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polite interest. Jo found them all too young and wondered briefly if a Bristol student might not have attractions.
    ‘Seriously,’ said Ali, ‘none of us knew what to do after the exams, did we? At least none of us could think of anything our parents would actually let us do.’ She meant
her parents and Jo’s mother, because they all three knew Lucy’s would let her do whatever she wanted within reason. ‘The advantage of this is that my mother thinks it’s a
good idea.’
    ‘My mother wants to send me off to some camp because she’s going to a conference,’ said Jo.
    ‘Hang on,’ said Lucy. ‘Just before we sign up for this, what exactly is it?’
    ‘It’s a three-week dig at a place called Montacute on the site of a Norman castle.’
    Jo looked at her, frowned, looked away.
    Lucy studied her. ‘Astonishing. You manage to sound excited about that.’
    ‘It’s three weeks of freedom,’ Ali said with a note of pleading in her voice.
    ‘Where will we be staying?’
    ‘Everyone’s camping. All the diggers. I’m glad. It’s much more fun that way.’
    ‘I have very firm views on camping,’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t mind sleeping under the stars so long as there are five of them and they’re fixed to a hotel
wall.’
    ‘No, it’s really fun, I promise. They have campfires at night and they sing songs and stuff.’
    ‘Is there a pub?’ asked Lucy.
    ‘Probably.’
    ‘They’ll serve us if we’re with all the others, won’t they?’
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘I haven’t been ID’d for
ages
. Will they have power at the campsite? I don’t want my iPod going flat.’
    ‘Power? It’s a field. A field with boys in it,’ said Ali hopefully.
    ‘But I know what archaeologists look like,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ve seen them on television. They’ve got long straggly hair like old sheep and they’re bald on top.
They get incredibly excited about very small broken bits of pottery. They’re always drinking beer and they knit their own sweaters.’
    ‘Where exactly is Montacute?’ Jo asked.
    ‘Near Yeovil,’ said Ali, and brought out a map.
    As Jo looked at the map, some of the names on it penetrated the curtain in her head, prompting a small thrill almost like pleasure – Martock, Somerton, Wincanton. She put her finger on
Montacute and knew she wanted to go there.
    A month and a half later the three girls got out of the Yeovil bus in the middle of Montacute village and lined up on the verge like some demonstration poster of different body
types: Lucy, the tall blonde with the aquiline profile; Jo, half a head shorter, dark and curved; Ali, who barely reached Lucy’s shoulder, stocky and with hair which looked, as Lucy had once
said in a far-too-honest moment, as if it had been assembled from other people’s leftovers.
    Jo was looking all around her and seemed to be sniffing the air. It was the nearest to liveliness that her friends had seen all week. The other two had come out of their GCSE exams released from
pressure but completely true to type. Lucy had indulged in a theatrical spectrum ranging from comic despair after the Maths exam to claiming the best answers ever written to an English paper. Ali
had been quietly pleased with all of them, but anxious not to rub that in if she was talking to anyone less confident. Jo had only said they were mostly all right.
    ‘Jo,’ said Lucy, ‘before we get there, Ali and I have got something to say.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Fleur made us promise something before she agreed you could come.’
    ‘I can guess.’
    ‘She made us promise to watch you take your tablets every day.’
    ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Jo with a sigh. ‘I will.’
    ‘No. That’s what we want to say. We’re not going to do it. It’s up to you. You don’t have to take them.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because we know what you’re like when you don’t. That’s the real Jo.’
    She looked at her friends, unsure what to say, so used now to the dulled-down world that the idea of weeks away