JENNY COLGAN
Do You Remember the First Time?

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Jenny Colgan 2004

Jenny Colgan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007153855

EBook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN 9780007388974

Version: 2019-04-17

Dedication

To Mr B, who

makes me feel

sixteen every time

he walks in the room. (The good way).

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The rain was beating down on the windscreen, as we tried to navigate (rather damply) along the winding country road.

‘I hate the country,’ I said gloomily.

‘Yes, well, you hate everything that isn’t fifteen seconds from an overpriced cappuccino,’ said Oliver crossly, although in his defence he had been driving from London for six hours.

‘I don’t hate everything,’ I said. ‘Only … those things over there.’

‘What things?’

‘Those … oh, you know.’

‘Cows?’

‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘You can’t recognise a cow?’

‘Remind me.’ He used to think this was really cute.

‘It’s where your latte comes from,’ he said, sighing.

Oliver does like the country. He was born, bred and boarding-schooled here. He couldn’t understand why someone who’d lived their whole life in London wouldn’t want to get out of it once in a while. I had patiently explained to him several times the necessity of all-night Harts the Grocers, proper bagels, and the choice, if one so wished, to pay six pounds for a bottle of mineral water in a nightclub, but he would bang on about fields and animals as if they were a good thing.

I examined his profile in the dimming light. He looked tired. God, he was tired, very tired. So was I. Olly worked for a law firm that did a lot of boring corporate stuff that dragged on for months and was fundamentally big rich bastards (Ol excepted, of course) working out ways to screw other big rich bastards for reasons that remained mysterious, with companies called things that sounded like covers for James Bond. I worked as an accountant for a mega firm – there were thousands of us. I tried to tell people it was more fun than it sounded, but I think after eleven years they could tell by my tone of voice that it wasn’t. It had seemed like a nice safe option at the time. It was even fun at first, dressing up and wearing a suit, but recently the sixty-hour weeks, the hideous internal politics, the climate of economic fear, and the Sundays Ol and I spent with our work spread out over the kitchen table were, you know, starting to get to me. I spent a lot of time – so much time – in the arid, thrice-breathed air. When we were getting to the end of a deal I’d spend twelve hours a day in there. That was about seventy-five per cent of my waking seconds. Every time I thought about that, I started to panic.

It wasn’t that we didn’t have a good lifestyle, I reflected, peering out through the rain, and thinking how strangely black it was out here: I hadn’t had much total darkness in my life. I mean, we both made plenty of money – Olly would probably even make partner eventually, as he worked really hard. But the shit we went through to get it … Jeez.

We took nice holidays, and Olly had a lovely flat in Battersea that I practically lived in. It was a good area, with lots of bars and restaurants and things to do, and if we got round to having kids, it would be a good place to bring them up too. Parks nearby and all that. Good schools, blah blah blah.

Good friends too. The best, really. In fact, that was why we were here, splashing through the mud in the godforsaken middle of nowhere. My oldest friend from school, Tashy, was getting married. Even though we’d both grown up in Highgate, she’d come over all Four Weddings when she and Max got engaged, and insisted on hiring some country house hotel out in the middle of nowhere with no connection to either of them.

I was glad she was getting married, give or take the bridegroom. We’d planned this a lot at school. Of course, not until we were at least twenty-two (we were both now thirty-two). In the manner of Princess Diana, if you please (although I’d been to the dress fitting and it was a very sharp and attractive column-style Vera Wang, thank you very much), and we’d probably be marrying Prince Edward (if we’d only known …) or John Taylor.

Olly caught me looking at him.

‘Don’t tell me – you want to drive.’

‘Do I fuck.’

He grimaced. ‘Look, I know you’re tired, but do you really have to swear so much?’

‘What? We’re not driving the Popemobile. We’re all grown-ups.’ I wrinkled my nose. ‘How would you start to corrupt a lawyer anyway?’

‘It’s just not nice to hear it.’

‘From a lady?’

He sniffed and stared through the windscreen.

I hate it when we get snippy like this, but really, I was exhausted. And now we’d have to go in and be super jolly! And Fun! All Evening! So I could keep Tashy’s spirits up. I wondered who else was going to be there. Tashy was a lot better at keeping in touch with people than I was. When really, all I wanted to do on a Friday evening was pour an enormous glass of wine, curl up in front of the TV and drift off before the best of Graham Norton, which might, just might, mean I woke up rested enough either to go to the gym or have sex with Ol (not both).

Oliver stayed quiet, staring out into the darkness. I turned up the radio, which was playing ‘Colourblind’ by Darius. Eventually he couldn’t stand it any longer.

‘I can’t believe you still listen to music like that.’

‘I’m breaking – what – the after-thirty pop music bill of rights?’

‘It’s just so childish.’

‘It’s not childish! Darius wrote this all by himself!’

Ol gave me a look. ‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘I’m not listening to Dido, OK? It’s not going to happen. I’d rather die.’

‘At least she’s your age.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

Ol shrugged it off, and I let him. I knew why we were squabbling anyway, and it was very little to do with the respective ages of pop musicians.

It put a lot of pressure on a couple, especially our age, when one’s friends baled out and got married, I reckoned. I mean, who was next? I was worried it was going to be like musical chairs, and we’d all sit down at once, wherever we happened to be.

‘Turn here?’

I looked at Ol, who knew already I wouldn’t know. He turned anyway, and a hedge brushed the window. It was very dark.

I mean, everyone was rambling along, having fun, working their guts out all week to get ahead, and pissing away the weekends for fun … then suddenly, ding dong, the first thirtieth birthday party and engagement bash invites had fallen on the doormat all at the same time, and we kept finding ourselves trailing round Habitat, buying the same vase over and over again.

I knew Tashy would try to do things slightly differently – everyone does, even if it’s just a new place to stencil their initials (‘Aren’t the salt and pepper cellars in the shapes of our names adorable? And so reasonable!’), but it was still a wedding, wasn’t it? There’d be a traditional Church of England service, the one everyone likes with the ‘have and holds, for richer for poorer’ stuff in it, even though our Sunday religion is strictly the Observer and the People; there’d be champagne on a lawn somewhere, there’d almost certainly be cold wild salmon at some point, and twelve-to-fourteen hours of pointless drinking before we had to stumble back to some horrid b. & b. somewhere for three hours before pulling ourselves out of bed to stuff full English breakfasts down our necks before piling back on to the motorway, leaving the bride and groom somewhere in a plane en route to the next forty-five years of togetherness, early nights, screaming babies and moving to Wandsworth because the council tax is cheaper and the schools aren’t too bad.

Which was fine, of course. Lots of people did it. In fact, at the moment, it seemed a hundred per cent of everyone was doing it. I glanced at Olly. I had a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach that he might be thinking it was about time that he, too, did it. Just little things. Like he took over my bill paying because it would make it more convenient. (It did too; for an accountant I’m shocking with my money, like all those dipso doctors telling you to cut down on the booze. I always leave it till somebody’s threatening to come round and total my kneecaps.) Or, maybe we should get a kitten? (If I wanted a small malevolent creature crawling round my kitchen demanding food I’d have a baby, thank you.)

Of course, my mum loved him. He was nothing at all like Dad; he was smartly spoken, and well off – oh – and hadn’t left her.

‘Not long now,’ Olly said then, rubbing my knee in a making-up gesture. And I believed him. It wouldn’t be long. Until Olly and I did what Tashy and Max were doing, and all our other friends were doing. Which should make me a lot more excited than I felt.

I shivered involuntarily.

‘Are you cold?’

‘Do you ever feel old, Ol?’

‘Erm, cold or old?’

‘Old.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. Well, I suppose, not really. I mean, I thought it might be a bit strange when I turned thirty, but it was all right really. I’m pretty much where I expected to be, don’t you think?’

I was surprised at this. ‘What do you mean, where you expected to be?’

‘You know – by this stage in my life.’

‘You mean, when you were younger, you thought about how close to a corporate law partnership you’d be in your thirties?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, I took the A levels to get on to a law degree course, so I suppose I must have done.’

‘You didn’t just take your A levels because your parents wanted you to, but secretly you were going to be a rockstar or a footballer?’

‘No! I think I knew by the time I was sixteen I wasn’t going to make it as a footballer.’

‘Really? I didn’t give up on being a gymnast until last year.’

‘The only gymnastics I’ve ever seen you do is accidentally falling out of bed.’

‘That’s not the point, is it? Don’t you ever wonder about how we ended up just here?’

Olly was slowing to a junction, and as he stopped he turned to me and took my face in his hands.

‘And what’s so wrong with right here?’

The lights of the country hotel were twinkling ahead. Inside were old friends and good company. Here at my side was a decent man. Nothing was wrong at all.

‘Flo! Ol!’

Tash had that massive, slightly manic grin people get when they’ve been welcoming people for hours. She looked splendid, as well she should, given the draconian diet she’d been on for the past six months ‘so my bingo wings don’t flap all through the service’.

I gave her a huge hug.

‘Elle Macpherson or Martine McCutcheon?’ she asked, turning round 360 degrees.

‘What, are you kidding? Kate Moss,’ I declared.

She beamed even wider. ‘Excellent.’

We’d been spending quite a lot of time, in the last few months, going through celebrity magazines and slagging off people getting married. We particularly liked those who go rather – ahem – over the top, like Posh Spice and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Max thought we were being incredibly childish. Oliver didn’t know about it, in case he thought I was trying to give him hints, which I wasn’t, in a way, although I was also getting to the point where I thought it might be a bit embarrassing if he didn’t ask, which I know isn’t very romantic.

Tashy is small, occasionally a bit chunky, but thanks to the no-fat, no-bread, no-booze, crying-oneself-to-sleep-with-hunger-pains regime she’s been on lately, there was not a pick on her. Her hair was currently extremely glossy and straight, though was, once upon a time, very wild and curly, and her sparkly green eyes betray her past when she went through a career a week and was constantly getting into scrapes. Now she’d settled into being a software designer, which sounded more glamorous than it was (and doesn’t sound very glamorous at all, really), and was marrying Max, who also worked in computers and who was tall, bald, and very, very dull, but a much better bet, on the whole, I suppose, than the good-looking unruly-haired rogues Tashy had spent most of her twenties waiting to call her, then get off with somebody else. And her boho look had gone too. Feather earrings and deep plum clothes had given way to a slightly more appropriate look for a nice middle-class North London girl. In fact, Good God, was she wearing Boden?

She grabbed me by the arm. ‘Come on! Come on! They can’t mix a Martini, but I’m getting married so we’re starting on the champagne we towed back from France.’

‘Yes, but you’re getting married tomorrow. Isn’t not having a full-on death hangover meant to be part of the whole big idea?’

‘Oh, sod that. One, I’m not going to get any sleep anyway, and two, someone’s coming in with that full body foundation spray thing Sarah Jessica Parker uses. Believe me, you won’t be able to tell if I’m alive or dead underneath it. You won’t believe the work that goes into making all us haggard over-thirties brides look like freshly awakened virginal teenagers.’

‘You want me to take the bags up then?’ said Olly, standing grumpy in the chintzy hall, which was filled with copper kettles and random suits of armour.

‘Well, do you mind?’ I said guiltily.

‘Then what am I supposed to do whilst you two go off and cackle like witches for three hours?’

I stared at him. I looked into his big likeable face. Why was everything he said tonight really irritating me?

‘Can’t you go and talk to Max?’

Olly dislikes Max in the way that you’re always a little chippy about people in whom you recognise a bit of yourself. Plus, he loves Tash to bits and has always been overprotective, vetting anyone she goes out with.

‘Is that Ol?’ came Max’s loud voice from the bar. ‘Thought I recognised that clapped-out XR5.’

‘I’ve got some work to catch up on,’ said Ol. He yawned ostentatiously, winked and headed upstairs.

‘Don’t work too …’ my voice petered out.

I heard the general sound of merriment through the big oak doors that led to the original ye olde trusty inne section, and sighed.

‘Can we not go to the bar?’

‘I think if there was ever a good minibar-emptying excuse it’s tonight,’ said Tash.

I rolled my eyes. ‘Yes, because we usually require a parental consent form.’

‘How’s the lovely Ol then?’ she asked as we quietly crept upstairs to avoid the revellers. ‘Getting in a romantic mood?’

I think it’s a bit insensitive to ask after someone else’s love life when you have a big white dress hanging on the back of your door.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I think we must have one of those relationships where you bicker a lot to show you care.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes. People who are too affectionate are overcompensating,’ I said blithely. ‘Apparently.’

‘OK,’ said Tash.

‘I took a test in a magazine.’

‘OK!’

I bounced on the bed in her honeymoon suite. ‘Well? Are you excited then?’

‘Do I look excited?’

‘Not as much as I’d expected, actually.’

She threw herself dramatically on the bedspread to join me, widening her eyes. ‘Oh, Flo, I just can’t believe it … you know. It’s the dreamiest thing that’s ever happened! I’m the luckiest girl in the whole wide world.’

‘Oh, shut up. You know what I mean, though. You must be a bit nervous, or something.’

‘I am. I really am. It’s just, what’s as exciting as it’s cracked up to be? Nothing.’

‘Getting into our first nightclub?’

‘Yeah, we were twelve.’

‘It was very exciting.’

She grinned. ‘Still. It is quite cool.’

‘You’re actually doing it!’

‘I know!’

‘That’s better.’

I rolled over onto my stomach. ‘So is it not going to be what we always thought it was going to be?’

Tashy stuck her lip out a little as we remembered the many hours we’d spent sprawled over her bed (I always liked going to hers; her slightly sluttish mother let us eat in front of the TV) in pretty much the same positions, discussing how it would be.

‘Well, I suppose I’ve had sex already …’

‘You haven’t! You filthy bitch!’

‘So that’s out of the way. And, also, he’s not royal and there aren’t six million people lining The Mall with flags to cheer us on our way.’

We were quiet for a moment, and I jumped off the bed and ceremoniously declared the minibar open. It even had Baileys in it. Ooh, we used to love that. Sugary milk!

‘Hey – remember these?’

Tashy eyed one up balefully. ‘A feature of my first night of unmarried intercourse … and, possibly, my last.’

I tore them open and we toasted each other.

‘To true love,’ I said.

‘Aha-ha-ha.’

Actually, I’d meant it. I took a swig.

‘Just think – you’ll never have to make love to a man who slaps you on the rump and calls you a filly ever again!’

‘Neiighhhh!!!!’

‘Or date ANYBODY SHORT.’

Olly and Max were both very tall. These were our minimum requirements. We’d always reckoned that short men for girls were the equivalent of that horrible joke blokes tell – ‘What have fat girls and scooters got in common? They’re both fun to ride, but you wouldn’t want your mates seeing you with one.’

‘Or snog anyone for a dare.’

‘Or sympathy.’

‘Christ, yeah. Remember Norm?’

‘It was charity work,’ I replied indignantly. ‘Helping the less blessed in the world.’

Norm had been something of a mistake, something of a long time ago.

Norm had been a snuffling pig, outright winner in an ugly pig competition.

‘Anyway, why are you starting, Bridezilla? What about Pinocchio?’

Pinocchio told a lot of lies and had a very long narrow woody.

‘Pour me some more Baileys immediately,’ demanded Tashy.

‘I don’t want to give you a headache.’

‘Are you joking? We’ve booked singers from the local choral society to sing the hymns. No one’s getting out alive without a headache.’ She rolled over.

‘It’s turning out all right, though, isn’t it?’

‘We thought that at sixteen.’

‘Oh yeah, when we hadn’t gotten pregnant. God, we knew nothing.’

‘I think we thought that was it, didn’t we? That we’d cracked it.’

‘And at any moment, the knight in shining armour was just outside putting money in the meter …’

‘Can you believe both of our Prince Charmings are going bald?’ said Tash meditatively.

‘Yours fastest,’ I said defensively.

‘It’s all the testosterone building up from me being too tired to shag him after planning this damn wedding.’

‘Does not shagging them make them bald? We could have saved Prince Edward after all.’

‘No we couldn’t.’

The thing is, when your friends fall in love – seriously – it gets very difficult to discuss the boys with them any more. It’s fine to completely and totally dissect someone you’ve seen twice because they look a bit like Pierce Brosnan and can get gig tickets, but once it creeps into the full time – watch telly with, wash socks of, etc. – it becomes impossible. It’s like discussing somebody’s naked dad.

Max was just so sensible, so safe. He just … he just didn’t get it. And he didn’t seem to know the lovely Tashy I remembered, haring down the seafront at Brighton with her heels in her hands at four a.m., or marching us off through Barcelona because she thought she knew the way and was buying the sangria, or dancing all night on top of a bar, or taking her stuffed rabbit on holiday until she was twenty-six … I know people think this about all their friends, but Max … he was all right, but I didn’t really think he was good enough for my her. I wanted someone who could match her, dirty giggle for dirty giggle, not someone who could help her work out her SERPS contributions and had strong views on the education of children.

Of course I knew this was how it was going to work. We’d even devised the Buffy scale of life relationships: you start off wanting Xander, spend your twenties going out with Spike and settle down with Giles. Which seemed to mean Tashy had never had a chance at an Angel. And, I suppose, neither had I. I didn’t believe in angels, anyway. I didn’t believe in much.

We leafed through a celebrity wedding edition of OK! magazine for the last time together as single girls. For one of us at least (and me too, of course, I’m never having bloody gold-rimmed parasols), the chances of ever having an elephant attending our wedding, being carried in on the shoulders of gold-painted slaves, spending over $2,000,000 on flowers, marrying someone older than our dads because they were very, very rich indeed, insisting all the guests wore a certain colour and weren’t allowed to talk to you, the press or the special bought-in soap celebrities, were about to vanish for ever.

We sighed as we flicked over to some other minor star, who had designed her own dress (which showed, in that it looked exactly like the highly inflated numbers we used to draw in primary school, complete with more flounces than Elton John playing tennis), and had fifteen flower girls, including seven she barely knew but who happened to be in a similar television show – plus one girl who was so ugly she had to be close family, but had been zipped into skin-tight, bust-squeezing fuchsia anyway, next to the telly lollipop girls, looking like the unhappiest whale in captivity.

‘“I haven’t been able to sleep for months with the excitement,”’ I read the bride said. ‘Really? Do you think? Months?’

Tashy glanced at the gushing copy. ‘They’ve only been together for six months. It’ll all be over by Christmas. She’ll be able to give hundreds of interviews about her heartache. It’ll make her feel really famous. No wonder she’s excited.’

‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Plus, you know, celebrities: they have to fall in love ten times harder than the rest of us.’

‘I know,’ said Tashy. ‘It must get really boring for Jen and Brad. They’ve been married for ever and people keep asking them if they’re still as divinely in love as they were when they first met. Well, they aren’t. Nobody is,’ she said, addressing the magazine sternly.

‘Do you remember when we were bridesmaids for Heather?’ I asked suddenly. Heather is Tashy’s big sister. She’d had to ask me too because we were so inseparable. We had had an absolutely great time. It was the eighties, so our dresses were enormous. We were allowed to wear a huge amount of blue makeup, white tights, and dance with all the boys wearing shiny Jonathan Ross suits. As Heather pointed out later, in a rare wistful moment after the divorce, we’d had much, much more fun than she had. At the time, we wouldn’t have believed that to be possible. We thought she was the most beautiful and enviable living thing we’d ever seen.

‘Oh, yeah. Don’t. I asked her if she wanted to be my matron of honour, and she snorted and said, “Thanks, but if you want to get involved in all that garbage, please do it without me, Natasha,” and went back to doing yoga and eating muesli.’

‘It is a real shame he got the sense of humour in the divorce,’ I said, and Tashy nodded glumly.

Then she popped her head up from the magazine. ‘Um.’

‘What?’

She jumped up and got us another Baileys.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Well, you know when you were talking about us being stupid at sixteen?’

‘Mm?’

‘You’ll never guess who my mother ran into at the post office. Invited the whole family.’

I rather love Jean, Tashy’s mother. She is giggly and dresses too young for her age and drinks too many gin and tonics – all the reasons she embarrasses the bits out of Tashy. It’s amazing how, even though we’re both in our thirties, we still turn into sulky teenagers when confronted with our mothers. It had been worse recently, with all the wedding arrangements for Tash, and there had been at least two occasions when Tashy had slammed out of the house shouting – and she was ashamed to relate this, even after a couple of glasses of wine – ‘Stop trying to control my life!’ She had also decided that since she and Tashy’s dad (they were divorced, and got on a lot better than my parents) were paying for most of this enormous bash, they got final say in just about all of it, which included the guest list, the napkins, and those tortuously crap little sugared almond things. (‘Why am I crying over sugared almonds?’ Tashy had asked me. ‘I’m not going to talk to her for a week. Cow.’) She is so different from my mother, who does indeed have nightmares after Crimewatch.

But this wasn’t solving the problem.

‘Who?’

‘We’re over it now, right?’

And I knew straight away.

‘This is why you stashed all this Baileys up here, isn’t it? To soften me up?’

She nodded shamefacedly.

‘You invited Clelland.’

‘His whole family,’ said Tashy, at least having the grace to look a bit embarrassed. ‘You know our parents were friends first, before any of us lot even went to school. All those seventies kaftan parties. Probably all throwing their keys in bowls.’

‘Let’s not think about that,’ I said. I might be an ancient grown-up, but I still didn’t like to think about my parents doing it. And also, my heart was pounding, and my ageing brain was trying to take this on board.

‘Anyway, they lost touch, but my mother ran into his mother at the post office – seriously, if she thinks she’s going to be thinner than me for this wedding then she’s got another think coming, upstaging bitch – so, anyway, they get talking and, of course, Mum can’t stop shooting her mouth off immediately and—’

‘Hang on,’ I said, interrupting her nervous chatter and sitting dramatically upright. ‘Clelland is coming?’

‘Um, yeah.’

‘OK, so can we forget the boring post office stuff …?’

‘Gee, gosh, you’re right, Flo. How selfish of me. It’s not like I’m busy or anything.’

‘It’s just … God, you know, I could have done with some warning.’

‘Me too,’ said Tashy. ‘I don’t think they’ll even all fit under the marquee.’

Of course, even though she’d been through it, I couldn’t really expect Tash to take this as seriously as I did. And, of course, Clelland isn’t his real name. Nobody’s called that, except probably some American soap star. Our parents were friends, and his dad is John Clelland, so he is too. The grown-ups called him little John, which he hated with such a vibrant passion he refused to answer to anything except for his surname until we got used to it. Then we discovered that porn book Fanny Hill, author John Cleland, and it was even worse.

That’s Clelland. Passionate about things. He had been my first crush. Tashy’s first crush had displayed her painstakingly homemade Valentine card all over the sixth-form common room to loud and lewd guffaws. Mine had been completely unaware of my existence for months. I’d really envied Tashy.

He was tall for his age, dark-haired, with expressive eyebrows: he was studious and intense-looking. He stalked around on his own a lot, which at the time I thought made him romantic and individual rather than, as I supposed now, horribly lonely and ‘going through an awkward stage’, as my mother puts it. And he had double English on Mondays and Thursdays, which was good, as, crossing over from chemistry, I could accidentally be there to say hello to him, Tashy stumbling along beside me, giggling her head off. He had to say hello to me because our parents knew each other, even though he was two years older and thus anything else would have been completely verboten.

At family parties he would sit in corners, dressed all in black, grumpily reading Jean-Paul Sartre or The Lord of the Rings, listening to Echo and the Bunnymen on his Walkman, refusing to eat meat from the barbecue, and the adults would all cluck and giggle over him and I would be furious with them on his behalf, but never brave enough to go up and say more than hello, red-faced and twisted up inside.

So, for a long time I was just one of the annoying people buzzing around him, trying to get him to clean out his bedroom. Until the year I turned sixteen. Big year that one.

And now I had one day’s notice to see him again. Sixteen years on.

At my birthday just a few weeks before, when I turned thirty-two, we went to Bluebird, and had a nice posh dinner out and drank Veuve Clicquot and everyone talked about someone we knew who was getting divorced, which made us feel better about most of us not even being married yet, apart from Tashy, who was about to get married and looked green for most of the evening. Then someone kicked off about house prices, and none of the women would eat the delicious bread, and the smart sex toys and silly things people had bought me started to look a bit stupid, and I started to feel almost impolite to insist that everyone came out and spent what turned out to be an absolute ton of money to celebrate with me for seemingly no reason. Then we got home and I was unreasonably rude to Olly and spent half an hour with the magnifying mirror counting wrinkles, then I wondered if I was ever going to have a baby and then I went to sleep. It wasn’t always like that.

Tashy and I had planned my sixteenth birthday party with almost as much precision as we planned this wedding, and with a lot more excitement. There was going to be some sort of sparkling wine, a punch. ‘I’m making it!’ said Dad sternly. ‘I don’t want anyone being sick.’

‘But you’re not going to stay upstairs!’ I whined.

‘Of course we are. Do you think we’ve never been to a teenage party before? We’ll be patrolling upstairs. With guns.’

‘PLLLEEEEAAASSEEE! It’ll be the worst birthday party ever.’

Finally, bless them, they’d borrowed Clelland’s little brother’s baby monitor and set it upstairs, then gone to the pub next door with it practically stapled to their ears. I was the only one who threw up.

There was a reason I was looking forward to this party. I had my first ever boyfriend.

Clelland had actually been away most of that summer. I’d moped around like a nightmare, working in the Co-op and contriving to make my parents’ lives a misery. Then, right at the end of one afternoon … he’d walked in, brown, thin, and heartstopping.

‘Hello,’ said Clelland, looking up from his bag of vegetables, which he had to buy and cook himself, in his parents’ efforts to get him out of this stupid vegetarian phase he was going through (I thought this was thrillingly noble).

‘Hi there.’

I gulped. My international crush – more than Paul Young, John Taylor and Andrew Ridgeley in one – was here, standing right before me … looking fit and tanned. I had to be cool. I had to be!

‘Haven’t seen you around,’ I said dully.

‘Hi,’ he said, swallowing too. ‘Well, I went off travelling for a bit.’

‘Really?’ I stuttered. ‘Nice.’

‘Not really.’ He shrugged unconvincingly, looking around the dingy dungeon and nylon uniform I’d clearly spent my summer in. ‘But I met a few people, you know. Students and stuff, hanging out. Then we all went to Spain, found this really cheap place, we worked as grape crushers and slept out under the stars. They let us drink as much wine as we wanted. Then we took the money we made and all went to Glastonbury for five days. But it wasn’t that great or anything.’

‘Good!’ I said. ‘I mean, sorry you had a rotten time.’

‘Yes? What’s been happening?’

‘Well, erm … Ratboy kicked in the bus shelter and they had to put a new one up. Then he kicked it in again.’

Clelland bit his lip. ‘What time do you get off?’

I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.

‘Um …’ I said. I genuinely couldn’t remember.

We walked home that evening in the warmth, and he bought me a bag of chips and we lay on the heath and ate them looking at stars maybe not quite as good as those over Spanish vineyards, but I liked them. Then we kissed and kissed and kissed, salty sticky kisses for hours and hours and hours in the way only teenagers can, entwined like two vines growing together. Then, finally, when the adults – the seedy, the dispossessed – started to arrive, we slowly headed for home, my insides turning somersaults all the way.

We 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 sat up. ‘You haven’t made a hash of anything!’ she said. ‘Look at you. Good job. Smart car. Lovely bloke.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said, staring at the ceiling. ‘Do you remember what you and I said we were going to do when we finished school?’

Tashy thought for a moment and then laughed out loud. ‘Oh, yes. We were going to buy a car, travel through Europe, drawing cartoons and portraits, end up in Paris, rich and famous, live in a garret, buy a cat, then … let me see … I was going to marry a prince of some sort, and you were going to move to New York and look a lot like Audrey Hepburn.’

Since I’ve turned thirty I’ve become a bit pissed off with Audrey Hepburn. We all grow up with her, and it can’t be done. Get your tits fixed and you could look like Pamela Anderson. Get cow arse injected in your lips and you could probably handle Liz Hurley. Wrinkle your nose and brush your hair a lot and you might get to marry Brad Pitt. But nobody, nobody but nobody, has ever looked as beautiful as Audrey Hepburn, and it causes untold misery in the interim. Have you seen the actress that played her in a mini-series? She looks like a cross-eyed, emaciated, buck-toothed wren compared to Audrey, and that’s the best they could get from the population of the whole world. Anyway.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘call me crazy, but maybe I’d have planned for that better by not immediately going to university to study accountancy then working for a company for ten hours a day for eleven years.’

‘I am calling you crazy,’ said Tashy. ‘There are hardly any princes left in Europe, and we don’t want Albert, thanks.’

‘Hmm,’ I grumped.

‘Flo, we did everything right, you know. Everything we were told. We looked after ourselves. And this is our reward. Good lives. Fun.’

‘If I was sixteen again …’ I said wistfully.

‘What?’

‘I’d shag Clelland to within an inch of his life.’

‘I wish you had,’ said Tashy. ‘Then you could have found out he was a weedy little indy freak, as nervous and teenage and odd-smelling as the rest of us, and then you could have stopped going on about him every time you got drunk for the next decade and a half.’

‘I do not!’ I protested. ‘And anyway, you do not have a romantic soul,’ I said, pointing at her.

‘Yeah? Well, what’s that, BABY?’

And she pointed to the dress hanging on the back of the door.

‘You seem distracted,’ Olly said as I slowly ironed my Karen Millen trouser suit. I’d loved it when I bought it, but did it now seem a bit … matronly? Old? Not exactly the kind of thing I wanted my first love to see me in?

‘Not at all,’ I said, in a completely distracted kind of a way, staring straight out of the window.

‘Are you pissed off your best friend’s getting married?’

‘You know, I’ve heard of people who got married and survived,’ I said. ‘Not many, though.’

‘Well, don’t worry,’ he said, looking at me with a twinkle in his eye, and suddenly I got a really strong feeling that he was planning something. In fact I knew he was. And I wasn’t sure how that made me feel. It might have made me nervous, if I wasn’t already incredibly nervous at the thought of coming face to face with Clelland again. Ridiculous, I know; so immature. It was just, I’d never run into him whenever I’d gone back home for Christmas or anything and … well, it was just interesting, that was all. He wasn’t on his Friends Reunited page either. Not that I checked a lot. I checked all the time, mentally giving points to people I thought were doing worse or better than me.

‘For God’s sake! Those bloody dry-cleaners have shrunk my trousers. Useless bloody bastards. I’m going to sue them.’ Olly sucked his stomach in.

‘Yes, dear,’ I said, suddenly realising, as I stood there with an iron in my hand, how much I was starting to sound like my mother.

Chapter Two

It was a lovely day for a wedding, if you like that sort of thing. This was about the eighteenth I’d been to this year, but it was still very nice. I suppose it was a bit different, being Tashy’s. I was very glad Tashy hadn’t pushed me about being the bridesmaid. When we were sixteen it was all we talked about, but brides over thirty have enough problems looking young and innocent as it is, without an Ancient Mariner hanging grimly by her side, trying to make light conversation with the ushers and ignore the whispers (‘Such a shame she’s not gone yet …’; ‘They do leave it so late, the lassies these days …’) and Tashy’s young niece, Kathleen, would do a perfect job of looking fresh and sixteen and completely overexcited, though trying to be too cool to show it – not entirely unlike we had been, it had to be said.

The church was cool and pretty as we slipped into seats near the front row, nodding and waving to everyone. No sign of him, and my parents weren’t coming till later. There is something incredibly evocative about a traditional English wedding ceremony, and this one was done beautifully; so much so that when they started up the Wedding March, I choked back a tear. Olly gave me a meaningful look.

Tashy looked wondrous, of course. She has excellent taste, and that eat-nothing-that-doesn’t-taste-of-poo diet had certainly worked. Her ivory sheath was incredibly tasteful, with gorgeous embroidered shoes just peeping out the bottom, matching the long lilies she held. I wondered briefly if she was going to burst out of her dress later after going into a crazed frenzy at the vol-au-vents table, then remembered that the point of a wedding is that you watch everyone else consume vast screeds of booze and nosh you’ve paid for but can’t partake in, in case you do something rash, like enjoy yourself. But here, in the peace and stillness of the old church, I couldn’t be cynical.

The vows were very traditional, and Max looked all right too, gruffly uming and erring over the responses – not that anyone was looking at him, of course. Even when we were kids, grooms always had something of an interchangeable quality to them. It was Barbie who was important. Ken was neither here nor there.

My eyes had kept scanning the pews for Clelland, just in case, but I couldn’t see him. Maybe he was that bald geezer over there … or that enormously fat chap wearing the colourful waistcoat …

‘God, how long is this going to go on for?’ whispered Oliver with a wink, although he had just been singing ‘Jerusalem’ loudly and off key, and was clearly having a sensational time. I swallowed, guiltily.

‘I hope there aren’t too many prawns,’ Olly was saying as we walked into the large marquee, which was bedecked with flowers and ruffled decorations. The sun was glinting off lots of very clean silverware and shiny glasses, waiting to be replenished on into the night. One billion photographs later and I still hadn’t seen Clelland.

‘Or anything with nuts. Or salad cream.’

‘I’m sure the Blythes are far too posh for salad cream,’ I said, and squeezed his hand chummily.

Olly was the pickiest eater I’d ever met in my life. I thought they thrashed that out of you thoroughly at boarding school, but I was obviously wrong, because he refused to eat most things that weren’t cheese or fish fingers, on various spurious grounds.

‘Well, you know viscous things upset my stomach.’

‘All fluids upset your stomach.’

‘Glooky ones most of all.’

I took a quick look at the hors-d’oeuvres coming over. Excellent – sausages on sticks, with a slightly pretentious veneer of sesame seeds over the top. He’d be able to cope with those, once he’d picked off the seeds. And I guessed I’d better make my way over to the bride as well, once I got half a—

My heart stopped in my throat. There he was, about ten feet away from me. Clelland. Looking exactly the same. In fact, if anything, he looked even younger. Then he turned his head away and disappeared into the crowd.

‘Oh my God!’ I said.

‘I know. Sesame seeds,’ said Oliver unhappily.

‘No, no. It’s just, I’ve seen an old friend. I have to go and say hello to … them.’

‘OK. I’m off to pat Max hard on the back as a kind of non-gay way of saying well done,’ said Oliver.

I walked over to where Clelland had been. But even as I got there, I felt something was wrong. Was my mind playing tricks on me? How could that be such an exact replica of someone I hadn’t seen for sixteen years? I mean, people change in sixteen years, don’t they? It would be completely impossible for it to be otherwise. I mean, of course, I’d hardly changed, thanks to the miracles of modern cosmetics … well, maybe I had a bit. Suddenly I gulped and smoothed down my hair. Did he have a picture rotting away in his attic?

I spotted his dark jacket again. He was talking to one of the waitresses with his back to me. I took a deep breath and walked up to him.

‘Erm … hey there!’

The man turned round. And at once I realised my mistake. The likeness, though, was absolutely extraordinary. The figure stared at me. This wasn’t a man at all, hardly more than a boy.

‘Sorry, but … oh, you look familiar.’

‘I’m Flora Scurrison,’ I said warily.

His face was furrowed in concentration for another minute, then he broke into an enormous smile. ‘Oh my God! Don’t you remember me?’

Something was ringing at the back of my mind.

‘It’s Justin!’

Justin, Justin …

Suddenly it hit me.

‘Oh my God.’

‘Yeah!’

‘You’re Clelland’s little brother.’

The one with the baby monitor.

‘Yes! I recognise you from the photos.’

‘I am SO OLD,’ I said, almost without realising it.

‘Everyone keeps coming up and telling me how much I’ve grown. I am nearly seventeen, actually. Quite grown up.’ He looked petulant all of a sudden and I was reminded overwhelmingly of Clelland.

‘You look a lot like your brother.’

‘I do not.’

‘He does not,’ said a deep voice.

I looked up.

‘Hello, Flora. Justin, scram.’

‘You always treat me like a kid,’ scowled Justin.

‘That’s because you sulk and whine all the time.’

Justin sulked off, whining.

‘He’ll be OK. He needs to eat about nine times a day, so the buffet’s probably the best place for him.’

Clelland was … well, it was impossible I’d have mistaken him for anyone other than himself.

He had filled out, of course; he couldn’t possibly be as absurdly skinny as he had been; that would have been David Bowie and nobody else. But his black, unruly hair was just the same as ever.

‘I thought he was you,’ I said, not trusting myself beyond a short sentence.

‘God, really?’ He glanced behind him at his brother, mooching off. ‘Was I such a slouching runt at that age?’

‘Worse!’ I gave a very peculiar slightly strangulated laugh. ‘At least he’s not wearing a Morrissey T-shirt. Every day!’

‘I loved that T-shirt.’

‘I know.’

I held out my hand. ‘Clelland, it’s good to see you.’

‘Oh God, it’s John. Please. Nobody calls me that any more.’

‘No, really? I thought you swore you’d never get tied down into “bourgeois tying-down name fascism”.’

‘Yeah? And do you still spell your name P-f-l-o-w?’

‘No,’ I said, going scarlet.

‘So … what have you been up to?’ He looked … he looked great. And wryly amused to see me.

‘Oh, lots of things,’ I said, as he easily lifted two glasses of champagne off a passing waiter.

‘Yeah?’

‘No!’ I said. ‘Well, I went to university then got a job and moved back to London.’

‘That’s three things.’

‘Over quite a long period.’

We stood for a moment.

‘What have you been doing then?’ I asked awkwardly.

Oddly, I could see over my shoulder, Justin had bumped into Olly at the buffet and was pointing out foodstuffs to him.

Clelland – John, but I really couldn’t think of him any other way – shrugged.

‘Well, I went to Aberdeen.’

‘I remember that,’ I said quietly.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, looking slightly awkward for a second, which came as a big relief to me. From the way our conversation had been going, I was beginning to wonder if I’d made up the whole romance in a psychotic episode and we were distant acquaintances greeting each other at a Rotary Club dance.

‘Then I joined VSO for a couple of years – get out and see the world, you know.’

‘Oh yes. Where did you end up?’

‘Africa.’

‘Wow, that’s amazing!’

‘Complete and utter shithole. I hated every second of it. I wanted to catch malaria so they’d have to send me home.’

‘God, I haven’t wanted you to die for ages,’ I said, before my brain had properly engaged. It was not a good moment. Olly stumbled over.

‘Jesus, Flo, I can’t eat a damn thing. Do you know they have almonds in the salad? You’d think they’d put on a few fish fingers just in case. This is going to be even worse than the Stricklands’ wedding, and that made me sick.’

‘You were drunk.’

‘God, yeah.’

Clelland raised his eyebrows.

‘This is Oliver,’ I introduced him. ‘My, er, boyfriend.’

Why the ‘er’? I was conscious that perhaps I wasn’t sounding as thrilled as I could.

Clelland put his hand out. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ said Olly, holding out his hand.

‘Clelland’s an old school friend.’

I’d never told Olly about Clelland. At first it was because I was obeying the ‘don’t tell new boyfriend about exes; they must think you’re a virgin’ type bullshit law. And then … well, some things are private. Also, I think if we knew all about how people behaved when they were teenagers, no one would ever go out with anyone.

‘Nice to meet you,’ said Olly gruffly.

Looking at them both, I felt very strange suddenly. I wasn’t comparing them. Definitely not. This was not a competitive thing. Clelland still had a chance to appear a complete prick.

‘Olly’s a lawyer,’ I said helpfully.

‘Really? And I shook your hand?’ said Clelland, and smiled.

I’d hardly ever seen his smile. Not something suburban rebels do very often, smile. They talk about suicide and Leonard Cohen quite a lot. It was lovely. His teeth were slightly crooked, and the incisors pointed in.

‘Oh gosh, yes, sorry about that. But we only really screw you if you’re a multinational, our lot,’ said Ol. ‘Just the sixth circle of hell really.’

‘So you’re not one of those chaps that advertises on telly for fat ladies who fall off their chairs at work?’

‘No. Although I help Flo, you know, when it happens at home,’ he said with a grin.

‘Yes,’ said Clelland in the way people have to when someone makes a slightly off-colour remark. I couldn’t tell if he thought it was funny either.

‘What line are you in then?’ said Olly, half eyeing a waitress carrying a bowl of prawn toast. He reached out a hand and took four.

‘How come you can eat sesame seeds on toast and not on sausages?’ I said without thinking. Both the boys looked at me.

‘Because it’s toast,’ said Olly, as if explaining to a four-year-old. ‘Anything can be done with toast.’

Clelland stuck his bottom lip out at me.

‘Um … I’m an ethical logistician.’

‘A what?’ I said.

‘Oh. Do you perform on stage a lot?’ said Ol. ‘Puppets and so on?’

‘No …’

‘OK, what is that then?’

‘Well, I try to direct aid through the best routes. Try to play down the possibility of it being hijacked by armies, that kind of thing.’

I admit it. My heart leaped. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d have dreamed he’d be doing. Well, that or some sort of tragic Moulin Rouge-style poet, obviously, but this – heroic, good for the world, manly – I had a vision of him standing on top of an elephant, for some reason. Then, I’m ashamed to say, one of me looking like Meryl Streep in Out of Africa-style linens, saying, ‘I hed a ferm in Efrica …’

‘I hate it,’ said Clelland. ‘It’s a pissy job.’

‘Really? It sounds interesting,’ said Olly.

‘Everyone says that.’ He ran his hand through his dark hair. ‘It’s bloody endless government bureaucracy, and as to how much good we even do at the end of the day I couldn’t tell you. Certainly doesn’t seem to make anything any better. God, I’m sorry. Am I being really depressing at a wedding? Was I always like this?’

He looked directly at me, and I couldn’t meet his eyes. Get a grip, I told myself fiercely. Any minute, surely, Olly was going to spot the hot vibes coming out of my head and give me serious trouble.

‘You were worse,’ I said.

At Heather’s wedding, just before my birthday, I had flirted madly with the best man, danced up and down with the ushers and ended up sharing a bottle of champagne down by the fountain with a grumpy-looking Clelland, who was talking about the bollocksy bourgeois imperative of forced enslavement. It was all rubbish, of course. It’s just coincidence it came true for Tashy’s sister.

‘I’m never getting married,’ he’d said, and my little teenage heart had dropped. What was I thinking? That we were going to run away to Gretna Green? Why did I think men two years older than me were grown up? Because I didn’t know anything else, I suppose.

‘Oh,’ I said, fingering the fading roses of my bouquet. I dabbled my hand in the fountain in what I hoped was an alluring manner.

‘Ritualised enslavement,’ he grumped, pulling me to him. ‘For men and women.’

His long thin hand brushed across the top of the lace on my dress. I shivered. We had done heavy, long-distance, serious snogging, but I still had a very heavy layer of being-a-non-slut, anti-aids parental-warnings, throw-it-all-away-pregnant-schoolgirl outright fear morality hanging over my head and hadn’t let him go any further than the waistband of my C&A knickers.

‘You’re lovely,’ he said. I beamed. He took this as an excuse to slide his hand up the sixteen layers of tulle I was wearing. Unsurprisingly, he got fatally lost on the way, and the whole romance of the fountain started to peter away as we kissed onwards, he groping desperately somewhere heavily hemmed only slightly north of my knees.

The more he pawed around, frantic, the more awkward and embarrassed I became. This wasn’t how they described it in our purloined copies of Cosmopolitan at all. And there certainly wasn’t much of this going on in Lace, or Sweet Valley High.

‘Oh God,’ said Clelland in lust and frustration.

I gulped, still at the stage of kissing when you’re very conscious of what to do with your saliva.

‘Erm …’ I said.

Then he found it.

‘Ooh!’ I said.

He looked at me, but with a misty expression in his eyes, like he couldn’t really see me.

I gulped again. ‘I can’t,’ I said firmly.

‘What – never?’ he said, focusing on me.

‘I don’t know …’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you are m-my girlfriend, Flo, and I-I thought …’

He was so red-faced I thought his head might explode. This new stutter wasn’t helping either.

‘I … I don’t think so.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Everyone! Bridesmaids! Ushers!’ I heard Tashy’s mum calling from the house. ‘Come on! We’re cutting the cake!’

We looked at each other, two frightened deer.

Clelland went to withdraw his hand but before he could I had stood up quickly. I was as pink as my skirt as I ran to the house, leaving him there looking after me, confused.

Heather looked a picture, her hair as enormously rigid as it had been that morning, but now teetering unpredictably to the left.

She held her hand over Merrill’s. The cake was a ludicrous, six-storey pink and white nightmare, flowers curling crisply round every corner. I shut my eyes tight.

‘What are you doing?’ whispered Tashy, who I’d been relieved to find when I came in.

‘Making a wish when they cut the cake.’

‘You don’t make a wish when you cut a cake at a wedding. You’re thinking of blowing out candles at a birthday.’

‘You do too make a wish,’ I said, cross with her.

‘Even if you did, it wouldn’t be your wish, would it? It would be theirs, asking for lots of children or something. Yuk! Imagine Heather making babies!’

‘Yuk!’ I said, smiling and felt slightly better. They raised the knife. I shut my eyes anyway.

‘I wish … I wish I was grown up, and love was easy.’

Funnily enough, when the photos had been taken and the glasses raised, I did feel different, in a strange way. I put it down to that miraculous change that’s meant to happen to you when you’re coming of age, like getting your national insurance number, but which I’d never felt before.

Now, however, a boy had touched me. I was a woman. I had made a woman’s choice. I was going to behave like one. And also, of course, I was desperate not to lose him.

I walked straight up to Clelland, looking so out of place in the black shirt he’d insisted on wearing, dragged him on to the dance floor and kissed him like a woman should.

It wasn’t until years later it occurred to me how unbelievably childish and embarrassing this might have been for our respective families.

And, of course, families never let you forget. My dad had just arrived at Tashy’s wedding, late and a bit pissed. He came roaring up to Olly, Clelland and me.

‘Hello, young Clelland! Good to see you! Tell me, you promise not to smooch our girl here for the whole of the evening, will you? Like at some weddings I could mention.’ He slapped him on the back and snorted with laughter.

Olly’s ears pricked up.

‘Dad!’ I said in an agony of embarrassment. ‘That was years ago.’

‘I’ll try,’ said Clelland, looking amused.

‘Hello, Mr Scurrison,’ said Olly.

My dad is a bit rude to Olly. I don’t know why, but then my dad pretends not to dislike anyone, whilst holding deep personal convictions about people as varied as Jim Davidson and Tony Blair.

‘Ah yes, hello, Oliver. Didn’t see you there. Are you losing weight?’

This wasn’t fair. It wasn’t Olly’s fault he was getting perhaps a little more than a bit of a tum. We all worked long hours, and if you eat practically nothing and then have to fill up on sausage – well, things can get a bit out of hand. He looked fine in his three-piece suit, though.

‘Um, no. How are you doing?’

‘I’m fine, fine! Just keep me out of Flora’s mother’s way now.’

I grimaced. I realise it’s important to Dad to feel that the fact that they’ve split up is a bit of a jolly ‘Ooh, Vicar, where’s my knickers?’ farce, but I don’t have to like it. I was the one ringing home from my first term at university and listening to forty-five minutes of uninterrupted sobbing from my mother. I’m the one that has to be contactable every single night now, or she calls the police. Being an only child to a neurotic mum can be even less fun than it sounds. And it was his fault.

Why do so many people split up like that? ‘We’re just waiting for the kids to leave home.’ What does that even mean? ‘We’re waiting until our children take their first fluttering steps out into the world, forging their own personalities and identities and living alone for the first time, then we’re going to crack their worlds apart.’

I’ve forgiven my dad. You don’t, of course, have much of a choice, unless you want it to turn into a blood feud that cascades hatred down the generations. All I can say is, she was twenty-nine and it lasted six months and, of course, he wanted to come home afterwards. He told me it was his last chance; his last way to do something different and that I’d understand when I was older, and you know, sometimes, looking at my life, if I’m being honest, I probably can.

I was twisted when my mum wouldn’t take him back. Part of me just wanted everything to suddenly evaporate so that they would go back to the way things had been or, better, the way I’d have liked them to have been, more The Good Life than Butterflies. But I was glad she wasn’t doing it. I was glad she was standing up to him. Because, although I didn’t exactly have twenty years of marriage behind me, and I didn’t know much about life (though then I thought I knew pretty much everything), I would have liked to have been as firm as she was with the love of my life.

I could see her now, coming in, but decided to duck from her until I’d got rid of Dad. Watching her in silhouette I was struck by how old she looked; my dad just looked like a jolly, chubby, balding, middle-aged man, of which there are approximately ten million in Britain; good yeoman stock. My mother was painfully thin for her age – I was always trying to get her into milkshakes because of that brittle bone thing – and walked as if she was in pain. If you looked closely she was beginning to get a hunchback. Once your world is cracked open, you can’t go back, I think. She never could. I can barely remember the carefree, normal way me and my mother used to relate when I was a teenager – normally, with sulks and huffs and slamming doors. I didn’t behave very well either. But now, she was more like a housebound grandmother, and she trusted nothing.

God, Tashy was brilliant back then. I couldn’t decide which was worse: losing my dad or losing Clell. In fact, I was so wrapped up in my own misery, I was hardly there for my mum at all, something I will never forgive myself for. Tash and I had a grand tearing-up of Clelland’s letters (which I still read anyway; he was having a great time. I only ever got three, ’cos I couldn’t reply to any of them. What with? ‘Dear Clelland. My life is shit. Love Flora?). I got my head down and got out as quickly as I could, and I’d been trying my best to have fun ever since. Looking at Ol, I wasn’t sure it was working.

It was a bad age for me. I thought it was because nobody could ever love me that I would always be alone. After all, if you love only two men, and they both leave at the same time, it doesn’t bode well.

There’s a reason we never forget our first loves, as Tashy has patiently pointed out to me many, many times. Our young little hormone-seething bodies have never felt anything like this before. Your brain doesn’t know what’s happening to it. After the first one, at least you’ve got some forewarning of the triple whammy that’s going to happen to your head, your heart and your groin. You understand what is going on, even if that doesn’t give you much more power over it than you have at sixteen.

And, as has also been noted, if your first love kisses you hard on the lips then disappears (or goes to Aberdeen – technically the same thing), and travels all over the place in the holidays, and then you go to Bristol, it’s hard to get a proper handle on the whole deal. You haven’t watched them grow fat or old, or watched them mess things up or, heaven forbid, stayed with them and watched the infatuation curdle. And as you grow up and learn the inevitable compromises of real love, it’s hard not to remember the unlined face and innocent excitement, especially if you think the other person might feel the same.

Or, of course, even remember you that well.

We were standing to watch the speeches. Oh God, Max, no, please.

‘Why is a woman like a computer?’ he began ponderously, and there was a palpable shift in the audience as everyone prepared themselves to laugh at something that wouldn’t be in the slightest bit funny.

‘You can turn it on whenever you like …’

Clelland kept sneaking glances at me standing beside him, and – I couldn’t help it – I was curious too.

‘Three-and-a-half-inch floppies …’ droned Max.

‘I thought it was you!’ said my mother, loud and too bright. She appeared from nowhere, with too much powder on, looking nervous.

‘I’m your daughter,’ I said rather sharply. ‘Who could you mistake me for?’

‘Goodness, I don’t mean that. I just meant … where were you? I was worried.’

She looked around anxiously. I did too, instinctively checking where Dad was. She started to quiver if he got too close.

‘Just chatting to people,’ I said. I didn’t want to reintroduce Clelland to her. I’d spent enough emotional time with my mother; I didn’t like her getting upset over me.

‘All right. Well, don’t go too far, will you, darling? I hardly know anybody here. I can’t think why Tashy invited me. All these young people!’

‘Don’t be silly, Mum. You know Tashy’s mum and dad!’ In fact, Jean chose that moment to put her hand up and wave. ‘There you go!’

‘But they’re the parents,’ my mother said as if talking to an idiot. ‘They’re very busy at weddings. Well, so I hear. Who knows, eh?’

I’d been waiting for the first one of these. I was amazed it had taken so long. I realised Clelland was close enough to hear every word of this.

‘Erm, yeah, Mum.’

‘You and that lovely chap. So good together. And you’ve been together so long! You must be next. Oh yes, there’ll be a wedding soon for us, I think. Darling, think about it! It’ll be such fun! We can do it all together.’ And she tapped my arm in what she clearly thought was a reassuring manner. I saw Clelland raise his eyebrows.

‘Ah! There you are, Olly! Hello, darling! It’s Mummy!’

Unlike my father, my mother adores Olly and, it has to be said, he’s very good to her. I think he does know that because I don’t have any brothers he’s the only man in my mother’s life at all apart from the postman, and so he treats her well. She is a bit – well, very – clingy.

This ‘call me Mummy’ stuff has to stop, though. It really has to stop.

‘Hello, Mummy,’ said Ol, bending down and giving her a hug. I think perhaps what annoys me most is that sometimes I think Olly gets on with my mother probably better than I do. And vice versa. I often think they’d probably do better on their own.

My mother turned round. ‘I won’t say a word, dear!’ she mouthed to me.

Clelland leaned over. ‘Aren’t you going to reintroduce me to “Mummy”?’ he said, with a glint in his eye.

‘She probably didn’t recognise you,’ I said. ‘What with all the disappearing and everything.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You. Disappearing. To Aberdeen. Remember?’

He started. ‘I remember you not replying to any of my letters.’

‘It was a busy summer.’

‘Damn right,’ he said, and looked annoyed.

‘… goes down on you,’ said Max.

‘So you’re getting married?’

I shrugged. ‘God, no … I mean, I might, I haven’t decided …’

‘Hasn’t he asked you?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Are you going to force him into it against his will?’ he smiled.

‘Only if I really, really have to. And just with guns and dogs and things, nothing major.’

‘I’m sure you won’t have to. You should get married.’

‘And what makes you the great authority?’ I asked, panicking suddenly.

Why was I panicking? This was ridiculous. And anyway, he wasn’t wearing a ring: I’d checked.

‘I’m thinking about it.’

‘Oh, yes? Who’s the lucky girl? Haggis McBaggis, famous fisher lady of Aberdeen?’

‘Hello,’ said a beautiful dark-haired girl, suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

‘Who’s this?’

‘Well, she fishes,’ Clelland says, ‘but only for compliments. This is Madeleine.’

‘What are you saying about me?’ the girl said. ‘Ignore him, he’s unbelievably rude.’

‘See?’ said Clelland.

‘You are going to be in serious trouble later.’ And she tickled him on the nose.

‘Fantastic,’ he said.

Who’s this tart, I have to admit I was thinking.

‘Are the first four years of all relationships the worst?’ said the girl. ‘Tell me they are. I don’t think I could stand it any more.’

And Clelland put a strong arm around her and squeezed her to him.

‘Well, it won’t be like this when we get back to Africa,’ she said.

Is it my fate, I wonder, to always end up at the fountain at parties? I had slipped out the door as soon as I decently could, even though I could hear my mother asking people for me in the querulous tone she gets when she’s feeling upset. The twice-daily phonecalls were enough at the moment. I took my glass of champagne and wandered down the path. All wedding-focused country hotels have fountains. It comes with the brief.

I dallied my hand in the water again, and tried to think. Why – why did I feel like this? I was practically shivering. I felt suddenly as if my head was full of shame and fear, and just misery, and I didn’t know why. What was the matter with me? I was having a near-violent reaction to something that happened every day. So I’d met someone who used to be special to me – it was sixteen years ago, for goodness’ sake. It was as long a time since I’d last seen him as it was from when I was born and the time we first went out. God, that was grim. That whole summer was a period of my life I tried not to think about.

I certainly wasn’t thinking like an adult now, a sorted, happy person. I sipped my champagne and felt that dull ache you get at the bottom of your heart like when you’re a kid and you do something terribly, terribly wrong and you’re going to be in for it later. It’s hard to ignore your conscience. Sitting by that fountain, I knew. If I wasn’t going to end up like my father: dissatisfied, always looking for the main chance; if I wasn’t going to stultify myself, but, more importantly, if I wasn’t going to harm a good, decent kind man, who loved me, then—

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Olly. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you. I’m starving.’

He sat down, brushing sesame seeds off his waistcoat, bought to cover up his creeping paunch.

‘Hi, there,’ I said, nervousness bubbling up in my throat. I could taste it. Oh God. How could this have happened so quickly? We’d gone from happy couple, living together, and now I was on the brink of …

Well, we weren’t that happy, were we? Or rather, me, with my selfish, adolescent mind, and my desire to see the grass as always greener, and my dreaming my life away: Olly hadn’t a chance. God, I was a bitch.

Olly unsteadily started to bend down.

‘What are you doing?’ I said awkwardly.

It looked like – it couldn’t be. Tell me he wasn’t getting on one knee. TELL ME.

I stared at him in shock for a moment, and he picked up my shock in his own eyes, which suddenly looked a bit panicked.

‘Look, I know we don’t always get on so well …’ he started (badly, I thought).

‘FLORA!’ screamed another voice.

It is a witness testament to my immaturity and stupidity that for a second I thought it might be Clelland arriving, having realised as soon as he’d seen me that he’d been stupid, finally doing his last-minute dash to save me, save me from this life I had asked for but didn’t want.

It wasn’t, of course. It was my mother. They don’t sound at all similar, but I was in a very highly strung emotional mood. Nevertheless, at that moment, I was glad to see her. She came down the hill, looking frail and confused. I wondered sometimes if she was getting early-onset Alzheimer’s.

‘Flora darling, where are you? We need you!’ Her tone was querulous. ‘They’re cutting the cake.’

Olly stood up and pasted a big fake smile on his face.

‘Hi there, Mummy!’

‘Oh, hello, you two lovebirds. Wouldn’t think you’d want to miss this bit. Also, darling, you want to see the cake. I’m sure Tashy could tell you where she got it. You never know, could be useful …’

And she linked her arm into both of ours as we exchanged glances – his rueful; mine, I suspect, terrified – and we marched back up the hill to the house.

The cake was indeed a teetering, rose-encrusted thing of wonder. Tashy was grinning in that slightly terrified way again, and Max looked like he was getting quite frustrated with her as he was trying to get her to put her hand underneath his, rather than on top.

I glanced over where Clelland and his lovely girlfriend were deep in smiling conversation. Of course they were. Probably planning the same thing. And only a spiteful person wouldn’t wish them well. Everyone looking so happy.

I gulped. I was thirty-two years old. Suddenly it was as if I saw all round me people who were caught in a bubble of affection and love. And outside, unseen, there was me. My mother. My father. The spectres at the feast. The people who made the wrong choices. Who stuck with someone they didn’t really love out of age. Or fear. No, it was worse – my mum and dad had at least loved each other once. It was only me, with a good man I couldn’t love. I’d forgotten to sit down when the music stopped. Booby prize for me. I blinked back tears of utter, revolting, all encompassing self-pity.

‘For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter with you?’ said Olly. ‘Are you trying to draw attention to yourself?’

Tashy and Max were lifting the knife.

‘Darling? Darling, what is it?’ My mother was tugging on my sleeve. ‘Do you want one of my pills? I’ve got some in my bag. Shall we go outside?’

The tears were streaming now.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Olly, hissing sharply. ‘Pull yourself together. People are looking.’

I caught Clelland’s eye. Well, maybe I was staring at him, wild-eyed and tearful. He opened his hands.

‘What?’ he mouthed. ‘What is it?’

He didn’t look pleased that I was on the brink of causing a scene. His girlfriend looked annoyed, as well she might. The happy couple were too far away to notice yet, but I couldn’t stop the tears streaming down my Karen Millen and I was definitely causing a scene. But the lump in my throat wouldn’t go away.

They brought the knife down.

‘I wish,’ I whispered, louder than I’d intended.

‘What?’ said Olly. ‘This is not the time, Flora.’

I gulped.

‘I wish I was sixteen again.’

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.

But then, if I was sixteen, it dawned on me pretty slowly … maybe I didn’t own a flat in Maida Vale. After all, my wallet had disappeared.

No. This was awful. Even though I suppose if I’d thought about it … no, that didn’t help, of course. The more I thought about it, the worse it got.

Let me see. Oh my God. No flat meant … no money … no job … no …

It is, believe me, a profoundly shocking moment when you realise that the only person who may understand your predicament is David Icke.

Suddenly I heard a noise. Shit. Someone was coming in the front door. Please, please, please let it be the upstairs neighbour. Please.

The footsteps stopped, and I dived behind the black leather modern chair in the middle of the room – which looked rather good, I noticed. The door opened. For a heartbreaking second I thought I – or rather, my thirty-two-year-old self – was walking through the door.

It wasn’t me, thank God, although the woman looked a lot like me. I guess she looked like how I used to look. I suppose I wasn’t as unique as I’d always liked to think.

About my (old) age, quite slim, wearing a casual-looking trouser suit. I liked her face. She looked like the kind of person I’d like to be friends with. Nice, good-fun grown-up person. Who was going to have a screaming blue fit if she saw a sulky teenager wearing a cheap anorak hiding behind her sofa.

‘Fuck!’ she yelled. ‘Where’s my fucking keys!’

She started throwing pillows and papers around. Was London really this full of cross thirty-something women? Whoever this girl was, it was like watching a facsimile of my own self. Was I really this stressed out all the time? Did I get that frown line down the middle of my forehead?

‘OK. If it’s not bad enough that I’m already late for my fucking meeting with my fucking prick boss, I can’t find a fucking thing in this overpriced shoebox.’

This was uncanny. She could be me. Closer up, I could see there was a crease in the middle of her forehead, a bloating around her hips – too many late nights staring at a computer screen, too many corporate lunches. No wedding ring. Flustered, snappy.

She wasn’t me. But she was.

When she found her keys and slammed the door hard on the way out, I sat on the floor and started to cry. Properly cry too. Big, dripping tears that went down my nose and hurt my throat. I didn’t make much noise, but they just kept coming. What was happening to me? What was I going to do? Had I been erased for everyone? But what about Mum and Dad? They seemed to know who I was. Where had I been? Where was I now?

I felt so sorry for myself. But no matter how much you feel like crying yourself sick, it can’t last for ever. Eventually, I pulled myself up and left quietly this house that was no longer mine, wondering who I might be, and where I might be going.

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