Do You Remember the First Time?

through layers of disgruntled tweenies without a backward glance.
    ‘Are you just going to cut up the side?’ she whispered, following my path.
    ‘Absolutely,’ I said, batting some tinsel off a girl’s head. ‘The trick is to pretend you did it by accident. Oh, sorry …’
    ‘Ow!’ I heard from some luckless girl who’d just got in Stanzi’s way.
    ‘There we are!’ Finally we were at the front, just – right up there, but watching from the side. ‘Now, all we have to do is not go to the toilet.’
    ‘Can we go on the floor?’
    ‘No, if you really need to go, borrow one of the smaller girls’ plastic handbags.’
    She giggled, and I looked around, feeling like David Attenborough, examining the tight flesh and suspicious looks from the girls around us. Even the flabbiest had a tummy-bearing top on, which I rather approved of. Why should fashion belong only to the Britneys of this world, goddamit? It was for all, no matter how many Big Macs you felt like eating.
    Nobody looked at us in the least bit strangely – well, why should they? And when the PA started playing ‘Follow the leader, leader, leader’, it suddenly seemed completely normal to hop to the right and hop to the left with sixty thousand similarly overtartrazined girls.
    I tried to buy Smirnoff Ices with my dad’s tenner, but despite my air of studied nonchalance, nobody but nobody was getting served here without some kind of special wristband, which obviously came with a credit card address, so I bought the most colourful, additives-filled soft drinks I could and two enormous hot dogs, which took most of my tenner, and I remembered I only had the one. Stanzi, however, insisted on counting out every penny of exactly half of the cost and I remembered how that worked.
    The girls behind us asked us to keep their places while they went to the toilet, and when they’d gone we giggled our heads off about the vileness of them and what happens when you get fifteen Portaloos and seventy thousand girls just starting to conquer the many vagaries of puberty.
    The noise was absolutely deafening, and it was pointless to do anything else except jump up and down, especially when the ponderous space music started.
    Suddenly the lights went down – way down; we were warned to go out and buy some merchandise or else, there was an enormous drum roll, the lights came up from the front very, very slowly, and suddenly a big, lanky, just about popstar walked to the front of the stage.
    I have never heard anything like the screaming that ensued. Well, I must have, but I just don’t remember Howard Jones being this popular. These girls could have solved the world’s energy crisis, if there was only a way to harness sixteen million decibels of pure raw screechpower.
    ‘Jesus fuck,’ I said.
    ‘AAAAAAAAAAAH!’ said Stanzi.
    It was a great gig. We screamed, we cried, we watched scores and scores of people get hauled off by the St John Ambulance, we divided into two halves of the audience and really tried to get our half to win, we believed him when he told us he loved London audiences second (after Scotland, of course, we understood), we booed the names Gareth and Will loudly and indiscriminately, we yelled, ‘MARRY US, DARIUS!’
    Then came the slow number. The lights came way down and he kneeled down and peered around the audience exaggeratedly slowly. A massive ‘ooohhh’ went up, to counterpoint the screaming, which continued.
    ‘Ah’m just looking for a special lovely lady tonight,’ he said. It was cheese at its pongiest, but we lapped it up. Girls were bursting their arms out of their sockets.
    ‘MEEEEE! MEEEEEE!’
    ‘Will it be this side?’ He went stage right, the opposite end from us. ‘The middle?’
    ‘THE MIDDLE!’ screamed a thousand tiny voices, injustifiable anger, seeing as they were the ones who had queued longest.
    ‘Or here?’ he said. And suddenly he was standing right over us, just a few feet away over the barrier.
    I laughed in spontaneous pleasure. ‘Hey!’ I said.
    He caught my eye and smiled back.
    Then he beckoned me up on stage.
    I nearly gagged. Stanzi was clinging on to my arm with a vice-like intensity. Two enormous Rock Steady bouncers were already heading over towards me.
    ‘Thank you,’ I mouthed, then indicated Stanzi to my right. ‘This one.’
    I really think it’s one of the most mature things I’ve ever done in my entire life.
    I have to say, seeing Stanzi up on stage being the object of a