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? What’s been happening?’
‘Well, erm … Ratboy kicked in the bus shelter and they had to put a new one up. Then he kicked it in again.’
Clelland bit his lip. ‘What time do you get off?’
I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.
‘Um …’ I said. I genuinely couldn’t remember.
We walked home that evening in the warmth, and he bought me a bag of chips and we lay on the heath and ate them looking at stars maybe not quite as good as those over Spanish vineyards, but I liked them. Then we kissed and kissed and kissed, salty sticky kisses for hours and hours and hours in the way only teenagers can, entwined like two vines growing together. Then, finally, when the adults – the seedy, the dispossessed – started to arrive, we slowly headed for home, my insides turning somersaults all the way.
We had a few glorious weeks. Kissing, reading, talking, slumping around complaining about our parents, drinking cider, pretending not to know each other if we ran into anyone from school in town, not having sex. Actually, that rather amazes me now. I assumed everyone was like me, and now I find that even my most respectable friends (in fact, the posher they are the more like rabbits they start) were romping in the hay from their early teens whilst I was pushing his hand away, desperate to do more, but desperate not to put myself out on a limb.
Good Lord, I was useless. And look what I missed out on, thinking all the boys would be so great. It took years after that to get the hang of it, and truly, I would have loved to have maturely and pleasingly enjoyed adult relations when I had a pin waist, boy’s bum and upper arms that pinged. Life is a bitch.
But then, I thought it was perfect. We went down to Brighton, tentatively hired a scooter, and I felt that I was living la Dolce Vita. We kissed on rocks, behind trees, on trains, everywhere possible, and the sensitive introverted lad turned out to be funny, gentle, idiosyncratic and only inclined to go on about George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson and Holden Caulfield when I wasn’t paying attention. We adored each other. Until –
‘Aberdeen?’ I stared at him.
He was trying to look sad and not excited by going to university at the same time.
‘It was clearing. You know. I almost didn’t get to go at all.’
‘Where is Aberdeen? Is it on an island or what?’
‘No, it’s in the North of Scotland.’
‘Do they speak English?’
‘Yes, I believe so.’
I stared at him in disbelief.
I left him in the sitting room, went out to the garage, took out my dad’s old road map and traced down the two boxes on the grid where places meet.
Aberdeen is five hundred and eight miles away from London.
‘Aberdeen,’ I said, taking a deep breath and trying to speak slowly, even though my heart was beating fit to burst and I wasn’t sure whether or not I was about to start crying, ‘is the furthest away from London you can possibly go.’
‘I know,’ said Clelland, half smiling that funny little crinkly smile. ‘It’s either that or the local technical college.’
‘You’re leaving me,’ I said, and all the poise I’d sought to hold on to had lasted less than fifteen seconds. At the time too, though, I couldn’t help but be slightly aware of the drama of it all.
‘Oh, Flora sweetie …’ He took me in his arms. ‘I’m going away. I’m going to university. It wouldn’t matter where I was going. We’re only young, you know?’
The lump in my throat was like trying to swallow a rocket. ‘But we’re in love!’
He hugged me and held me close. ‘I know. I know. You and me. Taking over the world, remember?’
‘From five hundred and eight miles away.’
He looked pained; he must have known then, or at least had an inkling, about what happens to childhood sweethearts when one of them moves on. And I think I saw it too.
‘I’ll be back at holidays,’ he offered lamely, as if trying to meet me halfway.
My mother caught me pounding up the stairs to my room.
‘What’s the matter, darling?’
‘NOTHING!’ I shouted in true teenage style, completely oblivious to any concept that she might understand what was happening – only too well, as I was to discover in a year or two. How could she? How could anyone know? Nobody had ever been in love like I had. No one was as special as Clelland. Nobody could see.
From my window I watched him as, after waiting half an hour, he slouched awkwardly down the garden path, and I wept with the magnificently dramatic thought that I would never see him again.
Oh God, the party. I tried to call it off, but Tashy and my mother had persuaded me that of course Clelland would show up. Plus we’d invited everyone.
The thing is, popularity is a tricky thing. It’s infectious. We couldn’t help it. It was the local comprehensive, it was pretty rough and, for some reason or another, that year everyone had decided to hate us.
I hadn’t thought it would extend to a party, though. After all, everyone likes parties, don’t they?
I was wearing a faintly daring red dress from Clockhouse, which I absolutely adored and spent the entire evening pulling down and panicking about whether I looked fat. (As the photos show, I looked teeny. Why on earth didn’t I realise how lucky I was before I had to wear long sleeves with everything and couldn’t brave the miniskirt any more?) How depressing. When I see all the teenagers these days marching around wearing next to nothing, Britney-style, I don’t think, ooh, look at that awful paedo-fodder.
