Drink, as it turned out, was not in short supply. Half-empty bottles were strewn around the counter; screw-top spirits sat on the shelves; cups full of strange, ugly scented liquid tilted precariously on the edges of tables. A suspicious queue for the loo suggested that it was another kind of hit that everyone here was after, so I suspected none of the alcohol would be missed.
Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to steal anything. I somehow felt self-conscious, and – despite the wine fog– weirdly out of place. I knew this was ridiculous. I knew that I looked more stupid and awkward just hovering there, not talking to anyone or drinking anything – but it felt wrong to swan into someone’s house and take their stuff. I couldn’t just swipe something. What if someone saw? I wanted people to like me. I wanted Marina to like me.
A figure walked past in a long black sequinned jacket, a single black feather dangling from one of his ears. ‘Yeah no I think she’s in my seminar,’ I heard him say. ‘Nice girl. Bit easy though.’
There was the safety issue too, I thought. Even in the nightclubs in my hometown, I had always made sure to push a thumb over the lip of my bottle in case it was spiked. Now, in this unfamiliar company, I didn’t want to risk my chances. No – I needed to get away from them. All these people. I needed air.
I went through a kitchen side door which led to the outside. It was very dark. I felt the notoriously cold Northam wind pinch at my cheeks, and immediately began to feel better.
I walked around pretending to be looking for something, and eventually wandered to the corner of the courtyard, where wicker chairs were spread out along the lawn and thin people in colourful clothes smoked and talked. They flicked their ash into a water feature and propped their feet on garish plastic toadstools. I took it all in. The garden was surprisingly big, I thought, for a student house. I guessed that it housed around four. I wondered where the residents were.
That was when I heard the familiar sharp voice, now slightly nasal: ‘Henry, it’s not true. And it’s not even your opinion, it’s some shit you’ve memorized from The Spectator.’
Marina was lying on the grass a few metres away, one leg spread loosely over the other. She was holding a cigarette between a pinched thumb and forefinger. Her hair fanned out over the shoes of the girl sat behind her – a girl who wore a turquoise velvet jumpsuit, who was staring mutely at the garden wall.
Henry was rolling a cigarette between graceful long fingers. At this slight from Marina he frowned.
‘Er no, Vanity Fair,’ he corrected. ‘Not that the source is the point. The point is the argument. It’s about the way that women bear life – men don’t feel the responsibility that women do. They have the freedom to be funny, because the shelf life on sperm is endless. They aren’t reminded of the heavy burden of … life all the time.’
Marina snorted. ‘Even for you that’s terrible.’
‘Even for me?’
‘Doubtless you’re a prime example of the superior male comedian.’
‘Doubtless.’
‘With your endless sperm and liberated mind.’
‘You said it, not me.’
‘Honestly, that’s the sort of thing that’ll be viewed in like two hundred years’ time as a twenty-first century curiosity.’ She stretched her leg towards him. ‘Some bored robot will be scanning through the clickbait archives, then they’ll come across that article and think—’
Henry put the cigarette into the corner of his mouth.
‘Think what?’
‘Millennials,’ Marina said drily. ‘Something about capitalism.’
She stretched out her leg across the grass, lifted it, and lightly kicked his jaw with the edge of her toe. The cigarette fell. I watched it roll gently across the grass, still burning. There was a lull in conversation.
Henry’s eyes tracked slowly from the cigarette to Marina’s toe. They tracked up to her ankle; to the blue edge of her skirt that skimmed the front of her calf. They hovered there for a second. Then he stared her in the face, rolled his eyes theatrically. Marina laughed.
The girl behind her stood up, dusted the grass off the velvet of her lap, and walked past me into the house.
I remained in the shadows for a moment, watching Henry and Marina talk. I considered their sharp reclining figures against the pink and yellow glow of the fairy lights.
Theirs wasn’t a romantic dynamic, I thought. It was sexual, definitely, but in a way that was kind of performative, which made me think they had never and would never have sex. They flirted artificially, like actors in a film. Or perhaps as though they were operated by a marionette master. Yes that was it: it was like someone was twitching their strings, tweaking fingers to cause jerky head movements at a suspiciously appropriate moment. The right movement and the right comment at the unnaturally perfect time.
‘But what do you even mean by that exactly?’
Henry’s face was lit up by the glow of the moon, and as he turned briefly away from Marina to take a sip from his drink, his lips parted to reveal a set of gleaming trapezium teeth.
Now he said it again: ‘But what do you mean Marina?’
Hearing his voice, with its insistent, droll intonation, made me reconsider the pair in another light. Henry’s voice, specifically, seemed out of kilter with his languid movements. Now I noticed it I realized that everything he said was a bit mannered, like he had rehearsed the words in his head a few times before speaking them. I leaned forward a little, eager to catch the tic.
‘Oh for god’s sake,’ said Marina. ‘All I’m saying is you sound like a fucking idiot. Just … stop being so pretentious, it makes me cringe.’
Marina wasn’t like that. When I heard her speak I felt that she was doing so impulsively. There was a lightness, an easiness in her voice and mannerisms. She had something that Henry lacked, a kind of authenticity.
As if sensing this observation, at that point Henry’s head turned towards me. He narrowed his eyes.
‘Oh,’ he said. He reached for a Heineken bottle on the grass. ‘Mari is this your pal? I meant to bring her over here.’
Marina didn’t look up. She was staring at her cigarette.
‘Sure,’ she said absently.
Henry stared at me with disapproval. He took a long swig from his beer.
‘Sorry,’ he said, unapologetically. ‘Who are you again?’
‘I’m … Eva.’
‘Eva Hutchings,’ Marina mumbled, and then – as though the name had jogged her back to consciousness, as though she had said it and then realized why she knew it – she looked up. Recognition flashed across her face. ‘Oh – you! Hello.’
She rolled over onto her stomach and stretched out a slim arm to pat the grass beside her. Henry said nothing. I edged forwards and sat down obediently.
‘Eva …’ she mused. ‘Eva from the lecture.’
‘Yeah.’
‘When did you get here?’
‘Just—’
‘I suppose you’ve met Henry.’
I looked across at him, and his eyes moved somewhere behind me.
‘Yup,’ he said, a new cigarette dangling out of his mouth.
Marina’s eyes flicked to Henry and then flicked back to me. In that gesture I recognized something conspiratorial, like a silent code