‘Well, you shouldn’t be,’ Dad said, his voice picking up. ‘Not if it means doing things like this. If she wants to turn up drunk or high or who knows what else at all hours, that’s her problem. Not yours.’ ‘High?’ I said, confused. ‘When was she high?’ ‘John,’ Mum said pointedly. I caught the look she gave him, and it occurred to me for the first time that maybe Sarah really was telling her things about Suzanne that I didn’t even know. The thought threw me, so I pushed it away.
So much of what was really going on with Suzanne could only be shown to the reader through the smallest of hints, like this. This was necessary because the story is being told through Caddy's eyes, and she's so oblivious – and Suzanne is *so* careful with what she lets her see and know – that finding little moments to reveal things to the reader was one of the hardest things to do. During the editing process, getting the balance right between the reality of Suzanne's life at this time and what Caddy would have seen and understood was one of the main things we worked on. Here's the background to this hint: Suzanne did indeed 'turn up high' back home at Sarah's flat in the early hours of the morning, so out of it that Sarah, worried, called Caddy's parents for help, because Caddy's father is an A&E doctor. Though he did help, of course, that event formed a lot of the foundation for why he was so (seemingly) irrationally against Caddy's friendship with Suzanne, and why her parents were so worried.
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