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on her clothes.
    Her only fellow traveller was a trashed boy who slouched in his seat, earphones blaring, and eyed her with menace.
    If she had been Loz, she would have asked him what he thought he was looking at and told him to turn his fucking shit music down. But she was Peg, so she suffered in silence and tried once more to count her breaths, to take herself away and zone him out, using the same technique she had tried before failing and falling asleep in the bungalow.
    She had found the method in a book on age regression and self-hypnosis borrowed from the self-help section of her library. The aim was to use the breathing and counting to put yourself in a state of what the book called ‘inner flow’. Then, by visualising yourself floating along a personal timeline, and seizing on glimpsed sensory details – your bedroom wallpaper, for example, or the smell of a favourite meal – you could access long-repressed memories.
    Yeah, right , she had thought when she first flicked through the book.
    The fact of her missing memory hadn’t particularly troubled Peg until recently, when it had begun to dawn on her that, apart from her year-long relationship with Loz, she had very little going for herself. With no ambition and few friends she wasn’t too clear who or what she was. Something seemed to be blocking her up. It felt to her as if there were a wall between her and most other people, Doll, Jean and Loz apart.
    It had been Loz, in fact – whose mother Naomi was a psychotherapist and who was therefore very conversant both with herself and the power of the mind to heal itself – who had made her realise this.
    ‘You need to do something about it Peggo,’ she had said one evening when, coming home from the restaurant after an early shift, she found her slumped in front of really crap daytime TV. ‘Before it gets too late and you’re completely fucked.’
    It was also Loz who suggested that the reason Peg felt so blurred round the edges – for that was as close as she could get to describing how she felt – had something to do with what Loz had decided to call her ‘weird childhood’, and how she couldn’t remember anything about it.
    She had offered Naomi’s services, but Peg had felt it was too close to home. It would feel . . . incestuous. Instead, ever her grandmother’s self-improving girl, she checked out the self-help book from the library.
    Following its suggestion, she had gone out and bought a digital voice recorder with five hundred and thirty hours of recording time. A bit of a Luddite, she had taken a full day to become conversant with the workings of the thing, but now she carried it with her everywhere, ready for the moment when she might engage with her ‘inner flow’. She had also bought a new red notebook and a slightly expensive pen, for more conventional recording of what her thoughts revealed and, if she were honest with herself, she much preferred this quieter, more contemplative method. After all, she had been brought up by her grandmother to record everything in notebooks – or, as Doll called them, ‘Commonplace Books’.
    But the voice recorder had cost thirty quid, and, even if she didn’t use it all that much, she had – partly out of the hate of waste she had also learned from Doll – elevated it to a sort of totemic level. If she wasn’t going to use it, at least it might provide a sort of prop to spur her on. So she kept it constantly in her pocket, more to stroke than to use.
    Her breathing took on the rhythm of the train, then grew slower and deeper. Almost magically, the boy’s horrible music became little more than a background hum: hardly troubling at all.
    She felt the recorder’s comforting weight in her pocket. From a position of scepticism about the process, she had now moved on to holding out great hope. She even had an idea it might be starting to work. Not that she felt any more defined, but her childhood – which had been a foreign land to her – had