Angie was pleased to see that Tiger had indeed moved the bottles, tucked his rucksack behind the sofa and was sitting cross-legged on the floor when they walked in. He stood up at once, proffering a hand to Jax who took it and shook it.

  ‘Hi. Sorry about this, mate,’ he said. ‘I had no idea Ange would be entertaining. But look, I can get out of your hair. Where’s this pub that you mentioned, Ange?’

  ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ replied Jax. ‘No need to race out on my account.’

  Angie felt aggrieved. Of course, Tiger should be going out. It was beyond question. ‘It’s the Masons Arms, Tiger,’ she said. ‘Just down the road, by the zebra crossing.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Tiger enthusiastically, but his body language suggested that she had told him to go and take a late-night dip in the River Ouse.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Jax. ‘There’s really no need. You might as well just stay here.’

  His body language also belied his words, but what could Angie do if Jax was determined to be noble? She could hardly manhandle Tiger out on to the street. She went to the fridge, removed three bottles of beer from her dwindling stash and handed them out.

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ said Jax and fell into the sofa, which objected loudly as if it had had just about enough of people abusing its springs.

  ‘So, how was the journey?’ asked Angie, positioning herself in Jax’s lap so that there was no question of Tiger sitting anywhere but on the floor, which was where Tiger promptly placed himself.

  ‘Long,’ said Jax. ‘I blame TV. I’m sure that before we had all this wall-to-wall crime drama it was much easier to hitchhike.’

  ‘Definitely,’ said Tiger, nodding fiercely. ‘You used to be able to get a lift pretty much as soon as you stuck your thumb out, but now you can be standing about for hours before anyone picks you up.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s got anything to do with the fact that neither of you are handsome youngsters anymore?’ Angie asked with a smile. ‘I think people are more reluctant to pick up adult men, and who can blame them? You could be serial killers for all they know.’

  ‘Who are you calling a serial killer?’ laughed Jax.

  ‘Yeah, who are you calling a serial killer?’ echoed Tiger. It made him sound like a child aping the adult in the room and Angie felt a bit embarrassed for him, but if Tiger noticed the awkwardness, he didn’t show it.

  ‘So, where did you two meet?’ he asked.

  ‘Up a tree,’ replied Jax, throwing a grin at Angie that made her stomach flip.

  ‘Well, not quite,’ she clarified. ‘We were both at Newbury.’

  Tiger looked at them blankly and shook his head as if this meant nothing to him.

  ‘The bypass protest? God, Tiger. Do you not watch the news?’

  Tiger shook his head again. Angie supposed he didn’t. He was rarely in the country long enough to get much of a grip on what was happening, and it was feasible that he might have missed the entire thing.

  ‘So, they wanted to build a bloody great bypass,’ said Jax. ‘It was going to cut through whole swathes of Berkshire green belt. One hundred and twenty acres of ancient woodland destroyed just like that. Sites of scientific interest, the works. The road just went straight through the middle. Ten thousand trees massacred.’

  ‘Bad news,’ replied Tiger.

  Jax rolled his eyes. ‘You could say,’ he replied sarcastically.

  ‘So, loads of people went to protest,’ said Angie, taking up the story before Jax had time to. ‘There were all kinds there, from vicars and the WI to women left over from Greenham Common, and some that had been at Twyford Down. You’ve heard about that, right?’

  Tiger shook his head again and Jax tutted.

  ‘Even Johnny Morris was there!’ continued Angie. ‘You know, from Animal Magic? You must remember Animal Magic?’

  Tiger began humming the distinctive theme tune.

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’

  ‘And so, you two just ran into each other?’

  Angie looked at Jax and smiled. ‘Jax had been on site since the summer. Him and the others built themselves this whole village in the trees. Twigloos, they were called, their little houses. Dead cute. And clever. A feat of engineering really, the way they all lived up there. They could move about from tree to tree without ever having to come down.’

  Jax nodded. ‘Yeah. We stayed up there for months. There was like this real solidarity, you know. Anyway, then one day Angie showed up in the tree next to mine and we got talking and . . .’

  ‘Not that convenient,’ said Tiger. ‘Love up a tree! Did you . . . ? I mean, up a tree!’

  ‘For God’s sake, Tiger!’

  Tiger shrugged as if the question was just begging to be asked. ‘So, what happened?’ he asked. ‘You must have come down eventually. Did you win?’

  ‘In the end they cut the trees down,’ replied Jax. Angie could still hear the bitterness in his voice.

  ‘With you in them?’ said Tiger, his eyes wide. ‘How did that work?’

  ‘Well, as good as. The bastards cut all the branches so we couldn’t get down and then used cherry-pickers to pull protesters off. We held fast for as long as we could.’ Jax hung his head as if he was single-handedly responsible for the failure of the protests against the new road.

  Angie put out a hand and stroked his back reassuringly.

  ‘Blimey!’ said Tiger, taking a swig of beer. ‘High drama in the treetops.’

  He was grinning to himself as if he found the whole episode deeply entertaining, and Angie threw him a warning look. She was beginning to regret the four beers and not getting rid of Tiger when she’d had the chance.

  ‘It was bloody serious, mate,’ said Jax. ‘There were people there prepared to die for the cause. I mean, actually die.’

  Angie thought that Tiger was going to laugh at that, but somehow he managed to swallow it.

  ‘I’m sure, mate. Big roads. Bad news. Seriously bad news,’ he said, shaking his head.

  Angie could feel Jax’s body tensing beneath her. The last thing she needed was for these two to have a full-blown row.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘So, that’s where we met. Right, I’m suddenly knackered. How about we retire to the bedroom, Jax?’ She gave him a wink which under normal circumstances would have been signal enough, but Jax, it appeared, was still gunning for a fight with Tiger.

  ‘What you don’t seem to understand,’ he said pointedly, ‘is just how much damage the road is doing. We can’t replace all that woodland, you know. You can’t just plant a few trees and hey presto, it all grows back. It was a habitat for God knows how many different species. The mammals, of course. Everyone thinks about the badgers and the cute little rabbits. And the birds obviously lost their homes. But the insects and the plant life. And the microscopic organisms like lichen and fungi. They had been growing there forever, since the Big Bang for all we know. And then they were all gone. Just like that. Totally unforgivable.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tiger. ‘I can see that. Poor little bunnies.’

  Jax sat up so quickly that Angie had to hold on to the sofa so that she didn’t get flung to the floor.

  ‘Are you always this much of an arse?’ he said to Tiger.

  Tiger shrugged. ‘I’m just saying, man, that when you’ve seen as much of the planet as I have it’s hard to get too worked up about a tiny patch of woods in a tiny country like England. Destruction of the rainforests. Now there’s a serious issue. Destroying the ozone layer. Shit. Yes! Let’s get worked up about that. But a bunch of tree-huggers in leafy Berkshire – I’m sorry, but I just don’t see it.’

  ‘Boys, boys, let’s take this down a notch or two, shall we?’ said Angie. They weren’t boys, of course, but fully grown men, although their behaviour might suggest otherwise. ‘Let’s just agree to disagree, shall we?’

  She pulled a meaningful face at Tiger, widening her eyes in her effort to get him to back off. She knew from experience that once Jax got the bit between his teeth it would be harder to distract him, and she really didn’t want her weekend spoiled by a stupid argument like this one.

  ‘Yeah, sorry,’ said Tiger. ‘I guess we all have causes that are close to our hearts.’

  Jax didn’t reply, but that was good enough for her.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow, Tiger. Sleep well.’

  Tiger looked at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s eight forty-five,’ he said, as if he were a primary school child objecting to his bedtime. Then he caught her drift. ‘Ah, right. I’m a bit knackered myself as it goes. It’ll do me good to have an early night. I’ll see you two tomorrow.’

  Angie mouthed ‘sorry’ at him and then took Jax’s hand. ‘Come on, you. Let’s go and catch up on what we’ve missed.’

  She grabbed the last two beers out of the fridge and pulled a still fuming Jax into her bedroom, banging the door shut behind them.

  ‘That bloke is a total jerk,’ spat Jax almost before the door shut.

  ‘He’s all right, really,’ she replied, not wanting to irritate Jax any further but still feeling the need to defend Tiger. ‘He’s just not tuned into the stuff that we are. He travels so much that he finds it hard to focus on the micro. But his heart’s in the right place.’

  Jax harrumphed, pacing up and down like a leopard. It wasn’t that big a space and he could only go a few steps before he had to turn round. Angie tried not to laugh at him. That really wouldn’t have helped.

  She lowered herself down on to the bed and arranged herself provocatively.

  ‘Come and lie down, baby,’ she said. ‘Forget about Tiger.’

  She patted the cover next to her but Jax was having none of it.

  ‘What’s the story, anyway, between you two?’ he asked.

  Angie knew what he was getting at, but it really wasn’t going to make things any better if she gave him all the details.

  ‘We met on my year out,’ she said. ‘In India. And then I came home to go to uni and he stayed where he was. He’s been travelling ever since. He doesn’t have a base in the UK any more so if he comes back he floats around begging favours until it’s time to leave again.’

  ‘Bloody scrounger,’ said Jax. His mood seemed to be getting blacker by the minute and Angie could see her lovely precious time slipping away from her.

  ‘Oh, let’s not worry about him,’ she said. ‘Come here. Relax. Have another beer and let’s just chill. I can give you a massage if you like, release those tangled chakras.’

  He seemed to relax a little then and came to lie down next to her. A wave of excitement rippled through Angie’s body at the proximity of his to hers. She swung her leg over his hips, sat astride him and began to rub at his shoulders and the top of his neck.

  ‘You’re so tense in there, baby,’ she said as her thumbs worked at the knots. She hoped that this didn’t set him off again, but he finally seemed happy to leave Tiger where he was on the other side of the door.

  She wasn’t really surprised that Jax didn’t understand Tiger or their unusual relationship. Sometimes, she wasn’t sure that she understood it herself. They had been friends for over a decade, although the time actually spent together over that period couldn’t have amounted to more than a handful of weeks since she had been back in England. And Jax was right – Tiger was something of a scrounger. He’d show up out of the blue, just as he had done today, and expect shelter and food whilst making no effort to contribute to the cost. He did help around the flat; it wasn’t as if he expected to be waited on hand and foot. And she supposed that he had to hang on to whatever cash he managed to earn to pay for his living expenses when he was abroad. But still, he definitely seemed to expect that she would be up for supporting him when he arrived.

  Still, whilst she didn’t have so much spare cash herself, she didn’t begrudge him it. He had been there for her, in India, when she had most needed a friend. He had sat up with her late into the night as she had tried to make sense of what had happened to her in life thus far – her mother, the children’s homes, the feelings of never belonging, never being secure or safe. It was Tiger who had listened without judgement, not tried to fix anything – what could he fix, anyway? – but had just let her work it all through in her own head. And for that she would be eternally grateful to him in a way that she would never be able to fully explain to someone else.

  She would be the first to accept, though, that Tiger was far from perfect. His thirty-year-old self hadn’t really changed that much from the eighteen-year-old she had first met. His outlook remained unsophisticated, despite all that he had seen in the world, and his needs were very simple. Angie had discovered a long time ago that there was very little point trying to get into any kind of political argument with him. He just had no interest, and anything that he did say was generally just a parroted version of what he had heard others say rather than a genuinely held belief.

  But Tiger had something about him that none of her other friends shared. A kind of courage. It took balls to have no base, no stuff, to go where you wanted with neither aim nor plan. She didn’t think she could do it – well, not for year after year. She liked to think that she kept her horizons wide but at the end of the day, her dreams were tethered, like a hot air balloon, so that they couldn’t just float off whither they would. Tiger’s were different. The only thing holding him back was gravity.

  But she couldn’t explain any of this to Jax. All he saw was an irritating ignoramus who was trespassing on his patch. That was fine. She didn’t feel the need to share what she and Tiger had with Jax. If he was going to be in her life for any length of time, then he would get used to the random appearances of Tiger at inopportune moments. And she did hope that Jax would be in her life, for a while longer at least.

  And with that in mind, she turned Jax over beneath her so that he was facing up and began to kiss him with everything that she had.

  19

  Princess Diana was dead and the entire country, as far as Angie could tell anyway, had gone completely mad. She had never heard so much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The carpets of flowers placed outside Kensington Palace also had to be seen to be believed. There were more flowers strewn on the ground than must have been grown in an entire summer, or so it appeared. It felt, Angie thought, as if everyone had channelled any bit of sadness or grief from their own lives into the mourning for this stranger. As a result, the atmosphere was weird, the energy somehow disjointed.

  Angie did feel sorry for the little princes though, following behind their father to look at the floral tributes. They looked like miniature adults in their ridiculous grown-up costumes, keeping a stiff upper lip as they must have been taught to do. All this repression of grief would only store up problems for them in later life, Angie was sure. She wanted to shout at them to scream and cry and release those pent-up emotions in whatever way felt most natural to them, but who was she to tell them anything?

  But despite all the oddness, normal life had to continue. Long before anyone had known what was coming down the track for the princess, Angie had received a bright orange envelope through the post. It contained a cheerful invitation, also orange but with jaunty blue elephants scattered across it, inviting her to attend Thomas’s first birthday party. Initially Angie had been confused by it, not being immediately sure who Thomas was. She didn’t know any children and certainly none well enough to be invited to their birthday party. The RSVP request cast light on the mystery, however – Leon and Becky. Was their child one already? Angie supposed he must be. It was hardly the kind of thing that you made up.

  Angie had to swallow down her resentment when she saw Becky’s name. Becky had stolen Leon from them, or Leon had allowed himself to be stolen. Angie wasn’t sure which was worse. But at least she’d been invited to the birthday celebrations, even if she was a duty invite. Maybe Becky would feel less threatened by Leon’s old friends from now on. Angie hoped so, because she and Maggie weren’t a threat to her. Well, not really.

  Then Maggie rang. At least Angie saw Maggie more frequently than she saw Leon, but even with Maggie it was hard to get together, so busy were they with their day-to-day lives. They spoke every week, though, keeping up with each other’s news. Maggie seemed to be doing well at work and when they did meet, she was always beautifully and expensively dressed (though Angie’s eye was not that tuned in to these things), and she drove a natty little convertible that Angie secretly coveted. But there didn’t seem to be much in her life outside her job. Her social life was made up mainly of work-related dinners or dull parties with her colleagues, and there was no suggestion of any romance. Maybe being a lawyer was like being a policeman. You ended up being married to the job.

  ‘Have you been invited to the birthday party?’ Maggie asked now.

  ‘What birthday party?’ Angie had replied, just out of badness because she knew the suggestion that Maggie had put her foot in it would make her squirm.

  It did.

  ‘For Leon’s boy’s birthday, Thomas, you know.’ And then, ‘Oh my God! Have they not invited you? I’m so sorry. That’s so insensitive of me. I had no idea. I just assumed because I’d got one that . . . oh God. How embarrassing.’

  Angie, grinning down the phone, let her off the hook. ‘You’re so easy to wind up, Mags. I’m only kidding,’ she said. ‘Of course I got one. Are you going to go?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ tutted Maggie. ‘You can be very irritating, you know, Angie Osborne. Anyway, I thought that if you were invited then we could go together and if it’s totally awful, we can slope off and go and get a cup of tea somewhere. What do you think?’

  Angie liked the idea a lot. She was determined to try a little harder with Becky from this point on, but it would be easier to do that with Maggie by her side. Leeds was less than an hour away and Maggie had the natty car. If she drove them there Angie wouldn’t even have to fork out for the train fare.

  ‘Why not?’ she replied. ‘Let’s go and meet Leon’s progeny!’

  So, a plan was made. On the day of the party, Saturday 6 September, Maggie would pick her up from the flat and drive them both to Leon’s house.