Mark says it’s time to go, but I do not want to leave this place. It has cast a spell on me and I can’t go home.
Last night, Bryn walked up to me as I swayed to an old soul record, handing me a beaker of cheap red wine. ‘Stay,’ he said, looking at me. ‘We all want you to.’
I glanced at Stella dancing next to me, her cool gaze unreadable beneath her dark fringe. But she did not contradict him, and after he had walked away to get another drink she placed her hand in mine and twirled me under her arm in an imitation of a 1960s dance couple at a contest. ‘Follow my lead,’ she said.
In the few days that I have been here, the possibility of another life has intruded with sharp-elbowed insistence. There’s nothing for me at home. My measly job at the shop, my knackered mam, stewing panacalty for hours next to the stove to try and soothe Dad’s pain and fury when he returns from the picket; Pete, his rough hands rummaging underneath my skirt as I stare at the patterned wallpaper of my room, peach and pale blue, counting the petals on its sprays of faded forget-me-nots in time with his grunts. He doesn’t know how to love me. My moans are a false balm to his ego. He’s a good man, kind; a catch, even, but when we are together it’s like he needs a dictionary and I, a tranquiliser. He’s never made me come.
I have noted the way Bryn looks at me. I know that look well. Famished. It scans the half-moons of my breasts and backside, greedy, but it is also shot, like silk, with warmth and friendship, and this is something new. I know he wants to sleep with me, and Mark knows it too. My brother watches me possessively, as though he’s loyal to Pete and not me, the little girl who would skip after him down the chares, pleading with him to let me play.
We spend hours talking, sitting up into the small hours. Bryn’s wife, too, who seems to have a fondness for me I don’t deserve. ‘It’s so great to have a woman closer to my own age here,’ she says, and she puts her hand in mine. ‘We are not so different, are we? You and I? I was young and innocent too when I came here.’
I think that I am not that innocent but I say nothing. Instead we talk about painting and poetry, surrealism and Simone de Beauvoir. When I reply to her questions she seems struck by the breadth of my knowledge, but quickly hides it. ‘I read a lot,’ I say; ‘it’s my way of being somewhere else.’
There is another life for me here. What fun it is to laugh and talk and drink and feel that, finally, I am understood. This is a world of music and ideas and freedom, and a whole city at my feet, unrolling before me like a magic carpet, rebuking my threadbare childhood at home as it beckons. This, I tell myself, this is the place.