The Boy I Loved Before (5 page)

Authors: Jenny Colgan

BOOK: The Boy I Loved Before

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âI hate it,' said Clelland. âIt's a pissy job.'

âReally? It sounds interesting,' said Olly.

âEveryone says that.' He ran his hand through his dark hair. âIt's bloody endless government bureaucracy, and as to how much good we even do at the end of the day I couldn't tell you. Certainly doesn't seem to make anything any better. God, I'm sorry. Am I being really depressing at a wedding? Was I always like this?'

He looked directly at me, and I couldn't meet his eyes. Get a grip, I told myself fiercely. Any minute, surely, Olly was going to spot the hot vibes coming out of my head and give me serious trouble.

âYou were worse,' I said.

At Heather's wedding, just before my birthday, I had flirted madly with the best man, danced up and down with the
ushers and ended up sharing a bottle of champagne down by the fountain with a grumpy-looking Clelland, who was talking about the bollocksy bourgeois imperative of forced enslavement. It was all rubbish, of course. It's just coincidence it came true for Tashy's sister.

âI'm never getting married,' he'd said, and my little teenage heart had dropped. What was I thinking? That we were going to run away to Gretna Green? Why did I think men two years older than me were grown up? Because I didn't know anything else, I suppose.

âOh,' I said, fingering the fading roses of my bouquet. I dabbled my hand in the fountain in what I hoped was an alluring manner.

âRitualised enslavement,' he grumped, pulling me to him. âFor men and women.'

His long thin hand brushed across the top of the lace on my dress. I shivered. We had done heavy, long-distance, serious snogging, but I still had a very heavy layer of being-a-non-slut, anti-aids parental-warnings, throw-it-all-away-pregnant-schoolgirl outright fear morality hanging over my head and hadn't let him go any further than the waistband of my C&A knickers.

âYou're lovely,' he said. I beamed. He took this as an excuse to slide his hand up the sixteen layers of tulle I was wearing. Unsurprisingly, he got fatally lost on the way, and the whole romance of the fountain started to peter away as we kissed onwards, he groping desperately somewhere heavily hemmed only slightly north of my knees.

The more he pawed around, frantic, the more awkward and embarrassed I became. This wasn't how they described it in our purloined copies of
Cosmopolitan
at all. And there
certainly wasn't much of this going on in
Lace
, or
Sweet Valley High.

âOh God,' said Clelland in lust and frustration.

I gulped, still at the stage of kissing when you're very conscious of what to do with your saliva.

âErm â¦' I said.

Then he found it.

âOoh!' I said.

He looked at me, but with a misty expression in his eyes, like he couldn't really see me.

I gulped again. âI can't,' I said firmly.

âWhat â never?' he said, focusing on me.

âI don't know â¦'

âI'm sorry,' he said, âbut you are m-my girlfriend, Flo, and
I-I
thought â¦'

He was so red-faced I thought his head might explode. This new stutter wasn't helping either.

âI â¦ I don't think so.'

âOf course,' he said.

âEveryone! Bridesmaids! Ushers!' I heard Tashy's mum calling from the house. âCome on! We're cutting the cake!'

We looked at each other, two frightened deer.

Clelland went to withdraw his hand but before he could I had stood up quickly. I was as pink as my skirt as I ran to the house, leaving him there looking after me, confused.

Heather looked a picture, her hair as enormously rigid as it had been that morning, but now teetering unpredictably to the left.

She held her hand over Merrill's. The cake was a ludicrous,
six-storey pink and white nightmare, flowers curling crisply round every corner. I shut my eyes tight.

âWhat are you doing?' whispered Tashy, who I'd been relieved to find when I came in.

âMaking a wish when they cut the cake.'

âYou don't make a wish when you cut a cake at a wedding. You're thinking of blowing out candles at a birthday.'

âYou do too make a wish,' I said, cross with her.

âEven if you did, it wouldn't be your wish, would it? It would be theirs, asking for lots of children or something. Yuk! Imagine Heather making babies!'

âYuk!' I said, smiling and felt slightly better. They raised the knife. I shut my eyes anyway.

âI wish â¦ I wish I was grown up, and love was easy.'

Funnily enough, when the photos had been taken and the glasses raised, I did feel different, in a strange way. I put it down to that miraculous change that's meant to happen to you when you're coming of age, like getting your national insurance number, but which I'd never felt before.

Now, however, a boy had touched me. I was a woman. I had made a woman's choice. I was going to behave like one. And also, of course, I was desperate not to lose him.

I walked straight up to Clelland, looking so out of place in the black shirt he'd insisted on wearing, dragged him on to the dance floor and kissed him like a woman should.

It wasn't until years later it occurred to me how unbelievably childish and embarrassing this might have been for our respective families.

And, of course, families never let you forget. My dad had just arrived at Tashy's wedding, late and a bit pissed. He came roaring up to Olly, Clelland and me.

âHello, young Clelland! Good to see you! Tell me, you promise not to smooch our girl here for the whole of the evening, will you? Like at some weddings I could mention.' He slapped him on the back and snorted with laughter.

Olly's ears pricked up.

âDad!' I said in an agony of embarrassment. âThat was years ago.'

âI'll try,' said Clelland, looking amused.

âHello, Mr Scurrison,' said Olly.

My dad is a bit rude to Olly. I don't know why, but then my dad pretends not to dislike anyone, whilst holding deep personal convictions about people as varied as Jim Davidson and Tony Blair.

âAh yes, hello, Oliver. Didn't see you there. Are you losing weight?'

This wasn't fair. It wasn't Olly's fault he was getting perhaps a little more than a bit of a turn. We all worked long hours, and if you eat practically nothing and then have to fill up on sausageâ well, things can get a bit out of hand. He looked fine in his three-piece suit, though.

âUm, no. How are you doing?'

âI'm fine, fine! Just keep me out of Flora's mother's way now.'

I grimaced. I realise it's important to Dad to feel that the fact that they've split up is a bit of a jolly âOoh, Vicar, where's my knickers?' farce, but I don't have to like it. I was the one ringing home from my first term at university and listening to forty-five minutes of uninterrupted sobbing
from my mother. I'm the one that has to be contactable every single night now, or she calls the police. Being an only child to a neurotic mum can be even less fun than it sounds. And it was his fault.

Why do so many people split up like that? âWe're just waiting for the kids to leave home.' What does that even mean? âWe're waiting until our children take their first fluttering steps out into the world, forging their own personalities and identities and living alone for the first time, then we're going to crack their worlds apart.'

I've forgiven my dad. You don't, of course, have much of a choice, unless you want it to turn into a blood feud that cascades hatred down the generations. All I can say is, she was twenty-nine and it lasted six months and, of course, he wanted to come home afterwards. He told me it was his last chance; his last way to do something different and that I'd understand when I was older, and you know, sometimes, looking at my life, if I'm being honest, I probably can.

I was twisted when my mum wouldn't take him back. Part of me just wanted everything to suddenly evaporate so that they would go back to the way things had been or, better, the way I'd have liked them to have been, more
The Good Life
than
Butterflies.
But I was glad she wasn't doing it. I was glad she was standing up to him. Because, although I didn't exactly have twenty years of marriage behind me, and I didn't know much about life (though then I thought I knew pretty much everything), I would have liked to have been as firm as she was with the love of my life.

I could see her now, coming in, but decided to duck from
her until I'd got rid of Dad. Watching her in silhouette I was struck by how old she looked; my dad just looked like a jolly, chubby, balding, middle-aged man, of which there are approximately ten million in Britain; good yeoman stock. My mother was painfully thin for her age â I was always trying to get her into milkshakes because of that brittle bone thing â and walked as if she was in pain. If you looked closely she was beginning to get a hunchback. Once your world is cracked open, you can't go back, I think. She never could. I can barely remember the carefree, normal way me and my mother used to relate when I was a teenager â normally, with sulks and huffs and slamming doors. I didn't behave very well either. But now, she was more like a housebound grandmother, and she trusted nothing.

God, Tashy was brilliant back then. I couldn't decide which was worse: losing my dad or losing Clell. In fact, I was so wrapped up in my own misery, I was hardly there for my mum at all, something I will never forgive myself for. Tash and I had a grand tearing-up of Clelland's letters (which I still read anyway; he was having a great time. I only ever got three, âcos I couldn't reply to any of them. What with? âDear Clelland. My life is shit. Love Flora?). I got my head down and got out as quickly as I could, and I'd been trying my best to have fun ever since. Looking at 01, I wasn't sure it was working.

It was a bad age for me. I thought it was because nobody could ever love me that I would always be alone. After all, if you love only two men, and they both leave at the same time, it doesn't bode well.

There's a reason we never forget our first loves, as Tashy has patiently pointed out to me many, many times. Our young little hormone-seething bodies have never felt anything like this before. Your brain doesn't know what's happening to it. After the first one, at least you've got some forewarning of the triple whammy that's going to happen to your head, your heart and your groin. You understand what is going on, even if that doesn't give you much more power over it than you have at sixteen.

And, as has also been noted, if your first love kisses you hard on the lips then disappears (or goes to Aberdeen â technically the same thing), and travels all over the place in the holidays, and then you go to Bristol, it's hard to get a proper handle on the whole deal. You haven't watched them grow fat or old, or watched them mess things up or, heaven forbid, stayed with them and watched the infatuation curdle. And as you grow up and learn the inevitable compromises of real love, it's hard not to remember the unlined face and innocent excitement, especially if you think the other person might feel the same.

Or, of course, even remember you that well.

We were standing to watch the speeches. Oh God, Max, no, please.

âWhy is a woman like a computer?' he began ponderously, and there was a palpable shift in the audience as everyone prepared themselves to laugh at something that wouldn't be in the slightest bit funny.

âYou can turn it on whenever you like â¦'

Clelland kept sneaking glances at me standing beside him, and â I couldn't help it â I was curious too.

âThree-and-a-half-inch floppies â¦' droned Max.

âI thought it was you!' said my mother, loud and too bright. She appeared from nowhere, with too much powder on, looking nervous.

âI'm your daughter,' I said rather sharply. âWho could you mistake me for?'

âGoodness, I don't mean that. I just meant â¦ where were you? I was worried.'

She looked around anxiously. I did too, instinctively checking where Dad was. She started to quiver if he got too close.

âJust chatting to people,' I said. I didn't want to reintroduce Clelland to her. I'd spent enough emotional time with my mother; I didn't like her getting upset over me.

âAll right. Well, don't go too far, will you, darling? I hardly know anybody here. I can't think why Tashy invited me. All these young people!'

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