‘Oh. Shit.’
My heart sinks right into the pit of my stomach.
‘What?’ Daphne asks.
For the hell of it, I punch in 1-2-3-4. No joy. We could be here a while.
‘How drunk are you?’ Daff laughs. ‘Can you really not remember your own door code?’
‘No, hang on, don’t worry … It’ll come to me …’
But obviously it won’t. I’m about to pull my phone out and see if Harv is still awake when I hear someone shout ‘WAHEY!’ at a deafening volume behind me.
I turn around to see Geordie Claire standing there, grinning drunkenly, with her massive rugby player boyfriend next to her. Both of them smell strongly of tequila and chilli sauce.
‘Hey, Ben!’ Claire slurs, dragging me into a wobbly hug. ‘So, we both really enjoyed your play. Really, really, really. It was very, erm … original.’
‘Yeah, top work, mate,’ says her boyfriend, whose name escapes me. ‘You were … great.’
‘He was, wasn’t he?’ Daff nods, somehow managing to keep a straight face. ‘He’s a natural hitman.’
Claire punches in the entrance code, and we all troop up the stairs together. We say goodnight to the two of them at the end of the corridor, and as we do, I find my voice dropping automatically to a whisper. It’s not even half eleven – still early for a freshers’ dorm on the last night of term – but I’m suddenly keenly aware of the fact that Alice’s room is right next door to mine. I have no idea whether she went on to the bar with the others, or whether she’s in there right now, just one paper-thin wall away from us.
By some miracle, my room key is in the pocket of the jeans I was wearing when I woke up, so I let Daff in before heading into the kitchen to make the tea. I flick the kettle on and stare at it hard, willing it to boil faster. I don’t know how long we’ll have together tonight – I have no idea if I’ll find myself back in 2020 at any moment – so I want to make the most of every second here.
Once the kettle’s boiled, I dart straight back to my room with the two steaming mugs to find Daff kneeling on my bed, peering closely at the bookshelf next to it. I spent hours arranging that bookshelf in preparation for precisely this moment: a hot girl peering closely at it. It was chock full of wilfully obscure, borderline unreadable paperbacks, all designed to make me look much deeper and more intellectual than I actually was.
I feel a little shiver of exasperation at my try-hard teenage self as I hand Daff her cup of tea.
‘Here you go,’ I say. ‘Milk, one sugar.’
She wrinkles her brow. ‘How did you know?’
‘I, er … Lucky guess.’
‘Very lucky. So, you’re doing English, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Me too.’ She takes a sip from her mug. ‘Mmm, good tea.’ And then, with a little smile, she adds: ‘You know, I’ve actually seen you in lectures.’
‘Oh, really?’ I’d definitely never seen her before this evening.
‘Yeah. You and Marek,’ she says. ‘You always seem to be the last ones to arrive. The lecturer starts talking, then the door slams and everyone looks round, and you two come swanning in in your long flappy coats, looking like you’ve just got out of bed.’
I can’t help laughing at the memory of it. ‘Oh God. We don’t mean to always be late,’ I start. ‘We just—’
She interrupts me with a grin. ‘I reckon you both like the attention.’
She’s right, of course. We loved it. God, we were a pair of knobs.
It’s so weird, thinking back to what I was like at this point. So full of ill-founded confidence, so desperate to appear cool and interesting at all times. For this whole first term, I saw Marek as a bit of an aspirational figure, I guess. Like Alice, he was clever and funny and sarcastic, and he seemed to have stepped straight out of Withnail & I, chain-smoking roll-ups in his moth-eaten pea coat. I’d bought one in the exact same style – I can actually see it now, through the gap in my wardrobe.
By second term, though – once I’d met Daphne – the Marek effect started to wear off. I began to realise that Daff and Harv were much more fun to hang out with. Mainly because when I was with them, I didn’t have to try so hard to be someone I wasn’t.
Daff shifts round to face me and sits cross-legged on the bed. She’s slipped her shoes off already, and she tucks her stripy-socked feet underneath her. Her curly hair is starting to wriggle free from her ponytail, and as she reaches up to retie it, she pushes her shoulders back and tilts her head, and for a moment, she looks so beautiful I can barely think straight.
This is just … mad. I mean: this is Daphne. I’ve known her fifteen years. Why the hell am I so nervous?
I plonk down opposite her, nearly spilling half my tea.
‘So, you’ve already got me figured out, then, have you?’ I say.
‘Yup.’ She grins. ‘Always late. Reads highly pretentious books. Bad at hiding in mazes. Good at making tea. That about sums you up, I reckon.’
‘Oh, great. Thanks a lot.’
‘No worries.’ She stretches her leg out and pokes me gently in the thigh with her big toe. It’s a gesture that’s so familiar – so relaxed and comfortable – that I’m suddenly seized by the idea that she knows. That this isn’t 2005 Daphne: it’s 2020 Daphne, and she’s inexplicably jumped back through time, too.
But as soon as that idea forms, it dissolves. Because the truth is: she was always like this. Right from the start. I remember it even on our first date. I made her laugh at one point, and she reached across and squeezed my hand. She was so intimate; like we’d known each other our whole lives.
She cranes her neck round to look out of the window, but she doesn’t move her leg away. She just leaves it there, with her foot still resting lightly on my thigh. She can’t possibly know the effect this is having on me – or at least I hope she doesn’t. It’s like a cement mixer has just been switched on in my stomach. All I can think about is leaning forward and taking her in my arms again.
‘You got so lucky with your view,’ she murmurs, staring out of my grubby second-floor window. ‘You can see the lake and the ducks and everything. My room looks out onto the bloody staff car park.’
‘Trust me, it’s not lucky,’ I say, remembering the racket the ducks used to make. ‘Listen to this lot.’ I lean past her, catching a scent of her perfume as I do, and crack the window open. The sound of hooting and quacking comes floating in, along with a blast of bitingly cold wind. ‘They’re like this all night,’ I say. ‘Honestly, I barely sleep in here.’
She laughs, her brown eyes twinkling. ‘So that’s why you’re always late for lectures. The ducks.’
‘Exactly. Blame the ducks.’
She glances out of the window again. ‘They’re probably hungry …’
She jumps up and bolts out of the door. When she comes back in a few seconds later, she’s swinging a half-empty bag of sliced bread. There’s a Post-it note stuck to it that reads: MAREK’S – DO NOT TOUCH. For a self-styled anarcho-communist, Marek always had surprisingly conservative views on food-sharing.
‘On a scale of one to ten,’ Daff says, ‘how pissed off will Marek be if we nick two slices of his bread?’
‘I’m going to say eleven,’ I tell her. ‘But let’s do it anyway.’
She drops back down on the bed and hands me a slice. We both poke