Friday 26 August

We’ve stayed up after everyone else is in bed to have more of Liz’s plum cake, made with bottled plums they grow here. (Kate said, There’s always plum cake, as though it’s no big deal.) The music room is at the opposite end of the house from the bedrooms, so we don’t even have to be quiet.

‘It wasn’t even perfect day week, it was retreat, reflect week, but we had a perfect day anyway.’ Clem is lying flat out on the squashy faded sofa with an arm extended to scratch Berry, Kate’s black lab, who is making a happy, yowling noise.

Clem was having fun with Ben today. Exactly the antidote she needed to fuck-me-but-don’t-tie-me-down Stu. Kate is sitting with her back to the piano. She turns around, puts her fingers on the keyboard, reminding herself, plays the first few chords of Lou Reed’s song and starts to sing it in her perfect, totally in-tune voice. We listen in awe, and then join her in our not-so-perfect voices.

Clem sings that she thought she was someone else, someone who wouldn’t throw a doughnut at her friend. She chucks a bit of cake in my direction, and it’s snap-caught mid-air by Berry.

Clem and Kate feel more like friends than my friends do because there’s honesty here, and I’m not being micro-moment-judged. My friends and I have got into such a habit of doing that and it feels like being smothered. It makes you self-censor all the time without even registering it.

The song yanks me backwards to being little. I remember thinking the orchestral swell of the music sounded ‘important’. We’re laughing now, and Kate makes us laugh more with some hammy pauses and significant looks as she plays. But when the bit about reaping and sowing starts, I start to cry without any part of me warning my eyes it’s about to happen. Clem looks mortified, her eyes shine with sympathy tears, and Kate stops playing, pats my shoulder, and says, ‘It’s okay, Adyadelaidey, no one here but us.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t say that – you’ve had a really shit week,’ says Clem.

‘More than you know.’ I stand up, and sit back down. Where am I going to go? ‘My dad’s gone to rehab. For six months.’

‘What’s his . . .?’ asks Clem.

‘Alcohol. And cocaine.’

‘So, that’s . . . good?’ Kate offers. ‘He’s getting some help.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘Has it been bad living with him?’ Clem gives me a tissue she’s fished out of her pocket and I blow my nose.

‘I’m used to it. It’s been there all my life. Mostly in the background. More fighting than usual lately. No money, apparently – we are in the shit – I have to leave school at the end of term.’

Berry comes over, puts her head in my lap and heaves out a big dog-breath sigh that makes me cry some more. Now I have the sobbing breathing that makes its own rhythm.

‘Was I too gross – what I said about the up-the-arse post?’

‘No way,’ says Kate, indignant.

‘Is that what your friends think?’ asks Clem.

‘They think what I said was unfair to Rupert.’

Clem snorts. ‘Fuck that.’

‘Here’s what I think about them.’ Kate lifts emphatic double middle fingers right up at face level.

‘And tough, Rupert. That rumour hurt you, not him. And you were right – it’s always girls – we’re always the target.’ Clem rolls off the sofa and sits on the floor, resting her chin on her knees. ‘I really want to know who PSST is.’

‘It’s got to be someone from Basildon working with people from a few other schools,’ I say. ‘There were heaps of Basildons at the Winter Fair who could have taken those photos of you, Clem.’

‘Ack – it was so crowded, we’ll never know who it was.’ Clem stands up and stretches.

‘It’s true about the photos, but some of the posts have information that could only have come from inside St Hilda’s and the other girls’ schools.’ Kate is gathering up our plates. ‘Who would do that?’

‘If only we could turn all the hate bombs into love bombs,’ I say.

Kate opens the door and shoos Berry outside. ‘Yes, if only the world was not the world.’