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was by her appearance which consisted of a smart white raincoat, a small black woollen hat that rested on the back of her head and tried to stem the long black hair that fell inexplorably down her back, black Sta-prest looking trousers and a pair of penny loafers.
    She had small, piercing blue eyes, a nose that turned up ever so slightly and a wide mouth that always gave the impression that she was brooding about something.
    â€˜Is there anywhere you can get a coffee around here?’ she suddenly asked.
    â€˜There’s a place across the road,’ I replied.
    â€˜Good.’
    Tuesday began to walk off and then turned back to me, myself and I, standing quite transfixed. ‘Coming?’ she said with a smile. ‘I won’t bite.’
    Over the cappuccino swing, Tuesday told me of her background, growing up in South Ireland amidst beautiful countryside and living the village life. When her father suffered his second heart attack and passed from this earth to the next, the mother, distraught and unable to live with the memories, moved to London in search of a new land. Tuesday was 14 years old.
    â€˜My father knew he was weak physically and so from an early age he prepared me for his passing. He talked to me about it and said I had nothing to fear and not to worry or grieve over him as he was going on to a much better place where we would eventually meet up again. I believed him. I still do.’
    Tuesday (so christened because that was the day of her arrival) and her mother moved in with friends first, and then a distant uncle let them rent one of his properties, a run down house that they were doing up in return for rent, and as this was down the way from my school, that’s where she had landed. When I unravelled my story, born and bred in London, P&M still together, happy childhood, it sounded, next to her fable of loss and journey, quite commonplace. Yet Tuesday listened to my particulars as if I was relating the most exciting story in the world and I found myself gladly falling further into her universe. I asked her out. She blushed just a touch and said, ‘sure, why not? But what ever will your friends say about you being seen with Maggie, eh?’
    â€˜That,’ I replied, ‘is of no interest to me.’
    Even so, under her insistence, we kept our liaisons something of a secret from the Pleb Patrol that stalked my school and, six months later, on a night etched forever in my HQ, we lost our virginities to one another in a small hotel pad, room 77, that we both saved up to hire. The one incident that I will never forget from that night happened when, so overcome by the nervous excitement of it all, the booking in under different names and the growing realisation that what I had dreamt about every night for what seemed like forever, was actually going to happen, I rushed everything and finished way too early.
    Turning my head away from her in burning shame, I crumbled against her body waiting and wishing for the sheets we lay on to wrap themselves around me and whisk me up and away to anywhere but this room. But that gal of mine had a real heart. She simply lifted up her hand, placed it on my head and stroked my hair.
    And then she said, ‘I’m so glad that it was you. It was lovely.’
    Tuesday taught me many things in the following months that I still abide by, such as always go with your feelings, whatever the cost, and never be scared, for no matter how bad things are there is always the way through. It explained why, as soon as they could, the school let Tuesday go and she happily made for the exit, strong in the knowledge that no matter what the odds she would always pull through. I dug that gal big time and there was nothing else to tell me differently until that nightmare evening when my heart took a blow that it is only now just recovering from.
    I had gone to pick up Tuesday for an evening of cinema and cappuccino and so could not understand why, when I reached