The Boy I Loved Before

by Jenny Colgan

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I have to stay at home with my parents. And they’ll go nuts if I stay out all night.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Can’t you tell them you’re staying at Tashy’s?’

  ‘It’s amazing how quickly everyone remembers their teenage guile. Anyway, no, I can’t, because Tashy’s a big scary adult woman, and anyway, I’m grounded.’

  ‘Really?’ He started to laugh. ‘You’re grounded. This is fucking nuts.’

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘I know. It’s nuts! Would you like me to buy you an ice cream to make up for it?’

  ‘Do you fancy me more now?’ I asked. Despite everything, insecurity was creeping in.

  ‘Olly,’ ordered Tashy. ‘Never answer that question.’

  ‘OK.’ Olly decided that, after all, we would have an ice cream. Ice cream was one of his major food groups. We followed him over to the van.

  ‘And a flake for the little lady,’ he was saying.

  Tashy looked at me. ‘I think he’s taking it rather well.’

  ‘Rather too well,’ I said. ‘I don’t want him getting boners for teens.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You watch TV. It trains them like beagles.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t serious about Jamie Theakston. Were you?’

  ‘Well, I find his dungeon proclivities a little overwhelming for my untouched body, but I’m not automatically ruling out any of the boy bands.’

  ‘Be serious. What about when you get back?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  Olly returned, bearing 99s.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘when are you going to get back to us?’

  ‘Well, assuming I want to come back,’ I said musingly.

  I surprised even myself.

  ‘Student grants,’ Tashy was saying earnestly. We’d repaired to the ICA. ‘Sweaters with big holes in the sleeves. Living off one pot of chilli for an entire week.’

  ‘Finals,’ said Olly.

  ‘Sitting your driving test. Which, by the way, they’ve made much, much harder.’

  ‘The Co-op.’

  ‘Other idiotic young people all around you.’

  ‘High hopes being dashed all over again.’

  ‘Middle-class students exploring socialism over long boring conversations.’

  ‘Trying to get on the London property ladder.’

  ‘Middle-class students telling you all about how their gap year in India really changed their life.’

  ‘Having to dance in public.’

  ‘Smoking dope again.’

  ‘A LEVELS!!!’

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘Look, it just came out. A possibility. I know it would be awful.’

  ‘Crazy awful.’

  ‘It’s just …’ I said. ‘I could … I could choose everything. Do things differently this time.’

  ‘What’s wrong with what we had?’ said Olly, staring hard at his cappuccino.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just … there’s so many possibilities. I mean, what if I went to film school?’

  ‘Flora, your favourite film is Goldeneye,’ said Tashy.

  ‘Mmm. He’s so beautiful. Oh God – and, really, far far too old for me now.’

  ‘I don’t think they let you in to film school just for fancying movie stars.’

  ‘They should,’ I said. ‘Then they’d stop casting Robin Williams in things.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be film school. Maybe I could be an illustrator, or a teacher … OK, maybe – no, make that definitely – not a teacher. Maybe I could go travelling for a bit. Ooh, join an ad agency. That always looked like fun. I could work as an intern. Maybe go into government. Be one of those clever wonks like in The West Wing. I bet there’s billions of things I could do. And I know what they are. And I know how to network. And this way, I could choose my life, properly, based on the world as it is and not someone desperately trying to get their UCCA forms filled in on time.’

  They both looked at me. Olly stopped playing around with a packet of sugar.

  ‘I always thought we had a good life,’ he said quietly.

  I suddenly hated the fact that Tashy was here.

  ‘We did,’ I said as earnestly as I could.

  ‘You say that. In the past tense, by the way. Of course. It sounds reasonable. But then … but then, you hated it enough to rent the fabric of space and time to get away from it. From us. From me.’

  Suddenly, savagely, he threw down the sugar, which ripped and sprinkled over the top of the table like a tiny hailstorm. He stood up, put on his coat, and made to storm out. Then he realised he hadn’t paid his share, paused, took out his wallet, threw some money on the table, and, finally, left.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ said Tashy. ‘I didn’t even know you two were having problems that bad.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know you were having problems with Max till I found you weeping on a park bench.’

  We both stared at our coffees.

  ‘I—’ We started at the same time.

  ‘You go first,’ said Tashy.

  ‘I think … honestly, you haven’t seen what happens at the wedding, but it’s not pretty.’

  ‘Why, what happens at the wedding?’

  ‘I’m not sure I should say.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Olly proposes.’

  ‘Ohmigod! Congrat—’

  There is a default setting for thirtysomething women, and Tashy hadn’t quite learned how to switch it off.

  ‘I mean, gosh, that puts a spanner in a few things.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Ooh, does he steal my thunder? Bad, attention-stealing friend.’

  ‘Definitely not. In fact, he doesn’t even get a chance to finish. Mum interrupts. In fact, we get interrupted just before your cake cutting.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Tashy. ‘So you really did do it on purpose.’

  We walked to the tube station together and were just about to go our separate ways, Tashy tutting when I bought a child’s ticket when she knew for a fact we both used to do it until we were nineteen, when I heard a rapidly becoming familiar voice.

  ‘Flora! Flora! What, so, now you go travelling without me, yes? Perhaps you’d be happier pretending I didn’t exist, no? You run away from home, you run away from your job, you run away from your best friend – you’ve gone crazy? You’re on drugs? Perhaps somebody gave you drugs in detention. So now you are up, in Trafalgar Square, working as a prostitute to earn more money for drugs? You’re a crack whore now? That is why you are too ashamed to see your best friend? All the whoring, yes?’

  Her accent seemed to get ridiculously strong when she was annoyed. Stanzi was wearing a hideous off-the-shoulder grey top with a pair of white combat trousers covered in ribbons, and little white ankle boots. To my eyes she looked like a crazed baby slut. She was clearly furious with me.

  ‘Stanzi,’ I said, trying to give Tashy a rueful smile but not quite managing it, ‘this is Tashy.’

  Constanzia looked at her with what I realised was a glazed expression she kept for grown-ups. ‘Very nice to meet you,’ she said cursorily. Then she leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Is that your crack whore madam?’

  ‘Ssh!’

  Tashy gave the tight smile she normally reserved for traffic wardens and people who work in electrical appliance shops. ‘Hello. Nice to meet you.’

  ‘And what is your connection to Miss Scurrison,’ said Stanzi in a ludicrously polite voice.

  ‘Um … this is, er, an external guidance person my parents hired for me.’

  Stanzi looked suspicious. ‘Oh, how lovely!’ she said, as if she had just been invited to a castle for tea.

  ‘And this is Constanzia,’ I said.

  She was tugging on my arm again. ‘You have a head shrink and don’t tell me?’

  ‘She’s very boring,’ I whispered back.

  ‘Yes, Constanzia, I have the authority to have Flora sectioned if I want to,�
� said Tashy loudly.

  ‘I have to talk to her in private for a second,’ I said to Stanzi.

  ‘She’s insufferable!’ said Tashy, as soon as we were in the corner alone.

  ‘She’s alright,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘I wish you were there with me.’

  Tashy smiled. ‘Look. I’ve got an appointment with the dressmaker this afternoon.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Well, I always wanted to ask you, but I never felt I could because you’d hate it so much. But now it’s all so weird that I’m going to.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Would you like to be my bridesmaid?’ She laughed as she heard herself say it.

  I stared at her. ‘But I might not still be …’

  ‘Well, let’s deal with that when it comes up, shall we?’

  We hugged. ‘Will you phone Olly for me?’ I said. ‘See how the land lies?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It was the first thing I was going to do. And you take a good long think about a damn fine man.’

  Stanzi wanted to talk, to ask me things about school, but it wasn’t working. I felt numb. I was worrying about Olly, I was worrying about Tashy, and I was worrying about myself and what I was doing, and where.

  ‘You don’t listen to me any more,’ complained Stanzi, as we sat in the bumpy carriage back to Highgate. ‘You don’t want to be my friend any more, is that it? You never chat. We never play Pogcode any more.’

  Oh God, I doubted very much if there would be a time in all the histories of the world that I would understand whatever Pogcode was.

  ‘You don’t even want to try and crash Ethan’s party?’

  ‘Grounded.’

  ‘Yes, so you wait till your dad goes out and talk your mum round, like always.’

  ‘I’m not really in the mood for a party.’

  She stared at me. ‘Are you sick?’

  ‘I haven’t been feeling myself lately.’

  Ha-ha.

  ‘OK, what about we go and hang around outside his house again? You know you love doing that.’

  ‘No I don’t!’

  Constanzia shrugged. ‘Felt like you did all those other times we did it.’

  Oh, for God’s sake. I stared out of the carriage window.

  Finally I felt a quiet push at my elbow.

  ‘You still want to be my friend?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You shouldn’t love Ethan any more.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Couldn’t pick him out of a line-up.’

  Stanzi smiled. ‘And we’re still in the We Hate Fallon club?’

  ‘We invented that club.’

  Then Stanzi did some kind of funny hand-punching motion towards me that I was clearly supposed to know how to reciprocate. I ducked, grinned and punched her on the shoulder.

  My dad was in the sitting room, putting on his shoes. My mum was clattering out of sight in the kitchen. I checked my watch.

  ‘Oof, work!’ I said loudly, stretching. ‘They said I was putting too much in, so they sent me home early.’

  My mother leaned out of the kitchen to give me a searching look, but I did my best imitation of total innocence. My dad didn’t look up at all.

  ‘Going out?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘Where?’

  He looked at me, puzzled. ‘Just down the club. You know. As usual. Couple of jars with Mike and Peter.’

  I’d forgotten about them. His two best friends, from way, way back, when he was sales repping around the North East. His two best buds had covered for him on Saturday nights when he went off to see his bit. It was so ridiculously old-fashioned, it was just plain stupid. Him and his little gang of friends had conspired to make my mum so ill I sometimes wondered whether she’d be better off in hospital. And he could sit here, neatly tying his shoes and tell me that’s what he was going to do.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, as she came in from the kitchen to see me.

  ‘All right, love?’ she said. ‘How was work?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘Listen, why don’t you go out with Dad tonight?’

  My dad stiffened.

  ‘It’d be nice if you had a night out. You might enjoy it.’

  My mother clutched the dishtowel close to her stomach. ‘Flora.’

  ‘Give you a bit of a change.’

  ‘Now I don’t know about …’ Dad started.

  ‘Oh, Flora.’ My mother came over to me and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Do you have a boyfriend? Is there someone you want to bring back here? Duncan, I know you’d like to put everything off till doomsday, but I think it’s time we all had the talk.’

  ‘No, no, that’s not it at all,’ I said in horror.

  ‘Do we have to do this now?’ said my dad. ‘I’m late. Er, for the lads.’

  My mother shot him a filthy look, then crouched down beside me. ‘Now, Flora, we know you’re old enough, legally now … and we know you’ve always been a good girl.’

  ‘Christ,’ said my dad. He got up heavily.

  ‘Duncan! For Christ’s sake, for once in your life take responsibility for your own child. Sit down. This is important.’

  ‘So. Have you met someone?’

  My insides twisted in six different types of agony. I wanted to cover my ears, then say: ‘No, but why not have this little chat with Dad?’

  ‘We just have to say,’ she glanced hard at my dad, who was staring at the floor, ‘now you’re sixteen, we don’t mind if you want to go on the pill. But we’d be much happier if – ahem – you wanted to use those, er, condom thingies.’

  I shut my eyes tight.

  ‘And you will understand, won’t you, if we say that you can’t stay under the same roof?’

  My mother was blushing heavily. We stood in silence, the only sound, some drivel coming from the television set.

  There was a very long pause while I tried to work out what to say and how to handle it without coming across like an overexperienced tart. Finally, I decided on the mature approach that would make them proud of me and raise my grounding, so I could go and get pissed at Tashy’s. I summoned up all the agony columns I’d ever read.

  ‘Mum. Dad. Thanks. Thanks for feeling free to have such an adult conversation with me. That makes me very proud. I just want to say that I’m not having sex – ’ I had a sudden flash of Ol, sitting by himself at home, and felt terribly sad – ‘nor am I likely to in the near future. If I do, you can rest assured I won’t be going on the pill, as I don’t want to be infertile by the time I’m thirty-four, particularly with the way fertility’s going in males.’ Christ, I hadn’t thought of that. What if I stayed here, then by the time I got to twenty-five, the entire male race did actually go extinct after all, as promised by Germaine Greer? ‘And I do know how to use a condom. Um, they teach you in school.’ Well, maybe they do now. ‘But it doesn’t matter anyway, because studies show that sixteen is actually emotionally very young to have sex, and many people who do lose their virginity at an early stage regret it later, not waiting for someone important.’ That’d be me then.

  My parents stared at me.

  ‘Oh God,’ said my dad.

  ‘You have met someone, haven’t you?’ said Mum.

  ‘No!’

  ‘I can’t believe she’s thought it through,’ said my dad, shaking his head. ‘My own little girl.’

  ‘What! I’m just being really mature about this!’

  My mother gave me a cuddle. ‘Oh, darling. And it seems like yesterday you were just our innocent baby!’

  ‘I’m not doing anything!’

  ‘I have to go,’ said my dad.

  I stood up and looked him in the eye. ‘Don’t you do anything either, Dad!’ I pretended to make it sound jolly. And, I hate to say it, but as he scurried out the door I was pleased.

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ I said. ‘Remember how we used to
bake together?’

  ‘When you were seven, we used to bake together,’ she said, confused.

  ‘Well, let’s try that again.’ I took her arm and we went into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, no, it’s not a teacher, is it? Please, let it not be a teacher,’ she said.

  Chapter Seven

  For a teenager, with supposedly very few responsibilities beyond school and my own good time, I couldn’t believe how unbelievably tired I was. I had thought I would be full of youthful energy, forgetting that teenagers sleep even more than students, amazingly. The situation was worse in my case because I felt I was constantly performing in a play without cues. I got through most of the following week under house arrest from my parents. They were watching me very carefully, and whispering to one another in corners, which I was going to have to take as a good sign, because last time round, they hardly spoke to each other at all.

  Then there was school. How the hell did I ever do any of this? I was doing English, maths, chemistry, and general studies A levels. Again. In fact, this was the first problem. I had long regretted – well, accountancy, obviously. One of the things I’d always wondered was, if, instead of doing business studies at university – dry as dust but, as my dad had pointed out before I went, ‘very useful’; obviously he was already predicting who was going to have to be the main provider in our little family – I’d done something I’d always fancied – history of art, say. Long hours of cultural discussion in libraries. Ooh, maybe I could go to St Andrews and see if I couldn’t get a crack at Prince William. Or even go for the big boys, Oxford or Cambridge. Nothing wrong with Birmingham, of course, it was a great laugh. But it hadn’t taken me long in life to realise that yes, going to one of the really snobby places really did open doors for you.

  On the next day back at school I picked up the first book out of my book bag. The folded-over corner was on a chapter entitled ‘Reagents and Conditions for One-Stop Conversions’. It was full of Greek characters. I didn’t have a scooby about a single bit of it. And even if I read it and read it and managed to convince myself I did, what was the one thing I’d already worked out in my head? What was the one thing I knew for definite I did not want to be doing in whatever bollocks-up of a future I might be in for this time round?