had a few glorious weeks. Kissing, reading, talking, slumping around complaining about our parents, drinking cider, pretending not to know each other if we ran into anyone from school in town, not having sex. Actually, that rather amazes me now. I assumed everyone was like me, and now I find that even my most respectable friends (in fact, the posher they are the more like rabbits they start) were romping in the hay from their early teens whilst I was pushing his hand away, desperate to do more, but desperate not to put myself out on a limb.
Good Lord, I was useless. And look what I missed out on, thinking all the boys would be so great. It took years after that to get the hang of it, and truly, I would have loved to have maturely and pleasingly enjoyed adult relations when I had a pin waist, boy’s bum and upper arms that pinged. Life is a bitch.
But then, I thought it was perfect. We went down to Brighton, tentatively hired a scooter, and I felt that I was living la Dolce Vita. We kissed on rocks, behind trees, on trains, everywhere possible, and the sensitive introverted lad turned out to be funny, gentle, idiosyncratic and only inclined to go on about George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson and Holden Caulfield when I wasn’t paying attention. We adored each other. Until –
‘Aberdeen?’ I stared at him.
He was trying to look sad and not excited by going to university at the same time.
‘It was clearing. You know. I almost didn’t get to go at all.’
‘Where is Aberdeen? Is it on an island or what?’
‘No, it’s in the North of Scotland.’
‘Do they speak English?’
‘Yes, I believe so.’
I stared at him in disbelief.
I left him in the sitting room, went out to the garage, took out my dad’s old road map and traced down the two boxes on the grid where places meet.
Aberdeen is five hundred and eight miles away from London.
‘Aberdeen,’ I said, taking a deep breath and trying to speak slowly, even though my heart was beating fit to burst and I wasn’t sure whether or not I was about to start crying, ‘is the furthest away from London you can possibly go.’
‘I know,’ said Clelland, half smiling that funny little crinkly smile. ‘It’s either that or the local technical college.’
‘You’re leaving me,’ I said, and all the poise I’d sought to hold on to had lasted less than fifteen seconds. At the time too, though, I couldn’t help but be slightly aware of the drama of it all.
‘Oh, Flora sweetie …’ He took me in his arms. ‘I’m going away. I’m going to university. It wouldn’t matter where I was going. We’re only young, you know?’
The lump in my throat was like trying to swallow a rocket. ‘But we’re in love!’
He hugged me and held me close. ‘I know. I know. You and me. Taking over the world, remember?’
‘From five hundred and eight miles away.’
He looked pained; he must have known then, or at least had an inkling, about what happens to childhood sweethearts when one of them moves on. And I think I saw it too.
‘I’ll be back at holidays,’ he offered lamely, as if trying to meet me halfway.
My mother caught me pounding up the stairs to my room.
‘What’s the matter, darling?’
‘NOTHING!’ I shouted in true teenage style, completely oblivious to any concept that she might understand what was happening – only too well, as I was to discover in a year or two. How could she? How could anyone know? Nobody had ever been in love like I had. No one was as special as Clelland. Nobody could see.
From my window I watched him as, after waiting half an hour, he slouched awkwardly down the garden path, and I wept with the magnificently dramatic thought that I would never see him again.
Oh God, the party. I tried to call it off, but Tashy and my mother had persuaded me that of course Clelland would show up. Plus we’d invited everyone.
The thing is, popularity is a tricky thing. It’s infectious. We couldn’t help it. It was the local comprehensive, it was pretty rough and, for some reason or another, that year everyone had decided to hate us.
I hadn’t thought it would extend to a party, though. After all, everyone likes parties, don’t they?
I was wearing a faintly daring red dress from Clockhouse, which I absolutely adored and spent the entire evening pulling down and panicking about whether I looked fat. (As the photos show, I looked teeny. Why on earth didn’t I realise how lucky I was before I had to wear long sleeves with everything and couldn’t brave the miniskirt any more?) How depressing. When I see all the teenagers these days marching around wearing next to nothing, Britney-style, I don’t think, ooh, look at that awful paedo-fodder. Well, sometimes I do a bit. But mostly I think, go for it, girls, because as soon as I became a student I went straight into dungarees and baggy jumpers mode, and I never got that body back again.
Tashy had done my makeup, which involved something we’d read in Jackie magazine. We tried to copy it laboriously and somewhat unfortunately, and I had two pin-sharp lines of pink blusher up each cheek and very, very heavy blue eyeshadow. Actually, it would probably be all right now; I’d probably look like Sophie Ellis Bextor. If she was thirty-two and average-looking, instead of twenty-four and some kind of alien high priestess.
I’d put on my nicest bra, brushed my teeth a thousand times and was desperately, desperately hoping that only one boy would ever walk up the garden path.
Not a single person came.
We sat and drank the punch and ate the crisps, and couldn’t even speak to each other. Tashy and I clung and tried to pretend not to cry. I looked at my best friend and felt my heart shrivel and die. This was life’s test. We were failing.
‘After this, school is going to be so much better,’ vowed Tash fiercely. We considered wrecking a few things anyway, just so my parents would think some people had arrived. But we didn’t. We ended up watching Dynasty. It was the longest four hours of my life. My mascara ran down and soaked my Clockhouse dress.
A few weeks later, my dad left us. About this time of year, in fact, as far as I remembered. Well, that would be a nice anniversary for my mum tomorrow.
Tashy was still talking, but I wasn’t listening. I was remembering the night I turned sixteen.
‘Your problem is, you think you only have one true love,’ Tashy was saying, bringing me back to earth.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘NO!’ she said. ‘That’s not it at all! What I mean is, it won’t feel quite the same, but that’s just because it’s not new any more. It’s just different.’
‘Less exciting.’
‘Well, you can’t experience everything as if it’s the first time round forever.’
‘That’s why being grown up is so sucky,’ I said. ‘I can’t even remember what it was like the first time I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But it was the most exciting thing that had happened to me at the time.’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t want to be sixteen again, would you? It was hell. Oh God, do you remember that party …?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It was hell then,’ I agreed, thinking about all the times Tashy and I had sat eating lunch, worrying madly about whether one breast was growing faster than the other and whether Loretta McGonagall was talking about us (she was) and whether we’d get invited to Marcus’s party (no, even though we asked him, the bastard. Just because we didn’t wear stiletto heels and make out. Well, of course that was the reason). ‘If I had to do it all again with what I know now I wouldn’t make such a hash of it.’
Tashy