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and seven kids by now.’
    I see her ear move up. Could that be a smile?
    ‘The Love Market,’ she repeats.
    ‘Well, it was really a marriage market in many ways. We go to our local market to buy food; these people went to find a wife.’
    ‘That’s very twisted.’
    ‘Actually, it wasn’t. It was charming. The boy made up a love song and sang it into the darkness. And somewhere in the crowd, a girl sang her own words back to him. Soon they’d be singing in perfect harmony—’
    ‘I’m going to barf. What did they sing about?’
    ‘I don’t know. It’s not like they sang in English just for me!’ Her ear moves again, and now I see a cheek, and a smile.
    ‘Anyway, the two lovers would then disappear into the forest for three days. And when they next emerged, that basically meant that—’
    ‘They’d had sex.’
    I still cannot get used to hear the word “sex” come out of my daughter’s mouth.
    ‘Well, okay, yes, they probably had. But over there, Aimee, once you’d had sex with a boy that was it for you; you got him for life. The girl would go off to live with the boy’s family. Her parents would lose a daughter, and another family would gain another pair of hands to work the land.’
    ‘Drastic,’ she says. ‘I am SO glad I don’t live there.’
    ‘No! It was romantic!’
    ‘Ergh. Which part precisely?’
    ‘Perhaps you had to be there.’
    ‘Or not, as the case may be, thank you. I am SO NOT EVER going there.’
    I smile at her as she shudders. ‘It wasn’t just young lovers though. Many of the people were there because they were married to somebody else, but their hearts belonged to another. I remember Patrick telling me that people came to the market to find what they had lost, or what they’d never had.’
    She turns slightly again, and looks at me, a little intrigued. ‘In my case, someone I met in Asia had told me about The Love Market. I always felt like I had to go there on my own. Something about it appealed to my young romantic heart.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘Well, Patrick was staying in one of the tribal settlements, in a primitive wood hut, the typical place you’d imagine a foreign newsman roughing it in. And I was staying in a fairly westernised, sanitary little two star hotel.’
    And it was a swift, wordless passage from hello into bed. I beam a picture of him to mind, and all the old feelings come with it. Patrick was tense and intense, and had trouble relaxing; he couldn’t seem to stop over-thinking everything. That confidence that bordered on arrogance but never quite crossed the line. He could be demanding and quite cutting. But I loved that about him because it said he was comfortable with me so quickly. He had a glamorous career. I had a degree in Human Resources and no career plan. We were opposites, yet none of that mattered.
    ‘Go on. It’s just about getting interesting. Did you have sex with him on the first date?’
    ‘Aimee! You’re twelve. I’m not talking about my sex life with you.’
    ‘But did you?’
    ‘No. You never ever have sex on a first date, with anybody.’
    ‘So after how many dates is it okay to have sex with someone?’
    I think for a while. ‘Fifteen.’
    Her jaw drops. ‘Go on then, get back to what you were saying about Patrick.’
    ‘Well, there’s not much more to say. We just clicked. We only had four days together but it wouldn’t have mattered one way or the other: there was this tremendous connection between us.’
    ‘Only four days! What happened then?’
    ‘Well, Patrick had to leave.’ It feels so odd being plunged back into the memory. ‘Where did he go?’
    ‘He had to go back to Hong Kong. And he had to go back to his life.’
    I don’t tell her that he was married. That he’d just got married that year. That my impression was that he’d somehow found himself in his marriage a bit by accident. Meeting me seemed to confirm a doubt in him that was already there.
    She looks as though I’ve lost her