LUKE
Will was muttering like a maniac and jabbing randomly at the quiz machine’s buttons.
‘Krypton . . . 1968 . . . The Diet of Worms . . .’
But he was getting every answer right. It was genuinely quite impressive.
‘How the hell do you know all thi—’
‘Shut up,’ he hissed. ‘We’re one off the money.’
He squinted at the screen. ‘Who wrote the 1925 novel The Trial?’ He spun round to face me. ‘Come on, English. This is all you.’
I pressed the ‘Franz Kafka’ button, and a few pound coins clattered out of the machine. ‘Fucking yes, mate!’ Will beamed, reaching down to collect the money. ‘Dream team.’
He squeezed past the pool table and I followed him up to the bar. ‘Played that machine so many times last year that I still remember pretty much all the answers. I might be fucking my degree up, but I could definitely get a first in pub trivia.’ He waved the barman over. ‘What d’you want?’
‘Nothing. I’ve got a seminar. Got to go back to the block and get my stuff.’ Will shrugged and ordered a pint, and I wondered if I should maybe try and talk to him about Abbey. About what ‘I’m not over you’ might actually mean.
Did it mean we were back together? It definitely didn’t feel like we were. Mainly because I hadn’t actually heard from her since the night we’d said it. It had been more than a week, and nothing. Not one single message. I’d been so pissed at the time, I was starting to doubt whether the conversation had even happened.
Will sipped his pint, and asked: ‘Your corridor still boring as fuck, then?’
‘I don’t see them, really.’ I shrugged. ‘They’re all doing Chemistry so they’re usually in labs all day.’
He nodded. ‘Cool. It’s just . . . I dunno what you’ve got sorted for houses next year, but we might have a spare room at my place.’
‘Oh, right. Really?’
It sort of knocked me sideways. The chemists were already talking about getting a house together next year, and in my head I’d been working up to asking Arthur and Rita what their plans were. But, then, they had their own mates and their own lives. They never actually messaged me, or arranged to meet up with me, like Will did. Arthur had only ended up next door to me because of asbestos and random chance. It wasn’t like we’d somehow bonded and found each other. The truth was, Will was probably the closest thing I had here to a proper mate.
‘Yeah, I’d be up for that,’ I told him. ‘Sounds good.’
He started counting the quiz machine winnings out on the bar. ‘I mean, nothing’s definite yet, mate. I need to see what Josh is doing.’
‘Of course, yeah.’
I said goodbye and went back to B Block to get my bag, where I found Beth and Barney in the kitchen furiously spraying air freshener to cover the stink of Arthur’s cheese.
I headed up the walkway to my seminar, pulling my jacket collar tight against the bitter wind and thinking for the zillionth time about that Abbey conversation.
The hardest thing was that I had literally no one to talk to about stuff like this. Last night, I’d got so sick of all these doubts and fears nagging at me that I’d even called Reece. But all we’d ended up talking about was how shit Arsenal were this season. I couldn’t get beyond the banter and pointless small talk. I couldn’t ever find the space to say what I really wanted to say: that I was starting to freak out. About everything; friends and football and not fitting in. But mostly about the idea that I’d broken something in Abbey, something that couldn’t ever be fixed.
It was like I was on edge all the time. Like I was slowly sinking, surrounded by people, and I couldn’t shout for help.
My phone buzzed, and my heart did its usual mini drum roll, but it wasn’t Abbey. It was someone on the football group; a fresher called Murf. I opened the message, which was another photo of a random sleeping girl – about the fourth this week.
You had to keep checking the group in case it was about training or a match, or something, but that meant you basically couldn’t avoid these photos. Dempers called it ‘The Wall of Shame’: whenever anyone in the team slept with a girl, they put a picture up. But the thing was, the pictures weren’t even the worst of it. It was the comments underneath that really gnawed at me. People rating the girls out of ten, saying horrible shit about the way they looked.
I looked at my phone again. Dempers and Geordie Al had already commented: ‘3/10 . . . Rough as fuck m8’ and ‘Any hole’s a goal . . .’ I put it back in my pocket and kept walking.
When I got to the seminar, everyone was already sat down. Phoebe was on the other side of the room, getting her books out of her rucksack. She looked particularly pretty today; her masses of curly hair were all pulled up neatly into a bun at the back, so you could see the whole of her face.
I tried, and failed, to make eye contact with her as I walked in. We didn’t even nod hello these days. As weirdly great as it had been to receive that text, I was starting to wish it had never happened. What was the point of fancying someone if they were too embarrassed to ever speak to you?
The idea suddenly occurred to me that I could even things out right then and there by sending her a text telling her how hot she looked. But I dismissed that pretty quickly as one of worst ideas anyone’s ever had.
Our tutor, Yorgos, came in, and dumped his bag on the desk.
‘Right,’ he announced. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you all today. Presentations.’
Someone groaned and Yorgos laughed. ‘I know, I know. Literature is supposed to be about sitting and writing, not standing and talking. But your essays will only make up seventy-five per cent of your mark this term. The other twenty-five per cent will come from this presentation.’
There was a louder groan this time, and Yorgos smiled again. He looked a bit like a younger, skinnier, less terrifying Javier Bardem. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You won’t have to go through this humiliating ordeal alone. You’ll do it in groups of three.’
He scanned the room. ‘And don’t just grab hold of your two friends next to you. Let’s mix things up a bit.’
He flicked his fingers like an orchestra conductor, picking out groups of three at random. On the last flick, he took in me, Hot Mary with the ridiculous hair, and Phoebe. ‘You three.’
Hot Mary grinned at me, and I grinned at Phoebe, but Phoebe just stared down intensely at her notepad.
As soon as the seminar was over, Phoebe bolted for the door, but Hot Mary blocked her off.
‘I was thinking we could grab a coffee, or something?’ she said to both of us. ‘Chat about the presentation?’
A few minutes later, the three of us were sat in Wulfstan Bar, drinking grainy lukewarm cappuccinos, and Phoebe had still not made eye contact with me. In fact, neither of us had actually said more than about five words. Hot But Ridiculous Mary seemed quite happy to do all the talking.
‘Like, I was thinking we should do the whole thing about memory, right?’ she was gabbling. ‘We could put Ted and Sylvia at the heart of it, obviously, but we can also bring in shitloads of other memory stuff: Joyce, Nabokov, Proust . . .’ She banged the table suddenly, causing half my coffee to bail out into the saucer. ‘Oh my god, we could make it a Proust-themed performance piece! Like, we could all sit at the front of the class, dunking bits of cake into cups of tea, talking about our earliest memories!’
She stopped speaking and stared at us, and I realized that she was finally expecting one of us to say something. She was wearing a green top with a sort of lightning-shaped split up one side. I could see a gothic-lettering tattoo snaking down into her jeans, but I couldn’t work out what it said.
I was focusing so intently on this that I momentarily forgot about the silence. Luckily, Phoebe didn’t. ‘Well . . . I like the memory thing,’ she said. ‘We should definitely do that. I’m just not sure about the performance piece bit.’ She smiled softly. ‘I’m not that much of a performer.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ Mary flapped her hands, dramatically. ‘You can leave the performance stuff to me. I could maybe even read out some of my poems. I’ve got one called ‘Winchester Casts No Shadows’ that deals heavily with the theme of memory . . .’
She reached down to get something out of her bag, and I saw that the tattoo said I love, I have loved, I will love. Out of nowhere, a memory hit me – a memory I didn’t even know I had – and it was like stepping on a landmine.
I looked at Phoebe. ‘You are a performer,’ I said. ‘You were whatshername in Grease. Frenchie.’
Mary stared at me. So did Phoebe. Mary was smiling a confused sort of smile, but Phoebe’s face was literally impossible to read.
‘I don’t know why I just remembered that,’ I carried on, feeling a weird rush from looking into Phoebe’s blue-green eyes for the first time since Freshers’ Fair. ‘It was Year Ten, wasn’t it? In the dining hall. You were great. I remember Annabel kicked her shoe off into the crowd and you ad-libbed a joke about it.’
Phoebe smiled, then looked down at her coffee. ‘Yeah, Year Ten, you’re right.’
I’d only gone to see it because Abbey had been Sandy. She’d looked ridiculously hot in the end scene with the leather trousers and blonde wig. I’d actually thought about auditioning for one of the bloke parts, but Reece had laughed so hard when I told him that I’d chickened out.
‘What the absolute fuck are you two on about?’ Mary demanded.
‘Me and Phoebe went to school together,’ I explained, and her eyes widened.
‘Oh, shit, this is perfect. So, like, maybe we can weave that in? I could do my poems, and then you two can, like, reminisce about sitting next to each other in double Physics, or whatever.’
This made me and Phoebe catch eyes again and smile.
Mary looked at her phone. ‘Oh fuckbags, I’m late for band practice.’ She stood up, artfully messing her multi-coloured hair with both hands. ‘You guys should totally come to our gig next week, by the way. We’re called Fit Sister. We do Electro Tuesdays in Gildas Bar.’ She slurped the rest of her coffee, and slammed the cup back down. ‘Anyway, chat later. Awesome brainstorm.’
Then she bounded off. And just like that, I was alone with Phoebe.
PHOEBE
The thing about Frenchie had totally freaked me out.
I’d basically been aiming to just keep my head down, not look at or speak to Luke, and then get out of the bar as quickly as humanly possible. But him mentioning Grease had dredged up all this random stuff I’d completely forgotten about.
That play had been right around the same time Luke and Abbey Baker had started going out. Every night, I’d come out of rehearsals to see him kicking a football against the wall, waiting for her. And then I’d go home and daydream pointlessly about what it’d be like if he was waiting for me instead.
Now that Bowl-Cut had disappeared, being alone with Luke definitely felt like too much to handle. It was like the text was flashing in front of me every time I looked at him. It was all just way too humiliating. I grabbed my bag, and was about to make an excuse and leave, when he spoke.
‘So, Mary’s quite . . .’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Isn’t she?’
That made me laugh, in spite of everything. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘She is.’
He mopped up some of his spilt coffee with a napkin. ‘I mean, there’s no way I’m sitting at the front of the class, dunking biscuits in tea and talking about my earliest memories.’
‘Yeah, I’m not really into that either.’ I still had one hand on my bag, ready to jump up and leave whenever the conversation stuttered or broke down. But it didn’t. It kept going.
‘Have you seen her tattoo?’ Luke asked.
I nodded. ‘“I love, I have loved, I will love.” Pret-ty deep.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Although it also sounds a bit like GCSE verb conjugation.’
‘True. Can you imagine what her poems are like?’
He raised his eyebrows again. He looked so fit. I tried not to think about it, as thinking about how fit Luke is tends to be what gets me into trouble. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It might actually be worth sacrificing twenty-five per cent of our first term mark just to hear them.’
We both laughed, and I thought, Is this what being a grownup is? Can proper adults accidentally text someone confessing their undying love, and then just have a friendly coffee with them afterwards? Is that really how the real world works?
‘I don’t want to be mean about Mary,’ I said. ‘I actually quite like her. To be honest, me and my friends are kind of obsessed with her.’
He nodded. ‘I’m kind of obsessed with her too. I sort of fancy her, but she also sort of terrifies me.’
Hearing him say he fancied Mary was definitely too much. I grabbed my bag handle a bit tighter, and Luke must have spotted it because he reached for his bag, too.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’re both agreed that we’re mildly obsessed with Mary, so that’s good. You heading back to Jutland?’
We finished our coffees and started wandering slowly back together. It felt like we were walking on ice. Feeling our way carefully back into normality. Every time it started to feel natural and easy between us, I remembered the text and imagined him reading it, and wanted to dissolve into the ground again. I prayed we didn’t bump into Frankie and Negin, as that really would send the awkwardness levels off the chart.
‘So,’ Luke said, ‘what actually is all this Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath stuff about memory? I sort of missed all that in the first seminar.’
He didn’t add: ‘I missed it because I was laughing my arse off at a message you’d just sent me calling me the hottest boy on Earth.’ But he must have been thinking it. It was the first time either of us had mentioned that seminar, and I felt my neck getting red. The text rash was following me. I pushed my scarf up to hide it.
‘Well, basically,’ I said, ‘what happened was, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met at this party, and it’s like one of the most epic and intense meetings in literary history. She bit his cheek and it bled.’
‘What? That’s a bit harsh.’
‘No, I think she just fancied him. Or it was like some kind of expression of . . . something. I don’t actually know. But she definitely bit him and from that moment they both knew that for better or worse they were tied together. Like they were meant to meet. And they both really believed in that kind of fatalistic moment.’
‘Right.’
‘But it’s just weird because they both wrote about it in their diaries, but one of them got this insignificant detail wrong. The blue or red ribbon thing. So, Yorgos was saying it means a lot because they are poets, and colour and imagery is significant, I suppose.’
Luke nodded slowly. ‘So, it’s like, either the ribbon was blue, and he really did see her clearly, like the person she really was . . . Or it was red, and he never really saw her. He just projected on to her what he wanted to see?’
‘Yeah, exactly,’ I said. ‘I agree with Mary, to be honest. It was her ribbon, she must have known. So, it was like he misread her from the very start.’
I could feel Luke looking straight at me. ‘OK, right,’ he said. ‘I get it.’
LUKE
I didn’t get it.
Was that what had happened with me and Abbey? Had I misread her from the start? Or had she misread me? Maybe she’d thought I was calm, steady blue, when really I was fiery, ruin-your-life red.
Thinking about Abbey made me suddenly feel guilty about liking Phoebe and even finding Mary hot-yet-terrifying. And then I felt guilty for thinking about Abbey and Mary when I should have been focusing on what Phoebe was saying. And then I got so frustrated with it all that I booted a conker off the walkway, scattering a bunch of squirrels.
‘Poetry’s too complicated,’ I muttered.
Phoebe laughed. ‘What do you like, then? Like, who’s your favourite writer?’
‘I dunno. I like John Fante and Ken Kesey. I like Hemingway a lot.’
‘Luke!’ She looked at me in what seemed like mock-horror, but could just as easily have been actual horror. ‘Hemingway was a violent drunk.’
‘I don’t mean I like him,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he was an absolute dick. But I do like his writing. I like how you can feel he’s really burning to find some sort of meaning from life. All these obsessions with shark fishing and bull fighting and big game hunting – like, doing mad, dangerous stuff to feel more alive.’
‘So, basically, loads of innocent animals had to die just for one drunk guy to “feel more alive”? I think I’ll stick to Jane Austen.’
We strolled past Jutland Bar and the computer room and the munchie machines. It was weird; it was like we were slowly finding a rhythm again. Nowhere near back to the easy banter of the Stephanie Stevens night, but not a million miles from it.
‘I’ve got a good book on Ted and Sylvia, actually,’ Phoebe said. ‘It was my mum’s – she was really into them. I can always lend you that if you want. Especially if we’re gonna be doing this whole presentation on them.’
‘Yeah, that’d be great, actually. Cheers.’
We were now right at the end of the walkway, where the path split, with D Block to the left and B Block to the right. We both stood there for a second, fidgeting with our bags and not looking at each other.
‘Well . . .’ Phoebe let the word hang in the air between us. I really didn’t want her to go. I wanted to keep hanging out with her.
‘Maybe . . . I could get it now?’ I tried. ‘The book, I mean?’
She fiddled with her massive scarf, and looked up at her window. Then she said: ‘Yeah. OK. Cool.’
D Block looked exactly the same as B Block, but the absence of Arthur’s headachey cheese smell made it seem more welcoming somehow.
Their kitchen was in a much worse state than ours, but Phoebe’s room was way tidier and nicer than mine. She’d actually bothered to decorate properly, for a start. There were pictures Blu-Tacked up all over the walls, and little, multi-coloured fairy lights strung over the sink cupboard. She reached up to get the Ted and Sylvia book from her shelf, and I squinted at some of the photos.
‘No way,’ I said. ‘Is that . . . Book Day?’
Among all the shots of Phoebe and her mates, there was a group picture of our whole school in Year Nine, with everyone dressed as different characters.
‘Yup’. She knelt on the bed next to me, and smiled as she looked at the picture. I peered harder at it, rocking forward on my knees. ‘Found you,’ I said.
‘The hair’s a giveaway,’ she sighed, taking a fistful of it and smoothing it out along her shoulder.
‘Are you . . . what?’ I looked closer, but I still had no idea. ‘A cloud?’
She laughed. ‘I’m the mouse.’
‘Oh, right, I get you: the mouse.’ I nodded. ‘The mouse. The generic mouse of literature. Which mouse?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘The Gruffalo mouse. Look.’ She pointed at the girl next to her, who appeared to be dressed as the devil. ‘Flora is the Gruffalo. Do you remember Flora?’
I did remember Flora, but I didn’t know she was called Flora. ‘Yeah, I remember her,’ I said. ‘Gruffalo and Gruffalo Mouse. That’s a bit . . . niche, isn’t it?’
She shrugged and handed me the Ted and Sylvia book. ‘The niche stuff is the best stuff. Are you even in this picture or were you too cool for Book Day?’
‘Of course I’m in it,’ I pointed at tiny, spiky-haired, fourteen-year-old me, squashed in between Reece and Harry on the back row. ‘I’m the greatest literary character of all time. Boy in an Arsenal kit.’
Phoebe made a face. ‘You wore an Arsenal kit to Book Day?’
‘Yeah, someone, somewhere, in the vast expanse of world literature has definitely worn an Arsenal kit. The bloke out of Fever Pitch for a start.’
‘The bloke out of Fever Pitch,’ Phoebe scoffed. ‘Classic.’
‘It is a classic, thank you very much’.
‘Whatever. You’re just crap at dressing up. Admit it. What did you wear to the emoji party? A smiley face, or something, wasn’t it?’
‘Thumbs-up, actually.’
‘Well, you could’ve made more of an effort,’ she laughed. And even though I knew she didn’t mean anything by it, it still made me think of the quidditch bail. And Abbey. And all the other fuck-ups I was leaving in a long trail behind me.
Could’ve made more of an effort. That would probably be written on my fucking gravestone.
I sighed and slumped down from kneeling to sitting on the bed. ‘Yeah, it’s true. The thing is, Phoebe, I guess I’m just, y’know . . . a bit of a prick, really.’
I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. She just stared at me hard. Which was quite disconcerting, as we’d only really been making nervous, fluttering, two-second eye contact since we got into the room.
‘You’re not a prick, Luke,’ she said slowly. Then she scooched away from me slightly, and started looking at the other photos. ‘Do you remember Zoe Kenney’s seventeenth?’ she asked. ‘In her dad’s massive house?’
‘Er . . . yeah,’ I said, although I had no recollection of Phoebe being at that party at all.
‘Well, you remember when Chris Isaacs and Alex Paine and that lot showed up? They were really pissed and they started giving Justin all that shit? Going on about how his long hair made him look like a girl?’
The memory started to defrost in my head. It was a horrible moment. They’d pushed Justin Hader on the floor and Chris had grabbed a pair of scissors, telling him they were going to give him a proper haircut. A boy’s haircut.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember.’
‘You were the one that stopped that,’ Phoebe said quietly. ‘You pulled Chris off him. You got them to leave him alone.’
‘Chris Isaacs and Alex Paine were the biggest twats in the whole school.’
‘Yeah, but they listened to you.’
‘Only cos I was on the football team with them.’
‘Yeah, well, either way . . .’ She looked at me again, right in the eyes. ‘That awful thing didn’t happen because of you. And I remember thinking, at that moment . . .’ She tailed off, and then shook her head gently, like she was embarrassed or something. She smoothed out another fistful of her long, curly hair. ‘Well, I remember thinking Luke Taylor’s not a prick, anyway.’
I tried to laugh, but it got stuck in my throat. It was like she’d shaken me awake suddenly, reminded me there was more to me than what had happened with Abbey. I sat there in silence on the bed next to her, pretending to look at the photos, and for the first time in for ever, I actually felt OK.