The Girl Before You

by Nicola Rayner

  ‘That depends on the drink,’ says Dave. ‘A Bloody Mary would be completely acceptable.’

  ‘Or champagne?’ says Kat.

  ‘Steady on,’ Ruth smiles. ‘Kat’s modelling herself on Dorothy Parker,’ she tells Richard.

  ‘Very sensible,’ says Richard, glancing pointedly at George, who has started talking loudly about oral sex. ‘She had some insightful things to say about money.’

  ‘And homosexuality,’ says Dave laconically.

  ‘And love,’ adds Kat.

  She can feel Richard’s proximity in her arms, a sort of fizzing. She puts her hand on the table near his. Her fingernails are red and chipped. She’s encouraged by the fact he doesn’t move his hand away.

  Ruth stands up suddenly. She looks wired. Maybe it’s too much caffeine.

  ‘She died alone, Dorothy Parker,’ she says. ‘No one even came to claim her ashes. So, you know, all of her cleverness didn’t save her in the end.’

  The way Richard is looking at Ruth, Kat can’t bear it. Her laugh comes out like a bark. ‘No one says it saves you, darling.’

  ‘Stay for a drink,’ Richard says.

  Ruth shakes her head. ‘Next time.’

  She is quick to leave, grabbing her coat, making for the door. She looks as if she’s about to weep. No one does a dramatic exit like Ruth.

  When Kat gets to Ruth’s room, Ruth takes her time answering the door. It’s a haze of smoke with the music, Nina Simone, on far too loud.

  ‘What’s up?’ Kat says, sinking into a beanbag without taking her coat off.

  Ruth sits down primly at her desk, though Kat can tell from the way the books are neatly closed and piled up she hasn’t been studying.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why are you being weird?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You are,’ laughs Kat.

  Ruth gets to her feet and switches off the music.

  ‘I’m not,’ she says again, looking out of the window.

  ‘You definitely are,’ says Kat.

  ‘There’s a gardener weeding the quad,’ says Ruth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You hardly ever see that, do you? Anyone doing the weeding, but it explains why the lawn looks so perfect the whole time. It’s like a painting.’

  ‘What?’ says Kat again.

  ‘He’s so still, he’s barely moving at all. Like a picture.’

  Kat twitches. She’s reminded of the way her mother tells a story. There must be a point in there somewhere.

  ‘A painting before it comes crashing off the wall,’ says Ruth. ‘Before the movement starts.’

  There’s a fine line, Kat thinks, between brilliance and craziness. She thinks of the way Ruth dances: that’s definitely somewhere in between.

  ‘Viene la tormenta,’ says Ruth.

  Kat, who had thought for a moment she might leave, sits very still. As if it would make a difference either way.

  ‘It means …’ says Ruth.

  ‘I know what it means,’ says Kat quietly. ‘The storm is coming.’

  ‘The thing is …’ Ruth says, as if making a formal announcement, and Kat realises that she doesn’t want Ruth to go on, that she knows what the thing is, or at least what sort of thing it is, and that nothing she does or says will be able to stop the thing developing. ‘The thing is,’ Ruth starts again, ‘I gave Richard a blow job.’

  ‘What?’ says Kat, though, to be fair, Ruth’s statement is not a nuanced one.

  ‘I can’t explain it,’ Ruth says. ‘I was really angry.’

  ‘You were angry?’ says Kat.

  ‘I just felt like it. In the moment.’

  Kat lights a cigarette, puffing out the smoke in angry little blasts. ‘In the moment?’ she says, wishing she could stop echoing Ruth. She tries not to think about Ruth kneeling in front of Richard, of his hands in her hair.

  ‘You can’t just go round doing what you want to do in the moment.’

  ‘You do,’ Ruth counters. ‘You always do.’

  Kat opens her mouth to argue the point but finds she is laughing instead.

  ‘And what is there but to do what you want in the moment?’ continues Ruth crossly.

  ‘Fuck, I do, don’t I?’ agrees Kat. ‘What a fucking hypocrite.’ She gets up to hug Ruth. The embrace is fierce and brief. She breaks away and looks at her friend. ‘I’m just jealous.’ She’s in show mode, her Dorothy Parker side taking over. ‘Did he have a nice cock?’

  ‘Kat!’ Ruth blushes. ‘You’re awful.’

  ‘Oh, don’t go all prudish on me.’ Kat sinks back on the beanbag. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘It was the night I cut up George’s clothes.’ Ruth starts to move as she talks – finding an ashtray, lighting a cigarette. ‘I bumped into Richard at the party and he told me that that girl George was with wasn’t his sister and I lost it. I went to George’s room … Richard came with me. He just sort of followed me there. And well, you know the rest.’

  ‘Richard was with you?’ Kat thinks for a moment the catch in her voice has betrayed her. ‘You did it together?’

  ‘No.’ Ruth shakes her head vehemently. ‘No, he wanted to stop me.’

  ‘He didn’t do a very good job of that,’ Kat says more sharply than she means.

  ‘No, he couldn’t stop me and then afterwards we hid in his room, which is on the same staircase as George’s, just beneath it. And the adrenaline, I think …’

  And Kat can tell she has returned to that night, to the way perhaps they leaned together against the door, the feel of Richard’s heart hammering against her ribcage, the smell of each other and how the moment changed, as moments do, from one thing to another.

  ‘You like him, don’t you?’ Kat says.

  Her face aches from the tension of pretending this is OK. She remembers running up the stairs to George’s room to warn Ruth, how she couldn’t find her anywhere. And all that time they had been just a floor below, doing that. She thinks she might be sick.

  Ruth comes to sit next to Kat. ‘I know you do, I know you like him.’

  Kat wants to keep pretending, to keep putting on a show, but she finds she can’t in this moment. She rests her head on her friend’s shoulder. There is an inevitability to how it will all play out, as if the three of them are hurtling downhill towards something.

  ‘I won’t do anything if you don’t want me to,’ says Ruth.

  ‘Don’t say that, Ruthie.’ Kat shakes her head. ‘Please don’t say that.’

  Naomi

  You can’t help who you fall in love with. I think of that after my conversation with Richard. That’s what Ruth used to say. I didn’t believe it until it happened to me. Years later I would watch Natalie Portman in Closer telling Jude Law that there was always a moment where you chose to give in to something, or to resist it. But when it happened to me I was young, and not as wise as Natalie Portman’s character, and I fell in love with someone just by looking at their back, if that’s possible.

  I had been in Roberto’s, a family-run café in the town where I went to school. I was waiting for my friend Jess, who was always late.

  Roberto’s was run by an Italian family who had moved to Wales in the Fifties. It was a small place but popular, with brown paper tablecloths and old wine bottles with waxy candles pushed into them. Roberto’s grandson, Andrea, whom Jess fancied like mad, began to light the candles. It was late April and the day’s light was softening. The shadows on the walls lengthened and the atmosphere inside the café-bar shifted to the intimacy of evening. Families with small children packed up for home; a couple of single drinkers gathered at the small bar by the door, where there were a few stools, Italian-style, for those who wanted to eat or drink there rather than at a table on their own.

  Jess and I would always bag a table in the furthest corner of the room, where we people-watched together. And while I had been reading and waiting – we were studying Wuthering Heights at the time – the owner of this peculiarly lovely back had come
in and perched on a stool at the bar, reading as well – I couldn’t see what, or I would have undoubtedly noted it down – and smoking. Wearing a deep red jumper, with a scarf knotted at the neck, he had a shock of dark hair. His neck was lovely. Tanned. Hairless. The line of it was elegant and clean. I remember wishing I had a pencil with me, a sketchbook, so I could capture it on paper.

  At the time, Ruth had just got together with Richard. I hadn’t met him myself yet, but something in Ruth’s tone had changed. When we spoke on the phone, she would sound distracted, starting halfway through stories that I hadn’t heard before, as if forgetting who I was, that she wasn’t telling the story to him. She didn’t talk about Richard in that searching way girls often do, trying to decipher him. A part of her had withdrawn from me – simply wasn’t mine any more.

  The Back looked like it was waiting for someone too, focusing on the door whenever it swung open. The bar began to fill up. I sipped my wine. I didn’t drink much back then: I had spent too much time behind the bar at the hotel, listening to the circuitous conversations of the very drunk, watching them stumble and trip over their words.

  ‘You don’t like losing control, do you?’ Jess had once said to me at a sixth-form disco. She had been dancing wildly, her hair a mess and her cheeks pink. I hadn’t known what to say: it wasn’t that I didn’t like losing control, more that I didn’t know how. Losing control was what Ruth did. She threw things and stamped her feet, flung her arms around the ponies and dogs, declared she loved or hated people. ‘They’re just emotions,’ I said to her once as we walked along the beach. ‘They pass.’ ‘Sure,’ she said, looking at the frothy white horses charge into the bay; she threw a stick into them, which got sucked in, disappeared. But I could tell she didn’t believe me. Not for a moment. To Ruth, emotions were everything.

  Andrea brought a couple of diners over to a table near where I was sitting. Once he had seated them and given them their menus, I asked him the time. Beaming at me, he looked at his watch with a flourish. He was nice, Andrea, though he was too old for Jess. Greying slightly at the temples and a little bit where his stubble started to come through, he was tall with messy hair and had a way of looking at your face too long. Jess used to blush like crazy around him.

  He nodded at the empty seat where Jess usually sat. ‘Where is your friend?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I straightened my fork. ‘She’s late.’

  ‘It’s ten past eight.’

  ‘She’s very late.’ I frowned. ‘Has she called?’

  Those were the days before we all had mobiles.

  ‘I don’t think so. I can check at the bar for you.’

  ‘No, it’s fine – I’ll ask. I’m a bit worried about her.’

  I picked up my handbag and coat. I decided, if there were no message at the bar from Jess, I would leave. I didn’t want just to sit around worrying.

  There was a gap at the bar right next to the owner of the back. I slid into it, my face burning. Suddenly, now I could actually look at the face, I found I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I didn’t want to ruin it. Before, however many qualities I had liked in a boy, there had always been something missing: eyes too far apart, or the wrong-shaped nose, or too much body hair. I could feel his gaze on my profile. I turned at last and looked at the face. And I thought: there it is. As if I had been waiting for this face all my life. But it was the face of a woman.

  It felt like opening a door to a room I didn’t know, wasn’t expecting. ‘I’m sorry,’ I almost said. ‘I’ve made a mistake.’ The woman was looking at me, but she didn’t seem flustered. She said, ‘Hello.’ Her voice was low. It had a twang, an accent. I could tell she was a Spanish speaker. I was aware of the fact I was sweating.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. But the word was over quickly – it sounded shorter, more abrupt than I’d meant it to.

  Roberto came over to serve me and was looking at me expectantly. I couldn’t remember why I was there for a moment.

  ‘I’m waiting for a friend who hasn’t turned up. Has anyone left a message for me?’

  Roberto shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. I’ll check.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ The woman put a hand on my arm.

  I tightened at the contact.

  ‘Sorry.’ The woman smiled. ‘I didn’t mean to make you jump.’

  I knew I was coming across as a lunatic. I felt so exposed, as if the woman could read my mind.

  She asked: ‘I was wondering. I mean – if you’re waiting for someone, you’re not Olivia, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ That much I knew.

  The woman explained: ‘I’m waiting for someone I don’t know. So I thought I’d check.’ She paused for a moment, said quietly, conspiratorially: ‘A blind date.’

  Words rushed into my head, but I managed to keep my mouth closed, so they didn’t spill out onto the bar, ruining this moment where I had been mistaken for someone quite different, for an adult. I’m seventeen. I’m a schoolgirl. A blind date between women? Are you mad? But in the end I just said, ‘No, that’s not me.’

  ‘Well,’ the woman smiled. ‘Can I buy you a drink anyway? While we’re waiting. I’m sure Olivia wouldn’t mind. If she ever shows up …’ Her smile transformed her lovely face into something remarkable. She had her hand on my bare arm again and I looked down at it – her long fingers, her olive skin. She knew what she was doing. She was in complete control.

  I thought at the time that everyone could see, everyone could tell what had passed between us. I paused before replying, heard the words in my head first. I would say: ‘That would be nice.’ And I would drink a glass of wine with this stranger, because there was no harm in two women having a drink together, was there? It was what I had planned to do with Jess, after all …

  But the words never made it out because, without warning, there was the sound of the door and there was Jess, red-faced and weighed down by shopping bags. There was a story about a sale at Miss Selfridge, a delayed train and a lost wallet that turned up eventually, but I couldn’t really hear any of it – couldn’t focus on the meaning of the words – until Jess asked: ‘The usual table, then?’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ I couldn’t look back at the woman or Roberto, no doubt smiling a welcome at Jess. I focused on the door, on escape. ‘Somewhere else,’ I repeated insistently. I took Jess’s elbow and marched her out of the restaurant.

  Alice

  Pregnancy has made Alice, who has never found sleep easy, especially on a Sunday night, even more wakeful. And now she can’t take her sleeping tablets, can’t drink, can’t do anything. She has started to wake at the coldest moments of the night, when the heating has clicked off and the pipes and radiators gurgle and groan. George, who is used to his parents’ big, cold house in Oxfordshire, which rattles and creaks through the night, can sleep through anything.

  They had stayed in a haunted hotel in St Anthony’s once as a dare. Alice had woken at four o’clock in the morning freezing and with the sense that someone was standing right outside their bedroom door. When she woke him, George had just laughed and said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling.’ That was back when dead people seemed like a distant, faraway thing. Not something that could actually happen to anyone you knew.

  Something she’d read in Richard’s book had made her start thinking of Dan – a fact about him that she’d forgotten: he had been the last to see Ruth alive. She had wandered into George’s study earlier that evening for a read while he was out watching the rugby. Richard had quoted a report: ‘Missing St Anthony’s student Ruth Walker was last seen swimming after the memorial ball by fellow student Dan Vaughan. “I can’t be sure,” he said. “But the girl swimming looked like Ruth because of her red hair. I know she loved to swim. It must have been around five in the morning, before the rain began.”’

  Alice had never felt comfortable around Dan. She remembers a night out in St Anthony’s with him when George had been at a student union meeting. Dan had been hammer
ed that evening, but Alice had still been new enough to her role as George’s girlfriend to make an effort with his friends, even the ones she didn’t much like. Dan had drunk so much that he’d needed a lie-down on a sofa. He’d rested his head on Alice’s knee as she stroked his sweaty forehead.

  ‘We need to find you a nice girlfriend,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t need to find me a nice one,’ he laughed. ‘A nasty one would do just fine.’ And he resettled himself with his hands under his head, his knuckles digging into Alice’s crotch. Not an accident, she thought then, and thinks again now.

  She hadn’t heard George come in from the pub, but he’d sauntered into his study to find Alice still sitting at his desk. Caught off-guard, she went on the attack.

  ‘Did Dan ever talk to you about seeing Ruth Walker swimming?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ George never liked talking about Dan.

  ‘Isn’t it strange?’ Alice said, closing the book and putting it face down on the desk. ‘That he was the last one to see Ruth.’

  A vague memory came back to her – which she can’t place – of Dan knocking on George’s door early one morning, of urgent whispers out in the corridor. When would that have been? She picked up the photo frame to give it a wipe.

  ‘Not really, darling.’ George took the frame from her, without looking at it, and put it back on the desk. He curled an arm around her waist. ‘Someone had to be the last to see her.’ He rubbed her bottom through her dress. ‘Are you wearing knickers, Mrs Bell?’

  Alice smelled the pub on him – beer and firewood. George loved having sex in unusual places. Once, at university, he’d fucked her on his balcony overlooking the quad in the dead of night. Alice had enjoyed that: she had never felt more alive. And it was more romantic than some of his assignations – balconies were one thing, but she was not going to do it in the toilet with him, another of his favourites. And not one with which he was unfamiliar, she suspected, though she tried not to think about that. He lifted up her dress and pulled down her pants.

  ‘What about the baby?’ she whispered.

  ‘I’ll be gentle,’ he said. ‘I won’t even tickle its head.’