It was definitely before he took me to the pub and plied me with snakebites (an odious mixture of lager, cider and grenadine that was favoured by the teenagers freely allowed to drink at seaside pubs in early '90s England), my tongue slowly turning bright red as Roger talked to me about his 'frigid' wife.
This was shortly before he tiptoed his fingers up the back of my leg one day while I slapped his hand away in peals of laughter, my insides burning with the warm glow of approval. It was common knowledge that only the best girls worked at Roger's* shop – he had even confirmed this, telling me how jealous his friends were that he got to work with so many 'pretty young things'. I worked for this man in the shop he ran below the apartment, and I had agreed to go upstairs with him after weeks of what can only have been careful grooming on his part, following a sustained effort on my part to achieve what I thought was the ideal body size. I actually felt flattered and grateful that he thought I was attractive. When I was 13, a man took me up to his apartment while his wife was out, gave me Pernod to drink and tried to manipulate me into giving him physical affection. Let me tell you an everyday story about one of the many things that can happen when girls are taught to hate themselves. Writer Clementine Ford: 'How many girls are preyed on by older men because those men correctly identify how desperate they are to feel like they matter?'
