PROLOGUE

EVERYONE,

EVERYBODY

He’s sitting in the only half-decent café there is, drinking tea and picking at a muffin, when he sees the car slow down and pull over to the kerb on the opposite side of the road, and watches a girl, just like the one he’s been thinking about, walk up to it, smiling, as the passenger window glides down.

Of course she’s smiling, she knows the driver.

Why wouldn’t she smile?

Now, she’s leaning down towards the open window. She tosses her hair and grins at something the driver says; pushes her shoulders back, her chest out. She nods, listening.

He finishes the muffin, closes his eyes for a second or two, enjoying the sugar rush. The rush upon the rush. When he opens them again, the waitress is hovering, asking if she can take the empty plate away, if he needs another tea.

He tells her he’s fine and says, ‘Thank you.’

She knows his name of course and he knows hers. It’s that kind of place. She starts to talk, high-pitched and fast, something about the river that has burst its banks again a dozen or so miles away, how terrible it must be for those poor people living nearby. All that filthy water running into their living rooms. The stink and the insurance, the price of new carpets.

He nods at the right moments and says something in return, one eye on the car and the girl, then looks at the waitress until she takes the hint and wanders away with his empty plate.

The girl stands up and steps back on to the pavement, casts a glance each way along the street as the driver leans across and opens the passenger door. Even though she knows him, trusts him, she knows equally well that she shouldn’t get into his car, not really. She’s not worried about anything bad happening, nothing like that would ever happen here. She probably just doesn’t want to be seen doing it, that’s all, doesn’t fancy the dressing-down she’ll more than likely get from the ’rents later on.

Cradling his mug, he inches his chair a little closer to the window and watches without blinking. He’s enjoying her few seconds of caution, and the fact that it is only a few seconds, that there’s not really any good reason to be cautious, makes him think about what it’s like to live here, just how long it’s been since he moved out of the city.

The reasons he came to this place.

A jolt to begin with, no question about that. A city boy all his life, then waking up to the whiff of cowshit. Birds he couldn’t name and bells singing from fields away and several weeks until he realised that the sound he wasn’t hearing was the blare of car horns from drivers every bit as stressed out and pissed off as he used to be.

The feel of the place though, that was the main thing. The community spirit, whatever you wanted to call it. It was what he supposed you’d describe as tight-knit . . . well, relative to what he’d been used to anyway. The people here weren’t living in each other’s pockets, not exactly, but they were aware of one another, at least. The size of the place has a lot to do with it, obviously. With that closeness and sense of concern. With the whispered tittle-tattle and the perceived absence of threat.

There was still trouble, still drunks around on a Friday night, of course. There was no shortage of idiots, same as anywhere else, and he knew that one or two of them could easily have a knife in his pocket or might fancy taking a swing because they took a dislike to someone’s face. But it hadn’t taken very long before he knew most of their names, who their friends or their parents were.

The girl pulls the passenger door closed.

Her head goes back and he can see that now she’s laughing at something as the driver flicks the indicator on and checks his mirror. She reaches for the seatbelt like the good girl she is. Like the good girl all her friends, her teachers up the road at St Mary’s, her mum and dad and brother know her to be.

She knows the driver and he knows the driver and the driver knows the waitress and the waitress knows the girl.

That’s how it is here. It’s why he likes it.

He drains his mug and turns at the door to wave and say goodbye to the waitress, before stepping out into the cold and standing beneath the awning, buttoning his jacket as he watches the car disappear around the corner.

It’s the sort of place where everyone knows everybody else’s business.

But they don’t know his.