1975
I arrive back to my new flat, lips swollen, thighs aching. Dee looks up from the table where she has been writing, takes one look at me and lets out a shriek. “Ah, no,” she says. “Not you. No, no, no.”
I glance in the little mirror that hangs over the table. Is it so obvious what I have been doing? In the dappled glass, I see my face, split in two by a smile.
“I don’t believe it,” Dee wails. “It’s not fair.”
I have won a competition I didn’t even enter. All through our last year in the convent, Dee moaned loud and long about her virginity. Leaving home launched her campaign to rid herself of her seventeen-year-old hymen, her tag of shame. She has a bet with Monica: whoever gets rid first also gets paid a tenner from the other.
“So come on, tell me all. I presume it was the myster
