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Temple.’
    â€˜Are you sure you’re all right down here by yourself?’
    â€˜Yes, Miss Temple.’
    â€˜You’re not lonely, just here with your own thoughts?’
    â€˜No, Miss Temple.’
    â€˜Good, I’ll let you get on with them, then.’
    As she goes back down the aisle, Miss Temple stops to check one last time with Billy, the boy who wasn’t having the fit. She pats him on the shoulder, and moves on. Behind her back, Billy turns and pokes out his tongue at me and waggles his open hands and fingers against the sides of his head, and three or four of his friends start jerking and convulsing their heads and shoulders.
    Prick, I think. You absolute little arsehole.
    â€˜Don’t take any notice of him, Laura,’ a voice comes up from the seat in front of me. ‘He’s like that with everyone. He’s just a bully and a show-off.’
    I look over the top of the seat at the two girls sitting quietly with their books on their knees and a packet of sweets open on a cushion between them. One of the girls is dark – Indian or Sri Lankan, I guess – with the blackest, gleaming hair pulled back from her face and pinned with bright plastic clips with animals and butterflies on them. Her teeth shine whitely in her brown face. She is so cute.
    â€˜Would you like a barley sugar?’ she says.
    â€˜Yes,’ I say, though normally I never eat barley sugar. ‘Thank you,’ I say, as she lifts the open packet up to me.
    â€˜What’s your name?’ I ask her while I’m choosing.
    â€˜Luisa.’
    â€˜Louisa.’
    â€˜L-u-i-s-a,’ she says again. ‘Without an o.’
    â€˜Thank you, Luisa.’ I look at the second girl who’s also sweet and smiling and has identical clips in her hair, which tells me just how close the two of them are. This second girl is pretty too but she looks pale, a faded colour shot against the black and white brilliance of Luisa.
    â€˜I’m Sarah,’ she says. Then adds: ‘Boys are awful, aren’t they? I just hate them, don’t you?’
    * *
    Philip Gardner was my first boyfriend, and he was the first boy I ever slept with. The only boy. I’m not a bike, or anything. Philip is two years older than me, and he was in Year 12 and the School Captain when we started going out and it was just before Grandma Vera died, and he came to the funeral in his father’s suit and was so sweet and understanding I nearly died myself.
    â€˜Darling, don’t you see, it was inevitable,’ Mum said, when I told her about Philip and me breaking up. Or not breaking up but Philip dumping me for another girl.
    â€˜Inevitable, why?’ I want to hear her answer at that moment, and I don’t. ‘Just because we’re different ages?’
    â€˜No, it’s not that. Age doesn’t matter.’
    â€˜You’re older than Philip,’ I tell her. And I’m talking about her Philip now. And she is older, but only by a year. Some people still think that’s strange when the woman’s older than the man and they want to discourse about it and what it means and use words like cradle-snatcher and toy-boy, or anyway the girls at school do, and I do too because I like the sound of it, because it’s sophisticated and smart and that, but I’m not absolutely sure what it means. Toy-boy. And when the girls at school found out that my step-dad was younger than my Mum, especially when she got pregnant and had Thomas – at her age and she was thirty-nine and even I was fifteen – they decided that that might be okay for now and it was even romantic and everything because he must love her a lot to get an older woman pregnant, but what would happen in ten years when she really was old and almost fifty and wasn’t pretty any more, like she is at the moment, and would he think he was crazy marrying someone who was too old to have sex any more – and they