One day before the end of term I was walking into town after school with Julie and Charlotte. We’d just sat our first mock A level – English lit – and had decided to treat ourselves to tea and a jam doughnut at Reeves the Baker. We were ambling along the gravel riverside path that was the more scenic route into the centre of town, our waistbands rolled over so many times that our grey skirts resembled wide fabric belts, and our ties in knots bigger than our fists.

I had tuned out of the conversation they were having about whether Steve Francis and Neil Hart fancied them – mostly because I could have told them the answer was almost certainly ‘no’, at least, not half as much as they fancied themselves. My head was full of Keats, The Fall of Hyperion, particularly a line that ran, ‘one minute before death, my iced foot touch’d the lowest stair…’

That line stuck with me. I’d laughed about it with the girls – ‘my iced foot’, like an iced bun or a foot in a bath of ice cubes. But secretly it haunted me, the cold descent to your fate, the knowledge that you’d reached the end of your life, the bottom of the staircase, no going back, not ever…

Dad’s iced foot had touched the lowest stair three weeks ago. It was as if, from the moment he told me he was dying, back in April, he had to get down to the business of actually doing it. Almost overnight his eyes turned yellow and the knobs of bones sprouted everywhere on him, like a grim budding magnolia but in reverse.

It was unbearable to watch, so I’d closed my eyes and turned the other way.

Selfish.

During the funeral I had yearned for Samantha. She was my future, but I hadn’t heard from her since April. I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, and to my shame, this upset me almost as much as losing Dad.

I hadn’t thought about Mum at all.

The girls were talking fast, gesticulating wildly, as if all the words they hadn’t been allowed to speak during the three-hour exam were now spurting out of them in a saved-up torrent. I probably couldn’t have got a word in edgeways even if I’d wanted to. They usually made me laugh with their intense diatribes on boys, but today I felt too spent to engage. Or perhaps I felt that I’d grown apart from them, since Greenham and Samantha and Dad’s death. I really didn’t care whether Neil Hart got the highlights in his hair done at a salon or just used Sun-In like the rest of us.

I drew a short way away and was idly watching the hypnotic dark-green swirl of the river weed under the surface as I walked, trying to spot the minnows and occasional freckled trout darting through it.

Someone was cycling towards us, and I instinctively moved closer to the riverbank to allow the cyclist to pass between us. She was almost upon us when the sun suddenly glinted on her hair, like a celestial arrow pointing her out to me. I gasped so hard and stopped so suddenly that Julie ceased mid-sentence in her impassioned rant about how much it hurt to get highlights, especially from her hairdresser, who seemed to take pleasure in snapping on the thick rubber sieve-hat, then dragging the hair strands through with the metal crochet-hook.

It was Samantha.

‘I swear she’s trying to stab me with that thing … What’s the matter, Meredith?’

I ignored the question. Samantha screeched to a halt beside me, the edge of the wicker basket on her handlebars touching my right breast, her eyes greedily latching onto mine and holding me in her amber gaze. She looked astonishingly beautiful, red hair streaming, like a Valkyrie on two wheels; an angel of death who would rip me away from my old life forever. I felt a slow smile spread across my face and wanted to run into her arms, yelling with joy. But then I saw Julie and Charlotte gawping first at her, then at me, then at each other, and I felt gauche in my rolled-up skirt, jumper tied round my waist, ankle socks and – the shame – I even had a naff flowery hairband in my hair, the one I’d had since I was eleven years old. I wanted to rip it off and throw it in the river. I couldn’t have looked more like the schoolgirl I was unless my hair had actually been in pigtails and I’d had ink splotches all over my fingers.

‘Hiya,’ I said, grinning at Samantha, questions tumbling over themselves behind the dam of my mouth. I immediately firmly closed it to prevent myself either kissing her or giving her the Spanish Inquisition.

‘Hey, you,’ she drawled, grinning back and pushing her hair out of her face. ‘Long time, no see. I have your brother’s rucksack and sleeping bag back at my place. Got time for a coffee?’

I glanced across at my friends, who both raised their eyebrows at me. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Great, about Pete’s things. He’s been moaning about them for weeks. Samantha, these are my mates Charlotte and Julie. Charlotte and Julie, this is Samantha; we met at Greenham a couple of months ago.’

‘Ohhhh,’ they chorused, their faces alight with prurient interest. I immediately flushed scarlet, agonising that they could see how turned on I was just to be in Samantha’s presence. I had to glance down at my nipples to make sure they weren’t betraying me through my thin bra and white shirt. Samantha clocked me looking and I could have sworn she read my mind. Her lips twitched with amusement, and my blush developed a blush of its own.

‘Jump on. You can ride shotgun,’ Samantha said, wheeling her bicycle around on the path in a brisk 180-degree turn and patting the spring-loaded metal rack on the back of it.

I slung my schoolbag over my shoulder, climbed on and held myself steady by grasping the edges of the rack behind me in the way I’d seen teenage boys do, although I’d have preferred to wrap my arms around her waist. She pushed off and began to pedal hard back the way she’d just come.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I called over my shoulder to the girls, sticking my legs out to the sides to get them off the ground. As Samantha managed to get up a bit of speed, I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my head. There would be questions, I could tell, although I didn’t think they would suspect that there was anything sexual between us … would they?

Oh, who cares, I thought, as Samantha’s wheels crunched over the sandy gravel.

‘Follow the yellow brick road,’ I called.

‘Well, I am from Kansas,’ she called back, laughing, and I felt pure happiness – for the first time since Dad’s death.

‘So,’ she said, once we got into town, the girls mere specks in the distance behind us when I’d glanced back. ‘Where shall we go?’

I directed her to another tea shop, one as far away from my friends’ usual haunt, Reeves, as I could think of, with lots of upstairs nooks and dark little corners. We ordered a pot of tea and toasted teacakes and found the most distant table, in a top room that only held two, the other one unoccupied. Once the elderly, cross waitress had struggled up with our tray and dumped it accusingly in front of us, Samantha poured the tea. Then she stopped, mid-pour, leaned forwards and kissed me before I had a chance to ask her where she’d been, what she’d been doing, why she hadn’t been in touch, whose camper van she had been sleeping in, whose pillow had her head been on for the past two months…

‘My dad died,’ I said instead, when we came up for air. I waited for the gasps of sympathy, but all she said was, ‘Move to London with me’ – more of a command than a question. ‘My mate Marsh has got an awesome squat in Willesden we can live in. I’ve been sorting it all out these last few weeks. Sorry about your daddy, he seemed real nice.’

‘OK,’ I replied, all the questions fleeing, forgetting that I had four more mock exam papers to sit; forgetting my promise to Dad to look after Mum, forgetting that Pete would be left to cope on his own. ‘When do we leave?’

So this was what being in love felt like. No wonder people raved about it.