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her daughter, who reminded her of herself when she was a young teenager. ‘Have you nearly finished? Are you off out tonight? It is Friday so no school tomorrow.’ There was genuine interest in her voice.
    â€˜Five more minutes and I’ll be done.’ Again Amy didn’t look up. ‘Then I’m going to my room. I want to play my music.’
    â€˜What are you locking yourself up for yet again? All you do is sit in your room and play your CDs. You should be out with the other girls, having fun and …’ Enid hesitated before adding ‘… meeting boys.’ Even without Amy looking up, Enid could see her daughter’s cheeks colouring a deep shade of ruby red. The opposite sex was never Amy’s favourite topic of conversation.
    â€˜Right, I’m done.’ Amy slammed her French folder shut before grabbing it with her other books and running off to her room. ‘See you later, Mum.’ Enid sighed as she watched her daughter’s bedroom door slam and heard the first burst of one of Amy’s CDs pulsate through the wall.
    â€˜What’s the racket?’ said Ivor Barrowman, walking into the tiny kitchen about thirty seconds later. ‘I can hear that in the front room. It’s putting me off Mr Bean .’
    â€˜It’s Amy playing her music again. That girls spends too much time in her room.’
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    I t was true . Amy did spend a lot of time in her room. But it was her favourite place. While other girls her age chose to spend their time meeting boys on graffiti-plastered corners of the council estate she and her parents lived on, she would much rather ensconce herself in her bedroom surrounded by the things that made her truly happy. Her CDs and her DVD player that her mum and dad had saved up for months to buy her for herthirteenth birthday.
    Who needed the rough boys on the estate offering her cigarettes, a spliff, a love bite or a quick finger behind the wheelie bins when she could surround herself with the much nicer charms of The Backstreet Boys, Usher and Enrique Iglesias as they stared down from the posters that decorated her bedroom walls? They wouldn’t let her throw her life away with a teen pregnancy and a lifetime of benefits and trips to the job centre to try and make ends meet. Amy had seen it happen to lots of girls on the estate where she lived. It was a tired old tale. She didn’t criticise them, if it made them happy then great, but when she finished her days at school she didn’t want to think that life stopped at the corner shop where she did her paper round.
    It was that paper round that allowed her to buy her CDs. She’d bought the new one by Britney after seeing her cavort around with a snake on the VMA Awards on TV. What a girl. Amy would love to be like her when she grew up. And she was definitely going to buy the first single by that group put together on the Popstars TV show that she tuned into every week. She’d practised being just like them in front of the mirror, singing into her hairbrush and flicking her fringe to the beat.
    Music was where Amy could lose herself. It took her to amazing places, to highs that no inner-city estate spliff could ever do. There was such a wealth of fabulous songs out there. She’d bought a Music Through The Decades CD set from a local charity shop. It was the best 50p she’d ever spent. Each of the four discs housed a collection from eras before her time. The swingy girliness of the sixties, the glam rock of the seventies, the poppy joy of the eighties and the raving dance of the nineties. Amy loved them all.
    Her friends mocked her at school, said that she shouldn’t be listening to that ‘old shit’ when she tried to teach them about it. One or two agreed with her but in general it was a case of ‘that’s what my granny used to listen to, give me The Chemical Brothers any day of the week.’ Couldn’t they see that there was so much