Do You Remember the First Time?

‘“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.