To My Best Friends. Sam Baker

really late eighties. Except for Nicci, of course. She had a bleached crop, the kind that looked like she’d cut it herself, which she had.

      ‘Look at you!’ Lizzie laughed, and Jo was embarrassed to see she was hoisting her boobs for the camera. As if they weren’t big enough already in those days. She wore a towel and nothing else. Lizzie was all wild red hair, in an over-large man’s shirt and Levi’s 501s, a look she adopted in their first term at university, under Nicci’s tuition, and wore for years. As ever, her hair hid her face.

      Mona was in the hippy phase that presaged her wander-lust. A long Indian skirt and a mirror-beaded waistcoat over a puffy shirt. On anyone else it would have looked like a sack, but she looked as lean as always. Only Mona would hide the slim-hipped, long-legged figure of a model under that outfit.

      And Nicci? She was channelling Courtney Love.

      Doc Martens, with her original sixties biker jacket, over a peach satin slip, her hair spiky. A bottle of vodka in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Jo was pouting, Mona was inscrutable and Lizzie was grinning, more or less. As for Nicci, she had a rock star snarl and that wildness in her eyes. The wildness that had only started to fade when she met David.

      Lizzie’s sniff broke the silence. ‘Still no tissues, I suppose?’ she asked, glancing around the shed. Her gaze fell on the remains of a kitchen roll. She tore off a square and passed the roll to the others.

      ‘Nicci lived in that leather jacket,’ Lizzie said. ‘She was wearing it the very first time I met her.’

      Chapter Three

       The Sixties Vintage Biker Jacket

       Sussex University. Brighton, 1992

      Lizzie barely opened her mouth in the Hardy seminar. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what she thought; she’d read Jude the Obscure three times to be sure. But why would anyone care what Lizzie O’Hara thought? And anyway, she was too intimidated by the peroxide blonde in the charity-shop nightie and battered motorbike jacket who’d been holding court for the last ten minutes. Where did she get her self-confidence, Lizzie wondered. At least she wasn’t afraid to express her opinions, even if Lizzie wasn’t convinced they were entirely accurate.

       When the blonde came up to Lizzie as she waited for a lift after the seminar, Lizzie couldn’t have been more amazed if Damon Albarn had asked her out. ‘I’m Nicci Gilbert,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t know about you, but I’m gasping for a coffee. Fancy one?’

       Dumbfounded, Lizzie just nodded, and found herself walking beside – well, slightly behind – the coolest and fastest-walking person, she’d ever seen, let alone spoken to, in her entire eighteen years of small-town life.

       They looked like chalk and cheese.

       Despite her best efforts, Lizzie’s long reddish hair was frizz rather than curls. Her skin was white and freckly, what little of it could be seen beneath her floor-length black jersey skirt, which bagged at the knee where she’d crossed her legs in the tutorial. An over-sized man’s shirt was meant to disguise her pear-shaped – and much-loathed – size fourteen body. In Lizzie’s eyes, it did the job adequately.

       Apparently not . . .

       ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ said Nicci, sliding into a corner table in the Students’ Union café, laden with plastic cups of nasty, lukewarm machine coffee. Allegedly black, the liquid looked more like a murky brown. ‘But that skirt . . . it really doesn’t suit you. You should try men’s jeans with a big belt. Or leggings, they’d work. The shirt’s great, by the way. But a baggy top and a baggy bottom just make you look . . .’

       At the expression on Lizzie’s face, the conclusion trailed away. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ Nicci said. ‘What I meant to say was, you’ve got that amazing body, and I’d kill to have curves.’ She ran one ring-laden hand down her birdcage-like chest to reveal a Jenga of ribs under her slip. ‘No such luck. If I had boobs – even small ones like yours – and a bum, I’d make sure everyone knew about it.’

       Lizzie was mortified. Where did she get off, this stranger slagging off her clothes and calling her fat? The way Lizzie was brought up, if you couldn’t say something polite, you didn’t say anything at all. One reason why she didn’t tell Nicci where to stick it, crap coffee and all. Plus, she didn’t have the nerve. Her instinctive reaction was to crawl under the table and stay there until Nicci had gone. Instead, she just nodded sheepishly and stared hard at the brown plastic cup in front of her.

      So that’s what I am, she thought as she stomped back to halls half an hour later, a charity case. And a fat one, at that. Well, bugger off. I can find my own friends. And I can dress myself without your help too.

       But somehow next day, without intending to, she found herself the centre of Brighton, in a second-hand shop in The Lanes, fingering a ripped up pair of 501s, washed and worn to soft.

      The following week, after their seminar Nicci was waiting for Lizzie by the lift, a battered paperback copy of A Pair of Blue Eyes in her hand.

       ‘Cool jeans,’ she said, when she spotted Lizzie. ‘Vintage too.’ She nodded approvingly. ‘They’re perfect on you. You look sexy.’

       Lizzie flushed, embarrassed. In spite of herself, she was pleased. Nicci grinned. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude last week,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you. I can be clumsy like that. I need to learn to keep my trap shut.’

       Smiling cautiously, Nicci slid her arm through Lizzie’s. ‘I just thought you’d look better in jeans – and you do. Come on,’ she added. ‘I’m meeting my friend Jo in the Union. I think you’ll like her. She lives in the room next door to me in halls. She’s the first friend I made here.’ She grinned again, taking Lizzie by surprise. ‘And you’re the second.’

       It was supposedly the first day of the rest of Jo’s life. The day life really started to happen. But sitting on a yet-to-be-made-up mattress in a single room on the third floor of halls, Jo had never felt so out of her depth.

       Her parents had left an hour earlier and she hadn’t moved since. So she sat surrounded by black bags, cardboard boxes and a new John Lewis suitcase bought especially for the occasion. Her worldly goods, such as they were. Sat and stared at the detritus of the room’s last occupant: Blu-Tack stains freckling the walls where once a montage of photographs had been, fading gig tickets still pinned to a corkboard, smiley-face stickers obscuring the window, which wasn’t big to start with. Proof, if proof was needed, that room 303’s previous inhabitant had been ‘popular’. All the signs so far suggested that Jo was going to be the opposite.

       To judge by the blank stares, uninterested glances and irritated sighs as she’d lugged her bags into the lift, Jo was sure friends whose photographs might paper those walls would be in short supply.

       Feeling like nothing so much as her eleven-year-old self, Jo allowed herself a few minutes to wallow. She knew absolutely no one here, and didn’t have a clue how to go about changing that. She’d probably be back home in Watford by the middle of term; friendless, grade-less and with a queue of people who couldn’t wait to tell her how much too big for her boots she’d been for wanting to do a degree in the first place.

       Ten minutes and then she’d get it together.

       Jo had just hurled herself face down on to the bed when there was a sharp rap at her door. Precisely the knock her mother used when she was making a show of respecting Jo’s privacy but intended to come in regardless.

       Before Jo could shout, ‘Hang on a sec,’ let alone blow her nose and wipe tears from her eyes, the door had swung open and a small, pointed face with huge kohl-rimmed green eyes topped with spiky white-blond hair appeared around it.