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jacket, stringy legs in black denim and oversized feet in enormous DMs. He’d done a double take when he saw Joy sitting there in her school uniform. She’d watched him wander up the road away from her, turning back every now and then to glance at her, before suddenly doubling back, plonking himself down and offering her a cigarette.
    Joy’s first impression of Kieran was that he smelled – of cigarette smoke and clothes that had dried forgotten in the washing machine. And she’d been mesmerized byone pimple in particular, a red one on the underside of his jaw with the ripest-looking yellow head she’d ever seen. She had agreed to give him her phone number mainly because she was too polite to say no and too slow off the mark to give him a false one.
    He’d arrived at her house to pick her up for their first date the following week. He stood on her doorstep in leather and denim, fuchsia Crazy-Color combed through the peroxide of his cockatiel hair and a large bunch of matching chrysanthemums in his scuffed hands.
    He told her he loved her after their third date and bought her an engagement ring from Elizabeth Duke six months later. It was gold with three small sapphires and two tiny rubies embedded in the band. She’d worn it because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
    ‘How come you never tell me that you love me?’ he’d asked one evening. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’
    She’d looked into his big, tender eyes, felt every shred of his nervous and unadulterated love for her and realized that there was only one thing she could possibly say to him.
    ‘Yes,’ she’d said, smiling and taking his hand. ‘Yes, of course I do.’
    It hadn’t even occurred to her that she could say no.
    They had spent hours on his single bed kissing and caressing. Joy didn’t enjoy the feeling of his slick tongue inside her mouth or his bitten-down fingernails on her flesh. As their fumblings progressed from over clothes to under clothes and from under clothes to inside clothes, Joy enjoyed it less and less. But she never denied him anything. She even let him guide her hand into his trousersone wet afternoon, and on to his clammy testicles. Once there she had no idea what to do next, and Kieran was too shell-shocked to find himself with Joy’s hand on his balls to push things any further, so she’d cupped them with as much enthusiasm as she could muster until she’d felt it was polite to remove her hand and place it somewhere less personal.
    Joy didn’t permit Kieran’s fumblings because she felt sorry for him. It wasn’t an act of charity. Nor did she permit them because she was intimidated in any way. And she didn’t permit it because she felt she should be grateful, either. She permitted it, purely and simply, because she didn’t believe she had the right not to. If she’d said no to Kieran at any point, she would in effect have been suggesting that she was better than him. And although anyone looking at Joy and Kieran objectively would have seen in a flash that she was way out of his league, although her parents were openly nauseated by the well-intentioned but unsavoury Kieran and the thought of him laying a finger on their beautiful, delicate girl, Joy just didn’t see it that way. She wasn’t anything special, so she had no right to deny other people the things they really wanted.
    Luckily for Joy, Kieran never asked her for her virginity. He’d treasured Joy’s virginity almost as much as Joy had been baffled by it; had held her hand in his while his eyes welled up with tears when she told him that she’d never had sex with anyone. As far as Kieran was concerned, Joy’s virginity was such a precious jewel that no one in the world, least of all him, should be allowed to take it away.
    They’d split up after two years when Joy had got tothe end of her tether with the incessant hours of unful-filling canoodling on Kieran’s single bed and had realized that ending the relationship was the only way to