and get on with other things. I do remember being in the missionary position on the rather hard floor and being grateful that it was once again certainly not a marathon session of sex.
Even though the earth had hardy moved for either of us, Trevor was keen enough to ask me out for another date and we were boyfriend and girlfriend for a while. He lived just a short bus ride away from my grandparents’ home, and sex was regularly on the menu when I could slip away from the house and hop on the bus to his home. By then the sex had got better. As I was still barely 13 years old, my grandparents were constantly questioning where I was going and I constructed what I thought was a foolproof and elaborate web of lies to conceal my new and growing enthusiasm for outings after school. The best and most obvious excuse was that I was simply seeing Jennifer, but she was now regularly shagging Mark, and the times of our dates sometimes failed to coincide.
My strict 7.30 curfew was broken more and more often as I found it harder to tear myself away from the fun of my boyfriend’s bed, and my grandparents started digging a little deeper into my life. Once they realised that my Jennifer excuse was holed below the waterline, my next line of defence was to invent fictitious evenings with another ‘friend fromschool’. The Asian girl I claimed to be visiting did exist but we certainly were never friends. I had grasped at her name as a drowning man grasps at a straw but I am sure that her parents would have been baffled to learn that I was allegedly a frequent visitor to their house, a home that in reality I had never even seen. Amazingly, my grandmother trustingly accepted my tale… for a while.
My downfall came because I had never counted on my grandmother sharing quite as much of my life as she did do with her daughter, my missing biological mother, who then lived more than 30 miles away with her husband and growing young family. My birth-mother had always stayed as part of my life, visiting me at my grandparents’ home or having me visit her when I stayed with my aunt nearby. There had been lots of toys and presents and clothes from her through the years but the relationship had been far more strained ever since I had discovered the truth about my birth.
Now, unbeknown to me, the ‘mum’ who I lived with was sharing her worries about my late nights and suspect behaviour with my birth-mum, a younger woman who represented a much more daunting prospect when it came to lying through my teeth. The first I knew of her growing involvement was a visit in which she suggested we go for a walk together to the local shops. En route I found myself being cross-questioned at length by a woman who was far harder to fool than my adoptive parents.
‘So what’s this girl’s name?’ she asked chattily. ‘Oh and where does she live… which road is that… what is her address… what’s her mum like… does she have many brothers and sister for you to play with…?’ The questions poured outin a torrent that I was ill-equipped to dam or divert. For a while I struggled to maintain the pretence of my Asian friend but I knew too few real facts to fool anyone. ‘I think it’s a good idea of I meet this girl’s mum, don’t you?’ my birth-mother said. ‘Shall I give her a call?’
It was a killer blow and red-faced and stammering I blurted out that I had told a ‘little fib’ to my grandmother. That little fib was soon exposed as a series of whopping great lies as I finally admitted that I was seeing a boy and that my clandestine visits to his home each evening were the reason for breaking my curfew. I had been well and truly caught out – but I knew that however tough the questioning, one fact must remain a tight-lipped secret.
‘I’m worried; are you having sex with this boy?’ my birth-mother demanded; a question that would never have passed my grandmother’s lips.
‘No, of course, I’m not… he’s not like that.’
‘Well you know