CLICK
L. SMYTH

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Lucinda Smyth 2019

Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Lucinda Smyth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Extracts of the poem ‘Marina’ are reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd from The Ariel Poems by T.S. Eliot.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008314101

Version: 2019-03-12

For my grandparents – Mary, George, Nick and Bill; and for Great Uncle Bob

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part II

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part III

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
May 2017

The first time I saw Marina was in October 2013. The last time I saw her was three months later.

It seems strange to put it like that. It still surprises me – despite having had years to think about it – how short that time frame is. Sometimes it is assumed that the oldest relationships are the most influential, and that those who know us for the longest periods are those who shape us most significantly. But often the opposite is true. It is the short, intense relationships which have the strongest impacts on us, and only those who flit in and out of our lives who have the power to make us profoundly different. The time spent with them is so brief that each moment in their company becomes effortlessly memorable. The feelings and smells and images that they evoke worm into our brains and we find ourselves returning to them compulsively – trying to pin them down, trying to understand their effects.

I still don’t understand what happened with Marina. I don’t understand the effect that our friendship had on either of us. The more I think about her, the more she eludes me.

But it would be wrong to say that I don’t remember anything about her. I remember everything extremely clearly, to the extent where I feel as though I know her well. I remember the way her eyes curled at the sides when she smiled; the way they narrowed with suspicion in seminars; the way she smoked with the cigarette balanced in the middle of her mouth. I remember the sound of her voice too: soft and low on the phone, deep and loud in large groups, slightly nasal with an upward inflection when she spoke to boys. My memory of her is so vivid that even hearing her name provokes a kind of frenzy in me. Without warning my mind fogs over, casts back, and it is like the last four years never happened. We are both eighteen again, stood outside the library, rolling our eyes at the other students.

Over the last few years I have been good at restraining myself. I have cut myself off from that life. I do not keep in touch with anyone from university. I have removed all traces of myself, online and elsewhere, so that they won’t be able to find me. I have tried to ensure that I am forgotten, so that every piece of my history is forgotten. And then I can forget it myself.

But recently she has started to reinsert herself into my thoughts. I see someone in the street with the same gait, or the same curl in the bottom of their hair, and my stomach lurches. I catch a whiff of her perfume – a sort of honey blossom scent – and my palms begin to sweat, I feel light-headed, convinced that she is in the vicinity.

It feels different this time. The newspaper headlines, the flashes of her face across the TV screens … I can’t help but suspect that everything is about to come to light. She is catching up with me. I need to set the record straight before someone else gets there first. I need to tell the story, as it was, from the beginning.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE
October 2013
i.

Marina and I met during our first term at Northam: a tiny elite university in rural England. At that stage I had been living on the campus for about three weeks, and I felt like I was on the brink of insanity. If that sounds flippant, narcissistic or entitled – good. I was eighteen years old. I was angry all the time and I hated university. Everything about it had fallen short of my expectations, from my room (which was small and dusty) to the nearby city (dull) to my teachers (likewise) to my floormates (shrill or condescending, often both). My course was limited in scope, heavy in reading, and there was a snippy, competitive atmosphere among my classmates which prevented us from becoming friends.

That last point I found especially disheartening. I had grown up in a small town with hardly any people in it – I had few friends, no siblings and my parents were antisocial – and I saw university as the point at which my life would really begin. There I would finally meet people who spoke the same language that I did. I would meet a group of people with conflicting opinions. I would have my mind wrenched open, would stretch my perceptions beyond what I had been taught, and I would learn – really learn – how other people saw things.

In reality everything was the same. The existing hierarchies and prejudices remained intact behind a screen of diversity. Conversations were either flat or gratingly pretentious. Everyone spoke about irrelevant topics in a language that I didn’t understand, and dismissed my contributions with a load of obscure statistics.

I’d told myself that I wouldn’t start drinking alone, but with that form of self-medication out of the window, there seemed only one good option left. I grabbed my laptop from my desk. I sat on my bed in my cold, damp room. For hours on end, I scrolled down my newsfeed.

The autumn of 2013 was the moment of the social media boom. True, certain giants had established themselves earlier in the millennium – by the time the iPhone came out in 2007, Facebook and Google were already a daily ritual. But in 2013 the market suddenly exploded, and a flurry of new apps and features arrived to steal your attention. The result of this – especially if you were a university student with little to do during the day – was that you were constantly glued to your devices.

I was no exception obviously. I had the full English: Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc – and my eyes were permanently locked to a screen. Sometimes this would mean that I was doing something productive (reading an article, writing an email) but mostly I was watching the digital lives of others. I was reading their statuses. I was reading their wall posts. I was studying their photographs, even the ones they weren’t tagged in. I was analysing their social lives in microscopic detail, tracing through their friend networks to see who their good-looking friends were going out with, what their interests were, what their cousin’s ex-partners looked like now.

When I did this time would soften and dissolve, so that I eventually forgot that it was passing. My surroundings would disappear. Then my sense of physical boundaries: having skin; a body. All that I would eventually become conscious of was the white rectangular heat of the laptop light on my face and the cold sensation of plastic or glass under my fingers. I would spiral from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter, back to Facebook, across to Instagram, looping and circling around again, refreshing the page impatiently, impatiently refreshing it again, rearranging the tabs, clicking on clicking off, tapping on tapping off, tapping back on and spinning back around again until some instinct caused me to wrench my eyes away and – stop. I was concerned by how much time I spent doing this, but I was also aware that there was a kind of satisfying fluidity to it. The Internet felt like a space which I could navigate freely.

Needless to say, I hardly posted anything on my own profile. That wasn’t the point. The point was that I could watch what other people were doing. I could watch my new peers. In this way it acted as a kind of sedative, a dose of virtual sugar, a way to fill my head with fug and so distract myself from reality. I could roll the mouse down my newsfeed for hours, and the photographs, the witty comments and the tags would keep coming. It was a numbing distraction, like watching a film or reading a novel.

But there was also a weird element of inclusion to it. Looking at those lives onscreen – I didn’t feel excluded in a way that I did from the people around me, or from the narratives I read or watched on TV. There was something interactive about watching social media conversations. I felt – perhaps because I could control exactly what I saw next – that I could become part of their lives. I felt that there, on the Internet, I was in the midst of a picturesque youth.

I mention all this because in the context of such a culture, obviously I knew about Marina before I met her face-to-face. I discovered her on my course Facebook group. The group was something that one of the university admins had invited us all to join in the weeks before the start of term, ostensibly so that ‘general files’ such as the reading list could be found in a convenient place. This was the official line. The tacit agreement was that these groups were for the purpose of Facebook stalking. They were a preview into the lives of potential friends.

What was therefore surprising was not that I knew who Marina was before meeting her, but that I didn’t know more about her. Her profile gave little away: I was surprised to see no cover photo, and no listed interests. All that I could ascertain from the small icon of the profile picture was that she had a curtain of blonde hair and a petite frame. She was leaning against a car with her head twisted sideways, her back turned towards the camera.

It was for this reason, I think, that Marina stuck in my mind. She had the sort of filtered virtual aura which suggested she was glamorous, and it was heightened by the fact that her profile was so private. She seemed to be above the boastful social media culture, to care little about it and – in being that way inclined – exuded a sophistication which I envied. To put it bluntly, she was the kind of friend I wanted to have.

It would be wrong to give the idea that I was desperate for company. I wasn’t always alone. There were often people I could spend time with at Northam, and I was fine at cementing rapport individually if I tried. But groups of people made me uncomfortable. Somehow I felt lonelier among them than I did on my own.

Probably this was due to my upbringing. I was an only child, and had been homeschooled for a few years before my A levels. In that time I had established a sense of independence that made me feel – naively – that I was in control of my existence. My tutor was a complete pushover, and my parents preferred to defer teenage-patrol duties to her than try to control me themselves. The result was that I ran riot and no one noticed. It was blissful.

Returning to school at sixteen was naturally a shock. I couldn’t believe that I’d have to adhere to a social order that I hadn’t devised myself. I couldn’t believe that I’d have to turn up on time, or pretend like I cared about other people’s small-talk problems. But in the short-term, I also wanted to fit in – so I put on a mask of cool politeness and feigned interest in whatever they said. People said I was polite. Really I found them boring.

I hoped that there would come a time where I wouldn’t be feigning interest. I looked forward to a future where I would be able to have conversations with people – one-on-one – that were conversations I actually wanted to have.

There was something in that glimpse of Marina that made me think that she would understand this position. I felt that she was set apart from others – that she didn’t live according to their customs. She, like me, could perhaps manipulate her face to seem interested in conversations that she didn’t really care about. She, like me, perhaps made hilariously sarcastic asides that other people didn’t pick up on. I was interested in seeing whether she lived up to this expectation and – if so – what her real thoughts and ideas were. So that’s why I looked out for her in those first few weeks of term. That’s why I made a note of her Facebook page, added it to my bookmarks, checked it every day.

In the initial seminars and lectures, I also kept an eye out for Marina. I would shuffle into the theatre, waiting for others to pass, eagerly noting whenever someone blonde or slight or vaguely short walked by. But it was never her. On a second glance I’d notice that they were in fact too tall, or their legs too stumpy; otherwise I’d glimpse a notebook and see a different name scrawled on the front. Soon I began to assume that ‘Marina’ had decided not to come to Northam after all. She must have received another offer from somewhere else at the last minute – or she’d been added to the group by mistake.

The days sloped by. I went to lectures and then retreated to my room. I looked at what other people were doing online and felt depressed about my state of isolation. Nothing, it seemed, was going to make me happy, to subdue that swell of anxiety – the suspicion that I was wasting my potential.

ii.

It was a Wednesday when it happened, that much I remember. I was feeling groggy that day, having spent the previous evening at a fresher’s event, and then in my room with some random guy whose name I have thankfully forgotten. At around two in the afternoon – unable to bear the stale smell of salt-sweat any longer – I decided to go to a lecture. I showered, dressed, left my building, crossed the campus, and then sat down in the corner of the theatre. The lecture itself was uninteresting. I sat through it passively; looking at the clock; glancing at my phone under the desk; scribbling notes for show.

When it had finished I walked down towards the exit. I was about to leave when I heard the voice of the professor: ‘That’s not quite how it works, Marina.’

Slowly I turned my head.

A girl of about five foot six was stood at the lectern. Her back was turned, but I could see that she had long blonde hair, slightly curled at the ends. Her head was cocked to the side. Now it shook vehemently.

‘I’m sorry, I know how it sounds,’ the professor continued, ‘but my hands are tied.’

‘Hands tied how?’

‘This isn’t suitable for discussion now.’

‘Hands tied how?’ she said again.

He lifted his head and looked cautiously around. His glasses tilted up from the end of his nose.

‘If you’ve already transferred to a different subject,’ he said, ‘then you can’t transfer back. That’s all there is to it, I can’t help you.’

I looked at the professor closely for a moment. He was a man of about sixty, with a protruding stomach and a sweaty flat face like a coin. Usually he wore an ironic expression – raised brow, curled lip, a smug glint in his eye. Yet his features seemed to have lost their composure. His mouth moved with sudden jerks, his eyebrows twitched; below them his eyes looked hollow and unfocused. He seemed unnerved by the girl in front of him – the girl whose face I couldn’t see, whose words I couldn’t quite hear.

I edged forwards, pretending to pack files into my bag.

‘You can help me. Of course you can. You’re the course convenor.’

‘No. It’s not that simple.’

‘Why?’

‘I shouldn’t have to explain.’

‘You’re a lecturer. It’s your job to explain. And anyway,’ she shrugged slightly, ‘I deserve an explanation. You of all people know that.’

The professor laughed in a forced, shallow manner: lightly at the back of his throat. The sound echoed around the room. I watched him push a hand through patchy hair, embarrassed and smiling. Then he glanced around again and caught my eye. At that moment his expression shifted: his features stabilized, became authoritative, patient, ironic.

‘Well I’ve said all that I can tell you,’ the professor’s voice was now resonant and calm. ‘Which is, that if you have any concerns then they should be sent to me in an email, copying in the head of department.’

Marina began to object, but before she could trap him in further conversation he cut her off, muttering darkly about pressing engagements. He gathered his papers together and lifted his overcoat onto his back. Then he smiled tersely at her, at me, and shuffled out the door.

Marina bent down to pick up her satchel from the floor and swung it over her shoulder. Then she sighed theatrically and turned around – and I saw her face for the first time.

It was slimmer than I’d expected, with high cheekbones and a slightly pointed chin. Those sharp shapes, mixed with her snub little nose, gave her an almost goblin-like appearance, and yet they were balanced out by a smattering of freckles and a full, bow-like mouth. Now, even though she was frowning – her brow furrowed, her mouth knitted into a downwards curve – the expression was childish somehow. There was an air of innocence, of mischief about her.

As she walked past me, she looked right into my face and her frown deepened.

Her eyes were green, I noticed, with small flecks of gold in them.

Alone in the lecture hall I reflected on the confrontation I’d just seen. Marina’s blunt manner amazed me. At school, those who engaged in backchat with the teachers were mostly layabouts without much wit, whose interjections consistently fell short of the mark. I’d often felt a prudish satisfaction watching their snark dissolve into humiliated silence: the corners of their mouths drooping, their eyes turning to the table.

With Marina it wasn’t like that. She seemed not only to be tolerated but respected by the professor. His reaction had not been reproachful or even impatient, but nervous. It was as though he suspected that she had the power to publicly humiliate him in some way. He had solicited her approval even while he was rebuking her.

iii.

I thought about this as I walked down the corridor until I realized I was in front of the pinboard. I looked up at the timetable showing the times and places of all the seminars, scanned them quickly. I wondered how many clashed with my commitments. Might I be able to turn up to some of them, just to see if she was there? Then I thought: that is impractical. She’d said she wasn’t on the English course. There was no reason to think that she’d be attending any of the other seminars.

A better bet would be to find her outside of lectures: in the library for example. I went to the library, but she wasn’t there. Not in the open downstairs area. Not in the creepy silent room. Not on the nooks of the upper floor by the archives. She wasn’t in the café, nor the dining area, nor the bar. She wasn’t in the campus shop.

On my way back to my room, I took a detour to the other side of campus, towards the bougie accommodation. Two girls were sat on a bench, and I overheard one of them complaining to her friend about having sunburned the ‘rooves’ of her feet while on holiday in St-Tropez.

‘Rosa,’ the other girl said, ‘Is rooves actually a word?’

‘Obviously it’s a word. It’s the tops of houses.’

‘Or feet?’

‘Or feet.’

I glanced up towards the tops of the buildings. They were slate grey and dusty in the autumn sunlight. High in a window I noticed the outline of a silhouette: a pair of hands adjusting a string, the slow mechanical movement of the curtain moving upwards to reveal a blue midriff. Instinctively I ducked behind a lamp post, and then – a second later – peered out again. The window was now ajar. A small hand was dangling out, clutching a cigarette.

I could hear someone laughing loudly. A slim almond-shaped fingernail tapped the butt of the cigarette, and sprinkles of ash fell from the sky.

It was her, I was sure of it.

I bent forward, squinting, and saw a trickle of wavy blonde hair spill across the sill. A head turned, and took a drag from the cigarette. It could feasibly be her, I reasoned, noting the outline of her side profile, comparing it to my mental copy of her profile picture. But she moved too quickly to draw any solid conclusions. Her features blurred together, made her look anonymous.

Abruptly the window snapped shut and the cigarette fell from the sill. It danced through the air down all four floors and landed near me on the concrete. I stared at the blunted end. There was a gentle smudge of lipstick along the butt.

For a second, I thought about picking it up. Then I became aware of a stilted silence nearby.

Turning, I saw that the two girls on the bench had stopped their conversation and were staring at me. Their faces registered a certain amusement, as well as a certain distaste. I realized suddenly how weird I looked. Sheepishly I emerged from the lamp- post and walked past them silently, expressionlessly, without even glancing in their direction.

The next day I walked past that window, and the day after that, but the blinds were drawn.

I didn’t see anyone there again.

***

I dreamed of Northam again last night. The open window. The gentle night breeze. Marina smiling down at me. Her mouth forming the words, her neck snapping back in a fit of laughter.

The dreams are always silent. I don’t hear her laughter. I don’t hear her say the words. But I always know exactly what she is saying. I know how her voice sounds saying it. And I know exactly what her laughter sounds like: the notes quickly rising to a shriek.

I look cautiously around, check that no one is watching. Then I flip the newspaper, curling my shoulders inwards and craning my neck down to peer at her face. I look at her snub chin, the almonds of her eyes, ripe berry of her mouth. I see there is a lock of hair in her face. I reach my hand out. I attempt to brush it away with the tip of my finger.

iv.

The following week I turned up five minutes early to the professor’s lecture. I hovered at the end of the corridor – the one leading to the theatre – and scanned the crowd waiting outside. I couldn’t see her at first, it was so busy and loud – all the faces blurred into one another – and so I edged forward, past the bent knees and bulging rucksacks and forearms crossed over folders. I avoided eye contact with those I vaguely knew, pulling my hair over my face.

Soon there was a commotion behind me: the professor.

He bustled through the group of students, papers waving theatrically in his hand, a murmuring of ‘excuse me’ as he pushed his way forward. Then, at the door, he wavered. I watched him intently. There was a strained look on his face, a kind of suppressed smirk. He looked as though he might have been rehearsing a line in his head. But he said nothing, only glanced sideways briefly, then straightened his shoulders and walked into the lecture hall.

My eyes tracked across in the direction of his glance. She was sat against the wall, reading a book. I noticed she was wearing the same style of dress as the week before, but a deeper shade of blue. Her hair was in a low, neat bun at the nape of her neck and her face was knotted into a little frown. She flipped over a page in the novel and raised an ironic eyebrow.

At that moment the crowd began to trickle into the lecture hall, and she stood up. I watched the dark blue fabric lift and drop as her legs unfolded and straightened. She began to move towards the theatre with them, and I followed where she was going, keeping a good distance behind. There was a spare seat next to her. Avoiding eye contact, I shuffled in and sat down.

Around us I heard the familiar hum of student voices – those awkward few minutes before the start of a lecture which are never quite long enough to make conversation. I stared at my hands. I wondered how to introduce myself. I wondered what I could say that would sound natural. I had never been good at introductory conversations: the ‘hello’ itself was fine, but the segue into small talk always felt stilted. I was terrified of the inevitable silences that would follow and so would pre-emptively fill them with vacuous babble – babble that I found impossible to sustain, so my sentences trailed out, and I would end up awkwardly cutting myself off … Anyway, I kept my mouth shut.

The lecture began. I paid attention this time, partly because the title irritated me: ‘Female novelists in the nineteenth century.’ That categorization was annoying. I had never been a fan of what-was-called women’s fiction, in the same way that I’d never been a fan of what-were-called women’s magazines. I liked the idea instead that literature transcended the boundaries of gender, and thought that to lump together the work of (in this instance) Gaskell and Eliot into a ‘women’s literature’ category was to strip them of a creative freedom that male novelists were automatically afforded. That said, I mostly read men.

There was also a particular reason – a particular detail – which jolted me to pay attention that day. It was a sound bite I happened to pick up on in the first five minutes. After introducing the topic of the lecture, the professor said: ‘Now, who exactly, made up the readership of lady novelists during this period?’

Not female novelists, as the lecture title indicated, or even women novelists, as I might have found acceptable – but lady novelists. Nice ladies. Polite genteel women who behaved themselves. Every time he casually dropped it in, I felt my face flush and my throat constrict in anger.

Now he peered over at the students in the front row, and tapped the pen against the lectern. I resisted the urge to charge to the front of the lecture hall, grab the pen and shove it up his nose.

‘A particularly interesting detail,’ he continued, ‘in fact I should say, a particularly controversial detail featured in the writings of both lady novelists is the—’

Someone cut in: ‘Women.’

The interruption jolted me alert. I felt a prickle of panic at the nape of my neck. The professor stopped speaking.

‘Pardon?’

I looked around. A hundred eyes were now staring towards my row, wide circles of panic and irritation. I thought for a moment that Marina had spoken, but when I turned towards her, I saw that she was looking back at me.

I realized, with horror, that the voice had been mine.

The room spun. To steady myself I turned my eyes away from Marina and looked forwards. The professor had stopped talking. He was squinting in my direction through his glasses. His eyes flicked from me to Marina, seemingly attempting to establish who, exactly, had interrupted him.

He cleared his throat.

‘Pardon?’ he said.

In my periphery I saw Marina fix her gaze upon me. My lower lip felt numb. What the hell was I going to say now? Why had I put myself in this situation? I brought my hands together under the table, laced my fingers so tightly that my knuckles ached.

Suddenly another voice piped up. I recognized a cool, affirmative tone.

‘They’re not lady novelists,’ Marina corrected confidently. ‘They’re women.’

The professor rolled his eyes.

‘Marina, if you have an issue, please send an email and copy in—’

‘If you’ve bothered to make us sit through a lecture specifically about quote unquote gender and the novel then surely it’s worth explaining some of these terms. Otherwise just stick to the one you’ve used in the title.’

My toes scrunched in my shoes. I felt excruciatingly hot. The backs of my knees were slick with sweat, my face unstable. Under the damp of my fringe I looked in Marina’s direction. She was looking straight ahead, not registering my presence. Her mouth was curled in the very corner: in what almost looked like a smile. She seemed … pleased.

The professor, on the other hand, was uncomfortable. His forehead was a blotchy red. His cheeks were pink and seemed to expand with the silence, pushing the collar of his shirt tight against porcine jowls. Now he scratched them, laughed breathily and said: ‘For your information there is an entire section on this in the reading material provided.’

‘Then—’

‘Marina, for the moment I would like to just get on with it …’

‘Well to be honest—’

‘Marina.’

Another, shorter, silence as the professor jigged from one foot to the other. I glanced around. Other students looked either bored or riveted. They chewed their nails. The professor rustled his papers and continued on a different tack: ‘If you’d like to discuss it having read the secondary material then there may be an opportunity at a later date. In the meantime’ – here he leaned a large, flat hand into the lectern – ‘I would like to just get on with it. And if anyone else has a similar issue, please wait until the end to raise it with me.’

***

That’s when it started, I think. That was the first time that I became aware of it happening: my body folding in on itself, the hardened core at the centre of my identity dissolving and becoming replaced by something else … something corruptible and soft; unfamiliar. Until that lecture I hadn’t been aware of it, but I’d always had a fear of being found out. To some extent I still have it. It is not just that I am worried that someone will discover an unpleasant secret of mine and reveal it to the world. It’s more specific than that. It is, I suppose, a fear which stems from me. It’s a sense that I’m not completely in control of my own actions; that, by accident or otherwise, I will be the principal agent in my own downfall. When I’m not paying attention, drawing a tight restrictive circle around myself, I’ll say something tactless or do something stupid, which will reveal my true nature as incompetent. Or evil.

I think again about the headlines in recent days – the torrid accusations, the glimpses of my face, the glimpses of my name. All of it makes me question myself. I am worried about what they are saying. I am worried about how they are depicting me. I am worried about whether that representation will cause me to lose sight of who I am again, that it will make me do something that I don’t understand.

***

It was that moment in the lecture when my self-doubt began to set in, I’m sure of it. Before then I had always thought of myself as someone reserved and watchful. I was a person with control over their inner thoughts and emotions. Though my silence unnerved people around me, I had always felt bolstered by it.

But because of that lecture slippage, I felt that my sense of self-preservation was gone. I had acted so out of character, and with such potentially humiliating consequences, that I couldn’t understand what sort of person I was anymore.

I scared myself.

v.

I was relieved when the lecture ended. My stomach hurt, the skin between my fingers was clammy. I no longer had any desire to talk to Marina. All I wanted was to leave. I gathered up my things, packed them into my bag and walked down the stairs out of the lecture hall. I went towards the toilets. There was an unused disabled one around the corner which I knew was always empty. I would be able to collect myself there.

I stood at the sink and splashed my cheeks with cold water. It hit my skin and fell back into the basin, leaving reddish marks. I dabbed at them with the edges of my sleeve. Then I turned to the mirror and studied my profile. My immediate reaction was one of embarrassment: how contrived I looked. Since I had arrived at university I’d made a conscious effort to wear more make-up every day: a mask to accompany my new identity. But now, in the shallow light of the bathroom, it was patently obvious how ridiculous it looked. The dark, sweaty sheen of foundation drooped around my jawbone; there was an ugly blue smear underneath my eyes. My lips looked bright and my teeth yellow.

In the past I had refrained from wearing lots of make-up, mainly because I thought that my face possessed a sort of masculine quality that meant I couldn’t decorate it without it looking try-hard. Here I realized it was more than that: the make-up seemed to expose rather than conceal; it brought out every pore, every wrinkle, every hideous bulbous feature. I rolled a piece of hand towel off the dispenser and began to mop away the product. With every wipe, I felt a calm sift through my body. I felt that I was effacing the features, the morning: the memories of the lecture.

The door creaked open behind me and I stiffened. A small, slim silhouette slipped in and approached the sink. She stood next to me, and as she bent forward I saw the curl in the bottom of her hair. I remained still, like she couldn’t see me.

For a few minutes we pretended not to recognize each other. We stood in silence, me removing my make-up, she adjusting hers. Then, suddenly, she said: ‘Aren’t you going to say thank you?’

It was delivered as a statement, not a question. I turned to look at her. She was still staring straight ahead, towards the mirror, so her tiny face was turned to the side. I noted how small her nose was, how her top lip puckered up towards it like a wave.

‘Sorry?’ I croaked.

Her eyes shot out at me from under a curl of her fringe. They caught the light streaming from the window.

‘Fine,’ she said, wincing, then looking back at the mirror. ‘But next time have some backbone. At least have something to say, if you call out the professor like that. It’s just embarrassing otherwise.’

Her little hand flicked up and down across her eyelashes, wiggling the brush. I watched the tiny threads of black thicken into clumps, the green crescents behind them darken in the shade. Briefly I wondered why she wore so much make-up, whether she looked the same without it.

There was a silence. To fill it I said, idiotically: ‘I’m Eva.’

‘Marina.’

I saw myself shift awkwardly in the mirror. There were questions written all over my face. I wanted to ask what she thought of me for interrupting the professor. I wanted to ask how she felt confronting him herself, yelling out in the middle of a lecture. I wanted to ask what her issue was with him. But these seemed like stupid, clumsy things to say at that moment so I changed tack.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know that you studied this subject.’

‘What makes you think that?’ she said.

I thought of the way she had looked at me when I first saw her, and the effort of not bringing that up made me flustered.

‘Well,’ I coughed a little. ‘I haven’t really seen you here before.’

She groaned. ‘It’s a long story.’

At this point I was standing diagonally behind her, leaning against the sink. I watched her fingers smudge along the corners of her eyes. The crease along her brow deepened. Her eyes narrowed. Then they turned slowly to look at me.

There was a cool frankness in her expression, as though she were expecting me to ask her something. I sensed that now – now was my chance.

What is it that causes us to confess things to strangers? And why, in a confined, gossipy place like Northam, would Marina tell me of her problems, of her saga with the professor? Sometimes it is possible to establish a certain affinity with someone in a matter of seconds. Something about the way they move or speak or dress seems to offer a glimpse of their underlying personality which – due to some correspondence in our own personalities – invites us to reveal certain things.

Despite my quiet nature, I was not used to extracting confidences from people, and so for a while I assumed that it was a connection of this kind which had caused Marina to speak to me. I thought – foolishly I’m sure – that my lecture outburst had caused her to recognize me as a kindred spirit. She had seen past my nervous exterior to the potentially interesting friend beneath. She had wanted to extract that person. She had wanted to help me come out of my shell.

Now I know the opposite is true. She hadn’t wanted that at all. Instead she had seen how much conviction I lacked, and recognized in it an opportunity.

I was someone who, quietly, shared many of her opinions, but had no confidence to contradict her where they diverged. I would be there to bolster her brilliance, that was all, a sickly weed next to a burgeoning flower, and by feeding off my energy she would emerge more beautiful, more charismatic. Without allowing me to realize it, she would steal all of my secret characteristics, all my good arguments and ideas. She would scrape them away and use them for herself, leaving me as an empty, silent husk – someone with no voice and no personality.

***

I stood there silently, studying her eyes and mouth and cheeks. There was another silence as she bent forward and pulled another eye pencil out of her pocket. I thought about the structure of bones under her face.

Then: ‘I have a long time,’ I offered.

She looked back at me in the mirror, squinting with suspicion. She rubbed the pencil along the insides of her under-eyes.

‘Well,’ she said suddenly. ‘It’s to do with Montgomery.’

Her fingers continued to move around her face, rubbing the pencil along the tops of her eyelids, smeared the kohl with her fingertips. As she did so, she gave me the background.

Marina had known Professor Montgomery for some time, she said, as a family acquaintance. Her father was an academic too, and they had entertained a rivalry since their university days. She had seen the professor at family parties and symposiums that her father hosted, and he had always seemed pleasant, in a small talk kind of way. Then, when she applied to Northam – originally for languages – she had been offered a scholarship to study the course with English literature. She guessed that the professor had had something to do with it, but that hadn’t put her off at the time. It would have been stupid to turn it down. The tuition fees had risen, and besides, ‘English is fine.’

But when she arrived she had found the professor insufferable. He was strangely controlling – always asking her to see him in his study, always giving her extra assignments. She felt that he was overfamiliar in his manner, vain about his professional success (constantly name-dropping other academics), and even his arguments were heavy-handed and boring. There was too much historical speculation, she said, and not enough of genuine interest. Those were the exact words that she used: genuine interest. As she said them she reached across to grab a piece of towel from the dispenser behind me.

A few weeks into term, she’d stopped going to English lectures altogether. She asked the board to switch to languages full-time. But the scholarship was contingent on her taking English as well, and so she had had to go to the professor directly to ask for permission. Having reviewed her attendance record, the professor was now waging a ‘petty’ war against her – neither allowing her to return to his course, nor to keep her scholarship only doing languages. Marina shook her head. It was just politics, she said, a way for him to exert power over her, and so to spite him, she was going to the lectures and seminars until she got her way. She said that she hated how nepotistic the place was, and how everyone in the humanities department pandered to the professor. She hated especially how one eminent academic – here she put her fingers in quotation marks – could have a monopoly like that in the twenty-first century.

‘Anyway, that’s the long and short of it,’ she said, making a grimace. ‘Unbelievably tedious.’

I wasn’t sure whether that description was supposed to refer to the story, the people in it, or her take on the situation. Whichever it was, it didn’t apply to her. She was a fantastic speaker: vivacious and precise. I wondered where she had learned to speak like this, so confidently and unapologetically.

‘How many languages do you know?’ I asked, somewhat out of the blue.

‘Enough to get by.’

‘French?’

No reply.

‘What about like … Russian, Chinese?’

She nodded primly. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was lying. Either she was a self-effacing genius or a narcissistic fantasist – and whichever it was, I felt unable to ask more questions.

There was another lull in the conversation. I stood there awkwardly and began to run imaginary sentences through my head.

Suddenly Marina said: ‘What are you doing this evening?’

The question had come out of nowhere. It was unclear whether it was a leading conversation or a piece of small talk.

‘Nothing,’ I managed.

‘There’s a house party down the road I’m going to.’

A prickle of anticipation shot through me.

‘Maybe you should come,’ she added.

The conversation was too perfect, surreally perfect, and it made me, for a moment, feel detached from myself. It was like I was watching a film of my life rather than participating in it. I tried to act accordingly: keep my face stable, not too eager.

‘Sure.’

I passed my phone across to her. My hand was shaking slightly. As she bent her head forward, I looked at her roots. Natural blonde. I studied the small translucent curls along the top of her crown, admired the way they framed her forehead.

She said would add me on Facebook and message the details later. Then she smiled, drew her bag over her shoulder and left.

I remember clearly how I felt once she had gone. Everything seemed to be in sharper focus. I looked at myself in the mirror again and this time my appearance had changed: my features were more pronounced, my face slimmer. My eyes had an interesting bright spark in them.

I walked back to my room dopily, registering details I hadn’t seen before – the way the grey clouds sloped into the horizon beyond the buildings. The way the silver willows curved into the lake, the way their thin branches dragged in the water. It was a beautiful campus, in its own way, I decided. The buildings had all been painted an unimaginative shade of brown, yes – and, yes, they were boringly arranged: a long rigid line of rectangles, like a queue for something that would never arrive. Demolition, for example. It was not exactly inspiring, and yet looking at it then I thought it had a pleasing symmetry and simplicity. Perhaps Northam offered a new opportunity after all. Perhaps I was on the cusp of something exciting.

In my room I looked at the small damp bed, the desk beside it. The clock read 3.51. I suspected that the party would start at around nine, which meant I should arrive at around ten, and that meant I now had a maximum of five hours to compose myself. I would just peek at Facebook, I told myself, and then shower and decide what to wear.

I lifted the lid of my laptop. Just a few minutes.

Two minutes later I looked at the clock and saw that it was now eight in the evening. I refreshed my Facebook page. There was still no message from Marina; no friend request, nothing. I paused.

I wondered whether she had forgotten, whether she had even been sincere in the first place. Maybe it was for the best, I reasoned. What kind of person invites someone to a party after meeting them in a toilet anyway? My mother would have a field day.

At the thought of my mother, I felt a wave of rebellious energy. I bit the bullet and sent Marina a friend request.

The minutes ticked by. I waited for her to accept. Nothing.

So I began to draft an accompanying message. Even in the first sentence I was aware of how weird I sounded: ‘I’m Eva, the girl from the toilet earlier …’ – it was difficult for me to carry on past that. Everything I wrote either sounded too eager and blunt: ‘so is there a party going on tonight???’, or falsely casual: ‘what’s the deal with the …’ I typed them out over and over again, deleting, redrafting and then eventually settling for the first thing I had written. I added in extra details, such as where I was living, where we could meet and what I could bring. I cringed at how long it was but forced myself to hit send anyway.

Ten minutes crawled by and no response came.

Now it was quarter to ten. I walked to the campus corner shop and bought a bottle of wine. It was one of those cheap bottles with a screw cap, a label depicting a pastel cartoon of some berries, and garish Italian font scrawled all over it in an unsuccessful attempt to make it look drinkable. I thought about guzzling it down right there in the middle of the pavement, just to get it over with. But before I could wrench off the lid, my phone vibrated in my pocket. Marina’s name flashed across the screen.

yeah there now

58 st clements

Was that supposed to be an invitation?

I hovered in the lamplight. I thought about going back to my room. Then I thought: fuck it. I unscrewed the cap of the wine, took a large swig, and began walking towards St Clements before I had time to think about turning around.

***

Someone is watching me.

He is sat a few tables away, beside the bookcase marked T-V. It is dusky over there, there is not much light. But I can still see his eyes staring out at me from the darkness.

At first I wasn’t entirely sure that it was me that he was watching. I thought that I was imagining it, or perhaps that he was looking at the clock behind me – but now it has become impossible to think otherwise. Every time I look up, his eyes burn into mine. I can feel them settle on me again when I look down. Now he is actually grinning: a slash of yellow teeth, like a slice of lemon. I can see him getting up. He packs his books into a satchel. He begins walking towards me. I feel panic. My hands grab at the stack of newspapers and clasp them into to my chest.

‘Hello,’ he says, approaching my desk. ‘Are you all right?’

His voice is calm and low, with the hint of an accent.

‘Oi, I asked you a question. Are you all right?’

Slowly I nod.

‘You look familiar,’ he says. ‘Have we met?’

A beat goes by – then: no, I tell him. No we don’t know each other.

‘Are you sure?’ he says again.

No. I’ve never seen him in my life.

‘Well, are you from around here?’

I say nothing.

‘You’re not, I can tell.’

I say nothing.

‘Maybe you want to see the local sights. We can go for a drink if you want.’

Silence.

‘Does that sound nice? Do you maybe fancy going for a drink? Or a coffee?’

No, I tell him.

‘We could go to the pub. I know a nice place around the corner.’

No, I’m fine.

He makes a face, like I’ve confused or upset him. ‘Why were you staring at me if you weren’t interested?’

I look back at the screen. I wasn’t staring at him.

‘Yes you were. Sat over here giving me the eyes.’

I continue to stare at the screen. The black screensaver descends, the cursor flickers. I hold the mouse and wait for him to go away. He hovers for a few minutes, puts his hands into the pockets of his squeaky leather jacket. I feel a sudden, dreadful certainty he is going to touch me.

But he doesn’t.

Instead he sighs, shakes his head, murmurs something and turns away. I hear him walking in the direction of the exit. I wait a long time before turning to look after him.

When I see that he is gone, I pull my sleeves over my knuckles, straighten my neck. I pull my skirt down so that the fabric is no longer rucked up beneath my upper thighs.

Upper thighs. My breathing tightens. I squeeze my eyes shut and try not to think about it.

vi.

Henry was about six foot four, with slim, quick features and a head of sharp blonde hair. He wore an expensive long coat, which moved like a blade of grass. I watched it sway gently in the breeze as he leaned against the doorway, frowning at me.

After the long walk to the house party, guided by limited 3G (signal is patchy in the Northam area), I had perched my empty bottle on the garden wall and knocked at the door. Henry had opened it.

He was a composed drunk, but an irritable one, and in any case he was drunk. He looked me over, tightened his jaw. I was struck by its sharp angle. Everything about him was elegant.

Eventually he said: ‘Hello?’

‘Hello – I’m with Marina,’ I stuttered. The wine slurred my words. I wished I could make them sound less apologetic.

Henry didn’t respond to this information at first. He looked pensive, as though he were trying to place the name. Then his eyes bloomed into large, black orchids and he nodded.

‘Oh right, hi – Henry.’ He gestured towards himself. ‘She’s just over here … She’s in the …’ He turned his back, and his coat flapped up to expose a glimpse of silky paisley shirt as he walked away.

‘I’m E—’ I began.

But before I could finish my sentence I was being swept into the hallway. Cigarette smoke drifted into my nostrils and eyes; strobe lights flashed wildly from the room next door; a strange kind of music thudded into my ears along with the ceaseless chatter of the people around me. I swirled through them into the house party.

What struck me first was not the noise or the smell but the number of people. The corridor was littered with people, people people people. They were leaning against bannisters, slouching on the ground beneath the window with cigarettes in their drooping hands, jiggling beer bottles while shuffling awkwardly to the music, or dancing madly before suddenly steeling themselves and leaning flat against the wallpaper. I scuttled past – trying to keep Henry in my sights as he sliced ahead of me at an impatient clip – and caught fragments of their conversations. ‘So Heidegger, I think actually, let’s be honest, when it comes down to it, is maybe not that wrong?’

‘Not sure about that mate.’

‘No – not crime. It’s grime and punishment. It’s an event I’m running.’

Oh right, I thought, squinting through them for Henry’s figure, so it’s this kind of party. The kind of party where you stood out unless you were wearing pyjama bottoms and some sort of naff glitter on your face; where everyone pretended not to know each other; where everyone talked about politics in a knowing, strident fashion. The sort of party where you could, potentially, disagree with someone without offending them.

I walked past the sitting room, through the hall, past the bathroom, past the coat hooks, down the corridor. When I finally reached the kitchen at the end of it I realized two things: 1) I had now lost Henry. 2) I badly needed a drink.

Drink, as it turned out, was not in short supply. Half-empty bottles were strewn around the counter; screw-top spirits sat on the shelves; cups full of strange, ugly scented liquid tilted precariously on the edges of tables. A suspicious queue for the loo suggested that it was another kind of hit that everyone here was after, so I suspected none of the alcohol would be missed.

Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to steal anything. I somehow felt self-conscious, and – despite the wine fog– weirdly out of place. I knew this was ridiculous. I knew that I looked more stupid and awkward just hovering there, not talking to anyone or drinking anything – but it felt wrong to swan into someone’s house and take their stuff. I couldn’t just swipe something. What if someone saw? I wanted people to like me. I wanted Marina to like me.

A figure walked past in a long black sequinned jacket, a single black feather dangling from one of his ears. ‘Yeah no I think she’s in my seminar,’ I heard him say. ‘Nice girl. Bit easy though.’

There was the safety issue too, I thought. Even in the nightclubs in my hometown, I had always made sure to push a thumb over the lip of my bottle in case it was spiked. Now, in this unfamiliar company, I didn’t want to risk my chances. No – I needed to get away from them. All these people. I needed air.

I went through a kitchen side door which led to the outside. It was very dark. I felt the notoriously cold Northam wind pinch at my cheeks, and immediately began to feel better.

I walked around pretending to be looking for something, and eventually wandered to the corner of the courtyard, where wicker chairs were spread out along the lawn and thin people in colourful clothes smoked and talked. They flicked their ash into a water feature and propped their feet on garish plastic toadstools. I took it all in. The garden was surprisingly big, I thought, for a student house. I guessed that it housed around four. I wondered where the residents were.

That was when I heard the familiar sharp voice, now slightly nasal: ‘Henry, it’s not true. And it’s not even your opinion, it’s some shit you’ve memorized from The Spectator.’

Marina was lying on the grass a few metres away, one leg spread loosely over the other. She was holding a cigarette between a pinched thumb and forefinger. Her hair fanned out over the shoes of the girl sat behind her – a girl who wore a turquoise velvet jumpsuit, who was staring mutely at the garden wall.

Henry was rolling a cigarette between graceful long fingers. At this slight from Marina he frowned.

‘Er no, Vanity Fair,’ he corrected. ‘Not that the source is the point. The point is the argument. It’s about the way that women bear life – men don’t feel the responsibility that women do. They have the freedom to be funny, because the shelf life on sperm is endless. They aren’t reminded of the heavy burden of … life all the time.’

Marina snorted. ‘Even for you that’s terrible.’

‘Even for me?’

‘Doubtless you’re a prime example of the superior male comedian.’

‘Doubtless.’

‘With your endless sperm and liberated mind.’

‘You said it, not me.’

‘Honestly, that’s the sort of thing that’ll be viewed in like two hundred years’ time as a twenty-first century curiosity.’ She stretched her leg towards him. ‘Some bored robot will be scanning through the clickbait archives, then they’ll come across that article and think—’

Henry put the cigarette into the corner of his mouth.

‘Think what?’

‘Millennials,’ Marina said drily. ‘Something about capitalism.’

She stretched out her leg across the grass, lifted it, and lightly kicked his jaw with the edge of her toe. The cigarette fell. I watched it roll gently across the grass, still burning. There was a lull in conversation.

Henry’s eyes tracked slowly from the cigarette to Marina’s toe. They tracked up to her ankle; to the blue edge of her skirt that skimmed the front of her calf. They hovered there for a second. Then he stared her in the face, rolled his eyes theatrically. Marina laughed.

The girl behind her stood up, dusted the grass off the velvet of her lap, and walked past me into the house.

I remained in the shadows for a moment, watching Henry and Marina talk. I considered their sharp reclining figures against the pink and yellow glow of the fairy lights.

Theirs wasn’t a romantic dynamic, I thought. It was sexual, definitely, but in a way that was kind of performative, which made me think they had never and would never have sex. They flirted artificially, like actors in a film. Or perhaps as though they were operated by a marionette master. Yes that was it: it was like someone was twitching their strings, tweaking fingers to cause jerky head movements at a suspiciously appropriate moment. The right movement and the right comment at the unnaturally perfect time.

‘But what do you even mean by that exactly?’

Henry’s face was lit up by the glow of the moon, and as he turned briefly away from Marina to take a sip from his drink, his lips parted to reveal a set of gleaming trapezium teeth.

Now he said it again: ‘But what do you mean Marina?’

Hearing his voice, with its insistent, droll intonation, made me reconsider the pair in another light. Henry’s voice, specifically, seemed out of kilter with his languid movements. Now I noticed it I realized that everything he said was a bit mannered, like he had rehearsed the words in his head a few times before speaking them. I leaned forward a little, eager to catch the tic.

‘Oh for god’s sake,’ said Marina. ‘All I’m saying is you sound like a fucking idiot. Just … stop being so pretentious, it makes me cringe.’

Marina wasn’t like that. When I heard her speak I felt that she was doing so impulsively. There was a lightness, an easiness in her voice and mannerisms. She had something that Henry lacked, a kind of authenticity.

As if sensing this observation, at that point Henry’s head turned towards me. He narrowed his eyes.

‘Oh,’ he said. He reached for a Heineken bottle on the grass. ‘Mari is this your pal? I meant to bring her over here.’

Marina didn’t look up. She was staring at her cigarette.

‘Sure,’ she said absently.

Henry stared at me with disapproval. He took a long swig from his beer.

‘Sorry,’ he said, unapologetically. ‘Who are you again?’

‘I’m … Eva.’

‘Eva Hutchings,’ Marina mumbled, and then – as though the name had jogged her back to consciousness, as though she had said it and then realized why she knew it – she looked up. Recognition flashed across her face. ‘Oh – you! Hello.’

She rolled over onto her stomach and stretched out a slim arm to pat the grass beside her. Henry said nothing. I edged forwards and sat down obediently.

‘Eva …’ she mused. ‘Eva from the lecture.’

‘Yeah.’

‘When did you get here?’

‘Just—’

‘I suppose you’ve met Henry.’

I looked across at him, and his eyes moved somewhere behind me.

‘Yup,’ he said, a new cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

Marina’s eyes flicked to Henry and then flicked back to me. In that gesture I recognized something conspiratorial, like a silent code was passing between us. Henry opened his mouth again, but before he could say anything Marina turned to me.

‘Hang on – I don’t have a drink. Eva, have you – no … Henry, you know where my vodka is.’

‘Er,’ Henry said.

‘Can you just get it?’

Henry looked at her meaningfully. His features seemed to enlarge and slope down his face, like a melting waxwork.

A silence followed which I found myself eager to fill, but as usual I couldn’t think of anything to say. I blinked the smoke out of my eyes. I plucked at the grass.

Finally Henry shrugged. ‘Fine,’ he said.

He stood up slowly and headed towards the light of the kitchen. I watched his coat billowing behind him. I listened to his footsteps across the grass.

When he was gone, Marina drew a hip flask from the coat lying in front of her, and poured the contents into two used cups. She pushed one into my hand. The liquid was a light grey colour, sort of cloudy, like dishwater. I took a sip, felt it slide into the back of my mouth and then crackle unpleasantly down my throat.

‘What is that?’ I choked.

‘Oh don’t.’ She made a dismissive gesture. ‘I’m sorry about him. There’s no one else here who will entertain his shit.’

She was talking about Henry, I realized. Perhaps she thought I had said ‘who’ instead of ‘what’.

‘Why do you then?’ I said. ‘Entertain him, I mean.’

My mouth was returning, gradually, to a normal temperature. My tongue curved around the inside of my teeth. It now had a rough texture.

‘What?’

‘Why do you entertain him? If you don’t like Henry, then why do you entertain him?’

She eyed me cautiously, and then took a swig directly from the hip flask. I became dimly aware of someone talking far away from us. There was a squawk from inside the kitchen, the sound of a bottle smashing.

‘Henry’s an old family friend,’ she said with a slight smirk, as though being an ‘old family friend’ were something unflattering. ‘I guess I know everyone else here through him.’

This wasn’t exactly an answer, but I was interested to hear what she might reveal about herself: what sort of colour she might add to my mental portrait of her. She spoke for a while about Henry, about how irritating she found him. I remember her saying how he was ‘contrived’ and that he always recycled other people’s opinions. Then she did a very good impression of him talking about gender.

‘It’s the responsibility women have, to bear life,’ she said, keeping her neck very straight, whipping her head around with her mouth pulled down at the corners. I laughed a lot, probably more than was appropriate. Furtively, I took a large mouthful of the liquid in my cup.

Marina was so good at impersonations. That seems an essential thing about her, now, whenever I think back on those days. She was a very good observer of people. She knew exactly how to capture mannerisms, subtle facial expressions, idiosyncratic modulations of voice and then project them for comic effect. Now I watched her eyes widening, her head shifting to the side and then glaring at me in disbelief, just as Henry had earlier. I took another large mouthful of my drink – too large this time – and choked a little. It was wonderful being in her company.

After finishing the contents of the hip flask, we headed back into the house and the familiar smell of vodka and vomit began to drift into my nostrils. Monotonous beats pulsed in my ears. The people along the corridors were now slouching almost horizontally, long eyelids drooping down their faces. They smiled lazily at us, sometimes they called ‘Marina!’, but she only responded distantly, dismissively even. She would twitch her mouth into what almost resembled a smile; mouth a word that could have been a ‘hello’ but might also have been a yawn. She did not stop for any of them. She kept walking forwards, forwards and forwards.

I followed.

We walked past the sitting room, where about fifteen silhouettes were shuffling around under the strobe lights, even less energetically than they had been earlier. Looking at their sloping silhouettes there reminded me, for some reason, of a passage I’d read somewhere about purgatory. We walked past the toilet, for which the queue had diminished. Several people were sprawled outside the doorway, their limbs dragging across the carpet. Peering closer I recognized one of them. It was Henry.

Marina bent forwards and gave him a hard rap on the shoulder. He jolted to consciousness, his grey eyes springing open – and blinking, then, for several seconds, as though readjusting to the scene. When he recognized Marina, he ran a hand through his hair and smiled warily.

‘Hey.’

‘You’ve got something of mine,’ she said. ‘I forgot.’

The smile vanished. ‘Mmm?’

‘You’ve got something,’ she repeated, sharply this time. ‘I need it back.’

She turned to me, frowning.

‘Stay here,’ she said.

She knelt down next to Henry, then swung his arm over her shoulder, crouched forward and stood up. He bowed over her, and though she was only a slip of a human, slim and ethereal really, in that instant she seemed to me stocky. Very secure. Slowly she began to pivot towards the bathroom door. She leaned him against the frame, bent forward towards the handle and opened it, stepping inside with him.

He protested mildly: ‘No, Marina, it’s fine. It’s fine, I’ll get it later. Mari—’

‘Shut up.’

They stood together, very close, inside the tiny bathroom. She balanced Henry against the sink, then glanced at me. Briefly I wondered if she cared what I thought of the situation, whether she knew that I’d made the connection, that I’d seen the tiny sachet in his hand. But before I could say anything – before I could examine her expression – she reached forward and slammed the door shut in my face. I heard it lock, and then their conversation became muffled by music.

It was time to go home.

***

I don’t know what to make of that memory now. It’s troubling to think about. I can recall very clearly the way Marina behaved towards Henry – how aggressively she spoke to him, how aggressively she handled him, how quickly she flipped from lavishing me with attention to not even registering my presence – and I know that it signifies something. But I can’t quite put my finger on what. Often memory works like that – you go to it to find a revelation, and it gives you the opposite: confirmation that you are missing something.

vii.

Throughout our months of friendship, the idea that Marina’s dalliance with drugs was an addiction didn’t cross my mind. It still seems an inappropriate term, and I flinch at it – addiction. It just wasn’t a word which applied to people our age, and everyone in that group, however wild they seemed, was cushioned by a kind of middle-class assurance that it was a pose. It was, as even our parents called it, an experimental phase – a rite of passage, not an act of sincere rebellion. After university we would grow out of it: get serious jobs, get sober (except on weekends) and get on with our lives. But that was the thing about Marina. She really wasn’t like us, as far as all that was concerned. She always took things too far.

The next day I awoke with a thick fog in my head. There were tiny red threads along the insides of my eyelids; my mouth contained a strong, acrid flavour and my cheeks had puffed up into two wrinkly, stiff blobs under my eyelids. In short, I had a hangover.

A lecture was scheduled for that afternoon, and I knew without opening my eyes that I wasn’t going to get out of bed for it. I also didn’t have to open my eyes to know that it was an unseasonably warm day. There was a kind of burning sensation in the room: the air was oppressive and thick, it heaved with sweat and the hot stench of alcoholic breath. I rolled over and plunged my face into the cold pillow, let it rest there for a moment. Then my hand crawled out to the side of the bed. I grasped the phone. I turned my head to the side, put my other hand over a light patch on the glass and noted the time. It was 12 p.m.. I had missed the lecture anyway.

On the plus side, I had several Facebook notifications. Marina had accepted my friend request. She had sent me a short message apologizing for abandoning me the night before. She asked if I might be free later that day:

i have to get something in town but we cd have brunch after

She wrote just like that: all in lower case, with no punctuation. It always bothered me – still bothers me – how someone so eloquent face-to-face could be so careless in their virtual correspondence. I was the opposite. I liked to observe rather than participate in verbal interactions and then, given a pen or a keyboard, I would write long, adjective-packed sentences which often came across as – yes indeed – contrived or expository. Thus:

Hi. No, don’t worry about it! Sometime this afternoon would work. I’m still in bed at the moment. What time were you thinking?

I hit ‘send’ without reading over it.

Usually I would review my messages – scan them for spelling mistakes, read them aloud, wonder how the other person would feel receiving them; what they would think about me. I was meticulous. But on this occasion I was too hungover, too lazy and fuggy-headed for it to matter until it had already been sent.

I lay there on the bed with my neck craned to the side, staring at the screen. The little dots wiggled in the corner; then they stopped. I waited for a few seconds for them to start moving again but nothing happened, so to kill time I went onto my profile. I flicked through my photos and wondered whether I came across as cool and aloof or friendless. There was a fine line I knew, and at that point in my life I often thought about it. Another thing I thought about was whether I was more or less narcissistic than other people. For example, was it more vain to fill your Facebook profile with self-promotional statuses and selfies, or to meticulously cultivate it so that you came across as ‘unbothered’ – like you didn’t care about what you looked like? Like you hardly checked Facebook, despite the fact that actually you rarely did anything else?

My own profile offered no reassuring answers, so I looked at Marina’s for comparison. She had barely commented on any of her posts, and her photos were all uploaded by other people. I flicked through them back to 2010. In each one she was either alone, or looking away from the camera; away from the people around her. This seemed to confirm something I had suspected already, but on recognizing it I felt somehow dissatisfied. If she was always this antisocial, why did she attract so many people? Where did they come from? Also, why hadn’t she been more embarrassing at school?

A notification popped up in the corner of the screen. It was a message from Marina. I felt a jolt – like she had somehow intuited that I was stalking her photos. But in fact she had sent me her number and a confirmation of the meeting time:

yeah like 3

Strange time for ‘brunch’, I thought. I glanced at the clock on the screen. It was now 1.15. I tossed the phone aside and buried myself in the pillow. I counted to four. In, out. In, out.

Silently I willed myself to get up. I pushed my head further into the pillow and then – after a beat – brought my palms up underneath my shoulders and lifted myself into a cat pose. Not too bad.

Another second went by and then I forced my body to move forwards and upwards. I watched my arms stretch out underneath me, mysteriously strong and agile, my legs crouched and straightened, and while performing those movements I suddenly felt as though I were watching someone else, as though my constituent body parts were acting separately to me. My hands picked up a towel and I wrapped myself in it. It felt alien, but cold and nice against my skin. My fingers reached out to the door handle, grabbed the grainy metal – that, too, seemed peculiar. Then my back was straightening and my feet were padding across the corridor towards the shower. This was a shower that I shared with six other people – one of whom now came out of his room, waved at me and made an arch comment about my scanty state of dress. I pretended not to see him.

In the shower cubicle, I took off the towel and stepped towards the spray. The water fell out in thin, tepid drips. I stuck my tongue into the stream. It was slimy, tasted faintly of sulphur. I dunked in my face, then my whole body. I began to feel alert.

At three o’clock, I met Marina for lunch in a small café in town. She was sat on one of the outside tables, wearing a grey fur coat and holding a large plastic water bottle. There was a bag at her feet with folders poking out of it. As I approached the table she tucked her phone into the bag, then leaned forward and waved towards me. Her eyes were smudged but her lipstick was carefully applied, and when she smiled her mouth opened fully. It reminded me of a crab emerging from its shell.

‘I’m exhausted,’ she said. ‘I haven’t slept.’

I replied: ‘Me neither,’ though it was obviously a lie.

‘I’m sorry about last night anyway, Henry wanted to talk about something and I was stuck in that bathroom for ages.’

I made a swift comment about not even realizing she’d gone – also a lie, but easier to stick to than ‘me neither’. I was relieved she hadn’t chased up my ‘me neither’. Instead she gave me a grateful smile and then we started talking about Northam.

The meeting went well. Very well, in fact. It quickly emerged that we thought along similar lines, and that we were finding the experience of university similarly disagreeable. We both railed about the idiotic structure of the course, the boorishness of other people in our class, the anticlimax of Northam in general. She, like me, had expected it to be more liberating. She said that she had turned down an opportunity to work on a film set with a family friend in order to come here. She said that she had wanted to be educated before getting a job – she had wanted to revel in the ‘experience for its own sake’. But now, confronted with the reality, she had started to regret the decision to come to Northam at all.

‘I mean this is an institution, not an academy,’ she said. ‘It’s full of people who view education as just a stepping stone. Look at the way the course is set up. Look at how closely the careers department is intertwined with everything the academic department does. Look at the way we’re instructed – I don’t know – to do group presentations so we can put ‘teamwork’ on our CVs. It’s depressing. Sometimes that alone is enough to make me want to drop out.’

I couldn’t say much to that. I tepidly responded with a counter-question.

‘But overall, it’s not quite …’

The corner of her mouth lifted. ‘What?’

‘You’re not going to drop out.’

‘No. I’ve thought about it … No.’

She looked around then, grabbed an ashtray from the table next to us and drew a packet of cigarettes from her bag, then put one in her mouth. I looked at the way it balanced there while she lit it. I thought about the passage of the smoke drifting past her lips, down her throat and into her lungs.

Then she looked up and saw me staring at her.

‘Would you like one?’ she asked.

‘Oh.’ I looked down at my hands. ‘No thanks, I don’t smoke.’

‘Suit yourself.’

Later on Marina would often chastise me for being ‘repressed’ – but I always knew she enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t like her. Even that gesture of refusing the cigarette had seemed to satisfy her, like I’d confirmed a judgement that she held against me. Where Marina was fun, I was reserved. Where she was cavalier, I was cautious. Where she was given to making grand statements, I offered a mumbling appraisal of both sides before ultimately agreeing with her. I think that’s how it looked, at least.

Smoke continued to drift around us, gradually travelling outwards to the surrounding tables where families were sat with their prams and soft drinks. A group of young women on the adjacent table were tucking into a roast. When Marina saw them, she lounged sideways and dangled her arm over the back of the chair. I sat with my hands in the middle of my lap, one foot pressed hard on top of the other under the table.

About five minutes into our conversation, the waiter came over and asked if Marina would put out her cigarette. It was clear from the first few words what he was going to say, but she only stared at him innocently, and continued to smoke until he’d finished giving a full explanation. There were people eating nearby, he said (his eyebrows raised, his hands rubbing anxiously against one another) – yes, there were people eating nearby and her smoke was unpleasant for them. He was awfully sorry, really he was, but would she mind … would she mind just while they had their meals? Otherwise there were tables further away.

Marina held his gaze. She sucked for a few seconds, raised her fingers to the stalk and finally plucked it from her mouth.

‘Of course,’ she said, exhaling a long plume.

Then she stubbed it in the ashtray in front of him.

It was like something from a film. I started to laugh quietly, discreetly, in a way that I hoped would show Marina I found her funny without offending the waiter.

It didn’t work. When I looked up I saw that the waiter was glaring at me. His look was so hostile – so accusing – that my apologetic reflexes kicked in and unthinkingly I blurted: ‘I’m sorry.’

He shook his head and walked away.

Marina laughed at that.

‘What did you do that for?’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘It doesn’t say no smoking.’

‘Oh. Yeah. Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologize,’ she said. ‘Definitely don’t apologize for me.’

Over the next few weeks we began to see each other more and more. We met for breaks outside the library, where I would stand with her as she smoked and talked, usually about the other people in our class. We sat together in seminars. We sat together in lectures. Then we started to cut lectures and just go to seminars instead. Then we started to skip the PhD-taught seminars – going to just one a week, the one led by the professor – and discussed the set books on our own.

Marina had some pretty weird ideas about literature. She thought that everything had a central meaning, and that you could pinpoint the ‘message’ of a novel or a play according to the intentions of the main character. Helpfully, she said, quite often the main character was a stand-in for the author. Thus King Lear was ‘about Shakespeare’s fear of early-onset dementia’; Anna Karenina was about ‘Tolstoy’s commitment issues’ etc. I never quite knew what she was on about, or whether she was actually joking, but she was entertaining to listen to nonetheless.

After the library Marina would often come to my room. Initially I lamented that I hadn’t put up posters or photos to make my life look interesting. But she seemed to like the fact that I was so anonymous, like a blank slate that she could draw all over. We would drink two or three bottles of wine there throughout the afternoon, and then head out to a party at one of her second year friends’ houses.

I say ‘friends’. The truth is that I never had meaningful conversations with any of them, and from what I recall Marina rarely spoke to them either. We’d spend a lot of time at parties at the fringes of conversation, smoking by ourselves, nudging each other, exchanging subtle looks. She didn’t really engage with other people – not fully. Even when she was at the centre of a big group, Marina seemed to be separate, superior, floating above everyone else – like a performer in a play. And, like a haughty actress, she regularly grew impatient with her fans.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked once, having seen her ignore a wave from a guy in Henry’s house.

‘Ugh, Robin,’ she said. ‘Henry’s housemate. He’s a dick. I can’t be bothered to do the stop-and-chat.’

Hearing her rebuff other people like this could have made me paranoid, but in fact, predictably, it had the opposite effect. It made me pleased. It struck me that for all her online popularity, for all her apparent charm and attractiveness, I was the only person who she ever really wanted to hang around with on a regular basis. When she was not with me, she was alone.

I liked that about her.

***

The librarian gives me an odd look. I have been in here for too long. Perhaps I am acting strangely, perhaps my face looks strained, perhaps I am making peculiar subconscious noises. Or maybe she knows. Maybe she recognizes me.

I pick at the skin between my fingers, watch the dry flakes break off and scatter onto the desk. It is already starting to get dark outside. I can see the tree swaying outside, the branches swooping forward to tap against the glass. They look and sound like fingers. I turn back to the desk. I flip over the newspaper so that the picture is hidden.

I don’t want to see her anymore. I don’t want to be near her.

CHAPTER TWO
Early November
i.

One day Marina decided that we would go to the beach. It was at this point early November – the sky was grey, a thick seasonal mist had settled over the campus, and the temperature was dipping to zero. I couldn’t imagine that a seaside outing was going to be especially pleasant. But true to form I didn’t bring this up, and my opinion wouldn’t have mattered. Marina said that she wanted to see the sea. She said that she was going to hire a car so that we could drive there.

I thought this was a lavish investment, considering we could just take the train, but I kept my mouth shut.

‘I know it seems unnecessary,’ said Marina, ‘but I like to drive.’

Marina was like that: if she wanted to do something a certain way, then she would do it irrespective of the practicalities or cost. I learned not to ask questions about her spending.

We went to a hire shop. The man behind the desk wore a name badge which said on it ‘Graham’. He called us both ‘Madam’ – this was very funny – and asked Marina which model she would like to take out.

Marina surveyed the selection of cars. After a while she settled for a convertible.

‘Oh?’ said Graham with surprise. Then he composed himself: ‘Certainly, Madam.’

Once we were strapped in, Marina turned up the music to ‘very loud’ and careered off down the road. The soundtrack of choice was early noughties R&B – she particularly liked Kelis and Khia – and I felt that there was a strange disconnect between the sinuous country roads, so English and so wholesome, and the thumping American lyrics coming out of the speakers. Marina seemed to enjoy this. When we reached a red traffic light, I remember her winding down the window and mouthing to the male driver next to us: ‘Lick it now, lick it good.’ He turned and tipped his flat cap at us.

Soon the clouds lifted and, against expectation, cool sunshine appeared in short misty bursts. Marina took this as sufficient encouragement to put the roof down, so roughly half an hour into our journey she swung the wheel and pulled into a layby. I remember her tiny green eyes darting to the rear-view mirror, her hands sliding over the plastic of the gearstick, a slim finger pushing the button below the radio control. The roof lifted up, tilted forwards and began to roll back.

‘So you’re from Walford,’ she said, as a fresh bout of wind blasted us across the cheeks. ‘What’s that like?’

It was the first time she’d asked me anything about my background and I struggled to find an answer. What was Walford like? My small, provincial town with the river running through the centre, with its functional concrete bridges, with its dusty Victorian buildings and neon supermarkets, with its tragic pubs? I thought of tweed and suede, rubber wellingtons. I thought of my mother’s voice, reproachfully correcting me: ‘Actually, Walford museum has the oldest cauldron collection in England.’ And I paused to think of something clever to say – some witty riff on this, some funny description to impress her – but there was really no way to spruce up Walford.

‘Dull,’ I said.

Marina laughed. ‘What’s the school in Walford – there’s that posh one.’

‘Wolsingham.’

‘Yes! Wolsingham Girls! Is that where you went?’

I dug my fingers into my seatbelt. I didn’t want to tell her about the homeschooling. And I worried that if I told her where I’d really gone to school afterwards Marina might know someone who would tell her that I had. So I said: ‘Yes.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So wait, hang on, you must know the Dukes?’

‘Mmm.’

‘What do you mean mm? They would have been … Like the year above you, maybe two years above. You must know Matilda.’

‘Oh. Yeah. I know of her.’

I had heard of Matilda Duke. Her family owned a large estate nearby – somewhere west of Durham – and in the early noughties the BBC had made a documentary about how her father, Bart, made money to maintain it. Bart was posh and swore a lot, which was considered hilarious, and I knew that he was thought of as a ‘prize guest’ on the Walford dinner party circuit. But I knew little about Matilda. She was at another school, so I’d never met her. I doubt she would have spoken to me anyway.

‘She’s actually surprisingly nice,’ Marina was saying. ‘I mean, her voice is annoying but once you get past that she has some great anecdotal material. She’s always been pretty … experimental.’

Marina went on to talk about how she knew the Dukes through her stepmother – they were related in some obscure way – and then went on to dissect Matilda’s personality without pausing for a response from me. I let go of my seatbelt, relaxed my shoulders.

‘She’s not actually as quote unquote wild as people think she is. She has few inhibitions in some ways but seems pretty prudish when you hear her talking about other people …’

Five minutes later she had come full circle and was talking about Matilda’s voice again.

‘It sounds like she’s eating a peach,’ Marina said. ‘Uverrything she shaysh is like she’s trying to keep the shaliva in her mouth.’ She turned and pointed at me, waiting for me to pick up the impression.

‘It would almost be Sean Connery,’ I said. ‘Except there’s too much plum in there. It’s more like …’

‘You don’t have to be posh to be privileged.’

‘Joanna Lumley,’ I said.

‘Very good … Hey, I wonder if she’s still doing those adverts.’

I settled back into my seat. The conversation was over: I had dodged the bullet. And I was right to relax: Marina never asked about Walford again.

We reached the beach and found a parking spot at the top of the hill. It was a tight space, so I got out while Marina parked. Then she climbed out and, without putting the roof back on, pressed a button on the keys to lock the car. The lights flashed twice: beep beep.

I stared at her. ‘Aren’t you …?’

She turned to me defiantly.

‘Aren’t I what?’

‘Aren’t you worried someone might … I don’t know, steal it?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The car. We should probably put the roof up.’ I paused. ‘Shouldn’t we?’

Marina waved her hand dismissively – a swift, sharp movement, like she was swatting a fly.

‘Eva, this isn’t Walford,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Crime levels aren’t nearly as high here.’

Not for the first time, I felt ashamed of my provincial background; of my unworldliness, of my ultra-cautious temperament. I was so neurotic. Also I was freezing from the journey. I pulled the collar of my coat tighter around my chin.

‘OK,’ I said.

Marina laughed. ‘Come on,’ she tugged my arm. ‘It’s going to be fun.’

It was fun. We drank beer and made sandcastles. We bought a disposable barbecue and piled it with meat, and bananas stuffed with chunks of Mars bar. I dug my toes into the wet sand, and through mouthfuls of charred chicken leg, asked Marina questions about her life before Northam. She spoke about feeling deprived of a ‘Generic Family Experience’, because her parents were divorced; because her mother had died when she was young. She spoke about her father experimenting with Buddhist philosophy, about how his investments had somehow benefited from the financial crash, about the ‘laughable’ attempts at poetry she had published in her teens. I pulled my coat fiercely around my neck. I drank a lot of beer. Marina drank a lot too, and I didn’t try to stop her.

It was getting late, and we were both quite drunk, when Marina slid off her coat and said that she was going to swim. She started to take off her other clothes. Then she ran into the sea. I didn’t join her because it was freezing, plus I felt a little self-conscious about a birthmark on my upper thigh. But I watched her, and I noticed everything. Marina’s skin was smooth and pale. Her underwear had a zigzag stripe. I studied her as she sprinted into the surf.

I remember, now, sensing a slow spread of anxiety as her silhouette charged into the high grey waves. The long slow curls sweeping across her back. Her small, fragile shoulders flinching as the cold water smacked against her stomach. The waves rising and falling, crashing onto her head, flattening her hair dark against her scalp. She seemed so vulnerable. She disguised it well – she did not scream – but I could see that she was fragile out there.

Later she emerged from the water, wrapped a towel around herself and sat beside me on the sand. ‘Pussy,’ she said. ‘It’s not even that cold.’

In the moonlight, the tiny golden hairs on her stomach stood straight, and there were goose pimples along her arms. She was shivering.

When we returned to the car it was raining. The seats were soaked through. The gearstick was slick with black raindrops.

‘Fuck,’ said Marina, expressionlessly. ‘That’s a shame.’

I said nothing.

We laid our coats over the seats and got inside. As soon as we sat down I could feel damp seep through to my underwear and so to distract myself, I smoked a spliff with the window slightly open. We drove home in a drunk daze. Marina was actually better at driving when drunk, or maybe it just seemed that way because I felt more relaxed. I really did. I was cold and wet and shivering, but I was also unusually happy.

Marina looked at me sceptically.

‘You’re quiet,’ she said. There was a note of accusation in her voice.

I told her my clothes were wet – that I was cold.

‘You can shower at my house,’ said Marina. ‘I’ll lend you some clothes.’

The following morning Marina returned the car, alone, and I forgot to ask about Graham and the rain damage. I still don’t know how much she had to pay for it.

ii.

There were a lot of things I forgot to ask Marina, now I think about it. The questions I did put to her were always beside the point somehow – too vague or too specific to elucidate what she was ever really thinking. I wish I’d fastened onto some of the other leads instead. I wish I’d asked where she was on certain days; how certain things made her feel. But there’s no use in regretting all that. I don’t know how much I can trust of what she told me anyway.

The conversational pattern of our friendship was this: I asked her questions about herself; she asked me questions about grand ideas. I’d say: ‘What was your mother like?’ and she’d reply, e.g.: ‘Do you think that life is a simulation?’ I got the impression that she only ever asked me questions so that she could answer them herself. If I gave a response that she disagreed with, which was rare, she’d brush it off and complain that I didn’t understand. She’d say that I didn’t ‘speak her language’.

Marina was opinionated. Her thoughts were hard-boiled, polished facts with no room for negotiation. I, on the other hand, had only a clutch of half-baked conclusions. I understood ideas, but I had no clue about how to settle on one at any given time – how you might say that something was more true than something else and actually mean it. My thoughts lay in my head in a series of unconnected fragments – like shattered glass – and I couldn’t piece them together to see what the original construction had looked like.

Sometimes I pretended this disconnect didn’t matter, but I knew it did. I didn’t want relativism. I wanted to find a definitive interpretation for everything.

When it came to writing my own essays, my conclusions would always say something admiring about the ‘unreadability of the text’, as though being confusing were a badge of literary merit. I would explain various theories and then wind up making a non-committal comment like: ‘Milton holds up a mirror to the reader’. I knew this was probably a cop out, the verbal equivalent of knowingly tapping the side of my nose – but expressing my ignorance was the closest I could come to saying something true.

Once I asked Marina what she thought of that line about Milton.

‘Unhelpful,’ she said. ‘Irresponsible, in fact.’

I agreed that it would be better to think of an actual argument – but what?

‘Paradise Lost is about someone struggling to come to terms with their sexuality in an oppressively homophobic environment,’ she added bluntly. ‘Lucifer rejects the heteronormative values pressed upon him by society – aka God, embodied by Adam and Eve – and is subsequently dealt the punishment of expulsion. He has to go and face his demons.’

‘Literally demons,’ I said.

‘Then he starts complaining about the decor of hell and saying stuff like: “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” It’s obvious – high camp. Put that.’

Her argument was always a bit off, but I found her conviction refreshing. The fact that she had so much confidence meant she could speak freely about any number of topics. She didn’t get tangled up in questions of political correctness or historical accuracy, as I did – she just charged on. And even if I wasn’t always sure that what she said was appropriate, or (when you unpacked it) made sense, there was something comforting about being close to someone who scoffed at the very notion of self-doubt. It made me believe that I, too, would one day have an opinion about something.

Looking back now, I think it was this self-conviction which caused Marina to be disliked by other people at Northam. There was something cold and uncompromising about her. It put them off, especially other girls.

Did Marina notice this? I think so. Did she mind? Unclear. She had a way of speaking to people that indicated she found them tedious, yes – but at the same time she always seemed to be seeking them out. When we went out to clubs or bars, she would always make some excuse to introduce herself to strangers. She would saunter over and ask for a lighter, or hang next to them with a sultry, bored expression on her face, waiting for a moment to sarcastically chip into their conversations.

I was so convinced by her self-confidence back then that I didn’t consider that this might be a sign of loneliness. In fact, I interpreted it as a personal insult. Her behaviour made me suspicious, paranoid even, like she was looking for an opportunity to get away from me.

iii.

I can’t keep putting it off.

The way I’ve written everything here, it makes it seem as though Marina dominated my first term at Northam. It is true that my memory of that time, like so many other things, is now clogged up with thoughts of her. I find it hard to picture any events where she wasn’t there – I can’t even clearly remember the moments where I was alone. But the truth is that there is another side to it. There were other things that happened. The other events, the events with the professor … I should address those.

In my initial glimpse of Marina with the professor, I’d recognized for the first time that there was something stagey about him. It wasn’t that he was lecherous exactly, but his authoritative persona, as someone who knew everything and whose self-confidence was unshakeable, struck me as unconvincing. I had seen him once without the mask on. Now, in the times I’d seen him since, it always seemed like he was trying to prove himself, like he was attempting to perform a part that he wasn’t at all suited to. Many people were like that at Northam – but the professor was the worst offender.

Or the second worst.

When I walked around campus, I’d sometimes see the professor with Henry. Their heads would be buried together in conversation in the café, locking eyes, nodding seriously. At other times they would exchange papers at the end of a lecture in an underhand fashion – Henry would slip the sheets sideways onto the lectern and give a perfunctory nod. It was like he thought he was on a mission for MI5 and not at ‘Renaissance Rhetoric’ in northern England. Once, when our first year seminar overran by ten minutes, Henry opened the door without knocking and ducked his head in. He looked panicked when he saw his mistake, muttering: ‘Wrong room.’ But I saw him go back in afterwards, when he thought no one could see him.

I heard from Marina that Henry was getting a head start on his dissertation. This was the cause of their clandestine meetings, she explained. She said that he was seeking advice from the professor about which areas of research might propel his chances of getting into Cambridge or Yale for a PhD. Early tuition was frowned upon, and since he was only a second year, it made sense for them to keep it hushed up.

‘To be honest though I don’t know why Henry bothers,’ Marina said to me. ‘It’s not that big a deal what kind of work you do anyway. References are what really matter. Professor Montgomery will pull strings to get him where he wants to go.’

This I found hard to believe. Then I remembered Marina’s scholarship.

The professor’s favouritism made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like the way Marina spoke about it either: she simultaneously criticized the ‘nepotistic structures’ of university, but was clearly complicit in it, in the fact she wanted to keep her scholarship. It hurt my head to think about this, so I tried not to.

Instead I deflected my dissatisfaction onto Henry and the professor. Conspiracy theories about them raced through my mind. One day I put one of them to Marina.

‘Do you think …?’

‘Do I think what?’

‘Henry and Montgomery …’ I said. I waggled my eyebrows, attempting to appear breezy and flippant.

‘Nah,’ Marina retorted, somewhat irritably. ‘For one thing, he’s definitely into girls.’

‘Who, Henry?’

‘God knows about him.’

‘Then Montgomery?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s got a wife but … to be honest, there are always other women. He was always accompanied by a “friend” to events, even when I was a kid. There would always be something dangling off his arm.’

This seemed to me so unlikely that I recoiled.

‘Ew,’ I said. ‘Who would … where did he even find them?’

‘Everywhere,’ she said.

‘But where?’

‘Everywhere, Eva. That’s how it works. He just … some people are like that. Women get desperate when they’re older.’

‘Does his wife know?’

‘No idea.’

I would try to push the conversation a little further then, try to dig a little bit more about the circumstances in which Marina and Montgomery knew each other, what he’d been like at those parties and out of office hours, but she would never dwell on the topic for long. It was fair, I guess, because I was so needy in my questioning.

‘You absorb too much popular culture,’ Marina said to me once. ‘That’s your problem. You see a story in everything. You’ve got so much wasted mental energy. Life isn’t a novel, Eva. We’re not in The Secret fucking History.’

This made me laugh so much that I started choking.

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