What a year! Penny thought. She’d liked having the students in. Her best friends among that lot were what they called trusties, which meant they wore dreads and tie-dye and smelled of wool. The smoked joints all day long and went from one music festival to another in a camper van borrowed from one of their mothers. They were all quite well off.
The summer had been an idyllic one, as far as Penny was concerned. They seemed to spend three months on pink candlewick bedspreads on the hillock of grass outside her house. Her new friends played in the play park and ran tearing about the place with all the little kids. The mothers from round there looked on disapprovingly for a while as Adele and Alan and Marsha, with their southern accents and scruffy clothes, helped the bairns to the top of the climbing frame, restrung the tyre swing for them and showed them how to roller-blade. Penny watched almost proudly as her crusty friends became an unofficial play scheme. The older girls had crushes on Sven, the blond Swedish boy. He had one of those crystal-clear accents like someone out of Abba. Penny read novels, one after another — she read fifty that summer — and admired the fresh-scrubbedness of him. Sven was pink and golden and tall, but he was a microbiologist.
The only times away from the park and the kids and the sun on Phoenix Court was when they took Adele’s mother’s camper van to the music festivals. They vanished for weekends at a time. Penny went with them only once, to Glastonbury, which was nice enough, but she couldn’t bear the toilet arrangements. She loved her tan, though, which seemed at its height at Glastonbury. She was the colour of Linda McCartney vegetarian sausages. So was Andy. Andy! Who’d been a Goth in his youth, he claimed.
Penny fetched out a pile of breakfast bowls, ready for the buffet. Was she really going to have cornflakes as part of the buffet? It was true that she found them comforting. They were one of her favourite things. But there was a danger that, when they came trooping in with their cans of lager and bottles of spirits, in their glad rags and ready to party, all her neighbours from Phoenix Court might think she was odd. Maybe she could just say that she expected the party to go on until breakfast-time.
There were noises of banging about upstairs. Andy was getting ready, having a clothes crisis. She hoped he was all right now. Earlier this afternoon Fran from over the way had been round. Fran was in her forties and careworn. Frumpy, Penny’s mother might have called her in an uncharitable moment. She came to see if they wanted any help preparing the party. Penny thought that was good of her, especially since she was always busy with all her kids. She reminded Penny of the old woman in the shoe. Fran had been particularly pleased last summer that Penny’s and student friends had taken to looking after the children.
With Andy there this afternoon, Fran had made the easy mistake of asking if Vince was coming back for the party.
Andy’s face had fallen. He said something about never knowing what Vince was up to, and disappeared upstairs. Penny hadn’t seen him again all afternoon. He stayed in the narrow bedroom that he and Vince had shared for six months.
Fran looked as if she knew she’d hurt him, but wasn’t sure how.
Penny said, “They were very close. Vince just ran off in August and he’s never been in touch with Andy at all.”
“Oh,” said Fran. She went back to blowing up the balloons. “I thought it was something like that.”
Ever since Vince had gone, Penny had been working hard at keeping his name out of things. She hid the fairly regular cards that came addressed only to her. She fretted at night about whether to keep Andy up to date with Vince’s doings, his new teaching job, his whereabouts. Andy pretended that he didn’t care and hardly mentioned his lover’s name. All that autumn he was angry.
Vince had made his announcement about his new teaching job on Penny’s birthday. This was in August, and he had commandeered the crusties’ camper van to take the household on a day trip to Lake Windermere. It was a drizzly, grey day. As Adele drove them over the Pennines, the others sat in the back laughing and drinking Montezuma.
Penny loved her birthdays because her mother had always put on a good show for her. It was the best day in the year. This was her first one without Liz, but her house-mates — Vince especially — tried to make it up to her. News from Liz and her beau came irregularly. They sent back jaunty notes from the seaside resorts they were visiting, one after another, stitching a ragged hem around the country. Andy said to Penny, “She’s gone all devil-may care,” his eyes wide with envy. Penny pointed out that Liz was always like that, and Cliff, the bus driver, only made her worse.
It seemed as if Liz was never coming back. Vince took Penny’s birthday plans into his own hands. Although he would
