The Boy I Loved Before Read online

  ‘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 resp
ectable 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.