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legs getting longer, tempers getting shorter with every passing year. My mum rarely put her feet up but when she did, she liked the TV on for a bit of company. Because we all lived too close to each other and yet miles away.
    The house wasn’t aired enough. We didn’t open windows. It always smelt. It smelt of the dog, the chip pan, of farts and sweat. Different types of sweat: my mother’s honestly earned and nervous, me and my brothers’ fetid and hormonal, my nan’s perfumed with lavender. But the smell I hate remembering most of all, out of all those foul stenches, is the smell of alpine air fresheners. That smell epitomizes my mum’s desperate, pointless grasp at middle-class respectability and it depresses me. Really depresses me.
    The TV was only ever off for a few short hours, after me and my brother had finally slunk off to our rooms, ostensibly to catch a few zeds. The silence started to hum. I didn’t sleep at night. I dreamt. Dreaming is what most empty and confused teenagers do. The difference being, dreaming is all that most of them do. Changing dreams into ambition, that’s what sorts the men from the boys. It was in those short, quiet hours when the TV was not blaring that I made my plans to be great. I wrote songs and practised on my guitar and swore to myself that I’d do anything, anything at all, to get to where I knew I should be. I’d work hard, I’d audition, I’d move to London, I’d ignore the word no, I’d keep trying, I’d win people over, I’d screw people over if I had to. I’d do it all.

4. Fern
    Flowers are romantic. That much is accepted by everybody, whether it’s a newly engaged woman wondering about the structure of her bouquet or some sorry-assed adulterer that’s been caught with his willy out and wants to try to make amends with his missus. Everyone knows flowers are a good place to start when dealing with matters of the heart.
    That’s why I’m delighted to be surrounded by them in the shop every day, especially at the moment. Adam and I are barely speaking to one another. I worked all day Saturday. He spent Sunday fixing up a gig somewhere, I forget exactly where, I’m not sure he even told me. Rationally, I know that he’d already confirmed this work before we had our row; irrationally I feel he’s avoiding me. To be accurate, we’re avoiding each other. Even when we finally fall into bed at the end of our gruelling days we do little more than exchange monosyllabic polite questions and answers, designed to learn precisely nothing about one another’s state of mind.
    Since Friday night the flat has been full of stress and silences, so I’m happy to rush to work and let the fragrances which perpetually float in the air soothe me. Ben’s Bunches and Bouquets is my sanctuary. My haven. Flowers can be calming, reassuring, joyful and sexy. Currently, they provide me with everything Adam isn’t.
    I never wanted to do anything other than be a florist. I started working at Ben’s B&B four years ago, just before I met Adam. I love my job. The shop is just a ten-minute walk from our flat and Ben is just a few years older than me and a fun boss who gives me plenty of creative scope and independence; he’s become more of a friend than a boss over the years. Even as a tiny tot I used to love to bury my nose in the bright roses blooming in my gran’s garden. I’d inhale the silky, sensuous scent the way some starlets inhale cocaine in the loos at China White; I couldn’t get enough. My gran had a keen creative and romantic streak. She lived before web design or adultery became acceptable conduits for these character traits and so, as she had always been especially green-fingered, she found a more genteel outlet – she arranged flowers.
    Gran grew lots and lots of flowers in her garden. Mostly I remember roses and sweet peas but I know that she grew delphiniums, lavender, marigolds and nasturtiums too, to name but a few. It was my habit to trail her as she mooched