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continuous line of brick like the miners’. The houses on Ridley Avenue were detached with gardens to the front and back; gardens with lawns, and borders of flowers, not vegetables.
    But the medical men were long gone and all she saw now were poky façades covered in pebbledash, while the original stained glass rising suns – still there in some of the thickset front doors – looked more like they were setting.
    She drove slowly down Bridge Street and Quay Road before parking outside the newly converted-to-flats Ridley Arms overlooking the Quayside at Blyth Harbour. Her apartment – open plan in accordance with contemporary notions of constant surveillance – was the only one occupied, even though the re-development of the old harbourside pub into four luxury apartments (the hoardings advertising them were up on the main road still) had been completed nine months ago. But then the kind of people the apartments had been built for didn’t exist in Blyth – in Tynemouth maybe or Newcastle, but not Blyth. Blyth wasn’t a place people re-located or retired to; it was a place people were born in and stayed. Being born here was the only guarantee for growing to love a landscape so scarred by man it couldn’t ask to be loved.
    Someone close by was burning a coal fire. It was the smell of her childhood and it hung heavy in the last of the fret. What was left was clinging to the masts of the blue and white Scottish trawlers, but most of the harbour’s north wall was visible now and there was a sharp brightness coming from the Alcan dock where aluminium was unloaded for smelting at the Alcan plant. Anna could just make out the red light at the pier end, as well as the thick white trunks of the wind turbines on the north wall – stationary, silent, and sentient.
    She was back where she’d started.

Chapter 4
    Laura was above her, barefoot, wearing pink and white velour shorts and a grey T-shirt, which had grass stains on the back and a Bugs Bunny transfer on the front – cracked because it was her favourite T-shirt and it had been over-washed. A light tan took the edge off the cuts and bruises running the length of her legs – legs that were swinging away from the branch Anna’s hands, hesitant, were reaching out for.
    Anna wasn’t trying to catch up; she was concentrating all her efforts on keeping going – up; up – and she wasn’t barefoot like Laura. She was wearing red plastic basket weave slipons because she’d seen too many crawling things in the bark of the tree to want to go barefoot. The shoes had good grip – it wasn’t the shoes that were slowing her down, it was her constant need to peer up into the tree in an attempt not only to ascertain how she was going to get up it, but how she was going to get back down.
    Laura didn’t need to do this – and only occasionally flicked her head upwards. She wasn’t interested in the views either as they got higher.
    But Anna was.
    Anna kept stopping to take in the Cheviot hills in the distance and, down below, their two tents pitched on the fringes of the tree’s shadow at the bend in the river. She could see Erwin, standing in the river with his trousers rolled up to his knees, fishing. Mary was lying on their green and blue check picnic rug on the bank, reading a book from the library – a wartime romance set in the backstreets of Liverpool. Anna could see the sun reflecting off her reading glasses.
    The tree was oak.
    They’d camped under it for the past two summers, but Erwin always forgot to mark the spot on the map so it took them a while to re-discover it each year. It was off the main road that cut across country to Jedburgh, down a single track road with four fords, and up a farm track. Anna had a feeling that Erwin forgot to mark it on the map on purpose because if they put a pencil cross on the Ordnance Survey map and gave the spot a grid reference it would somehow