Hanging Hill

steps – the floors, the roof, even the bricks were askew. Not a straight line in sight. In the last year and a half she and Millie had crammed it full of the craft they did in their spare time. The kitchen was stacked with things – the eggcups glazed and studded with paste gems, the little portraits of the pets they’d owned over the years pinned crazily to the walls, the boiled-sweet Christmas stars still hanging in the windows like stained glass, filtering the sunlight in coloured topaz dots. So unlike the house in Sion Road that they’d lived in with Julian.

The living room was at the back, looking out over flat fields, not another building as far as the eye could see. That night Sally left the curtains open to the night and sat curled on the sofa with Steve, sipping wine and staring in disbelief at the TV. Lorne Wood’s death was on the national news and the top story on the local news.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Sally murmured, her lips on the rim of her glass. ‘Lorne. Look at her – she can’t be dead. She was so pretty.’

‘Nice-looking girl,’ Steve said. ‘It’ll get more coverage than if she wasn’t.’

‘All the boys were crazy about her. Crazy. And on the towpath of all places. Millie and I used to go there all the time.’

‘It’s still a towpath. You still can.’

Sally shivered. She ran her hands up and down the goosebumps on her arms and inched closer to Steve, trying to steal some of his body warmth. She and Steve had been together for four months now. On nights like tonight, when Millie was at Julian’s, Sally would go to Steve’s or he would come over to the cottage, bringing armfuls of treats, cases of wine and nice cheeses from the delis in the town centre. Tonight, though, she wished Millie was with them and not down at Sion Road. After a while, when she couldn’t relax, couldn’t stop the shivering, she swung her legs off the sofa, found her phone and dialled Millie’s mobile. It was answered after just two rings. ‘Mum.’ She sounded half scared, half excited. ‘Have you seen it? On the news? They murdered her.’

‘That’s why I’m calling. Are you OK?’

‘It’s Lorne they murdered. Not me.’

Sally paused, a little thrown off by Millie’s dismissiveness. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just I thought with the way you used to be so close to Lorne you’d-’

‘We weren’t close, Mum.’

‘She seemed to be with you all the time.’

‘No – you just think she was. But really she preferred her mates at Faulkener’s and, anyway, I like Sophie better.’

‘Even so, it must be upsetting.’

‘No – really, I mean I’m shocked but I’m not crying my eyes out. It was ages ago. I haven’t seen her for ages.’

Sally looked up at the window, at the lonely moon lifting itself from the horizon. Bloated and red. Millie was a proper teenager now. To her a year really was an age. ‘OK,’ she said, after a while. ‘Just one thing – if you want to go out tonight will you speak to me first? Let me know where you’re going?’

‘I’m not going out. I’m staying in. With them.’ She meant Julian and his new wife, Melissa. ‘Worse luck. And it’s the Glasto meeting tonight.’

‘The Glasto meeting?’

‘I told you about this, Mum. Peter and Nial are going to pick up their camper-vans the day after tomorrow. They’re going to meet tonight to talk about it. Didn’t Isabelle tell you?’

Sally nibbled at the side of her thumbnail. She’d forgotten it was all so close. The boys were going to Glastonbury with Peter’s older brother and his friends. Peter and Nial had passed their driving tests and had been working like slaves for months, saving up money to buy two beaten-up old VW camper-vans they’d discovered rotting on a farm in Yate. Their parents, impressed by their determination, had chipped in to make up the shortfall and the insurance premiums. Millie hadn’t stopped talking about going with them to the festival, but the tickets were nearly two hundred pounds. There was no way. Absolutely no way.

‘Mum? Didn’t Isabelle say?’

‘No. And, anyway, I don’t suppose there’ll be any meetings tonight. Not with this news.’

‘There is. They’re going ahead – I asked Nial.’

‘Well, there’s no point in you going to a meeting if you’re not going to Glastonbury, is there? I’m sorry – but we’ve talked about this already.’

There was a long silence at the end of the phone.

‘Millie? Is there any point in you going?’

She gave a long-suffering sigh. ‘I suppose not.’

‘OK. Now, you get an early night. School in the morning.’

‘All right.’ Sally hung up and sat for a while with the phone face down on her lap.

Steve leaned across the sofa and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You OK?’

‘Yes.’

‘Said something you didn’t like?’

She didn’t answer. On screen the stuff about Lorne had stopped and the newscaster was talking about more spending cuts. Factories closing. The country going down the drain. Jobs disappearing every second.

‘Sally? It’s natural to be upset. It’s so close to home.’

She looked up at the moon again, a longing tugging at her. It would be nice to be able to tell him the truth – that it wasn’t just Lorne, that it wasn’t just Millie. That it was everything. That it was David Goldrab saying, I promise not to call you a cunt, and the thatch falling in, and the stain on the kitchen ceiling, and Isabelle’s look of dismay when Sally had said she was planning to sell the tarot. That it was having no one to turn to. Basically it was because of reality. She wished she could tell him that.

9

Bath was nestled, like Rome, in a pocket between seven hills. There were hot springs deep in the earth that kept the old spa baths supplied, kept the people warm and stopped snow settling in the streets. The Romans were the first to build on it, but successive generations had kept up the determination to live there in the warm – whole cities had crumbled and been rebuilt. The past existed in multicoloured strata below the citizens of Bath: like walking on layer cake, every footstep crossed whole lifetimes.

Zoe had grown up in the city. Even though she and Sally had been sent away as children, to separate boarding-schools, even though her parents had moved long ago to Spain, Bath was still her home. Now she lived high on one of the surrounding hills, where the city had spread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Victorian terraced house, all her own. The back garden was tiny, with just enough room for a few plant pots and a shed, but the inside was spacious for a person living alone, with three large, high-ceilinged bedrooms on the first floor, and at ground level a single room she’d made by knocking down the interior walls. It stretched thirty-five feet from front to back door and was arranged into two living areas – the kitchen-diner at the front, with a scrubbed wooden table in the bay window, and a TV-watching area at the back, with sofas and her DVDs and CDs. In the middle, where the dividing wall would have been, sat Zoe’s hog.

The bike was a classic – a black 1980 Harley Superglide Shovelhead – and had been her only friend on the year she toured the world. It had cost her two and a half thousand pounds and some long, sleepless nights when a drive belt gave up or the carburettor jets blocked in the middle of an Asian mountain range. But she still treasured it and rode it to work now and then. That night, at half past eleven, when the city outside the bay window was lit up like a carpet of lights, the bike was still cooling off, its engine making little noises. Ben Parris turned from Zoe’s fridge and came to crouch in front of it. He was carrying a saucer of milk, which he put at the front wheel. ‘There you go, favoured object.’ He patted the tyre. ‘Fill your boots. And never forget how loved you are.’

‘It’s not a bloody affectation, you know.’ Sitting at the table next to the window, Zoe upended the bottle of wine into her glass. ‘I don’t have anywhere else to put it. It’s as simple as that.’

‘There’s a back garden.’

‘But no way into it except through the house. I’d have to wheel the bike across the floor every day anyway so I may as well park it there.’