Bridget sits at the window of the upper flat, looking out onto the street where a group of boys are playing on their skateboards. They jump, pulling the boards up with their feet, spinning them, hoping to land on them but most often failing. The noise when the boards hit the road is a loud clatter. It drives Helen mad, but Bridget likes it. They are young. They are free. If they can’t make a racket now, then when?

Bridget has taken the newspaper onto the tiny balcony that looks out over the street. On the little table, no bigger than a serving plate, she has already placed her pot of espresso made with the ground beans that Helen brought her from Monmouth Coffee in Covent Garden. She has planned the moment. Good coffee, good demerara. A cigarette smoked slowly on this warm but cloudy morning in late summer.

If she were young, she’d take a photo of this coffee, this silver pot, this bowl of artfully rustic sugar cubes, and put it on Instagram. But she’s not young, and she doesn’t need social media to tell her that life is made of pleasures as small and simple as this.

And here is another: Helen, wheeling her bike up the front path, her long hair tied back with a brightly coloured scarf, like a Land Girl. She looks up, sees Bridget there on the balcony. The glancing expression of delight on her face when she waves is enough to make Bridget’s lungs fill. Small, simple pleasures. Helen has been to Eel Pie Island for a meeting with a company who want to option a novel she wrote years ago. The woman is a walking success story; everything she touches turns to gold. Bridget teases her about it: How come it hasn’t worked for me yet, eh? You’ve touched me enough times and I don’t see The Promise at number one.

Helen has disappeared from view. Moments later, Bridget hears the lock on the side gate, the clank as Helen negotiates her bike and her rucksack through the narrow side return. She will be another few minutes, enough to put her bike in the shed alongside Bridget’s vintage Mercian racer and Rosie’s brand-new hybrid.

Getting Rosie a bike to ride to and from sixth-form college took some smooth talking, not to mention a state-of-the-art helmet and a jacket so high-vis you can see it from space, but Toni relented in the end. It would have been unthinkable a year ago.

The key rattles in the downstairs back door. With a lazy smile, Bridget gets up from her chair and fetches another cup from the kitchen. What could be better than good coffee and good demerara? Answer: good coffee and good demerara with the one you love. Small, simple pleasures.

The pleasures of freedom.

She did not go to prison. She never got near. Emily was sentenced to life imprisonment, her expression in court on hearing the sentence something like beatific calm, as if imminent incarceration represented a kind of freedom in itself. And maybe it did. Freedom from all she had left behind, a willing abandonment of personal responsibility – a surrender to the system. The details that came out in court were so upsetting that one of the jury had to be excused to be sick. Bridget heard them with mixed feelings. Revulsion, yes, of course, but sympathy too for this woman who was as much a victim as the young girls she procured for her tormentor.

And gratitude. Bridget owes Emily her own freedom, she knows: this cup of coffee, this moment on the balcony. Why Emily chose to do that will remain a mystery, but whatever the reason, this sunshine, this day, and Helen, gone from her for so long and now back, all these things are part of her life forever, and it is beyond weird to know that this is down to her niece’s kidnapper.

‘Hey,’ Helen says, sitting on the other little chair.

‘Hey.’ Bridget pours her coffee, dunks a lump of sugar enough to soak half, which she knocks off with the end of a teaspoon and stirs in.

‘Now that’s what I call service. Thank you. Yum.’

Bridget sits back, squints against the sun as it comes out from behind the clouds. ‘Half a million?’

‘Of course. We can move to Florida. I’ve always wanted to live in a condo.’

‘What actually is a condo?’

Helen giggles and sips her coffee. ‘I have no idea.’

---

Later, Bridget does a job for a regular client over on Richmond Hill. Website update, absolute child’s play, but the guy doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. Easy money. She’s not complaining. She gets back at six and parks on the street. She misses the car park. Sometimes it takes her a good ten minutes to find a space big enough for the van. But the set-up is perfect: her and Helen in the upstairs flat, Toni and Rosie on the ground floor.

‘We can’t live like this.’ It was Toni who said that, after the trial. ‘It’s not fair on you, Bridge. You and Helen could still be together. She’s not moved on, and neither have you. I’m fine now; I’ll be fine as long as you don’t move too far away. Come on, Bridge. What’s the point in being free if you don’t live your life?’

‘But I can’t leave you alone,’ Bridget replied. ‘And what about when Squirt goes to uni in a couple of years’ time, what then?’

‘I’m perfectly independent…’

‘I know that. Don’t start. It’s not about that.’

‘I saw this.’ Toni pushed the local paper across the kitchen table. ‘It’s pricey, but with what we could get for this place, and if Helen were to sell her house…’

A small terrace split into two flats. Helen had shouted a resounding YES down the phone, but she wasn’t back from LA in time and the property went from under their noses. They didn’t get the second place either, but when the third one came up, the estate agent called them before the listing was published. Another small terrace, near the river – nearer still to the high street. Helen didn’t even have to sell her house; she rented it out and still had enough to chip in a good deal more than her fair share, flash git. And now they live like this. Still a funny family, by most people’s standards, but a family all the same.

Bridget presses the buzzer marked Flint.

‘Hello?’ comes her niece’s voice.

‘Open up, it’s the rozzers.’

Laughter, cut off. A buzz. Bridget pushes the door and goes in.

In the kitchen, Toni is at the table and Rosie is frowning over a chopping board, green wheels of courgettes in a bowl, red strips of pepper falling from the knife. Wafts of garlic simmering in olive oil, chilli flakes possibly. And this too is a small but enormous wonder: her sister, well, sane, after everything. Six months of therapy that in the end, according to Toni, wasn’t necessary, not really. The worst had happened. And Rosie has not suffered so much as indigestion for over a year. It is as if being broken for a second time has in some strange way fixed her troubled sister, her beloved Tones. Or perhaps it is the third time she has been broken: Eric, Stan, Owen. Third time un/lucky. Strange how in being plunged into the pit of someone else’s sickness, there has been healing after all.

‘Smells good in here,’ Bridget says, sitting at the table, leaning in for Toni’s kiss on her cheek.

‘I’ve told Mum to go to the pub with you for an hour,’ Rosie says, sliding the vegetables into a large frying pan. A hiss. ‘I’m making veggie lasagne and it’ll be ages. Can you persuade her? She’s being a saddo.’

Bridget meets Toni’s eye.

‘Are you coming for dinner, by the way?’ Rosie says. ‘In, like, an hour? I’m making loads. Why don’t you text Helen?’

Toni raises her eyebrows at Bridge. ‘Up to you.’

‘I suppose I could ask her.’ Bridget pulls her phone from her jacket pocket. ‘She’ll bring nice wine, at least.’

Two texts later, dinner for four all arranged, courtesy of Rosie’s new enthusiasm for vegetarianism, Bridget and Toni head out. It is still warm – warmer, in fact, than during the day now that the breeze has dropped. It is a late August evening. Rosie is seventeen. In September she will begin her last academic year before university. She doesn’t do theatre any more, for no other reason than a loss of interest. She still does taekwondo, but her real passion is psychology. She wants to be a psychologist or a psychiatrist, which, Bridget pointed out to Toni, is what comes of having a fruitcake for a mother.

‘Shall we go to The Fox?’ Bridget says.

‘Why not?’

It’s only Tuesday, there’s hardly anyone in. They go into the garden at the back so that Bridget can smoke.

A pint of lager each in front of them on the table, they chat about nothing in particular. Toni’s job, her colleague Richard, who has found a new boyfriend and is smitten. The boyfriend used to be a male prostitute, a source of great amusement to Toni. Bridget laughs at her sister’s chatter but cannot quite let go of the miracle of her, here, while Rosie is at home handling death traps such as knives and gas hobs and ovens, not to mention masked intruders smashing through the windows, armed to the teeth, dressed as ninjas.

‘So this guy,’ Toni can barely get her story out for giggling, ‘this guy had this client who apparently liked him to blow smoke all over him while he was naked and tied to the bed. And that was it. Literally. Tie me up, blow smoke all over me. But the funniest bit about it, Bridge, was that when he told Richard the story, he looked at him all serious and said, “The thing was, I was trying to give up.”’

They both laugh. Bridget pulls at her cigarette and blows the smoke across the table as if over an imaginary body. They both laugh again and sip their drinks. In the pause that follows, they look at one another as they often do.

‘You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?’ Toni says. ‘About Eric? I can always tell.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Bridget says, and then, ‘I can tell when you’re thinking about him too.’

Toni reaches across the wooden trestle table and touches her fingers to her sister’s wrist. She traces the letters, A and B, and gives a sad smile.

‘I can remember you waking me up,’ she says. ‘I’ll never forget it.’

Bridget nods, her insides flaming. She wishes Toni would stop. But at the same time, she wants her to continue. There’s no one here in the pub garden, just the two of them and their depthless history, their closeness, their love.

‘I bet you wish I never had,’ she says.

‘No, I don’t. Don’t say that. I don’t.’

Bridget pulls on her cigarette. ‘It was too hard for you. You were only fourteen.’

‘And you stopped it. You stopped it happening.’

‘I fucked it up, Tones.’

‘Don’t say that either. You didn’t mean to. And the police would have done fuck-all, like they did with Mum. It was an accident.’

At no time before or since has Bridget been so glad of her strength. Until that bastard Owen, of course. Even though Uncle Eric was a weedy bloke – one of those revolting ratty little men who smoke with their thumb and forefinger pinched around their fag, like they’re holding a straw in a carton of juice – she still needed Toni’s help, to hold the bedroom door open, to carry him down the stairs, to open the back door, the boot of the car.

They left him there. No one noticed he’d gone, not that day. He was always going AWOL, and besides, no one wanted him around. They drove the next night to Ham, and at two in the morning carried him to the cover of the trees. It was Toni who bought the spades from the hardware store while Bridget waited in the car, Toni who returned to the car to fetch the spades from the back seat once they’d laid the body on the rough ground of the Ham Lands. Toni who dug alongside her in the pouring rain and the dark. She was only fourteen. It was too much.

They barely made it home before seven in the morning, the two of them filthy, washing off the mud under the shower, rinsing the tub, every last trace, then sitting shivering in their threadbare bath towels, side by side on Toni’s bed.

‘We need to make a pact,’ Toni had said. ‘We will never, ever call the police. We will never tell.’ She had held out her little finger, which Bridget linked with her own. ‘No police.’

‘No police.’

‘I will never tell.’

‘Thank you.’

Later that day, Bridget went into the tattoo parlour with a piece of paper on which she had drawn the letters of their names, an A and a B, like a Celtic sign: a pact, their pact, a bond of blood.

‘Shall we get back?’ Tones recalls her to the present. ‘Dinner will be ready soon, if she hasn’t burnt the house down.’

‘Don’t you want another half for the road?’

Toni shakes her head. ‘Nah. But just this once, I’ll let you push me home.’

‘Bloody hell, the honour.’

Laughing, Bridget takes the handles of Toni’s wheelchair. Chatting all the way, she pushes her sister through Twickenham: to their street, their family, their home.

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