Free Growing Up Twice by Rowan Coleman Page B

come to visit her. It’s not that we don’t see her all the time. It’s just that for some reason, coming back to the place where we grew up has always seemed like a pointless exercise when there is so much to see and do out there. My mum moved out of town with my older brother a few years back when my niece was born. Rosie’s mum went to live in Florida with an American she met whilst working as a tour guide at Tower Bridge. Both our sets of parents divorced in the eighties and neither of us really knows our dad any more although Rosie has tea with hers about twice a year and he gives her money. I know mine lives in Battersea with his clichéd ex-secretary second wife, who is about six years older than me. He wears a leather bomber jacket, drives a sports car and has a firm belief that his comb-over makes him look less bald. Despite my efforts to make sure he has always had a number to contact me on, he never calls me and on the few disastrous occasions when I’ve seen him since he left he patently wishes he could be elsewhere, back in the life where he can forget he ever had a former family. For a long time, I thought there must be something I could do to build bridges, but gradually I realised that he just didn’t want to know. It made me feel like an over-persistent, clingy ex-girlfriend.
    But on the way here tonight, seeing the school we all used to go to and the café we used to drink Coke in after school, hoping to get a look at the sixth-form hunks, made me smile. These places and others, like the bus shelter where I avidly kissed my first boyfriends in full view of the poor commuters, and the park in which we cracked open those first illicit bottles of Lambrusco, formed such a seminal part of my early life that they suddenly seem inviting and reassuring once again. There must be something about getting older that makes reminiscing pleasant and the country of your childhood a safe haven. Just at this moment, though, that country seems very far away. Of all the news we’ve broken to each other over the years, this must be the biggest.
    ‘We brought some wine.’ Rosie hands Selin the bag and she looks into it.
    ‘Oh, red, that makes a nice change from your usual …’ She stops dead in her tracks. She pulls out a large party pack of fun-size Mars Bars from our off-licence carrier bag. She looks from me to Rosie and says, ‘Who?’
    Rosie and I, still standing like the accused in the dock, point at each other.
    ‘Hang on,’ I say uncharitably and unfairly. ‘Yours is much worse than mine.’ I can see that Rosie has changed her mind about wanting to tell Selin the news. I can see she is considering moving countries, changing her name by deed poll and undergoing plastic surgery in order to avoid telling Selin the news. And when you consider that earlier today she phoned her mum in Palm Beach and had no trouble telling her at all, you’ll understand exactly how much we care about each other’s opinions. Especially Selin’s, who in all of our years of friendship has never ever been wrong, not once. That’s not an exaggeration.
    ‘Owen is back in touch,’ Rosie says, shrugging her shoulders for my benefit and waggling her eyebrows. I think she is trying to tell me she wants to abort the mission. But this is going to have to happen at some point between now and next May and I’m not letting her off the hook.
    ‘Oh no, tell me you aren’t going to see him again.’ She looks at Rosie. ‘Did you tell her about, you know, the thing that we discussed?’
    Rosie nods.
    ‘Yes, she did tell me, thank you, oh, and thank you for deciding what I am and am not grown up enough to deal with myself.’ I am still indignant about that even though I know they were just trying to protect me and that Rosie’s tactic of prolonging the moment before she makes her revelation is working.
    ‘I’m
not
going to see him again. I wasn’t even before Rosie told me her bombshell, I’m not interested. No, Rosie go on, tell