Thirty Nothing - Softcover

'Yeah, that's right.' She was scraping her hair back into some kind of knot. The sun was playing on her and she looked quite pretty. She seemed strong and bright.

'Where d'you study ?' Dig was suddenly feeling vaguely sociable, as if he might quite like to see her again.

'God, you can't remember a thing we talked about last night, can you?' She smiled. She pulled a pair of yellow sunglasses from her rucksack and sat them on top of her head. 'Well' - she looked pleased with herself, a little embarrassed - 'I'm at sixth-form college right now, but my tutors reckon I'll get a place at Oxford next year - if I get my grades.'

Grades? Grades? Jesus! 'What - er, what grades?' Dig rubbed at the stubble on his chin.

'A Levels, of course.'

'So - you're - how old?'

'Seventeen.'

Oh dear God!

She was standing at the door now, her rucksack on her back, looking all of sudden like a child, like a small girl wearing big girl's clothes. She seemed to transmogrify before his eyes, her hips disappearing, her breasts deflating, her waist expanding, her hair morphing as he watched from stylish topknot to perky pigtails. Oh Jesus Christ! Seventeen!

'Hey, look,' she was saying, waving his ten-pound note at him, I'll find a way of getting this back to you - I promise. I have your number, I'll ring you.'

I'll ring you. I'll ring you!There was a child standing in his bedroom doorway, with a pierced belly button, waving his money at him and telling him she'd ring him. Jesus, what was the world coming to?

'Oh, and by the way - Happy Birthday.' She smiled at him, a nice, warm, intelligent smile, and then she was gone.

Happy Birthday. Oh yes, Happy Birthday indeed. Thirty years old. He was thirty years old. A thirty-year-old pervert. A dirty thirty old man. A heinous, raincoat-wearing, boiled-sweet-carrying, dribbling, drooling old man.

He'd slept with a seventeen-year-old.

OK, so it was the stuff of dreams, the stuff men of his age made lascivious, lustful jokes about over pints in pubs. But to have really done it, to be confronted with the reality of a seventeen-year-old in his bed. His little sister was eighteen and if he'd found out that she'd... with a man of thirty... he'd have... Well, anyway, it just didn't feel right. Dig suddenly felt a little to old to be chasing after much younger women.

The previous evening was starting to come back to him in dribs and drabs. Tequila slammers at Nadine's. Opening presents. Pints at the Lady Somerset with the rest of the crowd. All piling into a cab at midnight. Some club somewhere in town. (A club? They never went to clubs anymore.) More tequila. And then dancing - dancing for hours... God, he's probably looked a right arse. And that girl, that child... Katie! That was it, that was her name - Katie - except she'd pronounced it 'Kayday'...