Student (14 page)

‘This is the best I’ve ever felt,’ she tells anyone who’ll listen. ‘The very, very best.’

It’s four in the morning and we’re all on the beach with big bottles of San Miguel and Metaxa, smoking spliffs the shape of magic markers. The boys are talking bullshit at the speed of sound. We girls are more chilled out, but my head’s still throbbing from the speed and e. The weed smoothes the edges but it’ll be hours before I’m ready for bed.

It’s Helen who suggests playing Truth Or Dare. Any other time, I would have put a stop to it, but I’m too fucked up to flash a warning sign.

‘That’s such a cliché,’ Steve says.

‘What is it you’re interested in?’ Zoe asks Helen. ‘The truth or the dare?’

‘I like to hear the truth,’ Helen says. ‘We’re all friends, so the truth can’t hurt us. It can only make us stronger.’

‘Telling the truth gets people into trouble,’ Steve says. ‘It’s dangerous. Sometimes, lies are all that keep people from beating each other up.’

‘Nobody’s going to beat anybody up,’ Aidan says.

Mark is quiet. So am I.

‘Is Steve always this middle-aged?’ Helen, sotto voce.

‘Who wants to start?’ Zoe asks, before I can answer.

‘Truth, no dare,’ Helen says. ‘Can I start?’ She turns to me.

‘Allison, do you still have feelings for Mark?’

Easy one. The speed makes me open, articulate. ‘Of course I have feelings for him,’ I say. ‘He was my first serious boyfriend. I hope we’ll always be friends. But I’m not out to take him off you. I’m with Steve.’

Helen opens her mouth to ask a follow-up but Mark stops her.

‘Asked and answered. My turn. Steve, you’re always dropping hints when the women aren’t around. Now I want to know the honest truth. How many women have you slept with?’

Steve gives one of his lazy, arrogant smiles. ‘You don’t think I keep count, do you?’

‘I’m sure you do.’

‘We all do,’ I add, and Steve grins. Then I tense up a little. He may be a slut but he’s my slut.

‘Why doesn’t everyone have a guess?’ Steve says. ‘Make the game more interesting.’

‘Good idea.’ Helen gets out some green rizlas. ‘Everyone put their name and number on. Steve, you write it down too, so you can’t cheat. Remember, total honesty. No exaggeration.’

‘What about under-exaggeration?’ Steve says. ‘We’re talking about full sex, right?’

Everyone writes a number. Strangely, I want to win. I calculate what Steve’s told me about his first year in hall, average a conquest a week for term time, knocking off a few weeks for exams and illness. We hand the rizlas to Steve, who opens them.

‘OK, here we go,’ he says. ‘In reverse order. Helen: one. Very funny. Aidan, twelve. Not even close, buddy. Mark. Twenty-five. Getting warmer. Zoe, eighty-eight. Who do you think I am, Hugh Hefner? But the winner, the one who gets the prize of my body tonight and the most significant digit on this illustrious list, is Allison.’

‘What did you guess, Allison?’ Helen.

‘Forty-seven.’

‘Show us, Steve,’ Mark says.

‘Come on,’ Helen says. ‘We all want to know what number Allison is.’

Steve hands over the rizla. Forty-three. Suddenly, I feel humiliated. Forty-two women before me. How many will there be after?

‘My turn,’ Zoe says. ‘Mark, do you still have a thing for Allison?’

‘Jeez,’ Helen says. ‘Are you trying to split us up?’

‘Actually, I am,’ Zoe says. ‘In the long run, I think Mark and Allison ought to be together. He calms her down. She keeps him more... together. Nothing personal, Helen, but you know that Mark’s only a stop-gap for you.’

‘Notice she doesn’t apologise to me,’ Steve says, as Helen strokes Mark’s hair, murmurs something to him.

‘Does speed do this to everyone?’ Helen asks, ‘puts them on a total honesty jag? I’m beginning to wish I’d never started this game.’

‘Uh, Zoe and I took a little acid too,’ Aidan says.

‘And you didn’t offer us any?’ Mark says.

‘I’m not sure I’d take acid,’ I say. ‘Too scary.’

‘Too right,’ Steve says.

‘Obviously it wasn’t acid,’ Helen says. ‘It was that truth drug they used in the fifties, sodium somethingtol. Go on, Mark, give your answer.’

Mark doesn’t look at Helen, or at me.

‘Realistically, none of us are going to be with the same person for the rest of our lives. I know Helen won’t stay with me. And yeah, if I had to choose one person I already know who I’d like to end up with, it would be Allison. She knows that, at least I hope she does. But, you know, we’ll all probably get married, have kids etc with people we haven’t even met yet.’

‘Wow,’ Zoe says. ‘Allison, what do you make of that?’

‘I’ve already answered my question,’ I say.

We all see at once that Helen is crying.

‘Why?’ she says. ‘Why do people have relationships they know aren’t going to last? I don’t mean Steve and his one night stands. I don’t even mean you, Mark...’

‘Tired and emotional,’ Steve mumbles to me, as Mark gives Helen a cuddle.

‘Sorry,’ Zoe says. ‘I didn’t mean my question to...’

‘It’s OK,’ Helen says. ‘It’s just that, I thought he was going to marry me. I thought he was the one.’

Aidan clicks that she isn’t talking about Mark and turns to Steve. ‘I think it’s your turn. Uh, me or Zoe.’

‘This doesn’t have to be about relationships, does it?’ Steve asks.

‘Please,’ Aidan says, ‘anything else.’

‘Anything? The sodium pentothal reply?’

‘Anything.’

‘OK,’ Steve says softly. ‘Tell us what really happened, the night of the crash. Goes no further, just the six of us.’

‘That’s not on,’ Zoe says, sharply.

‘You don’t have to,’ Helen tells him.

I stare daggers at Steve, but he’s not looking. He’s staring at Aidan, who’s staring back at him. Mark was rolling a joint, but he’s stopped.

‘All right,’ Aidan says. ‘I agreed to play, so I will. You got any of that speed left, Mark?’

‘Isn’t it a bit late?’ Zoe says, as Mark gets the wrap out.

‘I won’t sleep tonight anyway.’

It’s nearly dawn. Aidan takes a large dab, washes it down with beer, and swigs from the brandy bottle as he talks. It takes him a while to warm up, but when he gets going, his voice is clear, strong, even defiant.

‘The thing was Huw’s idea in the first place. I passed my test two months before him and we’d go driving. Just driving. No destination. Once we drove through the Mersey Tunnel stoned and I got disoriented, nearly crashed. After that, Huw passed his test and got given his own car, so he did most of the driving. He came up with the game one night when we were both off our faces. How close could you go without hitting? How fast? He hated slow drivers, that was what really got to him. If you were behind the wheel on a road with no speed cameras, you ought to go at a fair lick, not twenty-eight fucking miles an hour. So he’d get right up their backside until they speeded up or pulled over.’

‘And if they didn’t?’ I hear myself ask.

‘They always did. Or turned off. Or something. We didn’t give them room to brake. Huw was better at it than me. I was worried about scratching my mum’s car. Huw had a banger, he didn’t give a shit.’

‘What sort of cars did you tail-gate?’ Steve asks.

‘Anything, as long as we could see the driver. Young. Old. Couples. As long as there were no kids in the back. That would have been too creepy.’

‘And didn’t you get any retaliation?’ Mark.

‘How many questions is that?’

‘You haven’t got to the crash yet,’ Steve points out. Aidan ignores him.

‘There was one time, a car braked slowly and we hit the bumper. He pulled over, tried to block the road. Big, angry guy got out. But he’d left us room to get past him. We scratched his car as we went round. He banged on our boot but there was nothing he could do to stop us.’

‘And he didn’t report you to the police?’ Helen.

‘Huw always put mud on the plates.’ Aidan pauses, takes another hit of brandy. ‘The police made a big thing of that at the trial, that we always put mud on the plates. Said it showed premeditation. Like we were looking to kill someone.

‘The night of the crash was just like any other night. We were at a loose end. I didn’t have any weed. Huw wanted to go to a party but I wasn’t up for it. I suggested the drive. I thought it might get my adrenaline going, make me more sociable.

‘I think Huw suggested that I drive. Not a dare. More that he was growing out of it. He had a car all the time, while I hardly got to use my mum’s. Driving was more of a thrill for me. Technically, I wasn’t insured to drive his car. That came up in court too.

‘Sometimes, before, it was a random thing. We wouldn’t do it or we’d start to, then drop back, turn off. That night, we were really up for it, almost like we’d decided it was going to be the last time, so it better be good.

‘They had a big car, a Volvo. Neither of us could tell how old they were. I suppose that made their reactions slower. They were on the long road out from the golf club. Blind corners, lots of dips. They were doing 25, 27 tops. Huw got really pissed off when they wouldn’t speed up at all. Then I started nudging them. Just tapping the bumper. And it had the required effect. They speeded up. We stayed right on their tail. Got up to forty, forty-five. Huw urged me to nudge them again, but it’s harder to do a nudge once you get to forty. They were up to fifty when, suddenly, they start to brake and I ran into the back of them. Not hard, there was barely a scratch on Huw’s car afterwards, but his brakes weren’t as efficient as theirs and they had to keep going.

‘If there hadn’t been anything on the main road when they came out, it would have been OK. But there was. I swerved around the accident. You could tell it was bad. The woman whose car they hit, the airbag in her Polo came up and she was all right. Well, she started bleeding from the nose when Huw went to talk to her. She was in shock. Later it turned out she’d broken her forearm. She couldn’t drive again for months afterwards. But basically, she was all right because the old couple only sideswiped her. After they did that, they went off the road, straight into the lamppost.

‘Their car was twelve years old. It didn’t have airbags, but that probably wouldn’t have saved them anyway. They were going too fast.’

Steve breaks the silence that follows. ‘How did they catch you?’

‘I phoned the ambulance on my mobile. For five minutes, we were responsible citizens, looking after the woman from the Polo, putting out the red triangle from Huw’s car. Then the police came and she must have said something because they arrested us both. She’d seen the way the old couple’s car came out onto the main road, knew there was something odd going on. There were a couple of other witnesses. One of them talked about how terrified the old guy looked. He’d had heart surgery, his daughter told the court, thought he wouldn’t live to see his second grandchild. And he didn’t, because of us.’

‘I got off lightly, mainly because I’d been sectioned by then. Huw’s parents told him what he had to do to get off and he got off. He wanted to confess, he didn’t want to dump me in it. Not that I gave a shit. Now I’m here and he isn’t. Some dare, eh?’

‘You can’t beat yourself up forever,’ Zoe says.

‘Watch me try,’ Aidan says. Then he quickly adds, ‘Anyway, it’s Allison’s turn now. Who hasn’t had a question? Zoe?’

Zoe and I look at each other. She’s pale. I look at Steve looking at Aidan. They can distance themselves, these men, see their own lives in abstract. Maybe it’s the drugs they’re on, or maybe it’s in their characters. Tonight, I don’t like Steve much and I don’t want to stay around Aidan. Why did Steve have to ask that question? We could talk this through but he’s off his face and won’t remember in the morning, though I will. I suspect Zoe feels pretty much the same.

‘I’m ready for bed,’ I say. ‘Zoe, do you want to sleep in our room tonight, leave the guys to it?’

She nods and gets up. We leave without making eye contact, without saying goodnight. On the way back to my room, neither of us utters a word. 

Vic says she’s moving out.

‘It’s not your fault, it’s just the way things go. We were best mates, but now you and Steve are all over each other and we hardly talk.’

‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘You didn’t call me once when I went home in the summer, Allison. You didn’t ask if I wanted to go to Ibiza with you.’

‘That’s because it was all couples.’

‘Straight couples.’

‘But you’d split up with Liz at the time.’ They split up the week before they were meant to move into a shared flat, but they‘ve since got back together. ‘You’d have felt...’

‘Exactly,’ she interrupts.

‘It’s not like that,’ I tell her, though I can see that it is. ‘The first few weeks of going out with someone, of course you haven’t got time for anyone else. That’s inevitable. But we can solve this, make space for each other.’

‘Too late, babe. I’ve already paid the deposit on the room. Mr Soar says he’s got someone else waiting to move in.’

‘Oh.’

‘I never thought, you know, you and Steve,’ she says, her voice oozing disappointment. ‘I hope it works out for you.’

She’s breaking up with me. I haven’t had a friend formally break up with me since primary school. Friendship is like romance. It needs to be nurtured. And I haven’t done much nurturing since Mum had her stroke. Vic didn’t know how to deal with that. She turned to Liz and I turned to Mark. At least that’s how I saw it at the time. Then there was Steve, waiting to become my lover. And, somewhere along the way, Zoe became my new best girl friend, only Vic doesn’t know this, because she’s never met Zoe.

Update: Aidan and Zoe are still together. Zoe thinks that telling everyone about the crash marked a major turning point for Aidan and, having done his worst, as it were, Aidan’s seen that nobody got really freaked out, so now he can get on with his life. After that night, Steve said, “I can’t believe you used to be into that guy.” Otherwise, we never discussed it.

Mark and Helen, meanwhile, are still in a sort-of-going-out state, but they’re not living together. Mark has moved into the city. I said there might be a room in our house, but he prefers to live alone. Or, at least, not with me and Steve.