It was the kind of house party where the parents were at a golf club dinner and someone would end up puking in the bushes of the neighbour’s garden and teenagers ‘got off’ with each other (if they got lucky). I had my toothbrush in my back pocket because it was intimated I could stay over, and I brought Cherry Lau with me. If there was to be a Carrie-style bucket of pig’s blood over my head as I walked in, she would get covered too and the humiliation would be shared. If there wasn’t, there would be booze and we could sit in the corner and talk about people.

As it happened the humiliation was all hers.

I told Kemp in the pub one night. We’d had a skinful of Jack Daniel’s and Cokes and he was trying to get stuff out of me. History kind of stuff. Stories. Anecdotes. I had a whole dubious pack to shuffle through that I really didn’t want to share, but I’d had just enough bourbons to confess to this shameful one. How it was a very drunken party. That the bush-vomiting had started early, about nine o’clock. I didn’t tell him a boy tried to stick his tongue down my throat at about ten o’clock, while we were moshing to Madness in the hall, then burst out laughing and said, ‘You’d look all right in the dark. I should have taken you down to the bottom of the garden.’

‘Full moon and too many stars, arsehole,’ I’d replied. ‘You’d still see me.’

I told Kemp that at about midnight, Cherry and I were at the bottom of that garden, sitting on a swing chair and necking a bottle of Southern Comfort. We were talking to a group of idiot boys who were pretending to smoke weed. They were talking about going to the dog track the next day and although they hadn’t asked or cared what we were doing, Cherry piped up with a Southern Comforted slur that she had a family wedding tomorrow.

‘What, a Chinese wedding?’ asked one of the boys.

‘Yes, my cousin.’ She was so pissed her eyes were all over the place behind her thick glasses.

‘What does that involve?’

‘It’s just a wedding,’ she shrugged, ‘there’s nothing different about it. Oh, the bride wears a red dress and we drink tea and it goes on for two days and we give red envelopes with money in them to the newlyweds.’

This was the most she had ever spoken to a member of the opposite sex, I reckoned.