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semicircles or breaking off into small groups, and exclaimed to Kyle and Chas: ‘Let’s go camping!’
    I grabbed my two-man dome tent, my gas cooker, foam mattress, sleeping bag and light. Kyle had driven us in his rich-boy Mini, our gear spilling out of the boot. Chas sang all the way along Great Western Road – funny, silly little songs that he knew every single word to. We laughed so hard at him, Kyle and I, but not so much when we realised that his repertoire could carry him all the way to Loch Tay and back. He sang around seventy different songs, I reckon, without even a tiny break. Tunes about Mrs McVittie having only one titty and wishing Campbelltown Loch was whisky, Cambelltown Loch och aye.
    He was still singing when we erected the tent in the rain, still singing when we realised the gas cooker was out of gas, and still singing after we ran a mile, only to find that the food at the local pub was ‘aff’. So we had vodka for dinner, and crisps, and Ifell on the tent after a midnight barf and it collapsed on Chas and Kyle.
    It was the funniest, best night of my life, and I found myself laughing out loud as I packed the tent the next day, even though it still smelt of cheese-and-onion puke.

CHAPTER NINE
    The night before they went camping, Kyle had spent two hours sitting on the bed watching Sarah try on her hiking gear. The boots matched the Tiso trousers perfectly, he had to admit, and the jacket-with-cute-pocket was surprisingly well cut, and the raincoat did fold perfectly into the side pocket of the Gore-tex rucksack, and Sarah had indeed done all the tasks on her list of things to do.
    He thought wistfully back to camping trips with Chas and Krissie. They’d once decided to go camping for the weekend at five o’clock on a Friday night and were on the road by five-thirty. He’d packed a cagoule and matches, Chas had packed a quarter ounce of Dutch skunk. Krissie had hardly packed anything besides chocolate. It couldn’t have been more different to this.

    Kyle was almost sweating with relief by the end of Sarah’s fashion show. He’d said all the right things, and was now allowed to go and read his paper (which had been placed in the recycling bin). He wasn’t always so lucky. Once, when he’d had a hard day and wasn’t thinking straight, he’d told Sarah the truth about a pair of shorts. ‘Maybe they shrank in the wash,’ he said, before shrinking into a tiny ball of regret himself.
    Kyle was used to feeling regretful by this stage.
    He regretted that Sarah was failing in her desperate attempt to build a different life from the one her mother had slapped together for her. She had it all mapped out – the stable home, the holiday house, the babies, the hard-working parents who would stay together and always be around. As time went on, Kyle realised he was witnessing a losing battle, because Sarah didn’t have the wherewithal to build a different life, didn’t have the role models or the confidence. She was trying to do brain surgery with a spoon.
    When Sarah had arrived at Kyle’s flat years before he’d been immediately besotted. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met and he spent most of the next nine months looking at her. He’d gaze at her while she was sleeping, look into her eyes across restaurant tables, and smile at her in shops while proudly noting the shopkeepers’ awe.
    But the infatuation had long died away.

    Back in their student days, when Chas was proclaiming the truth about beauty, he said: ‘Some folk get uglier the more you look at them, whereas some folk get more beautiful.’ This was true, Kyle now knew, because Sarah’s perfectly symmetrical face had become less intriguing over the years. She had slightly too much flesh at the sides of her mouth, which time and an extra stone had accentuated. At thirty-three, she looked puffy. It wasn’t only that, though – there was nothing striking in her eyes, nothing sparkling in her smile, nothing that he wanted