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an excuse to talk to Mr Hale about plants. He brought her nice winter pansies and ornamental cabbages, as well as little heathers and dwarf azaleas and a bag full of the right soil to plant them in.
    Sometimes he gave her sweet-smelling plants like night-scented stock, which she planted for poor blind Miss Mack at number 3.
    It was easy to talk to Mr Hale but he was quite hopeless if she tried to bring the conversation around to Laddy. He seemed to know nothing about his own son. Not a thing about what he was like as a child, or who his friends were, or if he missed his mother when she went away. Mr Hale just shrugged helplessly about it all.
    ‘And suppose she came back, you know, Laddy’s mother? Would you all like that?’
    ‘I don’t suppose Biddy would like it,’ he said, after some thought.
    ‘No, but I mean you and Laddy?’
    ‘Well, I don’t know, it would be interesting to know where she had been, what she was doing, I suppose. That’s all.’
    ‘But wouldn’t you have liked her to stay?’ Star persisted.
    ‘No one would want someone to stay if they wanted to be off somewhere else,’ he replied, as if that was obvious.
    Star felt very foolish indeed.
    She wished she had a friend, someone to talk to, but Rita, who had been her pal in a way at school, had gone to work as a travel rep in the Canary Islands, and Miss Casey was still in Spain with the man called Watches, and Nessa, who lived a few doors down Chestnut Street, was always busy and never had time to talk to Star. Miss Mack was so old that she wouldn’t be much help.
    There was nobody at work, because all the other girls said she was mad not to fancy Kenny, who now ran not only the whole fish section, but a lot of the deli as well. He was going onwards and upwards and was real management material. Star was crazy to tell him that she didn’t really want to go out with him again in case it was leading him on.
    Wouldn’t it be great to have someone you could talk to about everything? Isn’t that what everyone wanted? Or was it only in movies and magazines that people had those kind of friends? Someone who would sit and listenabout Laddy, and tell her that he didn’t
really
care about the stream of young, barely dressed women who paraded in and out of number 23. A friend who would tell her that yes, OK, he might have been moving some stolen goods that night she had lied for him, but basically he wasn’t a criminal. And even though he did know someone who knew someone who had fixed a horse race, it didn’t mean that he moved with the underworld all the time.
    A friend who would tell Star what to wear, how to act in a way that would make Laddy love her now, just like she loved him.
    Her mother tried to be that friend but it was useless. Nobody confides properly in a mother. Molly had asked Star many times whether she was being sensible. She meant, was she using condoms or taking the pill. Star couldn’t explain that she had not had sex with Laddy, or indeed with anyone, because she had told everyone that she and Laddy had spent the night together in the single bed under the red rug. In fact Star almost believed that they had.
    Lilly looked on Star with more respect these days, too. Normally she thought of Star assomeone who didn’t tell tales about her hiding food. Lilly was well enough to work now, and she sold clothes in a smart boutique. Laddy next door had helped her get the job because he knew someone. He said she had great style, and that if she could eat a bit more to get some curves and a nice bottom she’d do great, and maybe even get discovered. The boutique owner asked Lilly to wear long-sleeved blouses so that nobody could see her thin, bony arms and the great sockets in her shoulders. All Lilly’s time at the clinic was helping her, and nobody had heard the sound of her vomiting in the night, not for a long time now, and she didn’t hide food all over the house as she once used to.
    Michael had a job too. In a video shop where