The Boy I Loved Before Page 3

  ‘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.’
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br />   ‘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.

  The vows were very traditional, and Max looked all right too, gruffly uming and erring over the responses – not that anyone was looking at him, of course. Even when we were kids, grooms always had something of an interchangeable quality to them. It was Barbie who was important. Ken was neither here nor there.

  My eyes had kept scanning the pews for Clelland, just in case, but I couldn’t see him. Maybe he was that bald geezer over there … or that enormously fat chap wearing the colourful waistcoat …

  ‘God, how long is this going to go on for?’ whispered Oliver with a wink, although he had just been singing ‘Jerusalem’ loudly and off key, and was clearly having a sensational time. I swallowed, guiltily.

  ‘I hope there aren’t too many prawns,’ Olly was saying as we walked into the large marquee, which was bedecked with flowers and ruffled decorations. The sun was glinting off lots of very clean silverware and shiny glasses, waiting to be replenished on into the night. One billion photographs later and I still hadn’t seen Clelland.

  ‘Or anything with nuts. Or salad cream.’

  ‘I’m sure the Blythes are far too posh for salad cream,’ I said, and squeezed his hand chummily.

  Olly was the pickiest eater I’d ever met in my life. I thought they thrashed that out of you thoroughly at boarding school, but I was obviously wrong, because he refused to eat most things that weren’t cheese or fish fingers, on various spurious grounds.

  ‘Well, you know viscous things upset my stomach.’

  ‘All fluids upset your stomach.’

  ‘Glooky ones most of all.’

  I took a quick look at the hors-d’oeuvres coming over. Excellent – sausages on sticks, with a slightly pretentious veneer of sesame seeds over the top. He’d be able to cope with those, once he’d picked off the seeds. And I guessed I’d better make my way over to the bride as well, once I got half a—

  My heart stopped in my throat. There he was, about ten feet away from me. Clelland. Looking exactly the same. In fact, if anything, he looked even younger. Then he turned his head away and disappeared into the crowd.

  ‘Oh my God!’ I said.

  ‘I know. Sesame seeds,’ said Oliver unhappily.

  ‘No, no. It’s just, I’ve seen an old friend. I have to go and say hello to … them.’

  ‘OK. I’m off to pat Max hard on the back as a kind of non-gay way of saying well done,’ said Oliver.

  I walked over to where Clelland had been. But even as I got there, I felt something was wrong. Was my mind playing tricks on me? How could that be such an exact replica of someone I hadn’t seen for sixteen years? I mean, people change in sixteen years, don’t they? It would be completely impossible for it to be otherwise. I mean, of course, I’d hardly changed, thanks to the miracles of modern cosmetics … well, maybe I had a bit. Suddenly I gulped and smoothed down my hair. Did he have a picture rotting away in his attic?

  I spotted his dark jacket again. He was talking to one of the waitresses with his back to me. I took a deep breath and walked up to him.

  ‘Erm … hey there!’

  The man turned round. And at once I realised my mistake. The likeness, though, was absolutely extraordinary. The figure stared at me. This wasn’t a man at all, hardly more than a boy.

  ‘Sorry, but … oh, you look familiar.’

  ‘I’m Flora Scurrison,’ I said warily.

  His face was furrowed in concentration for another minute, then he broke into an enormous smile. ‘Oh my God! Don’t you remember me?’

  Something was ringing at the back of my mind.

  ‘It’s Justin!’

  Justin, Justin …

  Suddenly it hit me.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘You’re Clelland’s little brother.’

  The one with the baby monitor.

  ‘Yes! I recognise you from the photos.’

  ‘I am SO OLD,’ I said, almost without realising it.

  ‘Everyone keeps coming up and telling me how much I’ve grown. I am nearly seventeen, actually. Quite grown up.’ He looked petulant all of a sudden and I was reminded overwhelmingly of Clelland.

  ‘You look a lot like your brother.’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘He does not,’ said a deep voice.

  I looked up.

  ‘Hello, Flora. Justin, scram.’

  ‘You always treat me like a kid,’ scowled Justin.

  ‘That’s because you sulk and whine all the time.’

  Justin sulked off, whining.

  ‘He’ll be OK. He needs to eat about nine times a day, so the buffet’s probably the best place for him.’

  Clelland was … well, it was impossible I’d have mistaken him for anyone other than himself.

  He had filled out, of course; he couldn’t possibly be as absurdly skinny as he had been; that would have been David Bowie and nobody else. But his black, unruly hair was just the same as ever.

  ‘I thought he was you,’ I said, not trusting myself beyond a short sentence.

  ‘God, really?’ He glanced behind him at his brother, mooching off. ‘Was I such a slouching runt at that age?’

  ‘Worse!’ I gave a very peculiar slightly strangulated laugh. ‘At least he’s not wearing a Morrissey T-shir
t. Every day!’

  ‘I loved that T-shirt.’

  ‘I know.’

  I held out my hand. ‘Clelland, it’s good to see you.’

  ‘Oh God, it’s John. Please. Nobody calls me that any more.’

  ‘No, really? I thought you swore you’d never get tied down into “bourgeois tying-down name fascism”.’

  ‘Yeah? And do you still spell your name P-f-l-o-w?’

  ‘No,’ I said, going scarlet.

  ‘So … what have you been up to?’ He looked … he looked great. And wryly amused to see me.

  ‘Oh, lots of things,’ I said, as he easily lifted two glasses of champagne off a passing waiter.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Well, I went to university then got a job and moved back to London.’

  ‘That’s three things.’

  ‘Over quite a long period.’

  We stood for a moment.

  ‘What have you been doing then?’ I asked awkwardly.

  Oddly, I could see over my shoulder, Justin had bumped into Olly at the buffet and was pointing out foodstuffs to him.

  Clelland – John, but I really couldn’t think of him any other way – shrugged.

  ‘Well, I went to Aberdeen.’

  ‘I remember that,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, looking slightly awkward for a second, which came as a big relief to me. From the way our conversation had been going, I was beginning to wonder if I’d made up the whole romance in a psychotic episode and we were distant acquaintances greeting each other at a Rotary Club dance.

  ‘Then I joined VSO for a couple of years – get out and see the world, you know.’

  ‘Oh yes. Where did you end up?’

  ‘Africa.’

  ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’

  ‘Complete and utter shithole. I hated every second of it. I wanted to catch malaria so they’d have to send me home.’