Jo woke up sure she had heard the alarm, immediately afraid she was late for school. The bell ran away to the back of her head into the dream space and she knew it for the wrong bell, a church bell tolling wildly, not the clock’s calm electric buzz. Night filled the room but it was an unfamiliar shade crossed with yellow and the sounds were unfamiliar too – a quiet slapping of water and a car engine in the wrong place, with the wrong echo. Remembering she was now in this unknown Exeter, she got out of bed on to a bristly floor that released traces of a landlord’s cleaning chemicals as her toes disturbed the pile. She went to the open window, leaned out staring sideways, towards the dark water of the river with streetlight splashes bouncing on the ripples. The buildings beyond rose towards the centre of the city. It felt no worse than York, a little better even, just another place to be. Up the hill, a distant bell chimed twice and she switched on the light to check again that she had all her clothes ready. They were clothes from her old school and her mother had promised that the new school would not mind. There was the map her mother had printed off for her and two pound coins. Fleur had a meeting, she said. Otherwise she would have taken Jo there, as it was her first day, but she was sure it would all be all right. Jo looked at the map. It seemed a long way. She went quietly back to bed.
In the morning, she took the map and the two pounds and a spare set of keys from a hook by the door and went out to find herself cut off from the city by the river. She turned right, looking for a way across, wasted five precious minutes, then turned back in mounting alarm and found a footbridge to the far side. There would be a bus, her mother had said, but when she found a bus stop, the names of the destinations bore no resemblance to anything on her map. She asked a young woman who looked like a student and replied in what Jo thought might have been German, then a traffic warden who pointed vaguely ahead. At nine o’clock, when school started, her heart was pounding and she was finally in a road whose name appeared on her map, but it seemed to be a long road and the side turnings came crawling towards her, each one refusing to fit the deceptively ordered promises of her now-crumpled map.
On the edge of tears, she sat on a bench and asked Gally to help her. To her surprise, she felt a small bubble of laughter start up inside her, a feeling of how ridiculous this was. I’ll get there when I get there, she thought. It has to be somewhere.
It was half past nine when she finally reached St Matthew’s School. The grounds were empty so she followed the signs to the school office where they looked at her clothes in surprise, consulted the computer and led her to a classroom where every eye swivelled towards her as she walked in.
‘This is Jo,’ said the woman who had brought her. ‘She’s just arrived.’
It was a science lesson and the class was split up mostly into groups of three, mixing liquids in tubes. The teacher looked around and settled on the only pair of girls. ‘You can work with them,’ he said. ‘Lizzy, look after Jo, will you?’
The girl, who had long blonde hair, made a face and Jo’s heart sank but all she said was ‘My name’s not Lizzy.’
The other girl, who was short, studious and quite wide, said, ‘Ignore her. He’s only gone and delivered you into the hands of the most dangerous girl in the whole school. I’ll look after you. I’m the sensible one. I’m Ali.’
And that was how the three of them turned into a trio, how Jo’s life became more bearable and how she let more normal emotional comforts in. Lizzy – who turned out to be Lucy – and Ali had been inseparable for years. They had met on their first day at primary school when the teacher paired them up for a spelling exercise. Ali was immediately fascinated by Lucy’s insouciance, by her declared lack of interest in anything she termed boring and also by her clothes, which seemed to come from a richer and softer planet than the one Ali inhabited. Lucy was secretly impressed by the fact that Ali knew so much stuff.
It took three weeks before Fleur found a private psychiatric clinic for Jo, in a large country house half an hour from Exeter, and that was a valuable three weeks because it cemented Jo’s friendship with Ali and Lucy before more tablets arrived to take the edge off her. The doctor had a name full of harsh sounds and a voice to match so that Jo could often not understand the questions he asked her. He listened to Fleur more than he did to Jo, nodding as Fleur described events that Jo had trouble recognising. He accepted Fleur’s account of Jo’s imaginary voices and suggested a new brand of antipsychotic. ‘It is mild,’ he said, ‘only mild. You will hardly notice but very good, I think.’
Jo noticed and Ali noticed and Lucy noticed. After school, Jo would usually go back to one or the other of their houses. Lucy’s house was modern and airy and full of colour. Lucy’s parents, who were both something to do with media consultancy, treated their daughter as if she was an amusing acquaintance of their own age and gave her an allowance which meant Lucy’s room was always full of shopping bags and new clothes, a rainbow array of disposable self-indulgence. Ali’s home, indeed her whole life, was the antithesis of that. Her family lived in a Victorian villa with narrow windows – an old and serious place where the ceilings were high, the bulbs were dim and the walls were grey. There was nothing soft about it. The rooms were full of trays and boxes of bones and broken pottery and occasionally, when her mother came back from her latest excavation, Ali would find fresh boxes had overflowed into her bedroom. Her mother, who was the prototype of Ali’s short and powerful build, told her they were interesting and she believed her. While Christine Massey was away digging, Ali and her father would potter round the house in a companionable and undemanding alliance. He became much more fun. When Christine returned in a welter of rucksacks, the communication switched to Colchester colour-coated beakers, Samian bowls and the rim shapes of black burnished ware. Ali longed for the time when she would know enough to say something about them that her mother would want to listen to.
The whole house smelt of old earth and slow decay and Jo woke from her first sleepover on a mattress on Ali’s floor to find herself staring into the eye sockets of a skull with a sword-cut across the top. She didn’t mind that at all. She stared quietly at the skull until Ali woke up, wondering what sort of soft, flexible flesh had once turned it into a face, what sort of brain had steered it along and who had mourned for it.
That was before the new tablets came. Afterwards, few thoughts like that could penetrate the chemical barrier. ‘You’re a lot more normal these days,’ Fleur said. ‘That’s a relief, I can tell you. No more talking to the fairies.’
‘Why do you have to take them?’ Lucy asked indignantly, sprawled across her bed. ‘They’re bad for you. You’re much quieter. My mother says you should call ChildLine.’
‘It’s not her fault,’ said Ali, who was sorting her homework into folders. ‘You know what Fleur’s like. Would you want to argue with her?’
Ali knew all about forceful mothers. When Christine Massey thought something was a good idea, other people tended to give in. Christine had never considered the possibility that her daughter’s preferences might not be exactly congruent with her own. When she was seven, Christine hoisted Ali into the saddle of a small pony because she had heard that riding was the healthiest interest to cultivate in a daughter. Ali found the height, smell and muscled determination of the pony quite terrifying but that had no impact on her mother. Unable to see any alternative to falling off this wobbly ridge of leather-topped horseflesh, Ali did so many times and was immediately hoisted back on by Christine, who saw this as only a minor interruption to the project. Ali rode for the next six years without enjoying a single second of it and was only released when the pony died of old age, or possibly pity for her. During that time, the idea of telling her mother she would rather not never even crossed Ali’s mind. She had developed a worried look by the time she was five and it rarely left her. In her own life, she tried to be as forceful as her mother and could never quite bring it off.
The three of them only rarely went back to Jo’s house. Fleur was usually busy, poring over plans and estimates on the kitchen table, or deep in conversations with builders and architects as she rebuilt her business life. Mother and daughter shared the same roof but very little of anything else.
The three girls grew up at different speeds and in different ways as the years passed. Lucy went on looking two years older than she really was and refusing to take any boy seriously who wasn’t another two years older than that. Jo had turned from child to girl and those boys who looked first at Lucy would often find something less obvious but more lasting when their gaze slipped to Jo, though they shied away from her detachment if they tried to take it further. Ali prayed secretly for some miracle of puberty that might stretch her upwards and inwards. One winter’s day at the end of 2009, just after lunch, Jo found her sitting on the frosty grass behind the science block, with her back to the wall and traces of tears on her cheeks.
‘I was looking for you,’ Jo said as she sat down beside her. ‘What’s up?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Ali. ‘Everything. You know.’
‘No I don’t. Tell me.’
Ali sighed. ‘I heard Chris and Tim talking. They didn’t know I was there. Chris said I’d been mooning around and he thought I fancied him and Tim said “Bad luck.” He said I was a . . .’ She stopped.
‘You don’t have to tell me what he said. He’s an idiot.’
‘He said I was a fat dwarf with breath like a sewer.’
‘You haven’t got bad breath.’
Ali gave her a dark look.
‘You’re not fat,’ said Jo, ‘and you’re five foot two.’
‘Five foot two and a half,’ said Ali and burst into sobs.
‘Chris Mellon is a halfwit and Tim Smith barely even counts as a life form.’ Jo put her arm round her friend’s shoulders.
‘That’s not everything. There’s Facebook. I’ve been getting horrible messages.’
‘Who from?’
‘From the Six.’
‘The sleazy Six?’
The Six were the girls who thought they ran the school – the sharpest, hardest, rudest sixteen-year-olds in the place.
‘Listen to me,’ said Jo. ‘None of that matters. When we’ve done our GCSEs we’ll be out of here and going to Exeter College and this will all be a bad dream. That’s only a few months.’
‘But right now, I’m here and they’re here and . . .’
‘And what?’
‘. . . and I’m nearly sixteen and I still don’t have a boyfriend and I wish I did,’ Ali wailed.
‘Ali, that’s like crying on Monday because it’s not Thursday.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your life will come along at its own speed and when you’re not expecting it, and there’s nothing you can do to hurry it up.’
‘But it might not.’
Jo moved a little away from her and stared out at the wider world as if she were listening to something, and when she turned back Ali thought some mystery had come into her eyes. ‘There used to be times when there weren’t enough men or women to go round,’ Jo said, ‘usually men because they caught the rough end of the world. Then if you were stuck, like most people were back then, and you couldn’t get away, you just had to put up with it, but even then the good ones found their match. I don’t mean people like the Six, I mean the really good ones – people like you, the sort of people someone would want to spend their life with. The right person comes along. And it’s so different now. You meet so many people these days, so very many people. Nobody stays in one place any more but that helps, you see? Just breathe deeply and be patient. Your time will come.’
Ali stared at her. ‘You haven’t been taking your pills, have you?’
‘Not for three days,’ said Jo. ‘Mum forgot again. She’s picking them up today.’
‘Don’t you feel the difference it makes?’
Jo shrugged. ‘Yes, but then I forget.’
But for Fleur’s approach to life, the friendship of the three girls might not have survived the amount of time Jo spent shut down in her chemically-dulled world. Fleur always put Jo second to her business activity and that meant there were regular periods when they ran out of pills. For three or four days, every now and then, Jo would emerge from that chrysalis and remind her friends why they stuck with her.
The other two, Lucy in her studied flightiness and Ali in her stolid determination, were on a mission to save Jo from malign adult forces.
One day in early May 2010, with the start of their GCSE exams only two weeks away, Ali summoned the other two to join her in a cafe on the way home from school.
‘My mother’s got this idea,’ she said, and Lucy groaned.
‘The answer’s no,’ she said. ‘Now what’s the idea? Somehow I already know it’s not going to be fun.’
‘No, it will be. Listen.’
‘Does it involve digging?’
‘That’s not the point. It—’
‘It’s digging. Count me out.’ Lucy got to her feet and reached for her bag.
‘Give her a chance,’ said Jo. She was dull that day.
‘Why? I know all I need to know.’
‘There are boys,’ Ali said quietly, and Lucy sat down.
Lucy was currently playing the role of tragically spurned lover. She had spent the past three months entwined around sharp-tongued Matt, tall, slim and nearly twenty – Matt, with his own band which played evening gigs in some of the town’s bars and cafes. Matt’s drummer, Whizz, liked Jo in a hopeless and unrequited fashion but Ali knew none of them were interested in her.
The group had been broken up by Matt’s sudden switch of affection to a nineteen-year-old music student.
‘It’s such a tragedy,’ Lucy had said. ‘Horrible Harriet’s stolen him and it’s not just my pain, it’s yours too.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Ali said immediately.
‘I didn’t really mean you, I meant poor Jo.’
‘I’ll probably survive,’ said Jo.
Lucy was getting tired of the tragic role. ‘What boys?’ she asked.
‘Twelve students from Bristol University.’
‘Twelve students? They could be girls.’
Ali shook her head. ‘By the law of averages half of them will be boys. That’s two each.’
‘No it’s not. It’s one each for you two and four for me.’
‘One?’ said Ali, ‘Only one?’ but the fact was she would have given anything for one.
‘You can have mine,’ Jo offered. She knew Lucy would be able to take her pick. Lucy had been surrounded by boys since they had first met. Jo had no obvious beauty yet, just a pleasing curve of cheek and chin framed by dark brown hair, but her smile turned heads and that smile, once so rare, was seen more often these days. The boys who were drawn to it got no more than polite interest. Jo found them all too young and wondered briefly if a Bristol student might not have attractions.
‘Seriously,’ said Ali, ‘none of us knew what to do after the exams, did we? At least none of us could think of anything our parents would actually let us do.’ She meant her parents and Jo’s mother, because they all three knew Lucy’s would let her do whatever she wanted within reason. ‘The advantage of this is that my mother thinks it’s a good idea.’
‘My mother wants to send me off to some camp because she’s going to a conference,’ said Jo.
‘Hang on,’ said Lucy. ‘Just before we sign up for this, what exactly is it?’
‘It’s a three-week dig at a place called Montacute on the site of a Norman castle.’
Jo looked at her, frowned, looked away.
Lucy studied her. ‘Astonishing. You manage to sound excited about that.’
‘It’s three weeks of freedom,’ Ali said with a note of pleading in her voice.
‘Where will we be staying?’
‘Everyone’s camping. All the diggers. I’m glad. It’s much more fun that way.’
‘I have very firm views on camping,’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t mind sleeping under the stars so long as there are five of them and they’re fixed to a hotel wall.’
‘No, it’s really fun, I promise. They have campfires at night and they sing songs and stuff.’
‘Is there a pub?’ asked Lucy.
‘Probably.’
‘They’ll serve us if we’re with all the others, won’t they?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I haven’t been ID’d for ages. Will they have power at the campsite? I don’t want my iPod going flat.’
‘Power? It’s a field. A field with boys in it,’ said Ali hopefully.
‘But I know what archaeologists look like,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ve seen them on television. They’ve got long straggly hair like old sheep and they’re bald on top. They get incredibly excited about very small broken bits of pottery. They’re always drinking beer and they knit their own sweaters.’
‘Where exactly is Montacute?’ Jo asked.
‘Near Yeovil,’ said Ali, and brought out a map.
As Jo looked at the map, some of the names on it penetrated the curtain in her head, prompting a small thrill almost like pleasure – Martock, Somerton, Wincanton. She put her finger on Montacute and knew she wanted to go there.
A month and a half later the three girls got out of the Yeovil bus in the middle of Montacute village and lined up on the verge like some demonstration poster of different body types: Lucy, the tall blonde with the aquiline profile; Jo, half a head shorter, dark and curved; Ali, who barely reached Lucy’s shoulder, stocky and with hair which looked, as Lucy had once said in a far-too-honest moment, as if it had been assembled from other people’s leftovers.
Jo was looking all around her and seemed to be sniffing the air. It was the nearest to liveliness that her friends had seen all week. The other two had come out of their GCSE exams released from pressure but completely true to type. Lucy had indulged in a theatrical spectrum ranging from comic despair after the Maths exam to claiming the best answers ever written to an English paper. Ali had been quietly pleased with all of them, but anxious not to rub that in if she was talking to anyone less confident. Jo had only said they were mostly all right.
‘Jo,’ said Lucy, ‘before we get there, Ali and I have got something to say.’
‘Yes?’
‘Fleur made us promise something before she agreed you could come.’
‘I can guess.’
‘She made us promise to watch you take your tablets every day.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Jo with a sigh. ‘I will.’
‘No. That’s what we want to say. We’re not going to do it. It’s up to you. You don’t have to take them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we know what you’re like when you don’t. That’s the real Jo.’
She looked at her friends, unsure what to say, so used now to the dulled-down world that the idea of weeks away from it sounded almost frightening, then she nodded slowly.
Ali looked at her instructions and the map. ‘It’s this way,’ she declared and set off. They made a hundred yards before Lucy stopped them.
‘My straps are hurting.’
‘I’m not surprised they’re hurting. You can see through that cotton,’ Ali said. ‘Didn’t you bring an old sweater or something?’
‘I don’t own any old sweaters.’
‘Didn’t you bring anything serious?’
A Land Rover was coming up behind them.
‘All my clothes are extremely serious. Those Bristol boys won’t know what’s hit them. Just make sure you’re on my tail. Where I lead, you follow.’
The Land Rover pulled in ahead of them.
‘You said they’ll all have big white beards,’ Ali said. ‘They’re not even going to notice the fact that you’re hardly wearing anything at all.’
The driver of the Land Rover opened his door as they reached it.
‘You look like the rest of my diggers,’ he said. ‘I’m Rupert. I’m running the dig. Would you like a lift?’
‘Where’s your big white beard?’ said Lucy.
‘You’ve got to be Christine Massey’s daughter,’ said the Land Rover driver, glancing at Ali as he let in the clutch. ‘You look just like her.’
Ali sighed.