“Great thanks, yep, really good, actually.”

“But it’s so chilly in here.” Mrs. Turner looked down at me where I lay with the duvet pulled up to my chin, “Poor Willa’s frozen.” She moved across the room to try to shove the window shut. Robyn stood in the middle of the room, dragging her fingers through disheveled hair. Fingers that smelt of me, I thought. In Robyn’s hair.

“No run this morning, Robyn? It’s not like you to still be in bed at this hour.”

“Too icy, miss.” Robyn widened her eyes and grinned at me behind Mrs. Turner’s back. “It’s more inviting inside.”

Mrs. Turner gave up on the window. She looked at me and smiled, tipping her head on one side, and, softening her voice, said, “And how are you, sweetheart?”

“I’m all good, thanks.” I smiled. Mrs. Turner smiled. She moved to the door. Then she stopped. She turned round. She looked from me to Robyn and back again, a puzzle in her eyes.

“Have you two swapped beds?”

***

Laika was missing. Laika was missing and I missed her with a raw, incomprehensible grief that sat inside my every cell. And yet the truth is, I would count the next eighteen months as some of the happiest of my entire life.

It was a world that existed entirely inside that room, and if I could go back and relive every single moment of it again, I would. I still do. But now I only ever remember it in snapshots.

Once, laughing. The sound burst from me one morning and was so strange and unexpected I immediately clapped a hand over my mouth. I hadn’t known that I could ever laugh like that again. But there it was.

And music. Singing, dancing to Robyn’s ridiculously retro tastes, “You’re Simply the Best,” “Always on My Mind,” “Don’t You Want Me, Baby?”

Celebrating our birthdays within a month of each other, both of us turning seventeen.

Robyn’s tender kisses. The curve of her clavicles. The nubs of her spine. The small of her back. The stretch of skin over her hips. The tip of her tongue. How much I wanted her. The way she made me come.

She must have guessed things, I suppose, but she never let on. I think she was too good, too kind ever to ask. Or perhaps she was scared of making things worse. But she must have guessed something. I know she must have, because she was always there for me, holding me, talking to me, when I woke from dreams in which I was pushing through rivers of thickening concrete, forever trying to reach a half-submerged shape. Never getting there, crying out. Night after night after night.

And, once, this: Robyn talking about something, lying on her side, facing me, her voice rippling with laughter, teasing, her fingers dancing over my skin, her hand playful, then her tickling fingers jabbing into the skin of my ribs and my instant No. The command flew from me fast and hard and unbidden; my voice loud, edged with panic. Just as fast I grabbed her wrist with my hand. We froze like that, me holding Robyn’s hand in the air, my eyes fixed on hers. I wasn’t smiling.

Robyn looked at me, her smile fading. I opened my hand and let go of her wrist. Slowly Robyn put down her hand, keeping her eyes on mine.

“Whoa,” she said. “Sorry.”

I started to speak. “Sorry—” I stopped. “Don’t tickle me. Anything, just—not that.”

“Okay,” she said.

She lay back down. I put my head next to hers on the pillow. Her face was as gentle as ever. My eyes moved over hers. I felt I had to say something, to explain.

“I—” I stopped again. She put a gentle hand on my arm.

“It’s okay,” she said, “really. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to say anything.” She let a long moment lap between us. “But you could tell me anything, you know. Anything. I swear I’d never tell a soul.”

“Go on, then.” I slipped the chain off my neck and placed it in the palm of her hand, folding her fingers over its tiny dolphin. “Swear.”

She grinned. “Fine. I, Robyn Bee, do hereby swear—”

“Solemnly swear—”

“Do hereby solemnly swear that you, Willa Martenwood, could tell me anything—”

“Anything?”

“Anything, and I would never tell another soul.”

“Thank you,” I said, smiling. She dropped my necklace back into my hand. I put it back on and we lay down again, two heads on one pillow. “That means a lot.”

I could have told her anything.

I could have told her everything.

I just never did.

***

The day school finished for the summer, Robyn’s mother picked us up in a battered blue Defender, and in the two hours it took to drive to their home I honestly don’t think she drew breath. Sometimes she talked to us, sometimes to passing sheep and the flocks of pheasants that periodically flooded the road; at other times to the Land Rover itself, Bertie.

I’d never ridden in a Defender before. The three of us sat rammed together on a bench seat in the front, and there were bits of moss growing on the inside of the windows and holes in the floor where you could literally see straight through to the road. The thing lurched wildly as it went round corners, and we went with it. I clung on to Robyn until she pointed out a handle on the dash she called the Oh shit bar, then I clung on to that.

Before long we were off the main roads and on to single-track lanes. We crossed river after river, sometimes on ancient stone bridges, and sometimes actually plunging through the water, Bertie reeling like a drunk over the riverbed’s rocks. We wound our way through valleys so thick with trees the landscape looked almost Jurassic; everywhere was hung with vines and drifts of lichen, and the forest floor was thick with ferns.

Then Mrs. Bee was saying, “Come on, Bertie, you bastard,” and, as the oaks gave way to open moorland, we began the final ascent to the house, up the steepest hill imaginable, on a stony unmade track.

And then there were dogs barking and running alongside, and we drew up outside a lone stone cottage with a slate roof. Straight off two men appeared from the house. The tall thin one with curly graying hair, a big nose and wide grin I guessed must be Robyn’s father, and the other her brother, a young man with a shy smile and a limp. All of them were talking and hugging, and the two dogs were jumping at Robyn and practically howling with joy when she bent down to kiss the top of their heads. Then her dad and brother were hauling our bags into the house and we followed, scattering cats, ducks and a goat in our wake.

I swear to God we must have gone back in time. The house was somehow alive, as if the actual physical building was living and breathing. Chickens and dogs marched through the kitchen, and there were hundreds of bats in the attic that streamed out from under the eaves at dusk. It wasn’t a big place, and everything seemed to spill from the inside to the out: there were pots of geraniums and herbs by the back door, boots and dog beds, even the scent of the kitchen escaped into the garden—the smell of yeast and coffee and cinnamon and apples. Upstairs, the bedsheets smelt of marzipan, the towels of cucumber. And not only did they not lock up at night, they didn’t even shut the front door. Outside, there were long views in every direction.

Everything was old, in fact the bathtub was seriously ancient. The loo flushed with a chain, and the plumbing was treated like some sort of prehistoric creature in need of special care, a job which Robyn’s dad, Chris, performed regularly with a wrench and a bucket, coaxing the pipes to splutter and gurgle their way back to life. Nothing was wasted in that household. Scraps went to the animals or the compost, and everything else was repurposed as seed trays or flower vases or saved for later, just in case. Everything had some sort of value, it seemed. Even the smallest thing mattered.

Meals appeared at a kitchen table that was hewn from a long plank of pale oak with an undulating surface, like a sea on a calm afternoon. Robyn’s dad had made it. In fact, it turned out he’d made pretty much everything in that house and nothing was what you’d call perfect, no surface was flat. All the wood was full of dips and knots and bumps. Not one of the legs was square.

“You shouldn’t overwork wood,” he told me, spotting me running my hands over the kitchen worktops one morning. “It takes away its soul.”

For a house in the middle of nowhere, it wasn’t a quiet place at all. It was full of noise and had a regular stream of visitors too, some of whom had made the climb because they’d spotted the word teas faraway on the roof of the pottery and others who arrived simply by word of mouth. Whoever they were, Robyn’s mum, Caro, coaxed stories out of them. We met a group of dinner ladies from Truro, an archaeologist from Hexham, a professor of physics from Kansas, a stripper from Southend. Caro was fascinated by everyone. If they liked dogs, they were welcome.

Every once in a while someone would arrive who didn’t speak English, and those were always the visitors that Robyn and I enjoyed the best. Not only did their appearance entail Caro performing a series of increasingly complicated mimes, but when they came to pay they’d be completely bemused by her absolute refusal to accept even a single penny for the tea and cake. Then, after that, it just got worse. Before they were allowed to leave, Caro would produce a tatty old exercise book for them to write in. On the first page she’d written please assist future visitors by writing this is not a tea shop in your own language below—

“Mum,” Robyn said one night as she flicked through its pages, “you do realize you only ever give this book to people who don’t actually have a clue what they’re being asked to do, right? Look at this entry, somebody’s just written Bizarre.”

***

The next month just went. I barely had time to think about home. We were somehow always busy. It was only at the end of my second week that I realized they didn’t actually have a TV—Absolutely no point, Robyn said, there’s no reception.

In the evenings, after supper, the whole family just sat around the kitchen table and talked, or sometimes played cards for buttons and coins. Big debates happened there too, discussions on art, politics, music, current affairs, anything really. Other things too, specific things, some of which I’d never even heard of before: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the Bechdel Test, Hooper’s Law, Schrödinger’s Cat, Dunbar’s Number, the Barnum Effect; and, once, argued passionately by Chris and with more examples than you’d think strictly necessary, Frank Zappa’s musical genius. Mostly these discussions were started by Caro in a passing comment delivered casually, a small thing thrown into a ring. But just as quickly each idea got picked up and passed around. Every point was acknowledged, then instantly challenged. I soon realized you had to think fast and back up your arguments with good evidence, or else Robyn’s brother, Michael, would pick them to bits with a precision that was needle-sharp. Robyn’s dad, I thought, listening intently with his head cocked on one side, looked a bit like a raven, but he spoke like a priest, adding his own thoughts to ours in a voice that was measured and soft. Nobody ever lost their temper. Nobody shouted. Nobody stormed out. It took me a while to understand no one ever got angry about anything. If I’d have figured them out sooner, I would have owned up to accidentally breaking a bowl. I should have said something straight off, of course, but Laika and I knew better than to own up to anything. Nonetheless, I felt a deep shame for letting the moment pass. They were so generous about it. They must have known it was me.

***