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sake. Just be direct:
     
Dad, I’m afraid that I cannot come and see you before your operation .
     
    And that’s just brutal. Nothing I write sounds in any way close to adequate. I sit and stare at the screen, reading and rereading his message, desperately trying to think of something to say to him, something I actually feel . Trouble is, I don’t really know what I feel, other than horrible. I give up, delete what I’d written and close the message. Then I open another email account, the secret Hotmail one that Dom doesn’t know about. I have three new messages. Two are spam, quickly deleted. The third, which arrived that afternoon, comes from [email protected]. Alex. No subject line. I click on her name to open the message.
     
So, it’s confirmed. Aaron’s playing away. Checked his BlackBerry on Christmas morning while he was in the shower. Message from Jessica. And I quote:
‘Lying in bed, wearing new La Perla (thank you, thank you!) and no one to play with. Can you get away Boxing Day? Happy Xmas my darling Jx’
I wasn’t surprised, of course, but you were right, it does feel like someone’s stuck a knife into one’s chest and is twisting it, slowly, slowly, oh so bloody slowly. Haven’t said anything to him yet. I’ve barely got out of bed since I saw the message. Feigning illness. So now he brings me chicken soup in bed and soothes my (allegedly) fevered brow and all I want to do is punch him in the face.
I guess you must think I got what was coming to me.
God, I miss you Nic.
xA
     
    I take a large gulp of whisky. Some of it drips down off my chin and onto my T-shirt. It’s one of my sleeping shirts, I’ve got a few, all of them ancient relics from another life. This one is my Different Class T-shirt, Julian bought it for me when we went to see Pulp play at the Brixton Academy in the first term of my first year at university. It’s soft, worn thin over my shoulders, holes appearing along the seams. It will disintegrate to rags before I throw it out. I take another swig of my drink, shut down the computer, wipe the tears from my eyes and go back to bed.

Chapter Four
     
    New Year’s Eve, 1991
    High Wycombe
     
    Resolutions:
1. Enter the Seventeen short story competition
2. Lose half a stone
3. Phone Dad at least once a week
4. Sign up for the photography course at the leisure centre
5. Forget about Julian Symonds
     
    CHARLES WAS COMING round for dinner, which really pissed me off. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; he was actually really nice. It just seemed … insensitive. This, after all, was the anniversary of my parents’ spectacular break-up and there was still part of me that blamed Charles for it. Charles, my mother, myself most of all. Somehow over the course of the past twelve months Dad’s part in the whole thing seemed to have diminished in importance.
    Mum suggested that I invite a couple of friends around to join us for dinner; grumpily, I declined.
    ‘It’s going to be really boring ,’ I pointed out. ‘My friends do not want to come round here and watch TV with you and your boyfriend .’
    ‘Okay then, darling, have it your way,’ Mum replied breezily, which infuriated me further. This was not going my way. This is not how I wanted to spend New Year’s Eve. I wanted to be going out to a party, or at least having a party at home. Actually, the thing I wanted most of all was to have last New Year’s Eve back, a chance to do it over, minus the bloody ending. More than anything on earth, I wanted to be sitting in my bedroom with Julian Symonds.
     
    Julian and I had not spoken since Valentine’s Day. He’d called a couple of times in the summer, but I’d got Mum to say that I was out. I didn’t want to talk to him, ever again . I didn’t want to hear him say that he was sorry, or to tell me that it wasn’t me, it was him. I didn’t want to hear him say that he really hoped we could be friends. It was all just too humiliating, too painful.
    The thing was, I should