Click

by L. Smyth

  ‘I don’t think I do,’ I said. ‘She’s a good … she’s a good friend.’

  Henry laughed at that, and when I looked up I saw that his head was thrown back in amusement. I noted the shape of his throat: the sharp arrow of Adam’s apple pointing into the air. I took another large swig of my drink.

  ‘Oh come on, don’t pretend like you don’t know. What I mean is … Why do you put up with how she treats you?’

  He sat down in the armchair, stretched his hand along the back of the cushion. There was a small smile on his face. He seemed more relaxed, more genuine now that Marina wasn’t there. He looked up. His eyes were lighter.

  ‘That’s pretty rich from you,’ I said.

  Henry shrugged. ‘We don’t pretend to be friends.’

  ‘Right.’

  His hands dove into his pockets, and produced a tiny bag of white powder. He pinched it open and poured some of the contents onto the table.

  ‘You’re often so direct that I can’t tell whether you’re joking or not,’ I said.

  ‘We’re not talking about me.’ He pressed the powder with a credit card and then cut it into thin white lines. ‘We’re talking about Marina. She always cuts you off. It’s a bit weird.’

  I focused on a tiny piece of powder. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes you do. And you should be straightforward – face up to it. You should speak more.’

  He cocked his head to the side and smiled gently. Then he gestured towards the table with the card. I saw the flash of the Coutts emblem; below it a set of white streaks. They shimmered on the blue surface. I thought of the sea. I shook my head. He shrugged, drew a twenty from his pocket, dipped his head forwards and dove downwards. His face slid along the table like a rolling pin, and there was a loud, squeaky sniff as the line shot up his nose.

  I sat there limply. I thought about getting out my phone.

  ‘You sure you don’t want any?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  Generally speaking, I no longer felt that awkward when they did this. I no longer felt conspicuous not participating. It hadn’t been an issue since the first time Marina had asked me to do it, when I’d said no and confirmed that it wasn’t my kind of thing. (Good, Marina had said. It was a hassle for me to share their supply.) But in that moment with Henry, I felt differently. I knew that this situation had a particular charge. I knew from the way that he kept glancing at me that if I said yes, then and there, that it might change the nature of our relationship.

  He kept leaning forwards, and his voice had a gentle lilt.

  ‘Sure?’ he asked again.

  I sipped my beer, nodded, and the jerky, sudden movement of my head immediately caused me to feel nauseous. The room seemed to swerve, the pores of the ceiling enlarged and came very near to my face, and then, I realized, so was Henry. He was holding a rolled £20 note towards me. The edges of his nostrils were shiny. I could smell something like petrol. And I knew in that moment that I was about to do something I would regret.

  Afterwards, I stood up and gave the note back to him. It was slippery and smooth under my fingers. They touched his as I passed it back over.

  ‘All right?’ Henry said.

  I nodded. I felt very, very funny. The room was swaying and I was moving with it. Everything was bright and good. Short hot bursts of air erupted from my nose and the breath on my upper lip was causing it to lift at the edges. That was a nice feeling. That was such a nice feeling that a large smile broke out over my face. I had so much energy all of a sudden! I lit a cigarette but it wasn’t enough – I needed to spread my arms. I flung them out across my body.

  ‘You sure you’re all right?’ Henry said.

  Wow he was beautiful. He looked so beautiful.

  I nodded again. I bent down giddily and put the cigarette into the ashtray. I flexed my fingers into a star shape. The music thudded in my ears and the floor seemed like water. Henry was a long looming figure, coming very close to me. I looked slightly past him, noticed the figures in the corridor. Lovely party humans! Then I leaned forward, reached my hand around his neck, and brought my face close to his. His mouth looked funny from this angle: a series of wavy little lines. I couldn’t distinguish between them and his chin. I pulled his face in further.

  His breath was warm on my cheek. His eyes were like the moon. I thought about laughing or taking a photo or telling him that but instead …

  I kissed him.

  He was reluctant, passive, at first. His body felt cold and stiff and his lips didn’t move. This was not the expected reaction. In fact I was momentarily so amused by this lack of enthusiasm that I started thinking of ways that I could recount it to Marina. He was frigid after all, he was a robot man, he was … then I came to and realized that no, wait, he actually was reacting now. His mouth began to move; then it began to feel warm. Gradually his head leaned forward, his long fingers slid around my neck.

  I dimly processed the situation, almost as a third-party observer. What were we doing now? Why was this happening? It was so weird!

  It was then that I sensed a familiar presence in the corner of the room. I pulled away abruptly, it all felt too abrupt, and as I reeled backwards and readjusted my eyes the scene began to fall into place again: the sharp edges of Henry’s face, the look of confusion in his eyes staring past me, the curl of his fringe over his eyebrow, the brown shabby sofa and the swell of the ceiling.

  My eyes tracked across the ceiling, studying the pores in the paint, blinking, refocusing until I could identify the silhouette in the doorway. Short and secure, with two arms folded over the abdomen. A smile wavered on my lips.

  ‘Marina.’

  She turned and disappeared.

  ‘Marina!’

  My voice sounded strangely nasal, and so much louder than I expected, echoing down the corridor.

  Listening to it I felt a dark, warm pull deep in my stomach. I started to laugh.

  ii.

  Over the next few days I hardly left my bed at all. My hangover was excruciating – a dull, persistent headache and a nausea which made me sweat and shake all over. Those physical symptoms were exacerbated by the shameful memory of the party. But why did I feel ashamed? It wasn’t that I had expected anything to come from kissing Henry. The kiss itself was so random as to be inscrutable. As I thought about it, turning the image in my head over and over again, I found it impossible to even pinpoint specific details about it: what I had felt towards him at the time, what he had looked like, what my hands had been doing.

  I couldn’t understand why any of it had happened.

  Now my hands moved towards my phone. No messages. I drew up the lid of my laptop and pushed myself into a sitting position. I began to scroll through photos of Henry. He was undeniably very handsome. His eyes were round and deep and dark; his face was masculine and angular; his mouth was attractively taut. Yet even captured in this 2D format, there was something off about him. He was too controlled. That rigidity had a frigidity, a kind of standoffishness.

  Well – what then? Did kissing someone always mean that you were sexually attracted to them, or was it just the impulse to do something that had overwhelmed me, that had gradually been building up over the weeks of following Marina around?

  Yes, I decided, that was the reason – plus the drugs – and when I discovered that the kiss had not affected Henry either, my convictions were strengthened. I saw him again in the corridor after a seminar. He gave me a curt, dismissive nod, made some disinterested small talk, and then drew a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and left. It was clear that he thought no more and no less of me. It was as though the evening hadn’t happened.

  Predictably, however, it had affected Marina.

  I had been trying to contact her for three days when I finally saw her outside the lecture theatre. I had been texting her, calling her, Facebooking her – at first in a casual tone, then semi-apologetic, then disguised as a joke, then openly desperate. Three days in the timescale of
a student is a long time. There is so little structure to the day that each minute seems like an hour, especially when you’re waiting for someone to contact you. Marina and I were used to spending nearly every hour together and her absence seemed alien, unnerving.

  So when I saw her outside the lecture theatre, I felt such a twisted mix of hurt and anger and nervousness that I didn’t know what to say. I had spent so long looking at pictures of her online that in my mind she had almost become an abstraction – her physical presence made me feel overwhelmed.

  I saw her move towards me. Her small arms were curved out in an arc, her long wavy hair spread out down her back and then she leaned forward into a hug. I flinched a little at the unexpected physical contact, but she drew me in further towards her, wrapping her arms tightly around my abdomen. The gentleness, the intimacy of the gesture moved me. I relaxed into the hug, put my arms around her.

  ‘What’s wrong with your phone?’ I said, murmuring into her hair. ‘I thought you’d been kidnapped.’

  There was a moment of silence before she drew her face back to look at me. There was no warmth in her face. She wore a cold, cruel smirk. We detached from each other quickly.

  ‘So,’ she said flatly. ‘Did you have fun on Saturday night?’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Did you?’ she said again. Her voice was cold and expressionless.

  For something to do I looked down at my nails. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘You and Henry …’ she said, and nudged me with sharp little elbows.

  I wanted to ask her where she had been for the last few days, why she had been ignoring me, whether she had a problem with Henry or with me or whether it was something else. Her sharp little eyes glared into mine. Steadily I held her gaze.

  I said: ‘No, it was nothing.’

  ‘Oh come on.’

  ‘No, it really was nothing.’

  ‘How long have you been interested in him?’ She nudged me again, this time lodging her elbows deep into my ribs. ‘Did your crush develop straightaway – at the first party? Was it un coup de foudre, or has it been slowly developing?’

  I wasn’t embarrassed. Despite the forceful bluff of her tone, there was an uneasy look on her face that made me feel powerful. Her pupils looked a little dilated, and she wore a wavering expression. She was unconvincing.

  ‘I’m not interested in him,’ I repeated. ‘It’s just something that happened. He was high, I think and I was … well, drunk.’

  ‘I was thinking that it’s funny, because you’ve never been in a room with him alone before.’

  ‘So?’

  Just then the professor strode past, and the crowd began to shuffle into the lecture hall. We followed them cautiously.

  ‘So?’ I repeated, once we had sat down.

  Before she could answer – if she was going to answer –the professor cleared his throat, loaded up the PowerPoint and began to speak from his lecture notes. She shrugged and turned away.

  I sat through the lecture anxiously, twiddling my thumbs. Every so often I glanced at Marina. She was disturbingly quiet. Her lips were pursed tight. She looked intently at the PowerPoint projected on the front wall.

  After weeks of having to restrain Marina – of feeling on edge whenever she was in the company of the professor – perhaps this quietness should have relaxed me. Instead it made me feel anxious. It made me feel like there was something going on in her brain that I could not access, that she was shutting off from me.

  After the lecture ended she did not pack her bags and march out, like she usually did. She sat next to me and stared straight ahead at the table. Her eyes had a glazed expression.

  ‘Marina,’ I murmured. ‘Are you OK?’

  She pursed her mouth into a grimace.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing’s going on.’

  ‘Yes there is. Is it Henry? Is it me and …?’

  She laughed and bit the edge of her pen. ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ she snorted. ‘You.’

  I felt something inside me snap. It was clear, in the bitter intonation of that word – you – what it was that she really thought of me. She thought that I was pathetic, ridiculous, insignificant.

  ‘Then,’ I attempted to contain my anger, ‘what is it to do with?’ I dug my fingernails into my palm. ‘And if it’s not to do with me, then why are you ignoring me? Why are you bringing me into it by overanalysing what happened with Henry? Just tell me what the problem is.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you just tell me that you had feelings for Henry?’ she snapped suddenly. ‘It’s not like I mind. I think it’s weird that you didn’t say anything before.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ my voice wavered, ‘because nothing was going on. I don’t feel that way about him. I was just out of it, I—’

  ‘There’s no need to be so coy about it, Eva. I really don’t care if you like Henry, but I’d have appreciated the heads-up. I could have helped … shape his opinion of you.’ She curled a stray piece of hair around her finger, then looked up at me from under her fringe. In that moment she looked ugly and cruel.

  I felt a cold whip of anger. ‘You mince about like some grand intellectual,’ I erupted. ‘You think you’re so fucking sophisticated because your dad does something so feted for a living and you’ve acquired some of that language and self-importance by being around him. But when it comes down to it you’re nothing. All you care about is being at the core of every conversation, the object of everyone’s desire, the centre of attention all the fucking time. All you add up to is someone who wants to be … wanted.’

  A silence fell. I watched Marina turn away from me for a moment. Then she wiped her fringe from her eyes, and looked up at me again. I saw that she was smiling.

  ‘Why are you so defensive?’ she said.

  ‘Because I’m fucking sick of you. I’m sick of the way you flounce around pretending to be some grand feminist when your entire existence depends on impressing people, usually men, with your fake knowledge and your fake confidence and your fake looks. Either I have to follow you like a lapdog, or you ignore me.’

  She shook her head and laughed mirthlessly. ‘You sound hysterical,’ she said. ‘I can’t speak to you like this.’

  ‘Oh hysterical.’

  ‘Grow up.’

  ‘As soon as I do something that you don’t like, you shut me down—’

  She turned and sighed. ‘You’re so …’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I practically shouted.

  ‘You’re disappointing,’ she said. ‘Just another needy bitch.’ Then she leant forward into her rucksack, and pulled a notebook out. She began scribbling something down.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked her.

  She carried on scribbling. I felt the urge to say something else.

  ‘Marina I—’

  ‘Fuck off, Eva.’

  That mention of my name eradicated any shred of self-control I had left.

  It wasn’t just that I no longer admired her, I realized. It wasn’t that I no longer passively liked her – or even that I passively disliked her. I actively hated her. She suddenly appeared to me not as someone to look up to or be friends with, but an ugly hard obstacle – a thing that was having a corrupting effect on my life. I wanted to hurt her: obliterate her. I jammed all my things into my bag and swung it over my shoulder.

  Then I gave her a hard, vicious shove that knocked her sideways in her chair, and walked quickly out of the lecture theatre.

  ***

  For a while, when I thought back on that memory of pushing Marina it seemed to me quite funny. The sight of her heaving sideways, her long blonde hair swinging upwards and down, her body swaying out of control – it was comical. I liked thinking about the way I’d wiped that smirk off her face, just for a moment. I liked remembering how I had stood up for myself.

  Now the thought of it appals me. Writing it down makes my joints ache and my fingers tense over the keys. I just wish that I had handled t
he situation better. I wish I had said something to make her act differently, to make her reveal what was really going on in her head.

  I have always had a superstition about language, about the alchemic forces of conversation, and although I know, rationally, that it is not really true, I sort of believe that given the right tone and the right placement of words that it is possible to draw out the secrets of the universe. Words, more than anything, can influence the forces at work in the world. If you can manipulate a conversation, you can manipulate anything.

  Since I heard about what happened to Marina, I find myself constantly returning to that conversation. I think about all the other things I could have said to make her talk to me; all the ways I could have trapped her in a web of words. Instead I put myself first. I was clumsy and selfish and melodramatic.

  iii.

  From that moment until the Christmas holidays, I didn’t try to speak to her at all. I spent time instead with the people on my floor in my accommodation block. I cast aside my original judgements about them and made an effort to seem pleasant and kind. In return they let me into their circle. There was blonde Cathy who wore a variety of cardigans; curly haired Andy who liked to play chess; and, of course, self-appointed ‘crazy’ Irish Bob, who behaved rather tamely, but always embellished stories about himself. They were, I supposed, less stereotypically glamorous than the group that I had been hanging out with until that point in term. But the difference was that they appreciated me. They listened to things I had to say, and I didn’t feel as though I had to monitor what I wore, did or thought in their presence. I felt, in that week at least, valued for who I was.

  On the 17th of December, the Christmas holidays came around, and in accordance with the rules of my accommodation block I had to move home for a few weeks. My mother came to help me pack up my room. It took about an hour to fold everything into boxes. Seeing it bare, I felt an unexpected desire to talk to Marina. I wondered what she was doing. I wondered where she was going for Christmas. I knew that her father had a house in England but usually lived in the US. Would she be going there?