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Sarah Turner was the sort of girl who ought to have had hazard-warning lights fitted, and she knew it too. Whatever she got, she wasn’t ever happy with it. She only ever appreciated something when she saw it in her rear view mirror, but by then it was usually too late to go back. In case you haven’t guessed from the metaphors, Sarah was a driving instructor too.

She’d been single three years before she met Ronnie and as with any other situation, given enough time, she’d grown accustomed to being on her own and moaning about it. It wasn’t for want of opportunity. She met lots of single men in her job, and a good number of them ended up fancying her rotten - which usually worked in Sarah’s favour. Being smitten meant her pupils didn’t concentrate on their lessons as much as they ought to, so they ended up having to take more and more in order to reach a passable standard. Sometimes they even talked themselves out of putting in for their test (“I don’t think I’m ready,” – when patently they were) purely to spend more time under Sarah’s tutelage. When compared to her older, somewhat less aesthetic colleagues at the driving school, Sarah’s lessons-to-pass ratio was woeful, yet she had no shortage of willing students… most of them seventeen, and walking gear sticks of testosterone. But though she was only ten years past that herself, and had no disinclination towards younger men, she wasn’t about to realise some teenage masturbationary cliché merely to fill the vacancy in her own life.

Besides, she was comfortable on her own. She enjoyed the attention. There’s a certain kind of spotlight that only shines on a single woman in her twenties, and for Sarah it was a Super Trouper. It wasn’t just the scrutiny of the opposite sex she found so appealing, but the diligence and concern of her own. Her friends calling up and inviting her round so she wouldn’t be alone on holidays and special occasions. Colleagues offering the use of husbands and boyfriends for “those little jobs round the home” (although Sarah was quite competent at putting up shelves and fixing dripping taps herself, she never turned them away). And, of course, the matchmaking.

“There’s this wonderful single guy lives just across the road from us – he’d be perfect for you!”

“This friend of ours, he split up with his wife last year. He’s a little older than you, but he’s such a caring… So thoughtful… Not at all ‘macho’.”

“You must meet my cousin Mark.”

But though Sarah was always flattered by the recommendations, she rarely took them up. What if they didn’t work out? She’d feel like a disappointment: not to her date, but to his advocate. Besides, there was something else she liked about being on her own, though it wasn’t something she could have put into words. At least not until she finally succumbed to the inevitable…

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