Do You Remember the First Time?

Chapter Three

I groaned. God, I must have been pissed as a fart. I couldn’t remember a damn thing. Jesus. A crack of light was creeping across the floor. Ow. Bugger it.

‘Flora! Get up!’

I could hear my mother’s voice. I panicked. Oh no. That must mean I’d got drunk and she’d had to bring me home!!! Oh no! She’d be sitting with Olly right now and they’d be having tea and agreeing with each other about what a handful I was, and how she doesn’t know how he puts up with me. Later on I’ll get lots of sniffy remarks from him about behaviour fitting a grown woman and taking responsibility. Oh fuck. It’s like having my parents back together, those two sometimes. Except at least my dad can be fun.

I cringed as I remembered how mean I’d felt towards Olly. I hope nothing happened; I didn’t go and throw a drink at Clelland’s girlfriend … I didn’t, did I? I probed my mind for any tender spots of excruciating embarrassment, but there weren’t any there. Just a big black hole. That was peculiar. I don’t usually have vast gaps in my memory. I can’t—

‘Flora!’ Oh God. She sounds cross. Maybe I have done something really awful; my mother never gets cross at me nowadays. She’s too afraid, in case I leave her, or stop picking up the phone. If anything it’s the constant nervous entreaty that drives me so mad. This was almost better.

Suddenly I notice something. I’m in my old bed, at my parents’ house. Oh God. Oliver must have dumped me here. Oh no. Something must be terribly wrong. Did he finally get up the guts to propose and …?

Now, surely I’d remember something like that. But there’s nothing. Nothing there at all.

‘Yeah? Mum, could you bring me a cup of tea?’ I called out. Testing the water.

‘You must be joking, young lady!’ I could hear her starting up the stairs. ‘If you’re not up in two minutes, I’ll get you up. In fact …’

Then she walked into my room and I jumped three feet in the air.

‘What’s the matter with you?’

But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything except point.

‘Flora! Stop gawping like a fish and get ready.’

It was my mother – I can’t dispute that. But here’s the weird thing: she looked decades younger. Her skin was unlined, her hair brown and she seemed to have lost the hunch. Even her tone of voice was completely different. This was my mother how I remembered her from when I lived at home. I swallowed. I was half asleep, after all. She must have decided to sort her life out. Maybe after seeing Tashy’s parents at the wedding. Maybe she’d started on HRT and it was just kicking in.

‘God, Mum, you gave me a fright. You look great, by the way.’

She sat down on my bed. ‘Look, Flora, I’m sorry your party didn’t work out, but you can’t mooch around for ever. You still have to get up and face everyone today.’

What the hell had gone on at Tashy’s do?

Then she did something odd. As she turned to go she tutted and said something very strange under her breath.

‘Teenagers!’

I couldn’t quite have heard her as she said it. It just chimed in with the fact that something was very, very wrong. My room, for example, the room my mother had redecorated in beige as a guest room, even though the only guest she ever got was me, was covered in lots of pin-ups of R&B stars, and I don’t even like R&B. There were clothes all over the floor that I didn’t recognise. Had she got a lodger? Had I been unconscious for months? What the hell was going on?

I got out of bed – wearing, I noticed, a long flouncy nightie that I normally wouldn’t be seen dead in – and stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom. I held on to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. God, for someone who’d been so drunk she’d passed out and had to be taken to her mother’s house to sleep it off, I looked great.

I blinked at the reflection again, then, like a complete idiot in a cartoon, rubbed my eyes to make sure.

You don’t see yourself changing. Sure, you notice a wrinkle now and again, the odd half-stone that creeps on and off with annoying regularity. But it’s still you. Your face. Your best Zoolander face in the mirror. The way you sometimes catch sight of yourself in a shop window, then hope nobody else saw you looking at yourself. When I was a teenager, I used to spend hours staring in the mirror, mooning at myself, wondering. Am I pretty? Will my curls ever straighten out? Is one eye bigger than the other? Will boys like me? If I sleep on alternate ears, will they stop sticking out? Who am I going to be?

And it was exactly this face that was staring back at me now. No straightening irons had been applied to this hair. No subtle blonde streaks. No serums. No carefully plucked brows.

I wasn’t sure what was going on but had it pretty much figured for one of those extremely convincing dreams. Any moment, the Queen and a big hippopotamus were about to crash through the window and take me flying. Until then, I was going to make the best of it. I stared and stared. This looked like my face from at least ten years ago.

I had a crop of spots on my forehead. I moan about the occasional pimple now, but I’d forgotten what it was like when they used to grow in small fields. But apart from that, my skin was fresh, rosy … I turned round. I disappeared. I stretched out a long, white thin arm. Oh my God. How could I not have known this wouldn’t stay for ever? How could I not have realised that years of pizza and red wine could have an effect on this? When I was really younger, I thought I had an enormous arse and spent my entire time covering it up. I turned round again. OK, it wasn’t Kylie, but in absolutely nobody’s world was this a big arse. Wow! I jumped up and down. Nothing wiggled at all. Look! Look! Hip bones! Bones! Oh my God! OK, my hair was a frizzy disaster, with what appeared to be pink bits dyed in, but that’s OK, I know about expensive haircare products. I wished it wasn’t a dream, because this could have been so much fun. As if my body had turned into a Barbie doll, I could dress up and parade around. This was the best dream in the entire world.

‘Get out of the bathroom! You’re going to be late for school!’

Now, this was too much. Oh my God. School. Tashy and I sitting up the back of English, giggling our heads off.

No, I should just wake myself up before a monster came or something. I’m always quite lucid when I dream anyway. I always know that something won’t happen. I’d probably end up trapped in the bathroom, desperately knowing I was late for school on a test day and …

I have never felt water flow over my hands in a dream. I have never turned a tap on and got wet.

‘Hurry up!’

The door was banging. And I had to realise: that wasn’t Ollie’s voice. That was my dad’s.

Bloody hell.

I stood in the shower for a long time, shaking, although I turned the water up as hot as it could go. What the hell was happening to me? It couldn’t … this was impossible. What was I doing standing, washing myself (with impossibly pert breasts. Jesus, these were up by my neck!) in our old blue bathroom suite?

I thought. What had happened yesterday? I had gone to the wedding. I had met Clelland. I had fallen out with Oliver. I had made a wish over a wedding cake …

It couldn’t be. It couldn’t.

You know when something terrible happens and everyone says ‘Don’t panic’?

Now, I believed, was the time to panic.

Slowly, very slowly, I reached out of the shower and put a towel round my tiny waist.

I was back in my nightie, and my dad pushed past me into the bathroom. I barely caught sight of him. Jesus. Had I … travelled back in time? What was it, 1987? I caught my breath. So I could … what? Bet on general elections? Ooh, maybe go discover Take That! Maybe I could marry Robbie. He’d be older than me too. Was Jonathan Ross still free? He turned out to be a pretty good bet. Are the Backstreet Boys still children?

I stumbled back into my bedroom and leaned against the wall, my eyes closed, my heart racing a mile a minute.

Hang on, I should stop just planning on not-yet famous people I want to get off with; do something properly. 1987. Maybe I could save that baby who fell in a well! Oh my God! I have to save Princess Diana! Ooh, I can become the most successful medium there’s ever been! I started to get feverishly excited. What could I invent? Did Dysons exist yet? Ooh, mobile phone stocks! I was going to be so rich!

I shook my head. This was nuts.

Opening my eyes, I took in a picture of – oh, for God’s sake – Blue on my wall. And Darius, I noticed wryly. Oh shit. This couldn’t be right.

I went and sat down in front of my old dressing table. Yes. Still incomprehensible, still from the eighties, still there. My old face. Right. This time, I was wearing sunscreen every day. Not a wrinkle to be found.

So. I tried to put it together in a brain that was dealing with sudden shocks equivalent to six bonfire nights and a bowlful of LSD. My parents were younger. And still together. But Darius was looking older than me.

I didn’t want to come over all Dr Who, but, unbelievably, I was actually going to have to ask someone what year this was.

To postpone the inevitable, and try to calm my breathing, I tried to think about clothes. What age was I? The tits suggested nothing much under fifteen, anyway. Oh God.

I opened my wardrobe door tentatively. Yes, there it was, as if I’d never been away. That bottle-green skirt. The pale green shirt. The thick tights. Tashy and I had sworn blind we would never ever, ever put this damn school uniform on again. But what were my options at this point?

My dad, stroking his still-thick sideburns. I’d forgotten about those.

‘Hey, love,’ he said. ‘Sleep well?’

I was too petrified to say anything, judging that this wouldn’t exactly be an unusual response at the breakfast table from a teenager. Finally, ‘Can I borrow your paper?’ I stammered out.

‘Nice to finally see you,’ said my mother, and I suddenly felt a residual sense of annoyance that she was pleased at something I was doing.

‘Tcch,’ I tutted.

‘Why do you want to see the paper?’ asked my dad. ‘I’ll read you your stars, if you like. Oh, here we are: Virgo. “Today you are going to be late for school and are going out dressed like a bin bag.” Gosh, they’re spot on, aren’t they, love?’

I fumbled my badly tied tie, hands shaking.

‘Don’t tease her,’ said my mum crossly. ‘For God’s sake, give her the bloody paper.’

‘All right, all right,’ said my dad. ‘Here.’ He handed it to me. ‘Happy now?’ he said to my mother.

‘I don’t know. What time are you coming home tonight?’

He blew air out of his mouth. ‘Well, I’ve got a few things to drop off.’

My mother turned back to the kettle and said something under her breath.

‘What was that?’ said my dad.

I buried my head in the paper. Oh my God. I’d forgotten they’d been like this.

‘If you’ve got something to say, just say it.’

My mother’s thin ankles shook in their American tan tights inside her horrid old carpet slippers that I could have sworn I threw out years ago.

Fourth of September 2003, it said. Definitely. Completely. The twenty-first century. Not the eighties. In fact, it was about a month before the day I’d had yesterday, and Tashy’s wedding. WHAT? So – hang on. Me, Mum and Dad had gone back in time, but they seemed completely fine with it?

Had I been in a coma? Had the rest of my life after now been a dream? Was I in an insane asylum and this was a brief moment of lucidity? Had I taken a dodgy pill and rendered the last sixteen years of my life a bad trip? Hang on, how many bad trips have you ever heard of that involved a regular visit to blood donors and a Nectar card?

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said suddenly.

‘Walking are you, love?’ said my dad, taking back the paper. ‘Wonders will never cease. Might get some fresh air in those cheeks.’ I stared at him in disbelief and dashed out the front door, pulling it shut behind me.

I stood outside and fumbled into my bag.

In real life, whatever the hell that is, my mobile is small silver and rather elegant-looking. This thing was pink, fluffy and had leopard skin on it. On the display there was a pixellated picture of a badger.

Chuffing hell.

There were fourteen text messages waiting for me, and I didn’t understand a single one of them.

‘RUOKWAN2CAPIC’

What was that?

I scrawled through to find Tashy’s name. That’s who I had to speak to. It wasn’t there.

All the way on the train I couldn’t think straight. I certainly couldn’t consider – God – school. I just wanted to go home, go to sleep, wake up properly, and never take drugs again.

I bought my flat about six years ago, just before everything went crazily mad in the property market, although I didn’t think that then: at the time I thought I was going crazy. Although I spent most of my time at Olly’s in Battersea now, I hadn’t quite got round to getting rid of it (‘No point. Don’t you know anything about investments?’ I recall Olly saying, at one point). It suited me: have somewhere to go for a bit of quiet time. It was a tiny studio, and the wall between the kitchen and the bathroom was purely for show, but it was in nice North London and I’d loved it; loved painting it different experimental colours to see if anything would make it look bigger; loved following the autumn sun round the room like a cat when I was reading the papers; strolling down and having an overpriced cappuccino on my own, and generally feeling like a grown-up. It was on the ground floor of a fussy Edwardian terrace, with the usual North London mix of inhabitants: a Persian couple, a teacher and a diffident trust-fund musician who owned the whole top floor, from which the smell of dope could permeate the entire building.

I was hurrying there now. The only thought in my mind was getting in there. OK, I didn’t have my keys here, but I kept a spare set in the pots in the scrub at the bottom of the front garden. Once I was in I could sit down, take a few deep breaths, make a proper cup of coffee. I kept looking around suspiciously as I made my way up Embarke Gardens, but everything looked just as it normally did. The old blue car that never moved was still parked in the corner; Hendrix, the top flat owner’s cat, was stalking carefully around on his neighbourhood watch patrol, as he did every day. I heaved a sigh of relief. Nearly home.

I crouched down and felt for the key. It wasn’t there. That was odd. Mind you, Olly had probably gone nuts when I’d disappeared. He’d probably come round to find me. Might even be inside right now. Ooh. That wasn’t something I particularly wanted to handle right at the moment. Also, he was one of those very rational thinkers. I didn’t think he’d take my little jaunt into the unconscious too well.

Still, I had to get in. I rang the bell. No answer. Fuck. I rang the general bell to see if anyone would let me into the hall at least, but I couldn’t get an answer from anyone. Shit. I took a look around the street. OK. This wasn’t the first time I’d ever done this – this is where the key pot had come from – but I was going to have to climb in through the top of the window, which you could pull down if you had to.

I shinned up the badly done pointwork and found myself reaching up effortlessly. God, I was so lithe and limber! I could probably somersault in! La la la. I pulled the window down, and gracelessly collapsed on top of what should have been my favourite red squishy sofa.

Owwww.

Who the fuck put an enormous glass modernist coffee table with bumpy bits all over it into my flat?

I straightened up, clutching my back, and slowly looked around. And then again. Nope, it didn’t matter how often I stared, there was no doubt that this remained, indubitably, somebody else’s furniture, somebody else’s books. No. No no no no no. I tore around the place, weirdly, looking for something – anything – that would prove that I used to live here, used to exist. No. My God. I couldn’t … I couldn’t not exist. That wasn’t possible.