Do You Remember the First Time?

about being sixteen again, I’d thought about staying out late and having fun, not having detention and staying in on Friday nights, watching old Have I Got News for You s listening to my mum and dad rip each other to shreds. Which, when I thought back to it, I had done quite a lot of. Before Clelland had come along and … no, I wasn’t going to think about that. Not only was it long ago, it was in a completely different world.
    Plus, I couldn’t have sat still even if I wanted to. I was fidgety and antsy, and the atmosphere between my mum and dad was too frosty for words. I wanted to run out the house and go find some friends and pretend none of this was happening, but I didn’t want to see that look in my mum’s eyes again. So I was a trapped animal. I looked around my blue-wallpapered bedroom.
    I would have thought I was far too old for CDs by Gareth Gates, but clearly not. Oh well, I was the uncoolest girl in the school, so maybe that explained it. There was some old Steps, going back a couple of years, and lots of No Doubt, whom I clearly loved. Good. I put them in the woefully poor quality pink CD player that must have been a present. There were also plenty of other people I really hadn’t heard of, which was a bit embarrassing. I thought I was a bit more up on music than this, but I had no idea who Jay-Z was, or who those seventeen pikey-looking boys in the poster on my wall were. I leafed idly through several copies of Smash Hits , and wondered if I could remember who was about to become number one, so I could put a bet on it. I wandered over to my white, faux Louis XIV desk, which was horrible, and had a framed picture of a tiger above it – I loved tigers. I opened the drawers, one after another: magazines, free lipsticks and endless, endless screeds of useless-looking homework dribbled out. Then I got to one that was locked. Ooh, locked drawer.
    I felt perversely guilty and sneaky about this. I was sneaking on a teenager’s privacy – the most precious thing to them. She would be horrified, totally horrified and mortified if she knew a complete stranger was going to look at her secret things. Even if the complete stranger was me.
    I fiddled about at the bottom of the pink fluffy bag and, sure enough, there was a tiny key there. Feeling guilty, and with my heart thumping quite loudly, I turned the lock.
    There was a miniature bottle of peach schnapps (which I drank immediately, of course, gagging slightly at the cloying sweetness), some cigarette papers, a couple of pictures of men with their shirts off – foxy – a copy of Fanny Hill (I smiled ironically to myself), and, oh God. Yes. What I had probably been subconsciously looking for all the time.
    I drew it out. It was rather nice, actually, a plain, lined book with a silk cover that looked like a big investment of my Co-op money.
    My Diary.
    I had actually burned my own 1980s version of this little beauty some years before when I realised that, in fact, when I was an old lady sitting in a home I probably wouldn’t be that fascinated by reading who had annoyed me particularly that week, and if I couldn’t remember a person’s name ten years after the event, I’d be very unlikely to do so in my brief periods of geriatric lucidity. There also seemed less and less point in hoarding it for grateful biographers from the British Library.
    More than that, though, I didn’t like seeing the lonely and confused little girl I was. I know all teenagers are lonely and confused, to greater or lesser extents, but surely a point of being an adult is that we get to dump that entire thing, like a snake shedding its skin, and escape into a world of lasting friendships, real fun, a lifting of the terrible, everlasting self-consciousness that weighs on your shoulders every single second of every single day. I didn’t want toread about a girl who didn’t know she could be happy. I didn’t want to read about a girl who painted castles in the air, who didn’t know what the world could bring, who planned the wedding that was currently driving Tashy crazy.
    And everything did get better, of course it did. In the shape of a degree, and a nice little car, and a flat, and a nice boyfriend. She got all of these things. I’m just not sure that’s what she meant, or thought that’s how they would feel.
    And here I was again . I lay down on my purple eiderdown and cringed. You know, I didn’t think I’d changed so much. I looked at my soft, lily-white hands.