“You don’t just meet someone and BOOM, you’re in love,” my mother had told me. “Real life isn’t like in films.”

I didn’t believe her when I was twelve, and now that I was fifteen I knew she was lying. She wanted me to have the same miserable life she had, that’s why.

Love was exactly like it was in films: BOOM.

One minute you’re just an ordinary person, waiting for something great to happen, and the next minute – BOOM – something great has happened. You feel happier than you’ve ever felt before – than you ever thought you could feel.

I’m not sure if I fell in love with Les when he kissed me, or if it happened before that, when we were talking in McDonald’s. Not that it mattered. I knew that first night that he was the man I’d been waiting for since I was born.

After she stopped shouting at me through the door and finally staggered off to her own room, I put a Celine Dion CD in my Discman and lay on my bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars I’d stuck on the ceiling. I went over everything Les had said. I imagined every detail of his face, and the way he laughed, and the way he ate, and the way he drove, and the way he looked at me and how he tasted in my mouth.

So this is love, I thought. L-O-V-E: LOVE.

The CD ended and a really old song floated into my head. After my dad escaped when I was four, me and Hilary went to live with my nan for a few years. The Spiggs threw herself into rebuilding her life, so it was Nan I spent time with. Most afternoons we’d get out her box of old records and we’d play them on her ancient record player. This song was one of my favourites because it made me feel really happy. I made Nan play it all the time. And years later they had it in that film. Lying in bed that night, I could hear it exactly the way it sounded on her old record player. Scratchy and old-fashioned.