was being punished. The story, told to me by my mum, who had got it from his mum, was that Julian had snuck out to a rave, stayed out all night and came home in the morning ‘high on drugs’. He was grounded for three months, but since his parents couldn’t trust him to stay home all by himself, and since they wanted to come to the party, he was being forced, very much against his will, to come along.
‘Little bastard better not bring any drugs into this house,’ my father said when he was informed. ‘I’ll break his bloody neck. And you,’ he turned to me with a snarl, ‘don’t get any ideas. I don’t want you anywhere near him. You hear?’
Oh, I had ideas. I had fantasies, daydreams, scenarios, imaginings, entire scripts written in my head. I’d greet him (and his parents) wearing acid wash jeans and my new pink halter neck top from Jigsaw (which was the first overtly sexy piece of clothing I’d ever owned) and he’d be struck dumb, speechless with admiration. I, of course, would play everything really cool, but eventually he’d get up the courage to ask me to dance, and we would, a slow shuffle in the corner of my parents’ living room, the two of us, alone in a crowd. ‘Nothing Compares 2U’ by Sinead O’Connor. I put it on the end of the mixtape I’d made for the occasion (after ‘There She Goes’ by The La’s, The Stone Roses’ ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, ‘Suicide Blonde’ by INXS). Just in case.
This was of course all total bullshit. For one thing, Julian Symonds – gorgeous, smouldering, achingly cool fifteen-year-old Julian Symonds – wouldn’t look twice at me. He wouldn’t even notice me. Why would he? I was average. Undeniably, boringly average. Average height, average weight (in other words, not thin), boring brown eyes – the only thing different about me was my hair. Mum (and Mum’s friends) were always banging on about how lucky I was to have such lovely hair. ‘Titian blond,’ Mum called it, but to be honest in some lights it looked worryingly close to ginger.
Julian Symonds would never notice me. He never had before, in any case, we’d passed each other in the corridors at school a hundred times and he had never once glanced in my direction. I was a total nobody. And second, the chances of me slow dancing with anyone while my father was in the same room were remote. Dad wouldn’t like it. And wherever possible, I tried to avoid annoying my father.
Dad worked in middle management at Swan (tobacco papers, filter, matches) and he was always pissed off about something. Interest rates, football results, the travesty that was Rocky V, you name it, Dad was angry about it. But mostly he was angry with Mum.
Mum could never do anything right. That’s what she always used to say, anyway. ‘No matter what I do, it’s never right, is it? I never do anything right.’ When I was younger this struck me as odd, because Mum did do everything right. She was a brilliant storyteller. When she was reading to me at night she’d have me in stitches, giving Peter Rabbit a broad Glaswegian accent or reading the whole of The Cat in The Hat in a Jamaican patois. She was incredibly patient: she was the one who taught me to ride a bike, to swim, to bake brownies, to play pool – Dad didn’t teach me anything, except perhaps how to fish. And how to swear. So why, I wondered, did she think she never did anything right?
There may have been a time when my parents were happily married, but if there was, I don’t remember it. I do remember, when I was much younger, that things were better. Dad and I used to be friends. That was a long time ago, though. For years now, there had been tension in the air whenever Dad was around. Mum and I were quieter when he was in the house; we made ourselves small. We walked on eggshells; we tried not to get in the way. Things had been bad for a while now, and they were getting steadily worse. The screaming matches that had made me cry when I was little were now much more regular. And they weren’t just screaming matches any more either; these days they always seemed to end with something – a chair, a plate, a window, my first, greatly treasured,