‘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!’