The First Last Kiss (7 page)

Casey looks wired. She is waving manically and sends me over to a seat right in the corner. ‘Sit there, babe!’ she says brightly, in a high-pitched voice. ‘I’ll um, I’ll just get us some drinks!’ And she disappears, leaving me to sit on my own. A guy immediately swaggers over, in a try-hard outfit of a fitted white designer T-shirt, with Gucci sunglasses hung over the V-neck. The T-shirt is pulled taut and tucked into his tight faded jeans to enhance his gym-honed body and to reveal his ostentatiously displayed Hermes belt, presumably. None of this hides the vacant expression he’s wearing as his main accessory.

‘Hey girrrrl, you’re too pretty to be alone,’ Hermes Guy drawls, looking back at his mates and giving a thumbs-up sign.

I raise an eyebrow: ‘And you’re too stupid to realize that I want to be.’ He looks startled, but undeterred.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Effoff.’ I smile, through gritted teeth.

‘That’s pretty! Effoff! I ain’t heard that before. Is it Swedish?’

I snort in derision and wave my hands to dismiss him. He slopes off back to his mates, looking more than a little bit confused.

Just then Casey arrives with a bottle of champagne. ‘Here we go! I thought we’d start with something bubbly to get the party going!’ Her eyes hover around and then return to me. ‘Here’s to being young, free and single . . . and to, er, meeting
new
men!’ She pours me a glass and I down the lot. I’m going to need it tonight.

An hour later, I’ve consumed pretty much an entire bottle and I’m on the dance floor working some moves out to ‘Crazy in Love’. And I’m doing a pretty darned good job of it too! In my head and with a bottle of champagne inside me and in this dress, I reckon I can basically pass as Beyonce herself. I’m now re-enacting the video, with Hermes Guy who’s happily taken the role of Jay-Z. I was a bit harsh on him earlier. He’s actually really, really nice and I am looking well hot, so
why
does Casey keep trying to pull me off the dance floor? Now I can see why she gets pissed off when I try and stop her from having fun. I thought I was being protective; I realize now it’s just
annoying
.

‘Hey!’ I say, as she tries to steer me back to the VIP room. ‘What are you doing? I’m having a lovely time, dancing with whatshisface over there. Did you see me?’

I do a version of the booty dance but add the leg and arm waggle Mia and I created at uni for good measure. ‘Uh oh!’ I sing tunelessly as I edge back onto the dance floor. ‘This is fuuuuun, Case! Look at me, I’m having fuun!!!’ And for some reason, known only to me, I start doing the Robot.

Casey shakes her head and beckons me back over. ‘Come on, Moll,’ she pleads. ‘Let’s go and sit back down. I’ve bought us another bottle!’

‘YAY!’ I squeal. ‘But I’m going to finish dancing first, OK? Because I’m
good
at it! Look!’ And then I start flailing my arms around feeling as free and uninhibited as I’ve felt for ages. It’s 11 p.m., it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m young, free and single!

‘Please,’ Casey begs, trying to drag me away. ‘Molly, please come with me before you see . . . ’

‘Before I see wha— Uh . . . oh.’ I’ve hooked my hand around my ankle and my hand is behind my head, when I turn around and see him. Ryan. Across the dance floor. Kissing someone. A girl. A tall, blonde, beautiful girl.

A girl that’s not me.

‘I’m sorry,’ Casey says sorrowfully, slipping her arm through mine and trying to lead me away but I am stuck to the floor. ‘I tried to warn you.’

Everything seems to stop then, the music, the people, and I swear it is just him and me in the room.

Oh, and her.

I stare for a moment, I see him look up and over at me. He stops kissing her and pulls away. She says something but he shakes his head. She walks off. Then he raises his hand to his forehead, rubs it and sweeps it over his head like he does when he’s anxious. Then he looks at me, sorrowfully. I can’t move, I want to move but I can’t. I just stand there, on one leg, like a . . . flamingo, staring at him as the song changes and Casey tries to pull me away again.

‘Don’t do this to yourself,’ she says, taking my head in hers and forcing me to look her in the eye. ‘You were doing so well. Come on, let’s go now, Molly.’

I lower my leg, still staring at him. I wish I hadn’t seen it, but he’s single, he can do what he likes. So I just nod at him and I turn, and as I look back he raises his hand to his lips, as if to blow me a kiss. But instead, he just drops his hand so the kiss falls to the floor and he disappears. I want to run over there and scrabble around on the floor, like I do when I’m looking for a lost contact lens. I want that kiss. I want him. Why did I throw it all away?

I wail into Casey’s armpit in the taxi as she strokes my hair. Part of me thinks at least Casey’s finally got what she wants, a bawling best friend she can look after.

‘I know you don’t want to hear this,’ she says, still stroking my hair, ‘but maybe what just happened is for the best. I mean, now you can finally move on and accept that it really is over between you, can’t you, eh?’

I nod but what I’m actually thinking is I would have preferred to live in ignorant bliss, hoping he was in the same state I am, desperately missing me as much as I miss him.

9.11 a.m.

I press pause on the DVD and push a visibly miffed Harry off my lap, suddenly overcome by the guilt of how much I have to do. What the hell am I doing being distracted by a film? It’s just like when I was a kid and Mum used to militantly make me clear up my room every Saturday morning, and I’d wind up secretly watching
Going Live
.

I brush the cat hair off my leggings and walk into the kitchen, put my mug in the sink and grab the marker pen I left on the island unit last night. I need to label some of the newly packed boxes from last night with my clear and simple system: Charity Shop, Ship or Storage.

It’s the smell that does it. I close my eyes and inhale the pungent petrol-like smell as I take the lid off the pen. Ryan would often spend evenings sprawled across our lounge floor, drawing up various player formations on big sheets of white paper for upcoming school football matches while I read my photography books.

This scent is, in a way, stronger and more memory-inducing than his Hugo Boss aftershave and for a long time after he left, when I smelt that particular scent I’d find myself turning and following the wearer in case it was Ryan before realizing what I was doing and hastily retreating.

But unlike that, this smell brings pleasure as well as pain because it doesn’t just make me think of Ryan. It takes me back to my school days; Casey and I giggling during lessons and then scribbling notes to each other in our exercise books about boys we fancied. And of course, it reminds me of home. My parents. The smell of Sharpies infiltrated our house as they laboured tirelessly over homework books with their red pens.

I look in an unmarked box on the kitchen counter, full of random kitchen gadgets and scrawl ‘Charity Shop’ on the side. It may seem like I’m wiping a lifetime of memories out, just like on a whiteboard, but it’s in order to make way for new ones.

The Worst First Kiss

There are certain givens when it comes to falling in love. Take the first kiss. No one ever wrote about the path of true love starting with a terrible kiss, did they? Would Juliet have been quite so infatuated with Romeo if he’d just stuck his tongue down her throat instead of doing all that balcony stuff? Or if Jack had drunkenly snogged Rose at that below-decks party instead of tenderly kissing her whilst making her fly on the bow of the ship? Would it still have been the biggest grossing film of all time? Maybe Shakespeare and all his romantic writing contemporaries (and James Cameron) thought a bad first kiss was just too obvious a sign that the relationship was doomed from the start. At times, I’ve wondered the same thing.

<

‘Oh GOD, not him,’ I mutter darkly, spotting the familiar figure of Ryan Cooper approaching as I try desperately to hide behind my mum. It’s a cold, bleak Saturday morning and Mum’s dragged me out on a Christmas shopping trip to Southend in a bid to ‘bond’ with me. I’m hating it because generally I do everything to avoid being seen in public with my parents because they’re so embarrassing and so miserable.

They haven’t
always
been this unhappy but things have recently hit an all-time low and it’s really
pissing me off
that neither one of them has the guts to just put me out of my misery and leave. But Dad’s the head teacher at Westcliff, where I go, and Mum’s head of English at Thorpe Hall, the local private school where Ryan Cooper goes. They’re both well known in the community.

They’re only together because of some misplaced sense of social standing (and because no one else would have them). They can barely be in the same room as each other any more. Mum’s always in the kitchen, cooking, marking, moaning at me. Dad’s always in his office, looking at his paintings and his books, but mostly looking out the window, as if he’d like to be anywhere but here with us. So they continue with this ridiculous web of pretence. The older I get the more I see it and the more I hate being around either of them.

But Mum won’t give up. She insists on trying to find out what ‘makes me tick’. (I am so tempted to say one day, ‘Sex, drugs and rock and roll . . . ’ just to watch her
freak out.
) And I know she only wants to go shopping so she can try to get me to buy some clothes that she approves of (loafers, A-line skirts, roll-necks). I don’t know how many times I have to tell her that I
like
my old, holey jeans, my battered Converse and array of flannel shirts, army-surplus jumpers and short skirts.

‘Shall we go to Topshop dear? Or Mrs Selfridges?’ She smiles desperately at me now and tries to link my arm. I swiftly pull it away.

‘
Miss
Selfridge,’ I hiss. ‘And I wouldn’t be seen dead in there.’ I lift my Nikon F50 to my face from where it permanently hangs around my neck. It’s an early Christmas gift – and their attempt to buy my approval. At least now I can escape my miserable present by focusing my attention (and my lens) on my future career as a photographer. It’s all I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember. Mum and Dad tell me that the reason there are hardly any photos of me as a toddler was that I’d always run around to whoever was taking the photograph and stand behind it too, desperate to see what they were seeing. I picked up a camera for the first time aged four. It was Christmas and I can still remember looking through the little square window and secretly loving the fact I knew exactly what to do without anyone forcing me to learn. I didn’t need lessons, unlike the ballet I’d been sent to once a week since I was three. With this, I could just look and click. And I seemed to understand instinctively how to do it well. There were no chopped-off heads in my pictures, even at that age. That camera became my third eye. I walked around looking through it all the time. I remember thinking, when I was about seven, that it was like Dad’s glasses, it made me see better. Now I realize that it was because my photos captured real emotions instead of the fake ones people always seemed to portray for everyone else. It made me feel powerful, like they couldn’t keep any secrets from me whilst I was looking through it. I didn’t always take actual photographs though – Mum and Dad rationed my films to two a month, but I’d pretend, seeing, visualizing, adjusting, framing. As I got older I’d write notes in a book about light, shadow, composition and focus, and I became obsessed with famous photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, a master of candid photography who developed the street-style reportage photography that I’m inspired by.

And now, seeing the wet, rainy High Street of Southend shimmer through my viewfinder makes the day – not to mention this shithole seaside town – seem brighter somehow, turning it from something depressing into something beautiful. Sometimes I wish I could have the camera permanently attached to my eyes. Life looks so much better through it. Plus there’s the added bonus that it would hide my face enough for Ryan Cooper not to spot me.

‘Mrs Carter!’ he calls, hitching his sports bag up on his shoulder and increasing his pace as he swigs sexily from a Lucozade bottle.

Shit. He’s seen us. I busy myself changing the film in my camera, so I don’t have to acknowledge his presence.

‘Shouting at me in the street?’ Mum mutters. ‘What will people thi— Ryan
Coopah
!’ Mum trills as he appears in front of us. Mum uses her best Standard Received Pronunciation voice whenever she’s around fellow teachers, her students or their parents.

‘Alright, Mrs C?’ Ryan grins, lighting up the street with his smile, and then peers over at me. It’s not the style I like – way too clean-cut – but I have to admit he’s looking kind of hot in a hooded top, baggy jeans and trainers. And smelling nice, too. All freshly showered. I glance at his Puma bag. He must’ve had a match this morning.

‘Hi, Molly. I haven’t seen you around for a while. How are you?’

I don’t answer. I just turn away, lift my camera up and pretend to be busy snapping photos.

‘Shouldn’t you be at home doing your coursework, Ryan?’ Mum says tightly.

‘It’s Saturday,’ Ryan responds politely, glancing at me through his curtains. ‘I’ve just had a game of footie and thought I’d come into town.’

‘Time and tide wait for no man,’ Mum replies archly. ‘We all know you have a very bright future ahead of you in the sporting world, Ryan. The school is proud of your achievements, but you need a good education to fall back on if the – what do you call it – the ‘Beautiful Game’, doesn’t work out, hmm?’

My skin burns with mortification. Can’t she switch off her teacher act just for a second? Can’t she see I’m literally
dying
of embarrassment here in front of the hottest guy in town?

‘You’ve got your A levels coming up,’ she continues primly, ‘and your recent essays suggest . . . ’

Clearly not.

‘Mum, leave it,’ I hiss furiously. ‘You’re not at school now.’ She glances at me, her lips pinch and her cheeks flush – a striking contrast to her normally pale, unmade-up complexion.