Do You Remember the First Time?

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 theushers 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 therecertainly wasn’t much of this going on