Author: John Brindley

"This is a true delight of a book! Ideal for all ages and particularly suited to teenagers. Once you pick it up you will not put it down until you are at the last page!" ONLINEPOP NEWS 

with John Brindley

A first message from Amy

The original songs in this book mean so much to what happens to the telling of my story. 
They’re all available to download from my website:
www.amypeppercorn.com

You’ve already got all one of the songs “If Ever” 
from the story free with
“Starry-Eyed and Screaming”. 
So please go to the website, follow the links and then put in the code that you’ll find at the very back of this book.

After your download, you’ll be able to see what this song is all about and how it fits in with my life. 
I do hope you enjoy the song, 
and you like my story.

See you inside.                    	   

One

  Yes, it is Amy, by the way. My full name? As if you didn’t know. It’s Amy Peppercorn, no middle name. Amy Peppercorn, and I’m not kidding. That really is what I’m called. I sound just like something out of my baby twin sisters’ storybooks, don’t I?
  I’ve never met anybody with a name I’ve disliked more than my own. My best friend’s called Rebecca Bradley. She says she doesn’t like her name, but goes around calling herself Beccs Bradley, which always sounds really good. Her cousin’s called Kirsten, or Kirsty McCloud, a name that’s somehow got an American accent attached to it, I don’t know why – it just manages to sound dreamy.
  But Amy Peppercorn? What can you do with it? My little sisters are called Georgina and Joanna Peppercorn. We sound like such a bunch of – a whole bunch of Peppercorns, don’t we?
  Anyway, the best place to start telling you about what happened is the evening after school when Beccs and me decided to go and wind up the boys in the band, if you could call it a band.
   ‘Where we going?’ Kirsten wanted to know, tagging on behind Beccs, like she always did, with her long legs and hair and no real mates of her own.
   ‘We’re going to see The Worst Band In The World,’ I said, over my shoulder.
   ‘Oh, good,’ Kirsty said. ‘I like them.’
  Beccs laughed. I shook my head. Kirsty didn’t know what she’d said. ‘We’re going to the school hall to watch The Grunge Machine,’ I said. ‘They’re the worst band in the world, with the worst band name, and you like them?’
  Beccs laughed again, nervously.
  Kirsty gave a little tight-lipped smile. ‘Joke,’ she said.
  Beccs laughed. I didn’t. Kirsty was always saying stupid things without meaning to, then claiming she was only joking. Beccs always had to try to laugh. She might be Kirsten’s first cousin, but I’m not. Not first, second - not any number. I’m not related to her in any way. I didn’t have to laugh, just because Kirsten said it was a joke when I knew it wasn’t.
   ‘Come on,’ Becca said, because we’d all stopped in the corridor. ‘Let’s go and enjoy the worst band in the world messing up the worst music in the world.’
  If The Grunge Machine hadn’t been so bad, I probably wouldn’t be telling you all this. If they could have put two notes together without making it feel as though your teeth were being filed down, we wouldn’t have got involved. As it was, they had a couple of old amps, lead guitar, a couple of drums and wobbly keyboards. They were supposed to be an Indie band, except that Indie isn’t really supposed to make your ears bleed.
   ‘What was that s’posed to be?’ Peter Stevens was shouting at Michael Bradshaw.
   ‘What we supposed to be playing?’ Bradshaw shrugged. ‘I don’t know what we’re supposed to be playing.’
  Long Geoffrey Fryer was peering down over the little shelf of his keyboards. ‘You’re s-s-singing the wrong l-lyrics,’ he was trying to call out to Peter Stevens.
  Stevens, at his sparse drum kit, was supposed to be the leader. ‘I’m supposed to be the leader!’ he was yelling. ‘You’re supposed to be playing what I’m playing.’
   ‘What are you playing, then?’ Michael Bradshaw was shouting at him.
   ‘They sound better now,’ Beccs said. 
   ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I reckon we could do better than that.’
   ‘We could look a whole lot better, too,’ Kirsty said.
  Which was a dead typical thing for her to say. You wouldn’t know she was Becca’s cousin. Beccs isn’t tall, only about ten centimetres taller than me. She is a bit, not fat, but not not fat, if you know what I mean. While Kirsten is nearly two metres long with legs that could stretch the length of about Becca’s and my own added together. She is, Kirsty I mean, drop-dead gorgeous - but, you know, I wasn’t the only one, I’m sure, who thought she would be a lot more gorgeous still if she really did drop dead. I sometimes thought of suggesting it to her. Worth a try, I thought. She’d do practically anything if she thought it made her look good.
   ‘We could look a whole lot better than those grunge,’ Kirsty was saying, nodding towards the three boys as they started playing three different songs simultaneously.
   ‘That was much better,’ Peter Stevens said, when the racket collapsed again after a few seconds or so. ‘At least we all started at the same time that time.’
   ‘W-what s-song were we playing?’ Geoffrey Fryer said.
   ‘Don’t you know?’ Stevens asked.
   ‘Do you?’ Geoffrey Fryer asked back.
   ‘Course I do!’ he shouted.
   ‘Yeah,’ Bradshaw butted in, ‘of course you do. Cause every one’s the same for you. You just do the same thing, whatever we’re supposed to be playing.’
   ‘S-so do I,’ said Geoffrey Fryer, laughing nervously.
  He was laughing because we were. We were creasing up. They were pathetic, hopeless. Rehearsals to them meant practising all starting at the same time. None of them could play. Peter Stevens couldn’t sing to save his life. Which never really mattered, as they never seemed to get anywhere near that far. Nobody ever knew what The Grunge Machine were supposed to sound like.
   ‘They’re rubbish,’ Beccs was shouting as we ran out with our hands over our ears.
   ‘Wassamatter, girls?’ Stevens was calling after us. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of Blur, or something?’
   ‘W-were we d-d-doing Blur?’ long Geoffrey Fryer was shouting over the ear-pierce of feedback through the amps.
   ‘They were blurred, anyway,’ I grinned, outside.
   ‘What do you mean?’ Kirsty said, looking down at me.
  I always felt that Kirsty was looking down at me. She was, being about a good thirty centimetres taller than me - but especially as she was always asking me when I was going to have another fit. ‘We could all see the state of your knickers, don’t worry,’ she told me last time I had a seizure in one of the corridors, as if she’d enjoyed it. 
  I was supposed to always take different tablets twice a day and eat regularly and everything, but sometimes forgot. I was bored by it, but I think Kirsten was a bit jealous of the fact that I could do something as glamorous and mysterious as having an epileptic fit in front of everybody. I think she envied me the attention it always brought, never mind about my own shame and embarrassment at being so far out of control.
   ‘What do you mean?’ she said, pretending not to understand what I’d said about The Grunge Machine being blurred.
   ‘Joke,’ I said.
   ‘Joke?’ she said, with that dim, puzzled look she always put on her face. ‘I never get your jokes. Do you ever get Amy’s jokes?’ she said to Beccs. 
  Becca just laughed. She didn’t think anything was funny, but was laughing because she didn’t want to be put on the spot.
   ‘You’re just thick,’ I said to Kirsty.
   ‘Ooh,’ Kirsty said, ’listen to the maths professor. You think everyone’s thick, just because no one can understand anything you say.’
   ‘Don’t start arguing, you two,’ Beccs had to step in and say. She was always having to intervene between us. I wished she’d never had a cousin, then long tall Kirsten wouldn’t be her cousin and wouldn’t have to hang round with us with her long hair and long legs and short skirts.
   ‘I’m not arguing,’ Kirsty said, flicking her hair in that way she had, when she wanted to be better, or at least hairier, than everybody else. She flicked her hair in a different way whenever she wanted to be noticed.
  I noticed she’d gone from flicking her hair one way to flicking it another when Ben Lyons, who had come to the school from trouble in London, or so the rumours said, at the beginning of his Year Thirteen, came round the corner on his own. He was nearly always on his own - not because he had to be, but because he wanted it like that. He wouldn’t have been on his own for a minute if half the girls in our school had anything to do with it. It was ridiculous, the way they all went silent and stupid whenever he was around, talking about him all the time when he wasn’t, or pretending they didn’t like him when everyone could see they did.
  Kirsty went quiet as soon as he appeared in the corridor going in the opposite direction to the three of us. Kirsty’s hair was being flicked in her “notice-me, notice-me” mode, as she forgot all about what she’d been saying to me.
  In fact, we all went quiet as he came towards us. I think I could feel Becca’s heart rate, going thick and fast by my side. It could have been my own, maybe. I didn’t think so though. I wasn’t supposed to be like that. I was the Grade-A Maths and Physics student - Maths and Physics just weren’t like that.
  Actually, I was studying A-Level Biology, too. So maybe, just maybe that was what I could feel. Maybe I could feel my biology quickening as Ben Lyons approached. I don’t know. Maybe.
  I was going to say something to him, really I was - but I had such a dry mouth, I had to rely on Beccs to get in before Kirsten could make us look like three sweet-toothed girlie-girls.
  But: ‘Hi, Ben,’ she managed to giggle first, while Beccs and me were swallowing hard on nothing. Kirsty’s long blonde hair was swishing over our heads like some kind of boy-beacon to be seen for miles all round.
   ‘Hi,’ Ben said.
  We all stopped, with nothing to say between us. Ben was looking at us in turn. Kirsten was pushing back her hair, trying to push herself forward.
   ‘You been to see that band?’ Ben said.
   ‘Yeah,’ Beccs finally managed to say. I’d never seen her like this before. Beccs was a football player. She went around telling everyone she wanted to play for Man. U. and England when she’d finished her A-Levels. She always went round out of school kitted out in a M.U.F.C. home or away strip, including the socks. She had a dog at home called Ferguson and a real leather football signed by the whole of the first team of only two seasons ago. She played the beautiful game better than most boys in our year and was in the school team. First girl ever. She was fast and furious and deadly accurate. And now she stood there just behind her long tall cousin like a poor cousin herself, ashamed of her player’s legs and grazed knees.
   ‘Is that where you’re going?’ Kirsty quickly asked.
   ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d check them out.’
   ‘Don’t bother,’ I managed to say. He looked at me, as if he’d only just noticed I was down there. I know I’m not a metre and a half tall or anything, but I’m not that small. ‘They’re rubbish,’ I said.
  He smiled. Kirsten looked over me. 
   ‘They’re called The Grunge Machine,’ I said. ‘Have you ever heard such a rubbish name for a band?’
  Ben gave a little laugh.
   ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘they’re into rubbish copies some old band called Blur, but all out of synch with each other, all starting on different tunes at different times.’
   ‘Yeah,’ Ben said, ‘I know what you mean. Like, really blurred,’ he said.
  We were all laughing together then, at Ben’s little joke - except that Kirsten, when I looked at her, had some kind of a nasty smell under her nose, judging by the look on her face.
   ‘Amy said that,’ Beccs said.
  Ben looked at me again.
   ‘Amy reckons she could do better herself,’ Kirsty said, as the laughter began to fade.
   ‘Your name Amy?’ Ben said to me.
  I nodded.
   ‘Mine’s – ‘
   ‘Rebecca,’ Ben interrupted her by saying. ‘I know. I’ve seen you play. You’re good.’
   ‘Thanks,’ Beccs said, her face reddening. Actually reddening! I’d never once seen her blush before.
   ‘And you already know my name,’ Kirsten told Ben, as sweet as you like.
   ‘Yeah,’ Ben said, but not unconvincingly enough not to make Kirsten feel uncomfortable.
   ‘Kirsty,’ she said.
   ‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘You can sing, then?’ he said, to me.
   ‘Better than that lot, I can,’ I said, indicating back towards the hall.
   ‘Why don’t we give it a try then?’ he said, as casual as you like.
   ‘What,’ Beccs said, after a long while in which we all stood looking at each other, ‘just like that?’
   ‘Yeah,’ Ben laughed. ‘Just like that. Why not?’
  We laughed.
   ‘Why not?’ Ben said again.
  Again we all laughed.
   ‘I’ve got some tunes,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we give it a go?’
  Beccs and I were looking at each other, both wondering if he was having us on. 
   ‘Well I will,’ Kirsty said, swaying forward. ‘I’ve always wanted to be a singer. My mum says I look like – ‘
   ‘And what about you two?’ Ben said, to Beccs and me.
  We looked at each other again and smiled. ‘Nah!’ we both said, simultaneously.
   ‘Great timing,’ Ben laughed. ‘Perfect pitch. But where were you?’ he said to Kirsty.
  She shuffled.
   ‘What was your name again?’ Ben said to her, as she flicked back her hair.

Two

  My mum was pulling her hair out when I got home. ‘At last!’ she shouted at me as soon as I came through the door. ‘I didn’t know you were going to be late tonight. Where have you been?’
   ‘Just out with Beccs and – ‘ 
   ‘I’ve got to go, now! Your tea’s out there. Georgina’s in the dining room watching a video. Take your tea in there. Okay? Amy? Okay?’
   ‘Yes. All right!’
   ‘I’m so late!’
   ‘Then go.’
   ‘I don’t know where your father is. He promised me. You’d think he’d keep a promise, once in a while, wouldn’t you? I needed his car. Mine keeps cutting out. I’ll have to risk it. Oh no! Is that the time?’
  My mum was supposed to be learning yoga. She was supposed to go to the Adult Education Centre, which is, actually, my school, three or four times a week to learn about yoga, reiki, acupuncture, all sorts of things, exercises and breathing techniques for meditating and being calm.
   ‘I’m always late!’ she was shrieking, looking everywhere for her car keys. ‘Every week I’m the last one to arrive. When I get there – have you seen my keys? – they’ve always started and I have to meditate like mad to try and catch up.’
  She was running round the house, looking in the loo and the fridge for her car keys. ‘That father of yours! You tell him, when he gets home. Whenever that is. You tell him. It’s not fair. – Go and see if Georgie’s got my keys. Have a look in her nappy for me, would you?’
  As soon as I opened the door on her, Georgina screamed at me over the noise of her full-volumed video, struggling from a juddering highchair. She reached out for me, dragging at my shirt front.
  Mum came in while we were wrestling on the carpet. ‘It’s all right. I’ve found them,’ she said, picking them out of a pile of baked beans heaped on the carpet in front of the TV set. ‘George!’ she shouted.
  Georgie was hanging onto the front of me, squeezing my nose.
   ‘Georgie! Where’s the rest of your dinner? – Amy, be a love and try and find the rest of Georgie’s dinner, would you? Can you try to make sure she’s eaten some?’
  Georgina had beans in her hair. Now they were all over my clothes. ‘Mum! Why’d you leave her with it?’
   ‘I forgot. I’ve got to go, okay? Do what you can. Your father should be home soon.’
  I was trying to get the beans and sausage out of Georgie’s hair when my mother appeared again, wiping her keys with a paper towel. ‘Have you done your homework?’ she called. ‘Did you take your tablets? Do your homework,’ calling out to me as she slammed the front door closed.
  Georgina, hearing the door go, started to scream. She always screamed when someone went out of the house. She always screamed whenever anyone came in. So did her twin sister, Joanna – Jo. Georgie also cried whenever Jo did. Jo did whenever George did - as she did right then, from upstairs. I had to go up and get her out of her cot. She smiled when she saw me, but screamed again when she saw little Georgie downstairs with beans and sausages tied into her hair. Jo wanted beans and sausages for her hair.
  I had to go into the kitchen and fetch my own tea from the cooker for their cheeks and their hair and for the floor and my clothes. We were always having food fights in our house, every day. Every day my dad was stomping out of the house with sloppy rusk ground into his business suit. His ties were all stained with milk-sick. And that was just him. My mum was almost permanently coated in yoghurt, with the smell of gripe-water and liquefied banana hanging round her like a cloud.
  So there I was, combing the sausages out of my baby sisters’ hair all evening waiting for my dad to come home, when I should have been studying for my A-Level Maths. I was trying to dig the beans out of the carpet and find a Tiny-Tots video to distract my twin sisters when I should have been trying to understand why, in differential calculus, when you differentiated the trigonometric function of the sine wave you got a cosine wave. Can somebody explain that to me, please? No?
  They’re still babies yet, my little sisters. They’re fourteen years younger than me, which was a bit of a surprise, to everyone. Not least my mum. She thought she couldn’t get pregnant any more. My dad thought so too. I know this, because I had to listen to them both arguing and fretting about it for the nine months until the twins came.
  But they’re still babies - they don’t know yet what a pair of Peppercorns they are. I kept getting stuck with them as they mashed beans into each other’s hair and made each other cry and took it in turns to pop with sick. They were having a good old scream and one of them was going red in the face, making a rare stink in her nappy, doing everything they could to keep me from my maths.
  I tried to get my books out and at least have a look at the explanation on the differentiation of trigonometric functions. Don’t you know what I’m talking about? No? You and me both. Maths wasn’t so bad last term, at GCSE level. I had always  quite enjoyed messing about with numbers. There was something satisfying about it, when you got the answer you were looking for and you understood why. I used to think I could see why maths worked, by representations of the problem and its solution in my mind, like a maths picture only I could see and fully appreciate. There was something of myself in it - I could identify with it.
  But now – we’ve just started at A-Level, and this differential of sine(x) is equal to cosine(x), it means nothing to me. I have no pictures for it. I could open my books at the appropriate page and there was an explanation in black and white, but written, colourlessly, picturelessly, drying my brains to a crisp frazzle. I couldn’t think about it.
  A flop of semi-masticated beans slopped across the open pages of my books. I had the twins in their twin high chairs, from where they were throwing mashed beans in a tomato and spit sauce from a secret supply I had failed to discover. The video figures on their screen were doing one of their little toy dances as I did one of mine. ‘Look at my books,’ I was screeching as I danced about, searching for a tissue. ‘You two! – Oh, Dad, where are you?’
  I was always getting collared, coerced into looking after my very little sisters because no one in this house could stand it any more. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t want my parents to have any more kids. Neither did they, evidently. But they went and did it, not me. I was just a kid myself. I was supposed to be studying, but I was dancing out into the kitchen for some papers towels and howling to the moon while my sisters were screeching and packing their nappies in front of the TV set. The house was in a drastic mess, with unwashed washing up in the bowl and piles of laundry and no paper tissues for my beaned-up books.
  Running upstairs for some loo paper, I heard the front door slam above the racket the twins were now making, and my dad’s voice bellowing up after me, making the twins scream all the louder. ‘Where are you?’ he stood roaring, until I appeared running down the stairs with half a roll of paper wrapped round my left hand.
   ‘What are you doing to these two?’ he demanded to know, glaring at me, at the twins, back at me. ‘What’s going on, for pity sake? Where’s your m – Oh no! What day is it?’
   ‘Yoga,’ I said, wiping the pages of my maths books. ‘You were supposed to be home early.’
   ‘Can’t you shut those two up?’ he raged.
  We were both having to shout over the noise of Georgie and Jo, as they tried to give The Grunge Machine a run for their money. They were doing pretty good too, considering they were ampless, acoustic, unplugged.
   ‘What’s the matter with them?’
   ‘They want changing.’
   ‘I know,’ he shouted. ‘I’d change them for a new car, I would. I’d change them for an old car. I’d change them for anything. What’s happening in this house? Is this what I always have to come home to?’
   ‘Dad, I’ve got to do my home – ‘
   ‘You can’t leave me with these two. They stink. Amy, I need your help. I’m sorry. This isn’t fair, is it?’
   ‘No,’ I said, as we lifted a twin each from the high chairs, ‘no, it isn’t.’
   ‘No,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have to come home to all this. We haven’t been here all day, have we? We have to go out all day. Surely there’s enough time to sort this place, during the day? Wouldn’t you think?’
   ‘I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know.’

Three

   ‘I know you’re trying to break up The Grunge,’ Peter Stevens came over and said to Beccs and me. ‘I know what you’re trying to do.’
   ‘What you taking about?’ Beccs said.
   ‘You and her. The football player and the midget.’
   ‘Hey,’ Beccs said, leaping to attention. ‘Watch your mouth, Stevens!’
   ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re right, I’m sorry. You’re no kind of a football player, are you. You’re just a wannabe bloke.’
   ‘And you’re just a rubbish drummer,’ I said, ‘who can’t sing.’
   ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I know you think you can do better. I’ll wait and see. I’ll be laughing, then, I tell you.’ He started to walk away. ‘The Grunge Machine can do without Geoffrey Fryer, anyway. You can have him. He’s just a liability.’
   ‘What was that all about?’ Beccs said.
   ‘I dunno,’ I said, ‘but I think we should go and find your cousin, before Stevens does.’
  I was saying that, saying we needed to find Kirsten before Stevens did, not because I was worried what he might say to her, but because of what I thought she’d already started saying to him. His remarks had her stamp all over them. That stuff about me thinking I could do better than some grunge-indie band, that was straight from the horse’s mouth.
   ‘I haven’t been speaking to Peter Stevens,’ Kirsty said, with an expression of sweet innocence that would melt no butter. 
  I didn’t believe her. ‘What’s all this stuff about Geoffrey Fryer, as well?’
   ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said.
   ‘She doesn’t know anything,’ Beccs said.
  I knew she did, though. She had that look about her. I could see it. Beccs never could. She could never see what a scheming and jealous little cow – big cow, her cousin was. I was always forced to play the politician, keeping my mouth shut when I had something to say, or saying it diplomatically, couching it in terms that couldn’t offend, or not very often, anyway. In this way, I was as conniving as Kirsten herself, the two of us playing a game of hit and run round her cousin and my best friend.
  But then I’d get bored with the game. I’d want to tell Kirsty what a piece of lank string she was and how she made everyone fed up with just being in her company. Then Becca would have to step in to keep the peace and Kirsty would go all innocent and victimised and I’d feel another wedge driven between myself and the best friend I’d had ever since I could remember.
  Kirsten was always hanging round us. I didn’t know why. Well, I did, but I couldn’t discuss it with Beccs. Their families are quite close, so I can’t tell my best friend that her cousin was only with us because she didn’t have anybody else. No one else liked her, not since Melanie Cox, who used to be Kirsten’s best, and only, friend, drank three bottles of alco-orange and decided that Kirsty needed a few hard truths bringing home. Now they hate each other, and Mel Cox’s new best mate hates Kirsty too. 
  They all used to hate Beccs and me, in those days, but we didn’t care. We were best mates, so the others didn’t matter to us, not in the least.
  Then Kirsten started coming round, calling on her cousin and trying to get in with her. I obviously didn’t like her, or what she was doing - neither did Beccs, I was sure. But family’s family, I suppose.
   ‘Or,’ Kirsty said, ‘it might be something to do with our new band.’
  Beccs and I stood blinking up at her. I knew she knew something, the way she swayed, swishing her hair behind her back like the tail of a real pony. She was so sweet, so innocent. So very conniving.
   ‘Ben Lyons is serious,’ she said. She was trying not to smile too broadly. ‘He came and – actually, he came looking for me, to tell me his idea.’
   ‘What idea?’ Beccs said.
   ‘Well,’ Kirsty said, addressing herself directly to her cousin, as if I didn’t enter into it, ‘Ben says he thinks we’ll all look pretty cool fronting his new band if I’m in the middle, with you on one side,’ she said to Beccs, ‘and you on the other,’ she nodded briefly at me, ‘with him on drum machine and mixer. Then all we need is someone on keyboards.’
   ‘That’s all we need, is it?’ I said.
   ‘He doesn’t even know if we can sing,’ Beccs said.
   ‘No,’ Kirsty said, ‘but we’ll look good, and that’s nearly all there is to it, isn’t it?’
  Beccs and I looked at each other. ‘I thought we said no,’ I said.
   ‘Ben doesn’t take no for an answer,’ Kirsty said. ‘He’s so insistent. He really wants us to do it.’
   ‘Well I’m not doing it,’ Beccs said.
   ‘No,’ I said, ‘neither am I. And that’s all there is to it.’
  It wasn’t, of course. There was plenty more to it than that. You wouldn’t be here now if it was, neither would I. But you are, and so am I.
  Ben Lyons looked at me when we, Beccs and me, went to him with every intention of demanding to know who he thought he was, insisting that we were going to be singers in his band when we’d said absolutely not.
   ‘We didn’t say we would,’ I said, trying not to stammer as he looked at me. He had this way of gazing at you that disarmed all your demands, taking the edge off your insistence, until you were left not quite sure what you really wanted or what you’d actually said.
   ‘We didn’t say we’d sing,’ I was saying, quite unsure of myself now, and quite disconcerted that he could do this to me, making me feel like this. I mean, it wasn’t as if I really liked him or anything.
   ‘We didn’t say we would,’ Beccs said, ‘so we won’t.’ She sounded much more resolved than I did, much more in control. Her face, however, as I glanced at her, glowed as if she’d just won a really tough match.
  He was looking at us, disconcerting both of us, before he shrugged and said, ‘So what you sending your long tall mate round for?’
   ‘What do you mean?’ Beccs asked.
  Ben’s eyes fixed upon her. I felt her make some kind of reaction to him from beside me. I don’t know what she did, but I felt something.
   ‘I mean,’ he said, smiling, I’m sure, at her reaction to him, ‘your mate Kirsty coming after me asking what we’re going to do about the band and who’s going to be lead singer and who else is going to be in it and a thousand other things? How’m I supposed to know?’
  Beccs and I were looking at each other.
   ‘She told me,’ Ben was saying, to Beccs, ‘that you’re in,’ then saying, ‘and you’re out,’ to me.
   ‘Well I’m not in, either,’ Beccs said.
  I felt good when she said that, going against her cousin and everything.
   ‘She said you’re too little,’ Ben Lyons was saying to me, ignoring Beccs for the minute. ‘She said you’d look like a little boy on the stage. She said you sang like one, too. Like a choirboy, is what she said.’
   ‘She was joking,’ Beccs said.
   ‘Was she?’ Ben said, looking at me. ‘Don’t you sing like a choirboy then?’
   ‘She was joking,’ Beccs said again. ‘Amy can sing better than any of us. Kirsty knows that. These two are always winding each other up,’ she said.
   ‘I don’t care,’ Ben shrugged. ‘I don’t have a problem finding girls.’
   ‘No,’ I said, ‘we know.’
  He looked at me again, in that disconcerting way.
   ‘No,’ Beccs said, coming to my rescue. ‘So you’d better go and find some others, because we aren’t doing it, are we Amy?’
   ‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not. Even if I am the best singer in the school.’
   ‘Well I heard you had a voice,’ Ben said.
   ‘Did you?’ I said.
   ‘Did you?’ said Beccs, as if Ben had been talking to her. 
   ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Shame to waste it. Still, if your mind’s made up?’
   ‘It is,’ Beccs said. ‘Isn’t it, Amy?’
   ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Definitely.’
   ‘Definitely,’ said Beccs.
   ‘Definitely,’ we were saying, as Ben Lyons looked at us, disconcerting us into feeling not very definite at all.

  So we were not going to turn up at Ben Lyons’s first rehearsal in the hall on Friday evening. Definitely not, however bad he made us feel about turning him down. Most of the girls in our school would have jumped at the chance, I knew - but I had enough to worry about, without thinking of singing in some useless band in front of everyone in the school and making a complete idiot of myself. Kirsten could do it, if she liked. Beccs didn’t want to do it, me neither. Kirsten wasn’t part of our decision on this one. I liked that. Beccs wanted what I did, without her cousin. Kirsten could make a fool of herself by herself. Yes, she definitely could make a fool of herself. She was good at that.
  I am a good singer though. I’ve always had a voice. I’m quite little, as I said, but I’ve got a big voice. I’d always sung to my baby sisters in their twin highchairs to shut them up. I was louder than they were, so where they wouldn’t keep quiet for another Tinkie-TV session, they’d often shut up for me. I used to do this really old song my mum always liked me singing. I don’t know anything about the song, or how I came to know it so well, but I knew it all the way through:
	You would seize the day for me,
	Keep the night away for me,
	Make the darkness light for me,
	The noble sun ignite for me,
	If ever, if ever you were here …
  A really old song, very sad with a big tune, but, you know, good to sing when you’ve got a voice. 
  The twins would be wailing in their chairs, throwing plates and crying, my mum would be throwing plates into the sink, and crying, and I’d start to sing to quieten the lot of them in one go.
   ‘You would seize the day for me,’ and I’d look and the twins would be watching me and my mum would be sucking a dummy, quite forgetting to put it into one open and dribbling baby-mouth or the other.
  So it was nearly every morning after my dad had rushed out protecting his newly cleaned suit from the food flying across our kitchen - as it was that morning the morning of Ben’s first rehearsal. My mum was breathing like a yoga addict, trying to relax after another bout of bickering with my dad. He’d been sitting at the kitchen table trying to read his paper, with a twin on either side of him tugging at his news headlines and sports reviews left and right.
   ‘Why?’ my mum was asking, scraping the burnt eggs out of the frying pan.
   ‘Because I don’t like burnt eggs,’ my dad was saying. His name’s Tony, by the way. Anthony Peppercorn. He was a Peppercorn before any of us.
  My mum used to be called Jill Tidy. But now she’s a Peppercorn too, and tidy she is not. Not any longer. Jill Peppercorn is now very un-Tidy. She worried about her heart rate. She worried about relaxation so much she couldn’t relax. She worried about worrying so much. Sometimes her teeth ached she worried so much. She was studying yoga and reiki, aromatherapy, acupuncture and wine tasting.
  My dad tasted wine, too. He had to work late all the time, but when he came home he often smelled like half a bottle of Beaujolais and a big fat cigar.
  Mum burned the eggs again. The toast was cold, we were all late and the twins were wet and filthy from the print off the broadsheet they’d stolen and sucked into a papier-mâché.
   ‘I don’t like burnt eggs.’
  The twins’ mouths looked blackened with burnt egg white and news headlines. I opened my school bag and a great fat sausage of masticated newspaper flopped straight into it.
   ‘No,’ my mum was saying, ‘I mean why have you got to be late home again tonight?’
   ‘Work,’ my dad simply said. ‘Just work.’
   ‘But you’re always so late home nowdays.’
   ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘there are a lot of changes coming up. We’re all pushed to our limit. Everyone’s up to their eyes in it. – Look at this paper now. I wanted that to read on the train.’
   ‘Angela’s husband works in the city,’ my mum was saying.
  My dad looked up. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
   ‘He works in financial services, like you. He doesn’t have to work all hours like you do, almost every day.’
   ‘I don’t – what’s that got to do with anything? What are you saying?’
   ‘I’m not saying anything. I just – ‘
   ‘You just like making irrelevant comparisons.’
   ‘No. I just – Amy, I bet your friends at school don’t all have fathers coming home all hours, do they?’
   ‘No,’ my father answered. ‘But I bet at least some of them do, don’t they, Amy? Because that’s how it is, for some of us. Isn’t it, Amy?’
  They had a row once, my mum and dad - it started when my mum surprised everyone by falling pregnant. And it’s still continuing. When they found out it was twins, you could have hacked through the shocked silence in this house with a rusty butter knife. Then the screaming started. It has never stopped.
  They stood over me in the kitchen, asking me to resolve their problems for them. They were always trying to get me to decide. I could never say anything. I couldn’t resolve a problem if it was written down in black and white with an explanation and several examples in a maths book.
  My mum had always helped me with my maths. She had been a teacher once, a good one, before she became the mother of twins. My father, before he was father to his baby daughters, was happy being an ambitionless small office worker and husband to a first class teacher. ‘I’m forty seven next birthday,’ I’d hear him wail as my maths problems eluded me night after night.
   ‘Well so am I!’ my mother would start back at him. She could handle a full class of secondary school nutcases with ease day after day, but couldn’t stand to have his and her own age shouted again into her face.
  She had tried to persuade my dad to give up work for a few years to look after the twins. She had tried to persuade me to persuade him. He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t. ‘What do you think I am?’ he shouted.
   ‘What does she think I am?’ he appealed to me.
   ‘Well what does he think I am?’ she turned to me and said. She was heavily pregnant at the time.
  Do you know what it’s like when you’re nearly fourteen and your mum’s well into her forties and that big with pregnancy? It is so embarrassing. All your mates can see what’s happening. They look at you as if they’re wondering why. The thing is, was, I never did know why. Nobody did. That’s why there was so much arguing, so many angry silences, pregnant pauses that were set to last the full nine months and way beyond.
  The thing is, was, my mum wasn’t right for staying at home all day every day. My dad was all wrong for the new job he got in the city to earn more money to make up for the loss of my mum’s wages. I was never supposed to have these parents that weren’t right for the lives they were leading, or being led by. I wanted help with my homework, my maths. They thought I wanted to become a doctor one day. I don’t know, I can’t remember what made them think so - maybe when I was little I played at being a doctor, so they thought I wanted to be one. But I don’t know what there was in it to make my parents take me so seriously. I didn’t want to be a doctor, as much as my mum didn’t want to be a housewife, or my dad a financial services executive. I didn’t want to do A-Level Maths and Physics, or Biology. I’d got off on a wrong foot to please them, I knew already, at the start of the first term, but they never noticed.
  My dad was too busy being harassed from the house and into the train without his newspaper. My mum was just too busy being harassed. The eggs were burnt, the toast cold and the twins screaming to get out of their twin high chairs and start deconstructing the house again. I hadn’t a hope of understanding trigonometric differentiation, so sang my song, the only one I knew all the way through.
   ‘You would seize the day for me,’ I sang, in my big voice, standing to my full height of one metre and a whole forty-seven centimetres.
	You would seize the day for me,
	Keep the night away for me,
	Make the darkness light for me,
	The noble sun ignite for me,
	If ever, if ever you were here.

	And if ever you were here again
	I’d never shed a tear again
	Or make the sunrise mine alone
	Or see a new sun shine alone
	If ever, if ever you were here …
  One metre forty-seven centimetres. Short, but in proportion. If you saw a picture of me, a photograph, and I wasn’t standing next to chair or beside a door or anything, you wouldn’t be able to tell how small I am. If everyone else in a photo were to stand about three metres behind me, you’d never know. We’d all look the same size. But we’re not. I’m little, but with a voice that filled the kitchen far more than my body could, quietening the twins to a dribble from their almost matching open mouths and eliciting a quiet tear from my mother. ‘I love it when you sing that song,’ she said, as soon as I stopped singing that song. As soon as I did stop singing, or shortly after at least, the twins started up again and I had to gather my stuff and get ready to leave for school.
   ‘I’ve always loved it when you sing that song,’ my mother sniffed. She was crying. The twins were crying.
   ‘I – er – might be a bit – ’
   ‘Oh no!’ she cried. ‘I’ve got reiki. You’re not going to be late home again, are you? He’ll be delayed again, no doubt. It isn’t fair. I’ll miss everything again. Do you have to be late? Can you not – no, you go and – he should be here. He should, shouldn’t he? I wish someone could make him see how unfair it always is,’ she said, looking at me, as I was someone, anyone, at all.

  We weren’t going, Beccs and me. No way. We weren’t going to subject ourselves to that. Just – no way!
  We went, anyway. Well, we had to see what Ben Lyons was going to do, didn’t we? We couldn’t just not go, not after he’d specifically asked us, could we?
   ‘I’m not interested in him,’ I said to Beccs, ‘are you?’
   ‘No,’ she said, changing the subject quickly, too quickly, by telling me about some new fad diet she was thinking of trying. Ever since her cousin Kirsten had gate-crashed our scene, Beccs was always going on about different diets. She was a football player, probably the best girl player in the county, I thought. She played for the school and was supposed to be going for a trial for the Arsenal Ladies Under 18s. That was before the imposition of Kirsten. There was a before-Kirsten Beccs, and an after-Kirsten Rebecca. And I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, which version I preferred.
  She was a bit, not fat, but not not fat, as I said - which had always been all right by her, and by me. She was much, much faster than she looked, even stronger than she looked. And, I tell you, could she ever kick a ball? She was a mid-fielder, with a hard and accurate kick. She practised placing the ball, inch-perfect, from metres outside the penalty area. She was the free kick king – queen – king. Of course she was - she was Beccs, with a dog at home called Ferguson and a whole barrelful of real girl-power.
  But that was the pre-Kirsten version. Now fad diets kept coming and going, ruining Becca’s training programme by taking away nearly all her energy and her power and her speed. She was becoming less comfortable with being a football player, I could tell. Kirsten kept on and on trying to girlify Beccs. She wasn’t the same any more. The other Saturday I saw the two of them, Kirsty and Beccs, in the Mall at the Shopping Centre, with Kirsty in a pair of hipster trousers and a tiny top, but with Beccs – wearing a skirt. A skirt, on a Saturday! Beccs in a short skirt with Man. U set to line up against Liverpool at home! Man. U. had got The Pool away, and Beccs was wandering about in the Mall in the shortest skirt I’d ever seen her wearing, ever!
  Her big knees had Kirsten’s influence written all over them, even more clearly than the scabs on her grazes. It made me feel really strange seeing them there in the Mall on a Saturday afternoon like that. I had to dodge back into one of the shops so that they didn’t see me. I grabbed something from the skirt rack and went to the back of the shop pretending I wanted to try it on. I sat in the changing cubicle on my own wondering why Beccs had told me she was staying in that afternoon to do some schoolwork and to catch the football results as they came in.
  I didn’t wonder about it for long. I knew that my mate Beccs was turning more and more into the Becky-girl her first cousin wanted as a friend. My first friend Beccs had lied to me so that she could go out like a Becky wearing a skirt instead of her away strip without having to be embarrassed about it. It made me feel very strange to think about the fact that my best friend was more comfortable and having more fun with someone like Kirsten than she would be with me. 
   ‘No, I’m not interested in him,’ Beccs said to me, the day of the evening we definitely weren’t going to see Ben Lyons putting his band together in the hall, before changing the subject too quickly.
  It didn’t sound like the truth to me now. So much of what she said made me wonder what she said when she was with Kirsten. Becca certainly wasn’t behaving as if she really did have no interest in Ben. She blushed for him, making the lie that she was telling me that much more obvious. She was interested in him. So was Kirsten. But Kirsten didn’t lie about it like Beccs - she just fancied him, as simply as that.
  I was the only one, as far as I could tell, who was genuinely uninterested in Ben Lyons. He made me feel a bit, kind of, wobbly, especially when he looked at me, but what of it? That didn’t mean anything. I really couldn’t have cared less if I never saw him again for the rest of my life. All the girls fancied him. He made them all feel the same, when he looked at them. I just didn’t want to be like everyone else, that’s all. And if I did feel the same as all the others, I certainly didn’t want to give Ben Lyons the satisfaction of showing it.
  That’s why I definitely wasn’t going to the hall to make myself look a fool in front of any pee-taking Peter Stevens or anybody else with a grunge-grudge and a grinning, mocking sense of humour. ‘No way,’ I said to Beccs.
   ‘Nor me,’ she agreed. ‘No way.’
  Stevens was there, of course, at the back of the hall with his grin in place and primed for use against us as soon as we got there. Skinny Geoffrey Fryer, ex-Grunge Mechanic, was up on the stage with Ben, flapping nervously over his keyboard and glancing again and again at Stevens up the back.
   ‘Here comes the talent!’ Stevens shouted, as Kirsty, Beccs and I filed past in that order, shortening drastically as we went.
   ‘Where?’ his mate, the other grungster Michael Bradshaw said, from where he was crumpled into one of the furthest away chairs. 
   ‘Talent?’ Bradshaw said, his head popping up between the lines of seats. ‘I can’t see no talent.’
   ‘No,’ said Stevens. ‘On second thoughts, neither can I.’
  We filed past them in, as I said, descending height-order, with no words to say in our defence. I don’t know about the others – well, I do, they were like me – and I was feeling like a complete idiot and wishing I’d kept to my word.
  Geoffrey Fryer was twittering away, fiddling with everything at once, looking and not looking. But Ben Lyons was definitely not looking. He was going through papers and notes and stuff he had in some rat-eaten folder, taking no notice of anything at all as if he really wasn’t expecting anyone else to turn up.
  I was feeling more and more stupid as we made our way to the front of the hall. Ben Lyons was taking no notice of us at all. 
  Kirsty and Beccs were feeling foolish too, I could tell. We were all slowing down as we approached the stage, looking up at Ben and Geoffrey like imbeciles as Geoffrey smiled at us and laughed and looked at Ben and stopped laughing. He looked at us again, and started laughing again. Ben was still shuffling pages, apparently oblivious to us.
  Kirsten’s hair was flying: “Notice Me! Notice me!” Beccs, I could feel, I could actually feel without looking, was blistering beetroot red. We had to stand together looking up expectantly, like no-hopers no one wanted to pick for their team.
   ‘Well,’ I said, after far too long a silence from Kirsten and Beccs, ‘we’re here.’
   ‘Right,’ Ben Lyons looked up without a glimmer of surprise or welcome, ‘good. Now we can do some stuff,’ he said, tapping together his papers.
  So we stood there, we three girls, with Geoffrey Fryer nervously glancing to the back at the other Grunge Machine members and Ben Lyons looking up casually at us with his eyebrows raised, saying, ‘Well?’
  We seemed to shuffle closer together as he looked at us, with Kirsten’s hair flying above our heads like a comfort blanket.
   ‘What can you do?’ Ben said.
   ‘Do?’ I said.
   ‘We can do Courtney Schaeffer,’ Kirsten suddenly spurted out.
   ‘Really?’ Ben said, with some kind of mock amusement on his face. ‘What a surprise.’
   ‘Survive,’ said Kirsty.
  Ben nodded. ‘Survive.’
   ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t know it.’
   ‘We do though,’ Kirsty said, ‘don’t we, Becky?’
  Beccs took a sidelong, embarrassed glance at me. ‘Yes,’ she said, too quietly, as if she didn’t want me to hear her admission. Admitting that she and Kirsten knew Survive by Courtney Schaeffer all the way through, was the same as admitting they’d been rehearsing it together.
   ‘Okay,’ Ben said, ‘let’s hear you and Becky do it then. Come up here on the stage. Me and Geoff will go down there.’
   ‘Yeah,’ the grunge merchants up the back were calling. ‘Here we go.’
   ‘I can’t,’ Beccs said. ‘Not with those two up there. Not like that.’
   ‘What,’ Ben said, looking back at Peter Stevens and Michael Bradshaw, ‘those two? They’re no bother.’
   ‘They are,’ Geoffrey said softly.
   ‘See,’ said Beccs.
  Ben smiled. He looked to the back of the hall. ‘Would you two mind leaving?’ he called. ‘The girls here want to do a kind of non-swimmer’s version of Survive.’
   ‘Yes,’ Stevens called back, ‘we would.’
  Ben looked down at us. He shrugged. ‘They would mind, apparently. What can I do? They’re an audience. That’s what it’s all about, girls. Take it or leave it.’ And he offered them the stage with a very stagy flourish.
  So Kirsty and Beccs shuffled sheepishly up the few steps to the stage as Geoffrey gratefully whipped down them, followed by a mockingly amused Ben Lyons. Up they loped, abashed and ashamed by the laughter from the back of the hall.
   ‘We can’t just do it,’ Beccs said, ‘with no music or anything.’
   ‘Why not?’ Ben asked.
   ‘Come on,’ Kirsty said. ‘Let’s just be Courtney. I’ll be her, right, and you can be – ‘
   ‘And I’ll be all the others,’ Beccs said, with a little more of the footballer’s spirit back with her. Kirsten looked at her. ‘Joke,’ Beccs said.
   ‘Oh,’ said Kirsten. ‘Right. – Ready?’
   ‘No,’ said Beccs. ‘I can’t do it.’
  The boys up the back were laughing louder.
   ‘Course you can,’ said Kirsten. ‘Just follow me.’ And she launched herself into the song from the beginning and ran through to the end doing a clumsy copy of the dances from the video, with my poor friend Beccs doing an even poorer copy just behind her.
  Poor Beccs. Kirsty had been practising for this, anybody could see. She’d obviously been roping Becca in, learning the video actions bit by bit in preparation for her big audition.
  The boys up the back were having a great time as Beccs missed a great chunk of the lyric and went off into the verse, stomping up the stage trying to be a survivor while her cousin tried to survive the ordeal herself by hauling her back. Becca didn’t once glance in my direction. She couldn’t look at me.
  I was squirming in my seat next to Ben, embarrassed for my friend. The whole thing was horrible, copying the actions and expressions from a pop video like a couple of teeny-teens shouting “girl-power” as a means of expressing their “individuality”. It all had that kind of silly wannabe flavour to it, from their flat bumpy voices to their long school socks and black shoes. I could feel, I swear, Ben Lyons gritting his teeth beside me. I could hear the sound of my own teeth grinding inside my head.
  It went on a long, long time before the toe-curling finale that left Kirsten posing and pouting like Courtney Schaeffer herself and Beccs making a break for it down the stairs from the stage. The grunge-boys were shouting and cheering for less, much less.
  Beccs ran to one of the seats on the far side of Geoffrey Fryer, who was frozen into a grinning stick of something like disbelief, and buried her head in her hands. ‘I knew we shouldn’t,’ I could hear Beccs repeating over and over. ‘I knew we shouldn’t.’
  Kirsten, meanwhile, was stepping down from the stage as if she had just been presented with an award at the Brits. She was smiling. Her full hair was going from side to side. ‘Well?’ she said to Ben. ‘What did you think? Will we do?’
  I detected that even Ben had dropped a bit of his cool. ‘It – ’ he said, searching for words. ‘It – it – needs some work. It’s not – you’ll find my music very different from that.’
  Anybody’s music would have been different from that, I was thinking. But I didn’t say anything. I was just glad it was over. So was Beccs. So was Geoffrey Fryer. And Ben. Only Kirsten, and the boys up the back, enjoyed it. 
   ‘Did we look all right, though?’ Kirsty smiled at Ben, desperate for some words of encouragement from him. ‘We can work on the sound,’ she said, ‘as long as we look all right, can’t we?’
  Ben stammered, looking at me. ‘Well – we – we’d better hear what your – what Amy’s going to do. What are you going to do, Amy?’
   ‘Yeah,’ the Grunge were calling. They started to clap and chant: ‘A-me! A-me! A-me! A-me!’
   ‘I don’t know any songs,’ I started to say.
   ‘She doesn’t know any songs,’ Kirsten said over me.
   ‘Except – ’ I said.
   ‘Sing that one you do,’ Beccs surfaced and said. ‘Do that old one you do.’
   ‘She does an old one,’ Kirsten announced, loud enough to be speaking directly to the boys at the back of the hall.
   ‘Old-one! Old-one! Old-one!’ they started to chant.
   ‘Let’s hear it, then,’ said Ben, indicating that the stage was all mine.
  I didn’t want to do it. I told them I didn’t want to do it, but they said I had to now. They all agreed. Even smiling Stevens agreed from the back of the hall as he wrung his hands and licked his lips in anticipation.
  I licked my lips as I ascended the few steps to the stage. My mouth had completely dried up on me. It didn’t matter, as I wasn’t going to be able to sing at all. I couldn’t breathe properly. My feet wouldn’t move one in front of the other. Some silly idea of purposely falling down the few stairs and breaking my ankle flitted across my mind. But I wouldn’t be able to stand the laughter from the back of the hall. It was bad enough as it was. I had to turn to face it, with Beccs unable to look at me, as I was unable to watch her, but with Kirsten smirking by her side. Some of Kirsten’s hair had been flipped and had fallen onto Ben’s shoulder. She was smirking as if she knew where her hair had fallen, as if it was going to affect my singing and bring it down to a level even lower than her own. 
  It was her face that changed my mind, nothing to do with Ben Lyons. Kirsten’s face challenged me to sing my old song like another survivor. I felt a sudden rush of angry strength that gave me the breath I needed to start to sing:	
You would seize the day for me,
	Keep the night away for me,
	Make the darkness light for me,
	The noble sun ignite for me,
	If ever, if ever you were here.

	And if ever you were here again
	I’d never shed a tear again
	Or make the sunrise mine alone
	Or see a new sun shine alone
	If ever, if ever you were here.

But nothing is forever now I know
The sunrise and the day will go,
As the sun will burn to death one day
To be with you where you have gone,
Where suns and stars have never shone...
…all the way through.
  I went at it as if I was on my own, or trying to quieten my sisters in the morning with my mum grizzling over the sink. My voice increased in strength and confidence as I went through the old lyrics that I knew so well. I filled the school hall with my sound. I could do it. I could feel the size and emptiness of the hall and I could bring out sound enough to fill every square centimetre. At one point, some kind of mathematical construction passed through my mind, as if I was working out, calculating how much sound would be necessary to pack this place properly. I worked it out. The grunge up the back, and Geoffrey Fryer, showed their silenced, blinking faces, as did my friend Beccs, at last, while her cousin’s long hair flopped from Ben’s shoulder. Only Ben’s face showed nothing at all. Absolutely nothing.
  I worked the song through to the end, controlling my voice, keeping it pitch-perfect, loud enough to fill all the available space and no louder. It sounded different here, with so much more room to let it loose, with an audience, however small and local, however hostile.
  The silence at the end of the song seemed to have a sound all of its own. I could hear a reverberating disturbance in the metal rafters of the roof, in the open stage curtains that were still, but only just, as if a breeze had just blown through.
  Nobody said anything. Even the two leftover grungsters at the back kept as quiet as the curtains. I looked down at Ben. He was looking up at me.
   ‘Now scream,’ he said.
   ‘Scream?’ I said.
   ‘Scream.’
  I looked over at Stevens and Bradshaw. They were still silent. They were waiting. Beccs and Kirsty were waiting, with the face of a friend and an enemy. Geoffrey Fryer was waiting, as if he was afraid of the thing he waited for.
  Ben waited.
  I screamed. I felt all the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I felt Ben feeling the same. I felt Ben Lyons feeling like I did.