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

more The Good Life than Butterflies. But I was glad she wasn’t doing it. I was glad she was standing up to him. Because, although I didn’t exactly have twenty years of marriage behind me, and I didn’t know much about life (though then I thought I knew pretty much everything), I would have liked to have been as firm as she was with the love of my life.
    I could see her now, coming in, but decided to duck from
her until I’d got rid of Dad. Watching her in silhouette I was struck by how old she looked; my dad just looked like a jolly, chubby, balding, middle-aged man, of which there are approximately ten million in Britain; good yeoman stock. My mother was painfully thin for her age – I was always trying to get her into milkshakes because of that brittle bone thing – and walked as if she was in pain. If you looked closely she was beginning to get a hunchback. Once your world is cracked open, you can’t go back, I think. She never could. I can barely remember the carefree, normal way me and my mother used to relate when I was a teenager – normally, with sulks and huffs and slamming doors. I didn’t behave very well either. But now, she was more like a housebound grandmother, and she trusted nothing.
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    God, Tashy was brilliant back then. I couldn’t decide which was worse: losing my dad or losing Clell. In fact, I was so wrapped up in my own misery, I was hardly there for my mum at all, something I will never forgive myself for. Tash and I had a grand tearing-up of Clelland’s letters (which I still read anyway; he was having a great time. I only ever got three, ‘cos I couldn’t reply to any of them. What with? ‘Dear Clelland. My life is shit. Love Flora?). I got my head down and got out as quickly as I could, and I’d been trying my best to have fun ever since. Looking at 01, I wasn’t sure it was working.
    It was a bad age for me. I thought it was because nobody could ever love me that I would always be alone. After all, if you love only two men, and they both leave at the same time, it doesn’t bode well.

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    There’s a reason we never forget our first loves, as Tashy has patiently pointed out to me many, many times. Our young little hormone-seething bodies have never felt anything like this before. Your brain doesn’t know what’s happening to it. After the first one, at least you’ve got some forewarning of the triple whammy that’s going to happen to your head, your heart and your groin. You understand what is going on, even if that doesn’t give you much more power over it than you have at sixteen.
    And, as has also been noted, if your first love kisses you hard on the lips then disappears (or goes to Aberdeen – technically the same thing), and travels all over the place in the holidays, and then you go to Bristol, it’s hard to get a proper handle on the whole deal. You haven’t watched them grow fat or old, or watched them mess things up or, heaven forbid, stayed with them and watched the infatuation curdle. And as you grow up and learn the inevitable compromises of real love, it’s hard not to remember the unlined face and innocent excitement, especially if you think the other person might feel the same.
    Or, of course, even remember you that well.
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    We were standing to watch the speeches. Oh God, Max, no, please.
    â€˜Why is a woman like a computer?’ he began ponderously, and there was a palpable shift in the audience as everyone prepared themselves to laugh at something that wouldn’t be in the slightest bit funny.

    â€˜You can turn it on whenever you like …’
    Clelland kept sneaking glances at me standing beside him, and – I couldn’t help it – I was curious too.
    â€˜Three-and-a-half-inch floppies …’ droned Max.
    â€˜I thought it was you!’ said my mother, loud and too bright. She appeared from nowhere, with too much