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possibly happen to him if he’s doing nothing?’
    ‘Oh, you know what your father is like. He’ll probably drink too much and fall over the edge of a cliff.’
    ‘I’m hardly going to be able to stop him from drinking too much. You never have. And anyway, he’s not going to want me hanging around any more than I want to be around him.’
    ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t mind so long as you don’t get in his way.’
    She couldn’t quite be bothered to point out the flaw in her mother’s argument, the inherent contradiction between not getting in Jim’s way and keeping an eye on him.
    ‘You haven’t got anything else to do for the summer,’ Liz said.
    Sam folded her arms.
    ‘You could always take a friend.’ Liz was heading towards the door, ferreting in her handbag for the car keys, conversation over as far as she was concerned. Deal agreed.
    ‘I’d be surprised if I have any friends left after Jim’s performance last night,’ Sam yelled at Liz’s rapidly disappearing back. There was no reply. She stared out of the kitchen window again, mulling over her conversation with Liz. The dog was out in the garden now, scrabbling away at one of the flowerbeds, digging for buried bones. Or buried bombs. Perhaps it would be a chance to find out more about Jim, a last few days together before she went to college. And, loath as she was to admit it, Liz was right; she had loved their holidays in Orkney, crawling into passage graves, tramping across fields in horizontal rain to investigate the tumbledown walls of ancient brochs, searching stray megaliths for the stick-figure runes of the Vikings. Orkney, islands of the Norsemen, she mused to herself and a wire fizzled in her brain like one of Jim’s gaffer-taped electrical repair jobs. Operation Asgard. Asgard, Norse myth. Norsemen, Orkney. Was that it? Was that the rationale for the name – some dodgy connection with Orkney? She slumped on the kitchen floor, rested her head against the kitchen cabinet and gave the dog a dirty look as it moseyed its way disconsolately back into the kitchen.
    Sydenham Hill, West Dulwich, Herne Hill – the litany of stops on the commuter line. Sam whispered the names into the still evening air as she left the station, conjuring up the fields and woods beneath the tracks. A foaming-mouthed Alsatian tied to a rubbish bin snarled at her. She eyeballed the dog, straining on its frayed rope lead, tried to resist breaking into a run, swerved down the sandy path to the builder’s yard, negotiated her way around the piles of wooden pallets and headed to the warehouse. She put her hand on the door, hesitated, pausing to collect herself, calm her nerves.
    This was their regular meeting spot; an empty storeroom in the prefab building that Lee’s dad used as a base for his burgeoning construction business. This was the place where she hooked up with Becky, and a handful of others in their tightly-knit cabal, to plan their activities: the CND meetings, the leaflet stall outside the library on Saturday afternoons, the showings of ‘The War Game’, the marches. And, more frequently now, the trips to the peace camps that were sprouting up all over the countryside outside the British military bases housing American nuclear missiles. Protesting, political activism; it was becoming more like a way of life than an occasional activity, especially since they had all finished their exams. But despite the closeness of her clique, she still had to steel herself to climb the stairs. Just as she had always done. They might be her friends, but they all came from families with a radical pedigree: Aldermaston marchers, trade unionists, card-carrying members of the Labour Party. Hers was a slightly less salubrious heritage. Although, there was a pleasing irony about the fact that she had honed her political views courtesy of the Force and the trail of radical pamphlets left lying around the house by Jim: the Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, the Anarchist Cook