was as it once was; that the last ten years had been nothing more than a very lucid and very long dream. That it was an ordinary Monday morning once more, a lecture to get dressed for and hurry along to and not be late for, the bustle of other students around her in a shared kitchen, the hiss of a kettle, the tinkle of teaspoons in mugs, the radio blaring in the corner . . .
She held the iPod right up close to her face until the words blurred.
If I could just jump through the screen into the past.
‘Hey, Lee? What you got there?’
It was Jacob. The fantasy evaporated and she realised her cheeks were wet. She quickly rubbed them dry.
‘What is it, Lee?’
‘A gift from Raymond,’ she replied.
An hour later, back on their bikes coasting effortlessly down a gentle incline that seemed to have been going on for miles, she understood what Raymond had said in his note. Music pumping through the earphones, songs she half-remembered, favourites she’d never forgotten. A bit of rock music played deafeningly loud was as good a tonic as anything else.
On the flat horizon ahead of them she could see the grey outskirts of Cambridge and the late afternoon sun already beginning to make arrangements to settle for the night.
So should we.
Up ahead of them, off a slip road, was a short row of roadside terraced council houses, the front lawns littered with rotting rubbish and overgrown with grass gone to seed. Out front, a dozen cars, parked half on, half off the kerb were quietly rusting away, several of them blackened and twisted with fire damage from long ago.
A road sign informed them that Cambridge was five miles further up the road. It was as good a place as any to park up for the night. She pulled the earphones out and told the boys to steer up the slip road.
A few moments later, the bicycles braked with a hiss and skittering of dislodged gravel. They dismounted outside the row of houses and their cluttered overgrown front yards. Picking the emptiest garden they set about clearing some space, stamping down the tall grass and weeds and tossing aside enough of the garden toys tangled beneath to set down their tents and build a cooking fire between them. Leona sent Jacob into the nearest house to forage for firewood whilst she helped Nathan assemble the tents. She pulled a tub of their freeze-dried food out from beneath the trailer’s tarpaulin and measured enough out for the three of them, whistling as she did so.
Jacob stepped cautiously through the open front door, pushing it in with a creak of rusted hinges and the rattle of a loose glass panel nestled in a weather-warped frame. The dim interior beyond had once been a small front room; a flat-screen TV, the glass cracked in one corner, a fireplace. Above that was a school portrait of a boy in his uniform, hair cropped short on a bullet-shaped head and grinning mischievously. On the mantelpiece beside the photo sat an attendance certificate for Jamie Conner - Year 5 proudly framed. Jacob eased himself past a single sofa and an armchair, both rotting from damp and the rain that had blown in through the open door over the last ten winters.
He stepped across the lounge and into the kitchen and found a pine breakfast table and chairs that they could use for firewood. Several cheap kitchen units had rotted from their brackets and collapsed from the wall, spilling mismatched crockery and favourite tea-stained mugs across the counter and onto the linoleum-covered floor. A single weed grew proudly through the broken frosted glass of a back door leading onto a modest rear yard with a trampoline in it.
A narrow and steep stairway that creaked underfoot took him up to a bathroom and two other rooms with doors ajar. One was a boy’s bedroom wallpapered with a pattern of footballs and goalposts and peppered with Blu-Tacked glossy pullouts of Ronaldinho. Through the other door he saw the end of a double bed and the tented bumps of something beneath a fading quilt. He didn’t need to step forward to know what was in there. Jacob had seen this hundreds of times already over the years; the beds of families who had opted for the easy way out rather than fight to survive, beneath the faded quilt the pitiful twisted leather carcasses embracing each other, empty pill bottles on the bedside table.
He