Nowhere Girl ~ John Lennon/The Beatles

Chapter One: New Life

September, 1958

Despite all the chaos in her life, there was something quite serene about Robin Knight as she sat cross-legged on the front wall to her new house, smoking her fourth cigarette of the day. That serenity would not last much longer, not as her mother stood in the doorway, watching her nervously, knowing the ticking timebomb of her daughter's emotions.

"Uncle Al's just finished carrying all of your boxes to your new room if you want to go start unpacking, love," Rita Knight suggested, calling out from the front porch of the house as she watched her daughter on the wall.

Robin expelled a large burst of smoke before throwing the cigarette onto the path, squashing it out with the toe of her boot as she jumped off the wall. Silently, staring down at the floor, she headed back through the front door, practically shoving past her mother as she headed down the hall and up the stairs. A few months before if Robin would have shoved her like that Rita would have been fuming, but she knew it wasn't the time, not when her whole life had been turned upside down. If anything, she was glad she shoved her; it was the first gesture Robin had done in weeks to actually acknowledge her mother.

Acknowledgement didn't extend much past that, as Robin did as her mother suggested, heading up the stairs and into the room which was now meant to be her own. She wasn't sure about a lot of things at that point, but she was sure she'd never class her uncle's house as home, even if he'd promised her she could paint the room whatever colour she wanted and put up whatever photographs she wanted to. He'd been so nice about the whole situation, but Robin wasn't entirely sure how to respond to nice anymore, not since the world had shown her it was anything but.

The room was far larger than her bedroom back home in Sheffield. She didn't realise her uncle Albert was rich enough to have a house this large in the nicer side of Liverpool, considering his brother - her father - had them all living in a tiny flat in the Park Hill building, but yet there they were. The room that had been bestowed upon her was large, about the size of the living room and kitchen space in her last flat, with a large bay window and no furniture yet except for a rickety-looking double bed, a fairly small wardrobe and a dressing table. It looked thrown together, like a bedsit, but she didn't mind. It looked temporary, and seemed to reflect just how she wanted her new life in Liverpool to be; fleeting, a brief stop on the way before she went back to her real life.

Her mother had been right, boxes piled up in the corner of the room next to the unmade bed, except where her mother had been wrong was her choice of words. Saying 'all of your boxes' made it sound like Robin had a lot of things to unpack, when really, it was just three boxes, a small suitcase, and a leather satchel. In the end, that was all her life seemed to amount to after the move.

Robin began by shutting the door. She wasn't in the mood for any company, the past few weeks being enough to prove to her that everyone just wanted to be overly nice to her, and she didn't really fancy false sympathies. So with the door shut, she opened the first box, heaving out her portable record player, hoping that it hadn't been damaged in the move. She looked around for somewhere to place it before settling on the window-cill, the bay window providing more than enough space. She quickly set it up, trying to ignore the memories of the times she would spend using the player to drown out the sound of her parents arguing, before going and finding her record collection, stored safely in the same box. She didn't look which record she put on, and she barely paid any attention to the music, but she was glad it at least drowned out the silence whilst she got to work on the rest of her stuff.

She unpacked the suitcase first, carefully hanging up all of her clothes in the wardrobe, trying to organise the dresses and skirts separately from the shirts and trousers. Once she was done with the clothes she decided to place all her shoes on the bottom of the wardrobe, arranging them from flats, to boots, to heels. She liked her things to be neat and organised, and setting out her clothes in this way let her feel like she at least had some sort of control in this situation, when really she had no say in the move.