Student (2 page)

When he’s returned with the coffee, Mark rolls a joint. He always has better dope than anyone else, gets it at the golf club. Don’t know who from. Dope takes me deeper into myself, but it doesn’t help me open up about what I find there. Mark asks whether I’m seeing anyone. I shake my head.

‘Guys in Nottingham are just the same as guys here. Immature. Present company excepted, of course.’

‘You always said you got on better with boys than with girls.’

‘I do. Except for the ones who want to go out with me.’

‘Present company excepted?’

‘I’ve always thought of you more as a friend than a lover,’ I fib.

‘I noticed.’

I give him a sheepish smile. I nearly slept with Mark, several times, but I wanted to be sure before I lost my virginity. Stupid. Nobody’s ever sure. We were together eight months and he deserved more than a couple of inept blow jobs. I’ll bet Helen Kent gives him whatever he wants. I say none of this. I keep thinking about how Bob Pritchard was nearly my first and I wish I’d succumbed to Mark long, long before that horrible morning, which I keep trying to erase from my memory.

After a while, I announce that I have the munchies and demand my usual hall of residence late night snack: peanut butter on digestive biscuits washed down with a large glass of cold milk.

‘You’ll get fat,’ he teases as I wolf it down.

‘I wish,’ I say, pointing at my tummy, which is not so much flat as concave. Mark always claimed to love my small bottom and tiny tits, but now he’s going out with Wonder Woman so I suspect he was exaggerating.

I have to go home. My dad’s picking me up to spend Christmas Eve with him, his second wife, and my two-year-old half brother. Stoned, I think I can face them. I haven’t seen Dad since the day after the exam results, when he was so pleased with my three As that he promised me a car, even though I don’t know how to drive. I ask Mark whether he’ll come round on Boxing Day, but he ducks the question.

‘I’ll ring you,’ he says.

The world has changed. He has to consult Helen first.

Mark sees me to the door and kisses me goodbye on the forehead. Once, he would have offered to walk me home.

I spent last Christmas Eve at Mark’s. His parents went to Midnight Mass but didn’t insist we went with them. When they got back, all smiles and mince pies, they gave me a lift home. I found Mum asleep on the sofa, bottle by her side. I couldn’t wake her and wasn’t strong enough to drag her to bed.

Dad’s second wife, Ingrid, is thirty. When I was born, she was eleven or twelve. It doesn’t seem natural. I mean, it is natural, but it’s equally natural that I don’t want to see her, or my half brother. And it occurs to me, stoned, as I float home along dull suburban streets, that I don’t have to see them. I don’t even have to see Dad, who walked out on me, as well as Mum, the year before I did my GCSEs. In fact, fuck it. I won’t.

Back at Beacon Drive, Mum has already gone out. She’s left a note saying ‘dinner at four tomorrow’. If last year is anything to go by, this is wildly optimistic. I find a small turkey in the fridge, alongside several bottles of white wine, not all of them cheap. At least she’s making an effort. I wonder who Mum’s spending the evening with. She never discusses her love life, nor me mine. This being Christmas Eve, her date’s unlikely to be married, but I wouldn’t put anything past her.

I write a note for Dad and put it on the door. In my room, I wait for him to come and go. While I’m waiting, I think about Mark and Helen. I’m jealous. There’s no point in denying that to myself, no matter how stoned I am. I want to hurt someone and the only person I can hurt is Dad. I imagine him banging on the door, insisting I accompany him to his detached dream house in Meols, a wedding present from his wealthy new in-laws.

I pour myself some wine. Half a glass. Nearly everyone I know spends their free time getting off their face. I’d like to be the same, but don’t like to lose control. Dope relaxes me. Too much, maybe. I’m sure Mark failed his exams because he smoked too much weed. That’s the biggest reason I didn’t sleep with him. Weed made him laid back and cerebral. He didn’t pressure me to let him into my knickers. If he’d begged more, I would have caved.

I want to put some sounds on, lose myself in music, but I also want to hear Dad come and go. I’ve put the lights in my room on full, so he’ll know I’m in. I want to hear him react to what I’ve written in the note pinned to the front door. I look at my watch. He’s twenty minutes late. The wine’s gone. Bracing myself for the effort involved in ignoring him, I make myself a large gin and tonic. Mum always has two fingers of gin. I settle for one.

I don’t want to be a virgin. At uni, only the Christian girls are saving it and you can already see them beginning to have doubts. Everyone else got it over with before arriving or failing that, during fresher week. Some lads came on to me then, too, but nobody tried hard enough. There was always someone round the corner who would offer less resistance.

The phone rings. I check that Dad isn’t outside before answering it.

When I come off the phone, thirty seconds later, I add the second finger of gin to my drink. So what if his wife and son are both ill, it’s me Dad doesn’t want to see. When he started to go on about rescheduling for next week, I hung up.

I make another drink. And another. I decide that I really, really want to smoke some more dope. It’ll chill me out. But I don’t have any. I only know one person who definitely does and he’s probably with Helen. She’ll be round at his, like I was last year. I’m far too proud to ring him.

I’ll run myself a bath instead. That always relaxes me. Or I’ll buy some cigarettes. I sometimes smoke when I’m drunk, though I know it’s the start of a slippery slope.

After finishing my third gin and tonic, when there’s nothing on TV, I ring Mark. He drives round in his mum’s car. I didn’t even know he’d passed his test, that’s how out of touch I am. I’m sorry, though, that he’s driven, because it means he won’t have a drink and getting him intoxicated is the only device I have to get him into bed. I refuse to cry because my dad abandoned me on Christmas Eve. I refuse to.

‘I can’t believe what a bastard he is,’ Mark says. ‘It’s no wonder your mother...’ Tactfully, he doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he hugs me.

When I finish crying, I wash my face. Mark makes coffee. I don’t think he can tell how much I’ve had to drink, how much Dutch courage I needed before I could bring myself to call him. He rolls me a couple of joints, explaining that he’d better not smoke, since he’s driving.

‘But don’t let me stop you,’ he says, handing over a fat one.

I shake my head. ‘We’d better find something else to do.’

Mark gives me one of his silly, lop-sided grins. I take him by the hand and lead him upstairs. I’m worried that at any point he’ll stop, mention Helen. He doesn’t say anything. We undress each other like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He makes love to me gently. It hardly hurts at all. I’m sorry I’m so drunk, because I want to remember this, I want to experience it fully. I’ve waited a long time to find out what it feels like to have somebody else inside me.

If Mark is surprised I’m still a virgin he doesn’t say. Or maybe he can’t tell, thinks that the blood is from my period. After he’s taken the condom off, he holds me.

‘We should have done that this time last year,’ I say.

‘I only ever get things when I give up hoping for them,’ he tells me.

There’s no self-pity in his words, but they make me uncomfortable.

‘So much for hope,’ is all I can think of to say.

At ten thirty, Mum comes crashing in. We listen as she goes to bed, not realising I’m home. I want Mark to make love to me again but he has to go. He needs to get the car back to his parents for Midnight Mass.

‘You’re great, Allison,’ he tells me. ‘Too great to stay round here. Too great to let your dad get to you.’

After he’s gone, I keep thinking about Helen Kent, wondering if he went from me to her. Downstairs, I smoke one of the joints he left behind but stub it out halfway because I’m about to flake out.

When I wake on Christmas morning, I’m a little sore. It takes a couple of moments for me to remember why. While my bath is running, I put the oven on for the turkey.

Mark has had several months in which to visit, but now his girlfriend has an interview at Nottingham and he’s dropping everything to drive her over. We arrange to meet for lunch, after my midday lecture. Mark’s confident he can find Mooch, even though he’s never been to the city before.

When I turn up, he’s already waiting at the bar, drinks bought, big grin on his face, telling me I look good, even though I’ve let my hair grow over my neck and he likes it short, or used to.

‘Is it right what they say, that you spend your most of your first year getting rid of the friends you made in your first term?’

I consider correcting the quotation, providing what I think is the right attribution (my mum has the Brideshead Revisited box set) but manage to restrain myself. Back in sixth form, Mark was often on at me to ‘tone down my act’, not scare people off with my intelligence. Whereas I was looking for people to compete with me. At university, I thought I’d make friends who’d want to debate and dissect. But those soulmates only exist in Oxbridge novels. Here, everyone wants to get trashed all the time, just like at home.

‘I didn’t make that many friends in my first term,’ I tell Mark. ‘You know how I am. I don’t make friends easily.’

He looks concerned so I burble on. ‘I mean, I know loads of people. I’m not lonely or anything.’

‘Or anything,’ he repeats, an old trick of his to get me to expand on what I’ve said without actually questioning me.

‘Allison!’ Cate West, from my corridor. ‘Did you hear that noise at two this morning. I thought...’ She notices Mark and brazenly looks him up and down, liking what she sees. ‘Where has Allison been keeping you hidden?’

‘Merseyside. I’m visiting.’

‘Allison’s so mysterious. She never let on she had someone at home.’

‘She dumped me last summer. But we’re still mates.’

‘I didn’t dump you,’ I protest. ‘It was mutual — more or less.’ Then I direct my dagger eyes at Cate. ‘Actually, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do and Mark’s only got a couple of hours.’

Cate raises one eyebrow. ‘Sor-ree.’

As she flounces off, Mark frowns, then shakes his head. ‘That’s the reason you haven’t got many friends.’

I kick him affectionately in the ankle. He kicks me back.

‘How’s Helen?’ I want to know.

‘You can ask her yourself.’

‘I’d love to, but I have a seminar at two.’

‘She’ll be here before that. She really wants to talk to you. She’s serious about coming here.’

‘You can tell her what I’ve told you.’

‘You haven’t told me anything yet. You haven’t even told me if you’ve got a boyfriend.’

‘That’s a non-sequitur,’ I tell him, although I know this is key information for Helen. She will feel much more comfortable about my seeing Mark if I have a new bloke in tow. Maybe I should find a malleable gay man from central casting who will charm Helen so much she fails to notice that I’m winning Mark back. Only I don’t want to win him back. What good is an on-off boyfriend back home? I’d like to sleep with him again. I’d like to sleep with someone. Having sex just once feels like a cruel trick I’ve played on myself — better not to have found out that I liked it.

‘There’s nobody serious,’ I add. ‘You know how hard I am to get close to.’

‘You know how close I am to getting hard,’ Mark says, another old gag, but one that doesn’t sit well with me this afternoon.

‘How are your retakes going?’

‘It’s not going to be a problem,’ Mark says. ‘Long as I get a C in English Lit, I’m in.’

‘In where? Cardiff again?’

‘No. Nottingham. The other place. Trent. Why do you think Helen’s applied here?’

I want to punch him. He never showed any interest in coming to Nottingham when we were going out.

‘I did a really good job of selling the city, did I?’

‘I always fancied it. Before, I’d have felt funny, following you here. But since we split up, I thought why not?’

‘And Helen doesn’t think it’s odd, coming to the same city as you?’

‘We want to stay together.’

‘Don’t you think it might be a bit weird, the two of you starting university at the same time, in the same place, but on a different campus?’

‘Don’t see why. We’ve been together six months. That’s more than you and me managed — consecutively, anyway.’

This last with a wry grin. ‘But we won’t be on top of each other. Also, if things don’t work out, it’s not as though we’ll run into each other all the time.’

‘You really have thought it through.’

‘I’m serious about her. I want you to be friends with her. Hey, look. It’s our turn on the pool table.’

Mark had left money on the pool table, booking us a turn. It’s not like in the pubs at home, where the winner stays on and challengers put the money in. Mark, being Mark, has sussed out the system before I got here. I let him break. We used to play a lot of pool. It’s a good way to get around not having enough to talk about when you want to stay in the pub all evening. And it’s a good way to avoid talking about what he’s just told me.

We have never spoken about or referred to what happened on Christmas Eve. Mark did me a favour, that’s how I try to think about it. Your first time ought to be with someone you care about. What happened between us was an epilogue, a way of wrapping up my relationship with him, which lasted most of the upper sixth, if you don’t count the times when I was trying to dump him. We were together longer than six months, by the way. More like a year.

We’re down to two balls each when Helen arrives, early. Her interview has gone well. She asks no-brainer questions about the university while I try to beat her boyfriend at pool.

I answer impatiently. It’s obvious her experience will be different to mine. Look at her, nearly six feet tall with the sort of breasts other women have to pay for. She’s a walking advert for the National Health Service and the wonderbra. Even soberly dressed for interview, she’s a sex-bomb. Also she’s warm and friendly, all the things I’m not. When Helen asks a question, it’s because she’s interested in the answer rather than because she enjoys interrogating people (this isn’t how I feel but it’s the impression I give, according to a carefully balanced selection of my friends and enemies). People will queue up to be Helen’s friend.