‘Think what?’ Mum asked. ‘What doesn’t he think?’
‘That he’s out of my league… so rude! And as for Siobhan, well, maybe she does fancy him. I wouldn’t blame her. But Billy, for your information, prefers me… So maybe he’s not asout of my leagueas you think.’
Mum rolled her eyes and gave a little shake of her head. ‘That ego’s gonna get you into trouble one day, my girl,’ she said. ‘How old is he, anyway?’
‘He’s twenty,’ I told her, for some reason deducting a year from his age.
‘Well, I hope you’re being careful,’ Mum said.
‘Of course I am,’ I told her. ‘Of course we are.’ After all, Billy wore condoms most of the time.
‘Good,’ Mum said. ‘Because Premier League or not, we don’t want him getting you up the duff.’
* * *
Mum, unfortunately, had been clairvoyant about Siobhan and, one week exactly after our wonderful council-house camping extravaganza, I caught them in bed together.
The whole scene, from me opening the side door of Billy’s garage, seeing his bare buttocks and Siobhan's boobs, to turning and running away, must have lasted less than ten seconds.
Billy came hobbling after me, simultaneously trying to run and hop into a pair of jogging trousers, but I was too fast for him, and by the time he got them on I was gone, cutting diagonally across Dane Park, crying as I ran.
I walked all the way to the seafront and sat staring out at the grey swell until I started to feel cold, upon which I trudged miserably back to our house.
Mum was out at work that evening and Wayne was upstairs playing, I could hear,Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtleson the Nintendo, so I knew the likelihood of him interrupting my misery was low.
I switched on MTV and stared blearily at the screen.
I thought, momentarily, about calling Shelley, but the truth was that I hadn’t seen her since the night I’d met Billy and, in fact, had been actively avoiding all my friends.
It wasn’t that I was embarrassed by Billy’s poshness, nor was I embarrassed about the relative chavviness of my schoolmates. It was just that they came from different worlds really, and it seemed given that if I tried to combine them then… Actually, I don’t think I had any clear idea what would happen if those two worlds met. I just knew that it couldn’t possibly work.
So I sat alone and stared at the TV screen, with Mum’s words banging around my head:He’s out of your league. And he was, after all, wasn’t he? Siobhan was living proof of that.
Wayne came downstairs just after eight. I heard him light the gas under the kettle and pull a Pot Noodle from the cupboard.
‘All right?’ he asked from the doorway.
I shrugged, and, because it wasn’t actually a question, Wayne neither noticed nor cared that I hadn’t answered.
‘She’s such a donkey,’ he said. ‘God knows where they dug her up. Looks like someone you bump into in Tescos.’
Hazell Dean was singing on MTV, and I assumed she was the person Wayne was currently choosing to insult. ‘You know he’s a Margate boy?’ he added.
‘Who?’ I asked. There were no men currently on screen.
‘Mike Stock. From Stock Aitken Waterman. Born and bred in Margate. Our only claim to fame. Until me, of course.’
‘Oh,’ I said, uninterestedly. ‘OK.’
The kettle started to whistle then so, our socialising for the day apparently over, Wayne returned to the kitchen to hydrate his dinner.
Billy’s motorbike roared up shortly after that, and I hid in the corner of the room so he wouldn’t be able to see me through the lounge window. But Billy just went to the kitchen door and, finding it open, let himself in.
‘Dawn,’ he said, pulling off his crash helmet.
I’d just hurled myself onto the sofa facing away from him and towards the TV.
‘Dawn?’ he said again, moving into my line of vision. He was wearing his jumpsuit underneath a leather jacket.
