But recently she has started to reinsert herself into my thoughts. I see someone in the street with the same gait, or the same curl in the bottom of their hair, and my stomach lurches. I catch a whiff of her perfume – a sort of honey blossom scent – and my palms begin to sweat, I feel light-headed, convinced that she is in the vicinity.
It feels different this time. The newspaper headlines, the flashes of her face across the TV screens … I can’t help but suspect that everything is about to come to light. She is catching up with me. I need to set the record straight before someone else gets there first. I need to tell the story, as it was, from the beginning.
October 2013
i.
Marina and I met during our first term at Northam: a tiny elite university in rural England. At that stage I had been living on the campus for about three weeks, and I felt like I was on the brink of insanity. If that sounds flippant, narcissistic or entitled – good. I was eighteen years old. I was angry all the time and I hated university. Everything about it had fallen short of my expectations, from my room (which was small and dusty) to the nearby city (dull) to my teachers (likewise) to my floormates (shrill or condescending, often both). My course was limited in scope, heavy in reading, and there was a snippy, competitive atmosphere among my classmates which prevented us from becoming friends.
That last point I found especially disheartening. I had grown up in a small town with hardly any people in it – I had few friends, no siblings and my parents were antisocial – and I saw university as the point at which my life would really begin. There I would finally meet people who spoke the same language that I did. I would meet a group of people with conflicting opinions. I would have my mind wrenched open, would stretch my perceptions beyond what I had been taught, and I would learn – really learn – how other people saw things.
In reality everything was the same. The existing hierarchies and prejudices remained intact behind a screen of diversity. Conversations were either flat or gratingly pretentious. Everyone spoke about irrelevant topics in a language that I didn’t understand, and dismissed my contributions with a load of obscure statistics.
I’d told myself that I wouldn’t start drinking alone, but with that form of self-medication out of the window, there seemed only one good option left. I grabbed my laptop from my desk. I sat on my bed in my cold, damp room. For hours on end, I scrolled down my newsfeed.
The autumn of 2013 was the moment of the social media boom. True, certain giants had established themselves earlier in the millennium – by the time the iPhone came out in 2007, Facebook and Google were already a daily ritual. But in 2013 the market suddenly exploded, and a flurry of new apps and features arrived to steal your attention. The result of this – especially if you were a university student with little to do during the day – was that you were constantly glued to your devices.
I was no exception obviously. I had the full English: Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc – and my eyes were permanently locked to a screen. Sometimes this would mean that I was doing something productive (reading an article, writing an email) but mostly I was watching the digital lives of others. I was reading their statuses. I was reading their wall posts. I was studying their photographs, even the ones they weren’t tagged in. I was analysing their social lives in microscopic detail, tracing through their friend networks to see who their good-looking friends were going out with, what their interests were, what their cousin’s ex-partners looked like now.
When I did this time would soften and dissolve, so that I eventually forgot that it was passing. My surroundings would disappear. Then my sense of physical boundaries: having skin; a body. All that I would eventually become conscious of was the white rectangular heat of the laptop light on my face and the cold sensation of plastic or glass under my fingers. I would spiral from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter, back to Facebook, across to Instagram, looping and circling around again, refreshing the page impatiently, impatiently refreshing it again, rearranging the tabs, clicking on clicking off, tapping on tapping off, tapping back on and spinning back around again until some instinct caused me to wrench my eyes away and – stop. I was concerned by how much time I spent doing this, but I was also aware that there was a kind of satisfying fluidity to it. The Internet felt like a space which I could navigate freely.
Needless to say, I hardly posted anything on my own profile. That wasn’t the point. The point was that I could watch what other people were doing. I could watch my new peers. In this way it acted as a kind of sedative, a dose of virtual sugar, a way to fill my head with fug and so distract myself from reality. I could roll the mouse down my newsfeed for hours, and the photographs, the witty comments and the tags would keep coming. It was a numbing distraction, like watching a film or reading a novel.
But there was also a weird element of inclusion to it. Looking at those lives onscreen – I didn’t feel excluded in a way that I did from the people around me, or from the narratives I read or watched on TV. There was something interactive about watching social media conversations. I felt – perhaps because I could control exactly what I saw next – that I could become part of their lives. I felt that there, on the Internet, I was in the midst of a picturesque youth.
I mention all this because in the context of such a culture, obviously I knew about Marina before I met her face-to-face. I discovered her on my course Facebook group. The group was something that one of the university admins had invited us all to join in the weeks before the start of term, ostensibly so that ‘general files’ such as the reading list could be found in a convenient place. This was the official line. The tacit agreement was that these groups were for the purpose of Facebook stalking. They were a preview into the lives of potential friends.
What was therefore surprising was not that I knew who Marina was before meeting her, but that I didn’t know more about her. Her profile gave little away: I was surprised to see no cover photo, and no listed interests. All that I could ascertain from the small icon of the profile picture was that she had a curtain of blonde hair and a petite frame. She was leaning against a car with her head twisted sideways, her back turned towards the camera.
It was for this reason, I think, that Marina stuck in my mind. She had the sort of filtered virtual aura which suggested she was glamorous, and it was heightened by the fact that her profile was so private. She seemed to be above the boastful social media culture, to care little about it and – in being that way inclined – exuded a sophistication which I envied. To put it bluntly, she was the kind of friend I wanted to have.
It would be wrong to give the idea that I was desperate for company. I wasn’t always alone. There were often people I could spend time with at Northam, and I was fine at cementing rapport individually if I tried. But groups of people made me uncomfortable. Somehow I felt lonelier among them than I did on my own.
Probably this was due to my upbringing. I was an only child, and had been homeschooled for a few years before my A levels. In that time I had established a sense of independence that made me feel – naively – that I was in control of my existence. My tutor was a complete pushover, and my parents preferred to defer teenage-patrol duties to her than try to control me themselves. The result was that I ran riot and no one noticed. It was blissful.
Returning to school at sixteen was naturally a shock. I couldn’t believe that I’d have to adhere to a social order that I hadn’t devised myself. I couldn’t believe that I’d have to turn up on time, or pretend like I cared about other people’s small-talk problems. But