Читать книгу The Furies - Katie Lowe - Страница 11

All weekend, I couldn’t sleep. I paced the halls, watched reruns of Murder, She Wrote with Mum at 3am, the news at six, seven, eight. I scraped the mould off the crusts with a knife and made toast for us both, while I mimed conversations I might have with the girls (assuming they invited me back). I worked the theoretical common ground at which our personalities might intersect, making lists of topics I could raise that might somehow make me seem interesting, or witty, or both. I scrawled opening lines and points of conversation in my diary, before tearing them out, ashamed to see my desperation on the page.

I found a stack of mouldering catalogues by the door, and made a list of clothes I thought might make me more like them, make-up they might wear, so wholly unlike my own. I mimed my mum’s voice on the phone while she slept, nervously peeling strips from the wallpaper by the stairs. She didn’t notice.

On the Monday, however, there was no sign of the girls at school. I wandered from one class to the next, imagining them around every corner, among the faceless crowds. I walked by the sports fields, hoping to catch sight of Alex, whose name I had seen on the team rosters for both netball and lacrosse; wandered the cavernous halls of the library, looking for Grace; and by the art studios, imagining I might find Robin there. Not, that is, that I would have admitted this, to either myself or the girls I was balefully stalking. I told myself I was exploring, finding my way around.

As I waited outside the English classroom, I saw the quote from Chaucer written in arched letters on the blackboard. I still remember it now: ‘How potent is a strong emotion! Sometimes an impression can cut so deep / That people can die of mere imagination.’

‘Hey, new girl,’ a sing-song voice rang behind me, startling in the silence.

I spun around to find myself watched, warily, by a short – petite, I suppose, is the word – blonde girl, dressed head-to-toe in the school’s sports colours. She fingered the tape wrapped around her fingers. She was pretty, in a sleepy way, eyes heavy-lidded, like a doll’s. The kind you want to close with your thumb.

‘What are you doing?’ She looked at me with a half-smile, a mixture of sweetness and suspicion.

‘Just … Getting my bearings,’ I said, twisting my fingers, palms tight and sweating.

‘I saw you last week with the weird girls. Not that it’s any of my business, but … Well, you seem nice. If you want to make friends around here, you might want to avoid getting stuck with them.’

‘Why?’ I was less surprised at her opinion of the girls – though naturally, I was curious – than the very fact of having been noticed at all. I’d imagined myself invisible, disappearing into the crowd.

‘You really want to know?’

I nodded. A soprano began singing halfway down the hall, a little off-key. The girl winced.

‘Okay, well,’ she said, shifting her backpack from one shoulder to the other. ‘You remember Emily Frost?’

I wound the name around, picked at the threads. It had a familiar ring to it, but where I’d heard it, I couldn’t say. I shrugged.

‘Where’d you go to school again?’

‘Kirkwood.’

‘So you’re from round here. You must’ve seen it on the news. The one that did a Richey.’

‘A what?’

‘Richey. Manics Richey. Disappeared. Never seen again. Jesus, do you even read?’ Her tone was oddly sweet, gently chiding; I nodded. ‘Emily was all over the news last year. She looked like you, except …’ She trailed off. The image came back, and I knew what she was going to say. ‘Pretty. Prettier.’

‘Oh yeah. I remember. But—’

‘Right, good.’ She grew more animated, stepped towards me. I heard the rustle of tissue paper, smelled the chemical scent of Clearasil and body spray, a chemical musk. ‘So she was best friends with Robin, and the four of them did everything together. And then they had some kind of fight one day, didn’t speak for like a week, and then poof! Gone. Everyone says she killed herself, but they never found the body.

‘I mean, clearly there was more to it,’ she went on. ‘If you even mention her name near them, they just get up and leave.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I mean, if something like that happened to my best friend, I don’t think I’d be quite so cool about it, you know?’

I tried to muster a half-smile, a non-committal response. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I said, finally.

She shrugged. ‘Care in the community, I guess. Do you want to get some lunch? I’m Nicky, by the way.’

In the grim heat of the canteen, I found myself in a cloud of strange associations and artificial smells – coconut, lavender, lemon, all wrong – while girls with avian limbs and immaculate teeth giggled and clucked. The girl beside me had a laugh like a pony’s whinny, the dead eyes of a beetle.

They talked quickly, the conversation bouncing easily from one topic to another in long, breathless sentences, all featuring people whose names I didn’t know, though I nodded along, trying to keep up. A girl opposite painted her nails, brush dripping slow rolls of indigo blue; another doodled incomprehensible lists in a sticker-covered notebook, and for a moment, I wondered if I might fit in.

And then I saw them. Robin, Grace, and Alex, walking slowly across the grass, just as they had on that first day, the three of them smiling with quiet satisfaction, careless and somehow wild. I saw Robin’s hair burning fiery in the light, the moth-bitten chic of her coat; I saw Grace, preternaturally pale, large sunglasses covering the dark circles that seemed always to haunt her eyes; the crisp white of Alex’s pressed shirt, the sophisticated, sidelong glance across the Quad.

‘Ugh,’ Nicky said, her shoulder pressed against mine. ‘They’re so weird.’

I made a vague murmur of agreement, felt a pang of envy, a bitter ache in my teeth. As I stood to leave – making my excuses, the girls nodding and smiling blankly before resuming their chatter – I felt Nicky squeeze my wrist between bony fingers.

‘We’re going to the pier later – want to come?’

‘I … I’ve got homework.’

Nicky groaned. ‘We’ve all got homework. Come on. It’ll be fun.’

I felt the sharp edge of her thumbnail in the soft swell of my wrist; a brief flash of irritation, first at her, then at the other girls, for leaving me here.

‘Okay, yeah. Maybe. I’ll meet you there?’ I said, striving for the non-committal. I felt a thud of guilt as she smiled; it dissipated as the girls rounded the corner, and disappeared from sight.

Freed from Nicky’s vice-like grip, I did my best to slip away, squeezing between groups of girls who didn’t move as I passed (though on purpose, or simply because I’d so quickly disappeared into the invisible mass of average students, I couldn’t tell). In the cool air outside, there was no sign of them, the Quad empty but for a few pockets of girls in pairs, sharing secrets. Starlings hopped along the architraves above the open doors, swooping down to tug twitching worms from the dirt.

Two hands pawed at my face from behind, clumsy fingers poking at eyes and cheeks, and I screamed; a cackle echoed across the Quad. As I turned, Robin grinned her lop-sided smile, eyes puppet-wide and gleaming. ‘Come with me,’ she said, turning on her heels and walking away.

I stood, transfixed. ‘I still have classes,’ I called after her. She looked back, and I blushed, furiously, catching the eye of two girls, who’d turned to stare at the crack of nerves in my voice. My heart thudded with such force that I wondered if they could hear that, too; I smiled at them, willing them to look away.

‘Robin,’ I called again, as she loped away, headed towards the long school driveway. She didn’t look back; didn’t seem to care whether I followed, or not.

And so, without thought – without question, or doubt, or even the briefest flicker of pride – I followed her, down the hill and through the school gates, the Campanile bell sounding a warning behind.

‘Come on, just take one. One.’ Robin’s shoulder pressed against mine, in the town’s only real fashion store, where pop music hissed through invisible speakers, and girls tripped giggling between changing rooms, making catwalks of the aisles.

‘I can’t,’ I whispered back, looking down at the candied rows of nail polish, names underneath seeming all wrong, the inverse of themselves: Buttercup for a grassy green, Seashell for baby-blue, Moonlight for black.

‘It’s not difficult,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll show you.’ I watched her hands glide above, like a magician practising a sleight-of-hand. She paused, hovering briefly for a moment, plucked a neon yellow from the rack. In a single, swift motion, it disappeared. Even watching, I couldn’t tell whether it was in her pocket, or up her sleeve.

‘See?’ She moved to admire a case of lipsticks, their black cases shining like beetles. I stood, stunned, waiting for a looming security guard to swoop in and drag us away.

Nothing happened. No one came.

I followed Robin to the counter, where she hovered, thoughtfully chewing her lip. ‘It’s my birthday next week,’ she said, pointedly. Her eyes fixed on a red lipstick. ‘That’d go so well with my hair, don’t you think?’

‘I’ll buy it for you,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind.’ I had twenty pounds in my purse, my weekly allowance – though I also knew Mum’s bank details, and that the settlement sat there, largely untouched. It rarely occurred to either of us, it seemed – that we could have things, live differently, somehow. So we went on as we always had, with off-brand canned foods and frozen microwave dinners. For Mum, it was enough.

Robin rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever. If you’re too scared, then don’t.’

‘I’m not scared,’ I said, uselessly.

‘Well then,’ she said, turning to examine a baby-pink t-shirt she’d never, ever wear, eyes lowered, watchful.

I put a trembling hand over the counter, picking one, then another, examining each with what I hoped was casual disinterest. The harried sales assistant explained a refund policy to the mother of a screaming nine-year-old; as the assistant turned away, I slipped the lipstick into my palm, and down my sleeve.

A hand at my shoulder, a heavy slap. I flinched.

‘Good girl,’ Robin said. ‘Let’s go.’

The air in the street outside was a thrilling relief. I gulped, realizing I’d been holding my breath since I’d tucked the lipstick into my jacket. As we walked, she slid the nail polish out and held it between finger and thumb, close to my face. ‘Got something for you, too.’ I felt a rush of warmth, a sweet thrill at the gift.

I slid the lipstick from my sleeve, and did the same. She took it, clicking open a mirror she pulled from her pocket – an item even I hadn’t seen her take – and applied a dark slick to her lips as we walked, shoppers forced to dodge her, tutting as they passed.

‘How do I look?’ she said, turning to me, pouting.

‘Gorgeous,’ I laughed. It was true. To me, at least, she did.

She grabbed me by the shoulder and planted an exaggerated, ridiculous kiss on my cheek. ‘Now you’re gorgeous too,’ she said, grinning, the lipstick smudged with the impact, flecks of red on her teeth. I felt I ought to laugh, but couldn’t; I was too stunned. I stumbled along beside her, speechless and blind, as she chattered on about classes, homework she refused to do (‘on principle,’ she said, not explaining what, exactly, the principle was) and girls she hated, their crimes seeming to me like instructions, things I would no longer say or do.

As I look back, it seems ridiculous. And yet, though I have loved, and been loved, in the decades since we met, no infatuation could compare to the outrageous intensity of those first weeks with Robin.

I wanted to know every part of her, and she craved my secrets just the same. We each felt the raw crush of the other’s nerve-endings; we shared experiences great and small, sitting under trees dropping red leaves around us, glowing in the autumn sun. Occasionally, I would think of Emily Frost, as we passed the faded posters stuck to lampposts and trees, and the question would gather in my throat – Is she the reason you like me? But I’d brush the thought away, press it wilfully into forgetting, and take her interest in me as my own; raise some new topic of conversation, a new intimacy shared.

It seems impossible, now, to imagine an intensity so feverish, such delirium. Perhaps that’s a symptom of getting older. One’s feelings wear down, no longer sparking so keenly. Still, when I think of Robin, of those early days when our friendship was new and unfamiliar, I feel a swell deep within my chest, an echo of those heady days, when we ducked into a rain-battered chip shop and shared a single cone as we walked along the promenade, laughing at the withered old women and screaming kids, who seemed so stupid, so beneath us, so deserving of our contempt. When we smoked rolled-up cigarettes and stubbed them out in the sand, the detritus of summer – cans, fools’ emeralds made from broken bottles – shifting beneath our feet. When we drank sickly-sweet alcopops from glass bottles, breaking the caps on the metal backs of graffitied bus seats. Every breath, every moment, possessed with an illusion of glamour, of filthy decadence, purely because it was ours, we two our own radical world, a star collapsing inwards and bursting, gorgeous, in the dark.

Not, of course, that I was able to imagine this then, still chattering shyly as we walked along the pier, the setting sun turning the sea blood-red. I heard a familiar voice, and turned to see Nicky bounding towards the two of us. Robin let out a groan, and I swatted her arm. ‘Shhh,’ I hissed, feeling my cheeks redden as Nicky approached, caught in a lie. I’d mentioned her invitation to Robin earlier – this, admittedly, an attempt at making Robin jealous, though it seemed only to have the opposite effect: she had told me I was lucky, blessed to have been rescued, her hatred of Nicky vicious and clear.

And yet, I realized, as Nicky approached, it was Robin’s idea to come here, now.

‘How are you doing?’ Nicky said, as she strolled towards us, clutching an enormous stuffed bear (or cat – it was cheaply made, and hard to tell). She saw me staring at it. ‘Ben—’ she turned and pointed to a tall, tanned boy in a football shirt, lurking several paces behind ‘—he won it for me. Isn’t it cute?’

‘If you’re into that kind of thing,’ Robin muttered.

Nicky ignored her, and turned to me. ‘Are you coming to the party on Friday?’

She looked at Robin, who scowled back. ‘What party?’ I said, at the same time as Robin said ‘Yeah, she’s coming,’ the two of us laughing, awkwardly.

‘Awesome,’ Nicky said, pretending not to see, though a half-smile passed on her lips, a whisper of a smirk. ‘Also,’ she said, expression instantly serious, tone conspiratorial, ‘I wanted to ask … Is Grace okay?’

I felt my stomach drop; glanced at Robin. ‘I … I haven’t seen her. Why?’

‘Well, Stacey – you know Stacey, in the lacrosse team? She broke her finger at a match last Friday night. Which is horrendously bad timing, because we need her for the squad when we play …’ I felt myself dragged into the long and complex history of the school lacrosse team, and nodded dimly, waiting for her to return to the matter in hand. ‘Anyway,’ she said, finally, ‘she was at A&E and she said she saw Grace in the waiting room with Alex, looking like she’d been hit by a bus.’

‘She’s fine,’ Robin said. She looked out at the seagulls criss-crossing in the air, diving at unsuspecting tourists clutching fried doughnuts and newsprint-covered chips.

‘I don’t know … Bloody nose, black eye … Not that you’d know under all that make-up, mind. It’s a shame, really. She’s got such a pretty face.’

I shook my head. ‘I haven’t spoken to her. I didn’t know anything had happened.’ I turned to Robin. ‘Did you?’

‘No,’ she said, looking down between the broad slats of the pier.

‘Well, I thought you might know. Jodie – Jodie with the short hair, the lesbian-looking girl in the upper class – she asked Alex if Grace was okay this morning when she saw her, and Alex said she didn’t know what she was talking about. Which is kind of weird, right? I mean, if she was there and all. Which she must’ve been, because Stacey wouldn’t lie about something like that.’

I shrugged, though it seemed, based on Nicky’s sideways look, that my attempt at nonchalance was unsuccessful. ‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything,’ I said, at last. This seemed to appease her. Nicky smiled, leaned in to kiss my cheek – an affectation I suspected (though I couldn’t be sure) she’d adopted in some sly imitation of Robin, one’s lips marking the spot where the other’s lipstick had been, before – and bobbed off towards town, boyfriend in tow, leaving the two of us walking silently towards the sea.

Robin spoke, finally, when we reached the railings, looking out into the nothing. ‘Her dad’s a total psycho.’ She clung on, leaned back, and swung there for a moment, before pulling herself back. ‘Grace’s, I mean. He’s why she’s always got bruises.’

I turned to face her, a dull sickness rising. ‘He hits her?’

‘Yeah,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Can’t we—’

‘She says it’s not our business. Like, she won’t talk about it. Ever.’

‘Oh,’ I said again, uselessly. Silence fell, broken only by the clack and chatter of seagulls swooping above, the waves rattling the pier below. ‘Where’s the party?’ I said, at last, desperate to break the silence. I felt bad for Grace, truly; but my thoughts kept wandering back to Nicky’s other comment. The party. Robin hadn’t said anything, and if Nicky hadn’t brought it up, I wasn’t sure she would’ve mentioned it at all.

‘Halloween party,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend’s throwing it. You should meet him.’ She chewed, thoughtfully, at her finger, biting off a hangnail and spitting it into the water below. ‘Lots of boys in his halls, too. You might find one yourself.’

‘Halloween isn’t for another week.’

‘So?’

‘I don’t have a costume.’

‘You won’t need one. Wear what you’ve got on now, and no one’ll tell the difference.’

I threw a bottle cap at her, sand rolling back on the wind. I’d never been with a boy, never so much as kissed one. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. I thought back to my old school, scrappy, howling boys who’d tug and paw at the girls who let them, who encouraged them, and who told each other elaborate stories of who loved who, and how they’d fucked. It all seemed a lot of work, even if they had shown any interest in me (which, of course, they hadn’t).

Still, the prospect of a night with Robin, in what I imagined might be the more sophisticated, mature company of university students, was too tempting to refuse. ‘Can’t wait,’ I said, as the last spark of the sunset clipped the edge of the horizon, and the first brush of night air echoed in the wind.

The university was on the far side of town, only a couple of miles from the Kirkwood – and it possessed none of the grandeur of the grounds to which I’d by now become somewhat accustomed (though even now I am not wholly immune to the bloom of evening light behind the Campanile, or the froth of raindrops glowing above the Great Hall’s sage and silver dome on a cool spring day). I’d only ever been dimly aware that it existed, and even now never thought of it as a university. It was ‘the old poly’, or ‘the college’, to residents of the town, and I had never thought of it in any other terms.

All béton brut and gabions, grey crumbling into black, it was impressive, in its own way, and almost a better fit for the town: ugly in a way that seemed to be somehow intentional. Aggressive, even. The tower, indeed, had cut a lonely but ever-present figure in my childhood, the only tower building in the whole town – wide and squat, with gangways connecting its two halves, a ladder leaning on the sky. The leaves hung wincing from the trees, or cracked underfoot, scratching at the pavement; the sky grey and fat with mist, words made visible in the cool night air.

When Robin and I had met, in the dim lights of the bus station, where the shelters rattled in the evening wind, she’d thrown her arms around me in an overblown hug. ‘You look amazing,’ I said, the words muffled by the crush of her shoulder, the wide, black brim of her witch’s hat.

‘I know,’ she said, pulling away. ‘What … What are you meant to be?’

I tugged at the back of my coat, the blooming flash of red. ‘Red Riding Hood,’ I said, blushing; knowing, already, that it was stupid, a childish idea.

She laughed. ‘Okay, so, before I say anything else: you are adorable,’ she said, the words shot through and veined with sarcasm. ‘But this is a grown-up party. You need to look the part.’ She pulled me down onto the cold metal seat beside her, and began rooting through her bag, chewing thoughtfully at her smudged, blackened lips.

An old man, stinking of sweat and stale alcohol, paused to stare as she reached for my chin; instructed me to close my eyes, and hold still. I don’t know how long he stood there, though the smell of him lingered as I sat, waiting, feeling myself watched. And yet the touch of her, the assurance with which she smoothed foundation into my skin, brushed powder gently into the hollows of my eyes; the way she laughed, a little, when she told me to pout, the feel of breath on my skin as she leaned in to paint my lips … It doesn’t matter who sees, I thought. I don’t care.

‘There,’ she said, at last. ‘What do you think?’

I opened my eyes, blinking in the light; caught my reflection in the threaded glass of the windows as the bus shuddered in behind. Eyes lined with soft, smudged kohl, made them wider, their expression somehow no longer mine; lips lined fat, a blooming red. A painted shadow in the hollow of my cheeks.

I looked wholly unlike myself, somehow, drawn into a new self by her. And as I blinked once, and again, I felt a shudder of recognition. My features made fuller, more vivid, I looked, now, like the taped-up photos of Emily Frost, pocked and faded by the wind.

‘Do you like it?’ she said, she, too, watching my reflection in the glass.

‘Wow,’ I said, unsure what else to say.

She talked, almost without pausing for breath, all the way to the campus, flitting from one topic to another. About her little sister, whose obsession with a certain TV show meant Robin had to listen to it playing through the walls in the middle of the night. About a tattoo she’d been thinking of getting, that she’d drawn ‘fifty thousand times’ but couldn’t get quite right. About a horror movie she’d seen but couldn’t remember the name of, though a scene in which a woman had been chopped to pieces had struck her as ‘fundamentally unrealistic,’ because ‘there’d obviously be way more blood.’ I wondered about mentioning the accident, the strange absence of blood (in memory, at least) – but I couldn’t find the words. I’d told her almost everything, but never that. I didn’t want her pity; wasn’t sure I could bear to be anything but the girl she thought I was.

At the foot of the tower, voices and music roared from an open window several floors above. Robin grabbed my hand, and we walked through the wooden doors to a dull reception area, a single security guard sitting at a tiny screen, surrounded on all sides by lewd graffiti and defaced postcards. ‘Ladies,’ he said, with a grunt. ‘You students here?’

‘You really don’t recognize us by now?’ Robin said. ‘It’s me! Robin. Tenth floor.’ He shrugged and turned back to his screen, disinterested.

‘I can’t believe that worked,’ I whispered as we stood in the lift, Robin picking at her make-up in a mirror coated with dust and handprints, ‘FUCK THE TORIES’ scrawled in lipstick overhead.

‘Whatever. One of the boys would’ve come and rescued us, anyway,’ she said, with an overblown wink. I laughed. I had doubts about her boyfriend Andy’s capacity for rescue, based on the stories I’d heard from Alex and Grace earlier in the week, but held my tongue.

The lift shuddered to a halt on the eighth floor. ‘It only goes this far. Party’s on floor ten.’ She kicked the door, once; then again. It opened with a groan, and we stepped out into a dull corridor, the air curdling with a lingering smell of damp clothes and spilled beer.

I walked a few feet behind, pausing to examine the lurid posters and photographs stuck to each door. As I looked at one – a poster for Glastonbury Festival, two years earlier, the list of bands in such tiny print I had to lean in to take a look – the door swung open. I stumbled backwards, and Robin swung around, turning back.

In the doorway stood a tall, scraggly student, hair mussed as though he’d been interrupted from sleep, though given the pounding music above, this seemed highly unlikely (though I would eventually learn, through my own undergraduate experience, that it is indeed possible to sleep through anything, if one has enough work to ignore). ‘What’s this?’ he yawned.

‘Howdy,’ Robin said, not missing a beat. She extended a hand with a half-ironic formality which seemed capable of diffusing even the most fraught situations. ‘Robin Adams, pleased to meet you. This is Vivi. We’re going to a party – want to come?’

He stood staring blankly at her outstretched hand for a moment, blinking away sleep. ‘You’re inviting me to a party in the building I live in?’

‘Well, it’s my boyfriend’s party, so I figure technically I’m the hostess. Kind of,’ she said. ‘That means I get to invite who I like, even if they do live a few floors below and consider themselves above a formal invitation. And even if they don’t introduce themselves properly. Like, with a name.’

He glanced at me, for a split second, before turning back to Robin. ‘I’m Tom,’ he said, with a smile that gave his face an almost wolfish quality, attractive in a way I couldn’t place. I felt a flash of envy, in spite of myself, as he finally took Robin’s hand.

‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ she replied, coyly. ‘Well, we’re going to the party. Come if you want, or don’t. Your choice.’ She turned and strolled down the corridor, and I followed, looking back briefly to see Tom leaning in the doorway, still dazed by the encounter. He waved; I turned away and rushed to catch Robin, cheeks flushed with shame.

‘Bit of a rake, no?’ she said, when I reached the tenth floor to find her sitting on the railing, the ten floors below a sheer drop.

‘He looked like he needs a shower.’

‘They’re uni students. They all look like that.’ She laughed. ‘God, if you don’t like him, just wait till you meet Andy.’

On this, she was not mistaken. Andy, I would soon discover, was a skinny, mantis of a man, who – when we finally arrived, after a circuitous conversation with a student sitting red-eyed on the floor outside – was holding court on a single bed in an incongruously large dorm room, filthy dreadlocks clinging to his white, pimpled back in the fetid heat of the room. Even above the music, his voice carried shrilly, surrounded as he was by dazed students passing a succession of thick, glowing joints.

‘I’m not saying Ayn Rand isn’t problematic,’ he said, grandly. ‘It’s just that some of her ideas weren’t entirely without a kernel of truth. It just requires an open mind to see it.’ He coughed, a brittle, hacking cough, and Robin sidled up beside him to pat him gently on the back. He pulled her in for a nauseatingly long kiss, pausing for a drag on a joint, breathing the smoke into Robin’s open mouth. She turned to the group and, to my horror, pointed to me. ‘This is Vivi,’ she announced.

‘Hi, Vivi,’ they replied, as though hypnotized. Vivi, I thought, as I waved, awkwardly, and wandered to the makeshift bar in the far corner of the room. She sounds like fun. I poured a slug of off-brand cola into what looked to be an unused mug, whose faded university label proudly advertised ‘exceptional careers for exceptional students’. The warm liquid stuck in my throat, sharp and cloying.

I watched the mass of students, and wondered if this might be my own future; then, too, what exactly might be said to recommend it. I saw a girl dressed in a sleek Hepburn dress and tiara swaying precariously close to the open window, while a boy, deathly pale and shimmering with fake blood talked at her, staring wide-eyed into the middle distance. A few feet away, two girls – each with hair in luminous colours, turquoise green and Barbie pink, their make-up vivid, clown-like – sat cross-legged on the floor, engaged in a conversation that seemed to be turning sour. The girl facing me seemed to be growing more unsteady with every sip of vodka, taken directly from the by-now half-drained bottle; I counted a further three gulps before she rose, swaying, and stumbled out into the white glare of the hallway. A group of boys in ragged caveman furs stormed across the room, howling wildly, and proceeded to empty a carton of washing powder out of the window, onto some poor victim below. When it hit, they roared louder still, their hoots reminiscent of some monstrous creatures I had seen, once, on a nature programme.

Robin bounded over and poured herself a drink, topping mine up with a large slug of rum as she did so. ‘You like?’ she said, grinning.

‘Yeah, it’s cool,’ I lied, lifting the mug to my lips. The liquid was hot and searing; a rancid, chemical smell. I lowered the cup without swallowing, relieved to find her attentions elsewhere.

‘I love university parties. Not exactly the height of sophistication, but it’s nice to be around adults for a change.’ I searched her face for the irony absent from her voice, and nodded, solemnly, suppressing my own opinions on the matter. ‘Listen, I know it’s not normally your thing, but … Do you want one of these?’ She opened her palm, revealing a couple of white pills, their texture dusty, imprinted with a flower.

‘If it’s an aspirin, then definitely,’ I said, drily.

‘No pressure. It’s just … I thought I’d offer, so you don’t feel like you’re missing out.’

The boys roared again, now hurling bricks of soap and sopping balls of toilet paper out into the street below. The princess returned, tapped her friend on the shoulder, and gave her a weak kiss; the swaying girl still swayed, and the talking boy still talked.

I took the pill from Robin’s outstretched palm, and held it, nervously, in my own. I felt Robin wrap her arm around my shoulder with something like tenderness. ‘If you don’t like it, all you have to do is say you want to go. That’s it. If you feel weird, we’ll go straight home.’ The press of her, the promise, was enough: I swallowed the pill, washing it down with the searing, sour drink.

For the next fifteen minutes, I felt nothing, though I shuddered at every suggestion of warmth, every heartbeat a portent of doom. I had heard the stories of otherwise well-behaved teenagers who had died a sudden death from their first encounter with drugs, and imagined the cold words of the coroner’s report. My heartbeat quickened and slowed, the sense of panic rising and falling as I remembered, somehow, to breathe.

Still nothing, one moment of nothing after another, a nothing hollow with anticipation, until all at once a panoramic, gorgeous fullness burst around me, the air syrupy, the people diaphanous, unreal. I felt suddenly detached, watching the students around me, each with their own unique preoccupations and ideals, and felt a sense of oneness, an appreciation of other subjectivities beyond my own. Potent chemicals and sweat-ravaged debauchery: the source, no doubt, of the open-minded idealism for which students are known.

I turned to Robin, wanting to tell her everything – not only of this moment, but my whole life story, every secret emotion I had ever held in my heart, all the things I couldn’t say – only to find her seat now taken by the boy from the eighth floor, whose name I could no longer remember. Had he told us? I wasn’t sure.

‘How did you get here?’ I asked, reaching for the arms of the chair in an attempt to still the roiling room.

‘The stairs,’ he said, flatly. ‘Have you … Are you drunk?’

‘That sounds like something I am,’ I said, the words nonsense, confused. I felt a burning heat in the palms of my hands, and released the chair from my vice-like grip.

‘Little more than drunk, judging by those pupils,’ he said, leaning in towards me.

I pulled away. ‘It’s none of your business.’

He winced. ‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry,’ I muttered. I looked for Robin, scanning the room for the red glow of her hair. I saw her, back with Andy, who sat on the floor while she straddled his shoulders from the bed above, leaning over him occasionally for a kiss, her hair falling in strings down his chest, his fingers clutching at them, possessively. I felt sick, overwhelmingly sick, and looked down at the space between my knees, where the lines of the carpet curved and swelled like the roll of the sea.

‘Do you want some water or something?’ I’d forgotten I was being watched. I turned to him, slowly, feeling my neck and jaw tense, tongue thick in my throat.

‘Please.’ I felt both brimming with life, and horribly close to death. ‘It’s so hot,’ I said, as he handed me a plastic cup filled with dirty, bruised ice.

‘Sip it,’ he said, not letting go of the cup. ‘Don’t gulp it, or you’ll throw up.’

‘Okay,’ I said. The syllables sounded wrong, almost like a sing-song. ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ I said, impressed by the cadence of the letters. He laughed, took a step back, as though unsure of himself; then paused for a moment, and sat back down, slowly sipping his drink. I felt a swell, another flush of love for the people around me, and, in the moment, this stranger, who had come to me with iced water and kind words. ‘Thank you,’ I said, with what I hoped was a smile.

‘Any time,’ he said. ‘Would some fresh air help?’

‘I’m not … I’m not going anywhere near that window.’ I heard the words slur a little as I spoke, returning with a perfect echo.

‘Oh god, no. You’re absolutely not going near any windows, or sharp edges, or anywhere without childproofing.’

‘I’m not—’

‘I don’t mean that,’ he said, catching my meaning before I could finish my sentence. ‘I just mean you don’t need to worry. You can’t get in much more trouble than you already are.’

He extended a hand, and pulled me up towards him. Grateful to escape, I stumbled with him into the corridor, where the bright lights and lurid posters swam kaleidoscopic above the stained tan carpets and beaten, grey walls. Stumbling down the stairs, I felt the glow of the fluorescent lights, switching on and off rhythmically as though time had slowed to accommodate their usual invisible flicker.

The words on the posters followed me down the stairs – Dance Society Meet next week, Mason Hall, 5pm; Basketball Tryouts Tuesday – shorties need not apply!; Kafka’s Metamorphosis :: Auditions Monday!!! Occasionally I felt a rumble of doubt, the same hot sweat rising from the soles of my feet to my chest, but the feeling disappeared as soon as I had identified it, the memory delirious and fleeting.

As we reached the ground floor, the rhythm of the music echoing from above seemed still as loud as it had been in the dorm room. I put my hands over my ears, my head aching; Tom stopped as we rounded the corner, and put my hands back by my sides. ‘Act normal,’ he whispered, and walked me past the security guard (though the caution was unnecessary, he now absorbed in a tattered paperback with no interest in the activities of the students who occasionally disturbed his reading). I thought of Robin as we left the building. She’ll be fine, I told myself. And then, a little bitterly, she said she’d stay with me, and she didn’t, so it doesn’t matter anyway.

There is something enchanting about fresh air when intoxicated; though remaining steady in it is a skill I have yet to master, even now, when the mood of a long night strikes and I wander these old streets, unseen and unheard, after a night at home sipping a rich wine and, on occasion, taking some strange combination of powders and pills. Nowadays, of course, these are more likely to be opiates or sedatives prescribed by my friendly and dutifully sympathetic family doctor; still, that feeling always reminds me of this night, when the air was hazy and alive with a kind of magic.

Outside, the sky had cleared to black. As I looked up, he steered me around the slick of washing powder and soap thrown from the floor above, and we walked in silence towards the lake, around which student halls were arranged. With hindsight, ‘lake’ is, perhaps, a little too grand: the light of day would reveal it to be little more than a large pond, surrounded by concrete walls on all sides. As we approached, a flock of birds burst into flight, disappearing into the infinite darkness above.

He tucked his hands into his pockets; took them out, as though caught.

‘You don’t say much, do you?’ he said. I felt a sort of pity for him, a painful identification; I didn’t know what to do either.

I shrugged. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

He said nothing; turned and sat on the graffitied park bench behind. I joined him, wondering what I was doing; why I was so eager to follow this stranger into the dark night.

He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. ‘How old are you?’

‘Seventeen,’ I lied, feeling ashamed the moment the word left my lips. What was I trying to achieve?

He turned and looked at me, doubtfully. From the tower, a firework sparked and burst, leaving a yellow trail through the sky. I watched as it spiralled, dwindling down, the casing landing with a splash in the dark water. He drew breath beside me, and paused.

‘My girlfriend …’ he began. I felt a pang of loss at expectations I hadn’t realized, or at least admitted, I was harbouring: some midnight kiss, a childish imagining of romance. ‘She’s at Cambridge.’

I looked at him, unsure if I was imagining the note of apology in his voice. ‘How’d you meet?’ I said, the words ringing false, cheerful. We were amateurs reading lines, failing to perform.

‘The usual. Same school, same friends … You know.’ I nodded, solemnly, though I, of course, had no idea. ‘I think she’s probably met someone else, though,’ he sighed.

I gave a non-committal murmur, and he continued, though now – the chill of the night gnawing at my skin, the memory of Robin now an ache – I wanted to go back. I waited as he went on – a lack of letters, calls returned late or not at all – and, finally, gave a dramatic shudder. ‘I’m cold.’

He said nothing for a moment, as though surprised at the interruption; surprised, it seemed, to find me there at all. He blinked, and stood, and I followed. Occasionally he would pause to examine a discarded beer bottle on the ground or one of the dolls I now noticed had been hung from the sparse branches of the trees, which creaked and groaned in the wind. Every time I looked back, he smiled, and I mirrored him, unsure how else to respond. It was as though we were playing a game, the rules of which I – in my intoxicated state, at least – felt myself unable to grasp.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Robin hissed as we entered the reception area, where she sat perched on the security guard’s desk, he now a little put out, realizing he was no longer of use. She jumped off the desk and moved so close it seemed her breath was mingling with mine. Her pupils were wide and deep, and it looked as though she had been crying, her eyes wet, shards of mascara littered underneath. I saw Nicky, lurking behind, watching with interest; I waved, dimly, and she smiled, disappearing up the stairs.

‘She’s fine,’ Tom said, wearily. ‘She just needed some fresh air.’

‘Really?’ Robin said, her tone arch. She turned to me. ‘Fresh air?’

I nodded. I felt oddly ashamed, a swell of guilt rising as I tried to recall my reasons for leaving her behind.

‘Wanna go home?’ Robin said, after a pause. I felt the world lurch forwards, and another wave of nausea struck me like a punch to the gut.

‘Home sounds good.’

‘Okay,’ Robin said. She turned again to Tom, who was already walking back towards the stairs. ‘Thanks for looking after her,’ she said, though I thought I heard a note of sarcasm in her voice.

‘Any time,’ he replied, without looking. His footsteps echoed up the steps as we left the tower, and stepped out once again into the night. The brief moment of warmth in the reception hall served only to heighten the cold outside, which now felt biting and cruel. We walked in silence, down the hill towards the edge of campus, through a dark passage lined with chicken-wire fences and overhanging trees fused into a tangled canopy above.

‘I’m sorry for leaving,’ I said, a little relieved at the sound of my voice which, for the first time in hours, sounded like my own.

‘It’s fine,’ Robin said, a few paces ahead. We walked a little longer in silence, before she added, ‘I had a fight with Andy. I think we’re over.’

I felt a rush of relief at this, the implication that perhaps her tears were not on my account, but his. ‘I’m sure it’s not that bad,’ I offered, awkwardly.

‘How would you know?’ She turned to me, eyes flashing anger.

‘I don’t, obviously,’ I said. ‘What I mean is …’ I clawed for some non-committal phrase, something to appease her. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be better in the morning. You probably just need to sleep on it.’

She sighed. ‘I don’t want to be rude,’ she said, slowly. ‘But what experience do you have, exactly, that puts you in a pos-ition to be doling out relationship advice?’ Her eyes were dark in the orange glow of the street lamps, her shadow long and distorted up ahead. I felt my cheeks burn red hot, and, grateful for the cover of night, I looked down at my feet, watching the fabric of my shoes flash and listening to the tap of the pavement as we walked.

When we reached the mermaid, Robin leaned in and gave me a stiff peck on the cheek, gripping the hair at the nape of my neck with a clutch that felt just a little tense, her squeeze a little too tight. Without a word, she turned and walked away, her figure casting a long shadow as she disappeared into the night. I walked home in a stunned trance, remembering as I reached my front door that I had told my mum I’d be staying at Robin’s (her house a cover for a party expected to go on until dawn). I climbed the stairs and nervously crawled into bed, my mind uselessly grasping for answers as I tumbled into a cold, dreamless sleep.