The Boy I Loved Before by Jenny Colgan Read Free Book Online

Imagine Heather making babies!’
    â€˜Yuk!’ I said, smiling and felt slightly better. They raised the knife. I shut my eyes anyway.
    â€˜I wish … I wish I was grown up, and love was easy.’
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    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.
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    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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Dad!’ I said in an agony of embarrassment. ‘That was years ago.’
    â€˜I’ll try,’ said Clelland, looking amused.
    â€˜Hello, Mr Scurrison,’ said Olly.
    My dad is a bit rude to Olly. I don’t know why, but then my dad pretends not to dislike anyone, whilst holding deep personal convictions about people as varied as Jim Davidson and Tony Blair.
    â€˜Ah yes, hello, Oliver. Didn’t see you there. Are you losing weight?’
    This wasn’t fair. It wasn’t Olly’s fault he was getting perhaps a little more than a bit of a turn. We all worked long hours, and if you eat practically nothing and then have to fill up on sausage— well, things can get a bit out of hand. He looked fine in his three-piece suit, though.
    â€˜Um, no. How are you doing?’
    â€˜I’m fine, fine! Just keep me out of Flora’s mother’s way now.’
    I grimaced. I realise it’s important to Dad to feel that the fact that they’ve split up is a bit of a jolly ‘Ooh, Vicar, where’s my knickers?’ farce, but I don’t have to like it. I was the one ringing home from my first term at university and listening to forty-five minutes of uninterrupted sobbing
from my mother. I’m the one that has to be contactable every single night now, or she calls the police. Being an only child to a neurotic mum can be even less fun than it sounds. And it was his fault.
    Why do so many people split up like that? ‘We’re just waiting for the kids to leave home.’ What does that even mean? ‘We’re waiting until our children take their first fluttering steps out into the world, forging their own personalities and identities and living alone for the first time, then we’re going to crack their worlds apart.’
    I’ve forgiven my dad. You don’t, of course, have much of a choice, unless you want it to turn into a blood feud that cascades hatred down the generations. All I can say is, she was twenty-nine and it lasted six months and, of course, he wanted to come home afterwards. He told me it was his last chance; his last way to do something different and that I’d understand when I was older, and you know, sometimes, looking at my life, if I’m being honest, I probably can.
    I was twisted when my mum wouldn’t take him back. Part of me just wanted everything to suddenly evaporate so that they would go back to the way things had been or, better, the way I’d have liked them to have been,