"Gower Street." I repeated. "You need to get off at Gower Street."

"And the bus leaves when?"

I sighed heavily.

"I've told you Dad."

"I know you have love, I just can't remember." he chuckled. "I'm an old man now."

He was 52. Hardly the age when his memory was starting to betray him.

"There's a bus that leaves from outside your hotel at half past nine." I put my phone onto loudspeaker and threw it onto my bed as I moved towards the mirror to examine my unruly bed head. "Which gives you fifteen minutes. Can you and mum manage that?"

"And we'll get to Bower Street just after 10?" he asked, simultaneously ignoring my question and forgetting the name of the street they needed to get to, despite me repeating it ten seconds ago.

"I don't know about Bower Street, but you'll certainly get to Gower Street if you get the number 30 bus in the next fifteen minutes."

"She's being cheeky again!" he shouted to my mum.

"She gets it from you" her voice floated through my room in a quick retort to my father and I smiled.

"We're leaving now." my dad said. I could tell that he was smiling too. "And we'll see you in half an hour bun."

I grinned at the nickname. "I thought you'd given up on that?"

"Well..." he sighed. "That was before you moved away and I didn't like you as much." he joked. "Now that I only see you once a month, it's easier to pretend that you're my favourite child."

"Very funny." I muttered. "Now, please go and get the bus. I have a busy day planned for you both and chasing you around London because you're both lost isn't on my list."

"Dower Street?" he asked.

"You know, if the whole police thing had never worked out, it must be good to know that you could have been setting the stage alight with your wit."

"Love you bun."

"I love you too Dad."

"You won't love me when you see that I've brought my man bag with me..."

"The man bag? Really...?"

"Only because I know how much you love it."

"Looking forward to it pops."

I walked back to the bed and hung up. There was a loud knock at my door, before Charlotte, my roommate, came tumbling into my room.

"What time is Tom getting here?" she grinned, flopping down on the bed next to me.

"You're not allowed to refer to my dad as Tom." I told her.

"Why?"

"Because he's Mr. Jacobs to you." I answered, dragging myself up from the bed and in the direction of the large pile of clothes I had dumped on the floor.

"I prefer calling him Mr. Jacobs." a male voice stated as its owner sauntered into my room. "Makes him sound like he's in charge of me."

Housemate number two. Steve. The gayest man I've ever met. A complete and utter sweetheart.

"Oh, door's open." I muttered sarcastically. "Not like I'm just here in my bra or anything."

"Darling, we've discussed this before..." he sighed, gracefully dropping down onto my bed next to Charlotte. "No matter how many times you pout those lips of yours in my direction, I'm never going to sleep with you."

I pouted at him as my hands found my favourite t-shirt cum vest top that Steve had "lovingly" customised for me when we had first moved in together during our first year of University. Originally a vintage grey Ramones t-shirt that my dad had bestowed upon me when on my thirteenth birthday after he had realised that I was the only one of his four offspring with any kind of taste in music, Steve had decided that sleeves were "out" and had taken to it with a pair of scissors, leaving me with a flimsy vest devoid of sleeves and almost all of my dignity. I turned my back to my captive audience and pulled my bra off through one of the armholes, which now stopped just past my ribs.

"Braless...?" Steve asked. "For an afternoon with those lovely countryfied parents of yours?" He raised his eyebrows at me. "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto." He smirked to himself.

"The Wizard of oz...? Really?"

"Judy is a Queen." he protested

"You're a Queen." I muttered

"Tom won't be pleased with the amount of side boob on display." Charlotte mused while chewing on her bottom lip. "I mean... I'm sure that the male population of London will be happy but..."

"Those without sin always cast the first stone." I muttered, turning to my mirror and attempting to subdue my mane of honey blonde hair. "And besides, it's not as if I've got a lot to flash, unlike some..." I raised my eyebrows at her in the mirror as I played with my hair.

"Leave it!" Steve shouted, dramatically. Did I mention he was gay? So gay that I honestly think that the word was invented just for him.

"But it looks like I've just rolled out of bed." I said, attempting to flatten the Something About Mary-esque quiff that I had going on.

"Exactly!" he sighed. "Have you learnt nothing from me?"

"I've learnt to always knock before I go into your room." I smirked.

"A sock on the doorknob is a universal code for 'I'm having hot, sweaty, dirty sex in here'" he protested.

"You're not in American Pie, Steve..."

"I've not had a sock on my doorknob for ages." Charlotte muttered.

"That's because you have incredibly unrealistic standards." I answered, spinning around to look at her. "Ryan Gosling? Really...?"

She pouted. "A girl can dream can't she?"

"At least dream about someone good like Matthew McConaughey" Steve scoffed. "OR GEORGE CLOONEY!"

I wrinkled my nose at him. "You're worse than she is." I pointed at Charlotte.

I picked a pair of black skinny jeans up off the floor and wriggled into them.

"So attractive." Steve commented, giving me a sarcastic thumbs up.

"Hey, I didn't exactly invite you to come and watch me get dressed." I buttoned my jeans and leant down to tie my converse.

"I can definitely see boob..." Charlotte shouted.

"Then maybe you should stop staring at my chest?"

"I've not had sex in three months." she said. "Right now I'll take any action I can get."

"Me and my boobs are glad to be of service" I answered, grabbing my phone and keys and throwing them into my bag.

"I wish I liked boobs..." Steve sighed. "But they just don't do anything for me."

"See, I like my own..." Charlotte began. "And I have a strange connection to Lola's, which, by the way, are definitely more than a nice handful..." she nodded her head at me. "But I don't like any others."

Both Steve and I looked at her and a small silence fell across my room.

"I'm going to leave before this conversation gets any weirder." I told them both. "Remind me to buy a lock for my door at some point."

"I have to leave too..." Steve said. "I have a date with that obviously gay barista in the Starbucks by Tavistock Square."

He followed me out into the hallway of our rented house, a beautiful Georgian terrace that was permanently flooded with light due to the enormous bay windows and white walls. Luckily, I had stumbled across two people with whom I shared an absolute, unwavering sense of style with and we had spent a small fortune finding the perfect décor for each room in the house. My favourite was the huge grey L shaped sofa that dominated our living room where we usually spent most of our evenings snuggled up together watching films.

"By date, do you mean you're going to go and sit in Starbucks with your textbooks in the vain hope that he's into medical students?"

"Hot medical students" he corrected me. I grinned at him and wrapped my arm around his broad shoulders.

"I don't think he's gay..." Charlotte said as she shut the front door behind us. "I think he's metrosexual."

I linked arms with her as we began the walk to Gower Street down our own leafy road. "I don't like men who look like they might steal my moisturiser. It's such a turnoff when a man takes longer to get ready than I do." she had a dreamy look in her eyes. "I like them rough and ready and able to throw down like a boss in the bedroom."

"And speaking of douchebags..." he elbowed me in the ribs pointedly.

I rolled my eyes at him. "Don't start Steve."

"How is the lovely Tristan?"

Tristan, my boyfriend of nearly ten months and general hate figure within our household due to his aristocratic background and private schoolboy related snobbery. In reality, Tristan was a one night stand that had gone horribly, horribly wrong, but as the duration of our relationship had increased so had his tolerance of all things middle class, and I was finding less reason to dislike him. Which everybody knows is the start point to the path of true love.

"He's fine." I answered tersely. "Away visiting his grandfather in Sandringham for the weekend. There's a shoot or something... I think Prince Harry is there." I thought about the gorgeous copper haired Prince with whom I had shared a drink during one of my first outings with Tristan. He had the most wonderful sparkle in his eye and had almost every girl in the room under his spell within minutes.

"Nothing says rough and ready like a man who shoots defenceless animals for fun!" Steve said sarcastically. I glared at him balefully.

"So he's found another excuse not to meet your parents then?" Charlotte asked.

"Remind me once again why I live with you both?" I asked. "Because sometimes I forget..."

"Okay!" Charlotte said gleefully as if this were her favourite thing of all time. "With the exception of Steve and I, nobody else in our class wanted to talk to you, let alone live with you!"

"That's not true..." I said, eyeing her warily.

"Yes it is!" Steve yelped, jumping to Charlotte's defence. "I know you don't always see it Lo, but you are rather scary to both sexes."

"Is scary really the best word?"

"YES!" they chorused in unison.

"The first day of University is when alliances are drawn, friends are made, and enemies are marked." Steve said. He was gesturing wildly with his hands. He was going to begin one of his speeches.

"Sometimes, I don't think you're dramatic enough..." I muttered sarcastically. "Tom Cruise will be out of a job soon enough."

"Do you know how many girls I saw wearing Autumn/Winter 2004 Prada on our first day?" he asked, ignoring my remark. "Twenty seven. Twenty seven girls wearing fresh off the runway couture simply so they could impress their peers."

"So?"

"Combine the couture with the hair, the nails, the make-up..." he trailed off. "And most of them looked passable at best." he laughed. "And then you stumble in.."

I stopped at looked at him with a bored expression. "Is this story going anywhere Tolkien?"

"All five foot ten of you, with your implausibly long legs, and your annoying flat stomach, and your masses of blonde hair."

"They're not that long..." I looked down at my legs, which did look quite long in my current choice of jean.

"And if that's not bad enough, you have that face!" he cried. "That exquisite face of yours with that bone structure that makes me want to cry, and those lips that made me wish for just a millisecond that I wasn't gay." He cupped my face in his hands and rubbed my cheeks with his thumbs.

"It is a really nice face." Charlotte conceded.

"And you were wearing leather trousers, a white vest and converse." Steve finished, pausing for dramatic effect. "And all those girls who had spent so long perfecting themselves for our first day immediately knew that they had no chance of competing with you and your pure genetic perfection." he laughed again. "And no matter how nice you were to them, they were never going to be your friend, because the only friends you will ever have in the world will be the gays, and other winners of the genetic lottery like Charlotte here."

"And aren't you glad that you found us?" Charlotte grinned, throwing her arm around me.

At five foot nine, with her jet black hair, green eyes and massive boobs, Charlotte was a completely different kind of "winner" in the genetic lottery that Steve had conjured up out of thin air.

"Well thanks for the confidence boost." I smiled. "But this doesn't explain why men are scared of me."

Steve rolled his eyes as if I were a moron. "Sometimes I wonder how you manage to do your own laces up in the morning, let alone study medicine" he tutted.

"Isn't it a bit obvious?" Charlotte asked.

I shook my head.

"You're gorgeous, smart and so nice that Mother Teresa looks like a school bully in comparison..." Steve said. "It's a terrifying trifecta that confuses the average man." he grinned. "You, darling girl, are a triple threat." he looked at me with a serious face. "Accept it, embrace it and give it a big old kiss on the cheek."

"You really are the gayest man that has ever roamed our fair planet." Charlotte murmured. "It's quite impressive really..."

She was cut off mid sentence as a deafening bang hurtled towards us. It was the kind of noise that reverberated around your brain for a few seconds after it had happened. The kind of noise that made your heart beat faster than you ever thought it possibly could.

"What the hell was that?" Steve asked. I had noticed that his fingers were clasped tightly around mine.

"It might have something to do with the work being done on the tube?" Charlotte said, her voice shaky.

We had left the leafy comfort of our road by this point and had found ourselves on a main road and in close proximity to the hustle and bustle of London.

"There's no work being done on the tube today..." Steve interjected.

Charlotte nodded. "That's what it said on the radio right before I came and stood outside your door so I could listen to Tom on the phone."

I rolled my eyes at her. "Mr. Jacobs! He's called..."

I stopped once again as my eyes settled on a large plume of smoke that had begun to filter into the air.

"That's Tavistock Square" Steve said as we all turned to face the smoke. "There's no tube station in Tavistock Square."

"Look at the people..." I muttered, as a crowd began rush away from whatever had caused the smoke.

From our close proximity to the Square I could easily pick out people running away from the scene of the explosion with bloodstained clothes, pain etched heavily onto their faces.

"We need to go and help." I said, looking towards the mass of people. "We might be able to do something!"

My heart was still thudding wildly against my chest but the fear that had appeared at the sound of the bang had been replaced by a rush of adrenalin that was pulsing through my veins at an alarming rate. I was the first to start running, Charlotte and Steve followed closely behind. As we neared the plume of black smoke I noticed more and more people emerging bloodstained from the Square.

"What happened?" I shouted towards a man dressed in cycling gear, he was staring dumbly at the scene before us.

The thick black smoke was billowing from the remnants of a double decker bus. Half the bus was gone, the thick iron of it's skeleton mangled and twisted from the blast. Bloodied victims had spilled out onto the pavement, some crying out in pain, others lifeless. Carnage enveloped my senses, screams rang through my ears and the images of broken bodies imprinted themselves into my mind. And then I saw it, the thing that was far worse than the sight and smell of burning flesh. I heard Steve shouting at me before he dropped my hand, he ran into the mayhem. I stared at the bus.

"Lola!" Charlotte appeared beside me, she was panting as if she'd just ran the 100m final at the olympics. "That man... he told me."

"It's the number 30." I stared at the neon letters. "It's their bus." I croaked. "My parents..."

"They probably missed it! You know what they're like!" she was doing her best to put my mind at ease, but in her haste to quell my fears because she, unlike I had failed to notice the bus driver stumbling from the wreckage. He had his arms wrapped tightly around a small black leather messenger bag that he held in front of his mouth in a vain attempt to prevent the smoke from entering his lungs. I recognised it immediately.

It was my dads.