Do You Remember the First Time?

your day off too.’
    ‘You’re allowing me to go off with a stranger?’ I said. ‘Just like that?’
    ‘You should be a bit more grateful to Miss …?’
    ‘Miss Blythe,’ said Tasha, grandly.
    ‘Can I give you some money for cola?’ said my dad to Tash.
    ‘No, not at all.’
    ‘Come on, I know what you teachers get paid.’ And tomy mortification and Tashy’s obvious delight he pulled out a fiver and gave it to her. ‘I can’t thank you enough for keeping our daughter on the straight and narrow,’ he said.
    ‘She’s a one!’ said Tashy. ‘But we’ll keep working with her. You know, as parents I think you’re doing a great job.’
    My parents gazed at Tashy like they’d fallen in love.
    Stanzi came skidding towards us.
    ‘That beetch, she is in there so long I think I am going to die of suffocation!’
    She clocked Tashy. ‘Her again! She is everywhere!’
    Mr Di Ruggerio wasted no time. He gently cuffed Stanzi round the ear.
    ‘You give your teachers more respect than that, huh? She help your friend; I think we need to get her to help you, yes? Huh?’
    And, wildly protesting, Stanzi was borne away with the rest of the party.
    ‘See you tonight then!’ I yelled.
    ‘I am brilliant,’ said Tashy as we were left alone.
    ‘You most certainly are not,’ I said.
    ‘I’m a genius. And now you must call me Miss Blythe. And we have a fiver to spend. Woo!’
    ‘That could have gone really wrong,’ I said.
    ‘What plan did you have?’
    ‘I was going to sneak away.’
    ‘Ooh, sneak away. How very sixteen of you.’
    ‘It could have gone wrong,’ I repeated.
    ‘But instead I got you off the hook and off being grounded.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘And, in fact, any time you want to thank me for dispelling the fact that you’ve been seen out and about with a thirty-five-year-old man, go ahead.’
    ‘Thirty-four,’ I grimaced.
    ‘OK then.’
    ‘I’m going to call you Mum the rest of the day.’
    ‘You jolly well are not.’
    ‘Thanks, Mum.’
    ‘Oh bugger.’ Tashy was back to grumpiness and wasn’t enjoying watching me try on size eight bridesmaid’s dresses. ‘Why didn’t I get married when I was seventeen?’
    ‘Because you’d have been a dejuiced neurotic old crone with four kids and on to number three out-of-work mechanic husband by now.’
    ‘But I would have looked so fabulous.’
    ‘No you wouldn’t. You’d have chosen an exact replica of the Princess Di dress, complete with humongous flouncy sleeves and you’d have looked like one of those dolls people used to use to cover their spare rolls of toilet paper in the guest bathroom.’
    Tashy was getting a fitting at the same time. She looked fabulous in her ivory sheath column, but she was sighing nonetheless.
    ‘Tash, if it makes you feel any better, I have pimples all the way up the yazoo.’
    ‘Really? Your actual yazoo?’
    ‘No, my breastbone, but they’re still pretty gross.’
    ‘Huh.’
    ‘And, like I keep telling you,’ I took her hand, ‘you look beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.’
    ‘Really?’
    I gestured at an enormous meringue in the window, which was corseted with crisscross gold thread, so it looked like some kind of wiring network. It had sleeves like hot-air balloons.
    ‘Try this one on just in case!’
    ‘I’d better get out of this dress,’ I said eventually, when we’d gazed.
    ‘Oh, I know, I know. It’s just – actually, I think it’s depressing me more than anything else.’
    ‘I thought we were having fun,’ I said. ‘And, you know, fun is a really rare quality for me these days.’
    ‘I’m just not …’ She collapsed in a heap of tulle. ‘I mean, I’m not even sure I want to have sex with him for the rest of my life. Or even one more time!’
    ‘But, Tash, you’ve always seemed so happy; so suited.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘I mean, before I came back …’
    ‘You too also seemed so happy, so suited.’
    We looked at the ground.
    ‘Why do we do this to ourselves?’ said Tashy sadly.
    ‘Because it’s the grown-up thing to do?’ I said unhappily.
    ‘Because this is all there is?’
    ‘Because family is the answer?’
    ‘Because Max was too cheap to buy wedding insurance?’
    I stood up.
    ‘Your dress is perfect,’ Tash said, grinning through the tears. ‘We’ll take it. And now I have to go.’
    ‘Where?’ I said. ‘What if I’m in need of some guidance?’
    ‘But I’m seeing Olly,’ she said, ‘and he expressly said, and I quote, “If at all