Despite my quiet nature, I was not used to extracting confidences from people, and so for a while I assumed that it was a connection of this kind which had caused Marina to speak to me. I thought – foolishly I’m sure – that my lecture outburst had caused her to recognize me as a kindred spirit. She had seen past my nervous exterior to the potentially interesting friend beneath. She had wanted to extract that person. She had wanted to help me come out of my shell.
Now I know the opposite is true. She hadn’t wanted that at all. Instead she had seen how much conviction I lacked, and recognized in it an opportunity.
I was someone who, quietly, shared many of her opinions, but had no confidence to contradict her where they diverged. I would be there to bolster her brilliance, that was all, a sickly weed next to a burgeoning flower, and by feeding off my energy she would emerge more beautiful, more charismatic. Without allowing me to realize it, she would steal all of my secret characteristics, all my good arguments and ideas. She would scrape them away and use them for herself, leaving me as an empty, silent husk – someone with no voice and no personality.
***
I stood there silently, studying her eyes and mouth and cheeks. There was another silence as she bent forward and pulled another eye pencil out of her pocket. I thought about the structure of bones under her face.
Then: ‘I have a long time,’ I offered.
She looked back at me in the mirror, squinting with suspicion. She rubbed the pencil along the insides of her under-eyes.
‘Well,’ she said suddenly. ‘It’s to do with Montgomery.’
Her fingers continued to move around her face, rubbing the pencil along the tops of her eyelids, smeared the kohl with her fingertips. As she did so, she gave me the background.
Marina had known Professor Montgomery for some time, she said, as a family acquaintance. Her father was an academic too, and they had entertained a rivalry since their university days. She had seen the professor at family parties and symposiums that her father hosted, and he had always seemed pleasant, in a small talk kind of way. Then, when she applied to Northam – originally for languages – she had been offered a scholarship to study the course with English literature. She guessed that the professor had had something to do with it, but that hadn’t put her off at the time. It would have been stupid to turn it down. The tuition fees had risen, and besides, ‘English is fine.’
But when she arrived she had found the professor insufferable. He was strangely controlling – always asking her to see him in his study, always giving her extra assignments. She felt that he was overfamiliar in his manner, vain about his professional success (constantly name-dropping other academics), and even his arguments were heavy-handed and boring. There was too much historical speculation, she said, and not enough of genuine interest. Those were the exact words that she used: genuine interest. As she said them she reached across to grab a piece of towel from the dispenser behind me.
A few weeks into term, she’d stopped going to English lectures altogether. She asked the board to switch to languages full-time. But the scholarship was contingent on her taking English as well, and so she had had to go to the professor directly to ask for permission. Having reviewed her attendance record, the professor was now waging a ‘petty’ war against her – neither allowing her to return to his course, nor to keep her scholarship only doing languages. Marina shook her head. It was just politics, she said, a way for him to exert power over her, and so to spite him, she was going to the lectures and seminars until she got her way. She said that she hated how nepotistic the place was, and how everyone in the humanities department pandered to the professor. She hated especially how one eminent academic – here she put her fingers in quotation marks – could have a monopoly like that in the twenty-first century.
‘Anyway, that’s the long and short of it,’ she said, making a grimace. ‘Unbelievably tedious.’
I wasn’t sure whether that description was supposed to refer to the story, the people in it, or her take on the situation. Whichever it was, it didn’t apply to her. She was a fantastic speaker: vivacious and precise. I wondered where she had learned to speak like this, so confidently and unapologetically.
‘How many languages do you know?’ I asked, somewhat out of the blue.
‘Enough to get by.’
‘French?’
No reply.
‘What about like … Russian, Chinese?’
She nodded primly. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was lying. Either she was a self-effacing genius or a narcissistic fantasist – and whichever it was, I felt unable to ask more questions.
There was another lull in the conversation. I stood there awkwardly and began to run imaginary sentences through my head.
Suddenly Marina said: ‘What are you doing this evening?’
The question had come out of nowhere. It was unclear whether it was a leading conversation or a piece of small talk.
‘Nothing,’ I managed.
‘There’s a house party down the road I’m going to.’
A prickle of anticipation shot through me.
‘Maybe you should come,’ she added.
The conversation was too perfect, surreally perfect, and it made me, for a moment, feel detached from myself. It was like I was watching a film of my life rather than participating in it. I tried to act accordingly: keep my face stable, not too eager.
‘Sure.’
I passed my phone across to her. My hand was shaking slightly. As she bent her head forward, I looked at her roots. Natural blonde. I studied the small translucent curls along the top of her crown, admired the way they framed her forehead.
She said would add me on Facebook and message the details later. Then she smiled, drew her bag over her shoulder and left.
I remember clearly how I felt once she had gone. Everything seemed to be in sharper focus. I looked at myself in the mirror again and this time my appearance had changed: my features were more pronounced, my face slimmer. My eyes had an interesting bright spark in them.
I walked back to my room dopily, registering details I hadn’t seen before – the way the grey clouds sloped into the horizon beyond the buildings. The way the silver willows curved into the lake, the way their thin branches dragged in the water. It was a beautiful campus, in its own way, I decided. The buildings had all been painted an unimaginative shade of brown, yes – and, yes, they were boringly arranged: a long rigid line of rectangles, like a queue for something that would never arrive. Demolition, for example. It was not exactly inspiring, and yet looking at it then I thought it had a pleasing symmetry and simplicity. Perhaps Northam offered a new opportunity after all. Perhaps I was on the cusp of something exciting.
In my room I looked at the small damp bed, the desk beside it. The clock read 3.51. I suspected that the party would start at around nine, which meant I should arrive at around ten, and that meant I now had a maximum of five hours to compose myself. I would just peek at Facebook, I told myself, and then shower and decide what to wear.
I lifted the lid of my laptop. Just a few minutes.
Two minutes later I looked at the clock and saw that it was now eight in the evening. I refreshed my Facebook page. There was still no message from Marina; no friend request, nothing. I paused.
I wondered whether she had forgotten, whether she had even been sincere in the first place. Maybe it was for the best, I reasoned. What kind of person invites someone to a party after meeting them in a toilet anyway? My mother would have a field day.
At the thought of my mother, I felt a wave of rebellious energy. I bit the bullet and sent Marina a friend request.
The minutes ticked by.