Cheri flushed the chain without looking and splashed water on to her face. She was shaking and her whole body was covered in an angry, uncomfortable sweat that felt scratchy and constricting, like a rough wool body stocking. The face that stared back at her from the bathroom mirror was white and oily, like she’d never had that holiday in Antigua. Her freshly washed hair hung in grubby, ropy strands around her face.

She thought they took it out of you. She’d seen those gruesome pictures handed round the classroom at school, probably planted by school teachers trying to instil horror into their naive charges, of big black bins full of pink and purple parts, of small fat legs and alien heads with sealed eyes, of gore and blood and waste. She thought someone cut it out of you, like a tumour, or a lump or a gallstone. She had been horrified as the pretty (too pretty) Swedish nurse had gently explained to her that it was tiny, the size of a thumb, that she wouldn’t feel a thing - just like a heavy period, on the toilet, flush it away, you might want some sanitary towels, I can give you some, no-one seems to use them very much these days. She had been blond and pert with perfect skin and Cheri had felt ugly in the too long linen night dress Giles had bought for her, gift wrapped in tissue paper in a gold-embossed box and ribbon, confined to her bed, her circumstances so unattractive and grotesque. She wanted to be the pretty nurse in the tight dress, not the stupid girl in the stupid nightdress who’d got herself pregnant and was here to have her mistake scraped out of her.

She’d managed to put Martin off coming to see her once she’d realised that her six hours were up and she’d have to go home and take the thing home with her, still inside her. Martin would not have appreciated seeing Cheri like this. More to the point, Cheri would not have appreciated Martin seeing Cheri like this - ugly ugly ugly.

She tried to turn on the bath taps, the stiff Victorian brass giving way reluctantly under her weak wrists. The air smelt strange, musty and deathly. She poured a generous amount of Tootie Frootie bath bubbles under the running tap until they began to emit their sickly fragrance into the room - Giles had bought those for her too, before. Tootie Frootie, Mandarin and Nectarine, Ginger and Ginseng, Almond Oil and Apple, Relaxing Foam, Sensual Oil, Invigorating Bubbles, a bath for every mood, for every day of the week. He’d put the glass bottles and vials in a Champagne crate - underneath was a layer of pink Champagne in quarter bottles. He’d said something about wanting her to enjoy her own company, to savour solitude. He wanted the bubbles to pamper and smooth her, not the hands of some young idiot. He couldn’t touch her any more but he was happy to envisage Cheri, alone, candles flickering while she sipped pink Champagne in a bath full of purple, orange and watermelon green bubbles, soaping her long smooth legs and perfectly sculpted shoulders. Instead she’d used the multicoloured concoctions to prepare herself for Martin or occasionally, when she could get away with it, someone else even better looking.

And now she was using them to wash away the dead ochre blood of another man’s aborted baby that was quickly encrusting between her thighs.

Cheri was untouched by the sad irony of this misuse of bubble bath. She was trying to decide how to explain to Giles that he would have to pay for the abortion in full. It had been his idea, after all, to book her into a Harley Street clinic - she would have been perfectly happy (well, fairly happy) to have gone to the clinic in Tooting that Martin had chosen for her, but Giles had insisted.

‘Have you ever seen one of these places,’ he’d ranted, ‘dreadful, dreadful places - linoleum flooring, strip lighting and you’ll be in and out in thirty seconds without so much as a ‘how are you feeling?’ Absolutely not - you tell Martin if he pays what the Tooting clinic would have cost, I’ll pay the difference.’ Well, how was Cheri supposed to have said no. She never said no to anything that Giles was foolish enough to offer her. He’d asked her once if she ever truly appreciated his gifts and his caring and his unconditional love. She’d replied with the confident defensiveness of one who has anticipated the question and has a perfect stock reply - ‘Giles, some people are givers and some are takers.’ Giles had been vaguely amused by her hollow, picked up from a magazine philosophy. Cheri rarely attempted to theorise or look for explanations. People just did, things just happened, circumstances just were - why look any further? But it had also saddened him.

She pulled a towel decorated with seashells and seahorses from the heated towel rail and wrapped herself in it as she stepped out of the bath - she was feeling better already. At least it was over, she was clean, she was soaped and she was empty. She pulled the towel open and surveyed her body in the mirrors that lined the room - she did not want to be the last to know that she had developed cellulite - and was relieved to see that nothing had changed. The lustrous skin on her dancer’s legs was firm enough to reflect the lights from the bulbs that framed the mirror, her stomach was long and brown with a taut ridge of feminine muscle running down the middle. Exquisitely proportioned antique rose nipples sat atop perfect 34B breasts and a feint line of white ran across the small of her back where the band of her G-string bikini had obstructed the bright Antiguan sunshine - her buttocks were demerara-brown orbs of flawless satin.

Satisfied that her body was not showing any signs of its recent undignified trauma, she pulled her wet hair back from her face, hard, to pull the skin taut. The colour had returned to her face and she looked as she liked to look; brown, natural, young and beautiful. Her skin was clear and honeyed and the light reflected off her beloved chiselled cheekbones. She smiled at her likeness and her white orthodontically straight teeth smiled back at her.

As she wandered into the living room with a mouth full of foaming toothpaste and encased in a pure white fluffy bathrobe she heard footsteps on the street below - she glanced downwards into Almanac Road and saw a small dark-haired girl standing out in the street, looking down into the basement flat with a small, strange smile on her face.

She wondered briefly at what she might be doing and then walked back to the bathroom. A streak of liver-coloured blood on the underside of the toilet bowl caught her eye. She dampened some toilet paper under the tap and rubbed at the stain until her wrist ached.

‘Will you marry me?’

Oh God. Cheri’s heart sunk. Not again.

If Cheri had a ring for every proposal of marriage she’d received, she could have opened a jewellers.

‘Look Cheri, I know we’ve tried before, I know it didn’t work out - but things were different then - you were younger, you needed to... to ... find out a bit more about life. We could live wherever you want - you wouldn’t have to work, you could dance all day, we’ll live somewhere with a studio. Please Cheri - I can’t bear to see you get hurt anymore...’

Always the Drama Queen, Giles. From the first time she’d met him, when she was nineteen, he’d entranced her with elaborate and emotional stories from his past, embellishing and embroidering and sometimes breaking down in tears.

Giles wasn’t the usual Cheri-fodder. He was smaller than her for a start, flyweight build, with a snub nose and mischievous blue eyes. He was also twenty five years older than her, an ex-Royal Naval Officer with his own business in the City. Giles had realised a long time ago that their ‘attractiveness differential,’ as he called it was a problem. Cheri needed to be with good-looking men, young men with muscles in all the right places and a certain shape of jaw. She seemed to think that having a good-looking boyfriend made her a good-looking girl and that was all that mattered to Cheri. She wanted to be able to tell people that her boyfriend looked like Tom Cruise, or Mel Gibson or Jean Claude van Damme. She had left Giles in the first place for that Scottish boy with the huge motorbike and even bigger buttocks and then of course it had been up to Giles to pick up the pieces when he’d beaten her so badly she’d had to have a brain scan. He thought she’d learnt enough about life then.

But Cheri wasn’t easily taught. She wasn’t taught after her nervous breakdown, when Giles had flown back from a business meeting in Brussels to find her pale and scared in a white gown and a sealed room, emotionally shredded by a man with a square jaw and a wife. She was nothing, the married one told her when she’d confronted him with her new-found knowledge, a piece of shit - get off my shoe he’d sneered. And for six weeks the doctors at the psychiatric hospital had pumped her full of sedatives till she slept so much she almost forgot.

That was when Giles had bought her the flat in Battersea. Somewhere of her own, to be herself, somewhere with a nice bathroom and white sheets on the bed and a little kitchen where she could cook for herself and soft carpets and expensive curtains. Somewhere where she didn’t need to depend on men, somewhere that she couldn’t be booted out of and somewhere just big enough for her.

It had been fine at first, until she met Martin. Handsome, boring, lazy Martin - Martin who couldn’t care less about Cheri until she did something to make him care, and then he would sulk and strop and pout until she admitted she was wrong so he could go back to not caring again. As far as Martin was concerned, Cheri was a good looking girl with a great body and a really nice flat where he could come and watch telly and drink lager when there was nothing better to do. He’d even asked her to marry him - he knew there was no-one better for him out there, but she’d laughed and said no and he’d been relieved.

She’d given him a front door key and Giles had been horrified to find the vacuous Martin answering the phone sometimes and informing him that Cheri was out. He hated the thought of him sitting there on the mint green sofa that he and Cheri had chosen together from Peter Jones and helping himself to things from the dear little Smallbone kitchen, stained pink for a girl, his huge feet up on the mahogany coffee table watching football on the television he’d bought her for soap operas and black and white films.

And now there was the abortion. Maybe Cheri had learnt enough about life now, maybe she was ready for something real, to love, to be loved. He’d brought her a ring, not the same one he’d bought for her five years before, on her twenty first birthday - he’d taken that back the day after she rejected him - this one belonged to his mother. It was platinum set with clusters of brilliant shining diamonds clinging to a clear blue aquamarine baguette that was exactly the same colour as his mother’s eyes.

Cheri’s eyes lit up when he opened the box - it was his mother’s ring. He’d shown it to her before when he’d first told her the beautiful story of how his parents had met - it meant the world to Giles and even Cheri with her self-centred perspective on life realised the poignant enormity of the gesture.

Giles’s father had been the good-looking and boundlessly charming son of a family with Mayfair squares and Belgravian streets named after them. Edward, a happy non-academician and effortless eluder of his family’s military expectations played piano in a fashionable Soho bar before the Second World War and that was where he met Annabel, a beautiful nineteen year old with a voice like a nightingale. They sang Gershwin duets and captivated their audiences and their friends with their combined talent and the beauty of their love. They made other people happy by just loving each other.

But, as in all the best stories, Edward was married and so, a year later, when she discovered that she was pregnant, Annabel ran away, as far away as she could, to live out her inevitable fate. Her fate was a Welshman called Evans who offered to marry her, to bring up her child for her and to look after her. In those days this was a hard offer to refuse, so Annabel married the Welshman although she didn’t love him and six months later, while she lay in bed sore and deranged after a forty hour labour, her baby daughter was taken away from her and put into an institution. The Welshman refused to tell her where the baby was and so began five years of misery and unhappiness. The Welshman proceeded to make her pregnant four more times before the war put an end to these repetitious conceptions and the frequent beatings she suffered and he was sent to fight for his country.

Annabel remained in Cardigan, that little headland that clings grimly to the westernmost point of Wales, and without the constraints of her selfish and unintelligent husband she forged an impressive army career, rising through the ranks to Corporal, and bringing up her four children. But every night in her cold farmhouse should would dream of Edward and cry for her lost daughter.

One day in 1942 she had an appointment to meet with a Corporal from London. This always meant trouble and Annabel was ready for an argument.

Consequently she didn’t even look up when she called enter to the knock on her prefabricated office door and so was unprepared for the large bouquet of flowers dropped onto her desk and the strong warm arms that lifted her from her seat and spun her round the room till she was dizzy. The Corporal was Edward - his wife had died of Leukaemia two years previously and he’d done nothing but wonder, after a colleague had returned from Cardigan full of talk of a beautiful Wren called Annabel with aquamarine eyes.

Using contacts he found out where their daughter was being kept and they arrived at the home to take her away the very next day. A transfer was arranged for Annabel and the whole family moved to London. They married and Giles was born the following year, a child born into the happiest of circumstances, a child with aquamarine eyes who basked in the sunshine of his parent’s love for forty years until they died, as happy together as the day they met.

The ring had always been a symbol to Giles of pure love, of love that transcended everything, war and death and distance and time. And now he was offering it to Cheri, a damaged child with no ability to give or receive love, with no interest in love except what it could get her and with no idea even of how to love herself.

‘Oh Giles,’ for once, no smart comeback, no condescending laughter, no defensiveness, ‘I don’t know what to say - it’s your mother’s ring - I...I...’

Cheri was shocked to find herself almost choking on the words ‘I’m not worthy.’

Instead she burst into tears and clung onto Giles like he was a favourite bear, wetting the fabric of his white cotton shirt with her tears and her misery.

Giles’s flat wasn’t as smart as Cheri liked to make it sound - ‘the flat in the Docklands.’ It was a studio flat for a start, the size of most people’s living rooms, in one of the first developments to have been built in the area, and it was already starting to look quite shabby. It didn’t even have a river view, its small aluminium framed windows looking out over a grim ‘A’ Road and a distant panorama of council blocks and storage warehouses. The communal halls and corridors were institutional in design with polystyrene tiled walls and grimy grey office carpeting, stained and worn.

Giles pulled himself out of the black cab and took the Thames-side path to the front door of the bleak building. It was nearly eleven o’clock on a freezing early December night. He turned up the stiff collar of his raincoat to protect his face from the icy rain being thrown back at him off the dead black surface of the river and walked briskly. The anaemic interior of the building did little to warm him as he stepped into the tiny metal lift and pressed the button for floor five. The doors slid across his view of the river like eyelids, obscuring the skyline of North London barely visible across the impossibly wide expanse of water.

The Thames scared him sometimes - it chilled him. On a summer’s day it was delightful, a happy green ribbon of sodapop conveying bright white yachts and parties of sun-tanned tourists and partymakers. But on a dark winter’s night it could look so ominously black, like a thick soup of corpses and ashes and syrupy, cloying venom, a turgid snake of bile dividing the City into two.

Giles walked up the grey and white corridor with his key in his hand and the usual heavy cloud of loneliness descended upon him as he let himself into his tiny home.

He switched some lights on and the bareness of his flat engulfed him as it did every evening. His thin beige curtains billowed slightly with disappointment, the blue tweed sofa bed sagged defeatedly under the weight of another lonely day, the fridge sighed wearily as Giles opened it to reveal nothing more than a bottle of wine and an aged loaf of bread.

He was already quite drunk after three or four pints of bitter with the Marketing Director in a noisy City pub and he was absolutely exhausted. He’d been working since lunchtime of the previous day, for nearly thirty hours and his whole body felt wrung out and battered, his head hummed quietly and his mood had swung unavoidably from a high-energy office high to a deep and pounding melancholia. He had hoped that Cheri might want to stay with him tonight, he said he’d take her out for dinner to her favourite Chinese just under Southwark Bridge. But she had something else to do, a dance class or something. They were still to consummate their reincarnated relationship but Giles was used to being alone, he could wait. In a few months they’d be married and she’d always be around. At least she’d got rid of that Martin character. He could wait.

He pulled the wine from the fridge, took a watermarked wineglass from the draining board and collapsed onto the sofabed, clutching the bottle to his chest.

He fell asleep there, in his raincoat and his suit and his shoes.

He woke up with a start at six o’clock the next morning, his bones stiff and complaining. He changed his clothes, shaved and went back to work.

Cheri couldn’t marry Giles. She definitely loved him - he was funny and kind and interesting and he absolutely adored her - he was a part of her now, inextricably, but... she couldn’t marry him.

It was Jem, funnily enough, who’d put the doubts into her mind. She’d bumped into her on Friday night outside the flat on her way out to her High Impact Aerobics class. She’d been incredibly easy to talk to which was just as well because Cheri really hadn’t been in the mood to make an effort with the neighbours and, to her great surprise, Jem had been lovely, a really, really nice girl.

‘Hi,’ Cheri had said, ‘you live in the basement flat don’t you? I live on the first floor, my name’s Cheri.’

Jem had put her bulky collection of carrier bags on the pavement and shaken her hand. ‘My name’s Jem,’ she’d said with an enormously friendly smile, ‘it’s so nice to meet a neighbour! You know, I’ve lived in so many of these converted houses in London and never even seen anyone else who lives in the house, let alone talked to them. How long have you lived here?’

‘It must be about four years now I guess.’

‘It’s a lovely road isn’t it - and I love this part of London. Are you on your way to the gym?’ she’d asked, pointing at Cheri’s holdall and trainers.

They’d chatted for a while then, about dancing and Battersea and the neighbours - Cheri had told her about Siobhan and Karl and their dog and Mr Carvetti, the old man who lived in the attic flat with his huge ugly old cat called Auberon who’d never been outside but occasionally sat on the window ledge, in Mr Carvetti’s window box, peering gingerly down between the African Violets to the street below, at a world he’d never known.

‘Do you know my flatmates,’ Jem had asked, ‘Smith and Ralph?’

‘Only in passing,’ Cheri replied, ‘never more than a few words though, and usually about the freeholder. So, you’re the third person are you - flat sharing?’

‘Well,’ Jem had smiled shyly, ‘that was the original arrangement - it still is technically speaking but...

Cheri smiled involuntarily.

‘I’ve ... well, I’ve sort of started going out with Smith, you know, the fairer haired one...

It was completely unexpected, the plethora of feelings that swept over Cheri as she stood and watched the small, pretty girl talk so frankly and sweetly about her new romance - like the sky had just turned green or the trees had just turned purple, everything changed for a moment. Jem was in love, not a secret love, not a private love, but a huge big happy love that she wanted to share with the world and it glowed from every pore, from every follicle and every orifice and Cheri had been overcome by a sea of emotions ranging from jealousy, to despondency and to a deep, deep sense of loneliness as she realised that she had never, in her life, experienced anything remotely akin to the joy enveloping her downstairs neighbour.

Part of her had wanted to run away then, to take flight down Almanac Road with her hands over her ears so that she wouldn’t have to listen to another word of it but another part, a stronger part, had stayed put, wanting to experience second-hand the happiness that emanated almost tangibly from Jem.

Scenes from her life flashed through her head as she listened, images of ex-lovers, of broken hearted men, of fists flying towards her face, of hate, of anger, of indifference, of the Swedish nurse handing her a packet of sanitary towels, of the impenetrable door she’d stared at for four hours in the mental hospital, of Martin’s bland uninterested face, of her lycra-clad body in the mirror at the gym, of Karl’s face in the restaurant when she’d told him about the abortion, the look of hatred on his face in the dance club when he’d hurt her in the office, of her father in the morgue when she’d had to identify him as his only next-of-kin, the small posy she’d made sitting on top of his dirt-covered casket in the ground and then, looming over everything, an image of Giles, his kind, lived-in face looking at her with so much love, so much understanding and so much disappointment...

‘Is that an engagement ring?’

Cheri jumped.

‘What? Oh, yes,’ she held her fingers out to let Jem look at it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ gasped Jem, ‘when are you getting married?’

‘Oh, not until next June,’ murmured Cheri, still staring at the ring, is if she’d never seen it before. ‘I’ve got so much to do though... She was distracted, she felt disembodied, like she was looking at herself through a stranger’s eyes. She was getting married and all of a sudden she couldn’t remember why.

She thought of her dress, hanging in its cream plastic bag in her bedroom, yards of oyster silk and tulle speckled with tiny pink rosebuds, a confection of romance and little girls’ dreams. She was confused, disoriented. Her thoughts faded out and Giles’s face was in her head again, smiling at her with sadness, searching her face for something, for something that wasn’t there ... she looked up from her ring and into Jem’s face and saw it there, what Giles was searching for - love, true love, unconditional and unending, open and real - she saw it the face of a stranger and somewhere inside her a small voice whispered ‘help me.’

‘Does he live here?’

Cheri jumped again. ‘Who?’

‘Your boyfriend - the guy you’re marrying.’

‘Oh no - we don’t live together - yet.’

‘How romantic and old-fashioned! Are you excited?’ asked Jem eagerly.

‘Just so much to do at the moment - I haven’t had a chance to let it sink in really,’ Cheri adjusted her sports bag on her shoulder, she wanted to go now, her head was about to explode and she couldn’t bear to talk about this anymore, ‘it’s been lovely to meet you Jem. I’m going to be late for my class though, but I’ll hopefully see you around,’ she meant it, ‘it would be nice to have a friend in the house.’

‘Yes, it would - I come from a small village and I miss all this neighbourly stuff,’ said Jem picking up her carrier bags, ‘enjoy your class.’

She’d walked down to Lavender Hill in a daze after that, blocking out her thoughts, trying to concentrate on other things, but she couldn’t. Her head was just so full of things, things going round and round and she could feel tears pricking at her eyes, like water at a dam and if she’d let just one tear out she wouldn’t be able to stop. She felt lost and totally alone as she wondered who this girl was, this girl walking down Lavender Hill with a sports bag and an engagement ring and a flat paid for her by a man she was going to marry. Who’d decided she was going to marry Giles? - who’d made that decision, had she been there? - had she had anything to do with it? Who was she, who the hell was she?! She was walking faster and faster now, her eyes wide, making small moaning sounds under her breath, fighting the tears, fighting the thoughts, fighting the desperate feeling of being alone, of being a stranger. And knowing that it was her. It was her! Other people loved and allowed themselves to be loved. Giles loved her, Annabel had loved Edward, Jem loved Smith, Karl loved Siobhan, Mr Carvetti loved Auberon ... everyone else could do it - why couldn’t she? She was a freak, she was evil, she wasn’t normal, she was ill. She was sobbing now as she walked, not caring who saw her, not caring that people might think she was mad. Why couldn’t she be like Jem? Why couldn’t she just open her heart and let someone in - not just a man, but anyone. Jem was bound to have loads of friends, family and now a boyfriend who made her glow with happiness. If Cheri was to drop dead, who would care? And why should anyone care? What had she ever given to anyone else?

She wanted to tear the ring off her finger and give it back to Giles. She’d felt unworthy when he’d given it to her but had ignored the feeling, put it down to emotion, but now she realised she’d been right. She was unworthy. She approached the Fitness Club and pulled suddenly into a phone box. She wanted to phone Giles, she wanted to be loved and comforted and made to feel human. She phoned his flat - he was out. She phoned his office and got through to him, Giles answering the phone himself because the receptionist and everyone else had gone home.

He’d managed to decipher where she was through her sobs and cries and had arrived fifteen minutes later in a black cab to find her crouched on the floor of the phone box, her arms wrapped around her body, shaking and staring at the floor. Very gently, he’d brought her to her feet and carried her into the waiting taxi.

‘Where do you want to go, my Cheri? - I’ll take you wherever you want to be,’ he’d said, putting his jacket round her shoulders, looking for the heater switch, taking her hair out of her face.

She was still shaking, still staring and she lowered her head very slowly into Giles’s lap, curling her legs up underneath her on the seat.

‘I want to go home,’ she whispered, ‘I want to go home ...’

‘Almanac Road please,’ Giles had called through the sliding window to the driver.

‘No - I want to go to home!’

‘You want to come back to the Docklands?’

‘No - I want to go home - I want to go to Liverpool!’

They’d taken the cab back to Almanac Road and Giles had packed some bits and pieces for Cheri, taking underwear from her drawers and trying to put together an outfit for her to wear, not knowing what went with what, picking up a pair of socks through habit and then realising that they didn’t go with skirts and wondering where she kept her stockings. He telephoned the Adelphi in Liverpool where his company had a business account and booked a twin room, eventually found Cheri’s car keys in a drawer in the hallway and finally they left, Giles leading Cheri by the hand down the steps and into her GTI.

Cheri didn’t know why she suddenly wanted to go home. She hadn’t been back since her father’s funeral - there was no reason to, no-one to see, no-one to care, just her parents’ graves side by side in the graveyard of a tiny church that was used as a Judo and Karate Centre nowadays. There were other relatives of course, but none that she’d want to see, cousins of her own age, probably married with thousands of children and no money. There were old school friends too but they’d never liked her much anyway, as children - they’d called her daddy’s girl and stuck-up cow just because she’d worn nice clothes and gone everywhere with her father. He didn’t want her hanging around with them, or her mother’s relatives and after her mother died at the age of twenty one, when Cheri was just three years old, he’d stopped seeing them. The two of them had kept themselves to themselves; they didn’t need anyone else.

He’d make her breakfast in the mornings, whatever she asked for, soldiers, cereal, porridge, even waffles when they started selling them in supermarkets, and then he’d walk her to school, never stopping to chat to the mothers at the gate. They were all fascinated by Rudyard Dixon and his oddly dapper appearance. In an age of flared jeans, tight shirts and lurid colours, Rudyard was a generation behind fashion. His hair was always freshly trimmed and slick with oil, his clothes always clean and pristine, a fresh white shirt, a crisp navy blazer with militarily shiny brass buttons, a silk handkerchief, shiny loafers, skinny socks and a thin cigar, sitting in strange contrast against his broken nose, tattooed hands and a bizarre cockney/scouse accent inherited from a Merseyside mother and a Finchley father. He was handsome in a weasley sort of way, a sprinkling of Spanish blood showing in his permanently golden skin and abundant black hair and he held himself well, never slouching or shuffling. He was an odd one, the mothers used to say, that Rudy Dixon, as he adjusted Cheri’s hat and silently handed her her lunch money, then turned to light a small cigar before slowly walking away again, and there was definitely more than one of those disillusioned and prematurely ageing mothers who would have entertained a fantasy or two about the mysterious young widowed father.

He never did settle down with anyone else - he made a life for himself and Cheri and that was all he wanted. He’d never grieved for Cheri’s mother, just focused all his attention on his beautiful blond daughter, the image of her mother, and worked every hour that he wasn’t with her to provide her with everything she wanted. He worked as a sales rep for a costume jewellery company and although he did the job for twenty two years, he never grew comfortable with the idea of it - he came from a family of fighters and sailors and factory workers and bookies, he was not a natural born salesman, but he took the responsibilities of being a father very seriously and soon discovered anyway that the novelty of a handsome young man was worth an hour of gab and schpiel and as long as he made an effort with his appearance and smiled a few times during each painful encounter, the jewellery sold itself.

Cheri was Rudyard’s princess and Rudyard was Cheri’s everything and they got on better than most married couples, fairly sharing the household duties, supporting each other and caring for each other, never moaning, always accepting, each one putting the other first on every occasion. Cheri never had to ask him for anything, she only had to cast a wistful glance at some toy or item of clothing and it was hers, Rudyard smiling at his little blond angel as he peeled notes from his real crocodile wallet.

He’d taken it surprisingly well when Cheri had told him she was moving to London after her ‘A’ Levels to study Modern Dance - it was more important to him that Cheri make something of herself and her life than to hang around looking after him, he could look after himself. He’d found her a flat through relatives still living in London, he’d come down with her for her interview, they’d stayed in a lovely hotel in South Kensington and he’d taken her shopping afterwards to Oxford Street and bought her bags and bags of clothes and shoes. They’d had dinner at a smart restaurant in Knightsbridge and he’d told her how proud he was of her, how she’d never given him a moment’s disappointment in her life, brought him nothing but happiness and how, if he’d had sixteen children, they couldn’t have given him so much as half the pleasure and joy that she’d brought to him.

Cheri had only been living in London for two weeks when Rudyard died. He was forty years old. He’d been on the way to the post-box clutching one of his daily letters to Cheri when he’d been knocked down by two fourteen year old boys in a stolen Mercedes. He’d lain in the quiet street for an hour bleeding to death before he’d been found by a young mother - the large bloodstain on the tarmac took three years to finally fade away. The police arrested the two boys on the day of Rudyard’s funeral but they weren’t charged with his manslaughter.

Cheri met Giles shortly afterwards. He took her shopping, took her to the theatre, took her out for dinner and took her mind off her pain. Giles always knew that he was a buffer, that Cheri was on the rebound from the greatest love of her life, but all Giles ever wanted was for Cheri to be happy. He was the only one who knew the heartbreak that Cheri covered up with her blasé attitude and self-obsession and he made excuses for her every day, never wanting to add more pain to the burden that he knew she hauled around with her constantly. Giles carried her, he acted as a sponge to her misery and her grief and had never really given Cheri a chance to learn to deal with her anguish and the shortcomings that had been an inevitable by-product of her strange and cosseted upbringing. He’d allowed her to behave terribly badly for a very long time, always hoping that, with enough understanding and unconditional love she would pull through the long dark tunnel and see his face at the other end and realise that she was capable of loving again, the way she had loved her father and that only Giles, as her supporter and her rock was worthy of such a love. As the years went by, after her rejection of him as a lover, after watching her throw herself at one dreadful man after another, after all the giving and no receiving, Giles was tired, and he was disappointed, but he still loved Cheri, his beautiful blond angel and he knew now, at the age of fifty two, that it was his destiny to love her forever, whatever form that love was to take.

They drove in silence down the unlit motorway - Giles would wait until she was ready to talk. She appeared to be calmer now; she’d stopped shaking and crying and was staring blankly through the window at the monotonous black road ahead of them. He didn’t know what all this meant but he knew it was important - he could feel that they were approaching a turning point. She hadn’t talked about her father for years, or Liverpool, she’d made a show of getting on with her life and only Giles had known that really she was just going round and round in circles. This trip up the motorway felt like her first journey out of this incessant circumnavigation and as such, carried with it a sense of fear and trepidation.

They arrived at the Adelphi at about ten o’clock and Cheri stood in the faded and homely splendour of the hotel foyer while Giles checked them in. Her father used to bring her here for tea sometimes - funny, she remembered it being so much brighter and smarter - now it just looked like a colossal Old Peoples Home, dusty spider plants, etiolated floral wallpaper, a faintly musty smell, threadbare velvet banquettes, teak reception desk, crystals missing from the vast chandeliers that hung ominously from rusting chains and fraying cables. Oddly institutional, but welcoming nevertheless, like the home of an aged aunt. Odds and ends of people milled around, Japanese tourists, businessmen, executive women in smart suits, the same people observable in hotel lobbies the world over. And now they were here - did they make a strange couple? Cheri in her gym clothes and trainers, her eyes red and swollen, her hair dishevelled, and Giles, smart and neat in his diminutive suit with a red silk handkerchief drooping from the top pocket, his elfish features starting to show the strain of a long day at work and a three hour sprint up the M6. They certainly weren’t the norm. Cheri wondered what the red-haired receptionist whose name badge declared her to be Collette O’Donnell would make of them. Would Collette ever get herself into a situation like this? They were probably the same age - but Collette would have a nice boyfriend, her age, who she knew she loved and wanted to spend the rest of her life with. Collette would still live with her parents and her mother would wake her up for work in the mornings with a cup of tea and her father would help her fix her little red car when it broke down and when Collette married her nice boyfriend, her father would walk her up the aisle and her mother would wear a hat and sob happily in the front pew. Collette would never have to be collected from the floor of a phonebooth in South London by an older man who she was supposed to be marrying but didn’t know why. Collette would never allow an oversized biker from Stirling to beat her on the kitchen floor with a monkey wrench. If Collette got pregnant it would be a joyous event and she would give birth to a smiling red-haired cherub, beloved of both its parents, not have a condom split on a leather chair in the office of a seedy dance club while having sex with a man whose surname she didn’t even know, a man who loved someone else so much that he couldn’t look her in the eye. No, not Collette. Cheri. Cheri would do all those things.

‘Thank you then Mr Grosvenor and Miss... Miss Dixon,’ she said smiling and handing them their booking slip, ‘I hope you enjoy your stay.’

They both smiled weakly and made their way up the sweeping dirty red carpet-clad staircase and wandered, still in silence, through endless yards of dusty corridors, following the room number signs at T-junctions until they finally reached their destination.

Their room looked like someone’s spare room - two misshapen lumpy single beds, pink candlewick bedspreads and a peculiar selection of unnecessary nick-nacks offset by out-of-place concessions to commerciality in the form of a trouser press, tea making facilities and a brand new television with remote control. The curtains were tissue-thin, the floor covered over with two different and clashing carpets of orange and brown swirls. But it was warm and snug and safe and Cheri flopped backward onto her bed and stared at the ceiling. It was a nice room.

The silence between them was now so long-lived it had taken on a life of its own and sat thick and heavy in the air, like an overcooked custard. Cheri’s voice broke a little as she started to speak.

‘Thank you,’ she croaked.

Giles responded immediately, spinning round from the sink where he was filling the kettle with water.

‘How are you feeling, my Cheri?’

‘Oh, better - tired - Giles. I’m so sorry...’

He sat down next to her on the bed and took her hand. ‘You have nothing, whatsoever, to be sorry for. I’m very proud of you. I know how difficult this all is for you.’

‘Giles - I’m hungry.’

‘Oh dear - we’re probably a little late for room service. Let me see if I can sweet talk them into doing us a round of sandwiches.’ He gave her hand a little squeeze and went to the telephone.

Cheri brought the bedspread around her like a papoose and listened while Giles talked. There was no question at all that he would be able to negotiate sandwiches - even if the entire kitchen had packed up and gone home the manager would probably make them himself if necessary such was the extent of Giles’s charm - he was the most wonderful person, he really was. He had an amazing ability to open up to people, to get people to open up to him. Everyone who worked for him loved him. He’d once found his receptionist crying at her desk. Her American boyfriend had just telephoned to say that their two-year-old, long-distance love affair was over, he’d met someone a little more local. Giles had taken the inconsolable girl out of the office and out of London and down to his cottage in Wiltshire where he’d fed her, entertained her and allowed her to wallow in misery and self-pity while he kept a discreet distance and then brought her back to the office, less desolate and more hopeful, on Monday morning. The list of Giles’s good deeds and examples of his charitable and caring nature could go on and on, especially if you were to add to it his selfless actions on behalf of the ungrateful child currently rolled up inside a pink candlewick bedspread.

Cheri didn’t want to listen to it, but somewhere inside her a voice was nagging, a horrible, whiny but impossible to ignore voice and the voice was telling her to let him go, telling her that Giles deserved better. She’d always thought it was the other way round - it made more sense for Giles to be the undeserving one, an older man, a not at all conventionally attractive man, a man who was destined to be alone - he should be grateful to be allowed the company of a beautiful girl like Cheri - she was a princess, she would bring youth and laughter and hope to his life - lucky Giles, lucky Giles ... but the voice that had suddenly begun to lecture in her head had a horribly authoritative tone to it, it knew what it was talking about. Cheri was the lucky one and she did not deserve Giles - she was going to ruin his life, she was going to make him miserable, she was going to disappoint him for the rest of their days together - she wasn’t in love with him ...

‘They only had pate and cucumber - you like pate and cucumber though don’t you? - all the kitchen staff had gone home - the manager’s making them for us herself!’ he smiled as if this was the first time that anyone had responded so nicely to his affable and likeable disposition. Cheri smiled too, for the first time since her conversation with Jem. Dear Giles ... lucky Cheri.

They watched television while they ate their sandwiches and then they went quickly to sleep, both too exhausted to speculate for longer then a few seconds on what they were doing lying on lumpy beds in Liverpool and where the next day was going to lead them.

—–

Cheri rose quietly the next morning - she knew what she wanted to do and she needed to do it by herself. Giles was sleeping deeply, he always did, his jaw hanging open very slightly, emitting small, baby-like snores, in keeping with his frame, his body not curled up but poker straight, a result of years spent in narrow berths on Navy ships. She looked at him fondly and silently left the room.

At the front desk she left a note for him with the receptionist - Laura Teale this time - and the doorman showed her to a waiting taxi. She gave the driver the address and sat back and watched her hometown waking up on a Saturday morning, shop shutters going up on Union Street, early morning shoppers pushing prams, fried breakfasts being eaten in cafes and canteens, the sun shining clear and bright like it always does when most people are still in bed and oblivious, like God playing a trick on the slothful, a prize for those who rise early enough to see it, the streets yet to be grubbied by thousands of pairs of feet.

Cheri felt clear-headed and purposeful as the scenery turned to suburbia - she hadn’t known why she wanted to come back here last night, but now she understood. She should have come back years ago.

The cab finally pulled up outside an ordinary house, identical to the other houses on the landscaped estate, new in the eighties but a bit rougher around the edges now, cream Venetian blinds at the windows, plants in terracotta pots lining the neat pathway, a china cat sitting wistfully on the windowsill, a quiet house, maybe still sleeping. Cheri paid the driver and regarded the house briefly before walking up the pathway and ringing on the doorbell.

Within a moment the door was opened by a bald but youthful looking man in his sixties, wearing a tracksuit and a gold identity bracelet, a small wiry dog sitting at his feet sharing the same expression of friendly curiosity.

‘Yes?’ he said pleasantly.

‘Um - I hope I’ve got the right house - I’ve come to see Mrs Sullivan - Angela Sullivan.’

‘You mean Angie - yes, she lives here - she’s Angie Goodburn now though, we got married last year,’ he turned to the hallway behind him ‘Ange!! Ange! There’s someone here to see you.’

‘At this hour - who is it?’ the disembodied voice was joined by a tall, slim woman in her fifties, wearing black ski pants and a red and navy Nordic knit jumper with buttons on the shoulders. She had vanilla-coloured hair, like Cheri’s, cut short and feathery, and wore large-framed glasses that obscured her small chiselled face and magnified her blue eyes so they were the size of Ping-Pong balls. She was drying her hands on a tea towel and was followed by another small dog, this one a little less personable, eyeing Cheri suspiciously.

‘Hello?’ she asked, searching Cheri’s face for something to recognise.

‘Um - hello,’ Cheri hadn’t planned this at all. ‘My name’s Cheri - I’m, well, you probably don’t remember me, I’m, I was Rowena’s daughter. I’m your granddaughter.’

The woman stared at Cheri blankly through her enormous glasses for what felt like an age, mirrored by her husband and her two small dogs.

Without emotion she motioned for Cheri to come inside.

It wasn’t how she’d imagined it to be - her father had given her the impression that her mother’s relatives lived like gypsies, twelve to a room, in dirt and chaos.

The house was neat and modern, papered with blue and grey stripes and floral borders, dado rails painted white, soft cream carpet underfoot, panelled doors with brass fittings leading through to the kitchen at one end and the living room at the other. The woman held out her hand for Cheri’s coat and hooked it over the stained wood banister.

‘Can I get you a cup of tea - I was just doing us some toast as well - would you like some?’ she spoke in a soft Liverpool accent, slightly weasy, borne out by the two hundred pack of Embassy’s sitting on the varnished pine coffee table.

Cheri hadn’t had any breakfast. ‘I’d love some please, if it’s not too much trouble.’

The husband was clipping leads to the small dogs’ collars.

‘I’m taking these two out, Ange - I’ll probably drop by our Dawn’s on the way, see how the little ones are getting on - they’ve had flu, Rebecca and Lucy,’ he explained unnecessarily to Cheri, ‘I’ll see you later love.’ He pecked her on the cheek and nodded amiably at Cheri before leaving, the door closing loudly behind him, the two women suddenly alone.

‘I’ll get the tea on then - make yourself comfortable - there’s magazines under the table if you’re bored,’ she disappeared into the kitchen.

Cheri looked around her - the walls were covered in photographs of children and weddings. She was probably related to most of them but didn’t recognise a single face. She searched for a picture of her father - not one. She would have looked for her mother but she didn’t know what to look for - she’d never seen a picture of her before, she presumed she’d look like her, her father had always told her she was the image of her mother.

She absent-mindedly picked up a copy of OK magazine from under the table and flicked through it without interest, past pictures of celebrities she’d never heard of and photographs of hearty stews and hotpots to “keep the Winter chill at bay”.

‘What brings you to Liverpool then - last I heard you were living in London - dancing or something?’ the woman laid a tray down on the table, pushing things out of the way to make room for it, taking the lid off the teapot to stir it with a spoon.

‘Oh - just visiting really,’ what rubbish! Cheri took a deep breath. ‘To be honest, Mrs Sullivan - sorry, I mean Goodburn - I came to see you - I came because...

The woman poured tea into cups on saucers, she didn’t look up.

‘I came to find out about my mother - I want to know about my mother...

The woman still didn’t stop her activities ‘What was it you wanted to know exactly?’

Oh God - where could she begin?...

‘Everything - I want to know everything. I want to know what she looked like, what she smelled like, how she sounded, was she clever, could she dance, could she sing, was she funny, was she bad-tempered, was she ... was she proud of me?’

The woman finally stopped moving, took a seat opposite Cheri and looked her in the eye, her glasses magnifying the small tear that had formed in the corner of her eye.

‘Oh pet - didn’t he tell you anything?’

Cheri shook her head sadly.

The woman’s face crumpled then, the hard lines turning to tender folds of compassion, her body almost visibly collapsing under the heavy weight of years of grief and guilt and heartache. She launched herself towards Cheri, propelled by remorse and pity and took her hands tightly in her own, squeezing them hard, too hard and crying, thick, viscous, agonising tears.

‘That bastard - excuse my language - but that bastard! God, you poor pet. Hold on - hold on just one minute,’ the woman disappeared into a tall cupboard and reappeared with her hands full of photo albums. ‘Here,’ she said through her tears, handing them to Cheri, ‘here, this is Rowena - this is your mother.’

She helped Cheri to turn the pages of the old book, pictures slipping precariously behind the dried out gum on the worn out plastic, talking her through them.

‘This is Rowena in Blackpool when she was five and that’s her sister Dawn, your auntie. Pretty as a picture weren’t they. And that’s Rowena on her first day at school, look at those knock-knees! And here she is with her father, your grandfather Eric - he died about twenty years ago now, when you were only six - you probably don’t remember him. And this is Rowena and her best friend Carol after they’d been to see the Beatles back in 1966 I think it was- she looks like you don’t you think - this was before she met your father of course,’ the woman’s voice became bitter at the mention of Cheri’s father, ‘and this is your mother on her wedding day...’

Cheri brought the page a little closer to her. An intense ache jolted through her as she looked at the eighteen year old girl in the white dress, too much black eyeliner and pale lipstick, hair piled on top of her head and stiff with hairspray, smiling into the lens and holding the train of her dress out of her way as she stepped out of an old Austin Princess.

‘You were there then of course,’ the woman smiled, pointing at Rowena’s belly. ‘The invisible bridesmaid!’

Cheri continued to stare at the face in the photograph - this was her mother. Her mother. This was Cheri’s mother. She was beautiful - much more beautiful than Cheri - her face was softer and kinder, her eyes more full of life and love, her mouth more generous. But she did look like Cheri - the same vanilla hair, defined cheekbones, golden skin, and beautiful shoulders and collarbone showing over the top of the lace of her dress. Cheri didn’t know what to feel - this was a young girl, a child - but it was also her mother, the mother she’d never known.

‘Beautiful wasn’t she - some used to say the most beautiful girl in Liverpool. And she threw it all away for that bastard. Threw away the last years of her life living with that weirdo - I’m sorry pet, I know he’s your Da and everything but Rowena was my daughter, you were my granddaughter and he took you both away from me and I missed the last years of my baby’s life and missed the whole of yours ... I shall never forgive him for that, ever ...’

‘He said you lived like animals - he said you were violent and wild and ... and ...’

‘Your father - your father met our Rowena and she was so beautiful and loving and everyone loved her so much and he was scared, scared that she’d go off him, leave him, love someone else more than him - he couldn’t bear for her to be out of his sight for a moment and that included her family. He wouldn’t let her see us from the day they got married. She’d sneak out sometimes, when he was at work, bring you with her and come round to the old house and she’d swear blind she was happy, that she loved him but I knew she was lying - I could see it in her eyes. She was like a trapped bird she was - it broke my heart. He told her we were no good for her, that they deserved a better life and that we’d hold her back because we were poor and happy - he always had such big ambitions, he was going to be so rich, so wealthy, so successful, the three of you were going to live in a posh house on the Wirral. She began to believe him in the end, she began to get airs and graces, would make comments about our furniture sometimes or my new dress, snidey comments like she was better than us, but I knew it was him talking, not our Rowena. He turned her against us. It was so cruel. I always thought she’d leave him eventually or see what he was really like and then we could be close again, I’d have my Rowena back, the way she used to be - so happy and carefree and special but it was too late - God didn’t give us the time, there was no “eventually”. She died - she was twenty one years old and she died... oh God!! I’m sorry,’ the woman’s voice broke like china then and she put her head into her hands and sobbed, tears of grief, her slender body shuddering violently. Cheri patted her numbly on the back. After a moment she recovered and lifted her glasses to wipe the tears away from under her eyes.

‘It was a brain haemorrhage - I don’t suppose he told you that either did he? That bastard! He moved house without telling us where he was going and the last time we saw either of you was at Rowena’s funeral. We tried to find you, we really did - we went to his company but they said he’d left, didn’t know where he’d gone. Every now and then someone would say ‘oh - we saw your Cheri in town the other day - she looked very pretty,’ but we never saw you again. Love ...,’ she held Cheri’s hand, ‘I’m ashamed to say this I really, really am ... but I gave up on you. It hurt me so much that I couldn’t see you and I hated your father so much that I cut you out - I made myself stop caring. I had Dawn, I had Rebecca and Lucy, I told myself that was enough and I actually began to blame you as much as your father. I bumped into your father in town a few weeks before he died - he was quite pleasant really - and he told me all about your plans to go to dance school in London. I could have pushed it - he was mellowed and I could have asked to see you, asked for an address, asked anything - but I didn’t - Oh love - I didn’t care...’

The woman began to cry again and Cheri didn’t quite know what to do - she felt no emotional attachment to this woman, she was unused to consoling people, but she wanted her to feel better - it wasn’t her fault. She squeezed the woman’s hand ineffectually.

‘And then when you turned up at the door just now ... at first, oh God, at first I felt nothing ... I didn’t want to know. I’m so sorry love, I really am so sorry... you poor, poor thing...’

The woman was crying uncontrollably now and Cheri was feeling uncomfortable. The woman reached for her cigarettes and opened the packet with shaking hands - she offered one to Cheri who took one and they both lit up and inhaled in silence for a moment.

Cheri took a deep breath - she had to get to the point now.

‘Tell me about her, Mrs Sull ... Goodburn - please. I want to know everything ... Daddy would never talk about her - I used to ask about her and he’d just say I didn’t need to know, she was gone, we had each other, it would just upset me.’

Mrs Goodburn pulled a tissue from the sleeve of her jumper and wiped at her eyes and her nose.

‘Here I am wallowing in self-pity - I’m sorry - you didn’t come all the way here to watch an old woman feeling sorry for herself did you? Where do I begin?... I know! - I know exactly what to do ...’ She went to the wooden cabinet that housed the TV set and began to rummage through the piles of videos on the bottom shelf. ‘I know they’re here somewhere - we had these transferred from old Cine films a few years ago - hours and hours of the stuff - it was always too much of a performance to put the screen up and I wanted to be able to watch them whenever I wanted. I haven’t looked at them for ages though ...ah - here they are.’ She took a handful of cassettes and checked their spines. ‘Let’s start from the beginning ...’

It was getting dark by the time Cheri left her grandmother’s house. Mr Goodburn had come back at lunchtime with the two small dogs and quickly found another reason to leave the house when he’d walked in to find the two women immersed, watching a history unfold that he’d had no part in. They hadn’t even noticed lunchtime come and go - just sat and watched and smoked cigarettes, Cheri’s grandmother giving a constant running commentary over the music that had been dubbed onto the jerky old films. ‘This is the old house, where your mother was brought up ... that’s Domino, the dog we had when the girls where little ... that’s my late husband, Eric, your grandfather ... this is the summer when we went to Cardiff ... there’s your mother, the one in the blue dress - she came first in that dancing competition - you inherited that from her ... this is her first boyfriend, Keith - such a nice boy, I always hoped they’d settle down together ... look! look! - that’s you! ... one hot summer’s afternoon when she brought you round to see us... ‘

‘Pause it! Pause it!’

Cheri’s grandmother paused the tape and they stared at the image left suspended on the screen - seventies technicolour, airbrushed blue sky, Cheri’s mother wearing a short floral lime green shift dress, vanilla hair parted in the middle and backcombed at the crown, sitting on a deckchair in the back garden, holding aloft her baby, a fat, smiling, happy baby, mother and child looking into each others eyes with a love that was, for one minuscule moment in time, breathtakingly and heartbreakingly palpable. Cheri stared at the image in wonder and awe, her heart suddenly filled with an overpowering feeling of pride, but a pride that was tainted with the most painful, excruciating sense of loss. And that was when she finally began to cry.

Cheri’s grandmother and her husband insisted on driving Cheri back into town, to the Adelphi. She forced a carrier bag into her hands, full of photo albums and videos. ‘You have these,’ she said, ‘I’ve got the memories - you need these more than I do...’

They wouldn’t get out, they said, as they sat in the brand new shiny yellow Corsa outside the Adelphi, saying their farewells. Cheri and her grandmother held each other in a deep, warm, long embrace. ‘Come for a week next time - make a proper visit of it - you can meet your auntie Dawn and your cousins and I’ll take you visiting - there’s so many people who’d love to see you, so many people who would want to know you.’

‘Yes - I will,’ said Cheri, and she meant it, ‘I’d like that very much.’

She stood outside the hotel, feeling the cold now in the inappropriate outfit that Giles had selected for her, and waved goodbye to the little yellow Corsa until it disappeared round a corner. She turned slowly and walked into the lobby, enjoying the warmth that immediately enveloped her as she walked through the door.

She was in a state of shock. That was her life she’d just waved goodbye to in the yellow car. It was her life. It was her mother and friends and relatives and pets and fun and summer afternoons and birthday parties and grandchildren and nice little houses full of family and ... and... normality. It was being just like anyone else. It was belonging and loving and caring. It was the past and the future and it was here and now. It was knowing who she was and how to love and who to love and loving herself. It was where she would have been now instead of being where she was. It was the difference between being Cheri Dixon and being Collette O’Donnell. She could have been Collette O’Donnell...

She wandered through the dusty corridors trying to remember her room number - 12 something, was it left here? no, it was right...

She had a mother now - Rowena Dixon. She’d been a lovely mother, a wonderful mother, the best mother in the world. She could dance and sing and she was pretty and wore lovely dresses - she played with Cheri all the time, bouncing her on her lap, making her smile, making her gurgle and laugh. Her mother had a family and loads of friends - there was Carol and Jane and Di and Christine and her little sister Dawn who worshipped the ground she walked on. And she’d had boyfriends, lovesick suitors queuing at the door to see the most beautiful girl in Liverpool - Keith and John and Paul and Jim. She loved everyone and everyone loved her - but there was no-one in the whole world that Cheri’s mother had loved more then her daughter. She was the happiest mother in the world because she had the best baby in the world and she dressed her in pink and ribbons and pushed her proudly through the streets of Liverpool in her brand new shiny pram and covered her in big fat kisses and blew raspberries into her tummy and sung her songs and read her stories and played with her toes ... Cheri had a mother.

She’d only had a mother for a few hours - she could have had a mother her whole life. She could have known all this before. Her mother had died, but her father had killed her ... killed the memory of her, her father had stopped her from existing. Why? Why did her father do that? Why did he steal her mother from her? Why did he kill her?

She loved her childhood though - she and her father. She was so proud, he loved her so much he didn’t need anyone else. She had loved it - she thought she’d loved it, but now... was that love? Was that right, not to need anyone else - he kept her all to himself - she’d turned into nothing more than a reflection of him, like a small, flat mirror - she could have been a brilliant diamond, multi faceted, dazzling with reflections of a family, friends, a grandmother, a cousin, a niece. She was small and dull and unpolished and her mother had shone like cut crystal. Daddy was mean - he was mean and horrible. She was like him ...

She wanted to go home now - back to London and lock herself in her flat on her own, no Martin, no Giles, take the phone off the hook and watch the videos over and over again, until her mother became a part of her - until she learned how to be different. She wanted to be alone, just her and her mother, for a long time ...

189, 190, 191, 192 - this must be it ... knock at the door. Giles! Oh thank God you’re back, I was starting to get worried about you ... here, have a cup of tea - have you eaten? Is everything alright? - I got your note - did you find your grandmother? Not now Giles, not now you lovely sweet man - I’m tired - I’m sorry. I’ll tell you all about it but not now... Oh of course my Cheri, of course - just tell me though - are you glad you went? Yes Giles, I’m very glad I went. Oh good - oh thank God - I’m so proud you brave, brave girl, so proud ... yes, of course we can go now - whatever you want my Cheri, whatever you want ...

They packed quickly and silently and shut the door behind them, walked back through the corridors and into the lobby, gave the key back to Laura Teale, signed the account, unlocked the GTI and drove back down the M6, back through the dark. Cheri sat silently and thoughtfully in the passenger seat, hugging the bag her grandmother had given her to her chest and Giles drove fast and steady, feeling scared and alone, wondering what had happened and what it meant for him and his future happiness.

Cheri slowly slipped the beautiful ring off her finger and put it on the table between them. Giles regarded it sadly for a moment and then, with an almost imperceptible shrug, picked it up and put it in his inside pocket.

‘Well...’ he begun, for something to say rather than as a prelude to anything of any significance. He’d feared this, ever since Liverpool. Well, ever since she’d first put the ring on her finger if one was to be entirely truthful with oneself. He’d expected her to say no then. Been quite taken aback at her emotional reaction and speedy acceptance. It had been a gesture of reassurance on his part, another attempt to make her feel secure, assure her that he would always be there for her to fall back on, no matter what. He’d expected her to scold him for his foolishness, insert a rather large flea in his ear and laugh lightly and affectionately at him for his silly old ways. He would have given her the ring anyway and life would have gone on as before. But then she’d said yes, and the last two months had been a precariously trying time for him, a never ending series of lonely nights, more resonantly empty then before as Cheri’s absence became less acceptable and more painful. His only reminder that he was an engaged man had been the constant flow of bills and credit card statements informing him of how much this whole farcical event was going to cost him, bills from all sorts of diverse organisations, shops and companies, bills that he felt entirely detached from. It had been a most unsettling couple of months, a kind of frighteningly silent madness. And now it was all over.

‘Well ...’ he had no idea what to say. Was he sad? Was he relieved? He’d never truly felt engaged, never really expected it to happen, despite the bills that informed him that it was.

‘Giles - I’m so sorry. I’ve treated you badly, so badly...’

‘Oh no my Cheri, not badly, just ... just ... oh dear - how terribly sad ...’ he trailed off and poured himself another glass of wine.

They were in Cheri’s flat. It was the first time they’d seen each other since Giles had dropped Cheri home after their night in Liverpool. She’d asked him not to call, not to worry, just to wait and she’d contact him when she was ready. Giles had tried hard not to worry but had failed. Poor Cheri and her sad empty little childhood, devoid of people or laughter, old before her time, an unpaid housekeeper to her peculiar father. It must have been very difficult for her, going back, unearthing a grandmother she’d never known, opening up all sorts of painful old wounds and doing it all by herself. He’d wanted so much to help her, talk to her about it but she’d been adamant and for two weeks he’d not seen her, heard from her or had any contact with her whatsoever. Until she telephoned him at work that afternoon. What are you doing tonight, she’d asked him, come over for some dinner, we need to talk. And no matter that she’d made him something with watercress and seafood, when he hated both watercress and seafood, no matter that he’d promised his Office Manager that he’d attend her leaving drinks that night and no matter that whatever it was she wanted to discuss was more than likely to be bad news for him, he’d just been relieved to hear from her and so pleased to have been invited. And sweetly touched by the effort that Cheri had put into the meal, a brand new copy of Delia’s Summer Collection in the kitchen, the table prettily laid with coordinating napkins and candles, bought specially for the occasion. Cheri’s hair was worn up in a sophisticated twist – he’d never seen it up before and she looked elegant and womanly, ironically marriageable. They’d chatted pleasantly about nothing while they ate, Giles alternating mouthfuls of food with large gulps of wine to mask the flavour of the food and after the meal was finished and he’d cleared the plates away, they returned to the table and both lit up a cigarette.

The whole evening had been working towards this point.

‘Giles,’ she begun, ‘I’ve got a lot to say to you tonight, but before I start, I just want to tell you that I love you and that I always have and always will.’

That had warmed Giles, despite its obvious function as a prelude to something negative. He’d always known that Cheri loved him but never heard her say it before, and say it with such sincerity and meaning.

‘That night,’ she continued, looking more self-possessed and serene than Giles would ever have imagined possible, her face seeming to have lost its hard air of disinterest and calculation, ‘that night, when you had to pick me up from Lavender Hill and you took me to Liverpool, I had no idea why I wanted to go - what for ... I hadn’t thought it through at all, just sort of flipped really. And then I woke up the next morning and I knew why, I knew what I wanted ...’

She told him about her day with her grandmother, about the photographs and the videos and her bittersweet introduction to her long-dead mother. She explained how she’d felt, the tragic loss, the sickening realisation that her father had stolen her life from her, not given it to her as she’s always believed. She’d done more thinking about herself and her life, past and future, than she’d ever done before in the last two weeks and she’d already started to make changes. Martin was gone. Giles had only been vaguely surprised to discover that he hadn’t gone before, when they got engaged. Cheri had finished their relationship over the phone – she had no desire to see him ever again – and he’d taken it badly, very badly, flooding her with flowers and phonecalls and declarations of love that he’d never thought to express to her before. He’d get over it, he’d find someone else to treat with his particular brand of indifference – he was just smarting with indignation rather than dying of a broken heart.

She’d taken a look at the way she’d treated people in her life, especially women. It had occurred to her that she had not one female friend. She’d always thought of other women as silly and emotional and rather pathetic. Now she realised that she was jealous of them, jealous of their relationships and their careers and the fact that men loved them for who they were, not for the way they looked. Like Karl and Siobhan…

Even Giles, with his accepting nature and familiarity with the vagaries and awfulness of Cheri’s journey though life, had been shocked by the revelation about the couple downstairs, about Cheri’s protracted and concerted ‘man-hunt’ to get hold of Karl and the seedy sexual encounters on an office chair that had followed, finally extinguished by a burst condom and an expensive abortion. ‘Oh Cheri,’ he sighed, ‘why?’ Because she thought he was unattainable, she explained. Because every Saturday morning she’d look out of her window and see Karl, Siobhan and their sweet little dog walk back from the shops, laden with shopping and they’d be laughing and chatting about wonderfully domestic issues and mutual friends and their plans for the day and he would casually place a hand on Siobhan’s shoulder and look at her as if she was the only woman in the world, as if she wasn’t fat, as if it didn’t matter. She hadn’t realised she was jealous then, she thought it was vile and icky and boring, and that Karl patently had no idea what he was missing. He was a handsome man – the hair and the sideburns were a bit silly and some of his shirts were a little loud but she could see that he was fit, he had a good solid neck, wide shoulders, a great bum accentuated by his tighter than currently fashionable trousers and wonderful thick black hair, shiny with gel, just like her father’s. And she just loved Irish accents, had never been able to resist them. He could do better than that, she’d decided, he just needed something, or someone, to make him realise. She thought she was doing him a favour.

It had been hard at first, getting his attention. It had taken weeks of wearing her shortest dresses and cutest skirts – she guessed he’d like cute over sophisticated or tarty – ‘come on,’ she’d wanted to shout at him, ‘come over here, take a look at a real woman, take a look at me, look at what you’re missing – you can have me, I’m yours. I promise you, you’ll never look back, never be happy with a fat woman again.’ But to no avail. He looked at her, he smiled, he said ‘morning’ when they passed in the entrance or on the street, but he didn’t ‘notice’ her. And the more he didn’t notice, the more she wanted him. It had become almost an obsession, deciding what to wear in the mornings, listening out for the slam of their front door, ensuring that their paths crossed at least once a day. She’d followed him once, wondering where he went every evening at six o’clock in his Hawaiian shirts and peg trousers and had discovered that he taught a dance class. At last, a connection, a way in. She could jive, her father had taught her when she was a little girl, they’d danced together every Friday night even when she was a teenager, when other girls of her age were hanging out with their friends or going on dates. She waited until the class finished and then followed him home again, colliding with him at the front door and engineering a conversation towards an invitation to join his next class.

Even then it had been hard. She turned up every Tuesday night and summoned up every ounce of her dancer’s passion to inject into the child-like steps of the easy dance, ensuring that she always partnered Karl and that every move she made shouted ‘sex,’ lassoing him with her eyes, hooking him with a grind of her hips, and smiling, always smiling. But still, nothing. He would compliment her on her dancing, express his gratitude that at last he had a partner who had a true appreciation of Ceroc, buy her a beer, walk her home afterwards. But nothing. Siobhan this, Siobhan that. He talked about her all the time and eventually she realised that if she wanted Karl she would have to take him, he wasn’t going to come of his own accord. So she did. ‘Let me buy you a beer for a change,’ she’d said after three weeks. And then, when the beer was gone and it was time for Karl and Cheri to go, ‘I really fancy another drink – let me buy you a Tequila.’ And then when those were gone, ‘let’s have another – go on.’ She’d had to persuade him, jolly him along, but he’d agreed in the end. After a third Tequila they were laughing and relaxed and Cheri had swivelled around towards him on her barstool, smooth brown legs conspicuously crossed, eyelids lowered, closing the gap between them and, before any embarrassment had a chance to creep in she’d locked her eyes with his and kissed him. Gently at first, hoping that she wouldn’t have to do all the work, that he’d respond to the sensual brush of her lips and kiss her back. She’d looked at him again. ‘I love dancers,’ she’d said, her eyes moving from his lips back to his eyes and to his lips again. She’d brushed his lips, a little harder this time. ‘I especially love Irish dancers,’ she’d drawled, ‘with soft lips.’ He’d kissed her back then and Cheri felt aflame with triumph. She’d done it! This man who’d probably never been unfaithful to his lumpen girlfriend in fifteen years, who’d never looked at another woman, never thought about the joys of a new body, of young flesh, of the excitement of sexual infidelity, she’d shown him! Their kisses became longer and harder and his tongue probed deeply into her mouth and he brought his chest up close to hers, gripped her back and emitted a small, slightly animal grunt. ‘Let’s go to the office,’ he groaned, searching his pockets for the key, and they’d stumbled into the small, stiflingly hot room, pungent with the smell of stale cigarette smoke and warm plastic at the end of a long, hot summer’s day. Cheri had let her dress drop to the floor, a practised procedure, and enjoyed the look on Karl’s face as her saw her for the first time, unwrapped, pert, smooth and naked. He’d been awkward, fumbling with his clothes, clearing a space, never taking his eyes from her body. ‘God you’re beautiful,’ he’d said, rolling a condom onto his erect penis. It was all over in five minutes, hard, fast and uncomfortable, Karl sweating profusely, his trousers still round his ankles, his quiff drooping and falling into his eyes, the office chair moving precariously on its wobbly wheels. ‘Oh Jees,’ he kept saying as he came, ‘oh Jees.’ And then he’d stood up and pulled up his trousers, ‘shit it’s hot in here,’ he’d said, and handed her her dress from where it lay on the floor. ‘I’m going to wash my hands.’

That should have been it really. They should have left it there. But as far as Cheri was concerned, it wasn’t over. It wasn’t over because, although she’d seduced him and aroused him and led him astray, he wasn’t grateful and she wanted him to be grateful. She wanted him to start having doubts about his relationship with Siobhan, to want more and more of Cheri, to realise that he wasn’t happy and that only Cheri could make him happy. But he didn’t. He never asked for more than Cheri offered him and took even that with an affronting lack of graciousness. She almost had to drag him up to her flat one weekend when she knew that Siobhan was away. She cleaned the flat from top to bottom, cooked a romantic meal, Frank Sinatra, his favourite, wafting alluringly from room to room, clean sheets, new underwear, flowers. Maybe, she’d thought, they just needed a different environment. Maybe when he saw how lovely her flat was, maybe with no time constraints and no wobbly wheeled office chair, things would be different. But it hadn’t been. It was longer and more comfortable and less sweaty but it was still entirely perfunctory and Karl had wolfed down his dinner afterwards and gone back to his flat to watch telly on his own.

It wasn’t until the abortion that Cheri realised what the problem was. Karl, quite simply, thought Cheri was a tart. It was a foul realisation and had shocked her to the core. She began to wonder how many of her previous lovers had felt the same way about her. She thought she’d been doing them a favour and in a way she supposed, she had – at least they hadn’t had to pay for it. So she’d finished their relationship and then Giles, sweet, precious, wonderful Giles had proposed to her and she’d seen it as an opportunity to make herself decent, to be with a man who loved for who she was, not the way she looked, to be a married woman with a status. She would still have lovers, but she would be a married woman with lovers, not a tart. She’d chased Karl, trapped him, begged for it almost and she’d needed something to ease the shame she felt. She needed to regain control. She’d turned up at Karl’s party to show him that he was wrong, she wasn’t a tart, she was thoroughly decent – look, she had the ring to prove it. She’d tempted him into the office, expecting him to say ‘so, you’re getting married, you’re obviously very special, how blind of me not to have noticed, not to have appreciated you while I had the chance,’ to have looked at her with new eyes, with regret. But, of course, he hadn’t. He’d made her feel even worse, reinforcing her worst insecurities.

She had wanted to marry Giles, but for herself, not for him, not for them. And now, as she slipped the ring off her finger and lay it on the table between them, she realised that Giles deserved better. She couldn’t love, she couldn’t love anyone, and until she learned how to do that she didn’t want to be with anyone.

‘There’s a girl who lives downstairs,’ she said thoughtfully, rolling the tip of her cigarette in the ashtray in front of her. ‘She’s called Jem and she’s very bright and pretty, really nice. I was talking to her the other day and she was telling me about her new boyfriend. They’ve only been together a couple of months but she knows they’re right for each other. She said it was destiny, that she dreamt about him before she ever met him and now they’re madly in love and unbelievably happy. It was that night in fact, the night we went to Liverpool. And she was talking about him and their relationship and how happy she was and something inside me just sort of ...’ she exhaled and put her hands to her heart, ‘something sort of woke up, like something that had been asleep for years. And it hurt, it really hurt. Because I want that Giles. I want to meet someone and just to know, for it to be easy and happy and right. Like your parents, and like Siobhan and Karl. I don’t want to end up married to you making you miserable for the rest of your life while I go off and have affairs and make myself miserable. Giles, I’m so, so sorry to have dragged you through so much and I’m just so grateful to have you and your love and now the best thing I can do for you is to let you go, because I love you and I want the best for you. I’m stopping you from meeting someone wonderful, you deserve someone wonderful. I’m going to stop taking from you Giles, stop using you. I’m going to sort out my own problems from now on, it’s going to be hard, but I can’t expect you to pick up the pieces of my disasters for the rest of your life. I’m going to get a full-time job – teaching dancing – I’ve been for some interviews and I’ve got some things lined up. It’s not very well paid, but if I just cut down on some other expenses, clothes and stuff ... and then I want you to sign this mortgage over to me – I’m cutting free Giles, I’m letting you go …’ She stopped and looked up at him from the ashtray she’d been staring at throughout her speech. She almost said ‘what do you think? Do you think I can do it?’ but stopped abruptly. It wasn’t Giles’s job to advocate, approve and authorise any more. This decision was hers. ‘That means no more gifts, no more holidays, no more meals out – just a friendship …’

Part of Giles felt unspeakably sad. Not for the loss of their future, he’d never truly believed they had one in that sense, but at the death of her childhood, her dependence on him. She was all grown up now, or at least on the way there. She didn’t need him any more. His only child, a son, Sebastian, had always been precociously independent, gently brushing aside his father’s attempts to help him through life, and was now somewhere, God knows where, in Africa taking brilliant photographs no doubt, and consequently Giles had never had the joy before of being able to give help to someone he loved who had a genuine need for that help. But the greater part of him felt nothing but brilliant happiness. This, he realised now, was all he’d ever wanted.

‘Oh Cheri,’ he said warmly, extinguishing his cigarette, ‘I want to tell you how proud I am of you, but I don’t think that’s what you want to hear, is it? I’m just so… so ... glad,’ he held her hands with his across the table, ‘and, I hate to say it, but I’m so terribly relieved, you know,’ he smiled crookedly at her. He controlled his urge to assure her that he would always be there if she couldn’t make a mortgage payment, if she needed someone to talk to one of the dance schools about giving her a job, if she needed a holiday or a new dress. That was no longer his function. They were to be friends. It was going to be hard for Cheri, there was no doubt about that – she had to learn to love. He hoped she’d recognise it when it came her way. And it was going to be hard for him, no-one to worry about, no-one to nurture and then the inevitable pain he would face when Cheri one day found her true love and asked him to accept it – worse than the Martins and the big-buttocked Scotsmen that came before – someone who would fill entirely his role in Cheri’s life and so much more. How sad that it hadn’t been him …

‘Giles, before I start my big independent woman thing, just give me one more piece of advice – you’ve always given me such wonderful advice,’ she gripped his hands tightly and looked him firmly in the eye, ‘how will I know? How will I know if it’s the right man. And how will he know, how will he know he loves me?…’

Giles smiled and leant back on his chair, stretching out his arms and blowing into his cheeks, in one of his familiar overblown mannerisms, a sign that he was feeling happy, that the stresses of the last few weeks were already fading away, that his personality no longer matched his stature.

‘Gor blimey!’ he exclaimed, chuckling, linking his fingers behind his head, ‘now, that’s quite a question. And it has a thousand different answers. Sometimes you both know – instantly,’ he clicked his fingers, ‘just like that – Pow! Sometimes it creeps up on you,’ he walked his fingers across the tabletop, ‘sometimes you find a person attractive and then grow to love them and sometimes you love someone and then grow to find them attractive – although, not in our case unfortunately,’ he smiled at Cheri, mischievously. ‘People have been known to hate each other on sight and then fall madly in love later – sadly, it usually works the other way round. But Cheri, knowing you as well as I do, my one piece of advice would be this. Don’t fall in love with a square jaw, or a pair of buttocks, or a married man, fall in love with a person. Let a person in. A whole person – and that means their friends, their socks, their hairy back, their history, their family, their bad jokes, their job and their needs. Fall in love with someone who wants to share all this with you and who wants to share your socks and your friends … Someone who doesn’t just want a pretty girlfriend, someone who wants a person too. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy and there’ll be mistakes and heartache along the way, but you’ll be making the mistakes for different reasons, for non-destructive reasons and you’ll be able to learn from them and not make them again the next time. So many people go through their entire lives, one relationship after another and they never learn, all they take from their mistakes is bitterness and resentment, it’s always someone else’s fault. If you can see that it’s two people’s fault then you can leave the relationship feeling sad but feeling stronger and wiser and next time you can say ‘no – I don’t want to do it this way this time, I don’t want a man who does such and such and behaves in such and such a way.’ It won’t be the hand of God when Mr Right arrives, it’ll be down to you – you’ll be ready for him and you’ll recognise him and the relationship will work because of all the homework you did beforehand. You’ll just have to pray that Mr Right’s been doing his homework too!’

‘And what if he hasn’t?’ said Cheri, twisting the hem of the tablecloth.

‘Then let’s hope he’s a good fast learner. If he’s not, then more heartache. That girl you were talking about downstairs – Gemma was it? Don’t be so sure that her story has a happy-ever-after. They’ve only been together two months. They don’t know each other. People can put in Oscar-winning performances in the early stages of a relationship, filter out the bad stuff, ham up the good stuff. You can get a feeling for what the other person wants you to be and it’s very easy to play up to that – ‘oh – he likes independent women – I can play that,’ ‘oh – he loves football – I can be enthusiastic about it if it makes him happy,’ ‘look how happy it makes him when I cook him a meal – I’ll do it all the time.’ But you can only keep up these performances for so long, the truth comes out eventually – the real man or woman, who probably isn’t that different from the stage version, has to give up the act in the end and quite often that’s where a relationship fails, ‘oh, she’s stopped watching football with me – wants to see, oh, I don’t know, the Clothes Show instead – how terribly disappointing, I thought she was my dream girl.’ If you can get through that disappointing bit and still love the person, then you’re on to something. Give those two lovebirds downstairs a few more months. She may have ‘seen him in her dreams,’ but from now on she’ll be seeing him in real life, every day,’ he reached for his Silk Cuts and lit another one, ‘and Cheri….’

‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Most important, more important than anything – don’t forget about the nice guys – really,’ he emphasised, seeing the look of amusement on her face, ‘that’s where everlasting happiness lies – nice guys – but then, I would say that wouldn’t I?’ he chuckled again.

Cheri smiled and got up from her side of the table. She moved towards Giles and slowly lowered herself to her haunches and wrapped herself around his waist, burying her head into his chest.

‘Giles, oh Giles, I can’t believe you’ve put up with me for all these years – you deserve a medal, you really do. If I told you I loved you a million times it wouldn’t make up for all the times I should have said it to you before.’

Giles put his cigarette down and gently put his arms around Cheri’s shoulders and stroked the crown of her clean, shiny head. A look of intense unhappiness crossed his face briefly and then he smiled.

‘My friend,’ sighed Cheri.

‘My friend,’ said Giles.

Cheri had never felt guilty before – never. She’d felt regret, she’d felt bad, but she’d never before felt the deep, painful agony of guilt. That was her Karl was talking about on the air in front of hundreds of thousands of listeners – she was that ‘disposable woman’ who meant nothing to him – the one he didn’t even really enjoy having sex with, the one who was so shit and so worthless that she made even Karl Kasparov feel better about himself. Her. Cheri Dixon. It was awful. She’d cried and cried and cried. Here she was, trying desperately to sort her life out and make herself a better person and along comes Karl Kasparov to tear it all down again.

But she didn’t let it. Instead she felt guilty. She listened to the man crying on the radio and realised it was her fault – it wasn’t as if she’d been in love with him and had wanted him for herself – she’d deliberately tried to destroy Karl’s relationship, because it had meant nothing to her, other people’s happiness had meant nothing to her. Yes, of course, two to tango and all that – but she’d had to try bloody hard to get Karl to jeopardise his relationship with Siobhan, he hadn’t been easy, as easy as the others. No – it was her fault and she felt weighed down with guilt. And she’d felt so wretchedly sorry for him, to have had what she wanted so badly – love – and to have lost it so tragically.

She saw him come home on Christmas Eve, while she was packing for Liverpool. It was the first time he’d been back since his radio show. She saw him from the window looking grey and dull and monotone, not like the Technicoloured Karl she remembered. She watched him put his key in the lock and wondered how he felt. She wanted to go and knock on his door, to launch herself into the flat and throw herself at his feet and to apologise and beg forgiveness, to tell him about her guilt and her sadness and her compassion. But she controlled herself. That was what the old selfish Cheri would have done. He was still raw, he was still in pain, and the last thing he’d have wanted was to see her face. In fact, as a complete antithesis to her behaviour in the days while she was trying to ‘net’ Karl, she avoided him like the plague, only leaving her flat if she was sure that there was not even the slimmest chance that their paths might cross.

She’d found herself tip-toeing across her flat, as well, not wanting to offend him in his flat below with the sound of her footsteps. She kept her television turned down low and spoke softly to anyone who called her on the phone. It was probably a little excessive, she realised that, but she wanted Karl to be able to go about his life without any reminders whatsoever that he was living in such close proximity to the architect of his sad and lonely existence.

She was selling her flat anyway – she couldn’t afford to live in Battersea anymore, her teaching wasn’t bringing in nearly enough money to cover the mortgage – so she’d put it on the market and had started looking at places in Earlsfield and the not-so-nice parts of Wandsworth. She couldn’t wait to move. Then she really would be able to start afresh, without living with this constant reminder of what a bad person she was.

Cheri thought about sending flowers, a note, a card, phoning, leaving him a message. She wished that she could turn back the clock and undo every nasty, sleazy, selfish action. If only life was like a word processor, replete with Delete buttons and Undo functions and mistakes could be rectified, just like that. One press of a button and Siobhan would be instantaneously reinstated in the flat below and Karl would be miraculously happy again and she would be able to watch them once more from her living room window, walking back from the shops with their little spaniel, smiling and laughing and content.

She’d thought about contacting Siobhan too, begging her forgiveness, persuading her to give Karl another chance, explaining to her that really, it hadn’t been Karl’s fault at all, she’d forced him into it, raped him almost. It wasn’t quite the truth, but if it meant that Siobhan would forgive Karl and come back, she’d be happy to lie about things. But how could she? She had no idea where Siobhan was staying and even if she did, Siobhan would take one look at Cheri and slam the door in her face. And who could blame her?

She was trying so hard in other areas of her life, trying so hard to be good. She’d started teaching a voluntary OAP dance class once a week, for arthritics. All the old biddies loved her – they all said that her class was the high spot of their week. It made them feel good and, to her surprise, it had made Cheri feel wonderful, seeing the positive effect that her class had on these poor twisted, gnarled old dears. And she really liked some of them – they were sweethearts.

She’d taken Giles out for dinner, as well, even though she couldn’t really afford it. It had given her real pleasure to whisk the bill away from under his nose and to insist on paying it, despite Giles’s remonstrations. And then she’d tried to set him up with one of the other dance teachers at her school, a really nice divorcee called Gina, with two grown-up children and a wonderful figure for a fifty year old. They’d been out on a date and it hadn’t worked out, but it had been a nice thing to do, nonetheless and Giles had been grateful and amused.

And she’d been cultivating female friendships, accepting invites to girl’s nights out and after-work drinks with her colleagues.

She was trying so hard and she was starting to feel genuinely happy, for the first time she could remember. If only she could do something, anything to make Karl and Siobhan happy again, life might just be perfect …

Cheri rose early on Saturday morning. She had a class to teach in Wandsworth at nine o’clock.

She pulled the full rubbish bag from the swing-bin in the kitchen, tied the bunny-loops deftly into a knot, slipped into her downy puffa-jacket, threw her handbag over her shoulder and bin-bag in one hand, gym bag in the other, she let her front door slam closed behind her and skipped softly down the stairs to the ground floor.

‘Oh Karl’, she whispered under her breath as she became aware of the letters strewn about the hall. She put down her bags and crouched to pick them up, pulling out the ones addressed to herself and putting the ones addressed to Siobhan back on the shelf.

When she picked up the letter that Karl had scrawled all over she stopped for a second, concentrating to read the almost illegible biro marks. A thought occurred to her and she grabbed her handbag, pulled out a pen and wrote something into her Filofax, smiling slightly.

She’d promised to do a favour last night, for that bloke downstairs, Ralph. It was a big favour and it was only because he was so charming and endearing that she’d agreed to do it. That, and the fact that it was a nice thing to do and she was trying to be the sort of person who did nice things for other people. But now she had something that he could do for her. A favour for a favour.

She was sure he’d be happy to oblige, especially when she told him why she needed him to do it. She’d give him a ring when she got back from her class.

She slipped the pen back into its loop on her Filofax, snapped the book shut, threw it into her handbag and placed the letter on top of the pile on the shelf.

The front door closed behind her and she smiled as she skipped down the front steps, filled with wonder at how easy it was to be a good person and how absolutely lovely it made her feel.