The Boy I Loved Before Read online

  ‘Hasn’t he asked you?’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘Are you going to force him into it against his will?’ he smiled.

  ‘Only if I really, really have to. And just with guns and dogs and things, nothing major.’

  ‘I’m sure you won’t have to. You should get married.’

  ‘And what makes you the great authority?’ I asked, panicking suddenly.

  Why was I panicking? This was ridiculous. And anyway, he wasn’t wearing a ring: I’d checked.

  ‘I’m thinking about it.’

  ‘Oh, yes? Who’s the lucky girl? Haggis McBaggis, famous fisher lady of Aberdeen?’

  ‘Hello,’ said a beautiful dark-haired girl, suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Well, she fishes,’ Clelland says, ‘but only for compliments. This is Madeleine.’

  ‘What are you saying about me?’ the girl said. ‘Ignore him, he’s unbelievably rude.’

  ‘See?’ said Clelland.

  ‘You are going to be in serious trouble later.’ And she tickled him on the nose.

  ‘Fantastic,’ he said.

  Who’s this tart, I have to admit I was thinking.

  ‘Are the first four years of all relationships the worst?’ said the girl. ‘Tell me they are. I don’t think I could stand it any more.’

  And Clelland put a strong arm around her and squeezed her to him.

  ‘Well, it won’t be like this when we get back to Africa,’ she said.

  Is it my fate, I wonder, to always end up at the fountain at parties? I had slipped out the door as soon as I decently could, even though I could hear my mother asking people for me in the querulous tone she gets when she’s feeling upset. The twice-daily phonecalls were enough at the moment. I took my glass of champagne and wandered down the path. All wedding-focused country hotels have fountains. It comes with the brief.

  I dallied my hand in the water again, and tried to think. Why – why did I feel like this? I was practically shivering. I felt suddenly as if my head was full of shame and fear, and just misery, and I didn’t know why. What was the matter with me? I was having a near-violent reaction to something that happened every day. So I’d met someone who used to be special to me – it was sixteen years ago, for goodness’ sake. It was as long a time since I’d last seen him as it was from when I was born and the time we first went out. God, that was grim. That whole summer was a period of my life I tried not to think about.

  I certainly wasn’t thinking like an adult now, a sorted, happy person. I sipped my champagne and felt that dull ache you get at the bottom of your heart like when you’re a kid and you do something terribly, terribly wrong and you’re going to be in for it later. It’s hard to ignore your conscience. Sitting by that fountain, I knew. If I wasn’t going to end up like my father: dissatisfied, always looking for the main chance; if I wasn’t going to stultify myself, but, more importantly, if I wasn’t going to harm a good, decent kind man, who loved me, then—

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Olly. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you. I’m starving.’

  He sat down, brushing sesame seeds off his waistcoat, bought to cover up his creeping paunch.

  ‘Hi, there,’ I said, nervousness bubbling up in my throat. I could taste it. Oh God. How could this have happened so quickly? We’d gone from happy couple, living together, and now I was on the brink of …

  Well, we weren’t that happy, were we? Or rather, me, with my selfish, adolescent mind, and my desire to see the grass as always greener, and my dreaming my life away: Olly hadn’t a chance. God, I was a bitch.

  Olly unsteadily started to bend down.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said awkwardly.

  It looked like – it couldn’t be. Tell me he wasn’t getting on one knee. TELL ME.

  I stared at him in shock for a moment, and he picked up my shock in his own eyes, which suddenly looked a bit panicked.

  ‘Look, I know we don’t always get on so well …’ he started (badly, I thought).

  ‘FLORA!’ screamed another voice.

  It is a witness testament to my immaturity and stupidity that for a second I thought it might be Clelland arriving, having realised as soon as he’d seen me that he’d been stupid, finally doing his last-minute dash to save me, save me from this life I had asked for but didn’t want.

  It wasn’t, of course. It was my mother. They don’t sound at all similar, but I was in a very highly strung emotional mood. Nevertheless, at that moment, I was glad to see her. She came down the hill, looking frail and confused. I wondered sometimes if she was getting early-onset Alzheimer’s.

  ‘Flora darling, where are you? We need you!’ Her tone was querulous. ‘They’re cutting the cake.’

  Olly stood up and pasted a big fake smile on his face.

  ‘Hi there, Mummy!’

  ‘Oh, hello, you two lovebirds. Wouldn’t think you’d want to miss this bit. Also, darling, you want to see the cake. I’m sure Tashy could tell you where she got it. You never know, could be useful …’

  And she linked her arm into both of ours as we exchanged glances – his rueful; mine, I suspect, terrified – and we marched back up the hill to the house.

  The cake was indeed a teetering, rose-encrusted thing of wonder. Tashy was grinning in that slightly terrified way again, and Max looked like he was getting quite frustrated with her as he was trying to get her to put her hand underneath his, rather than on top.

  I glanced over where Clelland and his lovely girlfriend were deep in smiling conversation. Of course they were. Probably planning the same thing. And only a spiteful person wouldn’t wish them well. Everyone looking so happy.

  I gulped. I was thirty-two years old. Suddenly it was as if I saw all round me people who were caught in a bubble of affection and love. And outside, unseen, there was me. My mother. My father. The spectres at the feast. The people who made the wrong choices. Who stuck with someone they didn’t really love out of age. Or fear. No, it was worse – my mum and dad had at least loved each other once. It was only me, with a good man I couldn’t love. I’d forgotten to sit down when the music stopped. Booby prize for me. I blinked back tears of utter, revolting, all encompassing self-pity.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter with you?’ said Olly. ‘Are you trying to draw attention to yourself?’

  Tashy and Max were lifting the knife.

  ‘Darling? Darling, what is it?’ My mother was tugging on my sleeve. ‘Do you want one of my pills? I’ve got some in my bag. Shall we go outside?’

  The tears were streaming now.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Olly, hissing sharply. ‘Pull yourself together. People are looking.’

  I caught Clelland’s eye. Well, maybe I was staring at him, wild-eyed and tearful. He opened his hands.

  ‘What?’ he mouthed. ‘What is it?’

  He didn’t look pleased that I was on the brink of causing a scene. His girlfriend looked annoyed, as well she might. The happy couple were too far away to notice yet, but I couldn’t stop the tears streaming down my Karen Millen and I was definitely causing a scene. But the lump in my throat wouldn’t go away.

  They brought the knife down.

  ‘I wish,’ I whispered, louder than I’d intended.

  ‘What?’ said Olly. ‘This is not the time, Flora.’

  I gulped.

  ‘I wish I was sixteen again.’

  Chapter Three

  I groaned. God, I must have been pissed as a fart. I couldn’t remember a damn thing. Jesus. A crack of light was creeping across the floor. Ow. Bugger it.

  ‘Flora! Get up!’

  I could hear my mother’s voice. I panicked. Oh no. That must mean I’d got drunk and she’d had to bring me home!!! Oh no! She’d be sitting with Olly right now and they’d be having tea and agreeing with each other about what a handful I was, and how she doesn’t know how he puts up with me. Later on I’ll get lots of sniffy remarks fr
om him about behaviour fitting a grown woman and taking responsibility. Oh fuck. It’s like having my parents back together, those two sometimes. Except at least my dad can be fun.

  I cringed as I remembered how mean I’d felt towards Olly. I hope nothing happened; I didn’t go and throw a drink at Clelland’s girlfriend … I didn’t, did I? I probed my mind for any tender spots of excruciating embarrassment, but there weren’t any there. Just a big black hole. That was peculiar. I don’t usually have vast gaps in my memory. I can’t—

  ‘Flora!’ Oh God. She sounds cross. Maybe I have done something really awful; my mother never gets cross at me nowadays. She’s too afraid, in case I leave her, or stop picking up the phone. If anything it’s the constant nervous entreaty that drives me so mad. This was almost better.

  Suddenly I notice something. I’m in my old bed, at my parents’ house. Oh God. Oliver must have dumped me here. Oh no. Something must be terribly wrong. Did he finally get up the guts to propose and … ?

  Now, surely I’d remember something like that. But there’s nothing. Nothing there at all.

  ‘Yeah? Mum, could you bring me a cup of tea?’ I called out. Testing the water.

  ‘You must be joking, young lady!’ I could hear her starting up the stairs. ‘If you’re not up in two minutes, I’ll get you up. In fact …’

  Then she walked into my room and I jumped three feet in the air.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything except point.

  ‘Flora! Stop gawping like a fish and get ready.’

  It was my mother – I can’t dispute that. But here’s the weird thing: she looked decades younger. Her skin was unlined, her hair brown and she seemed to have lost the hunch. Even her tone of voice was completely different. This was my mother how I remembered her from when I lived at home. I swallowed. I was half asleep, after all. She must have decided to sort her life out. Maybe after seeing Tashy’s parents at the wedding. Maybe she’d started on HRT and it was just kicking in.

  ‘God, Mum, you gave me a fright. You look great, by the way.’

  She sat down on my bed. ‘Look, Flora, I’m sorry your party didn’t work out, but you can’t mooch around for ever. You still have to get up and face everyone today.’

  What the hell had gone on at Tashy’s do?

  Then she did something odd. As she turned to go she tutted and said something very strange under her breath.

  ‘Teenagers!’

  I couldn’t quite have heard her as she said it. It just chimed in with the fact that something was very, very wrong. My room, for example, the room my mother had redecorated in beige as a guest room, even though the only guest she ever got was me, was covered in lots of pin-ups of R&B stars, and I don’t even like R&B. There were clothes all over the floor that I didn’t recognise. Had she got a lodger? Had I been unconscious for months? What the hell was going on?

  I got out of bed – wearing, I noticed, a long flouncy nightie that I normally wouldn’t be seen dead in – and stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom. I held on to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. God, for someone who’d been so drunk she’d passed out and had to be taken to her mother’s house to sleep it off, I looked great.

  I blinked at the reflection again, then, like a complete idiot in a cartoon, rubbed my eyes to make sure.

  You don’t see yourself changing. Sure, you notice a wrinkle now and again, the odd half-stone that creeps on and off with annoying regularity. But it’s still you. Your face. Your best Zoolander face in the mirror. The way you sometimes catch sight of yourself in a shop window, then hope nobody else saw you looking at yourself. When I was a teenager, I used to spend hours staring in the mirror, mooning at myself, wondering. Am I pretty? Will my curls ever straighten out? Is one eye bigger than the other? Will boys like me? If I sleep on alternate ears, will they stop sticking out? Who am I going to be?

  And it was exactly this face that was staring back at me now. No straightening irons had been applied to this hair. No subtle blonde streaks. No serums. No carefully plucked brows.

  I wasn’t sure what was going on but had it pretty much figured for one of those extremely convincing dreams. Any moment, the Queen and a big hippopotamus were about to crash through the window and take me flying. Until then, I was going to make the best of it. I stared and stared. This looked like my face from at least ten years ago.

  I had a crop of spots on my forehead. I moan about the occasional pimple now, but I’d forgotten what it was like when they used to grow in small fields. But apart from that, my skin was fresh, rosy … I turned round. I disappeared. I stretched out a long, white thin arm. Oh my God. How could I not have known this wouldn’t stay for ever? How could I not have realised that years of pizza and red wine could have an effect on this? When I was really younger, I thought I had an enormous arse and spent my entire time covering it up. I turned round again. OK, it wasn’t Kylie, but in absolutely nobody’s world was this a big arse. Wow! I jumped up and down. Nothing wiggled at all. Look! Look! Hip bones! Bones! Oh my God! OK, my hair was a frizzy disaster, with what appeared to be pink bits dyed in, but that’s OK, I know about expensive haircare products. I wished it wasn’t a dream, because this could have been so much fun. As if my body had turned into a Barbie doll, I could dress up and parade around. This was the best dream in the entire world.

  ‘Get out of the bathroom! You’re going to be late for school!’

  Now, this was too much. Oh my God. School. Tashy and I sitting up the back of English, giggling our heads off.

  No, I should just wake myself up before a monster came or something. I’m always quite lucid when I dream anyway. I always know that something won’t happen. I’d probably end up trapped in the bathroom, desperately knowing I was late for school on a test day and …

  I have never felt water flow over my hands in a dream. I have never turned a tap on and got wet.

  ‘Hurry up!’

  The door was banging. And I had to realise: that wasn’t Ollie’s voice. That was my dad’s.

  Bloody hell.

  I stood in the shower for a long time, shaking, although I turned the water up as hot as it could go. What the hell was happening to me? It couldn’t … this was impossible. What was I doing standing, washing myself (with impossibly pert breasts. Jesus, these were up by my neck!) in our old blue bathroom suite?

  I thought. What had happened yesterday? I had gone to the wedding. I had met Clelland. I had fallen out with Oliver. I had made a wish over a wedding cake …

  It couldn’t be. It couldn’t.

  You know when something terrible happens and everyone says ‘Don’t panic’?

  Now, I believed, was the time to panic.

  Slowly, very slowly, I reached out of the shower and put a towel round my tiny waist.

  I was back in my nightie, and my dad pushed past me into the bathroom. I barely caught sight of him. Jesus. Had I … travelled back in time? What was it, 1987? I caught my breath. So I could … what? Bet on general elections? Ooh, maybe go discover Take That! Maybe I could marry Robbie. He’d be older than me too. Was Jonathan Ross still free? He turned out to be a pretty good bet. Are the Backstreet Boys still children?

  I stumbled back into my bedroom and leaned against the wall, my eyes closed, my heart racing a mile a minute.

  Hang on, I should stop just planning on not-yet famous people I want to get off with; do something properly. 1987. Maybe I could save that baby who fell in a well! Oh my God! I have to save Princess Diana! Ooh, I can become the most successful medium there’s ever been! I started to get feverishly excited. What could I invent? Did Dysons exist yet? Ooh, mobile phone stocks! I was going to be so rich!

  I shook my head. This was nuts.

  Opening my eyes, I took in a picture of – oh, for God’s sake — Blue on my wall. And Darius, I noticed wryly. Oh shit. This couldn’t be right.

  I went and sat down in front of my old dressing table. Yes. Still
incomprehensible, still from the eighties, still there. My old face. Right. This time, I was wearing sunscreen every day. Not a wrinkle to be found.

  So. I tried to put it together in a brain that was dealing with sudden shocks equivalent to six bonfire nights and a bowlful of LSD. My parents were younger. And still together. But Darius was looking older than me.

  I didn’t want to come over all Dr Who, but, unbelievably, I was actually going to have to ask someone what year this was.

  To postpone the inevitable, and try to calm my breathing, I tried to think about clothes. What age was I? The tits suggested nothing much under fifteen, anyway. Oh God.

  I opened my wardrobe door tentatively. Yes, there it was, as if I’d never been away. That bottle-green skirt. The pale green shirt. The thick tights. Tashy and I had sworn blind we would never ever, ever put this damn school uniform on again. But what were my options at this point?

  My dad, stroking his still-thick sideburns. I’d forgotten about those.

  ‘Hey, love,’ he said. ‘Sleep well?’

  I was too petrified to say anything, judging that this wouldn’t exactly be an unusual response at the breakfast table from a teenager. Finally, ‘Can I borrow your paper?’ I stammered out.

  ‘Nice to finally see you,’ said my mother, and I suddenly felt a residual sense of annoyance that she was pleased at something I was doing.

  ‘Tcch,’ I tutted.

  ‘Why do you want to see the paper?’ asked my dad. ‘I’ll read you your stars, if you like. Oh, here we are: Virgo. “Today you are going to be late for school and are going out dressed like a bin bag.” Gosh, they’re spot on, aren’t they, love?’

  I fumbled my badly tied tie, hands shaking.

  ‘Don’t tease her,’ said my mum crossly. ‘For God’s sake, give her the bloody paper.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said my dad. ‘Here.’ He handed it to me. ‘Happy now?’ he said to my mother.