of humour in the divorce,’ I said, and Tashy nodded glumly.
Then she popped her head up from the magazine. ‘Um.’
‘What?’
She jumped up and got us another Baileys.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Well, you know when you were talking about us being stupid at sixteen?’
‘Mm?’
‘You’ll never guess who my mother ran into at the post office. Invited the whole family.’
I rather love Jean, Tashy’s mother. She is giggly and dresses too young for her age and drinks too many gin and tonics – all the reasons she embarrasses the bits out of Tashy. It’s amazing how, even though we’re both in our thirties, we still turn into sulky teenagers when confronted with our mothers. It had been worse recently, with all the wedding arrangements for Tash, and there had been at least two occasions when Tashy had slammed out of the house shouting – and she was ashamed to relate this, even after a couple of glasses of wine – ‘Stop trying to control my life!’ She had also decided that since she and Tashy’s dad (they were divorced, and got on a lot better than my parents) were paying for most of this enormous bash, they got final say in just about all of it, which included the guest list, the napkins, and those tortuously crap little sugared almond things. (‘Why am I crying over sugared almonds?’ Tashy had asked me. ‘I’m not going to talk to her for a week. Cow.’) She is so different from my mother, who does indeed have nightmares after Crimewatch.
But this wasn’t solving the problem.
‘Who?’
‘We’re over it now, right?’
And I knew straight away.
‘This is why you stashed all this Baileys up here, isn’t it? To soften me up?’
She nodded shamefacedly.
‘You invited Clelland.’
‘His whole family,’ said Tashy, at least having the grace to look a bit embarrassed. ‘You know our parents were friends first, before any of us lot even went to school. All those seventies kaftan parties. Probably all throwing their keys in bowls.’
‘Let’s not think about that,’ I said. I might be an ancient grown-up, but I still didn’t like to think about my parents doing it. And also, my heart was pounding, and my ageing brain was trying to take this on board.
‘Anyway, they lost touch, but my mother ran into his mother at the post office – seriously, if she thinks she’s going to be thinner than me for this wedding then she’s got another think coming, upstaging bitch – so, anyway, they get talking and, of course, Mum can’t stop shooting her mouth off immediately and—’
‘Hang on,’ I said, interrupting her nervous chatter and sitting dramatically upright. ‘Clelland is coming?’
‘Um, yeah.’
‘OK, so can we forget the boring post office stuff …?’
‘Gee, gosh, you’re right, Flo. How selfish of me. It’s not like I’m busy or anything.’
‘It’s just … God, you know, I could have done with some warning.’
‘Me too,’ said Tashy. ‘I don’t think they’ll even all fit under the marquee.’
Of course, even though she’d been through it, I couldn’t really expect Tash to take this as seriously as I did. And, of course, Clelland isn’t his real name. Nobody’s called that, except probably some American soap star. Our parents were friends, and his dad is John Clelland, so he is too. The grown-ups called him little John, which he hated with such a vibrant passion he refused to answer to anything except for his surname until we got used to it. Then we discovered that porn book Fanny Hill, author John Cleland, and it was even worse.
That’s Clelland. Passionate about things. He had been my first crush. Tashy’s first crush had displayed her painstakingly homemade Valentine card all over the sixth-form common room to loud and lewd guffaws. Mine had been completely unaware of my existence for months. I’d really envied Tashy.
He was tall for his age, dark-haired, with expressive eyebrows: he was 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 Mondays and 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 came out 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
