Student (16 page)

Steve’s working late again. I reckon up how many nights he’s done in the last three weeks. It’s at least ten, maybe twelve. This is his final year too. He’s meant to work no more than two nights a week. Bored, I ring up Zoe. She has a moan about Aidan, how little he’s there for her, how he won’t go to his therapy group, his secretiveness. It’s all too familiar.

‘He’s fine when we’re alone, but he’s never been good in company.’

‘Some people aren’t.’

She asks what I’m doing at Christmas.

‘Staying at Steve’s. Dad’s going to Barbados and Mum won’t know what’s going on, though I’ll call her, obviously. How about you?’

‘Aidan’s lot have hired a cottage in Scotland for Christmas and New Year. They’ve invited me. It’s got to be better than staying at home.’

For each of us, it’ll be our first Christmas away from West Kirby, but that’s cool. We’re no longer teenagers.

‘Have you seen Mark?’ she asks.

I tell her about my embarrassing scenes in restaurants, concluding with Steve and the mysterious text message.

‘It has to be a set up,’ Zoe says. ‘Steve wouldn’t be that obvious.’

‘He was never subtle.’ We discuss the numbers game. I fill in some of the details he only hinted at on Ibiza.

‘Some of his conquests are bound to be resentful that he never called,’ Zoe says. ‘This one probably thought she was doing you a favour.’

‘Maybe she was.’

‘I thought you and Steve were solid.’

‘I’m sure he’s cheating on me,’ I say, realising as I say it that ‘sure’ is an overstatement.

‘Who with? How can you be certain?’

‘Knowing Steve, it could be more than one person. He likes taking risks and he doesn’t mind being obvious.’

‘You’re telling me. That guy could ogle for Britain in the Olympics. On Ibiza, on the beach, when I had my top off... and you should have seen the way he looked at Helen sometimes. Mind you, Helen seemed to enjoy the attention.’

‘Mark was worried that Helen was playing away again.’

‘You don’t think..?’ She doesn’t have to finish the sentence.

‘Steve and Helen? It has crossed my mind. Helen wouldn’t, though. Would she?’

‘Not if she thought you’d find out.’

In other words, she would. Zoe is a better judge of character than I am, which makes me wonder why she’s still seeing Aidan. But we all have our blind spots.

‘Helen admires your taste. She always looked up to you at school.’

‘She did?’

We were at the same school for six years out of seven but I didn’t notice Helen until I was in the upper sixth. I barely noticed anything other than myself. It took Mark to teach me the meaning of the word ‘solipsism.’

‘Have you got her address?’

At eleven, I borrow a jacket with a hood on it and head out into the November chill. Helen’s house is only a three minute drive away. She’s in Old Lenton, by the hospital, an area full of tall, badly lit houses, each bigger than the one I live in. I park on a nearby road. Helen has a first floor room, Zoe told me. Only one first floor light is on, so that’s the window I watch, hoping it’s hers.

The room’s occupant has company. I see more than one silhouette. I want it to be Mark. I so want it to be Mark that I ring his number, expecting to hear it ring. Instead, it goes to voicemail and I hang up. Then I dial Helen’s number, which I got off Zoe. Sure enough, I see her silhouette answer the phone. I hang up quickly. All I have to do now is ring Steve’s phone, and my suspicions will be squashed or confirmed.

But I can’t bring myself to. Instead, I wait. If I see Steve leave, I can get in my car and be in bed before he makes it back, then confront him at my leisure.

Only he doesn’t leave. At quarter to twelve, Helen’s light goes out. Whoever it is must be staying the night. I drive home.

Steve’s already there, getting ready for bed.

‘Where’ve you been?’ he asks, and I have no answer for him.

‘Walking. Thinking.’

He hugs me. ‘You’re freezing!’

He pours me a brandy from the stash he keeps in our chest of drawers. When I ask about his weekend, he isn’t evasive, not exactly, but he doesn’t have a lot to say. He makes up for this by coming on to me, and taking as long as I need before he allows himself to finish. And this release, this orgasm, this enormous feeling he gives me is enough to justify my living with him, going out with him, relying on him, for no-one else has been able to do this for me before and, when it comes down to it, what does sexual fidelity matter, as long as he’s there for me when I need him to be? What does any of it matter, when we’re all dust in the end?

I spend the night hugging him close to me, so close I wake up in a sweat. In the morning, as I watch him dress to go to uni, I worry that I’m being over-clingy. I’ve put all my eggs in the Steve basket.

I have a dissertation tutorial at eleven, but my tutor can’t get much out of me. I’m dragging myself back to the car park, trying to remember where I left the Mini, when the phone rings. It’s Zoe.

‘Guess what?’

She sounds so cheerful that I feel I ought to be able to guess.

‘What?’

‘Aidan’s asked me to marry him.’

‘You? Aidan? Married?’ This is so far beyond my expectations that, for a minute I am flummoxed, utterly unable to respond, but Zoe is too excited to notice. ‘That’s so... random.’

‘Now look, I’ve thought about this and discussed it with my mum, and with Aidan, of course. I’d like you to be maid of honour.’

‘Wow! Thanks, that is an honour.’

I’ve not said I’ll do it but Zoe takes my acceptance as read and starts going on about the big occasion, when it should be and, more crucially, where. I daren’t ask why she’s agreed to marry Aidan in the first place. She knows her own mind, I tell myself. Which is more than I do.

Steve’s not working tonight. I will be able to have a proper talk with him. We can discuss how to cope with what is happening to my mum, work out how many days to go to his at Christmas, which is less than a month away. I’ll tell him about Zoe, too. That’ll get him going.

I’m waiting for him to get back from uni when my phone rings. I don’t recognise the number. It’s Helen Kent.

‘Allison, hi! You rang me last night.’

‘Did I?’ I am utterly incapable of making up a lie to explain myself. ‘Yeah, I got your number off Zoe. How did you...?’

Thankfully, she doesn’t make me finish the sentence. ‘Mark recognised your number. We got cut off somehow. I would have called you back, but we were... anyway, I figured you’d call again if it was important.’

‘Has Zoe told you her news?’ I ask, letting Helen assume that this was what my call was about.

‘Just now. Isn’t that incredible? Her and Aidan. I mean, I could see her going out with him out of pity but Jesus, marrying him? What’s she on?’

‘She says she’s in love.’

‘She’s known him half her life. It’s not love, it’s desperation. She’s dropped out of uni and got that there may never be anyone else as good as this comes my way again feeling. I can’t blame her. I was nearly stupid enough to give up Mark. He’s coming to Turkey with my family at Christmas, did he tell you that? What are you and Steve doing?’

‘We’re going to his,’ I say, as though this is a routine visit rather than the first time I’ll have met his family. I’m relieved that he isn’t sleeping with Helen, but I’m hardly about to share confidences with her.

When I get off the phone, Steve’s home, carrying a large suitcase that I don’t recognise.

‘Where’s that from?’ I ask, as I put on the kettle to make a brew, like a dutiful housewife.

‘I borrowed it,’ he says, ‘from a friend,’ and at once I know what’s coming.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘I wanted to tell you yesterday but you were so down and...’

‘You thought you’d screw me one more time for the hell of it. Who is she?’

‘She’s a second year. You don’t know her.’

‘She has nice luggage.’

‘I’m not moving in with her. I’m not moving today. This is more...’

‘Symbolic?’ I say. ‘Let me guess, she made you bring it with you because it would force you to tell me why you had it?’

‘Something like that,’ Steve admits. ‘I’m not the living together type, with you for six months, that’s five months longer than anybody before...’

‘But you’d have chucked me after a fortnight if we hadn’t happened to be living in the same house.’

‘That’s not true. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry it’s a bad time, but there’d never be a good time, would there?’

‘I suppose not.’

I am torn between demanding details of his infidelities and wanting to be dignified. This is what happens when you date a slut. At least, because I knew about his past, we have always used condoms. I don’t need testing for STDs. I need my head examining for going out with him in the first place.

Steve can’t move out for several days. There are notice periods, deposits to be paid. But I can’t go on sharing a room with him. Next day, I persuade Jon, in my old room, to swap with me. The others are pissed off about losing the lounge/TV room but Steve’s hardly there, so they keep using his room anyway. I suppose he’s with his new woman. Changing rooms means that it’s Jon and not me who answers the door when a guy from five streets down shows up with a name tag and a flea collar.

‘He said his daughter came across her on the street a week ago but this is the first time he’s found anyone at home. She was run over.’

‘What happened to her body?’

‘I didn’t ask. You could hardly expect him to hold onto a dead cat for a week, could you?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

And I have to hurry upstairs because I am bursting into tears over a cat I never wanted in the first place. How will I explain to Mum that I let her cat die? How can I explain anything to her, the state she’s in?

Two weeks pass. Then term ends and everyone goes away. Except me. This is a good opportunity to get a load of work done. I need a good 2:1 if I am to hang around and do an MA, which is the only plan I can think of at the moment. As I’m driving out of the university after my last tutorial, I pass Helen. She waves, and I could easily offer her a lift, but I pretend not to see her. I’d have to talk to her. Mark isn’t just for birthdays and Christmas, I’d have to say. Right now I need him more than you do.

I decide I’ll work my way through the next six months. Never mind a 2:1, I’ll get a first.

I’m glad to be back in the attic room. I like the view from the window. Below, the students have gone home and the area is returned to its year-round residents, Asian and Italian families, young professionals in house shares. There are a few Christmas trees but they’re easy to ignore.

Zoe rings. She and Aidan haven’t decided a date yet but everything’s hunky dory. Before she can ask me what I’m doing over Christmas my battery dies and I decide, then and there, not to recharge my phone. I delete my facebook account. Email’s easy to ignore. So are the other people in the house. Now it’s just me, and my thoughts, in a high room, looking down on the world. Whatever happens is whatever happens. Random. Bring it on.

I saw him at the window again today. For a while I watched him at his computer, reading or writing, I’m not sure. Then he turned and stared at me as if I wasn’t there. He sits on his swivel chair, half facing the desk, half facing the window. Now and then he raises his head. Now and then our eyes meet across the street. Or would, if I could see his eyes. I am always the one who turns away first. I go and sit on my bed, which is to the side of the window, or I pull down the red blind. That’s another thing. He also has a red blind, the same shade as mine. But he never pulls it down.

Sometimes when I put my make-up on in the morning and I look around, he is already there, dressed, at the window of his study. I say it is a study, for it has a desk, and bookshelves, two plants. I don’t think he sleeps there. Does he go out in the day? I don’t know. Often he is in the study when I come home from university.

It is annoying, this being observed, yet I shall do my best to ignore it. I have a lot of work to get on with. I thought about moving the mirror, but it is brightest by the window. My mirror is round and very small. It needs all the light it can get.

This morning I get up early, raise my blind and move around the room in half light. Coming back from the bedroom in my dressing gown, I glance up and see him dart across the room, naked, to the desk. His body is thin and hairy, a little like Aidan’s. Coyly, he covers his genitals with an A4 envelope as he hurries out. No glance in my direction.

The man has dark hair and is thirty, or older. He appears to live alone. Probably the house is divided up into flats, as many are round here, but I cannot see through the lower windows. It’s possible he lives in a shared house, like me, or with a lover. At the weekends, he is nearly always in his study.

I don’t know what he does there all day — he wants me to try and guess, but I won’t give him that satisfaction.

The nights are drawing in. The red blind is so thin, I fear he can make out my shadow through it. But I can’t be sure. All I know is there are times I feel him watching me. Today is one. I go to the window. As I push a corner of the blind aside, I think I see his light go out. But I may be mistaken.

Outside, black clouds rush across the sky. His window is the first thing I look at when I come home from the university.

Some of the others have lace curtains, to keep out intruding eyes. His bathroom (or the room that I assume is his bathroom) has them too. Do the other windows on our side have such curtains? I have no way of knowing.

The nets we used for the Tarot readings must still be around.

Last night I dreamt of him at his desk. In the dream, I sit at the window, staring. Suddenly, he gets up, a huge piece of paper in his hand. He holds it up to the window. ‘WHY DON’T YOU CALL ME?’ he’s written, and, beneath it, a phone number. I look around for paper. I don’t know what I am going to write, but when I turn back a curtain has descended between his terrace and mine, like a thin cloud, or fog. I look at the paper and read what I have written there. ‘I don’t have a phone.’ Which is a lie. It sits by my bed, uncharged, waiting to be woken from its long sleep.