by L. Smyth
‘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.
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.’