The Boy I Loved Before (16 page)

Authors: Jenny Colgan

BOOK: The Boy I Loved Before

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âBunch of BO babies,' said Stanzi sourly. âLook at them all. What did you do, sleep here last night?'

âDon't worry,' I said. âI'll get us up the front.'

Stanzi mutely followed me as I did my time-honoured push-to-front-of-bar, head-held-high strut. She looked at me with, I thought, new respect as I pushed my way through layers of disgruntled tweenies without a backward glance.

âAre you just going to cut up the side?' she whispered, following my path.

âAbsolutely,' I said, batting some tinsel off a girl's head. âThe trick is to pretend you did it by accident. Oh, sorry â¦'

âOw!' I heard from some luckless girl who'd just got in Stanzi's way.

âThere we are!' Finally we were at the front, just â right up there, but watching from the side. âNow, all we have to do is not go to the toilet.'

âCan we go on the floor?'

âNo, if you really need to go, borrow one of the smaller girls' plastic handbags.'

She giggled, and I looked around, feeling like David Attenborough, examining the tight flesh and suspicious looks from the girls around us. Even the flabbiest had a tummy-bearing top on, which I rather approved of. Why should fashion belong only to the Britneys of this world, goddamit? It was for all, no matter how many Big Macs you felt like eating.

Nobody looked at us in the least bit strangely â well, why should they? And when the PA started playing âFollow the leader, leader, leader', it suddenly seemed completely normal to hop to the right and hop to the left with sixty thousand similarly overtartrazined girls.

I tried to buy Smirnoff Ices with my dad's tenner, but despite my air of studied nonchalance, nobody but nobody was getting served here without some kind of special wristband, which obviously came with a credit card address, so I bought the most colourful, additives-filled soft drinks I could and two enormous hot dogs, which took most of my tenner, and I remembered I only had the one. Stanzi, however, insisted on counting out every penny of exactly half of the cost and I remembered how that worked.

The girls behind us asked us to keep their places while they went to the toilet, and when they'd gone we giggled our heads off about the vileness of them and what happens when you get fifteen Portaloos and seventy thousand girls just starting to conquer the many vagaries of puberty.

The noise was absolutely deafening, and it was pointless to do anything else except jump up and down, especially when the ponderous space music started.

Suddenly the lights went down â way down; we were warned to go out and buy some merchandise or else, there was an enormous drum roll, the lights came up from the front very, very slowly, and suddenly a big, lanky, just about popstar walked to the front of the stage.

I have never heard anything like the screaming that ensued. Well, I must have, but I just don't remember Howard Jones being this popular. These girls could have solved the world's energy crisis, if there was only a way to harness sixteen million decibels of pure raw screechpower.

âJesus fuck,' I said.

âAAAAAAAAAAAH!' said Stanzi.

It was a great gig. We screamed, we cried, we watched scores and scores of people get hauled off by the St John Ambulance, we divided into two halves of the audience and really tried to get our half to win, we believed him when he told us he loved London audiences second (after Scotland, of course, we understood), we booed the names Gareth and Will loudly and indiscriminately, we yelled, âMARRY US, DARIUS!'

Then came the slow number. The lights came way down and he kneeled down and peered around the audience exaggeratedly slowly. A massive âooohhh' went up, to counterpoint the screaming, which continued.

âAh'm just looking for a special lovely lady tonight,' he said. It was cheese at its pongiest, but we lapped it up. Girls were bursting their arms out of their sockets.

âMEEEEE! MEEEEEE!'

âWill it be this side?' He went stage right, the opposite end from us. âThe middle?'

âTHE MIDDLE!' screamed a thousand tiny voices, in
justifiable anger, seeing as they were the ones who had queued longest.

âOr here?' he said. And suddenly he was standing right over us, just a few feet away over the barrier.

I laughed in spontaneous pleasure. âHey!' I said.

He caught my eye and smiled back.

Then he beckoned me up on stage.

I nearly gagged. Stanzi was clinging on to my arm with a vice-like intensity. Two enormous Rock Steady bouncers were already heading over towards me.

âThank you,' I mouthed, then indicated Stanzi to my right. âThis one.'

I really think it's one of the most mature things I've ever done in my entire life.

I have to say, seeing Stanzi up on stage being the object of a crooned love song was one of the funniest things I have ever seen, even though despite being someone who enjoyed sneering at the T-shirt prices, I was really beginning to regret not taking the opportunity.

On stage, surrounded by exploding lights and rapturous noise, the tiny fireball I thought I was getting to know had been entirely replaced by a bone-free rag doll, who swayed so alarmingly she practically had to be held up. Fortunately he's a big bloke, not like most pop stars, so she couldn't fall over completely. She stared into his eyes like Mowgli being hypnotised by Kaa, and swayed gently to the (very slow) song, mouthing along, slack-jawed, with the words, as the rest of the auditorium pretended to cheer (to show Darius how nice they were) whilst secretly wishing Stanzi killed in a million
different ways. Didn't he know he was meant to pick the fat girl, for goodness' sake, so they could all feel he was only doing it for pity and would much rather be with them? But it wasn't, ha-ha-ha, it was my friend and it could have been
me
! Ha-ha!

I remembered suddenly, as I was waving along (I could somehow remember all the words) how jealous of Courtney Cox I was when she gets pulled out in that Bruce Springsteen video and wondering a little wistfully if I was the only person in this whole auditorium who could remember that. Not even Darius could. But I wasn't that person any more.

âShe's rubbish,' said a girl wearing fairy wings next to me.

âYeah, I bet he's really regretting it,' said her friend. âOh no! I've pulled a minger!'

âThat's my friend you're talking about,' I said, trying to look taller than five foot four.

âReally?' said the first one quickly. âDoes she know him then? Can she get us backstage?'

I wasn't to find this out right away, as, when the song ended, and Stanzi received a big, sweaty hug and a kiss, which she seemed disinclined to let go of, she wasn't sent back into the crowd with me, presumably in case she got torn limb from limb by twenty thousand ravaging teenage beasts. They sent her off sideways, presumably smuggling her through a side exit, and I had to watch the rest of the gig on my own.

I didn't care, though. In fact â ooh, it suddenly occurred to me that if someone from school were there we might even get some cool points for this. Yeah, then we could start changing things around here; that would be great! I jumped up and down to âColourblind' in the encore with everyone else, excited.

I was sixteen all evening. And it was great.

I didn't really come down â and I didn't think Stanzi was coming down, ever. Hyperventilation was clearly going to be a way of life from now on. No backstage passes for us, alas, but she did get her Darius T-shirt â for free â and a big cuddle and kiss from the man himself, which is really quite a lot better than sex when you're a virgin teenager in love with a pop star, and she was jumping like a pogo stick when Dad and I found her round the side. Full-fat Coke at Pizza Express didn't help.

âIt's love,' I said.

âI can't eat,' declared Stanzi dramatically. âI will never eat again. I will fade away to nothing and die for love because nothing in my life can ever again be as glorious as tonight.'

âCan I have your doughballs then?'

âNo!'

We had to drop her off when she became too incoherent to talk straight and I had to promise to Dad a million times we hadn't been drinking or taking anything we shouldn't.

I had an odd feeling when I woke up the next day. An absence of complete and utter dread. In fact, I felt almost â¦ jolly. The sun was shining, my thighs were slim, pop stars loved us, what could be as bad as Monday? I almost had a spring in my step as I kissed my dad goodbye outside school.

âOof,' he said. âBeen a while since you've done that.'

âWell, as long as you're on your best behaviour, you'll get another one,' I said, cheekily, enjoying his surprised face as I hopped out of the car. I'd decided to go for levity. If
someone was making nice in our family, maybe the rest of them wouldn't be so horrible. I didn't put much hope in my theory, but at the moment it was the only thing I had; I had thought the fish and chips might have helped, but the stony breakfast silence hadn't changed at all.

Then I noticed someone at the school gates, and stood still. Looking the picture of agonised misery, slouching around trying not to be too obvious, straight ahead of me was Olly.

Crap. Crap. I should have called last night. How could I just leave him on his own to stew like this? I felt terrible.

âOl,' I said. âOl.'

âI can't believe you'd make me do this, Flora,' he said, hands deep in his jacket pockets.

âCan't you pretend you're a supply teacher or something,' I said unhappily.

âYeah. Well, unfortunately all my clothes match.'

âWe can't stay here,' I said. âI'll get in trouble.'

âI've got the car,' he said.

âYeah, I'm going to get into an adult stranger's car outside the school gates. That's what I'm going to do now.'

âI really wish you were enjoying all this a little less,' he said.

âWhat, being tagged like a young offender. I can assure you I am not.' I gestured at him to walk and steered him into the dodgy little grocer's that appear to be close to most schools and still sell single cigarettes and chocolates without any chocolate in them.

Tiredly, he looked at me over the penny chews display.

âIs it over?' he said starkly. I don't know what I'd been expecting, but 01 is a very good lawyer. I swallowed abruptly.

âTell me what happens in a month,' he said, âat the wedding. There must be something.'

I shook my head.

âTell me.'

âI can't.'

He picked up a fistful of lollipops, impotently, and put them down again.

âWell, I suppose that means we're through then.'

The fat old lady behind the counter, whose entire life had clearly insisted on a total âdon't ask, don't tell' policy, deigned to look up from the
Daily Star
at this.

âOl,' I said. âOlly, I've changed.'

âOh, for fuck's sake,' said Olly, hitting the nearest box of Walkers. âI can't believe you'd trot out that hoary chestnut.'

The fat old lady looked on the brink of phoning the police.

I took a deep breath. This was it. I was going to do my first chucking, destroying a four-year relationship, throwing away a pretty much guaranteed shot at marriage, a family, a life that I'd expected; at some stage wanted. I was going to break Olly's heart, and wreck his dreams as well as my own. And I was going to do it in a school uniform. Avril Lavigne has nothing on me.

âOlly.'

âAre you two going to buy anything?' said the fat lady.

Olly glared at me.

âErm â¦ flying saucers?' I said, panicking.

He tutted and put a handful on the counter. The woman eyed him up suspiciously and waited, arms folded, until we left the shop, me beadily checking up and down the road to see if anyone was looking out for us. Then I thought, sod it. This isn't fair. And I went up to Olly and I took his arm. I had to lean up on my tiptoes to get to him.

âI'm so sorry,' I whispered into his ear.

One hand went to his head, and with the other he pushed me away.

âOh God, Flora.'

âIt's impossible.'

âYou won't be like that for ever. Will you?'

âWho knows?' I said. âI didn't get a manual.'

âWell, maybe when you come back, we can see again then.' His voice cracked a little.