When I opened the room door, a slender girl stood there with her back to me. She had the sort of cascade of golden hair that they show in shampoo advertisements. She wore white linen trousers and had a pashmina looped around her neck. At the sound of the door, she turned around.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Eleanor. You must be Leena.’ She wasn’t what I’d expected; I’d expected an exotic flower. But she was beautiful and confident, and that promised something. I put out my hand, feeling like her tall, awkward shadow.
‘Yah.’ She touched my hand briefly, then turned away again to open her suitcase and rummage through it. ‘I’m just grabbing my jacket; I’m meeting some friends to go into town.’ She snatched up a jacket, pink to match her pashmina, and flashed me a smile that melted away as soon as it had begun. ‘See ya.’
The door swung shut behind her and I stood there in the concrete room, alone.
I sat on the bed she’d left me. Everything was going on outside, and I had a suitcase full of clothes I’d picked to be a new, improved Eleanor Connor. The person I’d looked forward to magically becoming as soon as I got to the new promised land of university.
I had no idea how to be her yet.
Was she the kind of person who went out and introduced herself to people? Would she hang out in her room being cool and mysterious till people found her? Would she go and join a society right away and let herself be brought into a world of association?
Or would she sit here, unsure and lonely, almost (not quite, but almost) wishing for her mother to come back?
Someone rapped on my door, a complicated brisk rhythm. I got up and answered it.
A boy stood outside it. Some of the first-year males I’d seen were men already, but this one was a boy. He was tall and very thin, with almost delicate wrists protruding from one of the ugliest tartan jackets I’d ever seen. He wore thick-rimmed NHS-type spectacles and a goofy smile.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I’m Hugh. Pleased to meet you.’ He stuck out a hand.
I shook it. It seemed like an overly formal gesture, like this boy was pretending to be a grown-up. Then I remembered I’d done the same thing with Leena, and I shifted my weight, uncomfortable.
‘Eleanor,’ I said.
‘Eleanor. Excellent name.’ He scratched the side of his head and I noticed that his hair was messy, sticking up as if he’d not bothered to do anything to it since he’d got out of bed. ‘Listen, Eleanor, a bunch of us are going to the union in search of food and beer. You fancy coming?’
I looked beyond him to see who the ‘bunch of us’ were. Three people stood behind him: a boy with acne and an Iron Maiden T-shirt, an overweight girl who was already wearing a University of Reading sweatshirt, and a very thin girl with mousey hair.
‘Uh, I don’t know,’ I said.
These weren’t the friends I was supposed to have when I got to university. I was supposed to be with the interesting people, the exotic people, the creative people. These people looked like . . . well, anyone.
‘Come on,’ Hugh said, and he tilted his head and smiled at me. ‘You can help me knock on doors and round up anyone else who hasn’t got anything to do.’
The first few hours of your university experience were supposed to be formative. You could meet the people who would be your tribe for the whole next three years. Others would watch who you were with. They would categorise you.
‘Come on, El,’ Hugh said again. ‘We won’t bite you. And if you find somebody better to hang out with we won’t be hurt.’ His smile widened and his eyes actually twinkled behind his glasses. ‘Much.’
I glanced downwards. His trousers were too short for him, and he wore dirty canvas plimsolls, with red shoelaces in the left shoe and green shoelaces in the right shoe.
‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ I told him, and stepped out of the concrete room to join this tribe. For now.
‘Of course not.’ He pointed down the corridor. ‘You knock on the left-hand side, and I’ll do the right.’
Seven years since then, and he’d never left me alone since. Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t stepped through the door and joined him. What kind of person I might have turned out to be.
The guy with the Iron Maiden T-shirt found some other heavy metal fans and joined them right away; I don’t think I ever saw him again. The girl with the Reading sweatshirt, Deborah, responded to the pressures of university life by becoming anorexic. Weight dropped off her, she was borrowing my clothes, and then my clothes were too big for her. She swore she didn’t want help and then during our first-year exams she lost it.
I found her in the corridor of our hall of residence clutching the wall because she couldn’t stop laughing, or crying. It was difficult to tell which. When Hugh turned up (Hugh always turned up) we called the university nurse who called her parents and we only saw Deborah once more after that, in hospital in Basingstoke where she was from, and she was distinctly unfriendly. She got well, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with the university any more.
Five years later I named a secondary character in one of my novels Deborah and I couldn’t figure out why, whenever I wrote about her, I found myself awash in feelings of guilt. It was only when I mentioned it to Hugh that he reminded me.
Hugh’s memory was always much better than mine; sometimes I thought I didn’t bother to remember things because I knew he would.
The third girl, Gwen of the mousey hair, was actually still friends with us now, seven years later. Well, we sent Christmas cards. She dyed her hair blue during the first Christmas holiday and eventually became a divorce lawyer living in the poshest part of Henley. Her hair wasn’t blue any more. She worked something like twenty-three hours a day and always sent me and Hugh joint Christmas cards, as if we were a married couple.
And Hugh and me . . .
It’s difficult to chart how someone changes from an acquaintance to a friend, and even more difficult to tell exactly when that person becomes not only a friend but
the
friend, your best friend. Sometimes there are great leaps in intimacy, the afternoons leading to nights spent in the student union drinking and talking about your childhood and bickering about books, music, everything. There are shared visits home, crises with papers and exams and room-mates, the first book published, the first shared grief. The big events.
And then there’s just time passing. All the hours and hours and hours when you look over and there that person is, Hugh, being Hugh, becoming someone I knew so well that I never had to think about what he was like.
Lots of people assumed we were a couple. At first that made me a bit embarrassed because Hugh was such a geek. Holey socks, wild hair, those glasses. He usually looked like he dressed himself in the dark; in fact, I think most of the time that first year he did, because his rugby-playing room-mate Tyler was such a drinker that he never got up before two o’ clock in the afternoon and growled if the blinds were opened.
I wanted an extraordinary boyfriend: one of the curly-haired poet-types who slouched in the back of my English lectures, or a philosophy student who wore black and smoked cigarettes so intensely it seemed that every puff was an argument. Someone different and exciting who would make me different and exciting, someone sort of like the men my sister June brought home (a new one every time we saw her), only more intellectual. Not someone as comfortable as a pair of mismatched plimsolls.
Hugh, for his part, discovered girls in a big way when we were in our second year. It seemed as if his love life went from zero to sixty miles per hour practically overnight. He even made a play for me, once.
He turned up at my room on a Friday night around a quarter past eight, wearing a jacket and tie he’d tugged to half mast. I looked up from
Ulysses
with some relief when he poked his head around the door.
‘I thought you were going out with your mother,’ I said. She’d come to take him for dinner to celebrate his birthday, three days early so she could get in there before his father did.
He threw himself down on the single bed beside me and pulled his tie the rest of the way off. ‘I did. All she wanted to do was rehearse all the birthday parties she’d given me over the years and all the expensive presents she’d bought me and compare them to what my dad gave me. Year by year, in detail.’ He ran his hands through his hair, restoring it to its usual dishevelled condition. ‘I said I thought I was coming down with the flu.’
I ruffled his hair too, in sympathy. ‘How long have they been divorced? Nine years, ten?’
‘Since I was eight. Sometimes I swear they did it because it makes the arguments last longer.’
He looked at the ceiling, drew in a deep breath, and let it out slowly. ‘I’m through with it, though. Next time I see each of them I’m saying that they can compete all they want, but I’m not playing. The minute one parent even hints at mentioning the other one, I’m walking out.’
He slapped his hand on my duvet to emphasise his point.
‘Good for you,’ I said.
‘Yes. It’s time I took charge of my life. In all areas.’ Hugh sat up and smiled at me. ‘So it’s
Raiders of the Lost Ark
at the film theatre tonight. Fancy it?’
I threw
Ulysses
to the floor. ‘Of course.’
But when we got there, having arrived ten minutes late, Hugh had got the dates wrong and it was an art film about Danish wife-swappers.
Hugh had left his glasses in his room because his mother always nagged him to get contact lenses, so it fell to me to read him the subtitles.
‘ “Do you want to make love to my fair lady?” ’ I read in a whisper.
‘Is that to the soundtrack or actually to Audrey Hepburn?’ Hugh whispered back.
‘I think he means his wife, not the musical. Shut up, there’s more. “She is very good at giving -” ’
I couldn’t say it. I dissolved into snorting giggles and the people sitting near us glared at me.
‘What?’ asked Hugh. ‘What is she good at giving? Gifts?’
‘You know,’ I gasped between sobs of laughter.
‘I don’t,’ said Hugh, although the fair lady had started to do it onscreen and his vision wasn’t that bad.
‘Shhh,’ hissed someone a row or two behind us.
‘A bl—’
‘Blood? She’s giving blood?’
I could barely breathe. ‘No, she’s giving a bl—’
‘Black plague?’
‘Shhh!’
Hugh was managing not to laugh; I was clutching on to his arm so hard it probably hurt him, trying not to slide off my wooden seat. Meanwhile on screen two other people had joined the action and it appeared that they were also having a conversation about flower symbolism.
‘A blow job!’ I cried, and someone else yelled, ‘Shut up!’ and I put my head on the armrest and laughed as quietly as I could, tears streaming down my face, as Hugh shook with silent laughter beside me.
We snuck out soon afterwards, trying to ignore the dirty looks. It was a full moon and warm for March, so we swung by Hugh’s room, picked up a screwtop bottle of red wine, and went to sit by the university lake. There was a log hewn into a bench near some bushes on the bank, the perfect place to drink and watch the moonlight on the water and talk about everything and nothing; the kind of talk you can do with your best friend.
‘I never thought sex was funny before,’ I said.
‘It’s inherently funny,’ Hugh said. ‘Just listen: blow job. Say it.’
‘Blow job,’ I repeated, and giggled.
And then we lapsed into the kind of silence you can do with your best friend. The lake made lapping sounds on the shore and the moonlight was so bright it seemed as if I could taste it between slugs of wine from the bottle: something as refreshing as water and a little metallic.
It was difficult to believe that hundreds of students were around us, and beyond that, all of Reading; people with cars and televisions and noisy lives. Here it was hushed, liquid, Hugh and me and the smell of damp leaves beginning to grow.