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she could hold onto a grudge for days, weeks – even permanently.
     
    There was one woman, for instance, who Polly referred to as ‘the dead one’, who had had some sort of thing with an ex of hers. Polly swore that if she saw this woman while driving, ‘even though she’s only a walking ghost,’ she would mount the pavement and knock her right down, reversing back over her head to hear it pop. She had even turned it into a song, ‘Piss Redress’, which became the title track of her second album.
     
    For the most part, Rose found these florid revenge strategies amusing. Polly outlined them well and was entertaining with the detail. But there was always the suggestion that what she was saying might actually be true, and it was just a matter of luck that the situation hadn’t yet arisen where she might act out her plans.
     
    Once or twice, Rose had been at the receiving end of Polly’s anger, and she hated it. In fact, Rose couldn’t cope with anyone being angry at her and often went to great pains to avoid it. When she was younger, she would compare herself to Polly, finding herself a little wet around the edges, a little unformed, a little too eager to pour herself into the mould that her best friend carved out for her. But since marrying Gareth and having her children, she had found more focus and definition. It had probably helped, too, that Polly had moved over two thousand miles away. In the sum of things, though, Rose believed that her own approach, her desire to please, had led to a life less troubled than Polly’s.
     
    But the mess Polly was in right now was nothing to do with her anger; it was not of her own making – Rose had to remember that. Polly had just lost her husband: the man who had helped her out of big, big trouble, the man who had given her a whole foundation on which to rebuild her life.
     
    Polly appeared in the brightly-lit service station doorway, incongruous against the McDonald’s backdrop. She came out and was blown across the car park by the filthy weather. She, and her clothes, were far too flimsy for this English March. She looked as if she might take off, be swooped up across the dark night sky. For a moment, she seemed to have lost her bearings. She stopped to push her mop of black hair out of her eyes, scanning the cars, looking for Rose. A man in a good raincoat, hurrying across the car park, stopped for a second to take her in. You could almost hear him thinking that what he saw was interesting, familiar even; Polly had been a well-known figure fifteen years ago. You could see his calculation, then the decision that, weighing things up, he would just quietly return to his solid Audi and its sleek leather seats.
     
    Then Polly looked up and smiled the first real smile that Rose had seen from her. She flitted past the car and up the bank to sit down again.
     
    ‘We’d better get going,’ Rose said.
     
    ‘Just one more cig,’ Polly said, and she rolled up and lit another. She narrowed her eyes and exhaled a stream of smoke into the night. Then she turned to Rose. ‘I want to thank you,’ she said. ‘You and Gareth are being so generous.’
     
    ‘It’s nothing,’ Rose said. ‘Besides, we’ve got loads of space.’
     
    ‘I know. But I also know that Gareth and I have never really seen eye to eye,’ Polly said. ‘He hated me because I took Christos away from him.’
     
    ‘Do you think that was it?’ Rose said. It had always troubled her that Gareth could never put his finger on what it was that he found so off-putting about Polly. Her own theory was that it had more to do with his jealousy about their friendship – that he somehow felt threatened by it. In any case, the two couples made up of two sets of best friends didn’t hang out together as much as an outsider might have expected. Rose practically moved into Gareth’s flat a week after first sleeping with him. It was, she knew now, an avoidance strategy: simply put, Rose found it difficult to be