Student (3 page)

Mark lets me win and goes off to buy another drink, even though I try to insist it’s my round. Helen and I pretend to bond.

‘I used to be so jealous of you going out with Mark when I was in the lower sixth,’ Helen says. ‘I don’t think he even noticed me until you left.’

I don’t know how I appear to react to this, but Helen blunders on. ‘Are you going to be all right with it next year, Mark being in the same city?’

Has Mark told her who dumped who? He probably said the same to her as I said to Cate, that it was mutual. Technically, though, I dumped him.

‘People from the two universities don’t mix much,’ I tell her, wondering if she’ll note the warning. Second years don’t tend to mix much with first years, either, not at first, anyway — unless you count the ones who prey on sweet young virgins, a category Helen definitely doesn’t belong to. ‘It’s really not a problem for me.’

‘Great. I hope we can be friends. If I get in here, I mean.’

‘We can be friends anyway,’ I assure her.

She’s waiting for a freely given promise that I don’t want Mark back, but she’s not going to get it, and is too streetwise to ask. In a fair fight, she’ll always win. Helen and Mark live six streets from each other. I’m a hundred and fifty miles away.

‘Want another game?’ Helen has already taken a coin out of her purse and released the balls.

‘Hey!’ Noises off.

‘I think it was their turn to play,’ I point out to her.

‘Sorry,’ she turns to them, all charm. ‘Fancy a game of doubles, on me?’

‘No, you’re all right,’ says a guy in an oversized woollen jumper.

‘Are you sure? We don’t bite, I promise.’

‘All right then,’ says his mate, who’s wearing a combat jacket.

‘Great,’ Helen says, beaming, then, sotto voce to me. ‘He’s cute.’

Mark returns with the drinks and watches as the two women he’s trained combine to slaughter the newcomers. The lads try to laugh it off, putting in their money for the next game and insisting on a rematch. But I have to go. As I’m saying goodbye to Mark I see Helen whisper something to combat jacket. He comes over.

‘Your friend says it’s OK to ask for your mobile number,’ he says, sheepishly.

I try not to frown. He is quite cute. ‘What’s your name?’ I say.

‘Simon.’

‘OK, Simon. I’m Allison.’

Do I like him? We have discussed nothing other than pool shots and I’m pretty sure he’s a mechanical engineer. I give him my number anyway.

At the door, Mark kisses me goodbye, on the forehead.

Helen leans forward to give me a hug.

‘I’m going to forgive you for what you and Mark got up to at Christmas,’ she whispers in my ear. ‘Mark says it was a one off.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I was... upset.’

‘You don’t have to make excuses,’ Helen tells me. ‘He’s already eaten his humble pie.’ She turns to Mark, who’s looking decidedly queasy. ‘At least he had the guts to tell me. See you at Easter.’

I nod, then hurry out of the Portland Building with my head down, humiliated at being so outclassed by somebody from the year below.

Later, after several more games of pool and three pints of cider, I go to bed with Simon. I want to capture some spark of what I felt with Mark on Christmas Eve. Or what I wish I think I felt. I was too drunk for me to remember much beyond the closeness and the long-imagined sensation of having him inside me. This time, it’s over in seconds and Simon can’t wait to get out of my room. I could sense it, all the time I was with him: he wanted me to be Helen. But that’s fair enough, because I wanted him to be Mark.

One life slips into another. These days, West Kirby’s merely the place I visit during vacations. It’s hard to be bothered that Zoe Pritchard has dropped out of uni and is working in the travel agents, or that some guy I barely knew at school crashed his car. I went out with Mark just once over Easter break. Helen was too busy to join us: revising, supposedly. I tried to get Mark to come round again, when Mum was away with some bloke, but he said he was working six days of the week at the golf club, getting up ridiculously early. I ended up doing half an e with Zoe instead. Her parents were away so I didn’t have to think much about bastard Bob. We got trashed on skunk and watched shit on satellite TV. God, I’m glad to be back in Nottingham.

Mark asked if I was seeing anyone. Too proud to tell the truth, too honest to lie, I said there was somebody on my corridor interested in me, but I wasn’t sure about them. What I didn’t tell Mark was that the interested party was female. Though that might have turned him on.

Now we’re back, all the talk in hall is of ‘next year’ and who’s going to live with whom. I like hall, but only saddoes stay for a second year. Half the people you talk to have already sorted out a house share in Dunkirk or Lenton with their ‘bessie mates’. Nobody’s asked me. That is, several people have asked me what I’m doing next year and I’ve shrugged or hinted (perhaps not strongly enough) that I’m open to offers. But I haven’t had any offers. Except from Vic. Vic, short for Victoria, comes from a small town in Derbyshire where there’s no gay scene whatsoever. Until uni, she’d had a couple of boyfriends who made her think she was frigid. In her second week here, she let a girl pick her up at a dive in town and had her first orgasm. She’s been having one nighters with women ever since, but now she wants a relationship and I’m her chosen love object. She can’t handle a relationship with the sort of woman she meets in town, she says. I think she’s looking for a mirror image. We’re the same height (5’4”), brown hair with blue eyes. OK, my chest is flatter than hers and her face is flatter than mine, but if we cut our hair the same way, you could take us for sisters. In bad light.

‘Have you ever thought about sleeping with another woman?’ Vic asks over late night coffee (decaf).

‘Thought about it. I’ve also thought about murder and masochism, doesn’t mean I’m interested in trying them.’

‘Why not? Shouldn’t you try everything that doesn’t hurt anyone?’

‘In theory, sure. In practice, you have to fancy someone first.’

Vic takes the hint and doesn’t use the ‘time to experiment’ line again. A week later, she suggests that we share a flat together. I tell her I’m flattered but don’t think it’ll work.

‘People will assume we’re a couple. That’d cramp both our styles.’

‘Let them assume what they want. We’ll have a great time.’

I change my argument. ‘There are hardly any two-bed places to be had and they cost the earth, Vic. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to live with you. If we had enough people for a shared house, perhaps...’

‘I’ll sort it,’ she says.

Like me, Vic gets on fine with people in hall and has friends on her course but nobody she’s anxious to form a second, replacement family with. And that’s how most of the house hunters seem to see their future.

‘Time’s running out,’ Vic says a day later. ‘A lot of the best houses are already gone. We should start checking out notice-boards.’

‘OK,’ I say, comforted at having a partner in this quest, although neither of has much idea what we’re searching for.

Nobody’s sweating end of year exams, except me. They’re pass/fail and the marks don’t count towards your final degree result. I’ve always been anal about passing exams but, this year, I have a bigger priority: I want to get a boyfriend before Helen and Mark show up in the autumn. I’ve been for drinks with a couple of guys on my course. Nothing came of them. The nearest I’ve come to having sex lately was when a lad from the floor above me almost knocked me over when he was coming back from the pub the other night. He apologised and asked me if I’d like to sleep with him. I said ask me again when I’m sober. He hasn’t.

But I’m not that desperate. At a hall party last weekend, I went back to what I thought was a girl’s room to smoke some weed, but the girl (name forgotten) disappeared into the adjoining room and I found myself with a long-haired biker type, who gave me a slim line of coke, then got his prick out and asked me to lick it. I was out of there faster than you can say eeugh. I had other offers that night but the coke made me edgy and I think I must have slagged off the guys who tried to chat me up. I had to drink loads before I came down enough to sleep. Vic says I was advocating compulsory castration for even the mildest forms of sexual harassment.

‘I don’t think speed agrees with you,’ Vic told me.

‘He said it was coke.’

‘I know that greaser. He’s too hard up to fork out for coke. It would have been sulphate.’

‘Perhaps I’d better avoid both in future.’

‘I would if I were you. You turned pretty scary.’

May’s nearly over. The exams are a week away and neither of us have a place to live next year. Vic knows this guy called Paul. They met at Gaysoc. He seems all right and is in the same position as us, but three’s an even more awkward number. There are small houses we could rent a fair way out, in places like Long Eaton, but the ones near University Park all have five or six bedrooms. Vic and I go to an agency, who offer us bedsits: city centre, purpose-built, pile-’em-high, student cages. Paul contacts an old school Asian landlord who has houses in Lenton. There’s one, he’s told, where only a couple of people are staying on next year. We say we’ll see it that evening.

The Derby Road runs from the university to the edge of the city, a long, steep hill. Albert Grove is near the top, in Lenton Sands. We get there early and walk past the house, which is halfway down on the left, to the pub, the Old Peacock, at the bottom of the street. There are a few shops, including a supermarket and a chippy.

‘This could suit,’ Paul says. We agree to check out the pub after we’ve seen the house.

The guy who lets us in has a beard and a slight stoop, probably due to his height. He’s at least a foot taller than me. ‘Mr Soar told me to expect you,’ he says. ‘Shall I make us a brew while we wait for him?’

He’s a second year called Finn. I want to quiz him about why he hasn’t got three mates of his own to invite into the house. While I’m trying to think of a tactful way to do this, Vic wades in.

‘You say three people are leaving. Why haven’t you got some mates lined up to move in?’

‘Tess is a fourth year medic, like me. Our friends have already got houses.’

My mother would be impressed if she knew I was living with doctors, even trainee ones.

‘Can you take us round?’ Paul asks.

‘I don’t suppose the others would mind.’

The house is on the shabby side of dingy. Finn explains that he and Tess plan to move into the two downstairs rooms next year. We nod as though this is the most natural thing in the world, although I’m not sure I’d want a front-facing, ground floor bedroom. At the moment, the front room seems to be a living room, with a sofa, telly and DVD player.

The landlord arrives when we’re up in the attic room, which isn’t too big, but has a skylight and a window looking out onto the street and the house opposite. You can lean out and see who’s at the front door. I want it.

‘What do you think?’ Mr Soar asks.

‘How long can we have to think about it?’ Paul wants to know.

‘I show another group round tomorrow evening,’ Mr Soar says. If you call my mobile before then, the rooms are yours. If not...’ He shrugs theatrically.

We would like to meet Tess, our other putative housemate, but she’s not back from university yet, Finn says. He gives us his mobile number, so we can call him if there’s anything else we want to know, then we go down to the pub to talk it over.

It’s one of those pubs that must have once been a proper local only now students have taken it over, on both sides of the bar. The beer is cheap and so is the food. There’s a queue for the pool table. As Paul is buying the drinks, I overhear the people at the next table.

‘Think they’ll have gone by now?’ the woman says. I assume, wildly but, as it turns out, correctly, that they are talking about us.

‘Give it another five minutes,’ a bloke says.

Vic starts to say something. I put a finger to my lips and jerk my head in their direction.

‘I hope he changed his socks before they turned up,’ a bloke says.

‘God, I won’t miss the smell of his feet,’ says the girl.

‘How do you think Tessa stands it?’ A second bloke asks. ‘I was sitting next to him in the cinema last week. It was like stale gorgonzola wafting at me all evening. I nearly puked.’

‘Tess told me she got him to wear odour eaters,’ the girl says, ‘but that doesn’t work in bed. She has to change the sheets twice a week.’

‘Is that why they’re always down the laundrette? I assumed they were having lots of...’

‘I thought Tessa was one of those women who liked to sit on the washing machine with her legs wide open when it was on full spin and, you know...’ the first bloke says and the girl cackles loudly so that some people look round, which gives me an excuse to do the same. The second bloke, who has a goatee, isn’t laughing. The first guy is squeezing the woman’s knee beneath the table. These three look like medics, in that they’re more middle class and seem better off than most students. They have a supercilious sheen that makes me want to smack them. I didn’t get that vibe from Finn (or notice any smell coming from his feet). He’s more of a hippy. And if Tess or Tessa goes out with him, presumably she’s OK too. Paul returns with the drinks. Vic puts a finger to her mouth and hisses, ‘Next table. The other people from the house.’

They’ve gone quiet. I’m consumed by an urge to confront them. Or at least embarrass them a little. I do that sometimes. Mark calls these my fuckitall moments.

‘Excuse me,’ I say, and the woman looks in my direction. She can’t be more than two years older than me but her expression says I don’t belong in her world. I haven’t decided what I’m going to say to her. Vic and Paul are having kittens. They really want this house, I can tell.

‘Do you live round here? Only we’re thinking of moving up the hill.’

‘Which road?’ Guy number one wants to know.

‘Albert Grove.’

‘Good street,’ he says. ‘Not too busy. Some of them are used as cut throughs by, you know, commuters.’

‘Which university are you at?’ the woman asks.