“It feels safer this side of 18. The ground feels surer”

I PULL into my drive just before midnight, and from a distance see three women tumbling out of the house in heels.

I watch them pick their way across the uneven ground carefully, shrieking and laughing. I see now as I park that one of them is my 18-year-old daughter and she’s flanked by two old friends. I get out of the car and they greet me — arms outstretched — with a degree of enthusiastic fondness and delighted surprise that smacks of drink immediately. All sparkled up for clubbing, they stand in front of me. My daughter says, “dad’s in the bath” and asks if I can spin them into town instead. “He says he’ll be down in five minutes,” she says, “but you know what he’s like.”

“Hop in then,” I say on a tired out-breath, “quick.” They clack across the concrete, shouting effusive thanks and in a quick, coltish flurry of legs and swinging hair, they fold their long smooth limbs into the car, one of them sticking a leg back out and grinding a lit cigarette stub under her heel before drawing her leg back in. Their mood is effervescent, expansive and fills the car. I can feel myself smiling, despite my tiredness. The conversation is fragmented by arrangements shouted into phones and punctuated by ring-tones, but I pick up the pieces; they talk of this lad and that lad. Both lads, it seems, like one of the girls in the back. “But she’s unattaaaaaainable,” they tell me. The girl shrugs, says she doesn’t want to go out with either and then they all start to bob about, singing, “I like them tall girls, I like them short girls, I like them brown-haired girls, I like them blonde-haired girls, I like them big girls, I like them skinny girls, I like them carrying a little bitty-weight girls… I get all the girls, I get all the girls, I get all the girls….” It’s a Calvin Harris song, they tell me before tripping up on the lyrics from laughing too much.