At the foot of the tower, voices and music roared from an open window several floors above. Robin grabbed my hand, and we walked through the wooden doors to a dull reception area, a single security guard sitting at a tiny screen, surrounded on all sides by lewd graffiti and defaced postcards. ‘Ladies,’ he said, with a grunt. ‘You students here?’
‘You really don’t recognize us by now?’ Robin said. ‘It’s me! Robin. Tenth floor.’ He shrugged and turned back to his screen, disinterested.
‘I can’t believe that worked,’ I whispered as we stood in the lift, Robin picking at her make-up in a mirror coated with dust and handprints, ‘FUCK THE TORIES’ scrawled in lipstick overhead.
‘Whatever. One of the boys would’ve come and rescued us, anyway,’ she said, with an overblown wink. I laughed. I had doubts about her boyfriend Andy’s capacity for rescue, based on the stories I’d heard from Alex and Grace earlier in the week, but held my tongue.
The lift shuddered to a halt on the eighth floor. ‘It only goes this far. Party’s on floor ten.’ She kicked the door, once; then again. It opened with a groan, and we stepped out into a dull corridor, the air curdling with a lingering smell of damp clothes and spilled beer.
I walked a few feet behind, pausing to examine the lurid posters and photographs stuck to each door. As I looked at one – a poster for Glastonbury Festival, two years earlier, the list of bands in such tiny print I had to lean in to take a look – the door swung open. I stumbled backwards, and Robin swung around, turning back.
In the doorway stood a tall, scraggly student, hair mussed as though he’d been interrupted from sleep, though given the pounding music above, this seemed highly unlikely (though I would eventually learn, through my own undergraduate experience, that it is indeed possible to sleep through anything, if one has enough work to ignore). ‘What’s this?’ he yawned.
‘Howdy,’ Robin said, not missing a beat. She extended a hand with a half-ironic formality which seemed capable of diffusing even the most fraught situations. ‘Robin Adams, pleased to meet you. This is Vivi. We’re going to a party – want to come?’
He stood staring blankly at her outstretched hand for a moment, blinking away sleep. ‘You’re inviting me to a party in the building I live in?’
‘Well, it’s my boyfriend’s party, so I figure technically I’m the hostess. Kind of,’ she said. ‘That means I get to invite who I like, even if they do live a few floors below and consider themselves above a formal invitation. And even if they don’t introduce themselves properly. Like, with a name.’
He glanced at me, for a split second, before turning back to Robin. ‘I’m Tom,’ he said, with a smile that gave his face an almost wolfish quality, attractive in a way I couldn’t place. I felt a flash of envy, in spite of myself, as he finally took Robin’s hand.
‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ she replied, coyly. ‘Well, we’re going to the party. Come if you want, or don’t. Your choice.’ She turned and strolled down the corridor, and I followed, looking back briefly to see Tom leaning in the doorway, still dazed by the encounter. He waved; I turned away and rushed to catch Robin, cheeks flushed with shame.
‘Bit of a rake, no?’ she said, when I reached the tenth floor to find her sitting on the railing, the ten floors below a sheer drop.
‘He looked like he needs a shower.’
‘They’re uni students. They all look like that.’ She laughed. ‘God, if you don’t like him, just wait till you meet Andy.’
On this, she was not mistaken. Andy, I would soon discover, was a skinny, mantis of a man, who – when we finally arrived, after a circuitous conversation with a student sitting red-eyed on the floor outside – was holding court on a single bed in an incongruously large dorm room, filthy dreadlocks clinging to his white, pimpled back in the fetid heat of the room. Even above the music, his voice carried shrilly, surrounded as he was by dazed students passing a succession of thick, glowing joints.
‘I’m not saying Ayn Rand isn’t problematic,’ he said, grandly. ‘It’s just that some of her ideas weren’t entirely without a kernel of truth. It just requires an open mind to see it.’ He coughed, a brittle, hacking cough, and Robin sidled up beside him to pat him gently on the back. He pulled her in for a nauseatingly long kiss, pausing for a drag on a joint, breathing the smoke into Robin’s open mouth. She turned to the group and, to my horror, pointed to me. ‘This is Vivi,’ she announced.
‘Hi, Vivi,’ they replied, as though hypnotized. Vivi, I thought, as I waved, awkwardly, and wandered to the makeshift bar in the far corner of the room. She sounds like fun. I poured a slug of off-brand cola into what looked to be an unused mug, whose faded university label proudly advertised ‘exceptional careers for exceptional students’. The warm liquid stuck in my throat, sharp and cloying.
I watched the mass of students, and wondered if this might be my own future; then, too, what exactly might be said to recommend it. I saw a girl dressed in a sleek Hepburn dress and tiara swaying precariously close to the open window, while a boy, deathly pale and shimmering with fake blood talked at her, staring wide-eyed into the middle distance. A few feet away, two girls – each with hair in luminous colours, turquoise green and Barbie pink, their make-up vivid, clown-like – sat cross-legged on the floor, engaged in a conversation that seemed to be turning sour. The girl facing me seemed to be growing more unsteady with every sip of vodka, taken directly from the by-now half-drained bottle; I counted a further three gulps before she rose, swaying, and stumbled out into the white glare of the hallway. A group of boys in ragged caveman furs stormed across the room, howling wildly, and proceeded to empty a carton of washing powder out of the window, onto some poor victim below. When it hit, they roared louder still, their hoots reminiscent of some monstrous creatures I had seen, once, on a nature programme.
Robin bounded over and poured herself a drink, topping mine up with a large slug of rum as she did so. ‘You like?’ she said, grinning.
‘Yeah, it’s cool,’ I lied, lifting the mug to my lips. The liquid was hot and searing; a rancid, chemical smell. I lowered the cup without swallowing, relieved to find her attentions elsewhere.
‘I love university parties. Not exactly the height of sophistication, but it’s nice to be around adults for a change.’ I searched her face for the irony absent from her voice, and nodded, solemnly, suppressing my own opinions on the matter. ‘Listen, I know it’s not normally your thing, but … Do you want one of these?’ She opened her palm, revealing a couple of white pills, their texture dusty, imprinted with a flower.
‘If it’s an aspirin, then definitely,’ I said, drily.
‘No pressure. It’s just … I thought I’d offer, so you don’t feel like you’re missing out.’
The boys roared again, now hurling bricks of soap and sopping balls of toilet paper out into the street below. The princess returned, tapped her friend on the shoulder, and gave her a weak kiss; the swaying girl still swayed, and the talking boy still talked.
I took the pill from Robin’s outstretched palm, and held it, nervously, in my own. I felt Robin wrap her arm around my shoulder with something like tenderness. ‘If you don’t like it, all you have to do is say you want to go. That’s it. If you feel weird, we’ll go straight home.’ The press of her, the promise, was enough: I swallowed the pill, washing it down with the searing, sour drink.
For the next fifteen minutes, I felt nothing, though I shuddered at every suggestion of warmth, every heartbeat a portent of doom. I had heard the stories of otherwise well-behaved teenagers who had died a sudden death from their first encounter with drugs, and imagined the cold words of the coroner’s report. My heartbeat quickened and slowed, the sense of panic rising and falling as I remembered, somehow, to breathe.
Still nothing, one moment of nothing after another,