Trigger Warning

I wondered how drunk he was, how drunk I was, staring at the canal in the early light. I said something, I forget what, then I asked whether Scallie remembered where our hotel was, because I had forgotten, and he said he had forgotten too, and that Rob had all the hotel details and really we should go and find him and rescue him from the clutches of the nice hooker with the handcuffs and the shaving kit, which, we realised, would be easier if we knew how to get back to where we’d left him, and looking for some clue to where we had left Rob I found a card with the hotel’s address on it in my back pocket, so we headed back there and the last thing I did before I walked away from the canal and that whole strange evening was to pull the itchy Starsky-and-Hutch wig off my head and throw it into the canal.

It floated.

Scallie said, ‘There was a deposit on that, you know. If you didn’t want to wear it, I’d’ve carried it.’ Then he said, ‘You should drop Cassandra a line.’

I shook my head. I wondered who he had been talking to online, who he had confused for her, knowing it definitely wasn’t Cassandra.

The thing about Cassandra is this: I’d made her up.

* * *

I was fifteen, almost sixteen. I was awkward. I had just experienced my teenage growth spurt and was suddenly taller than most of my friends, self-conscious about my height. My mother owned and ran a small riding stables, and I helped out there, but the girls – competent, horsey, sensible types – intimidated me. At home I wrote bad poetry and painted watercolours, mostly of ponies in fields; at school – there were only boys at my school – I played cricket competently, acted a little, hung around with my friends playing records (the CD was newly around, but CD players were expensive and rare, and we had all inherited record players and hi-fis from parents or older siblings). When we didn’t talk about music, or sports, we talked about girls.

Scallie was older than me. So was Rob. They liked having me as part of their gang, but they liked teasing me, too. They acted like I was a kid, and I wasn’t. They had both done it with girls. Actually, that’s not entirely true; they had both done it with the same girl, Caroline Minton, famously free with her favours and always up for it once, as long as the person she was with had a moped.

I did not have a moped. I was not old enough to get one, my mother could not afford one (my father had died when I was small, of an accidental overdose of anaesthetic, when he was in hospital to have a minor operation on an infected toe. To this day, I avoid hospitals). I had seen Caroline Minton at parties, but she terrified me and even had I owned a moped, I would not have wanted my first sexual experience to be with her.

Scallie and Rob also had girlfriends. Scallie’s girlfriend was taller than he was, had huge breasts and was interested in football, which meant Scallie had to feign an interest in football, mostly Crystal Palace, while Rob’s girlfriend thought that Rob and she should have things in common, which meant that Rob stopped listening to the mideighties electropop the rest of us liked and started listening to hippy bands from before we were born, which was bad, and that Rob got to raid her dad’s amazing collection of old TV on video, which was good.

I had no girlfriend.

Even my mother began to comment on it.

There must have been a place where it came from, the name, the idea: I don’t remember though. I just remember writing ‘Cassandra’ on my exercise books. Then, carefully, not saying anything.

‘Who’s Cassandra?’ asked Scallie, on the bus to school.

‘Nobody,’ I said.

‘She must be somebody. You wrote her name on your maths exercise book.’

‘She’s just a girl I met on the skiing holiday.’ My mother and I had gone skiing, with my aunt and cousins, the month before, in Austria.

‘Are we going to meet her?’

‘She’s from Reigate. I expect so. Eventually.’

‘Well, I hope so. And you like her?’

I paused, for what I hoped was the right amount of time, and said, ‘She’s a really good kisser,’ then Scallie laughed and Rob wanted to know if this was French kissing, with tongues and everything, and I said, ‘What do you think,’ and by the end of the day, they both believed in her.

My mum was pleased to hear I’d met someone. Her questions – what Cassandra’s parents did, for example – I simply shrugged away.

I went on three ‘dates’ with Cassandra. On each of our dates, I took the train up to London, and took myself to the cinema. It was exciting, in its own way.

I returned from the first trip with more stories of kissing, and of breast-feeling.