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