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away as quickly as possible so you could forget it ever existed. The girls at school: whose was worse, whose lasted longest, where it happened, when.
    Helena’s story. That older college boy, tattoos like handcuffs round his wrists and the bar cutting his eyebrow silver, hanging outside the gate after school, putting his hands up Helena’s shirt out where all the parents could see. Helena said she was holding out, said he didn’t want it bad enough yet. It was the lingo of sales and stocks; what was the best deal, when was the right time to sell it all.
    Isabel saw it in full colour: the shape of the boy’s arms as he lifted the garage door, the skirt short enough for Helena to save till then, the bike he wheeled out to her. It was, Helena said – approaching the punchline with eyebrow cocked – a boy’s bike. A fucking racing boy’s bike, high enough he had to hold the drop handlebars while she climbed on.
    What do I do at traffic lights? she said, legs wavering, clutching his shoulder.
    His eyes were the colour of skylines, his shrug nonchalant enough to shudder feeling up her thighs, along her belly.
    Don’t stop, he said.
    She set out ahead of him, down the road, skirt snickering high enough to thigh her plan of action to Mrs Waiting’s net curtains: she’d lead him out along the canal towpath and down, find a good hedge, be waiting like some knowing nymph when he caught up.
    She heard him running behind her, wheeling the bike to gather speed. There was the rattle of the cards fixed to his spokes. She lowered her shoulder to take the turning onto the towpath. The ground pitted deep; the hole she saw ducking beneath her handlebars, the wheel turning as it went in and her pitching forward and down onto the bar between her legs.
    So I lost it, Helena said, shook her head with wry impatience at the forecast of everything; of life and what it surely would bring. Virginity lost against the bar of a bike.
    Isabel thought often about the traffic lights, imagining Helena and the boy skidding through the reds; not yarring sounds of fear or triumph, but silent in concentration. Even in a hotel room with cigarette-smelling sheets, even with a man twenty years her senior and the only person her father ever got drunk with, even with no condom, she’d thought it would be like riding red lights.
2014
    Mrs Williams had not held onto the end of the bunting and now half of it was in the pool, beginning to sink. The other end was cording up into the rafters. Kitty wassat on the stone steps, holding her swimming cap. When Mrs Williams waved at her she went and put her toes over the edge, drafted her body skywards and then arrowed down.
    She came up with the bunting wrapped round one fist and towed it to the far end. Tied onto the rafters it hung, dark with water, dripping a little.
    Go wait with the others, Kitty Moore. Mrs William shouted as if there was another Kitty there.
    She went into the locker room. The swim team were sat around, not doing much, some of them in underwear or fully clothed and wearing their caps. Kitty was cold: turned the shower on and ran it till hot. The walls of the shower room were slick as always, seams of mould running lengthwise down the corners, clogs of hair in the shallow yellow guttering.
    Why you wet? someone said. Kitty switched off the shower.
    Williams dropped in the bunting.
    There was a joke at that but Kitty didn’t hear much of it, only laughed when the rest of them did. She was thinking on the night before. All day she’d thought of it, seeing the words pulsing out from people’s lips and not quite getting them; stood for a good twenty seconds at the chips-or-mash question in the lunch queue.
    Kitty thought her mother should understand that you couldn’t have a fifteen-year-old daughter when you were thirty-one without everybody knowing you’d been one ofthose girls who gave it away fast as a hot potato. And you couldn’t expect either, Kitty thought, your daughter not to get old