by Rebecca Reid
Chloe could hear the yearning in Rav’s voice and knew that it wasn’t just about the project. Of course he wanted the money and the prestige, but it was more than that. It was about wanting to be back in Max’s world, illuminated by his reflected glory. He’d always loved it when they’d first known him, and while she might try to convince herself that they’d both grown out of it, the desire for Max’s attention, she knew in Rav’s case it wasn’t true.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, wishing she had the willpower to deny him. ‘We’ll go.’
She pulled out a pen and wrote ‘Dinner with Max’ in the shared diary which lived on the kitchen table. As she looked down at the wet blue ink, a twisting, griping feeling formed under her ribcage.
Zadie
Zadie’s finger rested on the button for the electric window of the car. She pressed it down, then pulled it up, flicking the window a centimetre up, a centimetre down. She used to do the same thing in the car with her parents when she was a child on the way back to school on a Sunday night. She would wait to see how long her mother would ignore it before shouting at her. But the driver in the front seat, neatly dressed in a navy-blue suit, didn’t notice. Or if he did, he said nothing. She stopped pressing the button, just in case he could hear over the hum of the road and it was annoying him.
She watched the other cars passing, looking through their windows at the children, dogs, suitcases in them. Occasionally, a car filled with boxes and bags and rolled-up duvets would pass and she would wonder if they, too, were on their way to start university. Presumably with their parents.
Her mother had been apologetic about not dropping her off. ‘I would have done, darling,’ she had said, ‘but we’re away that weekend. And it’s not like you’ve never been away before. You know, other people who get dropped off by their parents, this is the first time they’ve ever left home.’ She’d clearly been trying to assuage her own guilt more than anything else.
It was true. Zadie had been leaving home for months at a time since she was eleven. This wasn’t the big sticking-plaster rip that other people found it to be. In fact, it was coming as quite a relief. A summer at home with her parents breathing down her neck, obsessing about whether she was eating, worrying about who she was seeing – it had been almost unbearable. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ was a maxim that suited the Lister family down to the ground.
The driver indicated and turned off. The world felt quieter as soon as he pulled on to the new road, flanked by sloping green hills. Pretty. She had been to visit before, of course. The previous year, while Max had been ‘studying’, which seemed to mean playing rugby and convincing some sweet, spineless friend to do his academic work for him, she had visited all the time, convincing her house mistress that she was going home and telling her parents that she was at school. But it was different now. She was going to be with him properly. Like adults. No more waiting up at night, hoping he would call her from some party, inevitably surrounded by beautiful girls, while she was locked up fifty miles away at school. And it wasn’t going to be all about Max, either. She was going to find her own friends. Her own place.
She had sworn to her parents, who had clearly been furious that she’d got into such a good university, where her boyfriend just happened to go, that she would make her own life. And while she lied fluently to them, in this instance she really meant it. Max’s friends were painfully dull, obsessed with which school people had gone to, who people’s families were, and talked endlessly about sport.
‘Will it be your first year?’ asked the driver, cutting through Zadie’s daydream of a group of like-minded friends who wanted to visit galleries with her or paint huge, messy canvases together.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘First term of the first year.’
‘You must be a smart cookie, getting in here.’
Zadie laughed. He wasn’t wrong. Her teachers had almost choked when she’d announced that she wanted to come here. But six months in the library, doggedly learning everything she’d ignored in previous years, and here she was. ‘I’m reading History of Art. It’s a bit of an easy option.’
‘Doesn’t sound easy to me.’ He caught her eye in the wing mirror and smiled.
He pulled into the car park of the halls, which was filled with teenagers and suitcases and weeping parents. Zadie watched as a pretty blonde girl followed a slender woman and a bald man up the path. She had an armful of books and a dazed expression, as if she had arrived somewhere wonderful. Zadie considered her, considered all of them. She could do as she had promised her mother she would. Unpack into whatever box-sized bedroom she had been assigned. Make friends with the girls on her hallway. Do everything she had been doing at boarding school for the last seven years, all over again. And a little part of her wanted to. When was the last time she had done something the ‘normal’ way? But she had promised Max. She had come here for Max. They’d spent the entire summer excited about finally living together like grown-ups. How would he feel if she suddenly turned around and said she wanted to have the bog-standard university halls experience, rather than living with him?
She leaned forward between the two front seats and gave the driver her most persuasive smile.
‘Would you mind taking me a tiny bit further? It’s called Archer Crescent.’
The driver looked unconvinced. ‘I promised your parents I’d drop you here.’
Zadie laughed and put her hand on his arm. ‘I know, but that was because they were worried I’d try to convince you to take me to the airport so I could run away to Aruba and live naked on a beach for the rest of my life. This is just a little change of address.’
He raised an eyebrow but indicated left, turning towards the pretty crescent where Max’s parents had insisted on getting him a house, and away from the halls, where her parents had equally insisted that she would live.
Her mother was so obsessed with the whole thing she’d even braved having lunch with Max’s mother, who she couldn’t stand. ‘We’re like a really boring Romeo and Juliet,’ Zadie had laughed to Max.
The houses, which sat on a little hill, were tall and golden with pastel-coloured front doors. They looked out across the rest of the town; it was green and gold and teeming with possibilities. Halls was all well and good, but how could she be expected to resist moving in here? Finally, after years and years of hiding, making up alibis and snatching days together on holidays or over school exeats, Zadie would be able to be with Max. Really be with him.
The driver insisted on helping her drag all her suitcases and boxes out of the car. After she had piled everything up on the front steps of Archer Crescent, she went to give him a £20 note. But instead, for reasons she couldn’t quite understand, she found herself throwing her arms around his neck and planting a kiss on his cheek. He flushed, but didn’t seem unhappy about it.
‘Good luck with it all,’ he said, smiling at the floor. ‘Work hard, but don’t forget to have some fun as well.’
‘Thank you. It’s going to be great.’
2
Then
Greg panted as he dropped the suitcase on the uneven wooden floor. There was a sheen to his bald head despite the fact that it was cold outside – crisp and blue in a way that only October ever was.
A helpful-looking student adviser had offered to carry the bags to Chloe’s new room, but Greg, always keen to play the adoring stepfather for the outside world, had insisted that he didn’t need any assistance.
‘My hero!’ Chloe’s mother, Louise, smiled, putting her arms around Greg’s neck. Her touch made his blue shirt stick to his back. ‘What would we do without you?’ she laughed. Chloe considered telling her mother that without Greg she wouldn’t have needed to pack such heavy suitcases because she would want to come home more than once a term, but that would prompt an argument, and there was no point.
‘Thanks, Greg,’ she said, eyes firmly on the empty pinboard on the wall behind where he stood. He didn’t reply.
‘I wonder who your room-mate is go
ing to be,’ her mother said, her voice aspartame. She went to the door, looking at the little metal frames which held the names of those who lived inside. On the left, Chloe Sanders. On the right, Zadie Lister. ‘Zadie,’ she said, as if it was the most astonishing name she’d ever heard in her life. ‘Very exotic.’ She made ‘exotic’ sound like it rhymed with ‘toxic’. Her mother didn’t approve of unusual names. ‘It’s all so exciting, isn’t it?’ she added, looking around the room.
Chloe nodded. ‘It’s nice. I didn’t realize I’d be sharing.’ The room was wide and rectangular with a high ceiling. Each side had a double bed, a sink, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe, all made of the kind of pine that was virtually impossible to damage. She wondered what it would originally have been, before it was part of a halls of residence, when it was still a country house. Spartan and pragmatic as it was, nothing could take away from the height of the ceilings, the cornicing around the top of the walls and the huge sash windows.
Greg snorted. ‘If it’s not to your liking, we can take you home, madam. Or see if there are any rooms at the Ritz?’
It wasn’t worth replying. ‘You guys can go,’ she said to her mum. ‘It’s a long drive.’
Her mother swallowed. Was she genuinely about to cry, or was this for Greg’s benefit, all part of the heroic single-mother act? Chloe scolded herself internally, not for the first time, for being angrier with her mother for marrying Greg than she was with her father for walking out on them fifteen years ago.
‘I can’t believe we’re here,’ Louise said, her voice cracking. ‘I can’t believe that we got here, all on our own.’ She turned to Greg. ‘I was the same age she is now when I had her, and we made it, the two of us.’ She pulled Chloe into a hug. None of what her mother was saying was untrue. But Louise was doing the thing she always did, performing for an invisible camera. Ever since Chloe could remember, her mother had been acting out a film, casting herself as the tragic but beautiful heroine left to try and raise her daughter alone. This, Chloe supposed, was the closing scene. She’d drive off into the sunset with Greg (the fact that Greg was the antithesis of a romantic hero didn’t seem to matter much) and the credits would roll. Louise had done her job. Everyone would have to agree that she was a Good Mother.
‘Love you,’ Chloe said weakly into her mother’s apple-scented hair.
Louise picked her handbag up off the unmade bed, holding it on the crook of her skinny brown arm. ‘If you want anything, you just call. All right?’
Chloe nodded, surprised at the constriction in her throat. She’d been counting down to this since Greg had moved into their little house six years ago, literally and metaphorically sat his fat arse between Chloe and her mother on the leather sofa and commandeered the remote control, replacing their marathons of America’s Next Top Model with wrestling.
‘You guys should get going,’ she said, squeezing her eyelids shut.
‘You’re right,’ said Greg. ‘Your new mate will be here before long.’ He gestured at the empty bed. ‘You don’t want us embarrassing you when your roomie shows up!’
He didn’t know how right he was. Zadie was supposed to be her first friend here – someone to debate literature with, to stay up all night talking about love, life and the future with. And that wasn’t going to happen if Greg asked her whether she followed WWE before Chloe had had a chance to find out what books she liked. She watched as they disappeared through the door, down the stairs. She followed their figures through the window, her mother’s slender hand clamped in Greg’s shovel-like one.
It was difficult to know where to start. With the bed, she supposed. She pulled the tape off the box labelled ‘sheets’, the contents lovingly ironed by her mother, and made the bed. Then she put her books on the shelves. She took out her speaker and thought about putting some music on, but the idea of picking what she’d be listening to when Zadie arrived was too much to deal with.
There was a knock at the door and the nerves swelled in Chloe’s chest. This was it. Her first meeting with her room-mate. A small blonde girl with thin eyebrows put her head around the door, smiling. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Lissy.’
Oh. Not Zadie. Chloe fixed her face into a smile. ‘Chloe,’ she said.
‘A group of us from the corridor are going down to the pub. Do you want to join?’ She looked around the room. ‘Oh, wow, you’re sharing. Bad luck …’ She paused, seeming to realize that she was being rude. ‘But I mean, it might be fun. Everyone in America shares a room at uni. My cousin lives in Florida.’
Chloe drank in the girl’s jeans, zip-up jumper and trainers – the same outfit everyone back home wore; she even had the same shade of lipstick. She looked across at the unmade bed. ‘That’s really nice of you,’ she said, ‘but I think I’m going to wait for Zadie to arrive.’
‘Zadie?’
‘My room-mate.’
‘Oh.’ The girl smiled. ‘Cool. Well we’ll be at the George if you both want to join later.’ She disappeared, leaving a faint smell of Impulse body spray behind her.
Four hours later, Zadie still hadn’t arrived. The empty bed and shelves stood in stark contrast to her own side of the room, covered with books, fairy lights and posters.
She should go down to join Lissy and her friends. But something inside her recoiled at the idea. Besides, what if she went and sat with them at some sticky table in a pub and they talked about what A levels they’d done and what subject they were studying and if they had boyfriends, the same stupid conversation she’d had a million times back home, and, in her absence, Zadie arrived?
University, it turned out, was a lot like college. Lectures. Seminars. Essays. Girls swishing their hair and not speaking up in case their intellect made them less desirable to the boys, who talked at length about books they probably hadn’t read. Chloe’s conviction that she would be transformed into a latter-day bluestocking with reams of friends who sat around drinking and discussing art was starting to wane.
A few weeks into term, on her way back from a lecture, Chloe paused on the corridor outside her room, noticing that the door, which she was sure she had locked, was ajar, and that from inside was coming a sort of rustling noise. She pushed the door open, standing back, and looked in, framed by the wooden rectangle. In the middle of the room was a tall, thin girl with masses of blonde hair. She wore a dress which might have been a silk dressing gown, and she was pulling items of clothing from an old-fashioned suitcase and shoving them into the chest of drawers on her side of the room.
‘Hello?’ Chloe said after a moment.
The girl looked up and smiled. ‘Hi,’ she said. Her voice was breathy. She didn’t stop; her movements were fast and fluid. Chloe stood fixed to the spot, as if to step into her own room would be an intrusion. ‘Are you Zadie?’ she asked, after what felt like an hour. The back of her neck was hot.
‘Yes,’ the girl replied. ‘Can you pass me that?’ she asked, pointing to a folded silk eiderdown sitting on her desk.
Moving slowly, feeling like she’d entered some alternative universe, Chloe picked it up. It was the sort of thing her mother would have bought a cheap copy of from BHS then proudly displayed in the guest room at home. Zadie took it from her and arranged it over her bed, which, after six weeks of being rudely naked on her side of the room, was finally made up.
‘Thanks.’
‘What are you …’ Chloe tailed off. It was an obvious question. It made perfect sense to ask it. But she felt stupid anyway.
Zadie stopped moving, running her hands through her hair and wrapping it up into a knot on the top of her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘you must think I’m an actual loon. Don’t worry, I’m not taking your room. You must have been so pleased when you realized you were getting a double to yourself.’
Chloe had no idea what to say to that, so she put her bag down on her desk and retreated to her bed, pulling her knees up to her chest. No, she wanted to say. I wasn’t pleased at all. I wanted you to come. But that would sound insane. ‘You’re
not staying?’ she asked instead.
Zadie tipped her handbag upside down on the chest of drawers, spreading the detritus over it. She took a step back, admiring her handiwork, then looked up, as if realizing she needed to answer the question. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, I mean, I’m staying here at college. I’m just not staying here-here.’
‘It’s not—’ Chloe paused, but the words came out in spite of herself: ‘It’s not me?’
Zadie looked aggrieved. She came to sit on the bed next to Chloe, putting her hand on her arm. Chloe’s stomach twisted at the intimacy of the touch.
‘God, no,’ said Zadie. ‘Sorry, I’m being useless, I should explain. My parents are coming this afternoon and I need them to think that I’m living here.’
‘Why?’
Zadie sighed. ‘It’s such a saga, but – don’t think I’m awful, all right? So, they’re a bit over-protective, kind of controlling, and they’d be furious if they found out that I wasn’t staying here. It was part of the deal of them letting me come.’
‘So where do you actually live?’
‘With Max. My boyfriend. We’ve been together for years so, obviously we wanted to live together. But my parents are such psychos, if they find out that I’m not living here, then they’ll probably stop paying my fees or something obscene like that.’ She delivered the information at a million miles an hour, so fast that Chloe could only just follow what she was saying. ‘Anyway, my little brother, he’s such an angel – I mean, not an angel at all, he’s been thrown out of about seven boarding schools – anyway, he warned me they were making a “surprise visit”, which clearly is code for coming to check that I’m doing as I’m told. So when they get here I need them to think that I’m living here. With you.’
Chloe frowned and slowly got to her feet. Shyly, she pulled the blankets into a tangle on Zadie’s bed. ‘Then you need to make your bed look like you’ve slept in it. Won’t they be suspicious if it’s too neat?’
