Fabienne's sulking was so efficient, so profound, that it filled the house - you could smell it

The girl behind the counter at Maison Tartine has short, side- parted hair and viciously plucked eyebrows, smudged eyeliner and acne, but is achingly sexy as only a spotty French girl can be. Her eyes are the colour of hot caramel; her tiny, athletic breasts disdainfully unsupported beneath the dark, nylon shirt.

"Eet ees - uh - how you say? - mask - gateau masquerade, non?" I've ordered the cake for Jonathan's birthday (well, life is short and I'm not Jane Asher nor was ever meant to be) and now Raphael and I have come to collect it. The French girl bites chapped lips in frowning concentration as I sign the Mastercard chit. I attempt a sophisticated little smile, painfully aware of my sagging tracksuit bottoms, ancient trainers and golly-gosh English freckles.

When my penfriend Fabienne came to stay with us in Nottingham, I was 14 and she was 15 and a half. But it wasn't just that. I had short brown hair and no breasts and big feet and thought life began and ended with Emily Bronte. Fabienne was blonde and petite-but-curved with Debbie Harry roots. She kohl-rimmed her eyes and smelled headily of perspiration and patchouli and was studying to be a ballet dancer. This meant she spent a lot of time semi-clothed and did not do anything frumpy like read books. She wore tight, sage-green trousers and a tight button-front shirt, gold hoop earrings and an identity bracelet that jangled when she moved. And she knew how to move. I loathed, feared and worshipped her.

We walked around the overheated Victoria Centre in Nottingham as she bought Miner's lip gloss and Smitty perfume and Miss Selfridge mauve glitter nail-polish. As well as Juicy Fruit Chewing Gum, tampons, cigarettes. A swarm of boys followed. They drifted up to us, eyed us, called to us, whistled. Petrified, face burning, I kept my eyes down. "Fuck off," said Fabienne, wiggling her bum and pulling a Marlboro from her fringed leather shoulder bag.

She had fully expected to be allowed out in the evenings alone. But my mother put her foot down. "You're in our care, young lady. We'll take you wherever you want to go - you name it: theatre, cinema ..." She said we could go to see A Star Is Born with Barbra Streisand if we wanted, and have baked potatoes at The Gingham Kitchen afterwards. I couldn't wait.

Fabienne sulked. Her sulking was so efficient, so profound, that it filled the house - you could smell it. She ate little, drank black coffee and Diet Pepsi and washed her hair all the time. Sometimes she deigned to play rummy with me, but you could tell she thought time spent with her nerdy English penfriend would get her nowhere. And she was right.

The French girl lifts the cake box off the shelf with a pout. The birthday cake's a work of art, a cocoa-dusted mound, topped with an angelic chocolate face surrounded by curls of shaven chocolate. "But is it Batman?" Raphael asks, anxiously.

"It's some sort of a hero," I soothe. "A chocolate Angel Person who fights baddies."

Satisfied, Raphael trots back to the car with me. I place the box on a child car-seat in the back and, on second thoughts, fasten the seat-belt around it. "Will it be OK?" asks Raphael, visibly salivating.

"I'll drive really slowly," I assure him.

"Will you park on a yellow line?"

I laugh. "No.

"I'm going to die soon," he observes chattily.

"No, you're not," I brake carefully at the traffic lights, aware of my delicate, chocolate passenger. "Not till you're a very old man you're not."

"An old man with a long white beard and a dog?"

"Why a dog?"

"A dog in a jacket. Like old men have."

"Mmm, well, yes." The lights change.

The following summer, I went back to stay with Fabienne and her family in Brittany. She bought me a pair of tight trousers just like hers and took me to discos, always ditching me the moment she found a boy to slow- dance with. I hated those discos - the sex-music, the hard darkness, the wild-haired boys who rode their motorbikes up and down the boardwalk outside and yelled unfathomable French things at me. Mostly, I found my way back to Fabienne's house alone.

Fabienne had a 17-year-old brother, Jean-Marie: blond, hollow-cheeked, gorgeous. He ignored me completely, never looked at me, never spoke to me, but was never far away - aloof, silent, smoking. I thought he was keeping an eye on his sister, but he wasn't. He was actually waiting for her to abandon me. "Do you like Johnny Halliday?" he asked, scowling, as we walked by the sea.

"Who?"

One evening, he suddenly took my hand, played with my fingertips. I couldn't speak. The next evening, he kissed me, nervous, dry-lipped as we sat on the chilly, shadowy sand at dusk. His words kept me going for the next 12 months: "Tu es jolie. Je t'aime."

Jean-Marie was never my boyfriend, not really, but I loved him faithfully for a whole year, keeping his photo next to the pressed four-leaf clover in my diary. And back home in Nottingham, boys started coming up to me at parties. They didn't know why, but I did.

At 18, Fabienne wrote to me that she'd got engaged to one of the wild- haired boys from the seaside disco. Six months later, her fiance died in a car crash ("Je veux mourir, moi aussi ..." she claimed in her loopy, sloping script). But she worked as a dancer in Paris for a while and we sent each other Christmas cards. Then I lost her address. I've still got the photo of Jean-Marie.