Freshers

by Tom Ellen

  ‘Some of you are drinking slower than others,’ Dempers bellowed. ‘We need extra nominations.’

  I felt a hand clap me on the shoulder and looked round to see Will standing over me, smirking.

  ‘I think Taylor could do with a more experimental drink order.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I slurred. ‘If you like.’

  Will reeled ingredients off the top of his head: ‘Whisky, Pot Noodle, mayonnaise, absinthe, mustard, Guinness.’

  Trev winced next to me. ‘Fuck’s sake, man.’ Will grabbed a glass to prepare this lethal cocktail, but Dempers stopped him.

  ‘No. He has to drink it . . . out of his shoe.’

  The second and third years all cracked up laughing. I looked at Dempers to see if he was serious, and his pinched, unsmiling face told me he was. The mood seemed darker suddenly, more violent. But being massively off my face, I couldn’t tell for sure.

  ‘Get your shoe off, Fresher,’ Dempers snapped.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ I said.

  He leant down so his face was almost touching mine. He was so close I could smell his tangy, chicken-korma breath. ‘Did you not hear me, Fresher?’ he spat. ‘I said . . . Get. Your. Fucking. Shoe. Off. Now.’

  A flash of anger momentarily sobered me up, and I felt like shoving his face away. The second and third years started chanting ‘Shoe off, shoe off,’ and the other freshers were just laughing nervously. I looked at Will, vaguely hoping he might step in and veto the whole thing, but he was chanting along with everyone else.

  I took my shoe off slowly to a massive cheer, and watched as Dempers proceeded to fill it with the lumpy, greenish-black cocktail. He handed it back to me and I thought about the Game of Thrones bloke. How could he be that confident to just walk out? How he could be so sure he’d find other mates?

  ‘Do it,’ Dempers barked. I could see blobs of mustard bobbing up ominously near the laces. I put it to my lips, feeling the noise in the room rise and rise around me, and hoped the drink would just knock me flat out, and put an end to the whole evening.

  But it didn’t.

  It just made me throw up, quite violently, on my other shoe.

  The rest of the night happened in stop motion. One minute we were in a taxi into town, streetlights fizzing by in a blur, fresh air billowing through the window. The next, Toby was gabbling apologies and the taxi driver was shouting: ‘Fucking students! Who the hell’s going to clean up this sick?’

  Then we were in some club somewhere, and I was trying to stay upright, as Will yelled in my ear over the music.

  ‘Don’t mind Dempers earlier,’ he was saying. ‘He gets a bit carried away.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Sure you’ve seen it all before, anyway.’

  I nodded, but the truth was, football drinking at school had always been much tamer than this. More of a laugh. Probably because me and Reece were in charge, and we weren’t exactly going to force anyone to drink out of their own footwear.

  Will got his phone out. ‘I’ll add you to the group chat so you’ll know about training times and that. Plus, y’know . . . some extra stuff.’ He handed me another Jägerbomb. ‘Some bonus material.’

  I’ve no clue how I got back to the corridor. I staggered into my room, opened the sink cupboard, and tried to focus on my face in the mirror. But it kept dividing at the nose and swimming into two separate faces staring back at me.

  I lay down on the bed and looked at my phone. The football group was already buzzing with pictures of me and Trev and Toby and everyone else throwing up. Most of them involved me and the shoe.

  I scrolled up a bit and suddenly had to squint harder at the screen to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.

  In among all the puking photos there were three pictures, one after the other, of three different girls. Each was asleep in bed, their eyes closed, their hair messy on the pillow. Underneath the last one, Dempers had written: ‘Wall of Shame Top 3 from last year. Gauntlet laid, freshers . . .’

  I felt my skin prickle. It was like pressing your eye to a peephole; seeing something totally private that you knew you shouldn’t have access to. I don’t know why, but at that moment, for the first time since I’d got here, I really, really wanted to go home.

  I closed my eyes to try and sleep, but the next thing I knew I was hearing voices.

  ‘Hello?’ someone was whispering. ‘Luke?’ I looked down at my phone.

  ‘Abbey?’ I slurred.

  ‘Luke . . .’ she mumbled. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘No . . . What’s going on? Are you OK?’

  ‘You called me.’

  ‘Did I?’

  She sighed. ‘You sound pissed.’ She sounded tired. She sounded like home.

  ‘I’m not that pissed. How are you? I’ve been wanting to call you. All week.’ I watched the ceiling spin faster and faster above me.

  ‘Why?’ she whispered. It felt so good to hear her voice.

  ‘Because . . . I don’t know. Because I miss you, I guess. I was . . . Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I said on the first night. I wasn’t really thinking.’

  ‘You’re not thinking now.’

  ‘No, I am . . . I just . . . Uni’s not how I thought it would be. I don’t know if I’m fitting in here. I don’t know if it’s working out.’

  ‘So you thought you’d just call me and we’d get back together and everything would suddenly go back to how it was.’ She sounded tearful. ‘It’s not that easy, Luke.’

  ‘No, I know. It’s just . . . Maybe I’m not over you.’ The words seeped out of me before I could think about whether I really meant them.

  ‘I’m not over you, either,’ I heard her say.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘OK, then.’

  And then the ceiling stopped spinning, and I fell asleep.

  PHOEBE

  I was irrationally nervous.

  In the worst case scenario I wouldn’t get a job at a cafe. It wasn’t A Levels, losing your virginity or skydiving; just another situation I had to walk into, not knowing what the hell I was doing, and hope for the best. I had tied my hair back into a tight ballet-dancer bun and it was making my ears ache so I kept trying to wiggle them free.

  I gently pushed at the door but it was locked. Josh was behind the counter neatly laying out a row of giant scones. It was weird seeing him doing something so precise and un-blokish. The last time I had seen him he had been right in the middle of the dance floor of a club, really going for it. He was wearing a white shirt and it made him look younger than he normally did, like he was in school uniform. I knocked gently and he looked up, beamed and came over to let me in. Josh hugs you properly. Not a formality hug, but one like he has been waiting for you at the airport for hours. You don’t really get those kind of hugs at uni; huge, tight confidence-giving squeezes.

  ‘Nice Bettys bun, Bennet. You OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine, apart from the fact I’m knackered cos Frankie has shared a bed with me for three nights and she’s a massive wriggler.’

  ‘That girl is an absolute nutter. Last night she got behind the counter at the kebab shop and begged the bloke to let her serve the chips.’ He shook his head. ‘Negin had to trick her to leave by saying there was a tall man giving out pâté in the street.’

  ‘I went home at midnight because I’m taking this trial shift seriously.’ I was, I needed the money, and working at Bettys tea rooms seemed slightly more romantic than Pizza Hut.

  ‘Bettys are serious about people taking it seriously.’ He walked back over to the counter and handed me a box of scones and some gloves. I started to lay them out in a row next to his.

  I wanted to say something about Will. I didn’t want him to be this awkward thing in me and Josh’s friendship. I had enough awkward things with people at York Met to last me the next three years, and it’d only been three weeks.

  Even though I had now taken a solemn vow of chastity, including text message chastity, in front of Frankie, Becky and Negin, I was
already notorious in the D Block love-life stakes. I’d seen Will out a few times since Freshers’, and he’d just acted like he didn’t know me. I’d seen him get with people in clubs, and I didn’t really care. Well, I did care. I mean, I cared that I’d had this weird thing with him that included that first week of Freshers’ and the weird night at his and the guinea pig. But apart from that I just wanted to be able to go out and not have to worry about seeing him. Especially when I was already on high alert for Luke Taylor sightings. I’d had to hide twice in toilets this week, waiting for the all clear, and I was planning to just completely avoid eye contact with him in all future seminars.

  ‘Are you wiggling your ears, Bennet?’ Josh laid out his last scone.

  ‘Yeah, I went a bit militant with the bun. It’s giving me a headache.’

  ‘You look different with a bun. I can’t believe all that hair can go so small.’ He leant towards me. ‘Right, so Sandra will come up in a minute. When she does, just be super smiley. Like you’re in a cult. Round here it’s like, you’ve got to smile all the time. That’s the main thing. You can be a murderer as long as you are smiling hard.’ He looked down. ‘Excellent Battenberg arranging.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ A stern-looking woman, actually wearing what looked like a Downton servant’s uniform, came round the corner.

  Sandra took me downstairs to the staff room and handed me a neat pile of clothes in a clear plastic bag. I went into the staff toilet and pulled the shirt over my head and fixed the little brooch that came with it in the middle, where a bow tie would go.

  ‘You OK?’ Josh shouted from outside.

  I opened the door.

  ‘Yeah, I look ridiculous. And I don’t know what this is.’ I held it to my waist. ‘Do you have to be really skinny to work here?’

  ‘It’s the hat thing,’ Josh said.

  I looked in the mirror and put it on my forehead. ‘I don’t get it. How does it go on?’

  ‘I don’t know. Blokes don’t have to wear them.’

  ‘That’s the patriarchy for you.’

  ‘Hold on, turn around.’ He gently took a couple of pins out of my bun and my hair fell down. Then he gathered it into a ponytail and rewound the bun slowly, pinning it again, but more loosely. He held up each end of ribbon below the bun and tied them together with the hat thing on my head.

  ‘I feel like you’re getting me ready for school,’ I said.

  ‘Four sisters. I can do fishtail plaits, Dutch plaits, French plaits, those weird bun things on the side of your head, glitter partings.’ He patted my bun and we went back upstairs. There were lots more people there and we had a team meeting where Sandra spoke a lot about specials and clearing tables and keeping the queue happy. I was still a bit nervous. She kept saying words I had never heard before and everyone was nodding knowingly.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Josh whispered.

  I was on the counter for the morning and it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t have to work the till, just get the scones and cakes and biscuits and put them in boxes and hand them to a lady called Julie who seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every single thing Bettys had ever sold: ‘Do you have the Lady Betty Peppermint Creams?’ ‘Only at Christmas, my love. Give it a few weeks.’

  Just when I felt like it was all going well, Sandra appeared behind the counter.

  ‘That Laurel is ill again so I’m afraid I’m going to have to put you on the floor, Phoebe.’

  My stomach churned. I had never waitressed before and waitressing at Bettys seemed to be the Olympics of waitressing. Silver cake forks and tea strainers and lots of very white tablecloths. I thought about the words ‘silver service waitressing’ on my CV, which referred to pouring champagne at my gran’s seventieth.

  I just kept getting hotter. People kept asking me questions I didn’t know the answer to and everyone looked too busy to help. The quicker I took people’s orders the quicker more people seemed to sit down. I couldn’t remember the table numbers and I couldn’t remember all the teas and I couldn’t seem to input the orders without taking so long that people started trying to wave at me to come over and see them.

  I knocked over a tiny vase on one of the tables with a red tulip in and Sylvia Plath popped into my head. And that made Luke pop into my head, and I got a horror wave that I was getting my accidental text rash back, and then I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be doing. I had needed the toilet for so long that the pain just began to feel normal. How can people get paid so little to do something so complicated? The panic was making my mind go completely blank. I couldn’t remember what had happened three seconds ago.

  Four women at one of my tables kept looking at me. I took a tray of sandwiches over to a group of Americans and they shook their heads like I had done something wrong. I could feel sweat dripping down my back. I looked through the millions of little pieces of paper I had stuffed into my apron pocket. I found their one. I had definitely taken their order.

  ‘Sorry honey,’ one of them said. ‘We’ve been here for a half hour and we haven’t even been given our tea.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Let me just go to the kitchen and check on your order.’

  ‘Just the pot of tea would be good,’ another said, and gave her friend a look as if to say I was a complete idiot.

  Panic was rising inside me. I went downstairs and into the staff toilet and looked over the slips again. I hadn’t put their order through. And if I did it now it would go to the end of the orders and it would be another half an hour until they got anything.

  I couldn’t think properly. I needed to just own up to it, find Sandra and tell her what had happened. I took a deep breath and walked out. Josh winked at me from across the room. I shook my head trying to indicate what had happened.

  He smiled and said something that made the whole table laugh and then walked over to me.

  ‘I think I’ve totally fucked it up,’ I whispered. ‘I forgot to put an order in.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I can sort it.’

  But then Sandra appeared. ‘Are you all right love?’ she asked. ‘You’re supposed to be upstairs.’ Her voice had an edge to it.

  ‘Sandra.’ Josh wrinkled his nose. ‘I said to Phoebe I would put an order through for her, but I totally forgot. Don’t blame her. I said I would do it, cos she had that many tables and we were quieter down here.’

  She shook her head. ‘Right, go and sort it.’ And then she walked away. I wanted to throw my arms around him, I was so relieved.

  ‘Your hat’s coming off.’ He grinned.

  ‘Thank you so much.’ I was acting like he had pulled me out of the water after Titanic. I needed to get some perspective on this trial waitressing shift.

  ‘Well, I want you to get the job.’ He smiled. ‘So I have a mate here. I mean, I do like having twenty-odd mothers about but, you know . . . It would be a right laugh with you.’

  We got the tea and cakes for the table and served them together. Josh definitely had a way of talking to people that made them just like him, even before he had really said anything.

  Once the lunch rush passed, things got quieter. Josh and me re-laid all the tables and played Shoot/Snog/Marry in whispers between serving customers.

  Four o’ clock came around really quickly and I got changed and tried to fold up the uniform into the same neat pile it had been handed to me in.

  ‘You keep it.’ Sandra smiled. ‘Welcome to Bettys.’

  Me and Josh walked out together, and when we got to the corner he gave me another one of his massive hugs. He hugged me so tight he lifted me up without even realizing.

  ‘Thanks for getting it for me.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘You got it for yourself.’

  It was getting dark. People were finishing their shopping and going back to their cars. We wandered along the cobbled street towards uni.

  ‘Do you want to come to mine for a cuppa? It’s on the way back.’

  I pulled a face. ‘Um
. . . Dunno.’

  ‘You mean cos of Will?’ He sounded almost concerned. ‘Are you OK? About all that?’

  I nodded. I didn’t really know what to say. I wondered what he knew about that night. What exactly Will had said about it, and what Josh thought.

  We both looked in a toy shop window. ‘What would you go for?’ Josh pointed. ‘I reckon you would go for the squirrel Sylvanian Family.’

  ‘I already have that family, obviously. It’s the classic family. I would go for the light-up hula hoop. I mean, when did they invent those?’ I peered through the window. ‘I reckon you are a Nerf Gun kind of boy.’

  He crinkled his nose. ‘What? That’s a massive insult. I would go for the teddy bear. I love a good teddy bear.’

  We kept walking in silence. ‘I am OK about it,’ I said. ‘The Will stuff, I mean. I just feel like . . . I just don’t want it to be weird.’

  Josh nodded. ‘Yeah. Well, Will’s . . . He’s a bit . . .’ He trailed off. ‘He’s great in loads of ways, but . . . I dunno.’

  ‘I thought you two were really good mates?’ I said.

  He dug his hands into his jacket pockets. ‘I mean, yeah. We were on the same corridor last year and we both played football and it seemed really obvious from the start that we were gonna live together. And then his dad literally bought a house in York, so . . .’

  We stopped outside a kitchenware shop. ‘The living thing freaks me out a bit,’ I said. ‘People are talking about it already. Like, getting houses together.’

  ‘Honestly, Bennet, do not give in to the pressure. You don’t have to decide straight away. I kind of . . . wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘Do you still play football?’ I wondered if he’d met Luke.

  ‘No, I stopped at the end of second term. I played at school and everything, but up here, those lads are all quite . . . dunno. Can’t describe it really.’ He shook his head. ‘Like I said, I’ve got four sisters, so I guess I’m a bit more sensitive to all that sort of banter.’