CHAPTER 2
The evening finished with my pudding, of course, which brought giggles and snorts. Each bowl bore two pear halves, round side up, filled with the raspberry and ice cream mix, and perched on top of each upturned bit of roundness was half a grape, the whole slathered in chocolate sauce. I feigned puzzlement at the laughter.

CHAPTER 1
“Jill, you up yet? Busy day today, get that arse out of the bed!”

“Such sweetness in the morning!”

I buried my head back in the pillow, and noticed the marks. I really, really had to get used to cleaning my face before bed. I didn’t use much, just a bit of stuff round the eyes, mostly, but I could just about guarantee that I would be seeing a raccoon in the mirror.

CHAPTER 19
“Why the tears, Maman?”

She held me tighter, but turned her head away. “It is as I said to you the other day. I mourn my son”

I went to pull away, to make room to apologise, but she pulled me back, her head now on my breast.

CHAPTER 18
In the end, it was the cinema, and it was a film for the boys as well as for us girls, ‘A Long Betrothal Sunday’ with Audrey Tautou. It was supposed to be a love story, and it was, but it was also a war film, and much of that part was something I found very hard to watch.

CHAPTER 17
“Maman…”

“Yes, my sweet?”

“There is...at school, there is a boy…”

“Ah. I had hoped…but, alas, that day had to come. Does he know?”

“About my state? No, I think not”

“No, silly girl, does he know that you are looking at him?”

CHAPTER 60.
And so it went. I got up, I shaved as well as I could, Larinda did what she could to make the best of my face, I went to work, I got abused or not as the day passed, and a few kids would point in the street. There seemed to be some sort of armed truce in the office, where I had some true friends that I had always recognised as such, and to my gratified surprise quite a few more that I hadn’t spotted.

CHAPTER 16
“Maman! What am I to wear today? Can I not wear the same dress as yesterday? Elle has not seen it!”

My mother’s voice came up the stairs. “Margot has”

“Yes, but she will not---oh, my mother! You have, have you not?”

“I have done what, my sweet?”

“Asked them both back for the evening!”

She sat on the steps just upstream of the bridge. Two hours now, as the Ouse roiled and surged round the old stone and debris span in the eddies. Soon, perhaps, the flood markers in the pub downstream would need another notch, and the gardens to her right would be submerged. Winter rains, winter floods, who gave a shit, really? All part of a world she had tried to engage with, that had spurned every attempt she had made to join. The light was fading slowly on a miserably grey and washed out February afternoon, and as it went, so would she. There was only so much strength given to a person, she thought, and when that was gone, so were they.

CHAPTER 58
“What next? I suggest we prepare some sort of announcement”

I looked at him, wondering if he meant that I should make a tour of the various offices and cubicles. He was typing, though.

“I am drafting an e-mail for general distribution, and I am going to add a reminder that the Department has some very strict rules on diversity and equality, not to mention bullying. Here is my position, Mi…ss Carter. I do not like this at all. This is disruptive and abnormal, but I am as bound by the rules as any other staff member. I will not, CAN not, offer you my best wishes, but I can assure you that the niceties and the rules will be respected. Do we understand each other?”

CHAPTER 13
What can I say about that year? It was truly a rebirth, as Sophie emerged into the world almost as the Venus of Botticelli. I simply wore more clothing than the goddess in the painting.

CHAPTER 12
That term continued, and my friends became closer. The late Summer soon gave way to gales up the Manche, and the leaves span off the trees and into piles of awkward mulch on the footpaths. Serge had disappeared into a past that felt to me sometimes as if I was watching some elderly motion picture, sepia and silent. Sophie, she was here and now, and in laughing colour. My breasts, no longer ‘teats’ but true breasts, were slowly emerging from their lair in my chest. I do not mean to say that I suddenly developed attributes to match my age, but that it was no longer a case of a sensitive pair of nipples but of a true cushion forming behind them. If only one thing could withdraw from view as others appeared.

CHAPTER 54
They flew down in the end, and it was a serious crowd at the airport. Rachel and Larinda did the driving, as well as the accommodation, but in the end I had given up on the idea of having so many people around one table and booked a corner of the Dysentery, the inevitable nickname of the Dynasty Chinese restaurant. Will had called a favour in from a friend, a pretended sleepover, and would be on the train for the meal. Mats, sleeping bags, spare beds, we finally found enough nooks to fit everyone in, helped by that fact that several were sharing.

CHAPTER 10
The meal was, of course, superb, for that is where my mother keeps her strength, or at least part of it. There was also the strength she showed every day, in her love and support of her new daughter, but it was in the kitchen where she shone.

CHAPTER 9
And school days passed, until the weekend came, and each day began with the assembly of what was becoming, for me, a type of second family. We girls would meet on the bus, tease and be teased, and pass comment on everything from the colour of a teacher’s hair to the particular gifts and failings of boys.

CHAPTER 52
They weren’t that noisy, in the end, but I found Rachel slightly out of sorts the next morning. I had just filled the kettle to do my wifely duties, and she joined me in the kitchen. Her hair was all over the place and, to be blunt, she really needed a shower, but there was a slight edge to her expression.

“You OK, Rach?”

CHAPTER 7
September came, and the new school year was there in wait for me. I was actually impatient, because despite my most careful inspection, the drugs Maman had secured for me did not appear to be doing anything at all. What had worked, or was at least beginning to, was the careful attention she had paid to those few hairs that were starting to appear on my face.

CHAPTER 6
It was indeed a wonderful Summer, but it had to end with the return of the August people and the imminent opening of the new school year. Everything had changed for me, and it was a delight. Our neighbours, the new ones, had only seen me as that tall and bony girl who had moved in with her mother and the big policeman, and the local shopkeepers treated me as just one more woman doing the morning bread run.

CHAPTER 4
In the end, the fear got to me. It had been a rush, leaving the old place with a chest, and it was a delight to be dressed so beautifully in the hypermarket, but the closer Roland’s little car got to our flat the more nervous I became, till I begged him to stop so that I could change. I was so frightened that I insisted it be done behind a hedge on a side road, and when I returned, in scruffy jeans and baskets, as Maman had described them, and flat in front, I felt as if a door was closed, slammed in my face. She saw, and had a tissue ready for my tears almost before they fell.

CHAPTER 49
“Hiya James. You are James and you are my friend, aye?”

He smiled, which was always a highlight of my life. Karen saw, and smiled with him.

“Out in the open, Jill?”

“Aye, for today. Brought the support crew, like, but it is still a little off. We sort of thought London, you know, all used to seeing oddities, all strangers. Just wanted…”

CHAPTER 2
And he sat there, and sat there. Not a word, for at least five minutes, which seemed an age, and I wondered what he would do. He was my big brother, the man who took up Papa’s torch when he dropped it in the mud. He drew a long, soughing breath.

“Does anyone else know?”