by Katie Lowe
Robin spoke, finally, when we reached the railings, looking out into the nothing. ‘Her dad’s a total psycho.’ She clung on, leaned back, and swung there for a moment, before pulling herself back. ‘Grace’s, I mean. He’s why she’s always got bruises.’
I turned to face her, a dull sickness rising. ‘He hits her?’
‘Yeah,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Can’t we—’
‘She says it’s not our business. Like, she won’t talk about it. Ever.’
‘Oh,’ I said again, uselessly. Silence fell, broken only by the clack and chatter of seagulls swooping above, the waves rattling the pier below. ‘Where’s the party?’ I said, at last, desperate to break the silence. I felt bad for Grace, truly; but my thoughts kept wandering back to Nicky’s other comment. The party. Robin hadn’t said anything, and if Nicky hadn’t brought it up, I wasn’t sure she would’ve mentioned it at all.
‘Halloween party,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend’s throwing it. You should meet him.’ She chewed, thoughtfully, at her finger, biting off a hangnail and spitting it into the water below. ‘Lots of boys in his halls, too. You might find one yourself.’
‘Halloween isn’t for another week.’
‘So?’
‘I don’t have a costume.’
‘You won’t need one. Wear what you’ve got on now, and no one’ll tell the difference.’
I threw a bottle cap at her, sand rolling back on the wind. I’d never been with a boy, never so much as kissed one. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. I thought back to my old school, scrappy, howling boys who’d tug and paw at the girls who let them, who encouraged them, and who told each other elaborate stories of who loved who, and how they’d fucked. It all seemed a lot of work, even if they had shown any interest in me (which, of course, they hadn’t).
Still, the prospect of a night with Robin, in what I imagined might be the more sophisticated, mature company of university students, was too tempting to refuse. ‘Can’t wait,’ I said, as the last spark of the sunset clipped the edge of the horizon, and the first brush of night air echoed in the wind.
The university was on the far side of town, only a couple of miles from the Kirkwood – and it possessed none of the grandeur of the grounds to which I’d by now become somewhat accustomed (though even now I am not wholly immune to the bloom of evening light behind the Campanile, or the froth of raindrops glowing above the Great Hall’s sage and silver dome on a cool spring day). I’d only ever been dimly aware that it existed, and even now never thought of it as a university. It was ‘the old poly’, or ‘the college’, to residents of the town, and I had never thought of it in any other terms.
All béton brut and gabions, grey crumbling into black, it was impressive, in its own way, and almost a better fit for the town: ugly in a way that seemed to be somehow intentional. Aggressive, even. The tower, indeed, had cut a lonely but ever-present figure in my childhood, the only tower building in the whole town – wide and squat, with gangways connecting its two halves, a ladder leaning on the sky. The leaves hung wincing from the trees, or cracked underfoot, scratching at the pavement; the sky grey and fat with mist, words made visible in the cool night air.
When Robin and I had met, in the dim lights of the bus station, where the shelters rattled in the evening wind, she’d thrown her arms around me in an overblown hug. ‘You look amazing,’ I said, the words muffled by the crush of her shoulder, the wide, black brim of her witch’s hat.
‘I know,’ she said, pulling away. ‘What … What are you meant to be?’
I tugged at the back of my coat, the blooming flash of red. ‘Red Riding Hood,’ I said, blushing; knowing, already, that it was stupid, a childish idea.
She laughed. ‘Okay, so, before I say anything else: you are adorable,’ she said, the words shot through and veined with sarcasm. ‘But this is a grown-up party. You need to look the part.’ She pulled me down onto the cold metal seat beside her, and began rooting through her bag, chewing thoughtfully at her smudged, blackened lips.
An old man, stinking of sweat and stale alcohol, paused to stare as she reached for my chin; instructed me to close my eyes, and hold still. I don’t know how long he stood there, though the smell of him lingered as I sat, waiting, feeling myself watched. And yet the touch of her, the assurance with which she smoothed foundation into my skin, brushed powder gently into the hollows of my eyes; the way she laughed, a little, when she told me to pout, the feel of breath on my skin as she leaned in to paint my lips … It doesn’t matter who sees, I thought. I don’t care.
‘There,’ she said, at last. ‘What do you think?’
I opened my eyes, blinking in the light; caught my reflection in the threaded glass of the windows as the bus shuddered in behind. Eyes lined with soft, smudged kohl, made them wider, their expression somehow no longer mine; lips lined fat, a blooming red. A painted shadow in the hollow of my cheeks.
I looked wholly unlike myself, somehow, drawn into a new self by her. And as I blinked once, and again, I felt a shudder of recognition. My features made fuller, more vivid, I looked, now, like the taped-up photos of Emily Frost, pocked and faded by the wind.
‘Do you like it?’ she said, she, too, watching my reflection in the glass.
‘Wow,’ I said, unsure what else to say.
She talked, almost without pausing for breath, all the way to the campus, flitting from one topic to another. About her little sister, whose obsession with a certain TV show meant Robin had to listen to it playing through the walls in the middle of the night. About a tattoo she’d been thinking of getting, that she’d drawn ‘fifty thousand times’ but couldn’t get quite right. About a horror movie she’d seen but couldn’t remember the name of, though a scene in which a woman had been chopped to pieces had struck her as ‘fundamentally unrealistic,’ because ‘there’d obviously be way more blood.’ I wondered about mentioning the accident, the strange absence of blood (in memory, at least) – but I couldn’t find the words. I’d told her almost everything, but never that. I didn’t want her pity; wasn’t sure I could bear to be anything but the girl she thought I was.
At the foot of the tower, voices and music roared from an open window several floors above. Robin grabbed my hand, and we walked through the wooden doors to a dull reception area, a single security guard sitting at a tiny screen, surrounded on all sides by lewd graffiti and defaced postcards. ‘Ladies,’ he said, with a grunt. ‘You students here?’
‘You really don’t recognize us by now?’ Robin said. ‘It’s me! Robin. Tenth floor.’ He shrugged and turned back to his screen, disinterested.
‘I can’t believe that worked,’ I whispered as we stood in the lift, Robin picking at her make-up in a mirror coated with dust and handprints, ‘FUCK THE TORIES’ scrawled in lipstick overhead.
‘Whatever. One of the boys would’ve come and rescued us, anyway,’ she said, with an overblown wink. I laughed. I had doubts about her boyfriend Andy’s capacity for rescue, based on the stories I’d heard from Alex and Grace earlier in the week, but held my tongue.
The lift shuddered to a halt on the eighth floor. ‘It only goes this far. Party’s on floor ten.’ She kicked the door, once; then again. It opened with a groan, and we stepped out into a dull corridor, the air curdling with a lingering smell of damp clothes and spilled beer.
I walked a few feet behind, pausing to examine the lurid posters and photographs stuck to each door. As I looked at one – a poster for Glastonbury Festival, two years earlier, the list of bands in such tiny print I had to lean in to take a look – the door swung open. I stumbled backwards, and Robin swung around, turning back.
In the doorway stood a tall, scraggly student, hair mussed as though he’d been interrupted from sleep, though given the pounding music above, this seemed highly unlikely (though I would eventually learn, through my own undergraduate experience, that it is indeed possible to sleep through anything, if one has enough work to ignore). ‘What’s this?’ he yawned.
‘Howdy,’ Robin said, not missing a beat. She extended a hand with a half-ironic formality which seemed capable of diffusing even the most fraught situations. ‘Robin Adams, pleased to meet you. This is Vivi. We’re going to a party – want to come?’
He stood staring blankly at her outstretched hand for a moment, blinking away sleep. ‘You’re inviting me to a party in the building I live in?’
‘Well, it’s my boyfriend’s party, so I figure technically I’m the hostess. Kind of,’ she said. ‘That means I get to invite who I like, even if they do live a few floors below and consider themselves above a formal invitation. And even if they don’t introduce themselves properly. Like, with a name.’
He glanced at me, for a split second, before turning back to Robin. ‘I’m Tom,’ he said, with a smile that gave his face an almost wolfish quality, attractive in a way I couldn’t place. I felt a flash of envy, in spite of myself, as he finally took Robin’s hand.
‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ she replied, coyly. ‘Well, we’re going to the party. Come if you want, or don’t. Your choice.’ She turned and strolled down the corridor, and I followed, looking back briefly to see Tom leaning in the doorway, still dazed by the encounter. He waved; I turned away and rushed to catch Robin, cheeks flushed with shame.
‘Bit of a rake, no?’ she said, when I reached the tenth floor to find her sitting on the railing, the ten floors below a sheer drop.
‘He looked like he needs a shower.’
‘They’re uni students. They all look like that.’ She laughed. ‘God, if you don’t like him, just wait till you meet Andy.’
On this, she was not mistaken. Andy, I would soon discover, was a skinny, mantis of a man, who – when we finally arrived, after a circuitous conversation with a student sitting red-eyed on the floor outside – was holding court on a single bed in an incongruously large dorm room, filthy dreadlocks clinging to his white, pimpled back in the fetid heat of the room. Even above the music, his voice carried shrilly, surrounded as he was by dazed students passing a succession of thick, glowing joints.
‘I’m not saying Ayn Rand isn’t problematic,’ he said, grandly. ‘It’s just that some of her ideas weren’t entirely without a kernel of truth. It just requires an open mind to see it.’ He coughed, a brittle, hacking cough, and Robin sidled up beside him to pat him gently on the back. He pulled her in for a nauseatingly long kiss, pausing for a drag on a joint, breathing the smoke into Robin’s open mouth. She turned to the group and, to my horror, pointed to me. ‘This is Vivi,’ she announced.
‘Hi, Vivi,’ they replied, as though hypnotized. Vivi, I thought, as I waved, awkwardly, and wandered to the makeshift bar in the far corner of the room. She sounds like fun. I poured a slug of off-brand cola into what looked to be an unused mug, whose faded university label proudly advertised ‘exceptional careers for exceptional students’. The warm liquid stuck in my throat, sharp and cloying.
I watched the mass of students, and wondered if this might be my own future; then, too, what exactly might be said to recommend it. I saw a girl dressed in a sleek Hepburn dress and tiara swaying precariously close to the open window, while a boy, deathly pale and shimmering with fake blood talked at her, staring wide-eyed into the middle distance. A few feet away, two girls – each with hair in luminous colours, turquoise green and Barbie pink, their make-up vivid, clown-like – sat cross-legged on the floor, engaged in a conversation that seemed to be turning sour. The girl facing me seemed to be growing more unsteady with every sip of vodka, taken directly from the by-now half-drained bottle; I counted a further three gulps before she rose, swaying, and stumbled out into the white glare of the hallway. A group of boys in ragged caveman furs stormed across the room, howling wildly, and proceeded to empty a carton of washing powder out of the window, onto some poor victim below. When it hit, they roared louder still, their hoots reminiscent of some monstrous creatures I had seen, once, on a nature programme.
Robin bounded over and poured herself a drink, topping mine up with a large slug of rum as she did so. ‘You like?’ she said, grinning.
‘Yeah, it’s cool,’ I lied, lifting the mug to my lips. The liquid was hot and searing; a rancid, chemical smell. I lowered the cup without swallowing, relieved to find her attentions elsewhere.
‘I love university parties. Not exactly the height of sophistication, but it’s nice to be around adults for a change.’ I searched her face for the irony absent from her voice, and nodded, solemnly, suppressing my own opinions on the matter. ‘Listen, I know it’s not normally your thing, but … Do you want one of these?’ She opened her palm, revealing a couple of white pills, their texture dusty, imprinted with a flower.
‘If it’s an aspirin, then definitely,’ I said, drily.
‘No pressure. It’s just … I thought I’d offer, so you don’t feel like you’re missing out.’
The boys roared again, now hurling bricks of soap and sopping balls of toilet paper out into the street below. The princess returned, tapped her friend on the shoulder, and gave her a weak kiss; the swaying girl still swayed, and the talking boy still talked.
I took the pill from Robin’s outstretched palm, and held it, nervously, in my own. I felt Robin wrap her arm around my shoulder with something like tenderness. ‘If you don’t like it, all you have to do is say you want to go. That’s it. If you feel weird, we’ll go straight home.’ The press of her, the promise, was enough: I swallowed the pill, washing it down with the searing, sour drink.
For the next fifteen minutes, I felt nothing, though I shuddered at every suggestion of warmth, every heartbeat a portent of doom. I had heard the stories of otherwise well-behaved teenagers who had died a sudden death from their first encounter with drugs, and imagined the cold words of the coroner’s report. My heartbeat quickened and slowed, the sense of panic rising and falling as I remembered, somehow, to breathe.
Still nothing, one moment of nothing after another, a nothing hollow with anticipation, until all at once a panoramic, gorgeous fullness burst around me, the air syrupy, the people diaphanous, unreal. I felt suddenly detached, watching the students around me, each with their own unique preoccupations and ideals, and felt a sense of oneness, an appreciation of other subjectivities beyond my own. Potent chemicals and sweat-ravaged debauchery: the source, no doubt, of the open-minded idealism for which students are known.
I turned to Robin, wanting to tell her everything – not only of this moment, but my whole life story, every secret emotion I had ever held in my heart, all the things I couldn’t say – only to find her seat now taken by the boy from the eighth floor, whose name I could no longer remember. Had he told us? I wasn’t sure.
‘How did you get here?’ I asked, reaching for the arms of the chair in an attempt to still the roiling room.
‘The stairs,’ he said, flatly. ‘Have you … Are you drunk?’
‘That sounds like something I am,’ I said, the words nonsense, confused. I felt a burning heat in the palms of my hands, and released the chair from my vice-like grip.
‘Little more than drunk, judging by those pupils,’ he said, leaning in towards me.
I pulled away. ‘It’s none of your business.’
He winced. ‘Ouch.’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. I looked for Robin, scanning the room for the red glow of her hair. I saw her, back with Andy, who sat on the floor while she straddled his shoulders from the bed above, leaning over him occasionally for a kiss, her hair falling in strings down his chest, his fingers clutching at them, possessively. I felt sick, overwhelmingly sick, and looked down at the space between my knees, where the lines of the carpet curved and swelled like the roll of the sea.
‘Do you want some water or something?’ I’d forgotten I was being watched. I turned to him, slowly, feeling my neck and jaw tense, tongue thick in my throat.
‘Please.’ I felt both brimming with life, and horribly close to death. ‘It’s so hot,’ I said, as he handed me a plastic cup filled with dirty, brui
sed ice.
‘Sip it,’ he said, not letting go of the cup. ‘Don’t gulp it, or you’ll throw up.’
‘Okay,’ I said. The syllables sounded wrong, almost like a sing-song. ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ I said, impressed by the cadence of the letters. He laughed, took a step back, as though unsure of himself; then paused for a moment, and sat back down, slowly sipping his drink. I felt a swell, another flush of love for the people around me, and, in the moment, this stranger, who had come to me with iced water and kind words. ‘Thank you,’ I said, with what I hoped was a smile.
‘Any time,’ he said. ‘Would some fresh air help?’
‘I’m not … I’m not going anywhere near that window.’ I heard the words slur a little as I spoke, returning with a perfect echo.
‘Oh god, no. You’re absolutely not going near any windows, or sharp edges, or anywhere without childproofing.’
‘I’m not—’
‘I don’t mean that,’ he said, catching my meaning before I could finish my sentence. ‘I just mean you don’t need to worry. You can’t get in much more trouble than you already are.’
He extended a hand, and pulled me up towards him. Grateful to escape, I stumbled with him into the corridor, where the bright lights and lurid posters swam kaleidoscopic above the stained tan carpets and beaten, grey walls. Stumbling down the stairs, I felt the glow of the fluorescent lights, switching on and off rhythmically as though time had slowed to accommodate their usual invisible flicker.
The words on the posters followed me down the stairs – Dance Society Meet next week, Mason Hall, 5pm; Basketball Tryouts Tuesday – shorties need not apply!; Kafka’s Metamorphosis :: Auditions Monday!!! Occasionally I felt a rumble of doubt, the same hot sweat rising from the soles of my feet to my chest, but the feeling disappeared as soon as I had identified it, the memory delirious and fleeting.
As we reached the ground floor, the rhythm of the music echoing from above seemed still as loud as it had been in the dorm room. I put my hands over my ears, my head aching; Tom stopped as we rounded the corner, and put my hands back by my sides. ‘Act normal,’ he whispered, and walked me past the security guard (though the caution was unnecessary, he now absorbed in a tattered paperback with no interest in the activities of the students who occasionally disturbed his reading). I thought of Robin as we left the building. She’ll be fine, I told myself. And then, a little bitterly, she said she’d stay with me, and she didn’t, so it doesn’t matter anyway.