The temporary dam on the tears gives up and they start to flow again as Dan takes my face in his hands and kisses me so sweetly that the heart I’ve hardened against him begins to soften. Tiny painful splits appear, like those in a dry lip that’s been stretched too far.
‘That’s nothing to cry about,’ he whispers as he pulls back and smiles at me.
I nod but the tears don’t stop, even though I’m doing everything I can to make them. It is, I whisper silently inside my head. Because right at this moment, I know I’m telling the truth.
Becca and I do indeed go shopping. We wander round the giant Top Shop in Oxford Circus for at least an hour. I have no idea how much I have in my student bank account and I really don’t care. I usually hate clothes shopping in my real life, but I have ten hangers full of cool stuff in my changing cubicle and I can’t stop smiling.
‘How’s the dress?’ Becca yells from the cubicle next door.
I pull the curtain back dramatically and step outside. ‘See for yourself.’
She pokes her head out. ‘Wow! Dan is going to have a heart attack when he sees you in that!’
It occurs to me as I admire my reflection in the full-length mirror that I hadn’t even thought about how Dan might react. The dress is black, Lycra, and it hugs my bottom in an almost-indecent fashion. I would never have had the guts to wear this when I was twenty-one, believing myself fat and lumpy. Not the sort of girl who could get away with it. But compared to my forty-something self, this Maggie is svelte. Not perfect – there’s a slight curve to my belly and the top of my hips look a little boxy – but good enough. I can’t believe how great it looks on me.
‘I’m getting it,’ I tell Becca.
She makes me turn around and checks the price tag hanging down my back. ‘It’s over forty quid!’
I shrug. ‘You’re only young once, right?’
OK, maybe, in my case, twice, but I have the feeling I didn’t do it right the first go around. While this strange hallucination lasts, I’m going to make up for lost time.
I buy the dress then change into it in the toilets of a pub down Argyll Street, even though it’s more evening than daywear. When I walk out across the bar to where Becca is waiting for me, heads turn. The knowledge gives my walk a little extra swing.
We buy a cheap bottle of wine and head for St James’s Park, where we sit in deckchairs we don’t pay for. After two hours we’re very giggly, slightly sunburned and more than a little squiffy. We decide to paddle in the lake to help us cool off, taking it in turns to sip the last of the wine from the neck of the bottle as we stand there, but then a portly park warden comes along and starts shouting at us and we end up grabbing our bags and running away down the path in our bare feet, shoes hooked from our fingers, until we’ve finally outrun him, and then we collapse under a tree and laugh until we cry.
‘What next?’ I ask Becca. We’ve been taking it turns to come up with ideas and the paddling was mine.
‘I’m hungry,’ Becca moans, so after we’ve shoved our shoes back on our slightly damp feet we head in the direction of China Town. My purse is feeling considerably lighter than it was when I left Oaklands this morning and it’s the best place we can think of to stuff our faces on a budget.
We trail through Piccadilly and end up at Wong Kei’s, a student favourite because of its mountainous plates of food for low prices. We have to share a table with some American tourists who obviously have stumbled in here without knowing its reputation. Instead of understanding that the rude service is what brings people to this cult tourist attraction, they’re outraged. They don’t understand when the waiter barks instructions at them or brings them dishes he’s decided they should have instead of what they actually ordered. Becca and I just sit back, eat our chow mein full of unidentified seafood and enjoy the show.
After that we wander through Leicester Square and Covent Garden arm in arm. The wine is still having a pleasant effect (twenty-one-year-old me is such a lightweight!) and I keep telling Becca how much I love her. She’s been a true partner in crime and hasn’t blinked once at my mad suggestions, even though I know I’m acting totally out of character. Not many women have best friends like this, ones they can trust with their lives. I keep telling her that too, which only makes her tease me harder about my state of inebriation.
After scraping together our last pennies to share a pint of cider in an overpriced pub, we get talking to some guys who buy us more drinks and then we end up getting a cab with them to a club somewhere near Kings Cross that turns out to be an abandoned warehouse with huge rooms sprawling over multiple floors. I never went to anything like this when I was young the first time – the whole rave scene of the early nineties passed me by – and I launch myself onto the dance floor as if I’m planning to make up for that.
There’s one guy who’s been hanging around me ever since we got in the cab and he sidles up to me and tries to grind his hips against mine. I attempt to back away but he just keeps coming at me.
Becca leans in and shouts in my ear. ‘Ladies! Now!’
I nod, totally trusting her to be my wingman … woman … whatever. Creepy Guy tries to follow, but we slip away too fast and instead of heading for the loos, we sprint up a flight of stairs and lose ourselves in yet another room full of heaving, slick bodies. We dance most of the night away and when our feet are burning so hard we can’t stand to groove any longer, we catch a string of night buses that eventually deposit us on Putney High Street and stagger back to our flat, arm in arm and propping each other up, feet bare on the rough concrete paving stones as the sky turns from grey to pale-pink. Becca keeps starting to belt out ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ and I have to keep shushing her, so by the time we reach the front door to the house where our flat is, we’re almost giggling as loud as the singing would have been.
I fall into bed without taking my make-up off and smile at the ceiling as my eyelids drift closed. Now that is the way to do twenty-one!
I’ve been avoiding Dan as much as possible. Mainly because I just don’t know how to deal with him. However, there’s only so much ‘pretending to be revising’ a girl can do before she can’t put her boyfriend off any longer, and I end up going to a party with him on campus the following weekend.
Derwent Hall is the old-fashioned kind of student accommodation. None of these ‘flats’ with en-suite showers and homey little kitchens you get at universities these days. Instead, it has corridor upon corridor of single bedrooms painted in a colour Becca calls ‘anti-suicide green’, a tiny shared kitchen with only a Baby Belling and a juddering fridge to its name, and a communal bathroom with shower cubicles and sinks, and one bath in its own stall that takes twenty minutes to fill.
However, Derwent’s one advantage over those smart student flats we looked over with Sophie is that it has a common room. Not huge, but large enough to fit forty or so students in if they don’t mind squishing a bit, which they don’t.
The music is already pumping when we get there, the sparse furniture pushed back against the walls or shoved outside on the grass, and people are dancing, cans of warm lager in their hands. I’m tempted to join them but Dan has hold of my hand, and when I lean in to tell him I’m off to strut my stuff, he takes the opportunity to steal a kiss.
I plan to end it quickly, but I get kind of sidetracked. I’d forgotten Dan could kiss like this. His dad is a pastor and is a little old-fashioned about things, so Dan hasn’t had a lot of experience. The upside of that is