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make it stop. He’d cried so much that snot had bubbled out of his nose, but been otherwise dignified. He’d brought her yellow flowers and a nylon bear on her birthday a week later, then she’d never seen him again.
    On her first day in the sixth form, Miranda, one of the school bullies, took a sudden shine to her. She plied Joy with cigarettes and spliffs and little blue pills until one autumn evening, two months into their new ‘friendship’, sitting on the banks of the M25, watching the setting sun and halfway through a bottle of Wild Turkey, Miranda had suddenly pinioned Joy to the grass and stuck her tongue down her throat.
    Joy allowed Miranda to explore the inside of her mouth and the contours of her teeth, to her heart’s content. She even allowed Miranda to pull up her T-shirt and lick her nipples, but as neither of them really had any idea what happened next in an encounter of this kind it never really went any further. The friendship had fizzled out when Miranda met a proper grown-up lesbian at half term who taught her how to do things properly and since then Joy had remained completely untouched.
    Joy didn’t really understand the concepts of sex or desire. She’d never in her almost eighteen years met anyone with whom she could contemplate having sex; never felt her loins stir or tingle. The idea of being penetrated felt alien to her, like swallowing a hardboiled egg whole, or threading a piece of string through her head,from ear to ear. She’d had crushes on pop stars and actors, and she’d had crushes on the unattainable boys from the grammar school down the road, but she’d never, ever felt pure carnal desire in her life.
    Up until now.
    She watched Vince walking back towards her, across the pub, clutching two pints of lager. She liked his hair, thick and light brown, curling naturally into a soft quiff at the front, military short at the back and sides. He was wearing a black Fred Perry tucked into black gabardine peg-fronted trousers. His neck was heavy and smooth, and his shoulders were wide and strong. His big, handsome hands made the pint glasses look insubstantial. He was the man she wanted to lose her virginity to. From nought to sixty. Just like that.
    ‘So,’ she said, breathing him in as he sat down next to her, ‘tell me about the scars.’ And that was the other thing about this Vince person – he made her feel as if she could say anything she wanted.
    He smiled and touched them. ‘Aah,’ he said, ‘the scars. Do you really want to know?’
    ‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded.
    ‘OΚ. Well, I had some surgery. A year ago. I had some bone taken out of my jaw, pins put in, that sort of thing.’
    ‘What – really? How come?’
    Vince shrugged. ‘To de-ugly me,’ he said.
    Joy laughed. ‘What do you mean, “de-ugly”?’
    ‘I mean, I was weird-looking. I had an underbite, like this… ‘ – he pushed his lower jaw out a little to show her – ‘and it was affecting my eating and my teeth andeverything, so I had corrective surgery That’s where they went in to get to the bone.’ He pointed at the scars.
    Joy winced. ‘Did it hurt?’
    ‘God, yeah. It was fucking agony. I couldn’t eat properly for months after – lost loads of weight. I was under ten stone by the time they took the braces off. Looked like a skeleton. It was like hell, you know, couldn’t talk, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t move my jaw. All I did for a year was take painkillers and listen to music. It was a total nightmare.’
    ‘God, you poor thing. Is it OK now?’
    ‘Yeah. Well, sort of. It still aches a bit, still feels stiff when I wake up in the morning, and yawning and stuff can be quite uncomfortable.’
    ‘And did you… were you… I mean how ugly
were
you, exacdy?’
    ‘Well, the kids at school seemed to think I was pretty hideous. Melonhead, they called me.’
    ‘Melonhead? Why Melonhead?’
    ‘That’s my name. My surname. Well – the “melon” bit, anyway.’
    ‘Your surname is