Giant Days

by Non Pratt

  3) Human beings are considered neutral territory guided by their own agency and shall be turned neither for nor against either party. Any transgression of this clause will be considered “bitching” and will be dealt with accordingly.

  4) Contemporaneous occupation of the same space is not permitted, with the following exceptions:

  a) Environments in which basic human needs come first, including but not limited to locations listed in schedule A.

  b) Group scenarios.

  Should either named party come across the other, reasonable measures must be taken to avoid any and all contact—eye, verbal, and physical. Any transgression of this clause will be considered “engagement of the enemy” and will be dealt with accordingly.

  5) Romantic alliances are not to be flaunted and are subject to Clause 2.

  I hereby declare that I [insert name]

  “You haven’t even filled in my name!” McGraw looked up in affront.

  “Chill your bristles. It’s a boilerplate document that I’ve adapted.”

  “You have boilerplate contracts for things like this?”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know.” Susan crossed her arms and watched as McGraw flipped the page to read schedule A. “It’s a fair deal. Stay out of my way, and I’ll stay out of yours.”

  “Romantic alliances . . .” There was the faintest air of interest. “Have you been making any of those, then?”

  “None of your beeswax.”

  But McGraw barely drew breath before countering, “Any undisclosed information pertaining to one of these clauses is very much my beeswax.”

  “I have made alliances,” Susan muttered unwillingly. “None of them significant enough to affect our terms.” Then, after a brief pause, she ventured, “How about you?”

  For the first time since he’d opened the door, McGraw edged a little closer, his hand reaching up to her face as if to brush her hair behind her ear, but even as Susan opened her mouth to invoke Clause 4, McGraw withdrew, holding up the pen he’d taken from behind her ear.

  “May I borrow your pen?”

  “How about next time you verbalize your intent before violating my person?” Susan narrowed her eyes, imagining how satisfying it would be to telekinetically prune that magnificent mustache by plucking it from his face, hair by manly hair.

  McGraw rested the paper on the wall, added only Ed Gemmell’s name to his list of chosen confidants, and signed and dated both copies before returning them to Susan to sign.

  “I’ve not made any romantic alliances, and I’ve no intention of doing so,” McGraw said quietly. “I’ve let that spoil things for me before.”

  “Mm.” Susan folded one contract up and tucked it back into her pocket before giving McGraw the other. “You still have my pen.”

  The pen changed hands in silence.

  “OK. Well, then,” Susan said, “since we’re currently violating Clause 4, I think I should . . .”

  “Is all this really necessary?” McGraw put his arm up as he leaned on the doorframe, and Susan felt an alien stab of something like nostalgia for the friendship they had once had. There had been a time when Susan had thought she’d need no other friends in the world as long as she had McGraw.

  How wrong she’d been. Better not to have any friends at all than ones who betray you.

  “Yes, McGraw. All this is very necessary.”

  And with that, Susan turned on her heel and walked away, down the long, cream-colored corridor, back to the life she’d been so keen to make for herself before McGraw had come along to ruin it.

  2

  THE INSPIRATIONAL IMPACT OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

  When faced with a life-changing event, Daisy focused on the practical. Within her first week of university, she had registered with a new doctor and dentist, arranged insurance for her room, and updated her address for all the most important correspondence, such as bank statements, the quarterly village newsletter, and postcards from her Peruvian pen pal, Frida, to whom she’d been writing since she was six.

  Nonetheless, when she went down to the mailroom on her way to breakfast, Daisy found a large envelope addressed in Granny’s familiar looping handwriting, forwarding a stash of letters and magazines that had arrived in Crickleton.

  The faint scent of home that emerged from the envelope —whether real or imagined—and the sight of the latest issue of National Geographic conjured a rush of homesickness so acute that Daisy had to take a moment to sit on the bench outside and gather herself.

  The magazine in her hand was a yellow-framed window into the past. Daisy could see herself as a little girl, perching on the faded chintz of Granny’s favorite armchair, looking with fascination at photos from across the world, from inside the human body, and of outer space. It was afternoons sitting at the kitchen table, reading about unearthed Iron Age habitations and pterosaur remains, that had awakened her interest in archaeology and led her all the way to Sheffield. Yet here she was, wishing with everything she had that she was back home, eating breakfast with Granny, so engrossed in whatever debate this particular issue would prompt that their tea would grow cold and intellectual repartee would shift seamlessly into bickering over who should make a fresh brew.

  It didn’t matter that she was on her way to a J-block breakfast with her friends—the only company she craved right now was Granny’s. Taking her phone from her pocket, she dialed Granny’s number.

  No answer.

  Frustrated, Daisy tried again.

  No luck.

  Before the dam could burst, Daisy stood up purposefully, tucking her mail into her backpack along with the things she’d need for her morning lecture. She made a great fuss of zipping it back up, tightening the straps, and striding toward the canteen, as if she could outpace the sadness at her back, whose arms were slipping around her, squeezing her chest in an unwelcome embrace.

  Just as she reached the entrance to the dining hall, her phone buzzed.

  “Granny!”

  “Hello, my darling. Sorry I missed your call. Been wiring a new socket into the living room. Had half the floorboards up last night and found next-door’s cat down there this morning . . .”

  Daisy’s lip trembled at the thought of things changing without her. Sure, it was just a new socket, but then what? Finding a better home for the vacuum cleaner? Painting the front door?

  “. . . had to drag him out by the tail. Don’t think Nancy’s going to be too pleased at the state of him, but if she brings it up, I’ll tell her it was either that or bury the stupid thing alive. They did that, didn’t they? Put dead cats in the walls? You’d know all about this sort of thing from your course . . .”

  But Daisy was lost in a nightmare vision of returning home to find everything in the house ever so slightly different from when she’d left. Door handles turning the other way. Hot taps that now ran cold. Armchairs moved six inches to the left, so that they no longer aligned with the television . . .

  “Daisy?”

  “Don’t replace the microwave!” Daisy squawked in response.

  There was silence on the other end of the phone before her granny started up in a gentle tone, “Is everything all right, petal? You don’t sound quite yourself.”

  Daisy opened her mouth, ready to tell her grandmother how lonely she felt sometimes, how homesick . . . But then she stopped. This was her problem; sharing it would make it Granny’s problem, too, and she already had enough of those. Daisy might feel lonely, but Granny really was alone, and what was she doing? Was she moping around the place feeling sorry for herself? No. She was out there wiring in electric sockets and relocating the vacuum cleaner and (possibly) painting the front door.

  “I’m fine, Granny.” To distract herself, Daisy walked over to the bulletin board outside the dining hall, concentrating very hard on keeping her eyes wide open. “I just called because the National Geographic arrived, and I wanted . . .” What she wanted was to be able to share it with Granny. “I wanted to call and thank you for sending it.�
�

  As Granny chatted happily on the other end of the line, Daisy felt tears brimming behind her eyes, and she swallowed, glaring furiously at the poster in front of her nose.

  Activities Fair—Wednesday, October 18th, 3:00 P.M.–6:00 P.M.—Find your tribe. The same poster Jonathan had given her in the bar.

  “Are you going out and meeting lots of new people?” Granny asked. “Joining clubs and starting new hobbies is all part of the university experience as I understand it.”

  Looking straight at the poster, tears in check, she replied, “There’s an Activities Fair this afternoon. I’m sure I’ll meet tons of new people there. Got to go, Granny. I’m meeting Susan and Esther for breakfast.”

  Sadness didn’t suit Daisy; action did.

  Any visit to the canteen was accompanied by a soundtrack of murmured and half-shouted conversations, the clink of Sheffield steel, and the sharp scrapes of crockery. Clumps of students were distributed unevenly down the long tables: foreign students held together by the shared confidence that comes from being brave enough to go to university in another country, the lads who thought that supporting a football team counted as playing on one lounging about in casual sportswear, friends united by subjects or corridors or a mutual distaste for almost everyone else.

  “I don’t want to be here.” Susan stared balefully at her tray of limp bacon and partially solidified beans. “I want to be in my bed, tricking my brain into thinking it’s asleep.”

  “You have a lecture,” Daisy reminded Susan, ushering her further along the queue.

  This only served to make Susan grumpier. Mornings were not her favorite, and breakfast was usually a cereal bar and a flask of black coffee on the way to the medical school. But today, Esther had hammered on Susan’s door as she passed by on her way to an early-morning HIIT workout, and Susan hadn’t been able to fall back asleep.

  Esther was waiting for them by the cutlery station, the picture of irritating good health with her shower-damp ponytail and tray of muesli.

  “Ugh,” Susan muttered. “You’re exhausting me just by existing.”

  “Schadenfreude isn’t the only way to release those endorphins, you know. You should try a workout with me sometime.”

  “Absolutely not. All that bouncing and music and energy.”

  “You could do yoga with me,” Daisy suggested.

  “Work up much of a sweat when you’re stretching, do you?” Esther said a little loftily.

  “Sometimes. Things can get pretty intense when you’re in the zone.”

  “Let’s move this conversation along to where Kully’s waving us over . . .”

  Down at the far end of the table, a hand extended in a casual wave from a crisp white cuff.

  Kulvinder Singh was in Susan’s Anatomy group, and their friendship stemmed mostly from the fact that he appreciated a little organ-based dark humor. Handsome and preppy, he sat in stark relief to the girl slumped next to him, whose eyes were bloodshot, skin the pallor of a mausoleum’s masonry.

  “Daisy, Esther, you know Kully,” Susan said. “And this is Grace Latter. The work-hard–play-hard variety of medical student.”

  If Kully’s beam was the trademark of a man who knew exactly how good he looked, Grace’s crease of the lips was the dying effort of someone far too hungover to care about anything other than not being sick. She had a heart-shaped face and pretty blue eyes, with lilac hair pulled back in a scraggy ponytail, and she appeared to be wearing clothes three times too big for her judging by how far she’d had to roll back the cuffs of her sweater.

  “Hi.” Grace took a single, delicate nibble from a slice of dry toast. Every finger—even her thumbs—had an interesting-looking silver ring on it. “It seems I woke up in hell.”

  “Clearly you’re not familiar with the city of Northampton,” Susan said. “Legend has it that if you see a bus depot and say the name backward, a portal will open to spit you out through the hellmouth and into the city.”

  “And do those of us with a Young Person’s Railcard get a third off?” Esther inquired.

  “Of course.” A malevolent grin crept across Susan’s face. “A third off your life.”

  “Erk.” Grace slowly folded over, like a balloon from which the air was escaping.

  “So, anyway . . .” Kully pushed a glass of water closer to Grace. “What are you doing up so early? I thought English students just stayed in bed all day.”

  “Not when there’s a seven A.M. class down at the gym.” Esther put her spoon down to poke her bicep speculatively. “I’m going to hurt so much tomorrow . . .”

  “Stop it. Your good health is making Grace ill.” Susan nodded across the table to where Grace was struggling up from the table to make a bolt for the toilets.

  “I think that might have more to do with her hangover than Esther’s gym talk,” Kully said as they all watched Grace barge through the students still queuing for food, scattering them like bowling pins. “She drank the corridor party dry last night. Wasn’t in a fit state to get back to hers, so she slept on my floor.” A frown drove two straight lines between Kully’s brows the way one might Photoshop “consternation” onto the face of a male model. “I hope she isn’t about to be sick on the clean clothes I lent her.”

  As Susan and Kully moved on to talk about their subject the way everyone did if they had a quorum of two, Daisy carefully quartered her apple. Not having participated in much of the discussion meant she’d already eaten her granola and yogurt, and she was trying to slow herself down so she didn’t have to just sit there with an empty plate and an interested expression.

  Next to her, Esther’s attention was bounding around the room like a puppy at a barbecue, as if she believed there was something more to discover.

  Maybe there was.

  “Um,” Daisy said.

  No one heard her.

  “Esther?”

  No response.

  Daisy tried to think how her friends went about commanding attention when they wanted it.

  “Actually . . .” Daisy said in as confident a voice as possible, “I was thinking about going to the Activities Fair later.”

  Esther redirected her attention, and Susan looked up from her conversation with Kully, who said, “Wasn’t that weeks ago?”

  “Black mold. Health and safety,” Daisy said, remembering what Jonathan had said. “It got moved to today. I thought maybe we could all go together?”

  She looked hopefully from Esther to Susan, who issued a disgusted snort.

  “Clubs and societies are enforced fun for people who don’t have anything better to do with their lives than waste them.” Seeing how crestfallen Daisy was, Susan added a little more kindly, “Sorry, Daisy. I’m not much of a joiner.”

  Esther was holding her fingers to make a crucifix and leaning away in fear. “Nuh-uh. I’ve had my brush with organized socializing, thanks, and all I got was a tattoo and an overwhelming sense of foreboding.”

  Daisy had forgotten about that.

  As they went to offload their breakfast things, Daisy reasoned that it shouldn’t matter whether her friends came with her. As a freshly hatched social butterfly, she would just have to spread her wings on her own.

  Even if she still felt more like a caterpillar.

  On her way out of breakfast, Esther had found Ed Gemmell. Somehow they had ended up in the library.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing actual work,” Esther said, giving a slightly demonic expression to a skull she’d just drawn on the back of her hand. “The whole point of university is to learn to develop our own theories through experience and contemplation, not by copying out other people’s ideas.”

  “I think the point is that we have to know what theories already exist; otherwise we won’t know whether our ideas are original,” Ed Gemmell said without looking up from the book he was studying.

  Esther reached out and flipped the book over to a black-and-white photo on the dust jacket. The man in it was wearing a turtleneck and a stern expressi
on, wiry hair cascading down either side of a shiny bald head.

  “If Rupert Chalfont-Debray’s theories are so original, how come he looks exactly like all the other dusty white male academics? You could have subbed him in for the man who gave that lecture.”

  “By ‘that lecture,’ do you mean the series of six compulsory lectures we’ve had on early twentieth-century prose?”

  “Yes. Six. Totally what I meant.” SIX?!

  “That would be because they’re one and the same person. Rupert Chalfont-Debray is the head of the faculty.”

  “And how compulsory were those lectures, exactly?”

  “They didn’t check attendance, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Right.” Esther returned the book to its original position. “But . . . I should probably read this, then?”

  “Probably,” Ed Gemmell admitted, then cleared his throat. “You could study it with me now if you’d like?”

  But Esther had returned to doodling on her hands. “No thanks. I’m someone who works best under pressure. No prep until five minutes before I have to prove I’ve done any.”

  Esther hopped off the window seat on which she had been lounging to drift around the stacks, idly picking out titles and taking selfies in the same pose as the author in the photo before putting the best on Instagram and sending the rest to Daisy and Susan with the message: A Study in Being Studious.

  She didn’t like to admit it, but Esther was lonely. She had friends—good ones—but she also had a lot of free time. Back home, for all she’d bathed in the melancholy of being misunderstood, she’d also been busy. The Tackleford Academy timetable hadn’t allowed for much wallowing. Attending lessons was mandatory, and everyone’s extracurricular time followed the same schedule. There had been little opportunity for the free time that she’d craved like a drug so she could be alone with The Boy. (Once she’d secured him. High school romances seemed to move at a glacial pace.)

  Now that she had oodles of alone time and the privacy of her own room in which to spend it, Esther no longer saw the appeal.