Do You Remember the First Time?

studious and intense-looking. He stalked around on his own a lot, which at the time I thought made him romantic and individual rather than, as I supposed now, horribly lonely and ‘going through an awkward stage’, as my mother puts it. And he had double English on Mondaysand Thursdays, which was good, as, crossing over from chemistry, I could accidentally be there to say hello to him, Tashy stumbling along beside me, giggling her head off. He had to say hello to me because our parents knew each other, even though he was two years older and thus anything else would have been completely verboten .
    At family parties he would sit in corners, dressed all in black, grumpily reading Jean-Paul Sartre or The Lord of the Rings , listening to Echo and the Bunnymen on his Walkman, refusing to eat meat from the barbecue, and the adults would all cluck and giggle over him and I would be furious with them on his behalf, but never brave enough to go up and say more than hello, red-faced and twisted up inside.
    So, for a long time I was just one of the annoying people buzzing around him, trying to get him to clean out his bedroom. Until the year I turned sixteen. Big year that one.
    And now I had one day’s notice to see him again. Sixteen years on.
    At my birthday just a few weeks before, when I turned thirty-two, we went to Bluebird, and had a nice posh dinner out and drank Veuve Clicquot and everyone talked about someone we knew who was getting divorced, which made us feel better about most of us not even being married yet, apart from Tashy, who was about to get married and looked green for most of the evening. Then someone kicked off about house prices, and none of the women would eat the delicious bread, and the smart sex toys and silly things people had bought me started to look a bit stupid, and I started to feel almost impolite to insist that everyone cameout and spent what turned out to be an absolute ton of money to celebrate with me for seemingly no reason. Then we got home and I was unreasonably rude to Olly and spent half an hour with the magnifying mirror counting wrinkles, then I wondered if I was ever going to have a baby and then I went to sleep. It wasn’t always like that.
    Tashy and I had planned my sixteenth birthday party with almost as much precision as we planned this wedding, and with a lot more excitement. There was going to be some sort of sparkling wine, a punch. ‘I’m making it!’ said Dad sternly. ‘I don’t want anyone being sick.’
    ‘But you’re not going to stay upstairs!’ I whined.
    ‘Of course we are. Do you think we’ve never been to a teenage party before? We’ll be patrolling upstairs. With guns.’
    ‘PLLLEEEEAAASSEEE! It’ll be the worst birthday party ever.’
    Finally, bless them, they’d borrowed Clelland’s little brother’s baby monitor and set it upstairs, then gone to the pub next door with it practically stapled to their ears. I was the only one who threw up.
    There was a reason I was looking forward to this party. I had my first ever boyfriend.
    Clelland had actually been away most of that summer. I’d moped around like a nightmare, working in the Co-op and contriving to make my parents’ lives a misery. Then, right at the end of one afternoon … he’d walked in, brown, thin, and heartstopping.
    ‘Hello,’ said Clelland, looking up from his bag of vegetables, which he had to buy and cook himself, in his parents’ efforts to get him out of this stupid vegetarian phase he was going through (I thought this was thrillingly noble).
    ‘Hi there.’
    I gulped. My international crush – more than Paul Young, John Taylor and Andrew Ridgeley in one – was here, standing right before me … looking fit and tanned. I had to be cool. I had to be!
    ‘Haven’t seen you around,’ I said dully.
    ‘Hi,’ he said, swallowing too. ‘Well, I went off travelling for a bit.’
    ‘Really?’ I stuttered. ‘Nice.’
    ‘Not really.’ He shrugged unconvincingly, looking around the dingy dungeon and nylon uniform I’d clearly spent my summer in. ‘But I met a few people, you know. Students and stuff, hanging out. Then we all went to Spain, found this really cheap place, we worked as grape crushers and slept out under the stars. They let us drink as much wine as we wanted. Then we took the money we made and all went to Glastonbury for five days. But it wasn’t that great or anything.’
    ‘Good!’ I said. ‘I mean, sorry you had a rotten time.’
    ‘Yes?