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each other. Looking back as an adult, Susan realized that was an illusion. She had hidden a great deal that was important from Beth, so it was almost certain that Beth did the same.
    The last shared holiday was in 1966, when they were fifteen, perhaps the most memorable one of all because it was when their minds turned to makeup, boys and dances.
    ‘The wallflowers,’ Susan murmured to herself, remembering their first dance in Stratford, with all the balloons in the net above them. She’d bought a red dress that same afternoon without her mother’s approval, and put it on at Beth’s Aunt Rose’s house. It had seemed perfect in the shop, sophisticated, slinky and daring. But when they got to the dance and she saw that all the other girls were in the ‘Mod’ fashion, with long pencil skirts, high-necked blouses and ‘granny’-type shoes, it had felt too tight, too revealing, and she thought everyone was staring at her.
    Aunt Rose had said as they left her house for the dance that the best way to avoid being a wallflower was to look boys in the eye and smile. Also, they shouldn’t sit down, but dance together if no one asked them. That way it would look as if they had only come for the dancing and boys didn’t matter much to them.
    They did as Aunt Rose said, and they were astounded that so many boys did come and dance with them. Susan wondered if Beth remembered the two boys who grabbed them for the last dance and walked them home. They were brothers, both skinny and spotty, but as Beth said at the time, they were nice enough to practise on.
    ‘She’ll have forgotten all about you long ago,’ Susan whispered hopefully to herself. ‘She was always prettier, cleverer and more outgoing than you. Her life’s got to be too full to look back at anything.’
    Susan didn’t want to look back either. She’d learned many years ago that it was better to live only in the present, for thinking about the past only brought pain with it. But the present wasn’t a good thing to think about either. Not when Beth might suddenly recognize her, and Susan would be forced to try to explain how she had come to this. She had to make her mind go blank.
    Imagining the sea was her tried and tested way of blanking out all thought. A shingle beach empty of people, huge green grey waves crashing on to it. She pictured herself standing with bare feet on the wet shingle, running backwards each time a wave crashed in. Sometimes it caught her feet, and when it did, she got the sensation of being sucked back towards the sea along with the ebbing wave.
    Yet this time, instead of seeing nothing but the water, with the frothy white crests on the waves, and hearing the sound of moving shingle, she saw herself. Not as she was now, a worn woman of forty-four, with a flabby body and lack-lustre hair, but as she was in the early summer of 1967. Almost sixteen, her birthday only a week away, she was plump even then, but she had shiny brown hair, clear skin and sparkling eyes.
    She was on holiday with her parents at Lyme Regis in Dorset. It was, for all of them, their first real holiday in years, and it was also, although none of them admitted it openly, a celebration of her grandmother’s death.
    Susan had no memory of a time when life wasn’t dominated by the old lady, for she had come to live with Susan’s parents, Margaret and Charles, at their house in Luddington when Susan was just a baby. Her earliest memories of Granny were of seeing her sitting in a high-backed chair in the kitchen, with a shawl around her shoulders, complaining. Cold, heat, food, her medicine, bad legs or stomach troubles – anything could start off a litany of grouses. Susan couldn’t remember ever hearing her laugh.
    Her brother Martin used to claim Granny was a demon, her purpose in life to create misery. He used to stand behind her chair where she couldn’t see him and mimic her pursed lips and disapproving wagging finger. But Martin was lucky enough to be away at