The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saint's Tales by Imogen Rhia Herrad Page B

books in school, or on the telly sometimes. Not real .
    So I was sort of interested too, and thought I’d do a project about the Partition for history; it’d be dead easy really, I’d just have to follow Aneesa round for a bit and basically record everything she said, and then write that down properly and find a few pictures and stuff in the library, and there I’d be, project done.
    So I went home with her that day for tea, and there was Tariq like I’d seen him dozens of times before, in the door to her room; I can still see him now, standing there and smiling at her and then at me and suddenly it was like I’d never really seen him before, like there was a spotlight trained on him so that I could see nothing else, only that smile and those eyes and what a beautiful neck he had and I thought, I want to be a vampire and bite him. And then Aneesa said something and I’d no idea what. I went beet red and mumbled something, and Tariq smiled again and went to his room, and I had to try to say something intelligent to Aneesa, and pretend my brain hadn’t turned into a jellyfish.
    Well, you know. I was in love, basically.
    He was gorgeous, Tariq was. We went about holding hands a lot, and going off into the dunes and kissing and stuff, and it was great. I said, I don’t want to do anything, you know, really really serious, not yet, and he was cool with that, and I think maybe he was relieved as well, because he’d not gone out with anyone before either.
    I don’t know why my parents were such ages finding out; I mean, it’s not like we tried to hide anything. There wasn’t anything to hide, if you know what I mean, we weren’t doing anything, nothing really really serious; not like Karen in my class who got pregnant and had to leave before her GCSEs. I didn’t want that, I wanted to go on to college or maybe university and do something with my life, you know, and so did he, we had time; we could wait.
    And I’d got some condoms out of a machine, just in case.
    Funny, really, because I thought I was being grown up and sensible. I’d got them just in case, because sometimes I thought, I don’t really want to wait, I want to, you know, do it , like, now! Because what we were doing felt so good. And if we did, it’d be better to have something handy. But my Mum found them in my jeans pocket when she turned them out for the wash, although I’d asked her not to do that anymore, I thought I was old enough to do my own clothes, you know. But she said she’d had a machine nearly full, and was looking for something to put in it to fill it up, and so she just went through my clothes which were on the floor anyway, she said, as though that was a reason. And she said it just went to show that obviously I had things to hide and that was why I didn’t want her to go through them, which was not true .
    Anyway, I came home that evening and there were the condoms, on my plate at the tea table, if you please. And Mum and Da with faces like thunder, demanding an explanation. So I told them the truth.
    I thought they’d praise me for my forethought.
    Did they, hell! They set up a lament about how I obviously didn’t trust them enough to come and talk to them and get advice before embarking on such a big step. ( The word ‘sex’ wasn’t mentioned once .)
    I said we hadn’t really embarked on anything yet, and that I didn’t see why I should get advice if we weren’t doing anything. Or even if we did.
    I can see that that was a tactical error now, but at the time I was just really peed off that they were behaving like I was a little kid, when I’d been acting really sensibly and responsibly and everything.
    I said, ‘You knew I was going out with Tariq, we’ve been going out for ages!’
    And my Da said that as far as he and Mum knew that had only been a kids’ thing, only because I was friends with Aneesa. And how