‘Scarlett, Scarlett, there is no one like Scarlett,’ he would sing to me as we danced on the streets, at bus stops, bars, wherever we were. We were together for three years of dancing when he stroked my face, held me close and where sometimes I would cry out of nowhere because I was happy, for the first time in years, years, years.
Ollie and I moved for the same music and it was a uniting factor, but it was music that even though I had taken it down a notch, still went with being drunk, high, out of it.
We were young enough to handle that though. Just. We weren’t old enough to have to analyse why we got so out of it, or consider our behaviour as destructive. We didn’t see therapists or make up for it at the weekend with a fast day. Chaos was just what you did until something happened that stopped you being chaotic.
And when, twenty-three and in shock, I told Ollie one day that that vomiting episode hadn’t been a hangover but a baby, we grinned at each other. Because we had our reason to stop being chaotic.
It wasn’t on the script but we loved that scene. We would do this.
He kissed my hair and whispered to me: ‘Thank you.’
‘They’ll be funny,’ he said, grinning like I’d never seen him grin. ‘Like you. They’ll be funny and beautiful and confident and a big adventurer, just like you, Scarlett Scarlett Scarlett.’
Ollie started looking for a proper job, and he thrived with the purpose. I stopped drinking and getting high. Until our baby was born too early and didn’t make it and then I drank more, took more, pushed the boundaries and tried desperately to rewrite myself back into the party girl I was before, not the mum I had been planning to be.
I wanted to be out every night.
I wanted to try this club, and that club.
I wanted to submerge myself back in that world so that I could pretend I had never left it, even in my head, and maybe that would work; something had to, God it had to.
Because I wanted to die, really.
I wanted to have the threesome because a threesome seemed like the opposite of planning to be parents. Debauched. Irresponsible. Maybe it would be the thing that worked.
‘Really?’ said Ollie, concerned as I whispered it to him late one night on a dance floor.
‘Yes! Yes! Why not?’ I said, kissing his face, whirling him around the club.
‘It will be fun! An adventure! You always say I like adventures!’ I slurred. Except normally they involved impromptu flights to foreign music festivals or a big night out on a Monday. This was left-field.
But we could reclaim our messy young lives. Fully see off these sensible nearly-parents we had turned into. Live, so that the alternative stopped sidling into my head.
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea, Scarlett,’ he said, soft in my ear.
‘We’ve been together for three years,’ I told him. ‘We don’t want to get old and boring.’
That was exactly what we had wanted to get.
But in the absence of that, this.
Ollie looked concerned.
‘But now?’ he said, glancing down my so recently pregnant body. ‘Now?’
Now. Exactly now. That was the point.
And I snapped at him that just because I wasn’t at my skinniest, didn’t mean that our friend’s mate Mitch didn’t want to sleep with me.
‘Mitch made that clear actually,’ I said, sullen.
‘That’s not what I meant, Scarlett,’ said Ollie, sadly. ‘I meant physically, mentally. When you’re still healing.’
Well, was Ollie in, or was Ollie out? The implication was that I was doing it, either way.
He finished his vodka.
I was insistent and Ollie agreed, reluctantly, like he agreed to most things I said around that time in a desperate bid to make me smile again.
The next morning though, what had happened and what we had done when we were still grieving for our baby born only six months before had felt shocking. And for us, it marked the beginning of the end.
I shove in more Haribo. More. More.
After an hour and a half, the sat nav tells me I have one left turn to go. My stomach registers all of the sweets in that second and I fight the urge to vomit.
Ollie. I’m about to see Ollie.
You have arrived at your destination.
I take a deep breath and turn off the engine.
Out of the window, I see a man walking into the pub who looks like Ollie, except he doesn’t because he is in his early twenties and giddy and Ollie is in his thirties and by the look of his Facebook picture going grey and by the sounds of his messages, wary.
I unclip my seatbelt and get out of the car.
Deep breath.
Head in.
And it has to be one of the oddest things in life to walk into a pub and see your first love, all grown-up.
For me, Ollie is frozen in time, his arms in the air on a dance floor moving to Basement Jaxx with a lazy smile on his face. He has a bottle of Stella in his hand as he leans forward to touch the birthmark on my ear in a bar. He is naked, getting out of bed to walk to the kitchen to get us some water the morning after. He’s bringing in greasy packages of chip shop chips that we will devour to ease hangovers.
But now, he’s defrosted. It’s twelve years later and there is a tired-looking man drinking a coffee next to a pub window. He may well have had soya milk – he’s that kind, looks after himself even if he’s exhausted. The BMW in the car park might be his, but then perhaps it’s the Skoda with the Baby On Board badge in the back window.
He wanted children. I know that.
But with your first love you don’t know, you see, if he has a baby on board, because you do not know him, this man who took such a role in forming your whole life. Who is the reason you drink your coffee the way you do because you started drinking coffee when you were together. Who is the reason you get goose bumps from certain songs and cry at certain films.
You have thought of this moment, though, so many times, as you went to sleep, as you daydreamed on the bus, as you saw a date on the milk that made your stomach flip and realised it was his birthday. You have thought of telling him how well you’re doing, and looking good when you did it. You have thought how odd it is that you’re thinking all of this because why, when it’s so past and you don’t want him back.
You have thought Not now, when you have gone out with no make-up on and seen someone who looks like him from the back.
You have thought about not needing him any more, and how freeing that is.
And then you have wondered if that is real, if it would be, were you to see him again because what if first loves are like tornados; what if they obliterate everything in their path when they come along, even if on a calm day, when the sun shines, you can’t imagine their power? Perhaps you will always need him.
What am I doing?
You have thought of the romance of it all, of the depth of that immature love, and of all of that dancing. You have heard songs, and felt tears that contain seven different types of emotions.
You have thought of his skinny legs and his polo shirts and you have thought of his Midlands accent. He’s gone back home, Ollie, now he lives in Birmingham. To get some help with childcare for his children, perhaps? For extended family to be close to his own new one?
You have thought of that first love telling you that he wanted to be with you forever, and how that can have derailed. You have thought that well, it’s good that it did because look at you now with your real life, but also that it’s bad because look at you then, so in love and how can that not be sad, that it didn’t last.