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was just aboutto ask if she fancied coming in to work with me.”
    “I don’t really think …” Amanda began. But the rest of the sentence stuck in her throat.
    “Can I really, Granddad?” Sammy’s face was radiant now, while the eyes of Eric and Edna had fallen upon their daughter like a Siberian wind coming up off the North Sea.
    “Of course you can,” Eric took hold of Sammy’s hand, a smile twitching at his mouth.
    “Dad,” Amanda tried to start again. She waved her hand feebly towards Wayne, but his expression remained on the crack in the path it had been glued to since he’d got out of the car. “She’s got to unpack and have her tea …” she tried to appeal to Edna instead.
    “She can do all that later,” said Eric, smiling broadly. “Now she’s here, she’ll want to enjoy herself, won’t you, Sammy?”
    Sammy nodded, flashing her mother a triumphant smirk.
    “Don’t worry,” Eric went on. “I’ll make sure she get her tea,” the words dripped like acid from his lips. “That in’t me who want to short-change her now, is it?”
    * * *
    “Debs!” Corrine’s voice, more insistent now it had asked the same question three times, finally cut through her friend’s reverie. The music that had been playing in Debbie’s head, the record that Alex had brought home for her from his wanderings, a man with a low baritone intoning mysterious words about asking crystals, spreading tarots … “I said, what d’you reckon?” Corrine was holding up a folded page of
Smash Hits
, a photograph of a woman with mounds of eyeliner and a curly perm.
    “She look ace, don’t she?”
    Debbie frowned. She thought the woman looked a mess, a beer girl trying to look weird but forgetting she still had a haircut like one of The Dooleys.
    “I’m gonna get mine done like that,” Corrine went on. “Soon as we get paid.” Her hands reached for the packet of ten JPS on the tabletop between them and Debbie realised the magnitude of what her friend had just told her.
    “What’ll your mum say?” she asked.
    Corrine scraped at a book of matches for a light.
    “Don’t care,” she replied, fag in mouth. “I’ve been saving up for this all summer. It in’t too much to ask, is it – one haircut and a pair of shoes what are already knackered?”
    “Course not,” Debbie felt guilty now. Thanked God she hadn’t spoken aloud about The Dooleys. She took another look at the woman in the magazine.
    “NYC’s latest disco darling Madonna …” was as far as she read before there was a tapping on the window. Outside in the Victoria Arcade, Darren Moorcock and Julian Dean were waving at her.
    “Cor,” Corrine noted. “They look different.”
    Darren had grown his hair down to his shoulders and dyed it jet-black. Julian, whose skin as well as hair had been black to begin with, sported a tightly curled pompadour, fixed with glistening wet-look gel. Both of them were wearing black shirts, waistcoats, skin-tight jeans and pointed shoes with rows of silver buckles on them.
    Debbie’s face cracked into a grin, and she motioned for them to come in.
    “They look great,” she said as the bell jangled above the door. “Budge over, Reenie.”
    “Are you all right?” Darren sat straight down next toDebbie. It wasn’t that long since he was the same size as her, but now he seemed to have shot to nearly Alex’s height. He had black eyeliner on too. It really suited him.
    Darren glanced with approval at Debbie. “I see Alex in the pub last night. In Swing’s,” he added, with a certain measure of pride.
    Debbie’s eyes widened. She and Darren had always got on all right, thanks to their mutual propensity for spending lunchtimes in the art room. But last term, he had been just a short, squeaky-voiced kid with freckles. Now he seemed to have bloomed into something vastly more interesting.
    “Can you get served in there then?” she asked.
    “Yeah,” Darren nodded. Even his voice had changed, dropped into a lower