‘Er,’ Henry said.
‘Can you just get it?’
Henry looked at her meaningfully. His features seemed to enlarge and slope down his face, like a melting waxwork.
A silence followed which I found myself eager to fill, but as usual I couldn’t think of anything to say. I blinked the smoke out of my eyes. I plucked at the grass.
Finally Henry shrugged. ‘Fine,’ he said.
He stood up slowly and headed towards the light of the kitchen. I watched his coat billowing behind him. I listened to his footsteps across the grass.
When he was gone, Marina drew a hip flask from the coat lying in front of her, and poured the contents into two used cups. She pushed one into my hand. The liquid was a light grey colour, sort of cloudy, like dishwater. I took a sip, felt it slide into the back of my mouth and then crackle unpleasantly down my throat.
‘What is that?’ I choked.
‘Oh don’t.’ She made a dismissive gesture. ‘I’m sorry about him. There’s no one else here who will entertain his shit.’
She was talking about Henry, I realized. Perhaps she thought I had said ‘who’ instead of ‘what’.
‘Why do you then?’ I said. ‘Entertain him, I mean.’
My mouth was returning, gradually, to a normal temperature. My tongue curved around the inside of my teeth. It now had a rough texture.
‘What?’
‘Why do you entertain him? If you don’t like Henry, then why do you entertain him?’
She eyed me cautiously, and then took a swig directly from the hip flask. I became dimly aware of someone talking far away from us. There was a squawk from inside the kitchen, the sound of a bottle smashing.
‘Henry’s an old family friend,’ she said with a slight smirk, as though being an ‘old family friend’ were something unflattering. ‘I guess I know everyone else here through him.’
This wasn’t exactly an answer, but I was interested to hear what she might reveal about herself: what sort of colour she might add to my mental portrait of her. She spoke for a while about Henry, about how irritating she found him. I remember her saying how he was ‘contrived’ and that he always recycled other people’s opinions. Then she did a very good impression of him talking about gender.
‘It’s the responsibility women have, to bear life,’ she said, keeping her neck very straight, whipping her head around with her mouth pulled down at the corners. I laughed a lot, probably more than was appropriate. Furtively, I took a large mouthful of the liquid in my cup.
Marina was so good at impersonations. That seems an essential thing about her, now, whenever I think back on those days. She was a very good observer of people. She knew exactly how to capture mannerisms, subtle facial expressions, idiosyncratic modulations of voice and then project them for comic effect. Now I watched her eyes widening, her head shifting to the side and then glaring at me in disbelief, just as Henry had earlier. I took another large mouthful of my drink – too large this time – and choked a little. It was wonderful being in her company.
After finishing the contents of the hip flask, we headed back into the house and the familiar smell of vodka and vomit began to drift into my nostrils. Monotonous beats pulsed in my ears. The people along the corridors were now slouching almost horizontally, long eyelids drooping down their faces. They smiled lazily at us, sometimes they called ‘Marina!’, but she only responded distantly, dismissively even. She would twitch her mouth into what almost resembled a smile; mouth a word that could have been a ‘hello’ but might also have been a yawn. She did not stop for any of them. She kept walking forwards, forwards and forwards.
I followed.
We walked past the sitting room, where about fifteen silhouettes were shuffling around under the strobe lights, even less energetically than they had been earlier. Looking at their sloping silhouettes there reminded me, for some reason, of a passage I’d read somewhere about purgatory. We walked past the toilet, for which the queue had diminished. Several people were sprawled outside the doorway, their limbs dragging across the carpet. Peering closer I recognized one of them. It was Henry.
Marina bent forwards and gave him a hard rap on the shoulder. He jolted to consciousness, his grey eyes springing open – and blinking, then, for several seconds, as though readjusting to the scene. When he recognized Marina, he ran a hand through his hair and smiled warily.
‘Hey.’
‘You’ve got something of mine,’ she said. ‘I forgot.’
The smile vanished. ‘Mmm?’
‘You’ve got something,’ she repeated, sharply this time. ‘I need it back.’
She turned to me, frowning.
‘Stay here,’ she said.
She knelt down next to Henry, then swung his arm over her shoulder, crouched forward and stood up. He bowed over her, and though she was only a slip of a human, slim and ethereal really, in that instant she seemed to me stocky. Very secure. Slowly she began to pivot towards the bathroom door. She leaned him against the frame, bent forward towards the handle and opened it, stepping inside with him.
He protested mildly: ‘No, Marina, it’s fine. It’s fine, I’ll get it later. Mari—’
‘Shut up.’
They stood together, very close, inside the tiny bathroom. She balanced Henry against the sink, then glanced at me. Briefly I wondered if she cared what I thought of the situation, whether she knew that I’d made the connection, that I’d seen the tiny sachet in his hand. But before I could say anything – before I could examine her expression – she reached forward and slammed the door shut in my face. I heard it lock, and then their conversation became muffled by music.
It was time to go home.
***
I don’t know what to make of that memory now. It’s troubling to think about. I can recall very clearly the way Marina behaved towards Henry – how aggressively she spoke to him, how aggressively she handled him, how quickly she flipped from lavishing me with attention to not even registering my presence – and I know that it signifies something. But I can’t quite put my finger on what. Often memory works like that – you go to it to find a revelation, and it gives you the opposite: confirmation that you are missing something.
vii.
Throughout our months of friendship, the idea that Marina’s dalliance with drugs was an addiction didn’t cross my mind. It still seems an inappropriate term, and I flinch at it – addiction. It just wasn’t a word which applied to people our age, and everyone in that group, however wild they seemed, was cushioned by a kind of middle-class assurance that it was a pose. It was, as even our parents called it, an experimental phase – a rite of passage, not an act of sincere rebellion. After university we would grow out of it: get serious jobs, get sober (except on weekends) and get on with our lives. But that was the thing about Marina. She really wasn’t like us, as far as all that was concerned. She always took things too far.
The next day I awoke with a thick fog in my head. There were tiny red threads along the insides of my eyelids; my mouth contained a strong, acrid flavour and my cheeks had puffed up into two wrinkly, stiff blobs under my eyelids. In short, I had a hangover.
A lecture was scheduled for that afternoon, and I knew without opening my eyes that I wasn’t going to get out of bed for it. I also didn’t have to open my eyes to know that it was an unseasonably warm day. There was a kind of burning sensation in the room: the air was oppressive and thick, it heaved with sweat and the hot stench of alcoholic breath. I rolled over