My toes scrunched in my shoes. I felt excruciatingly hot. The backs of my knees were slick with sweat, my face unstable. Under the damp of my fringe I looked in Marina’s direction. She was looking straight ahead, not registering my presence. Her mouth was curled in the very corner: in what almost looked like a smile. She seemed … pleased.
The professor, on the other hand, was uncomfortable. His forehead was a blotchy red. His cheeks were pink and seemed to expand with the silence, pushing the collar of his shirt tight against porcine jowls. Now he scratched them, laughed breathily and said: ‘For your information there is an entire section on this in the reading material provided.’
‘Then—’
‘Marina, for the moment I would like to just get on with it …’
‘Well to be honest—’
‘Marina.’
Another, shorter, silence as the professor jigged from one foot to the other. I glanced around. Other students looked either bored or riveted. They chewed their nails. The professor rustled his papers and continued on a different tack: ‘If you’d like to discuss it having read the secondary material then there may be an opportunity at a later date. In the meantime’ – here he leaned a large, flat hand into the lectern – ‘I would like to just get on with it. And if anyone else has a similar issue, please wait until the end to raise it with me.’
***
That’s when it started, I think. That was the first time that I became aware of it happening: my body folding in on itself, the hardened core at the centre of my identity dissolving and becoming replaced by something else … something corruptible and soft; unfamiliar. Until that lecture I hadn’t been aware of it, but I’d always had a fear of being found out. To some extent I still have it. It is not just that I am worried that someone will discover an unpleasant secret of mine and reveal it to the world. It’s more specific than that. It is, I suppose, a fear which stems from me. It’s a sense that I’m not completely in control of my own actions; that, by accident or otherwise, I will be the principal agent in my own downfall. When I’m not paying attention, drawing a tight restrictive circle around myself, I’ll say something tactless or do something stupid, which will reveal my true nature as incompetent. Or evil.
I think again about the headlines in recent days – the torrid accusations, the glimpses of my face, the glimpses of my name. All of it makes me question myself. I am worried about what they are saying. I am worried about how they are depicting me. I am worried about whether that representation will cause me to lose sight of who I am again, that it will make me do something that I don’t understand.
***
It was that moment in the lecture when my self-doubt began to set in, I’m sure of it. Before then I had always thought of myself as someone reserved and watchful. I was a person with control over their inner thoughts and emotions. Though my silence unnerved people around me, I had always felt bolstered by it.
But because of that lecture slippage, I felt that my sense of self-preservation was gone. I had acted so out of character, and with such potentially humiliating consequences, that I couldn’t understand what sort of person I was anymore.
I scared myself.
v.
I was relieved when the lecture ended. My stomach hurt, the skin between my fingers was clammy. I no longer had any desire to talk to Marina. All I wanted was to leave. I gathered up my things, packed them into my bag and walked down the stairs out of the lecture hall. I went towards the toilets. There was an unused disabled one around the corner which I knew was always empty. I would be able to collect myself there.
I stood at the sink and splashed my cheeks with cold water. It hit my skin and fell back into the basin, leaving reddish marks. I dabbed at them with the edges of my sleeve. Then I turned to the mirror and studied my profile. My immediate reaction was one of embarrassment: how contrived I looked. Since I had arrived at university I’d made a conscious effort to wear more make-up every day: a mask to accompany my new identity. But now, in the shallow light of the bathroom, it was patently obvious how ridiculous it looked. The dark, sweaty sheen of foundation drooped around my jawbone; there was an ugly blue smear underneath my eyes. My lips looked bright and my teeth yellow.
In the past I had refrained from wearing lots of make-up, mainly because I thought that my face possessed a sort of masculine quality that meant I couldn’t decorate it without it looking try-hard. Here I realized it was more than that: the make-up seemed to expose rather than conceal; it brought out every pore, every wrinkle, every hideous bulbous feature. I rolled a piece of hand towel off the dispenser and began to mop away the product. With every wipe, I felt a calm sift through my body. I felt that I was effacing the features, the morning: the memories of the lecture.
The door creaked open behind me and I stiffened. A small, slim silhouette slipped in and approached the sink. She stood next to me, and as she bent forward I saw the curl in the bottom of her hair. I remained still, like she couldn’t see me.
For a few minutes we pretended not to recognize each other. We stood in silence, me removing my make-up, she adjusting hers. Then, suddenly, she said: ‘Aren’t you going to say thank you?’
It was delivered as a statement, not a question. I turned to look at her. She was still staring straight ahead, towards the mirror, so her tiny face was turned to the side. I noted how small her nose was, how her top lip puckered up towards it like a wave.
‘Sorry?’ I croaked.
Her eyes shot out at me from under a curl of her fringe. They caught the light streaming from the window.
‘Fine,’ she said, wincing, then looking back at the mirror. ‘But next time have some backbone. At least have something to say, if you call out the professor like that. It’s just embarrassing otherwise.’
Her little hand flicked up and down across her eyelashes, wiggling the brush. I watched the tiny threads of black thicken into clumps, the green crescents behind them darken in the shade. Briefly I wondered why she wore so much make-up, whether she looked the same without it.
There was a silence. To fill it I said, idiotically: ‘I’m Eva.’
‘Marina.’
I saw myself shift awkwardly in the mirror. There were questions written all over my face. I wanted to ask what she thought of me for interrupting the professor. I wanted to ask how she felt confronting him herself, yelling out in the middle of a lecture. I wanted to ask what her issue was with him. But these seemed like stupid, clumsy things to say at that moment so I changed tack.
‘Sorry, I didn’t know that you studied this subject.’
‘What makes you think that?’ she said.
I thought of the way she had looked at me when I first saw her, and the effort of not bringing that up made me flustered.
‘Well,’ I coughed a little. ‘I haven’t really seen you here before.’
She groaned. ‘It’s a long story.’
At this point I was standing diagonally behind her, leaning against the sink. I watched her fingers smudge along the corners of her eyes. The crease along her brow deepened. Her eyes narrowed. Then they turned slowly to look at me.
There was a cool frankness in her expression, as though she were expecting me to ask her something. I sensed that now – now was my chance.
What is it that causes us to confess things to strangers? And why, in a confined, gossipy place like Northam, would Marina tell me of her problems, of her saga with the professor? Sometimes it is possible to establish a certain affinity with someone in a matter of seconds. Something about the way they