‘Am yow seeing Curt this weekend?’ Janine enquired in a deliberately strident voice as we sat down for Friday registration.

‘Oh yes,’ I drawled equally loudly, keeping a sly eye on Karl, ‘he’s taking me to that new ten-screen cinema at Merry Hill to see Dirty Dancing tomorrow night, then we’ll most probably go for a pizza after.’

My tone was smugger than the one I used twelve years later to describe the magical weekend at New York’s Waldorf Hotel, booked by Neil as a surprise birthday gift.

‘Oh, you’re so lucky, Zoe,’ Claudette sighed in exaggeratedly dreamy tones.

‘Yeah, I wish I had a boyfriend.’  Andrea, with equal wistfulness, leaned her tilted head upon her palm.

‘I can fix you all up with some of Curt’s mates if you like.’

‘All right, Zo, you’re on!’

I winked at the girls and we crumpled into conspiratorial giggles, inviting curious stares from most of our classmates.  Let them stare, I thought.  Let them wonder what we’re up to!

These three new mates were a tonic for my ego.  They made me feel included and admired, in a way no friends of my own gender had before.  I, for my part, basked in my unfamiliar position as ringleader; pacesetter.

‘Dirty Dancing is a 15,’  Karl piped up. 

So he’d been eavesdropping!  He’d risen to the bait.  Fantastic!

I turned languidly to fix him with the most disdainful in my repertoire of ‘looks’ and replied, ‘Curtis is fifteen.  And I look it, when I’m all dressed up for a night out.’

‘Fifteen stone, more like,’ hateful Hayley Jasper, next to him, muttered.  I ignored her – not least because she wasn’t far wrong.

Eight months on from that hideous disco, Karl and Hateful were still an item.  By adolescent standards, they were practically married.  They were, to make a contemporary analogy, the Posh and Becks of form 2S.

I do find myself making unconscious comparisons between this pair and many famous partnerships, and thinking about it now, the manner in which they presented to the world was very much like that of a showbiz couple.  Their disco snog, and their every profession of love thereafter, was guaranteed to spawn dynamite gossip – the playground equivalent of column inches.

This week, they had made their greatest waves yet by showing up for Monday morning tutorial sporting matching peroxide crowns. 

‘I bleached us both.  We wanted to look like each uvver’s idols,’ Hayley explained as though it was the most natural thing in the world.  ‘I fancy Matt from Bros, he likes Wendy James off Transvision Vamp.’

Her tinting technique actually left poor Karl looking more like Billy Idol.  It was not a look that suited him – but he escaped derision (and it didn’t stop me fancying him).  Karl Corbett could get away with anything.  Together they resembled a pair of disco lights, bobbing around. 

She’s turning him into a rebel, I thought with rancour, dragging him to her gutter level.  She’ll most likely be piercing his ears next.  Knowing her, it wouldn’t stop at ears either.

‘Where d’you meet him then, this Curtis?’ demanded Tina Skidmore, chomping gum with ostentatious insolence.  She may have been speaking to me, but the folded arms and stern glare indicated we were still enemies, just in case I should entertain ludicrous pretensions that she had any sincere interest in my romance.  This was merely a case of Queen Tina exercising her right to pry into every facet of her fellow students’ lives.  Nothing was ever permitted to happen to anybody without her knowledge.

‘He lives down my road.’

‘I don’t know him, do I?’ asked Karl.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t.  He goes to a private school.’  (You don’t know all of my friends, Karl Corbett!)

‘Which one?’

‘Oh, er – ’ I stopped myself just in time from saying The Beeches, remembering the infamous Darren Fisher was now one of its brown-blazered number, and – rather neatly, I felt –  turned my ‘oh’ into ‘Oaklands.’

‘Oaklands?  Where’s that?’

‘Staffordshire, somewhere.’  I fluttered my hand in the vague direction of our bordering county.

‘Never heard of it.’

He wasn’t the only one.

‘How long’ve you been courting him?’ Tina persisted, continuing to chew sullenly (the effect made her look like a pissed-off cow as well as being one).

‘Couple of months.’

‘Snogged him yet?’

‘Course!’

‘Gorra photo of him?’

‘Got some at home, yeh.’

‘Bring one in – I could do with a good laugh.’

‘You won’t laugh, Tina, he’s bostin’,’ Janine butted in loyally, ‘he looks just like Jason Donovan.’

I cringed.  Beneath the table, I jabbed a warning toe at Janine’s white-socked ankle, but the damage was done already.  The girl meant well, but did not always know when to stop.  She didn’t need a spade; she was adept enough at digging holes – usually for me.

I mean, finding a snap of a fifteen-year-old lad amidst our copious albums at home was easy enough.  If Tina wanted evidence, I could damn well give it to her.  I was always befriending boys on family holidays – one of them could pass for ‘Curtis.’  Finding one who just happened to be a Jason Donovan lookalike was another matter entirely.

Thanks a bunch, Janine!

Janine Parrott and I were two lost souls on the highway of life when Fate had flung us together on a trip to the Black Country Museum in October 1987.

Nice one, Fate!

No, I shouldn’t say that.  She had a heart of gold – even if it was combined with verbal diarrhoea and the subtlety of your average cruise missile.

This outing occurred three months after my tearful egress from the disco (which, by the way, nobody had even noticed).  I spent an abnormally solitary summer in between, virtually confined to my room, eating cheese on toast in bed and citing ‘masses of homework’ as the reason for my hermit-like state.  Nobody called for me.

‘You’re not sickening for anything, are you?’  Mom flapped.

‘I’m fine,’ I snapped, and she didn’t push it.  I secretly loved Mom for that.  If she knew Karl had a girlfriend, and suspected me of suffering lovesickness, she didn’t show it.

There was a masochistic side to me, though, that rather enjoyed being lovesick.  I listened to hours of mopey music (Morrissey was a valuable aid to a good self-pitying session) and – even more hilariously – practised my wistful glances in the mirror.  This involved staring into the middle distance, chin jutting bravely and mouth agape like a gormless frog.  I had plans that involved wasting away, pining here in this garret – and then Karl would be sorry! 

(A girl who loved food as I did was physically incapable of wasting away, but it was a romantic idea.)

I was nice and safe in my bedroom.  My little mint green hidey-hole.  Sheltered from all that made me jealous, forlorn or humiliated.  The sight of ‘Back to School’ posters in Woolworths whipped up my stomach.  They reminded me that come September I would be back in the lion’s den with Karl, who was dating one of the foulest bitches in the year; Tina, who had declared all-out war on me; and Nas, who had deserted me.

The autumn term began in an unpromisingly lonely fashion.  Seeing nobody over the holidays had isolated me from all the cliques.

Which is why I occupied a coach seat on my tod for the museum trip, surrounded by giggling second years huddled into pairs.  Tina and her gang were sharing Silk Cuts in the back row before we even left the car park; the teachers pretended to be oblivious to the fumes.

Resigned to solitude, I unfolded Smash Hits from my bag and made a screen with it.

‘Look, Zoe, Janine’s all on her own too,’ Mr Spencer coughed, pretending the tickle was quite natural and not caused by the back row smoke to which he was still turning a convenient blind eye, ‘why don’t you come and sit next to her?  You don’t mind, do you Janine?’

‘Ooh no.  Feel free, mate.’

She was not a companion I had ever sought out.  Nas used to say she was ‘dead boring,’ and – I realised with jarring insight – what Nas said tended, increasingly in recent months, to go.  But looking across at ‘Fatty Parrot’ now, I was surprised to detect something wonderfully infectious in the smile that lit her pudgy face, and felt ashamed of slighting her previously.

Throughout the journey, Janine gabbled away in breathless Black Country – a trait by turns exasperating and endearing.  She frothed and jabbered until I was dizzy, but there was a natural joyousness about her that was hard to resist. 

We shared crisps and twittered over the magazine balancing it across our tree-trunky knees.

‘You like The Smiths, do you?  I prefer a bit of UB40 meself.  And – ooh, look at that Michael J. Fox poster – I think he’s cute, don’t you, Zo?  Actually, can I have that poster?  There’s only an advert on the back.  You don’t mind, do yer?’

Her two pals, in the row behind, were called Claudette Albert and Andrea Frost.  Like Janine, they were misfits shunned by those to whom image was all, but when one bothered to scratch the surface they had far more going for them than any so-called ‘trendies.’

Claudette was a tall black girl with a radiant, chorus-line smile – a legacy of the school drama club in which she was a leading light.  She was going to be a star, I was sure.  She had even appeared on TV, baton-twirling on one of those Telethon appeal thingies.  But with singing and dancing being decidedly uncool, unCapewell kinds of hobbies, accomplishments in this field were ridiculed rather than celebrated.

Claudette is a cruise ship entertainer these days, according to her Friends Reunited notes.

Andrea, or Andie, was pasty and dreamy; more half-soaked than a bowl of washing.  She wrote poetry, braided her hair, and fantasised not about bagging a rich husband as other girls did but dwelling in a clifftop cabin with a starving artist and singing barefoot to seagulls at dawn.

The four of us became inseparable, and I unconsciously assumed the ‘leader’ mantle.  I wasn’t a bossy-boots, they just appeared to look up to me for some reason.  They may not have been the most fashionable girls in the world, but they were loyal and genuine.  It may have been our ‘misfit’ quality that united us – that and gratitude to encounter people who actually wanted to talk to us rather than beat us up – but there was true kinship there too.  We had fun.  We understood each other.

Janine and I did, at any rate, for we were the class jumbos, with our comically overdeveloped breasts and what might nowadays be euphemistically termed ‘J-Lo bums.’  Janine weighed thirteen stone in the second year – whilst standing just five foot nothing in her over-the-knee-socked feet.

‘I can’t help it,’ was her standard whine, ‘I’ve got big bones.’  I actually used to find this grating.  I never said as much – after all, I was hardly in a position to carp – but at least I acknowledged I ate too much.

Even if acknowledge it was all I did.

Ugh, thinking back to the dross with which I clogged my poor young arteries is enough to make me live on celery forever in penance!  Janine and I were an injurious influence on one other.  There existed this kind of ‘she’s eating it, therefore that makes it all right’ mentality between us.  For example, if she was scoffing crisps (one of her six bags a day), or doughnuts or whatever, I felt compelled to do the same – and vice versa – for the pathetic sake of joining in.

Mom would optimistically sneak apples into my bag as hints, but they returned home with me each evening.  They sat there for days like lustrous green grenades, bobbing against my pencil tin until they rotted.  I adore fruit now; it breaks my heart to think of all those Granny Smiths wasted through my silly rebellion.

It wasn’t as though I especially disliked fruit then, though – more that I shied away, on obstinate principle, from anything Mom deemed ‘good for me.’

Claudette once commented: ‘We seem to be the only people in the world who detest Tina Skidmarks.  Everyone else must see something we don’t.’  It was another important thing we had in common.

‘Don’t ever let Tina hear you calling her that,’ I giggled, ‘anyway, these other people probably don’t really like her.  They just kiss her bum ’cos they’re scared of her.’

‘Do you think so, Zo?’

‘Yeah, specially the teachers.  I mean, look at the way old Slattery made me do PE last week, even though my ankle was killing from falling over that time – then she excused Tina from it just because she was on!  She’s been saying she’s on every week for the last month.  She ought to be in the soddin’ Guinness Book of Records – for the world’s longest blob!’

‘She’s so popular.  It’s not fair.’

‘Her and her gang of bitches think they’re It.’

‘And Hayley’s got Karl.  Cow!’  Now I was getting to the crux of the matter.

‘That won’t last forever.  Your time with him will come.’

‘Yeah, right.  Knowing my luck, them pair’ll probably get married.’

‘You mustn’t give up.  What we need is A Plan.’

And so Janine, Claudette and Andie became instrumental in the ‘let’s make Karl jealous’ campaign – hence the invention of Curtis.

We dreamed him up on my thirteenth birthday, nuzzled in sleeping bags on the Taylor family living room floor. 

Having outgrown fancy dress, cinema and swimming parties, I celebrated the dawn of teenage-hood with the latest in party fads – a sleepover.  Buttoned chastely into pyjamas, the four of us hogged out on Quality Street and painted each other’s nails.  My parents even packed themselves off for a diplomatic early night so that we might have the sacred lounge to ourselves rather than squish into my bedroom.  It was so fun and clandestine, like a midnight feast in a boarding school.

‘You need to tell him you’ve got a boyfriend,’ Andie advised, intently disengaging a coconut éclair from its crinkly sapphire wrapper.  She is the only person I have ever known who liked ‘the blue ones’ – every Christmas, when I see them snubbed and lonely at the bottom of the Quality Street tin, I think of her.

‘But I haven’t.’

Andie rolled her pretty green eyes.

‘He doesn’t know that though, dearie.  Make one up!  Make him seethe with jealousy!’

‘Yeah?’

‘Tell everyone you’ve met this chap, who you’re totally smitten with.  We’ll back up your story, won’t we girls?  And give him a real sexy name.’

‘What, like Brad, or something?’

‘Nah, reminds me too much of Bradley Round!’

‘Matt?’

‘Emilio?’

It was Claudette who suggested ‘Curtis.’  Curtis Jackson.  We all liked it.  It had a manly, Brat Pack-ish ring, yet was sufficiently unpretentious that it might plausibly be found in Sedgley – unlike Emilio, which had been Janine’s choice. 

High as kites on late-night sugar overload, we sketched a collective life history of this boy, this tall and hunky hero whose (non)existence would send Karl demented with envy.  We were going to make Curt hyper-intelligent, athletic and fifteen, a suavely mature fourth year, practically a man compared with Karl and his peroxide crop.

‘You’ll win him one day, don’t you worry, Zo,’ Janine whispered after lights-out, giving my hand, on the carpet between us, a brief, secret pat.  I wriggled cosily in the chrysalis-like bag, enjoying the sound of her words; enjoying the supportive company of friends in my convivially shadowy living room.  My mates.  In my house.

I floated into a slumber coloured with images of Karl, driven to his deathbed by a broken heart, croaking ‘I have relinquished Hayley – will you now relinquish Curtis and live happily ever after with me?’, me caressing a palm across his fevered brow, pondering for a cruel second before flinging myself upon him to declare, ‘Yes of course, my darling, if it’s the only thing that will cure you of this malady.’

Relinquish?  Malady?  I was spending too much time with Andie the poet.

‘So you’ll bring a photo of your Curt on Monday then?’

‘Er – yeh, sure, Tina.  Leave it to me.’

My mom walked in on me frantically hunk-hunting that evening.  Cross-legged on my bed with an album labelled ‘Ilfracombe 1987’ open across my thighs and three others towering next to me.

‘Just looking back on some of our old holidays,’ I feebly clarified.

‘That’s nice.  We’ve had some smashing times, haven’t we, the three of us?’

‘We have.’ 

Now was not the time to reprise moans about being the only member of my form yet to acquire a passport.  And in fact, rather than feel my usual instinct to sulkily disagree with Mom, I was struck by how right she was – we had had some smashing vacations.  My parents never took me to any of the tropical retreats that dotted the earth’s surface, but their love and exuberance made everything special, and I had – still have – a cache of golden memories from those weeks in Devon and Dorset.  Being able to acknowledge this made me feel like a terribly grown-up, sensitive person.

Mind you, I fully intended acquainting myself with a few of these tropical spots as soon as I was old enough to travel unchaperoned.

‘Got much homework this weekend?’

‘Mmm, but I can do it tomorrow.’

‘All right then, sweetheart.  Tea won’t be long now.  I’ll leave you to your pictures.’

My memory had not failed me – there were no Jason lookalikes amongst the posses of boys with whom I ganged up on the various beaches and poolsides our progress around the south coast had encompassed. 

I flicked, with increasing discouragement, through four years of hilarious haircuts and beachwear (no, Dad never did have the knees for Bermuda shorts!), but I was relentless.  Pride and credibility were at stake here.  I could not show up pictureless for school on Monday.  Tina would doubt me; take me for the pathetic, boyfriend-fabricating fantasist I was.

Sod it, that Richard we met in Ilfracombe would have to do!  He came from Surrey, or somewhere, and spoke with a refined accent that may or may not have been honed by a private education.  He was a skilful diver, and never out of the hotel pool, so he passed on the athletic count too.

As for his looks…

I carefully peeled the most lucid shot of Rich (which unfortunately also had his sister on, but my scissors would soon rectify that) from the sticky film.  Slanting it between my fingers, I squinted until viewing the poor lad through fuzzy, pinprick eyes.

Oh, I’d just have to tell Tina it was an unflattering likeness…

‘…and I think Janine exaggerated a little about the Jason Donovan thing.’

‘She didn’t half.’

‘He is lovely, though.  Much cuter than that in real life.  And so kind.’  I was laying it on with a shovel, the way Claudette suggested.  Bugger subtlety, just embellish his every fictitious virtue.  Naturally, I was doing so with half an eye on Karl.  Richard, in his Surrey classroom, must have wondered why his ears were burning.  His photograph – now sans little sister – was proceeding through Tina’s gang like a Pass the Parcel prize.  Karl, when it reached him, disappointingly neither seethed nor took to his deathbed.  Nor did he remove his denim arm from Hayley’s scraggy shoulder.  Shit!  ‘The other night, he took me to see Dirty Dancing – no problems getting in, by the way, I never even got asked for ID – and he bought me an ice cream and one of those large Cokes, you know, with the ice in, and – ’

‘Great,’ Tina sneered, flipping Richard – sorry, Curtis – over her shoulder to me without turning round, indicating the conversation was officially terminated. 

She was impressed, I could tell. 

Tina was remarkably easy to read.  She wouldn’t dream of displaying anything so uncool as enthusiasm, which left just two stock reactions at her disposal: ostentatious apathy meant she was secretly impressed by something; cutting, F-word-peppered derision meant she was most decidedly not.

Whatever reaction she made was invariably parroted by Hayley and Jodie.  I spotted how keenly they goggled at Curtis/Richard, but also how whilst doing so they darted enquiring looks at Tina, as though for guidance on how they ought to be responding.

Gutless little sycophants, the pair of them: taking their lead from Tina all the while.  Despising them made me feel stronger and freer.  At least I could speak and smile and laugh at jokes without soliciting permission.

A whole year, astoundingly, elapsed before my ‘Curtis’ cover was spectacularly blown.  I am not the world’s slickest liar, so feel a curious pride about this dubious accomplishment.

My trouble was that once I had – with greater ease than I could have ever anticipated – convinced my classmates I had pulled this fabulous guy, I was extremely loath to unconvince them.  A definite case of not knowing when to stop.  I may not, ironically, have realised my original objective, which was to transform Karl Corbett into a raging green-eyed monster, but my porky pie reaped other, un-bargained for benefits.

‘Have you noticed how Tina Skidmarks leaves us alone these days?’ I remarked one breaktime, observing from a secure distance the robbery of sherbet dabs from today’s victim, a first year with a Glenn Medeiros haircut.

‘Oy!’ bawled the poor indignant child as Tina wrenched the bag away, in so doing flinging a fog of its fizzy content back into his face.

‘Piss off, Bouffant!  Finders keepers, losers weepers.’

Janine bit into a crisp.  ‘Probably ’cos she’s got nothing to tease you about now you’ve got a chap – or she thinks you have.  She gives you more respect.’

‘And Hayley’s got nothing to get her knickers in a twist over now she thinks you’re not after Karl anymore.’

‘We want boyfriends now!  We’re starting to feel left out.’

‘Fair dos.  Oh yeah, I promised I was going to fix you up with Curt’s mates, didn’t I?  How about we quadruple-date tonight?’

It was delicious sharing such daft little secrets with the girls – even though most kids grow out of the ‘imaginary friend’ phase by about seven or eight.  I even remember these chaps’ names.  Claudette’s was going to be Ross, Andie’s was Stuart (because Stuart Goddard was Adam Ant’s real name, and – typically, endearingly untrendy – she was still in love with him eight years after his chart heyday) and Janine’s was Mark.  All Oaklands boys, of course.

It was as this point my porky pie grew to such a magnitude it could have provided meat for a hundred ploughman’s lunches.

To the other girls, it was never more than a bit of fun to have people on with.  To me, Curtis Jackson was more real than I cared to admit even to them.  In my thoughts as well as my words, he existed. 

Hearts with ‘ZT 4 CJ’ at their centre prettified my pencil case and homework diary.  The lad who grinned at me from his now permanent home in the see-through pocket of my purse had long since ceased to be Richard from Ilfracombe.  I had convinced myself I loved someone I didn’t even fancy when we were swimsuit-clad together two summers ago.

1989 saw the first Valentines Day when I rolled up at school not drooping my head and answering the dreaded ‘So how many cards did you get, then?’ with transparently evasive replies of the ‘Ha, wouldn’t you like to know!’ variety.

Instead, I flaunted like a badge a drippily syrupy card – of the kind on which cartoon rabbits and tacky pink glitter predominated, scrawled cunningly with my left hand – and a tube of Love Hearts, those fizzy sweets branded BE MINE, MARRY ME and the like.

‘It’s called method acting,’ Claudette had insisted as I dithered in the newsagents, feeling furtive and sordid, as though drumming up the courage to shoplift or purchase porn.  ‘Living your part.  You’ve got to be convincing all the way.  It’ll look suspicious if a chap as romantic as you tell everyone Curt is hasn’t sent you a card or a little gift.  They’ll all be expecting it.  Money well spent – trust me!’

She was right – and I really would be fibbing if I claimed not to enjoy the attention these mawkish tokens brought me.  I swelled as the glittery rabbit card made its journey around the cooing classroom – whilst making great efforts to ignore the door-sized work of art bedecking Hayley’s desk.  Humph, he must have spent the best part of a tenner on her!  ‘She’s not worth it, Karl,’ I yearned to yell.

I was part of a club now: the Loved Club, for those individuals with no need for defensive casting-down of eyes, for whom the fourteenth of February was not ‘just another day.’

A sign of my slackening grip on reality was that I actually found myself pitying the unattached, Valentineless majority – until I remembered my own billet-doux was bogus.

Tina was, as ever, Card Queen.  She got four, including a dubiously suggestive one from Delroy Bennett, Felix’s twenty-year-old brother, who rode a motorbike and wore suggestively tight jeans.  Jodie Glover cheekily sent one to Mr Spencer.  Andie posted her annual stanza to Adam Ant.

As our respective ‘romances’ flowered, the girls and I administered lovebites to ourselves.  (That’s ourselves, by the way, as opposed to each other – much, I am sure, to certain boys’ disappointment.  I never achieved that level of intimacy with any of my friends, thank you very much!)

These maroon bruises had surfaced on one or two necks and cheeks.  Tina, need you ask, was Lovebite Queen also.  There was a time when one could barely place a pinprick between her bites, and I forgot what her natural skin tone was.  Delroy had clearly been busy.

‘They look so painful,’ winced Andie, ‘what kind of cruel boy would do that to a girl?’

‘It’s not cruel, thicko,’ Janine scoffed, ‘it’s a kind of kiss.  A boy must really love you if he leaves his permanent mark on your body like that.’

‘Well I don’t want that kind of love, thank you very much!’

‘But it feels nice.  Sexy.  Apparently.’

So Janine gave me the idea.

Hunched in bed one Monday, I pinched a wodge of skin from my upper arm, worked it between my teeth with a weird sucky-bitey motion and spat it out purple.  I’d heard of giving lip service, but this was ridiculous!

Andie was right, it did look grimacingly painful.  It felt that way too, if I was perfectly honest.  I failed to see the connection between this gruesome purpling and love.

But perhaps it was pleasanter if meted out by a boy?  Masculine lips must be innately masterly in the art – otherwise why would so many girls succumb?

In the morning, now free of numb discomfort, I inspected my bite more approvingly.  It looked impressive.  Yes, the top of the arm had been a shrewd choice – well, albeit a choice essentially limited to places I could reach with my mouth, hide from my mother and show off in PE.

Which I did.

Oh, I did.

In the changing room prior to rounders, I peeled off my shirt and made a great show of scrabbling for the aertex top stuffed in my bag, leaving the arm bare just long enough for its claret blemish to register with Tina’s wily eyes.

‘Hey, nice hickey!’

I winked at Janine.  She’d fallen for it again!  Fooling Tina Skidmarks was becoming fun.  Addictive, even.

‘Ooh, I didn’t want you seeing that,’ I squealed, with extremely unconvincing modesty, making a perfunctory dive to cover it.  Tina prised my fingers away, with greater force than strictly necessary, but I was too happy to protest.

‘Tough – I already did!  Come and look at this, girls.’

My handiwork – or should that be lipiwork? – was then oohd and errd over by a goggling herd, led by The Three Bitches, or The Three Skiddies, as we had taken to (privately, naturally) nicknaming Tina’s trio.  Look at all those eyes!  I – Fat Zoe, Medusa, the Hulk – was the centre of attention.  Ha!  Even my former cohort, Nasreen Uppal, after barely speaking to me for two years, was giggling away with sisterly naughtiness at my apparent antics.

‘Curt’s quite a kisser then, eh?’  Tina formed suggestive arcs with her savagely plucked eyebrows. 

I attempted to mirror it.  ‘Oh, yes!’

So, unfortunately, was Karl.  ‘Unfortunately’ because the epiglottis his tongue was so enthusiastically tickling after the lesson did not belong to me.

‘Ugh, he must feel like he’s snogging an ashtray,’ I snorted to Claudette as we straggled, re-uniformed, out of the changing rooms and passed the panting pair, plastered to the wall.  As I was fielding, I had watched with hunger as he strode the cricket pitch (though he was only part of the reason I failed to catch a batter out), as magnificent and athletic as a leopard.  ‘Wish I was her, though,’ I added wistfully.

Hayley was so grown-up and privileged, meeting him from cricket, all damp and clean after his shower and smelling of the Old Spice he had taken to slapping about his agile body.  I knew it was Old Spice because my dad favoured the same brand.  It was ‘the mark of a man,’ according to the godly-voiced announcer who boomed over cheesily dramatic footage of a surfer in the TV ad.

I wished I had someone to wait for, full stop.  After any lesson.

You’ve got Curtis, I automatically reminded myself.  And my stomach jolted, as though I had just swallowed nail varnish, because it was then I realised my fantasism had gone too far.  I was literally living my lie.  I was hoodwinking myself.

Zoe, love, reasoned the headmistressy voice in my head, which I had spent the past year rashly ignoring, there is no Curtis.  You have no boyfriend.  You have never been kissed.  You sent yourself a Valentine card.  You snogged your own shoulder.  You.  Are.  One.  Sad.  Cow!

And then, as I moped at my bloated, make-up-less reflection in the cracked, hairspray-smeared mirror in the girls’ bog, the voice added: You will never get a boyfriend.  You will never be kissed.  You will die a virgin.  You may as well flush yourself down that toilet and spend the rest of your lonely, contemptible life in a sewer under Dudley.

Nearly a week later, I was slumped in front of Blockbusters, making half-hearted inroads into a litany of double-Dutch maths questions.

During the second Gold Run, Mom arrived home from the full-time job she had lately taken in Argos in Dudley.  She shot a sour look at the telly, in front of which she hated me doing my homework.

‘What use will trigonometry ever be to me anyway?’ I responded to her unsaid rebuke.  ‘I’m sure I’ll survive adulthood without needing it.’ 

(And, thus far, I have.)

She made no comment to this, but perched on the settee arm looking bemused.

‘Avril came in the shop today, for a griddle pan.  You know – Avril Corbett.  Hadn’t seen her in yonks.’

‘Oh yeah?’  I affected disinterest, but in a remote chamber of my brain alarm bells were tinkling.

‘She asked after you, and then said something a bit peculiar about you being in love!  Apparently her Karl has got it into his head you’ve found yourself a boyfriend – Kirk, or Curt, was the name she mentioned.  You’re not courting, are you, our Zoe?  I don’t know anybody called that, do I?’

Ohbuggerohbuggerohbugger.

I forced my scarlet face into a suitably outraged, defensive expression.

‘No!’  That, at any rate, was the truth.  ‘I think she’s made a mistake there.’

‘That’s what I thought.’  Mom gave a silly titter, presumably with relief.  I’m glad you’re happy now, Mother, I thought.  ‘I told Avril she must be thinking of the wrong girl.  “Our Zoe hasn’t shown much interest in lads yet,” I said, “she ain’t one for going out much at all, in fact.  She’s more for her food.”  Ha ha.  Talking of which, you did put the chops in like I asked, didn’t you?’

I nodded, much too mortified to speak.

‘Good girl.  Now let me get out of this uniform, and I’ll come and get the veggies on.  Dad should be home in a bit - ’

I exhaled hard and slapped my pen on to the dog-eared trigonometry over my knees.  Bloody parents!  I envied orphans.  Those Victorian waifs I loved to read about in comics may have had nothing to eat or wear, but at least they didn’t have well-meaning moms sticking their Scholl-shod feet in it and obliterating their offspring’s lately-acquired peer popularity.

But then Mom was hardly to know she was doing any such thing, was she?  I had nothing to fight her with.  It was nobody’s fault but mine that she had dropped me in it today.  There wouldn’t be an ‘it’ to drop me in had I not spent the last year lying my socks off.

‘I’ll be a laughing stock.  The whole school’s gunna know about this by breaktime.’

I neurotically paced the toilet floor, crying and twisting a sopping ball of bog roll between my fingers.  It was only ten to nine.  After a sleepless night contemplating whether I ought to skive today or face the proverbial music, I had chosen the latter, skulked to school, spotted Karl and Hayley huddling, promptly turned slightly hysterical and had to be carted off by Andie for a private wail.

‘Relax, you don’t know that.  Karl’s mom might not even have mentioned anything to him.’

‘Oh, she will, Andie, she will have.  And he’ll be telling Hayley all about it right now – they’re laughing at me out there, I know they are – and she won’t be able to wait to tell Tina Skidmarks – and – and – oh God, what a mess!  Why did I let you talk me into this Curtis business?  It was only meant to be a bit of a joke, but it’s all gone too far.’

Oh, the ruinous traumas of being fourteen!

‘Shh, don’t get in such a state.  Come on.’  She trickled the cold tap over her fingers and dabbed at my sniffly face.  ‘Maybe you’re right, perhaps you ought to tell everyone you’ve split up with Curtis now, but I bet even if they do find out you lied, it’ll be a nine-day wonder.’

‘It won’t.  Not with this lot.  They’ll never let it lie.’

I literally jumped when the door swung open.  I fully expected it to admit The Three Skiddies, ablaze with scorn and ready to inflict whatever latrine-based punishment they reserved for liars – but my fellow toilet-user turned out to be a fifth-former, who merely looked at us in mild bemusement before tramping into the cubicle.

Amazingly, I survived geography, first period, without any taunts or other hints that my secret was today’s top story on the Capewell grapevine.  Maybe Andie was right – my fears were baseless.  I was – what was that word again, beginning with P? – paranoid!  Yes.

But just ’cos you’m paranoid, as they might say in the dear old Black Country, doe mean the buggers ain’t out to get yer.  Moreover, it was Tuesday, which meant PE again.  And if my neat, private little life really was going to explode, it was guaranteed to explode in this most detested of lessons.

I had forgotten about the hickey, which was fading but still visible after a week.  Having ceased preening over the thing, I was at the stage where it was just there, like a birthmark.

Had I been more mindful now – kept my arm to the wall, say – Tina might not have had the perfect excuse to yell, ‘Do that yerself, did yer?  Suck yer own arm?’  I exchanged rabbit-in-headlights glances with my friends.  She knew.  And I was so, so dead.  ‘Cos your precious boyfriend don’t exist, does he?’  She stalked over to me, emphasising every dynamite syllable with an accusing slap of trainer on tile.  The words hung in the air dramatically like a speech bubble in one of those teenage mag photo stories.

There was a universal gasp and pause – broken by the odd whispered ‘What did she say?’ and more raucously by the yap and handclap of Mrs Slattery, our hatchet-faced games teacher.  The first time I’d ever been gladdened by her arrival.

‘Come on, girls – let’s have you out on that pitch!’

The conversation halted – though I had a funny feeling it might just resume after the game.

My PE-related memories are, without exception, gruesome.  Boggy pitches; musty kit; sports bras that fought a losing battle against my boinging boobs; hockey ball-shaped bruises; showers that alternately scalded and chilled one’s skin…

The worst bit was team-picking – the most humiliating, elitist practice in the world.  Hovering at the back in my aertex T-shirt and pleated wrapover skirt, nibbling my nails and gazing at the grass to shield my hurt eyes, as the popular, colt-legged girls who always got to be captains fought over who would not have me in their team.

‘You have her.’

‘No, you have her.’

‘You!’

‘No, you!  We want some chance of winning this game.’

I still have difficulty fathoming why being less than magnificent at games laid me open to the kind of contempt more appropriately reserved for murderers.  My inability to whack a ball or aim one through a hoop made me a target for the foulest sarcasm and derision – but why?  In English and home ec, I didn’t jeer at those who couldn’t write legible essays or make their apple pies crust up properly.  I’d have been sent to detention in no time. 

Why should PE be the only lesson in which name-calling and expletives were not only permitted but positively encouraged by the teacher?

I utilised every excuse in the skiver’s handbook at some stage during my stretch at Capewell (feigned ailments, fictitious dental appointments, ‘forgotten’ kit).  Whilst this was, admittedly, not the best method of endearing myself to the Slattery monster, it irked how the Skiddies were excused week after week on the grounds of their eternal menstruation.  But then Mrs Slatternly, like all bullies, was a coward and scared shitless of Tina et al.

I am no sloth now, though.  I love keeping fit.  The teenage me would have won the vote for Girl Least Likely to Ever Attend an Aerobics Class – yet there I am, every Wednesday, star-jumping and spotty-dogging away down the community centre. 

In schools, though, it’s all about contact sports, competition, teamwork, not letting your house down.  No emphasis on the physical benefits.  I thus misguidedly saw exercise as a chore, rather than a means to acquiring a svelte waist and a spry heart rate.

The Skiddies were no athletes themselves (‘It’s the fags’ being their oft-repeated excuse for possessing fitness levels more befitting to gasbags of sixty) but this did not stop them giving vent to an expletive-ridden commentary today (unheard and unpunished by Mrs Slatternly, of course) of my short-lived rounders innings.

‘Oh, her’s hit it for once,’ as my bat, by minor miracle, actually made contact with the battered white ball.  Then, ‘You pissing twat,’ when I was stumped out at second post.  I was always glad to be out, though – it meant I could sit down, until the time came to swap and field.

This day in 1989 was the first recorded case of Tina Skidmarks employing her new weapon of intimidation on me: namely a chilling stare that pierced right through me, as though she could see inside my soul.  Her unblinking eyes bored into me across the pitch and, on future occasions, across the classroom.  I didn’t know where to put my eyes; she just would not look away. 

I have never forgotten that flinty glower of hers; even writing about it now produces a surprisingly unnerving feeling. 

‘Got margarine on your fingers, Zoe Taylor?’ Slatternly bawled as, thrown off balance by Tina’s stare, I fumbled yet another catch.  I don’t recall, by the way, ever being merely ‘Zoe’ to her; she called me by my full name, pronouncing in tones that made it sound like an insult.  ‘Anyone but you would have got that easily.  I wish you’d put as much effort into your game as you do into cooking your pretty little cakes.’

‘Why don’t you just piss off, fanny-face,’ I hissed, through clenched teeth, addressing the daisies at my feet.

At last the final whistle – my favourite sound in the world – reverberated, heralding a return to what would usually be fully-clothed normality and sanctuary indoors.  Andie squeezed my shoulder and flashed me a tight, ‘Here goes’ smile as we joggled back with our bats and posts.

Slattery wove through the slippery, mildewy changing room in her Ninja Turtle-green shell suit, screeching orders.  She had a voice which years spent making herself heard across grassy expanses had rendered several octaves too high for its own good, and was the kind of woman who had no qualms about saying things like ‘sanitary towels’ in mixed company.  She was evil.

‘Stop that rabbiting, Philippa.  Come on, get yourself changed.  Have you remembered your deodorant this week, Samantha?  It strikes me that certain people’s personal hygiene leaves a lot to be desired.  Get a move on, Sunita – I’d like to go for my coffee break some time today if possible.’

‘What’s that you was saying about her Curtis not existing?’ I heard someone rasp with ill-muffled glee when Slatternly huffed out of earshot.

‘Oh yeah, Karl told me,’ Hayley chimed in, possibly the only occasion she ever spoke unprompted by Tina.  The thrill of having learned a credibility-destroying secret all of her own must have emboldened her.  ‘His mom saw Zoe’s mom yesterday, doing her scrubby little job in Argos, and guess what…’  She recited the incident to a delighted audience.

‘You’m kidding!’

‘No, her ain’t.’  I jumped.  Tina had materialised in front of me, like Morph.  I clasped my threadbare towel – under cover of which I had coyly wriggled out of my kit – defensively against my jumbo torso.  She leaned menacingly into what a body language expert would call my Personal Space: one hand on hip, the other flopping over my peg, slut-red lips crimping into a sneer, rock-star perm rioting over skeletal shoulders.  ‘Our friend Zoe here’s bin having us on.’  With a barely perceptible flick of her talon-like nail, she sent my shirt off the peg and plopping into a pool of muddy sweat on the floor. 

‘Oi!’

‘Sorry, sweetie, I’m dead clumsy sometimes.’

‘Leave her alone, you,’ Janine remonstrated bravely.

‘Shut it, lard-arse!  You’re a sad little bitch an’ all.  Can’t get chaps of yer own, so you have to make them up.  What you hiding under that towel, Zoe?’

‘A damn sight more than you are!’  This was rather witty, for me, I thought.  I judged by the way Tina’s eyes and cheeks blazed that her stunted mammary growth was, as it were, a sore point.  I’d rattled her.  But she recovered with the resilience of a boxer.  I instantly wished I’d kept my gob shut.

In one fluid movement, she wrenched away the pink towel and flapped it aloft like a flag.  There were cackles as my grey, mumsy underwear was revealed to the world.

I looked desperately around for teacher presence, but Slattery had disappeared – for all the use she’d have been anyway.  She’d more likely cheer Tina on; hold me down while the girl punched the daylights out of me.

‘That’ll teach you to get lippy!  Mind you, I can see why you had to lie now.  You’ll never catch a man in them undies, love.  My nan wears sexier gear than that.’

‘Give me that back!’  I snatched frantically at the towel, but she was taller than me and I couldn’t reach.

‘Not yet.  Me and the girls am gunna give you a little wash first.’ 

‘What the – ’

Lobster-strength claws were clamping my arms behind my back and marching me towards the showers.  Oh, please not the showers!  The misty pit dreaded by all schoolgirls.  Entering of one’s own accord was unpleasant enough.  I preferred to whiff than expose my floppy flesh and stubbly pubes beneath those blistering sprays.  Capewell logic being what it was, I knew the water would blister on a warm April morning like this – the bracing, icy water was reserved for winter.  I was terrified. 

‘Leave me alone, you bitch!’

‘Don’t cheek me!  This is what we do to sad scrubbers who make up stories.’

My mates – bless ’em – tried to haul Tina off me, but Hayley and Jodie waded in to restrain them.  Two against three – though in this case, two wolves against three rabbits.

‘Let go of me!’  I yelped and wriggled, much to Tina’s amusement.

‘Yow look like you’m trying to Moonwalk.  Saft sod!’

Violence was so not the way in our family – my parents didn’t even smack me – that I went into hyper panic mode where somebody else might have seen it as a bit of horseplay.  But I was convinced I was going to drown; that I would meet a fittingly undignified end beneath the mucky feet of washing wenches, whilst clad in gigantic pants the colour of dirty snow. 

Millimetres from the shower entrance, Tina dropped me as abruptly as she had seized me.  What?  Why?  Ah, that was it – Mrs Slattery was back!  Saved by the yell.  No doubt she heard me scream, though she made no allusion to it.  She just huffed there looking smug.

‘Hurry up, Zoe Taylor, get yourself showered.  And didn’t your mother tell you you’re meant to remove your bra and pants before you get under the water?’

God, I hated that woman!

‘So, you see, it was all your fault,’ I told Karl at the reunion.  My tone was jocular but with a sad undertone I was sure he detected.  In fact, I know he did.  ‘I had the piss ripped out of me for months – and a lamping by Tina Skidmarks – because you couldn’t resist grassing me up to your precious Hayley.  If you’d just let me enjoy my dizzy little fantasy, instead of repeating my mother’s bletherings from bloody Argos – ’

I floundered, startled by the sharpness and pain of a silly fourteen-year-old memory.

He reached for my hand.  ‘I’m sorry.  I was young and twattish – what can I say?  Anyway, Hayley was never really precious to me, not like – ’

‘You’re right,’ I interrupted, ‘it’s in the past, forgive and forget, and all that.  But to think the only reason I concocted that yarn about Curtis in the first place was to make you jealous!  Because I fancied you like mad.  More fool me, eh?’  I snorted and took a rather urgent gulp of spritzer.

‘Zoe, neither of us are fourteen anymore.  We all make mistakes – and I made my biggest one all those years ago, when – ’

Oh, but I’m giving too much away…