Thicker Than Water

The first time had been when I was four and was dragged against my will to Northcote Road Primary School to see my brother Matt playing Joseph in the nativity play. Anita was his Mary, and I liked the way she smiled. She delivered her lines nicely, too. I committed two of them to memory, and used to repeat them to myself every once in a while for the sheer pleasure of the sounds: “Come, Joseph. I am close to my time and we must reach Bethlehem before our baby is born” and “I thank you for your gifts and for your great kindness.

”

But that was just a childhood infatuation. The year after she stabbed Kenny - the year she turned sixteen - Anita was the most beautiful thing that had ever walked on two legs. And she’d saved my life! So naturally I was besotted with her to the point of insomnia, and used her as the raw material for a thousand fantasies ranging from the sloppily romantic to the baldly pornographic.

It didn’t help, though. She’d completed her metamorphosis by that time: she was all grown up and I was a kid.

The yawning chasm of two years was way too wide to vault across - at least in that direc Fshetion: if I’d been older than her it would have been a different story. She dated one of the boys who loaded the vans at Hannah’s pie bakery in Arthur Street: a guy named Alan, who was eighteen and had all the advantages of a job, a car and a total absence of acne. I hated him and wished harm on him, even though he’d once given me a quid to put a bet on for him at Coral’s.

But that passed. It always does. You learn to scale your desire to things within your scope, when you’re fourteen. Or at least you learn to distinguish between desires you can hope to satisfy and ones that are just between yourself, your conscience, and the box of tissues on your bedside table.

By the time I finally lost my virginity - to Carole Aubrey in the car park of the Red Pepper Club on Rice Lane - I wasn’t even fantasising about Anita on a regular basis.

The top slots were filled with movie actresses and female vocalists, interspersed with a few comic-book characters who really belonged to an earlier stage of my adolescence.

But I still saw Anita around, because Walton was a small place. Too small for her, I thought. I always expected her to leave, because it seemed to me at that time that leaving was the prerequisite for having any kind of a life.