Do You Remember the First Time?

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 FriendsReunited 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