Sometimes I think the undergraduates are grateful for my interrogations of the tutor, giving them plenty of time to go blank and sneak a look at their phone screens.

Except when the hour is nearly up and I ask when our essays are due in and the tutor says, ‘Oh thank you for reminding me, Georgina, that would be Friday.’ I hear the audible groan and irritated exhalation that the keeno mature student has gone and dropped everyone in it, again.

I can’t help myself though, I’m so excited to be here. I’ve had four first-class essay marks! I even got to grips with Beowulf!

I find the lectures almost luxurious. An hour to tune out of the city outside and live in the world of ideas and study and enjoy a sense my brain is being improved, knowledge increased, critical faculties sharpened, I said. ‘Yeah, like when you plug your phone in overnight for an iOS upgrade. Only I’m allowed to sleep through that,’ says Jared.

Jared is a very hairy tall boy in a beanie and the only student so far who’s spoken to me. He found out my age and told me he would totally take me out if I wanted, and ‘age isn’t a thing for me, if we vibe’. It made me feel like we’d be recreating Harold and Maude. I thanked him and said I was having some time out of the crazy game we call dating.

‘Right, are you like, divorced?’ he said. ‘Any kids? I’m probably not down for that whole scene.’

YOUTH.

I bounce into my classes every day, I walk around the campus with a smile on my face, and I don’t care if anyone thinks I’m a divvy. It’s such a novelty to me, to feel like I’m fixing things.

I want to get a First, not to be obnoxious, but to prove that there’s no shame in travelling the long way round to get where you want to go. It doesn’t matter if you take wrong turns. Arriving somewhere you want to be, in the end, is what counts.

So I reach out into the past, take the hand of that vulnerable, hopeful girl I used to be, and pull her forward to join me.

‘This is very profound, and moving,’ Clem had said, when I finally told them about Lucas coming to see me, after my reading. ‘But why aren’t you boning each other’s brains out?’

‘Have you really never considered training as a counsellor?’ Rav said to Clem.

‘I’m just saying – what’s not to bone about this man? He’s admitted his mistakes. He has great honour. Handy with some DIY. Stinking rich. And so handsome he could be a vampire.’

‘Urgh,’ Rav said. ‘What does that even mean?’

‘Undead high cheekbones. Moonlit skin. Angry dark hair.’

‘Cock like an ice-cold Calippo. Oh WHAT, Clem? You’re going to start acting like I’m too much?’ Rav said.

‘Well. I’d be on my back faster than an old lady on a frosty walk,’ Clem concluded.

Today, it’s my thirty-first birthday and I asked my friends if we could go hiking in the Peaks. Oh God, the UPROAR. Clem wasn’t going to be able to wear the Mary Quant dress she planned. Rav had some new navy suede shoes that he’d earmarked for an outing and: ‘Look, I know you feel like Miss Marple around these freshers but the self-loathing can go too far.’

‘You and I can go another time,’ Jo soothed, always the peace weaver.

I offered them a compromise – a night in The Lescar. No fuss, no frills. Clem was so disappointed she included a tiara from her shop in her gifts, which she bid me put on straight away. ‘Otherwise it’s nothing but a night in the pub.’

I felt a bit of a dick at first, but alcohol’s helping with that. Rav checks his watch, says: ‘My round,’ and goes to the bar.

‘But to be clear, you do fancy Lucas, right?’ Clem says. It’s been six months but she is still a dog with a bone.

I adjust my tiara. ‘It’s not difficult to fancy him, let’s be honest.’

‘What if he fancied you?’ Jo says.

I snort. ‘You’re kidding right?’

‘Why not?’ she says.

‘I dunno: our grimly tortured history and the fact that when I tried to kiss him once, he pushed me away and told me I repulsed him? I can read those sort of signals you know, I speak fluent “Man”.’

‘No,’ Jo says, swirling her drink in her glass, a double Monkey Shoulder on the rocks. I love her blokish taste in liquor. Jo is on Tinder, and having the time of her life since we got the tech sorted for her (she initially set it to ‘Men Within 100 Yards’ and Rav had to point out if there was a man hiding in her shed, he was unlikely to be Mr Right). Shagger Phil is, as best we know, a pining, celibate mess. The jury is still out on whether they’ll end up together, but this way, he’ll have waited for her.

‘Only because he was mixed up about your history. None of that means he isn’t attracted to you, and now you have your history sorted out …’

‘Exactly,’ Clem says.

‘Oh, you two! I know it would be a lovely postscript if Lucas and I got together after all this, but life’s not like that. And he’s going to marry a woman who looks like a member of The Corrs, I’m sure, not an ageing blonde in Yorkshire in fishnets.’

I see both her and Jo looking beadily at me. ‘Let me leave the memory of Lucas McCarthy with that handshake, not making a desperate hopeful arse of myself,’ I say, toasting them with my glass.

‘Yeah, you see,’ Clem says to Jo, ‘push needed.’ I see Jo nodding at her, and suddenly feel something is out of the ordinary.

‘You know we haven’t given you a birthday present? We sort of took a mad risk that will either see you grateful to us for the rest of your life, or …’ Clem trails off.

‘Or …?’ I say, with a hard intonation. Oh. God. If Clem thinks it’s ‘mad’ and a ‘risk’ …?

‘Or it’s a friendship-terminating calamity that will haunt us all ’til our end of days.’

‘Oh well, this is magnificent! Have you bought me an easyJet flight to Dublin and some Ann Summers crotchless pants? I am willing to waste your £100.’

‘No. It’s a bit wilder than that.’

‘OK, I’m honestly worried now, what have you done? Jo, you’re pale!’

Jo shows me gritted teeth and then glances up behind me and I go stiff, turn slowly and see Rav, who has a tray of drinks. And with him, Lucas McCarthy.

45

‘Surprise!’ Rav says, and I stare, dumbstruck, and wish I didn’t have a tiara on my head.

Lucas, his hands in the pockets of a dark jacket, eyes on me, says: ‘You know when you said I should definitely turn up for her birthday as a surprise and she’d love it and there was absolutely, without question, no flaw in this plan?’

‘Yes!’ Clem says.

‘Is that Georgina looking pleased to see me?’ He pretends to inspect my expression, and smiles. I am too shocked to smile.

‘She’s speechless with joy!’ Rav says, bustling past, setting his tray down. I feel their tense expectation.

I swallow, and try to collect myself. ‘Hi. Erm, what’s going on?’

‘We were trying to think how we could give you the greatest of birthdays, the birthday you deserve after everything you’ve been through …’ Jo gabbles, ‘And we thought, the best gift would be … that you’d like to see Lucas. And Lucas was up for a visit …’

‘They thought we should talk,’ Lucas says. ‘I was already thinking about getting in touch, then Clem and Jo got in touch with me …’

I look at Clem, full of delight at her own connivance, and a still very nervous Jo, back to Lucas, who has no right to look so at ease. He smiles again.

‘I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t have something to say. But I can go home again if this isn’t welcome, no hard feelings.’

‘No! No. It’s OK,’ I say. I will kill my friends later, slowly.

‘I’m fine to say what I have to say in front of your friends, if it won’t embarrass you.’

‘We would really like that,’ Clem says, before I can reply.

‘Oh you fu—’ I say. ‘How do I know if it’ll embarrass me when I don’t know what it is?’

‘It’s only embarrassing to me, really,’ Lucas says.

‘OK.’ I plant my sweaty hands on my knees, to steady myself.

‘I was wondering. Now we’ve sorted out our past. I was wondering if I could be part of your present again.’

My heart stutters and then stops. I am dead. I open my mouth and then close it again. Then open it.

‘Are you asking me to come back to The Wicker?’

‘No. I’m asking if I could take you out to dinner. Sometime; I can see you’re busy tonight. A date.’

I pause, sunshine spreading inside me. Lucas McCarthy is asking me on a date? ‘Aren’t you living in Dublin?’

‘No, not if you’re here. I’ve applied for a transfer. Hopefully the boss will sign it off but he’s a right wanker.’

I can’t help it. We grin stupidly at each other. He came back for me? He’d do that for me?

‘I’ve practised this with Devlin,’ Lucas says, ‘And I quote, “Come on you surly bastard you can do better than that, you’ve said more to me when you’ve been moping over her for the last few months.”’