I hate you by any name.
Sincerely,
Nat
Harriet
Lilith
Natalie
I was fifteen when my second life began.
It was the summer of 2000. Other things that happened that summer included Julie Fellows allowing Tom Pepper to touch her nipples for the first time, Sam Roberts claiming to have gone all the way with Rose Taylor and her denying it, Wayne Price getting permanently excluded for selling his crushed-up medication on the playground, Mrs Forman resigning her post as head of English amid rumours of an affair with the new science teacher, Pete Sampras winning his thirteenth Grand Slam title at Wimbledon, the leaders of North and South Korea meeting for the first time and the News of the World campaigning for new legislation giving parents the right to know whether a convicted paedophile lived in their area.
Sheltered from such dramas, my first life had been pretty regular. I grew up in a small town in the countryside. I had a mother, a father and a brother. My parents separated when I was eleven, but my mum, my brother and I only moved across town, a few streets away. After we moved, I fell out with my dad for a few years. He began dating twenty-three-year-olds, going to raves and acting like a teenager. I began revising for my SATs, reading books and swapping notes with boys in class. I had my first kiss when I was eleven – with Harry Heeley on the bus back from swimming practice while Kayla Weatherford timed us with her digital watch and Danny King looked out for Mrs Rice walking up the aisle. Shortly after that I started secondary school, where I held hands with Ben Legg, Robbie Burton, Chris Price, Michael Peterson, Stephen Hunt, Simon Shaw, Steven Critchley, David Robson, Gavin Gregs, Reece Cook and a guy at youth club known as Spike.
My favourite item of clothing was a floor-length denim skirt I could hardly walk in. My dark blonde hair reached my shoulder blades in a thick tangle, curtaining my face when I wanted to hide from the world. I’d recently purchased my first pair of tweezers and a box of Jolen personal bleach but had yet to use either, thus noticeable hairs shadowed both my upper lip and between my brows. I was short, not even five foot one – a situation I had tried to rectify a month ago by convincing my dad to spend £16 on five-inch silver platform sandals. I’d worn them with denim pedal-pushers to go shopping and would never again remove the Bowie-esque disasters from beneath my bed.
I considered a day a good one if I managed to avoid embarrassing myself during the seven excruciating hours spent at my mediocre school in the next town. They were few. Most recently, the blonde, bronzed netball captain had seemed to befriend me in order to confirm rumours that I had a crush on Stuart Oxford and, moments after I confided in her, summoned him to tell me – over the sniggers of all around – that he had a girlfriend (a hockey-playing, make-up wearing, French-kissing, Winona Ryder-look-alike girlfriend), but if she and all the other girls in this and every other school coincidentally fell in a vat of beauty-destroying acid, perhaps he’d take me to the cinema. Later that week, I’d also managed to alienate Rachael, the one friend I still had, while we secretly watched her sister’s Sex and the City videos by claiming with confidence that spooning was a kinky form of anal sex and I thought it disgusting. She’d asked her sister to clarify and told me at school the next day that I was full of shit and would probably die a virgin.
While on the topic, though I’d had a few boyfriends and even touched Peter Booth’s thing after we’d been ‘going out’ for six months (but only for a second before feeling utterly repulsed, darting out of the tent to find another cherry-flavoured Hooch and telling him I didn’t want to be his girlfriend any more), I had never handled a condom, still believed you could get pregnant from oral sex and had a poster of Dean Cain dressed as Superman on my wardrobe door that I’d torn out of Shout magazine at the age of twelve.
However, for all my naiveties, I was worldly-wise enough to realise owning up to them was out of the question. I may have known nothing about boys or sex that I hadn’t read in the Barbara Taylor Bradford novels my mum left in the loo, but I had never received less than an A*. I studied long words in the dictionary with the same voracity others my age collected Pokemon cards, I watched the news rather than cartoons and I made it a point to have every adult who met me comment, at least to themselves, ‘She’s so mature for her age.’
Why was I mature? One therapy analysis would conclude it had something to do with being a product of a broken home, my parents splitting up the same year I transferred from primary to secondary school and my devastated mother telling me every nasty thing she could think about my father as we packed our family lives into boxes and moved out of the thirteen-room Georgian detached house that had been a home for the first eleven years of my life. Another would suggest it was down to the amount I read and my stubborn insistence on skipping straight from The Famous Five to Anita Shreve, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker and Paul Auster, bypassing entirely those Goosebumps and Point Horror years that might shape an average teenager’s development. And another theory entirely would say that, as of yet, I wasn’t any more mature for my age than every other teenager who wants to be grown: that it was what came next that thrust me into an adult world with a child’s mind.
My second life began one Saturday in March when I begrudgingly followed my mum to a tea party at a neighbour’s house. We lived on a row of skinny Edwardian semis on the edge of town, the gardens backing on to a small wood beyond which acres of farmland stretched towards the horizon. The party was at the end of the street. Even my brother James decided this outing required sufficiently little effort to warrant attending, so the three of us plodded the few dozen steps along the pavement to be ushered through to the open-plan kitchen of number twenty-seven.
Once inside, the host Annabelle handed us mugs of tea and directed us through clumps of people to help ourselves from the buffet table. I loaded a plate with sausage rolls and fairy cakes and scuttled to a chair in the corner. When I’d swallowed my first mouthful and was reaching for my sugary tea, a voice spoke from my left.
‘I hate these things.’
I looked over and saw the mildly familiar face of Annabelle’s husband.
‘Isn’t this your party?’ I placed another sausage roll on my tongue and, noting the glass of wine in his hand, wondered if he was drunk.
‘Oh yeah, of course you have to put on a show, keep them all happy.’
‘What d’you mean?’ I asked, only half interested.
‘See over there?’ He pointed. ‘My in-laws. She chairs the WI and he sets the church quiz every Tuesday. If I didn’t throw a party, especially for a “big” birthday like this, I’d be hung, drawn and quartered by the gossipy blue-rinse brigade. Barbara’d come knocking on our door asking Annabelle what’s wrong, was I ill? Were we having marital problems? Annabelle would try to shut her mother up and Barb’d shriek, “What will everyone say?” and we’d end up having a party just to calm her down anyway. Much easier this way.’
I tried to stifle a giggle and almost choked on a large flake of pastry as he put on an old woman’s voice and flailed his arms in prim horror.
‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that. How old are you anyway?’
‘How old do you think I am?’ He looked at me with a smile.
‘Oh no, now you’ll get offended.’
‘I promise I won’t.’
‘Hmm, okay. Well, you said it’s a big one, and I’m pretty sure you’re older than my parents, so I guess it must be fifty.’
‘HA!’ His face cracked into a grin and he spilt a little wine on his beige trousers as he chuckled to himself.
‘What?’