Still putting the pieces of the Flo jigsaw together, she asked, ‘And yet you live in Bicester, the epicentre of all that was trendy and stylish in the world? Last season.’ Raven clapped a hand over her mouth. She hadn’t meant to be rude, but … c’mon. Bicester, home of discount designer wear and an ever-increasing amount of pop-up, new build ‘communities’ was hardly the centre of the universe. For some reason Raven had pictured worldly people as big city dwellers. The type of urban Oz big enough to have their own Time Out. Paris, Rome, New York. That sort of thing. The Bicester Weekly was hardly a font of cultural and consumable wonders.
‘My husband picked it because it was close to both Heathrow and Luton. He was a pilot.’
‘Oh! Does he still fly?’
‘No, love,’ Flo’s voice turned strangely tight. ‘They make them retire at sixty.’
The way she said it made Raven squirmy. As if retirement were akin to a death sentence. Her parents’ entire life could be easily described as a battle plan for retirement. It had always sounded like a safe place, retirement. Where there was enough money because you’d saved and enough energy because you’d eaten your five a day and enough time because you’d just sold your pharmacy/newly invented surgical tool/hedge fund/law firm partnership and carved out enough room in your life to start looking after your grandchildren who would follow in the same well worn path …
Now that she thought of it, retirement didn’t seem like the kind of place Flo would like at all. She had more energy in her pinky than Raven had ever had, apart from that one time her sister had actually behaved like a sister and taken her to London to see the Harry Potter plays. Apart from that … Raven was more your low-energy variety of teenager. It was safer that way. To fly below the radar. Flo struck her as the type who’d willingly throw herself into the line of fire. A woman who’d fling herself out of an airplane and let photos of her face all stretched out by the wind be plastered all over the shop if it earned a few bob for charity. And also because it would be exhilarating.
‘Why don’t we put it to Sue as well?’ Flo asked. ‘The bike ride. We’ll ask her over a glass of this fizz once we’ve got your bags moved in. If there’s anyone out there who needs something fun to work towards, it’s that poor girl.’
Raven nodded. ‘Sounds good.’ Dreams of life at Newcastle Uni definitely kept her tiny torch alight. On top of which, if Sue agreed to go along, maybe Raven could quietly duck out.
Riding a bicycle from the Lake District, along Hadrian’s Wall and on to Tynemouth with ‘our Kath’ from Kath and Kev was decidedly not Raven’s cup of tea. Although … arriving in Newcastle for a ‘well-earned supper’ did hold some appeal. As much as she ached to go to uni there, she’d never actually been. An untested nirvana. What if it was a complete nightmare? What if it was everything she’d ever dreamt of?
She considered it more seriously. Imagined herself powering up and then down a hill into Newcastle city centre on a bicycle. Red, preferably. Or aubergine.
Hmmm …
Something about arriving via a less beaten trail in a blaze of self-discovery and physically demanding glory seemed strangely fitting.
Most of the characters in the fantasy series she’d been favouring lately were always setting off on epic (usually surprise) journeys. There’d be, like, maximum ten pages of set-up and then kaboom! Time to hit the road. Then, about eight hundred or so pages later? The journey was over, lessons had been learnt, the protagonist was a changed person (usually for the better but mostly because they’d been through the worst) and there’d be about ten more pages of wrapping everything up or … kaboom! Another journey would present itself and the protagonist, a little older and a lot wiser would pick up their shoulder bag … and off they went on another epic adventure.
She wanted to be that person when she arrived at uni. Wiser to the ways of the world. Unfrightened by other teenagers and their nasty attacks on social media. Not that she’d been a target herself, but … why hadn’t she reached out to Aisha? Visited her in hospital? At her house once she’d been checked out? Told her no one really believed her parents were going to send her to India to marry an old man to be his slave because she was too dim and too ugly to be married off to anyone else and choose a husband herself like her sisters had. Racist bullshit is what it had been. And yet … she’d said nothing. Done nothing, apart from delete all of her own accounts when what she should have done was stand up to the girls who’d started spreading the rumours and told them where to put it.
Insecurity, she supposed.
Fear.
Would it go away if she moved to Newcastle? All those niggly concerns about being too fat, too tall, too weak, too impressionable, too pathetic to stand up to a bunch of bullies she knew were doing the wrong thing. It was awful having all of those frailties roiling round inside of her, vying for supremacy, when what she really wanted to feel was strong. Inside and out. Undaunted. Like Flo seemed to be.
Maybe this trip was exactly what she needed.
It wasn’t as if getting off a National Express in front of the student union building had as much of an emotional pow factor as arriving in the wake of one’s own spent energy. And maybe she’d even lose a few pounds before she started whatever degree it was
