Begin Again | ongoing

thirty-four

Viv has already gone to work by the time Sunny wakes up with a foggy head, a slightly fuzzy recollection of last night, and the comforting weight of a cat on her back. There's a crumpled note on the pillow that says, in Viv's elegant looping handwriting, I could really have done with having today off! I really enjoyed last night. See you later, love you xx

It makes Sunny smile. She folds the note in half and rolls over to find the diary on her bedside table – that's a thing now, she has her own side of the bed and a bedside table covered in her crap – and she slips the note between the pages for today's date.

The fourth of May. Shit. That means it's her birthday in two days. As if she's about to turn twenty-five. A quarter of a century, gone. She can't help but think of Margaret, who lost almost that much time in the blink of an eye, and for a moment Sunny can't do anything but lie there staring at the ceiling and thanking her lucky stars that the universe didn't treat her so cruelly. She rolls onto her front. Breathes in the smell of Viv, a scent that has swiftly become a comfort. Forces herself out of bed.

This is not nearly as bad as the night she went to Lickety Split. Yes, she over-imbibed last night but aside from the slightest of headaches, the kind that can be vanquished with hydration and a dose of paracetamol (because sometimes Martha's cure is bang on the money), she feels fine. She feels even better when she shuffles to the kitchen and finds that Viv has laid out everything for breakfast: two slices of bread are loaded into the toaster; there's an unpeeled banana sitting on a plate next to a peeled orange; a mug sits by the kettle with a spoonful of instant coffee inside.

There's another note, too. One that says don't forget to eat breakfast! xx scrawled on the back of a receipt from the CD place on the seafront. The one where Ravi works. Sunny has been in such a Viv bubble all week, hardly spending any time in Jupiter Court, and she hasn't seen her boys for – god, what is it, nearly two weeks?

"Be a good girl, Britney, okay?" she says as she squeezes a sachet of kitten food into a bowl on the floor and scratches Britney between the ears. In ten minutes she has managed to eat her breakfast – all of it, including every last segment of the orange – have the world's quickest shower, her unwashed hair scraped up with a few gaudy butterfly clips, and throw on a fresh outfit to go and see her best friend.

There are several CD places in Black Sands but she knows the one Ravi must be working at, the one that looks over the sea and is stocked with every possible genre of music, thousands of CDs and hundreds of vinyls lined up in flappable stacks that they used to spend hours looking through in search of their next obsession. It's no wonder he's working there when music runs through his veins and imbues his spirit. He is a walking encyclopaedia of random music information, spitting out factoids like a machine, and he is so easy to talk to. He must be the perfect employee.

After a jerky bus ride and a blustery walk, Sunny makes it to Vinyl Countdown. The owner has kept the name despite the decreasing popularity of vinyl in favour of CDs, and Sunny has always appreciated the dumb pun. It reminds her of being eleven, when Europe had just released their third album, and she listened to it so much that it started to jump on the first track. It became something of a joke in the Shelley household: any time any one of them had a task to complete that they didn't want to do, another would put on The Final Countdown, and the task had to be started before the song came to an end.

It got Sunny through a lot of undesirable projects, from getting stuck into an essay for GCSE English, to tidying her bedroom after putting it off for weeks. Well. Months. Now, like Pavlov's dog, she cannot listen to the song without feeling like she has to start being productive. She wonders if Viv knows that. It would probably make for a good relationship hack.

There are only two other customers inside. A skinny white guy with an eighties perm is scrolling through the rock vinyl records and a tall Black guy is looking through the compilation CDs. Sunny looks twice before realising it's Luke. He looks up and recognition dawns instantly with a wide, toothy smile.