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and careful. She would treat her car with respect. She wouldn’t, as Tara had done, regularly exceed the speed limit and take risks on roundabouts. She would never, never, get points on her licence. She had learned her lesson (several lessons, in fact) long ago.
    ‘So,’ the Woman said, at their next appointment, ‘how does it feel to have wheels?’
    For a moment, Tara saw herself literally with wheels attached to the soles of her boots, a pleasing cartoon image which made her smile.
    ‘Good,’ she said.
    ‘And are you doing much driving? Getting out and about more? Seeing the countryside?’
    Tara nodded, but it was a lie. She hadn’t yet driven further than the supermarket.
    ‘I’m going to go along the coast this weekend,’ she said.
    ‘And will you take a friend?’ the Woman asked, watching her keenly. ‘Have you a friend yet?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Tara, ‘I have. My neighbour, Mrs Armstrong.’
    ‘Mrs?’ queried the Woman.
    ‘She’s very formal,’ Tara said hurriedly. ‘She prefers to be called Mrs at the moment.’
    ‘Well,’ said the Woman, ‘that’s good. I hope this friendship develops. You need friends, Sarah. It isn’t good to go on being so isolated now. Friendship is important, it will do wonders for you.’
    A lecture on friendship … It was too much. Tara said nothing more after that. Next, the Woman would be asking about her love life and telling her love was important and would do wonders for her. It was so insulting. Rage built up in her, a Tara-like rage, the sort that at one time threatened to rule her life. The trouble was, she’d rarely let it all out. Her habit had been to contain it so that it burned inside her stomach and filled her head with a booming noise. Little whimpers of this rage would escape her clenched lips, but that was all. Her face she knew, because people pointed it out, would flush a deep, dark red. They would ask her if she was all right, whether she suffered from high blood pressure, and she would struggle to smile and say that must be it and she must make an appointment with her GP.
    She invited Mrs Armstrong to go with her for a car ride on Sunday.
    Once, she and Claire and Liz and Molly had gone for car rides. They couldn’t be called anything else except ‘car rides’. There was no planned destination, no pretence that they knew where they were going. It was just the fun, the excitement of having the use of a parents’ car to drive around in. All of them eighteen and desperate to leave home. Movement was the thing – up, off, away, and who cares where.
    It was rescuing that child which brought them together, then bound them, but Tara liked to think that if this incident hadn’t happened something else would have drawn them close. It seemed, once they’d become a quartet, that there was a natural affinity between them for all their various differences. Whatwas it? A restlessness? A sense of ambition? What was this friendship based on, what glued it together? Why did they seek each other out years later when they’d all gone their separate ways and it was difficult to meet? Why, when they had all made other friends, and had partners or husbands, why was this particular friendship so deep and special?
    History. That must be it. They concluded that what gave their friendship such strength was knowing each other so thoroughly. It was the legacy of lolling around when they were young, talking and drinking the night away, that was what did it. All that
time
, all those hours and hours of droning on to each other, letting slip likes and dislikes, worries, fears, hopes. No friendship afterwards could come near this kind of intimacy. They each had a dossier of emotional confessions on each other, many of them made by mistake and regretted. These were never mentioned in subsequent years, but they were there, in the collective memory of the quartet. And so, when their meetings became much less frequent, they never worried about the time gap, there was never