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reality, some of her friends distanced themselves. Oh yes. Of course they used subtle methods so it took some time to realize the truth, to absorb exactly what was happening.
    Others, sweetly, came closer. But that was threatening in itself.
    Of Angela Hopkins she would not think.
    Because, quite simply, she couldn’t.

THREE
    G EORGINA JEFFERSON WAS SCARED— how pitiful! Scared to be making such a journey alone. She wished she hadn’t given up smoking. And why had she bothered to clean the car?
    The hard shoulders and central reservations were chunky with wedges of old snow, tacky like badly set fudge. The countryside was the colour of her windscreen, spattered and grey. She was frightened when she first set out on so lonely a journey with no familiar end to it—no-one would kiss her, pour her a drink, show her her room, give her a towel. Like boarding school for the very first time and Mummy said, with a simplicity that was astonishing, ‘Run along and make friends, Georgina.’ Make friends? How? Everyone else had a friend. She was the only one standing alone. Had she missed something essential in her early development? The ability to make friends to order? Perhaps there was something wrong with her smile, perhaps it was too full of tears to count.
    Oh for a best friend. She would have done anything to get one. She tried. In those days she tried too hard to please. Even when Georgie was one of the gang she never found anyone of her own, anyone special with whom she could whisper, giggle at night and swap secrets. She could flick from person to person with an ease that was shocking. How many faces did she have, and which was the real one? Perhaps the other girls at school sensed there was something odd about her, and distrusted her. Or perhaps it was she who was threatened by closeness.
    She never could work it out.
    So there she was, alone on the road. And then there was that weirdest of feelings, pulling into the services, that unearthly forecourt where she stopped for petrol, wincing as the cold metal pump burned her hand, the freezing wind tightened her face, and even her eyes went dry as she stared at the slow-moving needle. She kept her mouth firmly closed to prevent breathing in that petroleum ice.
    Then the crazy warmth of the restaurant, clattering trays and the listless women who reluctantly collected them, looking as if they wore slippers, although a quick glance showed they did not. Where did they live, these creatures from nowhere? There were fields as far as the eye could see. Godforsaken. Soulless. Were. they golems come forth from under some metal stanchion where they lived with their concrete men? And what would they say, these bravest of women, if they knew she was frightened of being here alone? Would the cardboard soles of their eyes crease and fracture as they recognized this fellow pilgrim, or would they shuffle away and ignore her, just another leaver of sticky wrappings, sugar-wet rings and tinfoil ashtrays?
    Would their eyes tweak with interest if they knew who she was?
    She took a steadying breath. There was no queue, but the effect of the place meant that everyone was somehow in one. They had come so far on their journeys that nobody could go back. These were committed travellers. And these fellow diners, these mild people dressed mainly in beige, could they possibly be the ones who, not five minutes earlier, encased in their steel chariots, had threatened her, overtaken her, chased her? Charging strangers seething by on a wet, straight road, exchanging sneaky sideways glances through shatterproof, dirty glass?
    There was no real point in consulting her map, not yet. Not until she got off the motorway. Georgie stretched in her metal-framed chair and winced at the cramping of muscles held too long in one position. She sat in that restaurant and realized that this was the first positive thing she had done since Angela Hopkins’s death; everything up until then had happened within the circle of