Do You Remember the First Time?. Jenny Colgan
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‘Yes,’ said Clelland in the way people have to when someone makes a slightly off-colour remark. I couldn’t tell if he thought it was funny either.
‘What line are you in then?’ said Olly, half eyeing a waitress carrying a bowl of prawn toast. He reached out a hand and took four.
‘How come you can eat sesame seeds on toast and not on sausages?’ I said without thinking. Both the boys looked at me.
‘Because it’s toast,’ said Olly, as if explaining to a four-year-old. ‘Anything can be done with toast.’
Clelland stuck his bottom lip out at me.
‘Um … I’m an ethical logistician.’
‘A what?’ I said.
‘Oh. Do you perform on stage a lot?’ said Ol. ‘Puppets and so on?’
‘No …’
‘OK, what is that then?’
‘Well, I try to direct aid through the best routes. Try to play down the possibility of it being hijacked by armies, that kind of thing.’
I admit it. My heart leaped. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d have dreamed he’d be doing. Well, that or some sort of tragic Moulin Rouge-style poet, obviously, but this – heroic, good for the world, manly – I had a vision of him standing on top of an elephant, for some reason. Then, I’m ashamed to say, one of me looking like Meryl Streep in Out of Africa-style linens, saying, ‘I hed a ferm in Efrica …’
‘I hate it,’ said Clelland. ‘It’s a pissy job.’
‘Really? It sounds interesting,’ said Olly.
‘Everyone says that.’ He ran his hand through his dark hair. ‘It’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.
‘You 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.
‘I’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.
‘Oh,’ I said, fingering the fading roses of my bouquet. I dabbled my hand in the fountain in what I hoped was an alluring manner.
‘Ritualised enslavement,’ he grumped, pulling me to him. ‘For 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.
‘You’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.
‘Oh 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.
‘Erm …’ I said.
Then he found it.
‘Ooh!’ I said.
He looked at me, but with a misty expression in his eyes, like he couldn’t really see me.
I gulped again. ‘I can’t,’ I said firmly.
‘What – never?’ he said, focusing on me.
‘I don’t know …’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you are m-my girlfriend, Flo, and I-I thought …’
He was so red-faced I thought his head might explode. This new stutter wasn’t helping either.
‘I … I don’t think so.’
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘Everyone! Bridesmaids! Ushers!’ I heard Tashy’s mum calling from the house. ‘Come 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.
‘What are you doing?’ whispered Tashy, who I’d been relieved to find when I came in.
‘Making a wish when they cut the cake.’
‘You don’t make a wish when you cut a cake at a wedding. You’re thinking of blowing out candles at a birthday.’
‘You do too make a wish,’ I said, cross with her.
‘Even 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!’
‘Yuk!’ I said, smiling and felt slightly better. They raised the knife. I shut my eyes anyway.
‘I wish … 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.
‘Hello, 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.
‘Dad!’