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their history.
    Only for her, it wasn’t about doubt; at least not doubt over Sam. It was about something else. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on yet and didn’t actually want to think about…
    Melissa was aged precisely four and a half when she met Sam – enrolled in the Sacre Coeur primary school as a sop to her mother’s Catholic guilt. Eleanor was what Max frequently described as a ‘lapsed catholic’. Not quite an atheist but certainly heading that way.
    But Eleanor, Max explained, had made that first sacrifice of principle, so common among parents picking schools for their children. The Sacre Coeur was the best state school in their area and so what was a little hypocrisy when it was your child’s future? Eleanor and Max apparently reasoned that Melissa should make her own decision about faith when she was grown up herself. Meantime she should be taught the Catholic way with her parents on hand to dilute the scariest bits.
    The strategy inevitably backfired. Melissa decided she was to become a nun – an obsession that lasted alarmingly into the third year, trumped only by the arrival of a striking new altar boy called Michael. This first infatuation came around the same time an older boy in the school called Samuel Winters began inexplicably to accompany Melissa on her walk to school, offering to carry her satchel.
    ‘I don’t need you to carry my satchel. It’s not heavy.’ Melissa liked Samuel very much but had not the foggiest idea where his sudden interest in her blessed satchel came from. Still. He was funny and could do impressions of all the teachers. He was kind and popular but he was four years older than her – hanging out with the big crowd, which rather scared her.
    After Eleanor’s death, Melissa finished her stint at the Sacre Coeur then sat the 11-plus early to progress to the nearest girls’ grammar school, which was a forty-minute bus journey.
    Michael the altar boy went on to the mixed Catholic secondary school, which was a temporary source of conflict between Melissa and her father. Samuel the Satchel, as she had come to know him, had long since gone on to the boys’ grammar school and she saw him only occasionally when they caught the same bus. On these rare occasions, Sam would sometimes sit with Melissa for the journey home, only desisting when his friends bombarded them with whistles.
    ‘I’ve no idea why they do that,’ Melissa complained. ‘It’s not as if we like each other in that way. Is it?’
    It was not until the agony of A levels that Melissa bumped into Sam more regularly again. He was on the long haul studying Architecture at university and so was around only during the holidays when he managed to get a job at the local music shop. Melissa and her friends would often hang out there, using the booths to listen to CDs, and to her surprise, a number of her friends seemed to be in thrall to Samuel the Satchel.
    ‘Why didn’t you tell us you knew him?’ her close friend Emily whispered one Saturday.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Him.’
    Melissa had glanced across at Sam who was smiling in her direction.
    ‘I think he likes you, Melissa.’
    ‘Oh don’t be ridiculous. We’ve been friends since we were in primary school. That’s all.’
    ‘You think?’
    ‘I do.’
    ‘Well, good. Because I am hoping you can get him to notice me.’
    ‘You saying you fancy him?’
    ‘Duh, Melissa. Of course I fancy him. Everybody fancies him.’
    Melissa would remember this moment always. She put the CD in her hand back in its slot on the shelf and looked again at Sam. By this time he was serving an older woman, who was in animated conversation about the soundtrack for some musical. Melissa noticed with no little amusement that even this older woman was trying to flirt with him.
    Why it had not occurred to her before then that Sam would be a target for this kind of attention, she had no idea. She examined his jawline and felt her head shrink back into its neck.
    Do you know