The Boy I Loved Before Read online

  ‘God, I haven’t wanted you to die for ages,’ I said, before my brain had properly engaged. It was not a good moment. Olly stumbled over.

  ‘Jesus, Flo, I can’t eat a damn thing. Do you know they have almonds in the salad? You’d think they’d put on a few fish fingers just in case. This is going to be even worse than the Stricklands’ wedding, and that made me sick.’

  ‘You were drunk.’

  ‘God, yeah.’

  Clelland raised his eyebrows.

  ‘This is Oliver,’ I introduced him. ‘My, er, boyfriend.’

  Why the ‘er’? I was conscious that perhaps I wasn’t sounding as thrilled as I could.

  Clelland put his hand out. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Olly, holding out his hand.

  ‘Clelland’s an old school friend.’

  I’d never told Olly about Clelland. At first it was because I was obeying the ‘don’t tell new boyfriend about exes; they must think you’re a virgin’ type bullshit law. And then … well, some things are private. Also, I think if we knew all about how people behaved when they were teenagers, no one would ever go out with anyone.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Olly gruffly.

  Looking at them both, I felt very strange suddenly. I wasn’t comparing them. Definitely not. This was not a competitive thing. Clelland still had a chance to appear a complete prick.

  ‘Olly’s a lawyer,’ I said helpfully.

  ‘Really? And I shook your hand?’ said Clelland, and smiled.

  I’d hardly ever seen his smile. Not something suburban rebels do very often, smile. They talk about suicide and Leonard Cohen quite a lot. It was lovely. His teeth were slightly crooked, and the incisors pointed in.

  ‘Oh gosh, yes, sorry about that. But we only really screw you if you’re a multinational, our lot,’ said Ol. ‘Just the sixth circle of hell really.’

  ‘So you’re not one of those chaps that advertises on telly for fat ladies who fall off their chairs at work?’

  ‘No. Although I help Flo, you know, when it happens at home,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clelland in the way people have to when someone makes a slightly off-colour remark. I couldn’t tell if he thought it was funny either.

  ‘What line are you in then?’ said Olly, half eyeing a waitress carrying a bowl of prawn toast. He reached out a hand and took four.

  ‘How come you can eat sesame seeds on toast and not on sausages?’ I said without thinking. Both the boys looked at me.

  ‘Because it’s toast,’ said Olly, as if explaining to a four-year-old. ‘Anything can be done with toast.’

  Clelland stuck his bottom lip out at me.

  ‘Um … I’m an ethical logistician.’

  ‘A what?’ I said.

  ‘Oh. Do you perform on stage a lot?’ said Ol. ‘Puppets and so on?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘OK, what is that then?’

  ‘Well, I try to direct aid through the best routes. Try to play down the possibility of it being hijacked by armies, that kind of thing.’

  I admit it. My heart leaped. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d have dreamed he’d be doing. Well, that or some sort of tragic Moulin Rouge-style poet, obviously, but this – heroic, good for the world, manly – I had a vision of him standing on top of an elephant, for some reason. Then, I’m ashamed to say, one of me looking like Meryl Streep in Out of Africa-style linens, saying, ‘I hed a ferm in Efrica …’

  ‘I hate it,’ said Clelland. ‘It’s a pissy job.’

  ‘Really? It sounds interesting,’ said Olly.

  ‘Everyone says that.’ He ran his hand through his dark hair. ‘It’s bloody endless government bureaucracy, and as to how much good we even do at the end of the day I couldn’t tell you. Certainly doesn’t seem to make anything any better. God, I’m sorry. Am I being really depressing at a wedding? Was I always like this?’

  He looked directly at me, and I couldn’t meet his eyes. Get a grip, I told myself fiercely. Any minute, surely, Olly was going to spot the hot vibes coming out of my head and give me serious trouble.

  ‘You were worse,’ I said.

  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 turn. 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 the way things had been or, better, the way I’d have liked them to have been, more The Good Life than Butterflies. But I was glad she wasn’t doing it. I was glad she was standing up to him. Because, although I didn’t exactly have twenty years of marriage behind me, and I didn’t know much about life (though then I thought I knew pretty much everything), I would have liked to have been as firm as she was with the love of my life.

  I could see her now, coming in, but decided to duck from her until I’d got rid of Dad. Watching her in silhouette I was struck by how old she looked; my dad just looked like a jolly, chubby, balding, middle-aged man, of which there are approximately ten million in Britain; good yeoman stock. My mother was painfully thin for her age – I was always trying to get her into milkshakes because of that brittle bone thing – and walked as if she was in pain. If you looked closely she was beginning to get a hunchback. Once your world is cracked open, you can’t go back, I think. She never could. I can barely remember the carefree, normal way me and my mother used to relate when I was a teenager – normally, with sulks and huffs and slamming doors. I didn’t behave very well either. But now, she was more like a housebound grandmother, and she trusted nothing.

  God, Tashy was brilliant back then. I couldn’t decide which was worse: losing my dad or losing Clell. In fact, I was so wrapped up in my own misery, I was hardly there for my mum at all, something I will never forgive myself for. Tash and I had a grand tearing-up of Clelland’s letters (which I still read anyway; he was having a great time. I only ever got three, ‘cos I couldn’t reply to any of them. What with? ‘Dear Clelland. My life is shit. Love Flora?). I got my head down and got out as quickly as I could, and I’d been trying my best to have fun ever since. Looking at 01, I wasn’t sure it was working.

  It was a bad age for me. I thought it was because nobody could ever love me that I would always be alone. After all, if you love only two men, and they both leave at the same time, it doesn’t bode well.

  There’s a reason we never forget our first loves, as Tashy has patiently pointed out to me many, many times. Our young little hormone-seething bodies have never felt anything like this before. Your brain doesn’t know what’s happening to it. After the first one, at least you’ve got some forewarning of the triple whammy that’s going to happen to your head, your heart and your groin. You understand what is going on, even if that doesn’t give you much more power over it than you have at sixteen.

  And, as has also been noted, if your first love kisses you hard on the lips then disappears (or goes to Aberdeen – technically the same thing), and travels all over the place in the holidays, and then you go to Bristol, it’s hard to get a proper handle on the whole deal. You haven’t watched them grow fat or old, or watched them mess things up or, heaven forbid, stayed with them and watched the infatuation curdle. And as you grow up and learn the inevitable compromises of real love, it’s hard not to remember the unlined face and innocent excitement, especially if you think the other person might feel the same.

  Or, of course, even remember you that well.

  We were standing to watch the speeches. Oh God, Max, no, please.

  ‘Why is a woman like a computer?’ he began ponderously, and there was a palpable shift in the audience as everyone prepared themselves to laugh at something that wouldn’t be in the slightest bit funny.

  ‘You can turn it on whenever you like …’

  Clelland kept sneaking glances at me standing beside him, and – I couldn’t help it – I was curious too.

  ‘Three-and-a-half-inch floppies …’ droned Max.

  ‘I thought it was you!’ said my mother, loud and too bright. She appeared from nowhere, with too much powder on, looking nervous.

  ‘I’m your daughter,’ I said rather sharply. ‘Who could you mistake me for?’

  ‘Goodness, I don’t mean that. I just meant … where were you? I was worried.’

  She looked around anxiously. I did too, instinctively checking where Dad was. She started to quiver if he got too close.

  ‘Just chatting to people,’ I said. I didn’t want to reintroduce Clelland to her. I’d spent enough emotional time with my mother; I didn’t like her getting upset over me.

  ‘All right. Well, don’t go too far, will you, darling? I hardly know anybody here. I can’t think why Tashy invited me. All these young people!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Mum. You know Tashy’s mum and dad!’ In fact, Jean chose that moment to put her hand up and wave. ‘There you go!’

  ‘But they’re the parents,’ my mo
ther said as if talking to an idiot. ‘They’re very busy at weddings. Well, so I hear. Who knows, eh?’

  I’d been waiting for the first one of these. I was amazed it had taken so long. I realised Clelland was close enough to hear every word of this.

  ‘Erm, yeah, Mum.’

  ‘You and that lovely chap. So good together. And you’ve been together so long! You must be next. Oh yes, there’ll be a wedding soon for us, I think. Darling, think about it! It’ll be such fun! We can do it all together.’ And she tapped my arm in what she clearly thought was a reassuring manner. I saw Clelland raise his eyebrows.

  ‘Ah! There you are, Olly! Hello, darling! It’s Mummy!’

  Unlike my father, my mother adores Olly and, it has to be said, he’s very good to her. I think he does know that because I don’t have any brothers he’s the only man in my mother’s life at all apart from the postman, and so he treats her well. She is a bit – well, very – clingy.

  This ‘call me Mummy’ stuff has to stop, though. It really has to stop.

  ‘Hello, Mummy,’ said Ol, bending down and giving her a hug. I think perhaps what annoys me most is that sometimes I think Olly gets on with my mother probably better than I do. And vice versa. I often think they’d probably do better on their own.

  My mother turned round. ‘I won’t say a word, dear!’ she mouthed to me.

  Clelland leaned over. ‘Aren’t you going to reintroduce me to “Mummy”?’ he said, with a glint in his eye.

  ‘She probably didn’t recognise you,’ I said. ‘What with all the disappearing and everything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You. Disappearing. To Aberdeen. Remember?’

  He started. ‘I remember you not replying to any of my letters.’

  ‘It was a busy summer.’

  ‘Damn right,’ he said, and looked annoyed.

  ‘ … goes down on you,’ said Max.

  ‘So you’re getting married?’

  I shrugged. ‘God, no … I mean, I might, I haven’t decided …’