by Rebecca Reid
‘No. That’s true,’ Chloe said, and gave a small smile in return.
Zadie drained her coffee cup and readjusted herself. ‘Oh, I’ve made you sad. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. The last thing I want is to take the shine off it. If it helps, I lost mine to one of the grounds staff at school – no, don’t look horrified, he was only a year older than me – but then it got around and the school found out and fired him. I felt awful, he was sad, my parents were informed. The whole thing was horrible and I was furious that they’d all stolen the loveliness of it away. And now I’ve done the same thing to you. I’m so sorry.’
Her earnestness would have seemed false on anyone else, but something about the way Zadie spoke made it impossible not to believe every word she said.
‘No, no, not sad. I guess I was just still in my little bubble. I wasn’t thinking about that stuff.’
Zadie wrapped her arms around Chloe, wobbling her coffee cup on the pristine white duvet cover. ‘Think about it. It would have been a disaster if you’d ended up loving him for ever. Who wants to marry the only person they’ve ever slept with?’
Zadie
Max was never around in January. Even when he was at school, he had chosen to go back early so that he could run round the muddy fields, punishing his body for the excess of Christmas. And now that he had the peak of his career in touching distance, he was even worse. Every morning when she woke up he would be long gone, across town at rugby camp, back late and covered in dirt, interested only in a protein shake or, if he was feeling truly punishing, an ice bath. Zadie had been back at uni for a week, but they’d barely spent a waking hour together.
It shouldn’t matter, she knew that. But she hated January. It always filled her with this sort of sadness, like a pendulum in her chest. Other people seemed to be able to accept that Christmas was over, packing away decorations, pulling on Lycra leggings and embarking on diets. But Zadie found the passing of time, the way that the national mood shifted from celebration to misery in a matter of hours, unbearable. She gazed at her feet as she tramped back up to her room. She had called Max to see when he’d be home, because she couldn’t face another afternoon at home alone, but he wasn’t picking up. So she had time to kill here.
To her surprise, Chloe was sitting at the desk in their room, books spread out in front of her.
‘You’re already working?’ asked Zadie.
Chloe looked startled. Embarrassed, even. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I got my marks back for the end-of-term exams, and I didn’t do well. Plus, I missed a whole load of lectures last term, too hung over to go. I’ve got some make-up essays to write, otherwise they’re going to get properly stressy with me. I have to send this piece of work in by midnight.’
Zadie looked sadly at all Chloe’s books and felt guilty, not for the first time, that she only had three hours of lectures a week, and that she had a note from her psychologist saying that she shouldn’t be placed under undue pressure, lest it trigger a breakdown.
‘Have you got lots left to do?’ she asked, flopping on to her bed. ‘I was thinking we could go out.’
She shouldn’t tempt Chloe. She knew that. At school she had been moved from room-sharing with girl after girl when their parents had complained that Zadie was a distraction. And it was true. Just because she could dash off an essay in an hour and get a passing grade didn’t mean that everyone else could. And she tried to be grown-up about that. But the idea of an afternoon sitting alone, waiting for Max, was too much.
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Chloe.
‘We could just go into town for a little bit of shopping. And then maybe a glass of wine. You’d be back here by, like, five. You could work all evening.’
Chloe hadn’t wanted to go into Feight, the boutique on the high street with the whippet-thin assistants and the sofas for bored husbands. But Zadie had insisted. Then she had forced Chloe to try on dress after dress. As Chloe came out of the changing room and smiled at her reflection in the mirror, a warm feeling flooded Zadie’s insides. It made her feel better. Bad people didn’t get joy out of buying presents for their friends.
‘You have to have that one. And the blue one, and the pink one.’
Chloe laughed. ‘And then I’ll have to move in with you and Max because I won’t be able to afford to pay for halls.’
‘I’ll get them,’ Zadie said, scooping all the garments up in her arms and lying them on the counter. ‘Wrap them up, please,’ she said to the woman behind the counter, who gave her a snooty smile.
Chloe was flustered. She made lots of noises about not wanting them, about it being wrong, how she couldn’t accept them. Zadie pretended to listen, then swiped the card and handed Chloe the bags. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘drinks.’
Chloe wasn’t sure how they lost track of time so badly. But before long it was dark. And then it was late. Zadie checked her phone and there were lots of missed calls from Max, who sounded cross when she eventually picked up the phone. She hailed a taxi and pulled Chloe, also giggling and falling over, into it.
‘What time is it?’ Chloe slurred.
‘I think, like, ten,’ Zadie replied.
‘It’s 1 a.m.,’ said the driver.
Chloe looked upset.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I was supposed to email in my essay before midnight.’
Zadie laughed. But Chloe didn’t. Zadie watched her face in profile, orange under the street lights. Her stomach twisted and the lovely warm glow from the wine and the cocktails started to slip away as she watched a single tear slide down Chloe’s cheek.
18
Now
Chloe followed Max upstairs. Up more stairs. Past what looked like the master bedroom, to a smaller but no less hotel-like room at the top of the house. He pulled open the skylights, flooding the hot room with cooler air. Then he bent to kiss her neck, her chest, her cheeks and, finally, her lips.
‘I’d like another glass of wine,’ she said when he pulled away for a moment.
‘Of course. I’ll be back in a minute.’
Chloe took off her dress and surveyed herself in the mirror. As if it mattered what she looked like. Max wanted her because he wanted to give her what Rav couldn’t. He wanted to triumph where another man had failed. And, as an added bonus, he got to fuck the only one of his female friends who hadn’t opened her legs for him at university. She put her phone on the bedside table, swiped at it then lay down.
Max came over to the bed, twisted her hair in his hand and yanked her head back. ‘I always wondered what you’d be like in bed. Ever since that night when I found out that you were a virgin,’ he said into her ear.
His hands were everywhere, and his lips were everywhere else. He bit her neck and her breasts. ‘Harder,’ she whispered.
‘I don’t want to bruise you,’ he said. ‘When Rav gets back …’
‘Let me worry about that,’ she replied, pressing her almost naked body against his clothed one. So he bit her again. Harder this time. Harder still, after she writhed and told him how much she liked it.
‘Slap me,’ she asked, looking up at him through her eyelashes. He tapped her cheek gently. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ He did it again, harder. She moaned, encouraging him with her enthusiasm.
It came as no surprise to Chloe that Max was good at sex. She had always assumed that he would be. But he was seamless. He moved from action to action without a moment of hesitation. To her intense surprise, surprise soaked in guilt, when she closed her eyes and divorced herself from who it was she was in bed with, she found that she was almost enjoying herself. How many times had she lain in bed at Archer Crescent, listening to Max and Zadie going at it with the kind of aggressive lust that belongs only to people of that age, and wondered what it would be like to have Max’s hands on her skin? She watched his fingers brush her leg and tried not to rejoice in being touched by someone who had touched Zadie.
Eventually, he came, and remembering his complaint about Verity, Chloe gave an impressive pe
rformance, whimpering and clenching around him. He rolled off her and flopped back on the bed.
‘Fucking hell, Coco. That was quite something.’
‘It really was.’
‘Maybe there’s something to that delayed-gratification thing other people talk about.’
Chloe lay her head on Max’s chest. ‘Can I stay the night? Or will Verity be back in the morning?’
‘No, she won’t be here until tomorrow evening. You’re welcome to stay.’
Max fell asleep quickly. It was so like him to be able to drift off into a peaceful sleep moments after he had betrayed his fiancée. She got up quietly, gathered her clothes and went into the bathroom. It would be safer to wait until he was deeply asleep, but time was of the essence. She closed the recording she had made on her phone without watching it back. She couldn’t bring herself to just yet. Then she turned the bathroom lights on and took detailed photos, one by one, of every single mark on her body. The love bites on her neck, the flush on her cheeks, the bruise on her upper thigh where he had responded to her cajoling him to spank her. It had hurt, but she was glad of the livid red handprint it had left.
She took a deep breath. The last part. She went back to the bedroom and photographed Max. Slowly, determinedly. Then she photographed herself with him. She took his thumb and pressed it, moving so slowly and so gently she could hear her own heart beating, against his phone. It unlocked. Her chest untightened.
What should she write? What message would keep her options most open?
‘I hope that was okay – it’s been a while since I’ve done anything like that. Don’t tell Rav, and I won’t tell Verity.’
That was good. It sounded like him. Or at least it sounded enough like him that it would be believable. If it needed to be. She deleted the message from his phone as it flashed up on her own screen.
Then she called the car service Max had used earlier. She dropped her voice, low and sad. ‘I need a car, as soon as you can,’ she said. She whispered Max’s address. The woman at the other end of the line sounded suitably worried about her and assured her the car would be there as soon as possible.
On the way to the front door she paused, then went to the kitchen drawer where Verity kept her cigarettes. Took a couple out. Moved the lighter. It was the kind of thing that someone like Verity was certain to notice. Good.
The day after her encounter with Max, Chloe woke up with a feeling that reminded her of her birthday. A mixture of excitement and the anticipation of being disappointed, heavily laced with the guilt of what she had done to Rav. But there was no reason he would ever have to know. And it wasn’t as if she had acted out of lust. She had done what she had to do, for her friend. Any enjoyment she had derived from it was purely physical. Not her fault.
Her skin was raw from where she had scrubbed any trace of Max away, the water from the shower mixing with the tears streaming down her face. She checked her phone constantly, looking again and again at everything she had collected, reassuring herself that she had it all safe, weighing up all the options it gave her. The video of them together. The photographs of the marks on her body in the harsh light of the bathroom. The picture of Max, in bed, naked. The pictures of them together. Now she had to decide what to do next. How best to deploy her hard-won weapons.
Alongside the obsession with Max, with her treasure trove there was something else. A heavy, sticky feeling of grief, unlike the grief she had ever felt before when a grandparent or a much-loved pet ‘passed away’. For the last fifteen years she had indulged in daydreams – not often; once, perhaps twice a month – about a time in the future when she and Zadie would be friends again. When she would be able to share everything she did with her, when Zadie would sprinkle her very special brand of magic over their lives. She had created a version of Zadie as an adult, all her selfish, frightening tendencies wiped away by age but the sparkle still entirely present.
As the years wore on and Zadie was a more and more distant memory, she knew that it was unlikely. More and more unlikely. Eventually, almost impossible. But now, it was actually impossible. Completely, really, truly impossible. Zadie had always been there in the back of her mind, like an imaginary friend. She would hear her voice when she was deciding whether or not to buy a dress she couldn’t afford, or sitting next to someone painfully dull at a dinner party. The fact that Zadie was dead shouldn’t matter, not really. Nothing in Chloe’s life had changed. But somehow, despite the fact Zadie had been no more alive for Chloe last week than she was now, Zadie was gone for her. The wicked little laugh, the ideas, the naughtiness. She couldn’t hear it any more. It was gone.
At some point in the years that Chloe and Rav had lived in the flat, they had decided that it was too much work to look for anything that wasn’t immediately at hand and, besides, the flat was so tiny they couldn’t afford to waste a single centimetre of space. Every single one of their belongings that wasn’t used every day was stored in a tiny, dark room which the estate agent had optimistically called a ‘storage nook’. But today was going to be different. Chloe took out box after box, more than a little pleased that she had been so methodical when she had packed it all away. She found the record player she had bought Rav for his thirtieth birthday, when they’d lived with Lissy and Guy in the much bigger flat, and another box, filled with records. For a while, records had filled a little cavity in their marriage. Record-buying had become an activity. They stopped at charity shops as they passed to see if they could add to their collection. Surprised each other with strange or funny records they’d seen.
There was almost no space in the living room. A little round table, two bookshelves, a fireplace, a sofa and a TV. But, she reasoned, they never ate at the table, preferring to sit on the sofa and watch something mindless during the winter, or in the little garden in the summer. So she put the record player back together, wiring up the speakers and feeling beyond smug when the scratchy, warm music began to play, pulling her back to a time five years ago when she was newly married, living with her best friends and still convinced that everything would somehow be okay.
19
Then
Chloe tried to push open the door to her bedroom. The carpet seemed to be resisting her. Finally, she won the fight, shoving the door open and realizing that there was a wad of post on the carpet, acting like a sort of doorstop. She hadn’t been back here for a week. Maybe two weeks. She’d taken to sleeping at Zadie’s after they had people over. When Max was away, for whatever rugby-related activity he had gone off on, she would sleep in Zadie’s bed. They’d fallen into a soft, comfortable way of sleeping, each on their own side but facing each other, talking until they fell asleep. Zadie said it made her feel safe – reminded her of school, where she’d slept in a dormitory full of other girls for years. Chloe supposed it probably did something similar for her. Reminded her of a time when she was little, before Greg, when her mother would crawl into her bed, read to her and sing to her until she fell asleep.
Most of the bits of paper weren’t important. There was a letter from the library curtly demanding that some books be returned, a postcard from her mother and Greg, who had gone to the Lake District. But there was also a white envelope with a window that made her stomach twist. Nothing good ever came from an envelope with a window, her mother had always said. She slid her finger under the flap and tried not to throw up when, moments later, the words on the paper started to scream in her mind.
She had missed too many lectures. Too many deadlines. They wanted to see her for a formal meeting, and if she didn’t go, she would be automatically unenrolled. She had, the accusatory piece of paper claimed, ignored their previous attempts at getting in touch. How else would they have tried? When did she last check her university email address? Heart thumping, ocean noises inside her ears, she called Zadie.
‘Zaid,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper, ‘they’re going to kick me out.’
Zadie sounded sleepy, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise. When Chloe had l
eft that morning the house was still full of people and Zadie had been lying perfectly still and entirely asleep.
‘What?’
‘I’ve got a letter. I have to go to a meeting. If I don’t convince them that there are’ – she fumbled with the letter, trying to find the words – ‘“extenuating circumstances”, then I’m going to get chucked out.’
She listened to the rustle of sheets as Zadie sat up. ‘Calm down,’ she said.
‘I can’t, Zadie. If I get kicked out, I don’t know what I would do. I can’t move back home. I won’t be able to get a job. I basically spent my whole life trying to get here.’
Zadie shushed her gently. ‘Coco, it’s not going to happen. When is this meeting?’
‘Thursday.’
‘Okay, so you just turn up looking like shit, tell them that you’ve been struggling, that you need to stay enrolled otherwise you don’t know what you’ll do – make a big deal about that bit – and then look all teary. They’ll make you get some counselling and check in with your tutor a bit, and you’ll be fine.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Everyone does it, it’s fine.’
Chloe did as she had been instructed. She fought every one of her instincts, which told her to arrive in a neatly ironed blouse with her hair in a ponytail, and turned up wearing a lumpy jumper and jeans, unwashed hair loose over her shoulders. Most of the work was done for her, if she was honest. As she finished getting dressed, she looked at herself in the plastic-rimmed mirror above her sink. She had to admit that what looked back at her wasn’t good. The skin under her eyes was inky and the rest of her face was milk-pale. There were three livid red spots on her jaw line, and her hair had gone sort of floppy. She was thinner than she used to be, but not in a way she could feel pleased with. Her skin was soft and tissue-papery. When was the last time she’d eaten properly? The halls of residence put on dinner every night, safe, school-style food like sausages and mash or pasta bake. In her first weeks she had diligently gone every day, filling up on carbohydrates, making polite conversation with the people on her table. But as she had grown closer and closer to Zadie, she’d stopped. Zadie didn’t seem very interested in food. Coffee in the morning. Diet Coke in the afternoon. Whatever outlandish cocktail she’d decided to make any given evening. Olives, sometimes, a handful of crisps. The fridge was full of lean protein, cooked and eaten by Max. But food seemed too pedestrian, too prosaic for Zadie. But everyone did this at university. Everyone knew that students weren’t supposed to eat much, that drinking every day and being permanently hung over was how it was supposed to be. She had the whole of the rest of her life to eat vegetables and get eight hours of sleep a night.
