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know. I think I believe Dad more. He just said he couldn’t bear to tell me until it was real.’
    â€˜Did you really never notice that they weren’t getting on?’
    I have been thinking about this so much, and now I look back, I can see that the silences at home, Mum’s crying, and Dad being away a lot have all added up to something so obvious, but it’s amazing what you don’t see if you don’t want to. Nell is looking at me, her expression so kind that I crumple inside.
    â€˜No,’ is all I can say.
    I slump on the pink quilt next to her. She hugs me, and then places her hands on my shoulders and forces herself to smile.
    â€˜You will come back,’ she says. ‘You’ll come to see your dad and you’ll have all your London clothes and London friends and you’ll be so busy we’ll have to make appointments to see you.’
    I shake my head, eyes blurred with tears so Nell’s smile smudges into a blur with my posters and the necklaces festooned like cobwebs through the beams in my attic bedroom.
    â€˜I’ll miss you, Nell.’
    Nell squeezes my hands. ‘Oh, Lola, I wish I was leaving boring old Flixby and starting again with you. My mum and dad have both lived all their lives here,and I don’t know how I’ll ever escape it happening to me too.’
    I can see myself in the mirror on the chest of drawers, my dark hair still in the plaits I did yesterday morning, before I knew. Now they are wispy and bedraggled, and my face is blotched red with crying, while my eyes are as round and sad as a cartoon of someone having a bad time.
    â€˜I’d like to stay here all my life. Or at least for now. I don’t want to go with
her
.’
    I can’t call my mother ‘Mum’ right now, she has to be ‘her’. And even with that distance, I still clench my jaw, because I want to scream and hit out. Why can’t she go on her own to London? Dad and I could manage.
    I tried suggesting it to Dad last night, when he finally appeared in the house. I know he’d been hiding from me, and he came in holding his hat in his hands and looking apologetic and agonized. He reminded me of the vicar, Reverend Horace, when he turned up at the Christies’ house the other day to welcome them to the village. Reverend Horace stood on the doormat, watching Neoprene nodding to a battery-operated singing canary, and Sadie making small cakes with glitter icing, and he shifted nervously from foot to foot. Caroline made him a cup of tea, but whenever she sat down to talk to him, the telephone rang, so in the end he had to make do with me and Sadie. I was able to examine his expression closely, and Dad’s was the same last night.
    He shook his head when I made a perfectly goodsuggestion: ‘I can stay with you, Dad. Please let me. I don’t want to go away.’
    â€˜You need to be with your mother.’
    Dad never smoked, but now he pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. I gaped, astonished.
    â€˜You don’t smoke.’
    â€˜No, but I am now.’
    Dad’s odd smirk of defiance and embarrassment stayed in my mind until I fell asleep.
    â€˜My parents have both gone mental.’
    Nell and I follow the path along the creek and through the marshes towards Salt. Cactus scuttles ahead, his tail revolving madly as he sniffs in the heather for rabbits.
    â€˜My mum hasn’t stopped crying for a single minute since she told me. She’s supposed to be packing and starting a new life and all she can do is cry, which is useless and really annoying.’
    Cactus dashes up, proudly waving a stick in his mouth. I reach down for it and throw it across a small inlet and on to the opposite bank.
    â€˜And anyway, I’m the one who should be crying because I’m being stuffed into a new school without any warning. I mean we are actually leaving the day after tomorrow—’ I break off to nudge Nell. ‘Look at