by Fiona Harper
‘How’s the dress?’ Becca yells from the cubicle next door.
I pull the curtain back dramatically and step outside. ‘See for yourself.’
She pokes her head out. ‘Wow! Dan is going to have a heart attack when he sees you in that!’
It occurs to me as I admire my reflection in the full-length mirror that I hadn’t even thought about how Dan might react. The dress is black, Lycra, and it hugs my bottom in an almost-indecent fashion. I would never have had the guts to wear this when I was twenty-one, believing myself fat and lumpy. Not the sort of girl who could get away with it. But compared to my forty-something self, this Maggie is svelte. Not perfect – there’s a slight curve to my belly and the top of my hips look a little boxy – but good enough. I can’t believe how great it looks on me.
‘I’m getting it,’ I tell Becca.
She makes me turn around and checks the price tag hanging down my back. ‘It’s over forty quid!’
I shrug. ‘You’re only young once, right?’
OK, maybe, in my case, twice, but I have the feeling I didn’t do it right the first go around. While this strange hallucination lasts, I’m going to make up for lost time.
I buy the dress then change into it in the toilets of a pub down Argyll Street, even though it’s more evening than daywear. When I walk out across the bar to where Becca is waiting for me, heads turn. The knowledge gives my walk a little extra swing.
We buy a cheap bottle of wine and head for St James’s Park, where we sit in deckchairs we don’t pay for. After two hours we’re very giggly, slightly sunburned and more than a little squiffy. We decide to paddle in the lake to help us cool off, taking it in turns to sip the last of the wine from the neck of the bottle as we stand there, but then a portly park warden comes along and starts shouting at us and we end up grabbing our bags and running away down the path in our bare feet, shoes hooked from our fingers, until we’ve finally outrun him, and then we collapse under a tree and laugh until we cry.
‘What next?’ I ask Becca. We’ve been taking it turns to come up with ideas and the paddling was mine.
‘I’m hungry,’ Becca moans, so after we’ve shoved our shoes back on our slightly damp feet we head in the direction of China Town. My purse is feeling considerably lighter than it was when I left Oaklands this morning and it’s the best place we can think of to stuff our faces on a budget.
We trail through Piccadilly and end up at Wong Kei’s, a student favourite because of its mountainous plates of food for low prices. We have to share a table with some American tourists who obviously have stumbled in here without knowing its reputation. Instead of understanding that the rude service is what brings people to this cult tourist attraction, they’re outraged. They don’t understand when the waiter barks instructions at them or brings them dishes he’s decided they should have instead of what they actually ordered. Becca and I just sit back, eat our chow mein full of unidentified seafood and enjoy the show.
After that we wander through Leicester Square and Covent Garden arm in arm. The wine is still having a pleasant effect (twenty-one-year-old me is such a lightweight!) and I keep telling Becca how much I love her. She’s been a true partner in crime and hasn’t blinked once at my mad suggestions, even though I know I’m acting totally out of character. Not many women have best friends like this, ones they can trust with their lives. I keep telling her that too, which only makes her tease me harder about my state of inebriation.
After scraping together our last pennies to share a pint of cider in an overpriced pub, we get talking to some guys who buy us more drinks and then we end up getting a cab with them to a club somewhere near Kings Cross that turns out to be an abandoned warehouse with huge rooms sprawling over multiple floors. I never went to anything like this when I was young the first time – the whole rave scene of the early nineties passed me by – and I launch myself onto the dance floor as if I’m planning to make up for that.
There’s one guy who’s been hanging around me ever since we got in the cab and he sidles up to me and tries to grind his hips against mine. I attempt to back away but he just keeps coming at me.
Becca leans in and shouts in my ear. ‘Ladies! Now!’
I nod, totally trusting her to be my wingman … woman … whatever. Creepy Guy tries to follow, but we slip away too fast and instead of heading for the loos, we sprint up a flight of stairs and lose ourselves in yet another room full of heaving, slick bodies. We dance most of the night away and when our feet are burning so hard we can’t stand to groove any longer, we catch a string of night buses that eventually deposit us on Putney High Street and stagger back to our flat, arm in arm and propping each other up, feet bare on the rough concrete paving stones as the sky turns from grey to pale-pink. Becca keeps starting to belt out ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ and I have to keep shushing her, so by the time we reach the front door to the house where our flat is, we’re almost giggling as loud as the singing would have been.
I fall into bed without taking my make-up off and smile at the ceiling as my eyelids drift closed. Now that is the way to do twenty-one!
CHAPTER NINE
I’ve been avoiding Dan as much as possible. Mainly because I just don’t know how to deal with him. However, there’s only so much ‘pretending to be revising’ a girl can do before she can’t put her boyfriend off any longer, and I end up going to a party with him on campus the following weekend.
Derwent Hall is the old-fashioned kind of student accommodation. None of these ‘flats’ with en-suite showers and homey little kitchens you get at universities these days. Instead, it has corridor upon corridor of single bedrooms painted in a colour Becca calls ‘anti-suicide green’, a tiny shared kitchen with only a Baby Belling and a juddering fridge to its name, and a communal bathroom with shower cubicles and sinks, and one bath in its own stall that takes twenty minutes to fill.
However, Derwent’s one advantage over those smart student flats we looked over with Sophie is that it has a common room. Not huge, but large enough to fit forty or so students in if they don’t mind squishing a bit, which they don’t.
The music is already pumping when we get there, the sparse furniture pushed back against the walls or shoved outside on the grass, and people are dancing, cans of warm lager in their hands. I’m tempted to join them but Dan has hold of my hand, and when I lean in to tell him I’m off to strut my stuff, he takes the opportunity to steal a kiss.
I plan to end it quickly, but I get kind of sidetracked. I’d forgotten Dan could kiss like this. His dad is a pastor and is a little old-fashioned about things, so Dan hasn’t had a lot of experience. The upside of that is that what he does do, he does very well. By the time he’s finished with me, I’m thrumming.
Oh, why couldn’t you stay this way? I ask him silently. You’re so sweet and loyal and full of devotion. But then I remember the betrayal that is to come. I can’t let myself feel anything for him. I just can’t.
So I push away from Dan and head for the dance floor, playing memories in my head to stop me going back, pinning him against the wall and continuing that kiss: the guilty look on his face when I go into the study unannounced, the fib he told about meeting Sam Macmillan, the way he’s been lying to me about where he’s going once a fortnight for months and months. I use those mental images to keep me angry, because as long as I’m angry I’m safe.
I channel my anger-fuelled adrenalin spike by dancing to the twelve-inch version of ‘Love Shack’. Paul Ferrini comes over, Derwent’s resident stud, and joins the group of girls I’m dancing with. He offers me his bottle of vodka and I take a sip. We dance together after that. Nothing inappropriate, nothing too flirty, I reason to myself, as I feel Dan’s laser-like glare from the other side of the room, even though there’s a glint in Paul’s eyes that tells me it could be more than innocent fun if I wanted it to be. There’s a part of me that enjoys this tiny moment of payback.
When I’m finally so thirsty I can’t keep dancing any more, I return to my boy
friend. ‘Just having fun,’ I tell him as I slump against the wall and neck the paper cup of flat Lambrusco he hands me.
Dan harrumphs. He’s upset with me. But he’s not going to say anything. He’s not going to do anything about it. How very Dan of him. ‘Got a problem with that?’ I ask, unable to stand his passive-aggressive grunts a moment longer.
He fixes his stare on Paul, who is now half draped over Mandy Gomez. ‘You didn’t have to have quite so much fun!’
I’ve had enough of his hypocrisy, maybe not in this life but definitely in the other one, and the mixture of wine and spirits is spurring me on. I push myself off the wall. ‘Fine!’ I shout back at him over the music. ‘If I’m not supposed to be having any fun, then maybe I’ll leave. You’ll be happy then, because I won’t be having any fun at all!’ And then I stare straight ahead and start walking down the corridor to the exit.
‘Maggie? Mags!’ I hear him start to run after me but then the footsteps stop and he shouts something I don’t catch. The cool night air hits me as I open the door and march across the courtyard in the direction of the main gate. There’s no sound behind me but the dying breath of today’s summer breeze in the trees. I exhale with them, loud and long. I can no longer hear him loping along behind me.
Finally.
I don’t want him to follow me. I don’t want to have to deal with my real-life problems, most of which centre around him, while I’m having this weird trance or dream or whatever it is. All I want to be able to do is enjoy it while it lasts.
Oaklands College, a satellite of a larger university, has a beautiful campus. I don’t think I really appreciated it when I went there. Oaklands House, where the administration offices are, is a lovely, white Georgian mansion, surrounded by statues and tended gardens, complete with fountain. Beyond that is a large lawn, always covered in toxic-green goose poop, that leads down to a small man-made lake.
Rather than heading straight back to the flat I share with Becca, I decide to take a walk. I head down towards the black water, trying not to think about what might be sticking to the underneath of my DMs. I stand by the reeds and watch the moon, reflecting on the water, breaking apart and rejoining itself, only to be disassembled again by the ripples of the next goose that swims by on the other side of the pond.
The moment of stillness after my week of frenetic activity allows thoughts and feelings I’ve been keeping firmly at bay to come flooding back in.
I miss Sophie.
I wonder if she’s missing me, if she even knows I’m gone? Until I work out what strange trick my brain is playing on me, I don’t know if she’s quietly grieving, Dan’s solid arm around her shoulder, or whether she’s living it up in Oban or Ullapool while I sleep soundly in my bed. I know she doesn’t need me as much as she once did, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t need me at all. I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want her to have to go through that.
I close my eyes.
No.
I can’t think like that.
My stay here is just temporary. It has to be.
When I open my eyes again I’m aware of another presence on the lawn. I can hear squelching footsteps behind me, someone tracking their way from the ugly student union building towards the rose garden.
I feel very safe here, maybe because it still doesn’t feel real to me, but I suddenly remember that one year a girl was assaulted on campus when she walking between the spread-out halls of residence, and I turn.
The figure jumps and then a hand flies to his chest. I don’t think he’d seen me standing there near the reeds.
‘God Almighty, you gave me a fright!’ he says, and I instantly recognise the voice, even after all these years.
‘Jude?’ It’s just as well his name is only one syllable, because I’m not sure I can manage anything more.
The figure walks towards me, his edges becoming less blurry as he gets closer, and when he is ten feet away, I see that it is indeed Jude, the subject of all my recent fantasies, living and breathing right in front of me and smiling that smile that always turned my knees to custard.
‘Meg?’
I inhale. There’s something about hearing him say my name that way that makes me do that. ‘Hi.’
He frowns. ‘What are you doing out here?’
I shrug. I’m not about to tell him I just had a fight with Dan.
He smiles again and I almost start to feel dizzy. ‘Long time no see,’ he says in that lazy, posh-boy drawl he’s still in the process of cultivating, copied from his upmarket circle of friends.
I nod. And then, because I really need to say something else, I croak out, ‘How are you?’
The smile becomes lopsided and I know he’s quietly laughing at me, that he knows he’s got me all off kilter and he likes it. It would have made the other twenty-one-year-old me angry, because I would have thought he was mocking me, but the real me knows that he’s actually pleased to see me. The real me knows that in just under a week he’s going to ask me to run away with him, and he’s going to mean every word. That’s not disdain I see glinting in his eyes but honest-to-goodness pleasure at seeing me again.
He reaches out his hand. ‘Let me walk you home. You know Catriona Webb was attacked out here a couple of months ago?’ He points to a spot only a couple of hundred feet away past the rose garden.
I hesitate. Something inside, some strange kind of instinct, tells me he’s dangerous. Oh, I don’t think he’d ever hurt me, not physically, anyway, but it suddenly occurs to me that this meeting never happened in my old life.
What if I should have been more careful up until now? What if, by not sticking to the same script, I’ve been changing things, causing the repercussions to ripple out like the waves from the swimming goose, until the life I once knew is pulled out of shape and made into something different? While I’d love some things to change, what if I never get home back to Sophie? What if Sophie never even exits?
But even after thinking all of this, I reach out and place my hand in Jude’s. He’s right. With a sexual predator on the loose – maybe someone from outside the college who slipped past the lax security, maybe someone lurking in our midst – I really shouldn’t be wandering around in the dark on my own.
We start walking towards the front gate in silence, but after a couple of minutes he says, ‘So where’s Dave?’
‘Dan,’ I reply, even though I suspect he got the name wrong on purpose.
‘Dan, then,’ he adds, and I hear the smile in his voice.
‘Party in Derwent. I got tired.’
‘And he let you wander out here alone? That’s not very gallant.’
No, it wasn’t, I think, for a moment conveniently forgetting that I’d made it my mission to push ever-affable Dan to his limit. ‘Where were you coming from?’ I ask Jude, so I don’t have to answer his question.
‘Went to hang out with a friend, then we headed down to the bar for a drink.’
I nod. Without any more details I know this ‘friend’ was a girl. I change the subject. ‘So what are you up to after exams?’
He chuckles. ‘You know me … I haven’t got a plan. Dom and I are going to bum around the South of France for a bit and then, well … we’ll just see what crops up.’
I sigh. Seeing as I know ‘bumming around’ leads Jude into a successful career somehow along the way, I feel jealous. I worked hard, but I never amounted to anything more than ‘ordinary’.
‘What about you?’
I sigh again. The twenty-one-year-old me might not have known what the future holds, but I do. In just a few short days my life will be set on a course to suburban mediocrity and simmering discontentment. ‘I’m going to run away with the circus,’ I say wearily.
Jude laughs. Not one of his slightly cynical huffs, but a proper loud one, as if what I said tickles him. ‘Never really thought of you as the running-away type,’ he says and there’s an added edge of velvet to his tone. In an instant, the air around us changes.
I stop, turn and loo
k at him. I know I’m being stupid. I know I could be endangering everything by just being with him, let alone feeling … this … with him, but it’s like having an itch I’ve been trying not to scratch and on a reflex I’m reaching for it, taking my satisfaction in shredding what’s left of my resolve to pieces with my fingernails.
‘Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.’
He answers me with a smile. A wicked one. ‘You’ve changed.’
I stare him straight in the eyes. ‘Yes, I have.’
He glances towards Derwent Hall and then back to me again. The sounds of the party are drifting through the open common-room windows and across the lake. The geese pay no attention. It’s nothing they haven’t heard before. ‘Then Dave’s a very lucky man.’
I hold my breath and stare back at him. I feel as if my life is teetering on a fulcrum, that if I make one false movement it’ll tip. I know this moment is crucial but I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do.
All I know is that Dan is going to propose to me in four days and not even the tiniest part of me wants to say yes.
Becca finds me the next day in the canteen, while I’m buying a sad-looking tuna-and-sweetcorn baguette. I deliberately pretended to be asleep this morning, because I didn’t want to talk to her about last night. However, it appears that may not have been the best call, because my boyfriend clearly got to her first. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asks. ‘Dan told me you were a total bitch to him last night.’
I raise my eyebrows and turn to look at her. ‘He said that?’
‘Those weren’t his exact words. But I can read between the lines.’
She picks up a bottle of Appletiser and joins the queue. ’You need to apologise to him.’
Part of me wants to remind her what she said on the phone the night I told her Dan might be cheating on me, but I know that I can’t. She’ll think I’m crazy. I also know she’s right. This Dan has done nothing. If I filter out all the things he will do and will say, and look at the situation objectively, I can only come to one conclusion: I was a total bitch to him last night.