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She put Maria in charge of navigation, because she'd only ever visited the pier once and didn't trust herself with maps, and music, because if she'd let herself choose then they would have spent the trip listening to those tapes she'd found that morning in the attic. Years ago she'd spent a weekend copying them from vinyl, listening with her eyes closed and remembering hearing them first on Andrea's record player, the same songs over and over again till Mrs Yates told them they'd wear out the needle. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
She'd tried telling Clyde once that she'd seen the Beatles play live. He'd given her a look she chose to interpret as grudging respect.
Maria found a radio station that was playing something unfamiliar but inoffensive. It didn't make Sarah Jane complain to herself that all modern music was just awful noise, something she would take as a definite sign that she'd begun transforming into all of her great-aunts, and it didn't invoke Andrea's ghost.
The rest of today was going to do that quite enough as it was.
She turned up the volume and carefully didn't think about where they were going. "Clyde doesn't like this group?"
"No." Maria smiled. "All the music Clyde likes is very cool."
"Oh, I know. I get it filtered through Luke." Broadly speaking, Luke liked whatever Clyde liked, and beyond that didn't seem able to distinguish between types of music, or between music and everything else. He liked the Shipping Forecast, and the noise of the electric light in the kitchen, and she kept finding the living room radio tuned between stations, the voices blending and disappearing in crackles of static.
"Didn't Luke want to come?" Maria asked, frowning over the map that she'd folded neatly across her knees. "Maybe he'd be better at navigating."
"You're a wonderful navigator. I have complete faith that you'll get us there."
Maria flushed and carefully traced the motorway with one finger, and Sarah Jane forced back a smile at how earnest she looked. Determined today was going to come off all right; she'd even brought a bunch of daffodils she'd embarrassedly set on the back seat, flowers for a girl who'd died while her parents were still babies.
Luke and Clyde probably wouldn't have wanted to come, Sarah Jane told herself, and felt a pinprick of guilt that she hadn't asked them. She hadn't told her son about Andrea or how history had rewritten itself so neither of them were part of it. Oh, he would listen, and he would try so hard to understand, and she loved him very much, but without any conscious decision to keep it to themselves, it had become her and Maria's secret. Luke was better off spending his Saturday with his best friend, doing...
"I'm sure they told me what they were doing," she said. "Something about computer games."
"Taking apart the sensor bar on Clyde's Wii and rebuilding it so the display's 3D," Maria rattled off comfortably. "Luke found instructions on the internet."
I spent my twenties in a time machine, Sarah Jane thought. That shouldn't sound like science fiction. "And where did you tell Alan we were going?"
"I said we were going to the seaside. So now Dad thinks Blackpool's being attacked by sea monsters."
"Oh, you have to go much further north to get sea monsters," she murmured, thinking that that would be nicely appropriate; the place where Andrea died marked out on the map with Here Be Dragons.
"It hasn't changed much," Maria said. "It just looks older. What's wrong?"
She shivered, shaking off the sensation of someone creeping across her grave. "Just a strange feeling for a moment - I forgot that you'd been here before." The girl on the pier, the one who'd warned them, who'd known. Oh, after a while she hadn't remembered the face or the voice, but forty years later she'd spotted her new neighbour's daughter across the street and wondered why the world, for a fraction of a second, stopped.
"I blamed you, you know? For months, maybe years."
"Me?"
"Silly, wasn't it? But you told us not to go on the pier, and Mr and Mrs Yates blamed me, so I blamed you."
Maria's eyes were huge, hurt.
"Oh, Maria..." Sarah Jane wrapped her arm around the girl's shoulders. "I didn't know who you were. I half convinced myself you were some sort of ghost. For a while there was a craze for guardian angels, and then I was back to hating myself for not listening to you."
"Why did her mum and dad hate you?"
"They thought it should have been me, because my parents were already dead and there weren't many people to miss me," she said honestly, and felt Maria flinch. She didn't add that this was almost word for word what Mrs Yates had spat at her after the funeral. "You can't really blame them, Maria, they'd lost their child."
"I can," she said, as if she was going to go back in time again and have it out with them, and Sarah Jane almost smiled at how fierce she sounded.
She kept her arm around Maria as they walked slowly to the fence at the edge of the pier, and she wasn't too proud to acknowledge to herself exactly who was being comforted. Her heart raced with every creak of the planks beneath them, and she didn't look down because the waves between the gaps would make her dizzy; she'd never been afraid of heights before that day, she remembered, and when she'd grown up she'd always told people it was a lifelong, inexplicable phobia so she didn't have to explain.
It wasn't quite the right spot - and she knew, forty-four years later, the exact place where she'd felt her best friend's hand slip out of hers - but it was as far as she wanted to go.
Maria laid her flowers at their feet.
"There's something about having a best friend at that age," Sarah Jane said. "When you get older there are other things that get in the way, jealousy and..." she almost said 'sex', and then remembered the age of her audience, "and real life. Sometimes I want to sit Luke down and tell him to just, just treasure what he has right now with Clyde, because unless he's extremely lucky he'll never love someone in quite the same way again. Though I suppose it's different for boys."
"I was so angry at her," Maria said, and Sarah Jane turned in place and hugged her tightly.
"So was I, for a while. But I always forgave Andrea everything in the end. Even when I was thirteen and selfish and I had to forgive her for going away and leaving me alone."
Maria said, "You're not alone now."
Sarah Jane smiled, and cupped the girl's face between her hands for a moment. "That's because I'm extremely lucky," she said.