“It was one of them?” she asked, still sounding suspicious.

I nodded.

“Which one?”

I said I didn’t know. I hadn’t actually seen either of the girls take anything from her bag, but nobody else had touched it so it had to be them. She appeared to accept this.

I introduced myself. She told me her name too. Her initials were GF. I pointed out that if she was somebody’s girlfriend then she had the right initials, and she seemed amused at this, though she did not actually laugh. When she smiled she would always put her hand to her mouth to hide her braces and teeth.

I threw the tiny sharpener blade down a drain outside the college.

I started to meet her after school, at a café. I told her jokes and amusing things that had happened at the college. She talked of pop stars and other celebrities and sometimes we listened to the music she liked, sharing one earphone each. She had no brothers or sisters and her mother was dead so she lived alone with her father. I told her she was lucky to have no annoying siblings but she did not seem to share this view. It was very hard to get her to talk about her father or her life at home at all.

GF first let me kiss her at a bus stop while she waited for a bus back home. Her braces proved less of an encumbrance than I’d anticipated, though it still felt odd. We went to a dance for young people at the town Youth Club and danced very close throughout the closing songs of the evening. I think she could feel my erection through our clothes but far from holding back, as I’d feared, she pressed herself amorously against me. Later, in a shop doorway, we kissed very passionately, and I was allowed to put my hand up her blouse to feel her bra and breasts.

One day on a weekend she came to my house when my family were away visiting a dying relation. I had been expected to go as well but I’d claimed I was supposed to go on Work Experience that day. She brought a quarter-bottle of spirits with her and we got a little drunk. She had also brought some of her music and so we danced in my parents’ lounge, which felt odd. This time when we danced and kissed she let me undo her bra inside her blouse and put my hands on her behind through her long skirt, allowing me to cup her buttocks and tease them apart and slide my hands as deeply into the space between her legs as the skirt would allow. Her fingers dug into my back through my shirt and she made a cage of her fingers and clutched at my head, ramming my mouth against hers.

“Do you want to fuck me?” she asked. She looked and sounded very serious. I felt extremely nervous. I had meant to say “Nothing would give either of us greater pleasure!,” which was a line I’d heard in a film, but in the end I just nodded and said yes, I did.

“Where’s your room?” she asked, taking me by the hand. “We’ll have to close the curtains.”

I had kissed a few girls, and one, since gone away to university, had put her hand into my pants and wanked me off, but I was otherwise still a virgin. I had hoped to see things, to get to look at a girl’s body properly, in close-up, in soft sunlight or full moonlight, but she wanted the curtains closed and no lights on. I had a packet of condoms I’d stolen from my mother’s bedside cabinet but she assured me there was no need for these. I came very quickly the first time. She wanted to be taken from behind, her holding onto the headboard of my narrow bed, me kneeling behind her. Later she took me in her mouth. I thought this was a bit dirty at first, but she just gave a single snorting laugh when I mentioned this. I had become very hard again and could feel, against the skin of my cock, the braces imprisoning her teeth. I began to pull out as I felt myself approaching orgasm, gasping and telling her this, but she kept me in her mouth and let me come there. Later again we made love face to face, though her eyes remained tightly closed throughout. Her nails drew blood on my back, though I only realised this later. At the time the pain was not so bad and I remember thinking this was interesting. She laughed at the fact that I always wanted to clean up immediately, with tissues.

The room was dim but nowhere near fully dark and I had already noticed the various scars and burn marks distributed over a large proportion of her body. Even if the room had been pitch black or I had been blind, I would have felt the welts of raised scar tissue on her arms and thighs and torso. I had already half guessed, and one or two boys I knew – I would hardly call them friends, but we hung around together sometimes – had suggested that there was a reason she always wore long clothes and was excused gym classes and swimming lessons.

We had sex whenever we could. My dad’s garden shed was probably where we did it most, usually at night. It was hidden from the house and it was easy to get the key from near the back door. Sometimes we would pretend to do things to each other with items like the saws and hammers and the heavy vice that sat clamped to the workbench. We were invited to a party at the flat of some of her friends and had sex in a bedroom that had been set aside for just this activity; there was a queue.

GF had long been in a girls’ organisation called the Girl Foresters and had risen to the rank of junior officer. One time I got to fuck her while she wore the uniform of this organisation and that felt especially good. I fantasised that one day she would become a police officer and I would get to fuck her while she wore that uniform.

One time, for nearly a week, we had the run of a house belonging to an old lady who she cleaned for sometimes, when the old lady was in hospital. We fucked until we were both sore. She had bruises on her arms and the backs of her legs that I had not caused.

“Of course it’s my dad,” she said one evening, lying on the floor. If we did lie down to have sex, we always did so on a sheet spread over a quilt on the floor; she would not use the beds in the old lady’s house. I had asked her if the bruises came from her father. I had wanted to ask her this for some months now but had never felt the time was right. In all honesty I wasn’t sure the time was actually right then and perhaps if I’d thought about it more deeply I’d have realised the time would perhaps never be right, but I did want to know and I felt we were in a relationship of sufficient long-standing and even commitment that I deserved the prerogative of being able to enquire regarding such matters.

I asked whether he had always hit her. “Long as I can remember,” she replied. “Ever since mum left.”

I said I thought her mum was dead.

“He says she is,” she told me. “Won’t say where she went or where she ended up before she died. If she is dead.” She rolled over onto her front. I stroked her buttocks, which were very firm and round and smooth and one of the few places on her body that she had never marked with the various implements she used to cut herself. I wanted to ask her if her father had abused her in other ways, if he had abused her sexually as well. I had already guessed that he had but I wanted to be sure. However, I was worried that this might prove a rather difficult subject. GF could be very nervous and highly strung and was liable, when faced with a conversational subject she felt uncomfortable with or a line of questioning she objected to, to burst into tears, fly into a rage or storm out of a room.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said as I gently caressed her behind and she pushed back the cuticle on each finger to inspect the pale moon of nail beneath before biting on the ragged edges of her fingernails. I hesitated, wondering if she really had guessed what I was thinking. I decided, with a disturbed feeling, that she probably had guessed correctly. However, I did not say anything. I kept on stroking the glossy skin of her backside. “It is what you’re thinking, about him, isn’t it? What else he might have done to me if he does this to me. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?” she said. Still I said nothing. She continued to worry at her fingernails, biting them and tearing at them. She still didn’t turn round to look at me. “Well, what do you think?” she asked.