Click. L. Smyth
put my other hand over a light patch on the glass and noted the time. It was 12 p.m.. I had missed the lecture anyway.
On the plus side, I had several Facebook notifications. Marina had accepted my friend request. She had sent me a short message apologizing for abandoning me the night before. She asked if I might be free later that day:
i have to get something in town but we cd have brunch after
She wrote just like that: all in lower case, with no punctuation. It always bothered me – still bothers me – how someone so eloquent face-to-face could be so careless in their virtual correspondence. I was the opposite. I liked to observe rather than participate in verbal interactions and then, given a pen or a keyboard, I would write long, adjective-packed sentences which often came across as – yes indeed – contrived or expository. Thus:
Hi. No, don’t worry about it! Sometime this afternoon would work. I’m still in bed at the moment. What time were you thinking?
I hit ‘send’ without reading over it.
Usually I would review my messages – scan them for spelling mistakes, read them aloud, wonder how the other person would feel receiving them; what they would think about me. I was meticulous. But on this occasion I was too hungover, too lazy and fuggy-headed for it to matter until it had already been sent.
I lay there on the bed with my neck craned to the side, staring at the screen. The little dots wiggled in the corner; then they stopped. I waited for a few seconds for them to start moving again but nothing happened, so to kill time I went onto my profile. I flicked through my photos and wondered whether I came across as cool and aloof or friendless. There was a fine line I knew, and at that point in my life I often thought about it. Another thing I thought about was whether I was more or less narcissistic than other people. For example, was it more vain to fill your Facebook profile with self-promotional statuses and selfies, or to meticulously cultivate it so that you came across as ‘unbothered’ – like you didn’t care about what you looked like? Like you hardly checked Facebook, despite the fact that actually you rarely did anything else?
My own profile offered no reassuring answers, so I looked at Marina’s for comparison. She had barely commented on any of her posts, and her photos were all uploaded by other people. I flicked through them back to 2010. In each one she was either alone, or looking away from the camera; away from the people around her. This seemed to confirm something I had suspected already, but on recognizing it I felt somehow dissatisfied. If she was always this antisocial, why did she attract so many people? Where did they come from? Also, why hadn’t she been more embarrassing at school?
A notification popped up in the corner of the screen. It was a message from Marina. I felt a jolt – like she had somehow intuited that I was stalking her photos. But in fact she had sent me her number and a confirmation of the meeting time:
yeah like 3
Strange time for ‘brunch’, I thought. I glanced at the clock on the screen. It was now 1.15. I tossed the phone aside and buried myself in the pillow. I counted to four. In, out. In, out.
Silently I willed myself to get up. I pushed my head further into the pillow and then – after a beat – brought my palms up underneath my shoulders and lifted myself into a cat pose. Not too bad.
Another second went by and then I forced my body to move forwards and upwards. I watched my arms stretch out underneath me, mysteriously strong and agile, my legs crouched and straightened, and while performing those movements I suddenly felt as though I were watching someone else, as though my constituent body parts were acting separately to me. My hands picked up a towel and I wrapped myself in it. It felt alien, but cold and nice against my skin. My fingers reached out to the door handle, grabbed the grainy metal – that, too, seemed peculiar. Then my back was straightening and my feet were padding across the corridor towards the shower. This was a shower that I shared with six other people – one of whom now came out of his room, waved at me and made an arch comment about my scanty state of dress. I pretended not to see him.
In the shower cubicle, I took off the towel and stepped towards the spray. The water fell out in thin, tepid drips. I stuck my tongue into the stream. It was slimy, tasted faintly of sulphur. I dunked in my face, then my whole body. I began to feel alert.
At three o’clock, I met Marina for lunch in a small café in town. She was sat on one of the outside tables, wearing a grey fur coat and holding a large plastic water bottle. There was a bag at her feet with folders poking out of it. As I approached the table she tucked her phone into the bag, then leaned forward and waved towards me. Her eyes were smudged but her lipstick was carefully applied, and when she smiled her mouth opened fully. It reminded me of a crab emerging from its shell.
‘I’m exhausted,’ she said. ‘I haven’t slept.’
I replied: ‘Me neither,’ though it was obviously a lie.
‘I’m sorry about last night anyway, Henry wanted to talk about something and I was stuck in that bathroom for ages.’
I made a swift comment about not even realizing she’d gone – also a lie, but easier to stick to than ‘me neither’. I was relieved she hadn’t chased up my ‘me neither’. Instead she gave me a grateful smile and then we started talking about Northam.
The meeting went well. Very well, in fact. It quickly emerged that we thought along similar lines, and that we were finding the experience of university similarly disagreeable. We both railed about the idiotic structure of the course, the boorishness of other people in our class, the anticlimax of Northam in general. She, like me, had expected it to be more liberating. She said that she had turned down an opportunity to work on a film set with a family friend in order to come here. She said that she had wanted to be educated before getting a job – she had wanted to revel in the ‘experience for its own sake’. But now, confronted with the reality, she had started to regret the decision to come to Northam at all.
‘I mean this is an institution, not an academy,’ she said. ‘It’s full of people who view education as just a stepping stone. Look at the way the course is set up. Look at how closely the careers department is intertwined with everything the academic department does. Look at the way we’re instructed – I don’t know – to do group presentations so we can put ‘teamwork’ on our CVs. It’s depressing. Sometimes that alone is enough to make me want to drop out.’
I couldn’t say much to that. I tepidly responded with a counter-question.
‘But overall, it’s not quite …’
The corner of her mouth lifted. ‘What?’
‘You’re not going to drop out.’
‘No. I’ve thought about it … No.’
She looked around then, grabbed an ashtray from the table next to us and drew a packet of cigarettes from her bag, then put one in her mouth. I looked at the way it balanced there while she lit it. I thought about the passage of the smoke drifting past her lips, down her throat and into her lungs.
Then she looked up and saw me staring at her.
‘Would you like one?’ she asked.
‘Oh.’ I looked down at my hands. ‘No thanks, I don’t smoke.’
‘Suit yourself.’
Later on Marina would often chastise me for being ‘repressed’ – but I always knew she enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t like her. Even that gesture of refusing the cigarette had seemed to satisfy her, like I’d confirmed a judgement that she held against me. Where Marina was fun, I was reserved. Where she was cavalier, I was cautious. Where she was given to making grand statements, I offered a mumbling appraisal of both sides before ultimately agreeing with her. I think that’s how it looked, at least.
Smoke continued to drift around us, gradually travelling outwards to the surrounding tables where families were sat with their prams and soft drinks. A group of young women on the adjacent table were tucking into a roast. When Marina saw them,