We didn’t go on a date, because nobody went on dates back then. We just met up on the pedestrian street outside the Pelican, with all the other teenage drinkers. We drank bottles of Hooch and Smirnoff Ice, and tried to be sharp and funny. Bradley, with his black hair and black trainers and his piercing eyes, somehow persuaded me off to the multistorey car park on the London Road ‘for a drink’. He steered me into a wall and started kissing me. He put his hands up my top, and I let him, even though he was rough and impatient. He put his hands down my jeans, and I let him. I didn’t want to, but I had had almost no experience with boys and a chance like this wasn’t going to come my way anytime soon. He tried to have sex with me; I said no. He asked for a blow-job, settling eventually for a nervous handjob. I didn’t enjoy it, but he did, and that was enough for me.
Then he didn’t call, and I was crushed. I stared at Mum and Dad’s phone for days, eventually giving in and trying his number when I couldn’t bear it any longer. Nobody answered. I even got the bus to his house, near Stroud. I walked past his front door three times in thirty minutes, rain-soaked, hopeful and hopeless.
‘You should have slept with him,’ Mandy advised. ‘He thought you must be seeing someone else. That or you’re frigid.’
Claire, back in favour, laughed.
I could feel it slipping away already, that tiny flash of value I’d held since Bradley had taken me off to the Brunel multistorey. So I told Mandy to tell him I was ready to put out (her words) and he called me.
We became a couple, of sorts. I convinced myself that it was love and never imagined that I might deserve better. Norwould I have wanted someone better: I was part of a gang now; I belonged everywhere. I existed on that higher platform with Mandy and there was no way I was going back down.
Bradley often told me about other girls who fancied him and my teenage heart would freeze with terror. He went days without calling me, never walked me to the bus stop and often insisted on going without me to the Maltings, a nasty meat market of a club, so that he could ‘be himself’. More than once he decided this while we were in the queue, knowing I had nowhere to stay if I couldn’t stay at his. The day I passed my driving test, he failed even to congratulate me. He merely suggested I drive over to his house for sex.
‘Sounds like a top bloke,’ Eddie said.
I shrugged.
He looked at me briefly, and I was reminded of our first morning together, when we’d sat facing each other across his breakfast bar. Me, him; the smell of bread and hope. Then he looked away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. ‘Do you mind if we just get to the point?’ he asked quietly. ‘I understand why you’re telling me this stuff, but I – I just need to know.’
‘I’m sorry. Of course.’ I grappled with rising chords of panic. It was years since I’d talked out loud about what had happened that day. ‘I . . . Why don’t we go for a walk? It’s getting too hot to sit still.’
After a moment Eddie got up.
We walked up past a pastel-blue lifeguard’s hut and onto the boardwalk, which snaked south all the way to Venice. Bikes and rollerbladers whisked past us; gulls cartwheeled above. The morning’s brief cloud cover had been burned away and the air now shimmered with heat.
It was summer, a Monday afternoon in June. Mum and Dad had gone to Cheltenham for something and had left me in charge of Hannah after school. Hannah had Alex over. After an hour pretending to do their homework, they’d told me they were soboredthey might seriouslydieand instructed me to drive them to Stroud for a Burger Star. I’d said no. Eventually we’d compromised with a hanging-out-eating-sweets session on Broad Ride. They’d made a den up there a few years ago, when building and maintaining a den was still an acceptable way to spend a day. Now, long past that sort of thing, they liked to go up there to listen to music and read magazines.
I was sitting on a rug a little distance from them, reading one of my A-level texts. I had no interest in their whispered conversation about some boy in their class, but they were twelve years old and I wasn’t letting them out of my sight. Hannah was too much of a show-off to be responsible for her own safety. She didn’t understand the slimness of life; the consequences of a twelve-year-old’s bravado.
It was a warm day, the sky carrying thin twists of cloud, and I felt about as peaceful as I was capable of feeling back then. Until I heard the sound of a car, thumping and buzzing with overamplified music. I looked up and my heart lifted and sank. Bradley had called earlier, wanting me to drive over to pick him up. His car wouldn’t start, he’d said, could I come and get him? Maybe lend him some money to fix it?
No, I’d said to both. I was looking after two twelve-year-old girls; plus he already owed me seventy pounds. ‘Borrowed Greggsy’s new car,’ he said now, ambling towards me with a rare smile. ‘Seeing as you were too lame to help me out.’ He looked at Hannah and Alex with interest. ‘All right, girls?’
‘Hi,’ they said, goggling at him.
‘Since when did Greggsy drive a car like that?’ I asked. Itwas a BMW. Souped up, just how Bradley and Greggsy liked their cars, but a Beamer all the same.
‘He came into a bit of money.’ Bradley tapped his nose.
Hannah looked excited. ‘Did it fall off the back of a lorry?’
Bradley laughed. ‘No, mate. It’s legit.’
He couldn’t sit still for very long. After about ten minutes on the blanket he suggested we go ‘for a race’ in our cars.
‘No way,’ I said. ‘Not with the girls.’ I’d been in a race with him once before: Bradley versus Greggsy back and forth on the Ebley bypass late at night. It had been the most frightening twenty minutes of my life. When it had come to an end, in the new Sainsbury’s car park, my head had flopped down onto my chest and I had cried. They’d laughed at me. Mandy, too, even though she’d been just as scared.
Hannah and Alex, however, teetering on the wobbly diving board into adolescence, thought it was a great idea. ‘Yeah, let’s go for a race,’ they said, as if it were a little sports car Dad had lent me, not a banger with a one-litre engine and a head gasket whose days were numbered.
They went on and on, Hannah and Alex, Bradley riding on their coattails.It’s not the M-fucking-five, Sare. It’s just a shit little road going nowhere.Alex kept flicking her blonde hair over her shoulder and Hannah copied her, only she was less convincing.
My need to protect Hannah had not dwindled as the years had passed. If anything, it had strengthened as she’d transitioned from fearless child to swaggering girl. So I refused. Again and again. Bradley got more irritable; I got more stressed. Neither of us was used to me saying no.
But then the matter was taken out of my hands. Hannah, giggling, ran over to Bradley’s passenger door and got inside. Bradley ran round to the driver’s seat, quick as a wink. Istarted shouting at them, but nobody heard me because the car Bradley had borrowed had a dual exhaust and he was roaring the engine. He shot off towards Frampton and my stomach spilled out through my legs.
‘Hannah!’ I shouted. I ran towards my own car, Alex behind me.
‘Shit!’ she breathed. She sounded impressed and frightened. ‘They’ve gone!’
