Marcus snorted, and had to look away to compose himself. ‘Tamara, it’s really not that bad.’

‘Yes it is. I want a fucking skinny gingerbread latte and a cinnamon roll, now,’ I said very calmly, aware that I was beginning to sound like Violet Beauregarde from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. ‘And while I’m there I want to use my laptop and avail myself of their Wi-Fi service, go online and check my Facebook page. I want to go to Topshop. I want to Twitter. And then I want to go to the beach with my friends and look at the sea and drink a bottle of white wine and I want to get so drunk, I fall over and vomit. You know, like normal things that normal people do. That is what I want.’

‘Do you always get what you want?’ Marcus looked at me.

I couldn’t answer. A giant lump of oh-my-god-I’m-in-love-kind-of-feeling had gathered in my throat. And so I just nodded.

‘Okay,’ he said, perking up, and I swallowed, my Marcus crush sent flying down my oesophagus into my stomach. ‘Let’s look on the bright side.’

‘There is no bright side.’

‘There’s always a bright side.’ He looked left and then he looked right, he held his hands up and his eyes lit up. ‘There’s no library.’

‘Oh my god…’ I head-butted myself off the dashboard.

‘Right,’ he laughed and turned the engine off, ‘let’s go somewhere else.’

‘Don’t you need the engine on to go somewhere else?’ I asked.

‘We’re not driving,’ he said, and climbed over the top of the driver’s seat and into the bus. ‘So, let’s see…where should we go?’ He moved his finger along the spines of the books in the travel section and walked alongside them reading aloud, ‘ Paris, Chile, Rome, Argentina, Mexico…’

‘ Mexico,’ I said straightaway, kneeling up on the seat to watch him.

‘ Mexico,’ he nodded. ‘Good choice.’ He lifted the book from the shelf and looked at me. ‘Well? Are you coming? Flight’s about to leave.’

I smiled and climbed over the back of the seat. We sat on the floor, side by side, in the back of the bus and that day, we went to Mexico.

I don’t know if he knows how important that moment was to me. How much he actually saved me from myself, from absolute despair. Maybe he does know and that’s exactly what he was doing. But he was like an angel who came into my life with his bus of books at exactly the right time, and who whisked me away from a terrible place to a faraway land.

We didn’t stay in Mexico for as long as we’d hoped. We checked into our hotel, double bed, dumped our bags, and headed straight for the beach. I bought a bikini from a man selling them on the beach, Marcus had ordered a cocktail and was going to go on a jetski alone-I was refusing to get into a wet suit-when the knock came on the bus and an elderly woman who eyed me suspiciously stepped on to find something for her to pass her time in. We got to our feet then and I browsed the shelves while Marcus played host. I came across a book about grief; about learning how to deal with personal grief or a loved one suffering from grief. I hovered by that book for a while, my heart pounding as though I’d found a magic vaccination for all worldly diseases. But I couldn’t bring myself to lift it from the shelf-I don’t know why. I didn’t want Marcus to see, I didn’t want him to ask me about it, I didn’t want to have to tell him about Dad dying. Then that would mean I’d be exactly who I was. I was a girl whose dad had just killed himself. If I didn’t tell him, then I didn’t have to be that girl. Not to him, anyway. I would just be her on the inside. I’d let her rage inside me, bubble under my skin, but I’d go to Mexico and leave her behind in the gatehouse.

My eye fell upon a large leather-bound book in non-fiction. It was brown, thick, no author’s name or title along the spine. I pulled it out. It was heavy. The pages were jagged along the edges as though they’d been ripped. ‘So you’re like a Robin Hood of the book world,’ I said, as soon as the old woman had left with a racy romance under her arm, ‘bringing books to those who have none?’

‘Something like that. What have you got there?’

‘Don’t know, there’s no title on the front.’

‘Try the spine.’

‘Not there, either.’

He picked up a folder from beside him and licked his finger before flicking through some pages. ‘What’s the author’s name?’

‘There’s no author’s name.’

He frowned and looked up. ‘Not possible. Open it up and see what’s on the first page.’

‘I can’t,’ I laughed. ‘It’s locked.’

‘Oh, come on,’ he smiled, ‘you’re taking the piss, Goodwin.’

‘I’m not,’ I laughed, moving towards him. ‘Honestly, look.’

I passed it to him and our fingers brushed, causing a tingle of seismic proportions to rush through every single erogenous zone that existed in my body.

The pages of the book were closed with a gold clasp and attached to that was a small gold padlock.

‘What the hell…’ he said, trying to pull at the lock, making a series of grimaces that had me smiling. ‘Trust you to choose the only book in here that doesn’t have an author or title and is padlocked.’

We both started laughing. He gave up on the padlock and our eyes locked.

This was the bit where I was supposed to say, ‘I’m only sixteen.’ But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I told you, I felt older. Everybody always thought I looked older. I wanted to be older. It wasn’t like we were going to have sex on the floor, he wasn’t going to be in prison for staring at me. But still. I should have said it then. If we were in some old Gone with the Wind-style southern early nineteenth-century book, back in the good old days where women were men’s property and weren’t protected at all, then it wouldn’t have mattered, we could have rolled around in the hay in a barn somewhere and done whatever we wanted and nobody would have been accused of anything. I felt like hunting down that book from the shelves, opening it and jumping into the pages with him. But we weren’t. It was the twenty-first century. I was sixteen, very nearly seventeen, and he was twenty-two. I’d seen it on his ID card. I had experience in knowing that a guy’s horn didn’t last until my seventeen birthday. It was rare they felt like coming back in July.

‘Don’t look so sad,’ he said, and reached out and lifted my chin with his finger. I hadn’t realised he’d come so close to me and there he was, right before me. Toe to toe.

‘It’s only…a book.’

I realised I was hugging it close to me, both my arms wrapped around it tightly.

‘But I like the book,’ I smiled.

‘I like the book too, very much. It’s a cheeky very pretty book, but it’s obvious we can’t read it right now.’

My eyes narrowed, wondering if we were talking about the same thing.

‘So, that means we’ll both just have to sit and look at it, until we find the key.’

I smiled, and I felt my cheeks pink.

‘Tamara!’ I heard my name being called. A screeching, desperate call. We stopped gazing at one another and I rushed to the door of the bus. It was Rosaleen. She was running across the road toward me her face scrunched up, her eyes wild and dangerous. Arthur was standing on the pavement beside his car, looking calm. I relaxed a little then. What had Rosaleen all riled up?

‘Tamara,’ she said, breathless. She looked from Marcus to me, appearing like a meerkat again, on high alert. ‘Come back to us, child. Come back,’ she said, her voice shaky.

‘I am coming back,’ I frowned. ‘I’ve only been gone an hour.’

She looked a little confused then, looked at Marcus as if he was going to explain everything.

‘What’s wrong Rosaleen? Is Mum okay?’

She was silent. Her mouth opened and closed as if she was trying to find words.

‘Is she okay?’ I asked again, panic building.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course she’s fine.’ She still looked confused, but beginning to calm.

‘What’s wrong with you?’