by L. Smyth
For a few seconds I sat there in the mud. Then – after the last of the students trailed in – I stood up. My legs felt shaky, but my hand was not as bad as I’d thought – the pain disappeared within a few paces. That was lucky. I walked back to my accommodation alone, my knees sodden with mud and my palms and elbows freezing and bloody. When I finally got to my room, there was a queue for the communal shower. I sat on my bed, wrapped in a towel, staring at my mud-caked ankles and my mud-caked clothes.
I thought about her silhouette running away from me. I could still hear the sound of her laughter, echoing across the lake.
v.
It was after then that our friendship really began to disintegrate. I don’t believe I was to blame for this. Marina was increasingly volatile and rude, often barging into conversations unannounced, shutting them down abruptly, and then demanding attention via some other method. She would simper and snivel. She would wrinkle her nose at everything. She would constantly try to embarrass me.
‘Evie,’ she’d say after some snide comment, coming over to stroke my hair. ‘Where have you been?’ Then she’d tangle her fingers through my roots, begin threading a plait, start talking about how it was ‘funny’ that I’d started to dye it. She’d pick a piece of lint off my jumper and claim it was dandruff, say how that was ‘sweet’.
Her behaviour was grating, yes, but it’s true that I didn’t behave kindly during those final weeks of term. I felt a need to point out how annoying she was – how hypocritical and boring she was – and not discreetly, but in a goading, humiliating fashion. I would wait for her to start speaking, and then I’d butt in with a counter-question. I would lead her to raise her voice, then I’d coolly interject with a superior line of thought. I wanted to make her fearful. I wanted her to question herself. I wanted to make her unsure of her own personality.
One of the first things that I had started to call her out on, for example, was her hastiness in making judgements about people. She might have had a confident manner but her language was always extreme. She seemed to think that people were either inherently good or inherently bad – by their very nature – whereas at that time I tended to see people as being essentially blank, with a palette of character traits which changed according to mood or social context. I had neuroscience to support me on this; Marina had instinct. It irritated me that whenever we met a new person, they could never simply be nice, or reliable or fun according to Marina. They had to have a reluctant upside, and an extreme downside.
‘Rebecca Barnes makes some OK points in seminars,’ she would say, ‘but I’ve never met anyone with a more convoluted way of expressing themselves. She uses so many qualifiers. There is no point in making a good point if it means other people have to weave their way around your sentences to understand it.’
Where before I would laugh and agree, now I began to object. I said that I thought that, actually, Rebecca Barnes had some good insights and communicated them nicely. Anyway, I liked that she made contributions to the seminar. It was good to have someone to interrupt the silences.
Marina snorted when I said that, wrinkling her light freckled nose.
‘Well yeah, you’re right,’ she replied. ‘At least she makes a contribution in the first place.’
She always laughed softly, sweetly, after putting me down – as though my weaknesses were endearing character quirks. Once it had made me embarrassed. Now it made me want to hit her. But I smiled and laughed back through gritted teeth anyway – letting the laugh carry on for a second longer than was natural – just long enough to hint at how I really felt – and then we moved on to some other topic.
We were good at moving on like that. The truth is that we knew so little about each other that there were always safe conversation topics to return to – things we couldn’t disagree on. We could always teach the other about ourselves. We’d talk about our lives before we met: our former teachers, our schoolfriends, our families.
I loved hearing about Marina’s family. Even now, while there’s a strong instinct warning me against it, I also feel excited at the possibility of describing it here. I can’t help it. I still get a buzz out of it. Her life story has always been, will always be, exciting to me.
I’ll start with the content – the story. Marina and I were both only children, but the similarities end there. Excepting my homeschooling experience (about which I’m pretty sure I never told her) my upbringing had been dull. Hers, by contrast, was exceptional: a soap opera of Dickensian proportions. Her mother was a socialite who had been a bridesmaid at Princess Margaret’s daughter’s wedding. Her father, a loveable scallywag from ‘similar stock’, had made a fortune in the city before crashing out to become a semi-famous academic. They’d married at 25 and divorced at 29, after her father ran off with his ‘floozy’ research assistant. After that her mother had taken Marina to live with her in the Cotswolds. But then when Marina was 6, she had died of lung cancer and so Marina had been left motherless, forced to return to the home of her father and her new stepmother.
‘The hussy and her keeper.’
The plot was enough to hook me in. But Marina’s way of narrating elevated it to new pastures. She was enthralling, unpredictable, funny. She made her life seem not tragic but like a dark comedy. She said that she wasn’t aggrieved by the loss of her mother, but ‘better off for it’. In fact, she said, her mother had ‘deserved’ to die because of her irresponsible lifestyle.
‘Too many cigarettes,’ she would utter, striking a new one from the pack. ‘Too much booze. No wonder Dad left her, she was practically incontinent before I could walk.’
Her father, rather than a philandering traitor, seemed charmingly scatterbrained. Marina clearly adored him. She said that they were ‘two peas in a pod’, that her life had improved significantly after moving in with him. He had – she explained – ‘no filter after a drink’. I’d sit openmouthed as she told me the things he’d done. How he used to pick her up from school in an Elvis Presley costume; how he’d once confronted Tony Blair about the Iraq war while he was the keynote speaker at a banking event. Once, at a prestigious film party, he had jumped on stage while Phil Collins was performing and sung ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ to Marina in the crowd.
It strikes me as funny, embarrassing even, that I didn’t question how much of this was true. Even when I googled her stepmother and discovered that she was not some ‘floozy’ but a dour academic – I didn’t think to ask Marina for an explanation. I just assumed that my prejudices had jumped to the conclusion that she would be young, because that was the sort of woman men left their wives for. I felt ashamed at that. And when I looked up pictures of Princess Margaret’s daughter’s wedding and saw that none of the bridesmaids could have been Marina’s mother, I just assumed I’d got the wrong wedding, or otherwise that I’d misremembered the details of what she told me. My casual knowledge of the royal family surely paled in comparison to hers.
That’s how it was. I might have disbelieved everything else she told me, but the story of her family remained intact. It was wholly, uncomplicatedly, indisputably factual. However much we had argued before, however much I’d decided that I hated her, I would always fall silent when she spoke about it. I would listen to her intently, swallowing every word, never questioning anything.
These conversations were only light reprieves, however. The rest of the time we conducted polite, restrained small talk, or read stuff aloud while we got drunk, so as to distract ourselves from the heavy silences. I had a sense that soon, very soon, an outburst would punctuate the streams of nicety and the tensions would erupt, causing a chasm in our friendship.
CHAPTER FOUR
December 2013
i.
It came to a head on the night of Henry’s birthday party. Henry’s twenty-first birthday fell about two weeks before the end of term and he threw a lavish celebration in its honour. This was evidently true – it was a birthday bash – but Henry deflected. He claimed, tenuously, that the party was to celebra
te the upcoming Christmas holiday instead.
It should be noted that Henry ‘didn’t celebrate birthdays’.
‘What is age though, really?’ he’d said to me once, contemptuously, while on a cokefuelled bender. ‘The entire concept of becoming a year older is void. To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. I mean look at that star, Eva. It takes light eight minutes to travel from the closest star to Earth. That means that you’re looking at that star now – eight minutes ago. And so the star might be dead. I’m paraphrasing here, but the conclusion is that we might be dead. And so what is time? Time doesn’t exist. Time doesn’t exist, so it doesn’t make sense to celebrate birthdays. It’s … well, not just tacky – it’s fundamentally against my philosophical principles.’
He’d thrown me a look of disdain then, as though imagining all the tacky birthday parties I might have hosted over the course of my sad, bourgeois life.
The truth was I had never hosted any sort of party. I couldn’t stand the idea. Even attending them made me feel exposed. I drank too much and said too little, and I couldn’t dance, however drunk, without feeling self-conscious.
I was therefore less surprised by the fact that Henry had thrown what was effectively a birthday party than by the fact I had been invited. Objectively I wasn’t a great addition, and I had the strong impression that Henry didn’t like me. Whatever, I went.
Henry’s house was one of Northam’s less dingy student abodes. It had unusually large, airy windows, Danish light fittings and expensive cream carpets. Henry and his housemates had done their best to disguise this by buying cheap furniture which made the place seem more shabby and unclean than it really was. In the hall, there was a mouldy coat stand and a half-cracked mirror. In the kitchen, manky fridge magnets lay scattered along the surfaces, all bearing ‘ironically’ tacky slogans like: ‘A balanced diet is a glass of wine in both hands’, and: ‘If we can send one man to the moon, why can’t we send them all there?’ In the sitting room, two long, brown divans curled along the carpet in front of a pair of moth-eaten curtains. They cast a dull shadow over the room – a room that was now littered with cigarette butts and empty bottles. I sat next to Marina on a torn up armchair, smoking a spliff. My head rolled backwards over the upholstery. I wasn’t thinking about anything.
‘Calm down dear.’
Soon enough I clocked that Marina had been talking. She was talking not to me – but to a group of people on the other side of the room. I listened in and was instantly annoyed. She had used that sarcastic phrase – ‘calm down dear’ – in the professor’s study before we’d escaped. Before she had abandoned me. Why was she bringing it up now? I blinked and turned to look at her. She was sat very upright in her chair.
There was a delirious smirk on her face.
‘Britain wants to knock those trade barriers down. An opening Britain is the ideal partner for an opening China.’
She spoke in an exaggerated RP accent, with her mouth pinched into a tight line and her chin drawn deep into her neck. I watched as she leant forward slightly on every other syllable, then widened her eyes so that they shone with false earnest. I realized then what she was doing.
It was an impression of David Cameron.
‘Might I add,’ she continued, ‘that Eva’s drunk red face currently bears a rather strong resemblance to that of my dear dear colleague Boris.’
I didn’t laugh. No one else did either. A couple of people left the room to get drinks.
Marina tried to continue for a few more sentences, but her features kept jerking out of joint and she kept fluffing her line. Finally she threw back her head, laughing alone. Her hair spread out over the back of the sofa. I felt it brush gently against my ear.
‘David Cameron is awful,’ she said. ‘I mean, naturally I’d vote for him over Ed Miliband, but he’s still awful.’
I felt her words work their way around my brain. A slow but certain feeling of disgust penetrated my giddy head-fog, and I heard myself pointing out that she’d previously identified as a Labour voter. Marina explained that she was more inclined to vote Labour ‘ideologically’, but she couldn’t take Ed Miliband seriously.
‘Besides,’ she said, ‘my constituency is Tory, so it wouldn’t make a difference.’
I felt a sharp stab of indignation. I didn’t like this fatalistic streak – this shrug of complacency. Still, I could see that everyone else was leaving the room, likely as a result of her embarrassing performance, and so it seemed pointless to tear her down. There was no point without an audience. I marinated in the silence for a minute, let myself return to calm. Then, once everyone else had gone, I heard Marina switch on her autopilot. She started talking about the other people at the party.
‘God, they’re so boring,’ she said. ‘I’m so bored. It’s like no one wants to have a political discussion in here.’ After a few swift character assassinations, she concluded: ‘They only ever talk about people.’
My toes clenched in my shoes. Marina lit her cigarette, shrugged and carried on: ‘Small minds discuss people; average minds discuss events; great minds discuss ideas.’
This was a line I had heard before. It was something that Marina often liked to murmur under her breath, sometimes flicking her ash, in order to seem casually profound. I had fallen for it at first. It was a smart piece of rhetoric. It helped, too, the way she tended to look at me when she said it: a flash of conspiratorial warmth, twisting her mouth into a smile. But the charm had waned over the last few utterances – and now I just found it annoying. The quote wasn’t true. It was elitist, pretentious rubbish. I asked her where she’d heard it.
‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged, irritated. ‘It’s something my father says.’
No, I told her, it wasn’t something her father said. It was something that Eleanor Roosevelt had said, or was supposed to have said, once, to someone, somewhere – actually there was no evidence for it. I knew this because I had googled it two days before, anticipating this interaction.
She frowned. Her eyes sharpened into small green darts.
‘Who cares? It doesn’t matter who said it. It’s true.’
Was it? I asked her. Or was it a lazy piece of spin – the kind of simplification that someone like Henry was likely to parrot?
Silence.
As the silence lengthened, a tension stretched between us. She wiped her fringe away from her forehead. Her eyes were hypnotic, with a kind of unsettling melancholy quality. For a second I thought about holding my tongue – but then I took one look at her smug, smiling mouth and something inside me snapped.
Surely the greatest people, I continued, beyond the merely ‘great’ – did not cut off conversational avenues just so that they could lie around in their ivory towers theorizing. And besides – ‘There’s no need.’
And besides, she was just talking about people at this party. She spoke about other people constantly, in fact. Whether through impressions or in bitchy appraisals she was always comparing herself to other people, competing, shouting over, or dismissing them. It was her go-to topic of conversation. Yes. Of all people, she belonged to that supposedly inferior bracket who ‘talked about people’.
Now I was gathering momentum.
‘It’s pathetic,’ I said, louder, ‘how much it means to you to exert superiority over others. You go on about Rebecca Barnes because you’re threatened by how much Montgomery respects her opinion. You go on about – I don’t know – how Henry regurgitates other people’s ideas and can’t think for himself, because you don’t read as widely as him. You thrive off the idea that you’re superior to other people, but the truth is you can’t stop thinking about them. You’re nothing without—’
‘Oh wow,’ someone said. ‘Finally.’
I stopped, astonished, and looked over towards the door. Henry was stood in the doorway. He was clutching a bottle in one hand and an imperious cigarette in the other. He hovered there for a moment, then – as the silence lengt
hened again – he walked into the room. I watched the long lines of his coat, the swift movements of his shiny black feet, as he approached Marina and took off from where I had left off: ‘She’s not wrong, Marina. You do spend a lot of time talking about other people. I’ve just turned 21, so here’s a tip from an old soul. Stop being so fucking patronizing. It’s embarrassing and annoying for everyone. While I’m at it, your impressions really aren’t that funny. It’s just about fine when you do it every now and then but, for gods’ sake, it’s awful when you cut in like just now.’
Marina stared at Henry incredulously. Then her stare moved, slowly, to me. The green eyes widened accusingly. My glance shifted from Marina to Henry, Henry to Marina. They stared back at me. They waited.
I felt a knot roll in my stomach –panic and dread, but also something newly defined: indignation. I was right. Henry was siding with me. He was still condescending, still inappropriately aggressive, still void of self-awareness – but he was siding with me.
Marina and I stared at each other for several minutes, both refusing to blink. Then finally she looked to the floor, grasped both the arms of the chair and pushed herself up.
She said that she had to pick up something from her car.
I watched her shadow move into the square light of the doorway. Then it shrank, and she disappeared.
Henry and I remained together alone, silent for a moment. I was still sat on the sofa; he stood leaning against the armchair opposite. He took a drag from his cigarette. Then he shook his head slowly. Two long plumes came out from his nostrils and curled around his head.
‘I don’t understand why you put up with her,’ he said.
He was staring into space, with a vacant expression, apparently unbothered. But the intimacy of the conversation alarmed me. I looked into my drink.
‘What kind of comment is that?’ I said.
‘You know what I mean.’