CHAPTER 17
After Nita had gone, Kim rose from her seat.

“I should get back to Ruth’s”

“Can it wait a few minutes? I really want a quick talk with you”

She settled back down onto the settee, and I tried to spot any signs she was looking to run. Once again, my memories were haunting me, of sitting in the darkness outside the back door as Dad fed the hedgehogs and two carrier bags sat forgotten next to my chair.

CHAPTER 15
The young copper looked confused.

“Never heard of her. You able to wait a bit while I ask one of the older lads?”

I pushed back hard on my instinctive reaction to being in a police station and nodded.

“Aye, please. I’ve got the time”

He was back in less than five minutes, with a broad smile.

CHAPTER 13
Kim was running out of steam by ten o’clock, so I helped her up the stairs to her room before returning to the living room and Rosie, who was pensive.

“Who the fuck is she, Deb?”

“Someone else who’s had a load of shit, love. Thank your lad for the medicine; I don’t think she’d have survived much longer the way she was going, and the weather”

“Well, what are you going to do with her?”

CHAPTER 11
I made sure I followed the paper in question for a few weeks afterwards, which amused Ruth when she caught me reading it one day as I got outside a coffee and a ham and cheese toastie.

“Not exactly your sort of rag, girl!”

“Ah, a running story I’m looking for an update on”

“Would that be the one about the little shit who got a kicking from people you definitely didn’t know?”

CHAPTER 9
Rosie went home with her parents after the funeral, which was not a good day. More than Sam’s life seemed to have been sucked out of the world, so four of us clung to each other as things were said and hymns sung, as Linden had insisted on a Christian service for her child. I went in a dress and tights I had bought for the occasion, far from my normal style, and afterwards hung the stuff in the depths of my wardrobe with a little prayer that it would be as long a time as possible before I would need them again. I had had far more than enough of death.

CHAPTER 7
I had no booze in the house for once, which was fortunate, as it would have left me in no state worth thinking about, and most definitely well away from the level of rationality I needed to find. I slept fitfully, the night lasting forever as I woke up over and over again, my car crash of a soul trying to find ways to put my life back together and failing dismally at the job.

CHAPTER 5
Work was a new beginning for a time, as the three weeks or so of local slog kept me occupied, while the longer runs down West gave my mind the space and solitude to put things into a more sensible order than they had fallen into after the funeral. I played my music, I drove my wagon and I planned my days off, whether weekend or midweek.

CHAPTER 3
We spent two hours in the car park, as Rosie talked me patiently through the mechanics of riding a bike as opposed to not interfering with it from a pillion seat. There were a few niggles I could see, such as the odd speedometer and the lack of a side stand, but the little machine was docile and uncomplicated to ride.

“Down here, Debbie. This is the drain plug, and…hang on…”

She put some effort into unscrewing a black plug in the crankcase.

CHAPTER 51
Recovery from surgery was slow, but nowhere near as bad as I had feared. When I left Hemmings’ place, Carol was with me, having taken the train down so that I wouldn’t have to ride all the way home again alone, but for my little rubber ring under the new anatomy. We hardly spoke at all; what should have been the celebration of my body finally being compete was lost in the rattle of train wheels and Tannoy announcements from the guard. It all felt so utterly meaningless, and the question locked in my mind was whether I should really have bothered going through with the surgery. What, after all, was the point?

CHAPTER 49
“Good morning, Mr Hemming’s office, Julia speaking. How may I help you?”

“Um, my name is Debbie Wells. I was down for an assessment with Mr Hemmings about some surgery”

“Thank you. May I take your date of birth and postcode?”

CHAPTER 48
The seats were uncomfortable, as always, but in differing ways. Most of them were hard plastic chairs, that gradually sent your arse to sleep, with the occasional comfy-looking armchair bearing a beguilingly padded seat that was actually worse. You sat on the thick cushion, and the air trapped under the vinyl cover slowly farted out through the holes in the plywood base. With a sigh, you gradually descended to a perch on the base board, the frame digging into the backs of your thighs as the trapped sweat began to soak them.

CHAPTER 47
Sunday morning’s light told me I had got outside far too much alcohol the previous evening, and with that thought I realised that the evening had actually become morning before I had managed to deliver a very unsteady Mam to our corner of the site.

Hangovers are funny things, because they mirror the preceding state of drunkenness. When plastered, your mind comes up with all sorts of insights and mystical revelations, which will change the course of your life and deliver immeasurable benefits, if you could only recall them the following morning. Instead, the hangover arrives, which allows a detailed examination of the damage you are doing to your health.

CHAPTER 45
I tugged her out of the marquee and around behind the burger van, where the blast from the band was partially blocked, replaced by the chugging of a small electrical generator.

“What do you mean, Mam?”

“I can’t feel it, love. I mean, I can hear it, feel the sound in my gut. I just can’t FEEL it, can’t move to it!”

CHAPTER 43
The sun was warm on my face as I dozed on a south-facing bench, its heat reflecting back from the honey-coloured stone wall behind me, my backpack heavy against my side. It had been a rather complicated train ride to Hexham, but I was there, and the weather seemed set fine. All I had to do was wait for Mam and Dad, grazing occasionally from the food I had grabbed in Carlisle station as I waited for the little railbus that served the smaller stations. Mick had dropped me at Crewe, where I had caught the Intercity to the place Charlie had taken as his new home. I knew he was now locked up, but I had still felt the back of my neck prickling as I had waited on the platform.

CHAPTER 41
I had a hangover the next morning, but we had the shower, as Mam had promised, and I spent more than a few minutes soaking, which gave me time to settle my mood and my behaviour. Not my day, much as I might have wished things had followed a different course, but in a way the day actually was mine. Two people I loved would be happy, so suck it up, woman, and be happy for them. After all, didn’t I have Class?

CHAPTER 39
Mick Worsley had put a word in for me with the boss, and they had been as helpful as I could have hoped. There was a drop due in Chester, another a day later. I could ride there on the first drop, and if I could find somewhere to spend the night, I was guaranteed a lift most of the way there and back. I had started to laugh when Mr Mossman mentioned ‘finding somewhere to stay’, and he had given me a sharp look.

“Nothing really, Boss. It’s just that the last time I found somewhere to pass the night in Chester, it was under a tarpaulin in a pleasure boat by the river. I might just go a bit upmarket this time”

CHAPTER 37
The pattern of my life was set for the next year and a half, and to be honest, it wasn’t that bad. I worked hard in the week, putting in the hours at both the training centre and the local haulier, Mossman’s, that Dad had passed my care onto. There is more to driving a freight lorry than sitting behind the wheel, and Mossman’s gave me a decent apprenticeship in those extras. Their fitters talked me through the basics of maintenance, so that I could make a half-decent guess at the cause of a problem, and perhaps solve it without needing to call out a fitter or tow truck, but that wasn’t all of it.

CHAPTER 35
We left the Farmyard in light rain, heading north again through the maze of roads and lanes towards Aberystwyth. I wondered where we would end up on this circuit, knowing only that it would probably involve some time with Graham.

“Dad?”

“Aye, duck?”

“We going back to that do in Cumbria?”

CHAPTER 33
That was going to take some planning, but we had time, and the Hairy Stotty was calling, a rally far more to my taste than the Midgesummer had been. We made our way down there with the van’s windows wide open so as to catch a cooling breeze, which didn’t work too well, and on arrival found that the ground was baked absolutely solid. That lasted right up to the Saturday evening, when the weather broke.

CHAPTER 31
The other side of the ‘dinosaur' was lit up in the orange of the sunrise, and so were several other hills showing to the right of its northern slope. The hill we had passed on the way in, a chaotic pile of loose rock from the road, showed a grander flank, holding what looked like a hollow above steady slopes of green dotted with white sheep. People were already moving on the campsite, with several cooking bacon of porridge on little stoves.

“Morning, love!”

CHAPTER 29
They featured on the front page, as well as in what seemed like half the rest of the paper. It was a style of reporting I had already come to recognise and despise: a story too shocking for their readers, see pages 2-26 plus special colour supplement.

It wasn’t quite as bad as that, but there was a lot to read. Mam set out a couple of camping chairs, Rosie sitting beside me as I read. Dear god, and I had thought my time with the bastards had been a taste of hell. It seemed I had been given an easy time, compared with what I read.

CHAPTER 27
I slept well that night, even though my dreams were a little confused, and the dawn’s light had been replaced by a Summer morning when I eventually emerged from the tent. Mam and Dad had slept in the van, which felt a little strange at first, but it was simply another stage of my healing and growth.

From the day of our meeting, I had slept between or by them, except in our winter house, and now I was being given my own space, possibly as a recognition of greater maturity but maybe as a hint that my life was now a safe one.

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