I looked around at the clothes the other girls were wearing – some of them were in skirts shorter than I’d ever seen in the films we watched and tops that almost showed their boobs. Both girls and boys had rips in their trousers and they wore all the colours of the rainbow. There were people with pierced noses and strangely coloured hair. Rows of earrings. Blue nail varnish. So many things I hadn’t seen before, obviously not in real life, as I never saw anyone except Dad, who always wore pretty much the same thing every day, but I hadn’t seen anything like it in the films either.

The music and shouts were incredibly loud and the lights were so bright and there were loads of unfamiliar smells too. It was getting hard to think straight. I wasn’t sure what to believe any more.

‘Your dad really does keep you on a tight leash, doesn’t he?’ Fred observed, frowning.

‘He worries about me,’ I snapped, an unexpected flash of anger rising in me at him criticizing Dad like that. ‘He cares about me. A lot.’

Fred put his hand on my waist and kissed me hard, shoving his tongue roughly into my mouth.

‘Yep – he certainly does,’ he said as he pulled away from me. ‘But anyway, it’s good news for me if you’ve never been bowling – means I might even have a small chance of winning, for a change.’

I laughed, and leaned in and kissed him, gently, the way I preferred it, not that he’d ever asked me. I thought people might look at us, doing something like that in public, but no one seemed to care.

‘Come on,’ he said, indicating a bench to the left with a jerk of his head, ‘let’s get our shoes on and you can lose your bowling virginity.’

The bowling balls were surprisingly large and heavy, and it took me a few goes, but eventually I managed to throw one in a straight line and even hit a few pins down. Between each turn the screen, which as if by magic had our names on, changed and there’d be a little cartoon either celebrating your go (Fred) or lamenting how many pins you missed (me). It was amazing – I’d never seen anything like it.

And the clothes people wore! I still couldn’t get over them. So many different styles. It was noisy, yes, but people seemed happy. Even the ones who were shouting didn’t seem angry.

It didn’t look dangerous to me. But maybe not everywhere was like this. Maybe the dangers lay elsewhere.

Most of the girls here were about my age, some were even younger. Some were in big groups – just girls, or a mix of girls and boys – and others were in couples, like me and Fred. Sometimes they kissed or held hands.