Do You Remember the First Time?. Jenny Colgan
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up the phone. If anything it’s the constant nervous entreaty that drives me so mad. This was almost better.
Suddenly I notice something. I’m in my old bed, at my parents’ house. Oh God. Oliver must have dumped me here. Oh no. Something must be terribly wrong. Did he finally get up the guts to propose and …?
Now, surely I’d remember something like that. But there’s nothing. Nothing there at all.
‘Yeah? Mum, could you bring me a cup of tea?’ I called out. Testing the water.
‘You must be joking, young lady!’ I could hear her starting up the stairs. ‘If you’re not up in two minutes, I’ll get you up. In fact …’
Then she walked into my room and I jumped three feet in the air.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything except point.
‘Flora! Stop gawping like a fish and get ready.’
It was my mother – I can’t dispute that. But here’s the weird thing: she looked decades younger. Her skin was unlined, her hair brown and she seemed to have lost the hunch. Even her tone of voice was completely different. This was my mother how I remembered her from when I lived at home. I swallowed. I was half asleep, after all. She must have decided to sort her life out. Maybe after seeing Tashy’s parents at the wedding. Maybe she’d started on HRT and it was just kicking in.
‘God, Mum, you gave me a fright. You look great, by the way.’
She sat down on my bed. ‘Look, Flora, I’m sorry your party didn’t work out, but you can’t mooch around for ever. You still have to get up and face everyone today.’
What the hell had gone on at Tashy’s do?
Then she did something odd. As she turned to go she tutted and said something very strange under her breath.
‘Teenagers!’
I couldn’t quite have heard her as she said it. It just chimed in with the fact that something was very, very wrong. My room, for example, the room my mother had redecorated in beige as a guest room, even though the only guest she ever got was me, was covered in lots of pin-ups of R&B stars, and I don’t even like R&B. There were clothes all over the floor that I didn’t recognise. Had she got a lodger? Had I been unconscious for months? What the hell was going on?
I got out of bed – wearing, I noticed, a long flouncy nightie that I normally wouldn’t be seen dead in – and stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom. I held on to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. God, for someone who’d been so drunk she’d passed out and had to be taken to her mother’s house to sleep it off, I looked great.
I blinked at the reflection again, then, like a complete idiot in a cartoon, rubbed my eyes to make sure.
You don’t see yourself changing. Sure, you notice a wrinkle now and again, the odd half-stone that creeps on and off with annoying regularity. But it’s still you. Your face. Your best Zoolander face in the mirror. The way you sometimes catch sight of yourself in a shop window, then hope nobody else saw you looking at yourself. When I was a teenager, I used to spend hours staring in the mirror, mooning at myself, wondering. Am I pretty? Will my curls ever straighten out? Is one eye bigger than the other? Will boys like me? If I sleep on alternate ears, will they stop sticking out? Who am I going to be?
And it was exactly this face that was staring back at me now. No straightening irons had been applied to this hair. No subtle blonde streaks. No serums. No carefully plucked brows.
I wasn’t sure what was going on but had it pretty much figured for one of those extremely convincing dreams. Any moment, the Queen and a big hippopotamus were about to crash through the window and take me flying. Until then, I was going to make the best of it. I stared and stared. This looked like my face from at least ten years ago.
I had a crop of spots on my forehead. I moan about the occasional pimple now, but I’d forgotten what it was like when they used to grow in small fields. But apart from that, my skin was fresh, rosy … I turned round. I disappeared. I stretched out a long, white thin arm. Oh my God. How could I not have known this wouldn’t stay for ever? How could I not have realised that years of pizza and red wine could have an effect on this? When I was really younger, I thought I had an enormous arse and spent my entire time covering it up. I turned round again. OK, it wasn’t Kylie, but in absolutely nobody’s world was this a big arse. Wow! I jumped up and down. Nothing wiggled at all. Look! Look! Hip bones! Bones! Oh my God! OK, my hair was a frizzy disaster, with what appeared to be pink bits dyed in, but that’s OK, I know about expensive haircare products. I wished it wasn’t a dream, because this could have been so much fun. As if my body had turned into a Barbie doll, I could dress up and parade around. This was the best dream in the entire world.
‘Get out of the bathroom! You’re going to be late for school!’
Now, this was too much. Oh my God. School. Tashy and I sitting up the back of English, giggling our heads off.
No, I should just wake myself up before a monster came or something. I’m always quite lucid when I dream anyway. I always know that something won’t happen. I’d probably end up trapped in the bathroom, desperately knowing I was late for school on a test day and …
I have never felt water flow over my hands in a dream. I have never turned a tap on and got wet.
‘Hurry up!’
The door was banging. And I had to realise: that wasn’t Ollie’s voice. That was my dad’s.
Bloody hell.
I stood in the shower for a long time, shaking, although I turned the water up as hot as it could go. What the hell was happening to me? It couldn’t … this was impossible. What was I doing standing, washing myself (with impossibly pert breasts. Jesus, these were up by my neck!) in our old blue bathroom suite?
I thought. What had happened yesterday? I had gone to the wedding. I had met Clelland. I had fallen out with Oliver. I had made a wish over a wedding cake …
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t.
You know when something terrible happens and everyone says ‘Don’t panic’?
Now, I believed, was the time to panic.
Slowly, very slowly, I reached out of the shower and put a towel round my tiny waist.
I was back in my nightie, and my dad pushed past me into the bathroom. I barely caught sight of him. Jesus. Had I … travelled back in time? What was it, 1987? I caught my breath. So I could … what? Bet on general elections? Ooh, maybe go discover Take That! Maybe I could marry Robbie. He’d be older than me too. Was Jonathan Ross still free? He turned out to be a pretty good bet. Are the Backstreet Boys still children?
I stumbled back into my bedroom and leaned against the wall, my eyes closed, my heart racing a mile a minute.
Hang on, I should stop just planning on not-yet famous people I want to get off with; do something properly. 1987. Maybe I could save that baby who fell in a well! Oh my God! I have to save Princess Diana! Ooh, I can become the most successful medium there’s ever been! I started to get feverishly excited. What could I invent? Did Dysons exist yet? Ooh, mobile phone stocks! I was going to be so rich!
I shook my head. This was nuts.
Opening my eyes, I took in a picture of – oh, for God’s sake – Blue on my wall. And Darius, I noticed wryly. Oh shit. This couldn’t be right.
I went and sat down in front of my old dressing table. Yes. Still incomprehensible, still from the eighties, still there. My old face. Right. This time, I was wearing sunscreen every day. Not a wrinkle to be found.
So. I tried to put it together in a brain that was dealing with sudden shocks equivalent to six bonfire nights and a bowlful of LSD. My parents were younger. And still together. But Darius was looking older than me.
I