Confining myself to bed, days and nights start merging into one long, continuous landscape of time. I sleep a lot. Sam and the doctors think I need ‘time to recuperate’， as though I’m recovering from concussion and my brain simply needs quiet time in a dark room to heal. But it is my heart, not my brain, that is broken.
I wake from fitful bouts of sleep, my chest contracting with a tight panic, my sheets damp with sweat. I need to call Zoya. I need to find her. Where is she?
My phone is the only place I can look. Scrolling back through the years, I find the very first video I have of her – it is of the four of us at sixteen, getting ready for the end of year social at my house.
I’m filming. Zoya is doing Faye’s make-up on the bed, and Roisin is pinning up her minidress in the mirror to make it even shorter. Roisin has feathers in her hair, which makes me muster a smile, because I’d forgotten hair feathers were ever a thing.
‘Guys, I’m filming. We’ve got to record this moment,’ comes my sixteen-year-old voice from behind the camera.
‘What is so important about this moment?’ Faye asks. She looks so young, with her round face and chunky braces. She’s wearing a side fringe, which she was always fiddling with, desperate to grow out.
‘Us, finishing our GCSE year,’ I say from behind the camera, moving towards Zoya who waves.
‘Our graduation into womanhood,’ Roisin says in a mockingly dramatic voice. ‘Our last night of purity before the virgin sacrifices.’ When the camera moves to Roisin, I see how much more mature she looks than the rest of us. Her body developed first, and she was taller than we were. No wonder she was able to get served in a bar at fifteen. Out of everyone, it is Zoya who looks most unchanged. Same big hair, same small body. Her skin has a few pimples, her cheeks are a little rounder, but otherwise, she looks just as I remember her.
‘Who’s doing a virgin sacrifice?’ Faye asks, frowning, always prone to take Roisin too seriously.
‘Hopefully Will Havers will be sacrificing mine,’ Roisin says, running towards the camera and trying to lick the screen.
‘Gross, stop it, this is my dad’s phone!’ I squeal.
‘Stop filming then,’ Roisin says, holding her hand up against the lens. ‘Pervert.’
‘Oh, let her,’ says Zoya. ‘She’s got to practise for her big career in show business. You can interview me.’
Roisin moves aside, and the camera travels across to Zoya. She stops doing Faye’s make-up and sits down on the bed.
‘Okay, yearbook questions,’ I say, in the tone of a serious interviewer, and the camera wobbles as I consult the yearbook in my other hand. ‘When we’re old, like thirty, we’ll watch this back and see what we got right. First question,’ my voice goes on. ‘Which of us is most likely to be rich?’
Zoya thinks for a moment. ‘Faye. She’ll be one of those good witches, who makes her own potions. They’ll blow up online and become cult products.’
‘I made my own perfume once,’ says Faye, leaning across the bed and draping her long arms around Zoya in a clumsy hug. We were always hugging each other back then, climbing on each other, sitting on each other’s laps. There was zero sense of personal space.
‘A good witch, I said, good witch,’ says Zoya, kissing her cheek.
‘Most likely to get married?’ I ask, the camera wobbling as I consult the yearbook again.
‘Zoya,’ Roisin and Faye say at the same time, then both shout, ‘Jinx.’
‘No way,’ says Zoya. ‘I guess you, Luce, you’re the most romantic.’
‘I might have to kiss someone first, but okay. Ooh, most likely to get divorced.’
‘Roisin!’ Zoya says with a smile, and the camera moves to Roisin who gives Zoya the finger. ‘What? You’ll be like Elizabeth Taylor.’
‘Most likely to be a nun?’ comes my voice again.
‘Faye!’ shouts Roisin.
‘So, I’m a nun and a witch? I don’t like this game,’ says Faye.
‘Most likely to become prime minister?’ I ask.
‘Zoya,’ Roisin and I both say together. This question hits me hard because she could have been, she could have been anything she set her mind to.
‘Most likely to have kids first,’ I ask, and the yearbook creeps back into frame.
‘You,’ Zoya says, her eyes intent on the person behind the camera and it feels as though she’s talking to me, here, now. ‘You’ll marry a nice man and have two point four children. Then split your time between a quiet cottage in Devon and your glam pad in Hollywood.’
‘Where are you in all this?’ I ask her. ‘I don’t want to live in Hollywood if none of you are there with me.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll all go off and do our own thing for a bit. I’ll be an artist, travelling the world in a clapped-out van. Then, when we’re old, we’ll dump our men and the four of us will live in a commune,’ Zoya says, her smile lighting up the screen. Then my dad’s voice shouts from somewhere far off, ‘Lucy, girls, are you ready to go?’ and the camera view drops to my shoes. ‘Coming!’ I yell. That’s the end of the video.
Hindsight can be so cruel. Seeing my childhood bedroom, I think of all the hours of my life spent with Zoya – at school, at her parents’ house, at mine, on nights out, hanging out at Kennington Lane. How can all that shared life just end? Where have all her memories gone?
As I’m scrolling through more videos, from times I can remember, Sam’s face, furrowed with concern, appears around the bedroom door.
‘Can I get you anything? Coffee, company?’
I shake my head and turn over in bed to face the wall. I can’t face talking.
I text Michael: I’m sick again. I can’t come to work.
I sleep. Sam brings me food like I’m an invalid. Downstairs, I hear life going on without me.
I decide to call my parents. There’s no answer on the home phone, so I call my mother’s mobile. As I wait for her to answer, a thought takes hold – I could ask them to come and get me, to take me home to my childhood bedroom. Mum could look after me, make me chocolate semolina like she did whenever I was ill as a child. Dad could light the fire in the living room while filling me in on the daily waxing and waning of his vegetable plot. The thought brings on such a wave of nostalgic longing, I clench my jaw to stop myself from crying out.
‘Hello, Lucy,’ my mother’s voice sounds distant. ‘You know we’re in Scotland? We’re out and about, if it sounds windy. Does it sound windy?’
‘Scotland?’ I ask, the urge to sob receding.
‘We won that voucher, remember? We’re staying at the Balmoral. It’s terribly smart. The Scots do know how to do a hotel.’
I hear Dad’s voice in the background, ‘We’re being treated like royalty. Tell her we’ll bring her back some of that rum and raisin flavoured tablet she likes.’
‘She doesn’t like rum and raisin tablet, Bert, it’s you that likes it,’ says Mum. ‘Honestly. Oh, the bus is coming. No, that one, Bert, the fifty-seven. Yes! Yes, flag it down! Sorry, Lucy, we’re on the fly. Is everything okay? We’re seeing you soon, aren’t we?’