That night, we caught a train out of Pisa, which took us in some comfort as far as Milan, where we were deposited on the platform of another cathedral-like Italian station. There was just enough time for us to cross the road to the MacDonalds, where we ate copiously from the salad bar and drank iced tea in the evening sun. We liked the burger bars of southern europe very much, because we could eat surprisingly healthy food, with minimal linguistic hassle.

The connecting train to Nice was heaving, and not with thin or glamorous types, who would presumably have travelled with far more style. It was packed with dark-skinned, heavy-set men, smelling of tobacco and spirits, playing cards in the corridor. It was too busy for all four of us to sit in the same compartment, so we divided up our water bottles and squeezed in where we could.

It had been a long day of travelling and walking and fending off interested parties, as usual. We had been followed most of the way from the station to the leaning tower, until we stopped, en masse, at the middle of a bridge, and turned round to stare at the man. There was no crowd for him to melt into at that point, and no doorway to conceal him, so he knew the game was up, and skulked past us with an untrustworthy lope. Ellen jeered at him, bravely, and we laughed as though we did not care.

The tower had turned out to be unexpectedly small, the crowd of tourists expectedly large, and the array of souvenirs provided enough entertainment to carry us through until it was time to dash back for the train. By the time we left, we had all the usual photographs and stomachs full of pizza, which was as much as we ever required from one of these mid-journey diversions.

Overnight journeys had appealed to us as a means of economising on our accommodation, but naively, we had not taken account of the inevitable lack of sleep, either through overcrowding in the carriages, fear of molestation, or constantly being woken up for passport checks, when we travelled through many countries in one night. Emma found that padlocking her rucksack to the parcel shelf was no guarantee that its contents would be undisturbed; and Nicola had learned the hard way that it was a bad move to sleep with the window open and the light on, in a hot country where the insects bite with the ferocity of starving tigers. Ellen was the only one with the knack of getting a good night’s sleep in the most uncomfortable of conditions.

That night, though, it was Ellen’s turn to experience the darker side of travelling europe by train, squeezed into a compartment filled with garrulous men, who passed around cans of beer, and asked us in heavily accented french, because we didn’t speak italian, if we wanted to drink with them. We wanted to sleep, but it was so airless and noisy and cramped. Ellen nodded off in the corner, and I tried to rest with one eye open, wary of the men, who had kicked off shoes, undone shirt buttons, and generally made themselves comfortable. At that level of discomfort, you could not have described our state as sleeping; it was more of a trance induced by the train’s rocking motion and the rhythmic clatter of the rails beneath us.

Something woke me. The nip of an insect at my bare ankles, or the banshee-squeal of the train’s brakes, or a tickling trickle of sweat seeping down my back. On the opposite seat a couple was kissing, but that was where Ellen had been sitting, and that was Ellen, and she was still asleep. I shouted, grabbed at the man, pulled his hands away from her legs; no-one else in the carriage made a move to assist me. Befuddled, Ellen woke up enough to hit out, and the man retreated to his seat as though nothing had happened.

Come on. We lifted our rucksacks awkwardly down from the racks and pushed our way out into the corridor, where the unseated passengers had settled on the floor and against the windows, mostly slumbering as though they slept there every night. The windows were open, and when the warm dusty breeze woke Ellen properly, she burst into tears.

I can’t stand this. I want to go home!

The only remaining space was at the end of the carriage, next to the stinking toilet; but at least we had relative privacy and security. She sat down on her rucksack, and I remained standing, so that there was no chance I could fall asleep again. In theory, we would swap places after a couple of hours, but there was little hope of waking her once she was away.

I watched the sun rise over the Mediterranean Sea, washing it in streaks of salmon pink and gold. The waves made the pebble beaches sparkle, and I longed to jump from one of the jetties into the clean, cool water. I had felt filthy for weeks, and we joked that soon we would smell so bad that men would stop leching at us. We hand-washed our clothes, and they never felt good to put on once they were dry, all crispy and crumpled. We were hungry most of the time, too. But maybe Nice would live up to its name, and we could spend a few days recuperating there.

The station was in deep shadow when we arrived, and we were unprepared for the blast of heat, so early in the morning. Shouldering rucksacks that weighed more with every step, we consulted the tatty guidebook that had proved erroneous on so many locations, and trusted it to find us somewhere to stay, anywhere, so long as it had running water and a lock on the bedroom door.

She lay heavily on the sofa watching the rain through uncurtained windows. She was filled with doubt, and her doubts increased with every sullen tick of the clock, because he was over an hour late by now, and she had a nagging suspicion that it would always be like this.

In the last few days, it had occurred to her more than once that going back was still an option, and she was working up quite an appetite for humble pie. In lucid moments, she knew that what she had done was completely stupid, and she could not understand what madness had prompted her to leave a perfectly happy marriage, for this.

If she was honest with herself for just a moment, she would admit that this was not how she wanted to live. And she should have guessed how unreliable he was, although she did not know him well enough to realise how argumentative he was, and how much he drank. In fact, that was the whole problem: she did not know him well enough. And she did not like him well enough to continue sitting there, feeling miserable, just out of a feeling that she had made an irreversible decision. Why should it be irreversible?

She pushed back the blanket that she was tangled up in, and switched on the light, which suddenly revealed the bareness of the flat’s sitting room with unapologetic clarity. She could come back for her belongings later, not that there were many of them here. For a moment she considered leaving a note, but she had no idea what it would say; instead she slipped out of the flat and down the stairs, quickly, before she could change her mind.

Martin looked haggard, and his expression immediately became unfriendly when he saw her. Her throat was dry, her mind blank, so she stood wordlessly on the step, hoping that he would take the initiative.

He did. What do you want?

That was a good question. She wanted to undo everything, wind the clock back by six months and not screw up her marriage and not hurt this perfectly nice man and alienate her entire family and all her friends. She wanted to live their pleasant, mapped-out lifestyle, in their comfortable home, with all her things around her. She wanted not to feel like she was the biggest bitch on earth, and she wanted not to be constantly trying and failing to justify her behaviour to herself.

I want to come home.

His expression said that he did not feel like making this easy for her, but he stepped aside, inviting her in. They sat coldly at opposite ends of the long sofa, silent. She stared at the floor.

“I’m sorry” sounds very inadequate. Her voice sounded pathetically small.

He nodded, unhelpfully, and they sat in further silence, while she struggled to guess what she could say next, to move things along. The back of her neck was prickly with discomfort. She noticed that he had taken down their wedding photograph, and that the room was grim with dust.

It seemed hopeless. You’re right, I shouldn’t have come, she said, standing up and reaching for her bag; but he stopped her before she reached the door.

He held her by both elbows, looking down into her face, shaking his head. What makes you think I would want you back, now? How would I ever trust you again?

I don’t know. Despite the tension, she felt more comfortable this close to Martin than she had felt at any time in the last few weeks. The feeling that it would be worth the initial unpleasantness grew stronger.

Unexpectedly, he released her elbows and pulled her close to him so that her face was pressed into the wool of his untidy jumper, scratching her skin; and she could feel him sob into her hair. He held her, too-tight, so that she could only breathe out, washing both of them in waves of relief. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she murmured over and over again, and he kept on holding her as though he would never let her go.

Dear Diary

Last night mum took me to her work Christmas dinner. We went shopping the Saturday before, and she bought me a dress, it was shiny grey and soft, with a wrapover front – very grown up. She had a new dress as well. We spent ages doing our hair and make-up, then we had to put on our coats to walk to the restaurant.

There were lots of other work dinners going on in the same room, upstairs from the Italian restaurant that dad takes us to sometimes. First we went to the bar for a drink, and she introduced me to some of her colleagues. They were all pretty old, with yellow hair and far too much eyeshadow. Mum bought me a grapefruit juice, but she said I could have a glass of wine with the meal. One of the men at the bar gave me such a funny look when I was waiting, and I wondered if he worked with her as well. She said he worked in the warehouse. Read the rest of this entry »

You recognise his amazing handwriting on the envelope: a flowing italic with modest flourishes beneath the address. It was the only thing that ever struck you about him, and you didn’t know about that until the end of the date. His name was Danny, and he was a couple of years older than you were. You had met him the night before the carnival, found yourself sitting next to him on the beach, where most of the town’s population were staring at the bonfire and waiting for the fireworks to start.

You used to like the bonfire, because it was the only night of the year when you could be anonymous in this place; but that just meant losing yourself in the crowd or losing the crowd itself in the lingering shadows at the far edge of the bonfire’s light. You could slip beneath the notice of their upturned faces and their coos of enjoyment.

He was from Canada, and really there was no imaginable reason for him to be lingering in this outflung hole of a town in the north of England. He had leaned over and asked you the time, and even in your utter naivety, you recognised that as a chat-up line. It didn’t make sense, though. You were not pretty; you had very bad hair and your clothes were never quite fashionable. You knew this for a fact, because your classmates often told you all about it.

Now you recall that he had an attractive smile, but you can’t remember the colour of his eyes. His accent was cute, and he said the same thing about yours, which made you laugh, because of course you didn’t have an accent. It had been your friend Kelly who had seen you talking to him, and encouraged him to ask you out. To you, it had seemed pointless.

You arranged to meet the next day in the same place, and of course you were early. Kelly had loaned you a nice top, but it was an east coast cold afternoon so you had a big coat on as well. You kicked around for a few minutes on the beach, and when you looked round you spotted him, leaning casually against the railing up on the promenade. It felt a bit creepy, not knowing how long he had been there, watching her.

You walked with him along the grey concrete prom, both with your hands deep in your pockets. The sea was an indolent non-colour, dropping apathetic waves on to the dirty beach, and then sucking them back into itself, leaving a yellowish scum among the pebbles.

He told you that he was leaving tomorrow for a week with some friends in London, before he went home to Canada. You talked a lot about music, and he turned his nose up at most of the bands you liked, and talked instead about musicians you had never heard of. He wasn’t as friendly as he had been the night before, and at one point he asked if you had ever had a boyfriend before.

Not much, you had said, with a casual shrug.

You mean “not many.”

In fact, you meant none at all, but that did not need to be elucidated. He managed to make 17 seem immensely grown-up, compared with your 14 and a half.

For a while, you loitered in the bandstand, but the wind was getting under your coat, and he told you he had to be going, because there was something he wanted to watch on TV. He walked with you to the end of your street, where you both paused with half an expectation, although there had been no romance in the cold hour you had just spent conversing by the sea. He wrote down his address on a scrap of card that he found in his pocket, and that was when you saw his beautiful writing, the only reminder of the warmth in the smile you had seen the day before.

Six months afterwards you were surprised to get a christmas card from him; but not as surprised as you are now, half a lifetime later, to see his writing on an envelope on your doormat.

You cushion the promenade’s metal railings with your leather jacket, and look idly down at the spot on the beach where you had been sitting the year before. So much has changed in that time. The jacket is a gift from your parents, who are an absolute soft touch at the moment, drenched in guilt over their impending divorce; it is both expensive and unsuitable, with its soft leather, red padding, and dripping with zips. Last year they wouldn’t even buy you a pair of tight jeans.

The bonfire is further up the beach this year, making this a particularly good vantage point. Strangers are all around you in the brightly-lit darkness, and you haven’t seen anyone you know, and if you did, you would probably ignore them. This is your nearly-goth phase, but you’ve already learned never to conform completely, so your hair is dyed red not black. You discovered eyeliner fairly recently, and you’ve gradually been drawing it on in deeper, darker lines. Behind the make-up and the leather, no-one can touch you.

He is holding a plastic glass of beer, lounging against the railings not far away, and just for the hell of it, you part your lips and pout a little, to see what happens. At first nothing, but you don’t look at him, you watch the children on the beach below, daringly close to the flames. Then he leans over and asks you the time.

You smile faintly; you can’t believe that it’s so easy to reel them in. You already know you’re not interested in him; he has sandy hair and bad skin, and his jeans are dirty; from his voice you know that he comes from one of the less pleasant areas of the nearest city; he probably thinks this town has some sort of class. He quickly confirms your assumptions, and shows a lot of interest in your leather jacket, but you disappoint him when you tell him you don’t have a motorbike. He offers to buy you a drink, which you decline, wondering how old he thinks you are.

You end up walking with him to the caravan he shares with his sister and her little boy, and the sister makes you a cup of tea. You perch on the tiny, scruffy sofa, feeling incredibly posh, even in your faded t-shirt and jeans. He smokes rolled-up cigarettes and talks about his motorbike, while you pretend to listen.

He wants to see you again, but you put him off with a lie. The attention is nice, but he is not good enough for you; and you’re not even sixteen, so the world really is your oyster. It seems wasteful to expend energy dating someone you have nothing in common with and you know you don’t actually want to touch.

The best part is when he walks you home, and your dad is waiting outside the house, so you part company at the bottom of the street, once you are certain you have been seen. Your dad must be reflecting on how things are changing, too.