’t work. They say the next one probably will. Everybody’s wringing their hands because they can’t find him and because he’s white so nobody knows why he’s doing it. They don’t say this exactly but it’s implied.

‘That’s it,’ Danny will say, watching the news. ‘We’re leaving. We’re moving somewhere safe. Everybody make a list of the safest places they can think of.’

Ollie starts picking at his nail varnish and then sighs and leans back and folds his arms and looks sad, which is his default expression. He wears these canvas shoes to school and they’re soaking wet from the snow. So no wonder he’s sad, I guess.

Ollie got transferred into our class last week. He got into a fight with another boy in our year, supposedly, although it’s honestly hard to imagine Ollie fighting anybody. He spends most of his time on his own in the art room or the IT lab, looking sensitive and complicated and drawing pictures of birds. Or now, since he’s switched classes, hanging out with me and Teagan, since nobody else wants to talk to him. He’s mostly silent so this is fine with us. Teagan likes the stuff he draws. He did a perfect sketch of her violin, in black and white with colours radiating out of it, and gave it to her. She has it sellotaped on the inside of her locker.

I find my gloves – green with little embroidered stars, a birthday present from Nick’s mum, whose presents are always related to keeping me warm – and pull them on.

I’m waiting for Nick to pick me up, which happens basically never, because he hates driving and only takes the car into the city so he can complain about it.

‘You don’t have to wait,’ I say to Teagan, but I know she will, because lately she’s developed some weird sort of crush on Nick, and will take any opportunity to catch sight of him.

She shakes her head. ‘I’m not. I’ve got violin. I’m waiting for that.’ And she digs her hands into the pockets of her tracksuit top and squints up the road.

It was my birthday two weeks ago. A card from my aunt Niamh turned up yesterday. Her cards are always late, but then who knows how long it takes for post to get here from Australia. Even though she hasn’t seen me since I was three, she still sends me birthday cards and Christmas presents every year. She writes things like:

Dear Alena,

We wish you a very Happy Birthday and hope we will be able to see you soon. Even though we are far away, if you ever need somebody to talk to, or if you are ever having problems at home, please email us or even phone. We are not in touch with your brother so you can talk to us in confidence.

With lots of love from Niamh and Drew.

Nick says that Niamh and my mother didn’t get on and I believe him. Something about the way she never mentions her in the cards she sends. Still, there are probably things she could tell me about her, stories about them growing up, stuff nobody else knows. I think about this sometimes, when the cards turn up.

I actually remember meeting her. Apart from the blue carpet, it’s the only memory I’ve still got from being that young, the only thing that stayed in my brain, stubborn as a weed, when all the memories of my mother just disappeared, emptied out of my head like they weren’t important. Honestly, I’m pretty angry with three-year-old-me about this. Stupid little kid not paying attention to the important stuff, not remembering the right things.

Danny crouching down, telling me not to be shy. We are in a bright room with pictures on the walls. I guess it’s a nursery or a playschool. Niamh is there. It must be the time she came to visit after my mother died. I’ve never met her before. She is coming towards me, holding her arms out, and I start screaming and try to hide behind Danny’s leg. She’s a total stranger and I have the idea that she wants to take me away.

Probably the only reason I remember this is because that fear used to come back to me a lot, in weird nightmares or sometimes just when I was playing on my own or waiting for my brother to pick me up from school: this anxious, awful feeling that somebody I didn’t know was coming to take me away.

Since it turned out that Niamh did want to take me away – all the way to Australia, in fact – I obviously had good instincts back then. She’d never even met me until she turned up for the funeral, Danny says, and she was nice at first, trying to be helpful, and then after a few days she started talking about their home in Melbourne and how her husband Drew had a good job and how there was a garden and it was a good place for a child. Thanks but no thanks, Danny said. Then she turned up at the flat with a lawyer.

Danny makes her sound terrible. They’re both crazy, her and her husband, he’ll say. Both completely batshit. And he’s a racist.

Fine. Except every time I get a card from her I feel a little bad about it because after all, her sister had just died and it probably hurt her feelings that I was frightened of her. I never put these cards in the living room or on the fridge where all the others go, or anywhere that Danny will see them, but he knows she sends them. And I’ve never written or phoned because it seemed disloyal and I never had anything to say anyway.

THREE

‘Who’s the kid in the eyeliner?’ says Nick as I get in the car, throwing my bag on the back seat. My bag is brown and it’s real leather, but old and scratched and very soft, with red lining that’s covered in ink stains from where pens have leaked. I found it in Camden Market last year and persuaded my brother to buy it for me if I cleaned the whole flat including the inside of the fridge. Which I never did, so it was a pretty good deal.

‘No. But he makes all the teachers uncomfortable so they never ask him to take it off.’

Nick runs a Fairtrade coffee shop around the corner from our house and I’ve been trying to get him to employ me.

‘Fine.’ I turn the radio on and then off again. ‘Danny called me twice at lunchtime today. For no reason. Just like, Hey, I’m just checking in.’

Danny’s a little obsessed with the East End Bomber. He sits around reading about it all the time. He hasn’t been working, or he hasn’t been working enough hours that he doesn’t have time to sit around reading conspiracy theories online and sending me text messages giving me random safety tips – don’t get in an unlicensed minicab! – as if there’s ever been an occasion in my life where I’ve gone anywhere in a minicab. I will text him back: OK! He’ll text back: Just read an article. anyway have a good day. So, thanks.

My brother has had a lot of jobs. He used to write for the Hackney Standard. Then he worked for a charity, researching and writing long reports that went up on their website. For a while he did something in local television. Then he worked for a local politician. He wrote long reports for her, as well. But nobody ever voted for her, and eventually she gave up. That was a few months ago. Then he went back to the Standard. Freelance, he said. I don’t know what that means, other than that he seems to be at home a lot in the middle of the day.

Nick has been running the coffee shop the whole time. The flat is always full of coffee samples. I can’t smell coffee without smelling home.

There’s a lot of ways that Nick and Danny are totally different. Like that Nick gets up at six a.m. and wears nice shirts and does complicated things with his hair, whereas Danny rolls out of bed five minutes before he has to be somewhere and his morning grooming routine basically involves trying not to spill coffee on his shirt. And Danny gets stressed out all the time and always thinks terrible things are going to happen, whereas a word people like to use about Nick is that he’s unflappable. But then Danny is one of the only people who can make Nick laugh, and he can do it whenever he wants: like if Nick is in the middle of some super-serious speech over dinner about sustainable agriculture, Danny can still catch his eye and get him to crack up. Which is important, I think.

When we get back to the flat, Danny’s sitting on one of the high stools at the kitchen counter, with paperwork spread out in front of him, Bob Dylan playing on the kitchen stereo. Danny loves Bob Dylan. More than is probably normal. He has all of his music and about twenty hardback books about him, lined up on the shelves behind the TV.

The minute we walk in, he shuts his laptop and starts tidying the counter, gathering all his papers together and shoving them into his bag. ‘Lena, your coat has been lying on the back of the sofa all day,’ he says to me. ‘And I’ve had to look at it all day and think, she’s going to freeze to death, and everybody at her school is going to say that it’s because I let her go to school without a coat.’

I dump my bag on the kitchen counter and roll my eyes at him. ‘Are you more worried about me freezing to death or about what people would say about it?’

He gives me a very serious look. ‘I’m more worried about what people would say about it, obviously.’

‘Are you doing more stuff for Mike?’ Nick says, glancing at Danny’s paperwork. ‘You shouldn’t do that unless he’s actually going to pay you properly.’

‘He does pay me properly,’ says Danny. ‘And no, anyway. I’m working on something else.’

‘Since when does Mike not pay me? Mike, our friend, who always gets me work when – you know, he’s not just some random—’

‘Nothing,’ Danny says. ‘Nothing. Just work. I’ll tell you later. Nothing. Anyone hungry? I’ll make dinner.’

FOUR

We’re in the middle of dinner, and I’m trying to pick mushrooms out of my pasta sauce, but it’s too hot and I burn my fingertips.

‘I still like them. I just don’t want to eat a meal entirely made of mushrooms.’

Danny looks between us, wipes his hands on his jeans, leans back in his chair and folds his arms. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘So, Nick, do you remember my friend Leonie?’

‘My friend Leonie that I went to school with. I ran into her the other day. She’s actually – it’s interesting. She’s something like Chief Executive of Southwark Council now. Or Deputy Chief Executive, or something like that. Something pretty high up.’

‘I mentioned that I was looking for work, and she was talking to somebody she knew, and – anyway, so, it’s interesting, but I actually ended up getting offered a job.’

‘No. With someone else. It’s on a campaign.’ Danny very carefully starts twirling a strand of spaghetti round his fork. ‘I suppose you probably remember Jacob Carlisle.’

I don’t know who Jacob Carlisle is, although if Danny has started working for him he’s probably going to lose whatever it is he’s running for. But Nick has gone stone cold silent and they are having some kind of intense staring match.

‘I know how you’re going to feel about this, but it’s working with Jacob Carlisle.’

‘Who’s Jacob Carlisle?’ I say. Nobody answers. ‘Hello. Who’s Jacob Carlisle?’

‘He’s a politician.’ Danny goes back to concentrating on his food. ‘He used to be our local MP. He’s running as an independent candidate for mayor. He hired me as a researcher for his campaign. They liked the stuff I did with Sally.’

‘No. For real. I mean, not that he’s going to win or anything, he just wants to kind of put himself out there and—’

‘Listen,’ says Danny. ‘Before you get on your high horse, just listen. This is going to be full-time for the next four months, and the pay is like – you know, they’ve offered me an actual salary, proper money, not just—’

‘Well, I would hope you got a good price, since you’ve sold your soul.’

‘Mayor of London?’ I say, which is a stupid question but I’m unnerved. Nick and Danny don’t fight, not really, at least not in front of me. They bicker all the time, but you can tell they both enjoy it.

What does happen: sometimes – hardly ever, just sometimes, like for a few seconds – it will seem like they forget that I exist. I’ll be right there in the room and they’ll be talking about something and in this way I can’t really explain, I will just know that they’ve forgotten I’m there: like for a few seconds they think that they have normal lives and no responsibility to anybody but themselves and each other. I notice this sometimes.

Nick is shaking his head. ‘How long ago did this happen? Why are you just announcing this now?’

‘I thought you might have a problem with it, but I obviously shouldn’t have worried.’

I hear the elevator ping as it reaches our floor, and footsteps down the corridor. A door opens and closes. Mrs Segal next door.

‘Look, I need a job,’ Danny says. ‘I need a career. We can’t just eternally live off of coffee and maybe next week I’ll get some freelance, you know, whatever – we can’t. We need to save.’

‘Lena might want to go to university when she’s eighteen, which is not, like, a hundred years away—’

‘Of course you can have it,’ says Nick. He looks at Danny. ‘Right? I don’t know what it sounds like. Probably needs a bit of fixing up.’

‘I had a guitar when I was about fifteen,’ says Danny. ‘And I sold it or gave it to charity or something.’

‘Nope,’ says Nick. ‘You put it in your mother’s garage, and then we put it in storage with everything else.’

‘Which, by the way,’ says Danny, ‘renting that damn storage locker is something else we need to pay for.’

‘Yes,’ says Danny. ‘Let’s go and get it tomorrow. And maybe we can find something in there that we can sell, since I’m expected to be unemployed for the rest of my life.’

‘Everybody knows that he’s a shallow, opportunistic, fear-mongering – he doesn’t have a single conviction in his – everybody knows, Danny. You know.’

‘When you say everybody you mean you and your friends at the coffee shop.’

‘And hardly anybody else has even heard of him, so there’s not exactly a widespread—’

‘Lena.’ Nick turns to me. ‘Do you remember when the council tried to close the coffee shop down?’

‘About five years ago I got into all kinds of trouble because our friend Jacob Carlisle decided that the coffee shop was harbouring extremism because some animal rights organisation held a meeting there once—’

‘They held all of their meetings there, and it wasn’t just the animal rights people, it was those anti-capitalist anarchist whatever—’

‘—and left a few leaflets lying around or whatever and all of a sudden I’ve got some guys from Special Branch accusing me of selling lattes as a cover for all my terrorist activities—’

‘And it was all part of Jacob Carlisle’s Let’s clean up the streets campaign which basically meant Let’s kick out independent business in favour of—’

‘And you acted like Jacob Carlisle personally supervised the whole thing when I’m pretty certain he hadn’t then and still hasn’t even heard of the coffee shop, much less developed some personal animosity towards it.’

‘Well, OK, then, that absolutely absolves you from selling out your community,’ says Nick.

Nick starts cutting up his food into little bits. He’s looking at his plate when he says – under his breath but loud enough that we can both hear – ‘God, I’m just trying to imagine what your mother would think.’

My mother died very suddenly. She had a brain haemorrhage. Or an aneurysm. Something like that. Danny doesn’t talk about her. Any time I mention her at all it’s like a power cut. The lights go out behind his eyes. If I want to know anything about her, I have to ask Nick, and he hardly knew her. He knew her for like a year or maybe even less. Some of the stuff he tells me I think he makes up just to try and make it seem like she was a real person. She isn’t, really, not to me. She’s more like a photograph, or not even that.

Sometimes I pretend that I remember her but I don’t. I say things like, Oh I was playing in the kitchen and she was there reading a book or Oh she used to sing this song to me, when probably she didn’t sing at all, that’s just a stupid idea I got from somewhere, a film or something. When I was little Danny used to ask me, sometimes, stuff like, Do you remember this and What can you remember about that?, almost like a test, and I’d lie and say yes and make things up, because I thought that he wanted me to remember her. I thought it would make him happy, but it didn’t, and anyway he must have known that I was lying. And now we never talk about her at all. Like she never existed.

We definitely don’t just casually bring her up around the dinner table, and Nick already looks like he knows he’s made a mistake, like he’s said something really irreparably terrible.

I scoop up some spaghetti and flinch at the sound my fork makes as it scrapes against the plate. I’m trying to think of something to say to break the silence, but I can’t think of anything, and Danny is screwing up his napkin and dropping it on the table, shoving back his chair and taking his plate to the kitchen.

‘Let’s talk about it later,’ says Danny without looking at us. He dumps his plate in the sink and then walks down the corridor to their bedroom and goes in, slamming the door.

I don’t know if I should just carry on eating or what. ‘Why are you trying to imagine what our mother would think?’ I say, lowering my voice so Danny won’t hear.

‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ Nick says. ‘That was a stupid thing to say. Sorry.’

‘It’s just she’d have hated Jacob Carlisle. She’d have just – politicians like him. You know. She just didn’t have a lot of time for them. She thought they were all the same. That’s all.’

Nick smiles, a little. His eyes are red where he’s rubbed them. ‘Lucky you,’ he says.

FIVE

I look him up, obviously. Jacob Carlisle. After dinner when I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed with my ancient laptop that barely works. On the front page of his website there’s a black-and-white photograph of him writing something down in a notebook, with a phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder, like he was too busy working to pose for an actual portrait. He has short silver hair, but he looks young and healthy and serious. Kind of good-looking, if you like that kind of thing.

There’s only four sections on the website. Who I Am and What I Stand For, My Vision for London, Election News and Get Involved.

Who I Am and What I Stand For has another black-and-white picture of him – this time he’s leaning against a desk with a cup of coffee, laughing. Underneath, it says:

My name is Jacob Carlisle. I’m a lifelong Londoner; I’m a single parent to a teenage son; I’m a marathon runner, a dog lover, and a football fan. I’m a believer in real democracy, and in an era of cynical party politics, I’m a true independent. You may not have heard of me, and my opponents would like to keep it that way, but I am running for Mayor of London and I propose an alternative to ‘business as usual’. I’ll be shutting down the venues that harbour radical and extremist views before they can infect our communities with hatred; making sure that violent crime is swiftly punished, and that chaotic public protests are better controlled. I’ll be ensuring that innocent Londoners are never caught in the crossfire of someone else’s war.

That’s all it says. I start to wonder if nobody on the campaign knows how to run a website, because me and Teagan have done websites for school projects that have more content than this.

I kind of like the idea that the coffee shop might harbour radical views. The walls and windows are covered with flyers and stickers and leaflets campaigning to stop this and start that and vote for that but not for this, and let’s meet here to protest whatever. If you stop and read any of them you realise a lot of them don’t even agree with each other, but Nick will let anybody put stuff up as long as it’s not, quote, against the general ethos of the shop. There’s a feminist book club that meets there once a fortnight, and sometimes people give talks and do book signings for their self-published novels about radical utopias.

But truthfully: the idea that it might infect a community with hatred is pretty funny. It sells milkshakes and mango smoothies and as far as I can tell nobody at the feminist book club has ever even read the book – they just turn up and drink coffee and laugh a lot. I’ve spent almost as much of my life at the coffee shop as I have at home and I feel safe there. I feel calm. If it ever closed down it would be like the end of the world.

If Nick thinks that my mum would have hated this guy then I believe him, but then, what do I know? I have no idea what she thought about anything. The idea that she would hate some politician is interesting. Not earth-shattering or anything, but interesting. It’s specific and human.

There’s a bunch of her old books in the storage locker, but I usually ignore them because I only really like novels, and these all have titles like Women’s Struggle and Global Injustice and Resisting War – the kind of thing that Nick reads, in fact. But I think maybe tomorrow when we go looking for the guitar I’ll flick through them, maybe take one when Danny isn’t paying attention. Look for clues.

Politicians like him, I imagine myself saying sometime, if Jacob Carlisle is ever on the TV. They’re all the same. Danny looking at me like I’m a ghost.

SIX

On Saturday morning they find another bomb. That makes four. This one they have to blow up in a controlled explosion. It’s in Mile End or somewhere. A tired-looking man in a suit is on the television, saying that the investigation is ongoing and that people should be vigilant. Danny and Nick both watch with serious faces.

‘Morning,’ I say, padding towards the kitchen in my slippers. There was a cup of tea by my bed when I woke up but it was already cold. Danny and Nick both have coffee and they look exhausted, like maybe they were arguing all night.

They spend the morning being carefully nice to each other, and to me, until I remind Danny that he said he’d drive me out to the storage locker to get his old guitar, and then he gets annoyed again, and tries to make Nick do it. Danny hates going out there. But Nick has to go in to work, and eventually I persuade my brother that me getting a guitar will lead to the two of us sitting around talking about Bob Dylan all the time, so he sighs and looks at his watch and says, ‘Fine, all right, fine, but we’re making it quick.’

The storage locker is like this vault of treasure. Or: it’s like someone’s mouldy garage filled with broken furniture and sad old children’s toys. They’ve been renting it for years, ever since our mother died and Danny sold her house, and it’s a forty-minute drive so all the stuff just sits there, unwanted, rotting away in the dark because nobody – because Danny – can’t ever commit to getting rid of any of it. It’s mostly stuff that belonged to her, and some of his things from when he was a teenager.

Any time we go there I find something, though. As well as broken furniture there’s photo albums and birthday cards, old clothes and cushions and books with yellow pages and cracked spines, letters, coffee tins filled with beads and necklaces, tins of paint and comics and tennis racquets and bicycle parts. Last time I came home with an old Pentax camera that still works and a portable record player and a stack of old vinyls by folk singers nobody remembers. My room is strewn with all this stuff: weird, contextless ornaments and photos of people I don’t recognise. ‘How can you ever find anything you’re looking for?’ Teagan always says to me when she comes to my house. I can’t.

‘Yes, it is. Come on. Nick’s like, black and white, good versus evil, he’s like—’

‘Yes, Alena. He’s evil. He drowns puppies. Makes children cry. Hates Fairtrade coffee.’

There’s a silence. The traffic is slow and up ahead you can hear sirens, like maybe there’s been an accident.

‘Look, I don’t think he’s a bad person. I don’t think he’s going to destroy the world.’

‘There wasn’t that much on the Internet about him running for mayor,’ I say.

‘Yeah, well,’ says Danny. ‘He’s only just declared his candidacy. And he’s kind of an outsider. He’s an underdog.’

‘Hey, another great campaign slogan,’ Danny says. ‘Jacob Carlisle: why is he even bothering?’

He sighs again. ‘I know you are,’ he says, but he sounds so tired I give up asking, thinking maybe I don’t even want to know. Sometimes you can’t talk to Danny at all.

I reach and turn on the radio. ‘We will not be terrorised,’ a voice is saying. ‘The people of this city are stronger than that.’

SEVEN

We find the guitar; it only has two strings but when I wipe away the dust with my sleeve the body is smooth and unscratched, almost like new.

Danny wants to leave as soon as we find it, but I persuade him to let me look around for a bit.

‘Ten minutes,’ he says. ‘I’m going to go talk to the manager. See if we can get some kind of discount for renting for so long. Don’t touch anything that looks dangerous.’

I prop the guitar up carefully by the door, and squint through the gloom at the rest of the stuff. There’s an old dressing table with a cracked mirror that’s been sitting in the corner for as long as I can remember and on top of it there’s a stack of books. I go over and pick up the top one.

It’s an old paperback with a yellow cover and it says in black letters: A Guide to Disobedience by Ellen Caffrey. It’s tattered and fragile and there’s a coffee ring staining the front. I open it, and on the first page someone has written, To Heather. Thought of you! Happy birthday. With love, Lynn.

Heather is my mother. I try to think of when her birthday is but I realise I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve ever known.

I stare at some woman called Lynn’s loopy, unfamiliar handwriting for a moment, and then flick through the pages of the book, which are dry and delicate and sun-faded, even though it’s been sitting here in the dark for years.

Someone has tucked a postcard into the middle and I take it out. I actually collect old postcards. I used to be organised about it: I have folders at home where they’re all categorised by theme. But all my recent ones are just stuck round my mirror or inside my locker and tucked inside books. You can buy whole boxes of them at charity shops and markets, but I’m selective. I like ones with people in.

I squint at the picture. It’s black and white, and there are lots of women lying on the ground with their arms linked together. Some of the women in the middle have their fists raised in the air. I like the expressions: they look angry and joyful at the same time.

No one has written anything on it, but there’s a few lines of small printed text on the back.

Published by Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures and Hackney Greenham Women: WOMEN MAKE LINKS. Set of eight postcards. Women blockade the Blue Gate, USAF Greenham Common, in July 1983. L-R: Sue Dines, Lynn Wallace, Heather Kennedy, unknown, DeNel James, unknown.

So I turn it back over and look at the third woman from the left, who has her eyes closed and is shouting something at the sky, and who is, apparently, Heather Kennedy.

Then I hear Danny coming back, so I tuck the postcard back inside the book and put the book into my bag. There’s a pair of glasses with black plastic old-fashioned frames on top of the dressing table, too. I pick them up and turn them over in my hands, and then I put them on and turn to look into one of the dusty mirrors leaning against a wall.

‘I can see through these,’ I say, as Danny comes back in. It’s true: the glasses are filthy but even through the grimy lenses everything seems a little sharper. Danny comes and stands behind me, and we look in the mirror.

‘We should get your eyes tested,’ Danny says. Then he glances at what I’m wearing, obviously noticing for the first time today. ‘Lena, are you trying to style yourself as an eccentric character?’ he says. ‘Don’t we ever buy you new clothes?’

I can see what he means. I’m wearing a t-shirt that used to be his, and an old cardigan from a charity shop with leather patches on the elbows. My jeans are washed-out and rolled up at the ankles, and my red Converse are scuffed beyond recognition. My hair is getting way too long and my parting is crooked. A few weeks ago I tried to dye blue streaks in my hair: it didn’t really work because my hair is too dark, but you can still see them, uneven widths and faded indigo, growing out at the roots. The glasses basically complete the look.

He’s not much better, in a t-shirt I happen to know he’s had since before I was born, and jeans splattered with white paint from when he repainted the bathroom. Which is still basically like formal-wear for him.

‘Were these our mum’s?’ I say, carefully, touching the frame of the glasses.

He hesitates, meets my eye in the mirror for a moment. Then he turns away, picks up his jacket from where he’s tossed it on the back of an old chair. ‘I suppose so,’ he says, flatly. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ve got stuff to do.’

I take the glasses off and put them in the front pocket of my bag. I don’t want them to get broken but I reckon if they’ve lasted all this time they must be hard to break.

EIGHT

‘Listen,’ Danny says when we get back in the car, after I balance the guitar carefully on the back seat. ‘I actually have to swing by my new job, just for ten minutes. It’s out of the way but I have to sign some stuff. You can come with me or you can wait in the car, and then we can go and get guitar strings or whatever you need, OK?’

‘Yes,’ I say, although I don’t know what. I’ll think of something. Then I look at him. ‘Are you trying to buy my loyalty?’

Danny takes us to a tree-lined street of big, white terraced houses in west London, and parks on the street outside. There’s a Jacob Carlisle poster in one of the ground-floor windows.

‘Is this his office?’ I look down the road, wondering if anybody famous lives in any of the houses.

‘Yeah.’ Danny turns off the engine, and sits for a moment as it ticks, cooling down. ‘But I think it’s his house. Or one of his houses. Something like that.’

‘Not especially, since you’re dressed like some orphan I just found in the street.’

‘You don’t want to do your Hey, everyone, here’s my sister who I heroically raised single-handedly, aren’t I a great guy routine for them?’

He grins. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not today.’ Getting out of the car, he says, ‘Ten minutes. Don’t get in trouble.’

I’ve never been in trouble a single day in my life but Danny says this to me probably fifteen times a day. He says it to Nick too. I’m going to buy some milk. Don’t get in trouble. What trouble he thinks we’re going to get into I have no idea.

I watch him as he walks up to the front door. He punches a key-code on the security panel, and goes inside.

This isn’t the first time he’s been here, I realise. And for some reason it’s not until then, until I watch the door swing shut behind him, that it occurs to me that he must have been lying to us for a while.

I decide I need a new set of highlighters for school and somehow Danny ends up buying me twenty-five different colours of the most expensive kind, even though, honestly, I don’t highlight that often. Then he finds a music shop for guitar strings and then we stop at a Starbucks for coffee and orange juice. We sit at one of the tables by the window and I watch people going past with their shopping bags and headphones. Across the road there’s two policemen standing in front of the tube station with huge guns and blank expressions; neither of which, I think, will help all that much if someone leaves a home-made bomb in a sandwich bag somewhere, but anyway.

There’s a weird nervousness everywhere, here included; people looking at each other suspiciously while they drink their coffees. I get a message from Teagan. I have literally been in that Mile End Tesco’s 100s of times it’s near where I used to do orchestra, she says, followed a few seconds later by !!!!!!!!

You could be dead right now! I text her back and then feel bad for making a joke.

I send her a photo of myself, looking fake-shocked, and she replies, You’re in Starbucks! I can see the cups! Nick will flip.

This is true. If he knew we were inside Starbucks he’d go mental: he’d deliver his lecture about protecting independent businesses and make me and Danny both read A Very Short Guide to Ethical Living again.

‘Hm?’ Someone’s left a newspaper on the table and Danny’s trying to do the sudoku with a blunt pencil. He can’t do sudoku and is therefore obsessed with it even though it’s basically for old people who don’t want to get Alzheimer’s, which I’ve told him.

He stops what he’s doing and looks up, studies me for a moment. ‘Don’t talk to me about you being seventeen,’ he says. ‘That makes me feel ancient.’

Squeezing my hands together under the table I say, in a rush, ‘So do you know someone called Lynn who was friends with our mum?’

His pencil is pressed against one of the empty boxes but he doesn’t write anything. He goes very still and puts the pencil down and I knew it. I knew he would do this and I don’t even know why I thought it was worth trying because I knew it. Power cut, all systems down, you have trespassed into a forbidden area. ‘I’m sorry?’

I reach under the table for my bag, search around inside and find the book, push it towards him and flip open the first page. He looks at it and I almost snatch it back because, for some reason, I get this idea that he will take it and not give it back. My heart is beating a tiny bit faster than it should. It’s weird how you can still sometimes feel nervous with someone you’ve known every single day of your life.

‘I found it just now. See, it says, Happy Birthday from Lynn inside. I wondered if you—’

‘Alena, I told you not to go hunting through all that shit, all right? It’s not safe in there, all that old furniture is dangerous. There’s nails and god knows what.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘It’s amazing I wasn’t killed when I picked up this book, by a nail—’

I take the book back, hold it on my lap. ‘Happy birthday. With love, Lynn. I thought you might know who she was. There was actually – that’s not the only thing I found. There was also this postcard—’

‘If you want to call them that. She knew a lot of people. Like anybody does.’

Not anybody. I have one friend. Two if you count Ollie. Danny thinks he has friends but they’re mostly people he hasn’t seen in years. He really only spends time with me and Nick.

‘Did you – I mean, you obviously didn’t – did you stay in touch with any of them?’

Danny folds his newspaper over and finishes his coffee, puts the mug down in a let’s go way. ‘No.’

‘We need to get going. We should get home. We shouldn’t be in Starbucks. Nick can sense it.’ He sees the expression on my face and says, with what sounds like a lot of effort: ‘Yes, she had a friend called Lynn. It was a really long time ago. All right? There’s nothing else I can say about it.’

Greenham Common, A Guide to Disobedience, a postcard with a picture of both of them on it – it seems like there’s a lot he could say about it, or someone could say about it. She would have hated Jacob Carlisle, Nick reckons.

But I back off. I drop it. We are having a nice day. I have a guitar. And I want him to think of me like a grown-up, not some kid who’s always nagging him.

Contents

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE