Jessica Adams - Girls’ Night In

The Safe Play Areas Programme runs throughout the Balkans on land cleared of mines, unexploded bombs and rubble. War Child builds playgrounds where children of all ethnic backgrounds can play without fear, encouraging them to make friends and build bridges for the future.

In Rwanda, girls rarely have the opportunity to be educated into their teens – in fact as few as 8% complete primary school and are able to go on to secondary school. In partnership with Girls’ Night In, War Child will fund essential improvements to a girls’ school near Kigali, ensuring that a greater number of young girls are given the opportunities taken for granted throughout the West.

Freya North

Freya North was born in London but lives in rural Hertfordshire with her family, where she writes from a stable in her back garden. A passionate reader since childhood, Freya was originally inspired by Mary Wesley, Rose Tremain and Barbara Trapido: fiction with strong female leads and original, sometimes eccentric, characters.

In 2012 she set up the Hertford Children’s Book Festival, which she continues to run. She is an ambassador for the charity Beating Bowel Cancer and a judge for the CPRE Rural Living Awards. Her 14 bestselling novels have been translated into many languages and published around the world.

Freya North

‘Lady – is your nose itching?’

Finty McKenzie took the palm of her hand from the tip of her nose, where it had been doing all manner of pressing, rotating and jiggling, and looked up. Locating the owner of the husky mid-Atlantic drawl, he who had posed the question, she alighted on an elderly man, clad in plaid.

‘You got an itchy nose, huh?’ he pressed, not waiting for an answer. ‘Honey! Doncha know? You’re gonna kiss a fool!’

The exclamation mark soared instantly from floor to ceiling of the plush hotel bar, but it was the word ‘fool’ which reverberated; the ‘f’ having been expelled from teeth and lips like a bad taste, the ‘1’ lingering on a very spiked tongue tip. The aged American chuckled extravagantly (because he knew what he was talking about), Finty whooped with sudden laughter (because she hadn’t a clue what he was talking about), but Brett, the man sitting next to her, he who had been bedding her these past three months, gave no hint of reaction.

To prove a point, but not quite sure what, or to whom, Finty affectionately kissed Brett in front of the American. This served to make the man guffaw so heartily that a fit of coughing befell him and expedited his exit from the bar.

‘What a character!’ Finty laughed.

‘Shoot me when I get like that,’ Brett said measuredly. Immediately, Finty experienced a quite violent reaction which she had come to term ‘a moment’. She’d never had one until she’d met Brett. Every so often, something he would say or do would, for a moment, alarm her so severely that it would course through her blood like acid. The searing horror came as much from self-disgust that she could be with such a man, as from his crime itself. However. Here she still is. These were but moments. And she wasn’t sure from where they originated. Head or heart. And which should rule which? These were but moments. Wasn’t she just looking for things to throw at the relationship? She’d scold herself for sabotaging something that might well be very good indeed. More tolerance, that’s what’s needed. But from him or her? She had justified the thinly veiled racist comment he had once made as but a momentary aberration. And he’d only been joking, of course, when he’d asked her to make his bed the morning after they’d first slept together there. And he had a migraine that night he left her stranded in Soho in the early hours. It had been OK. She’d found a cab almost immediately, just a street or three away. And Brett had phoned the next day to explain that he suffered from migraines. That they made him do strange things. Like leave people in the centre of the city at an unseemly hour. Of course, of course. All forgiven.

‘Brett gives me a fucking migraine,’ Sally said, peering into the oven and wondering if it was the slightly grimy door that made the Marks & Spencer luxury cheese puffs look golden or if they were indeed ready. ‘How long?’

‘Three months, must be,’ said Chloë distractedly, rocking against the radiator as if forgetting how hot it was each time her bottom met it.

Sally stared at her. ‘The cheese puffs,’ she said with theatrical kindness, raising an eyebrow at Polly and fixing Chloë with a look of exaggerated pity.

‘Oh, them ,’ said Chloë in a bid to patronize Sally for ranking cheese puffs higher in the grand scheme of things than Finty and Brett, ‘almost eight minutes.’

‘But they look ready,’ Sally protested, saliva shooting around her jaw and her stomach reminding her that crisps and a pot of coleslaw at lunch had not hit the spot.

‘You leave them be for another four minutes,’ Polly warned, brandishing the empty carton for emphasis and opening a bag of hand-cooked vegetable crisps in a futile bid to lure Sally away from the oven. ‘Here. And wine while you wait. It’s my bloody oven.’

It was Polly’s turn to host the Gathering. Though, as hostess, her responsibilities were minimal apart from ensuring that ready-made luxuries were in the oven, that the corkscrew was foolproof and that any live-in lovers had been banished. The Gathering was a monthly institution, founded instinctively three years ago when all four girls found themselves dumped and depressed and desperate to do voodoo. They had convened with a need to exhaust their repertory of expletives, to drink much vodka and perform a cleansing ritual Chloë had read about which entailed the burning of a bunch of sage and much chanting. The swearing and the smoke from the sage gave them giggles, they soon found themselves quite drunk on spirits bottled and natural, and their sense of personal justice and order in the world was restored. Where their hearts had hurt at the beginning of the evening, now their sides ached from laughter. They decreed that such a restorative tonic should not be restricted to times of crisis but should become a mainstay of every month. Raucous in Richmond at Polly’s place or dancing in Dean Street until the proprietor told them to leave; chilling out at Chloë’s or conversing animatedly at a Conran restaurant; a few sniffs rapidly devolving into mass sobbing at a chick-flick at the Leicester Square Odeon, or getting stoned and saying not a lot at Sally’s. Wherever they were, their sense of togetherness could make a month make sense. In or out, they’d shake it all about, kiss each other liberally at home time and look forward immensely to the next gathering.

‘I think I’m planning my life, and doing the things I’m doing, safe in the knowledge that I can always Workshop-Through-It at our Gathering,’ Polly had once said, to much nodding all round. Which was why Finty’s absence was so unfathomable. Rather insulting. Just a little worrying, too.

‘Don’t like,’ said Chloë, wrinkling her nose.

‘I’ll have yours, then,’ said Sally, fanning her mouth and eyeing Chloë’s cheesy puff.

‘ Brett ,’ Chloë said. ‘Don’t like him .’

‘You’ve only met him once,’ Polly protested.

‘As have you,’ said Chloë, ‘and did you like him?’

Polly gave Chloë a swift smile of defeat. ‘No.’

‘Ditto,’ said Sally who’d burnt the roof of her mouth but couldn’t possibly admit to it and therefore took another cheesy puff. ‘I don’t like what he’s doing to her.’

‘Do you mean that he’s taking her away from us?’ Polly, who feared this to be the case, asked.

‘No,’ Sally said, ‘not that. More, I feel that he’s detrimental to her self-confidence; which is why she jumps to his beck and call.’