Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things.

      Saki

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

      Chapter Twenty-Two

      Chapter Twenty-Three

      Chapter Twenty-Four

      Chapter Twenty-Five

      Chapter Twenty-Six

      Chapter Twenty-Seven

      Chapter Twenty-Eight

      Chapter Twenty-Nine

      Chapter Thirty

      Chapter Thirty-One

      Chapter Thirty-Two

      Chapter Thirty-Three

      Chapter Thirty-Four

      Chapter Thirty-Five

      Chapter Thirty-Six

      Chapter Thirty-Seven

      Chapter Thirty-Eight

      Chapter Thirty-Nine

      Chapter Forty

      Chapter Forty-One

      Chapter Forty-Two

      Chapter Forty-Three

      Chapter Forty-Four

      Chapter Forty-Five

      Chapter Forty-Six

      Chapter Forty-Seven

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Also by Sarah Salway

      Copyright

       About the Publisher

       You can tell me anything, she said.

       And I believed her.

       I only have your best interests at heart, my biology teacher told me. It’ll go no further unless I consider you at risk.

       There are moments when you really can stop time. Make a decision to go one way, and not the other. There’s just a sense, a prickle on the skin, something impossible to describe, that tells you you’re at the crossroads. But it’s only when you’re too far along to change direction that you realise you ever had a choice.

       So, lulled by the warmth in the biology lab and the novelty of an adult really listening to me, I spent the afternoon telling her stories. In the cosy web I wove there, I lost sense of where I began and she ended. We seemed to be in it together; my words pulling expressions out of her face that made me want to carry on, to take the two of us higher and higher up a ladder of emotions. I was filled with something outside myself. I didn’t have to think, to struggle and stumble in the middle of a sentence for a thought or a word, not even once. I was floating. It was only when we reached the top that I realised how exhausting it can be to empty yourself out.

       When it was time to go home I stood in the doorway, not wanting to cross the threshold back into the outside world.

       ‘I can come here again, can’t I?’ I asked. ‘We can do this another time, can’t we?’

       I was watching the tears falling down her cheeks. They looked like icicles dropping off her chin. It made me want to laugh, but I was proud too. Proud that I’d made her feel that much. On the wall behind her there was a poster of a dissected human heart. All the tubes coming from it were left dangling in mid air. Cut off with a bloodless straight line.

       By the time I got home, she’d already spoken to the headmistress who had rung my mother, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Not even the blood that pumped through our bodies, not even the air we all breathed. Everything had become thick, hard to absorb. It iced up the inside of our throats until we longed for any kind of warmth, even the fiercest hottest words that burn you in hell. At least they would melt the silence.

       That’s how I learnt the power of stories.

       Chapter One

      ‘How did you meet?’

      People always ask you this when you become part of a couple. It’s throat-clearing, before they get to the really interesting stuff which normally involves what they think about things, or how they met their partners, or just anything about them really.

      Miranda was different though. She was only about a year older than I was, but was already a hairdresser in the salon near to the stationery shop where I worked. We met in the street where we were both forced to smoke our cigarettes. We were furtive, trying to look as if we didn’t mind being outside. ‘We’re fag hags,’ I said to her when we got to know each other better, but she never found this as funny as I did.

      ‘You’d look lovely with your hair thinned,’ she said to me the first day, after we’d been shuffling round and nodding at each other from our respective doorways for a bit.

      I stubbed my cigarette out quickly and went back inside. I hoped I had smiled at her too but I’ve been told that sometimes when I try too hard, or am taken by surprise, my attempts at a friendly expression come out as grimaces. Ones I can’t get rid of for a long time afterwards. My mouth gets so dry, it’s as if my face has frozen with all my teeth bared.

      Her words stayed in my head though, and a bit later I nipped into the toilet to look in the mirror. I brushed the hair away from my face and practised being normal. I pinched the ends of my hair with my fingers to try to understand what she meant.

      I tried to see myself as Miranda must have seen me.

      Bright.

      Interesting.