The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

  The next morning I couldn’t believe it. That daring, sexual person couldn’t have been me, could it? If Miranda had been there I might have asked her: how much of what I thought I remembered had been real? Had she seen me go off with the man to the poolhouse? Had that actually happened? Or had it, in fact, just been a particularly lurid hallucination? I couldn’t bring myself to ask Samira, for fear that she’d laugh at me and tell me to grow up.

  It must have happened, I decided: there was a telltale ache between my legs that said it had. I was convinced I could smell him on me. But no one said anything the next day. I checked for any signs of joking or bravado among the boys, but there was nothing.

  Luckily, there are several of us abstaining this evening. Bo – of course, Samira, Nick in support of Bo. I could see how unimpressed Nick was by this addition to the evening in his glare when Miranda proffered the bag to him, practically reaching across Bo to do so. She seemed utterly oblivious, but then she’s always given a good impression of shrugging off things, as though nothing can touch her. As her oldest friend, I know that this isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes it takes no small effort to appear so carefree.

  Now she’s over by the record player in the corner of the Lodge’s living room, flicking through a shelf full of old records. Eventually, with a cry of victory, she finds the one she wants – HITS: STUDIO 54 – and places it on the turntable. As the music spills out, some husky-voiced songstress, Miranda goes to the middle of the room and begins to dance. She is completely at ease, dancing like this with the rest of us watching, sitting still. She’s so in tune with her body. I have always longed for that lack of inhibition. Because, really, isn’t that what dancing is? It isn’t about being particularly talented: not unless it’s something you do professionally. It’s more an ability to shake off your own self-consciousness. I have never been able to do that. It’s not really something you can learn to do. You either have it, or you don’t.

  I remember our teenage years, blagging our way into nightclubs. Though Miranda didn’t have to blag. They always let her in on first sight: she was fifteen going on twenty-five, and already gorgeous. In hindsight, when I think about the looks men would give her, the comments they made to her, it turns the stomach. I’d creep in behind her, hoping no one would notice me. I remember dancing beside her, warmed by the vodka stolen from my mum’s limitless supplies. Copying Miranda’s moves as faithfully as her own shadow; because I have always been that: her shadow. The darkness to her flaming torch. Feeling almost as though I had shaken off my awkwardness.

  Miranda is the sort of friend who makes you bold. Who can make you feel six foot tall, almost as radiant as she is, as though you are borrowing a little of her light. Or she can make you feel like shit. Depending on her whim. Sometimes on those nights out she would compliment me on how I looked – always in something borrowed from her already extensive wardrobe, baggy in the bust and hip region, a bit like a girl playing woman in her mother’s clothes. Other times she would say something like: ‘Oh God, Katie, do you know how serious you look when you’re dancing?’ then an impression – squint-eyed, grim-mouthed, stiff-hipped – ‘You look like you have the worst case of constipation. I’m pretty sure that isn’t how Sean Paul intended people to dance to this.’ I would feel all my newfound confidence desert me – I would feel worse than ever. I would take a big long swig of whatever vodka-and-something drink I was holding, until I felt the slide, the shift. And I’d understand then why my mother seemed to use alcohol like medicine.

  As ever, it is almost impossible not to watch Miranda dance. She is so graceful, so fluid, you could assume that she has had some kind of special training. The only one of us who is not watching her, actually, is Julien. He’s looking out of the window at the blackness, frowning, apparently lost in thought.

  Miranda gestures to us all to join her. She grabs Mark’s hand, pulls him to his feet. At first he looks lumpish and awkward in the middle of the carpet. But as she fits her body to his they begin to move together, and with her he acquires a rhythm, sinuous, even sensual, that he would never find on his own. It seems to be infectious, the thrum of the music exerting a pull over everyone. Samira gets up – she’s always been a fantastic dancer. She has that looseness, that sense of ease in her own skin. Giles grabs Emma’s hand, pulls her to her feet and dances her around the room. Giles has no rhythm at all, but he clearly doesn’t care – he’s like an overgrown, drunken schoolboy. They cannon into one of the deer heads on the wall, knocking it askew. Emma tries to right it, with an anxious grin, but as she does Giles seizes her around the waist and turns her upside down.

  ‘Giles!’ Samira shouts, but she’s laughing, and she turns away from them with her eyes closed, lost to the music. Emma’s laughing, too – though she’s perhaps the only self-conscious one of all of them, tugging her top down as Giles sets her back on her feet. Now Nick’s standing, too, putting his hand out for Bo, and they’re arguably even better dancers than Miranda, they move so well together.

  As ever, though, it is Miranda the eye is drawn back to: the sun around which all the others are orbiting planets. Mark is in his element, leaning into the grooves of her body as they dance. Never has his crush on her been more blatant. If you can call it a crush. Sometimes I have wondered if it might be something more.

  When Miranda and Julien started going out, I remember thinking it was a bit odd that his mate seemed to be acting as a kind of courier between them, ferrying messages back and forth. Mark would arrive at our college, asking to speak with her. He had something to tell her from Julien. Julien, like a king, sending out an envoy, wanted to invite her to his rugby game that weekend. Or to accompany him to some party. It was pathetic, I thought. It couldn’t really be a friendship at all, more like a form of hero worship, or slavery. Who did Julien think he was? And why did Mark put up with it? True, like Miranda, Julien has the sort of looks – and the kind of charisma – that are prone to attracting acolytes. But Mark wasn’t unattractive, or awkward and shy. He didn’t need to stoop so low. And it was bizarre. We all had mobiles by then. Julien could simply have sent a text.

  But then I started to notice how Mark looked at her, I began to suspect that those visits weren’t at Julien’s instigation, after all. Mark had volunteered. He began turning up not just outside, on the quad below our block, but actually in our very corridor. Someone had let him in, he’d say, when I asked how he’d got past the door code.

  Once I ran into him sitting just outside Miranda’s room.

  ‘She’s out,’ I said. ‘She has a meeting with her tutor until four.’ It would be an hour and a half until she came back.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I don’t have anything else to do.’ And I realised that he wanted to be there, waiting around for her.

  There was one other time that sticks in my mind. Julien and Miranda were properly together by then, the hot new couple. We went for a barbecue at Julien’s house on a boiling day after exams – we’d moved into private housing by then – the huge, ramshackle townhouse where he lived with eight other rugby lads, including Mark. I was the invisible plus one. Admittedly a couple of Julien’s friends had tried, half-heartedly, to flirt, but I’d been cold and stand-offish with them. I didn’t want to be known as Miranda’s worse-looking but easy friend.

  Julien was at the grill, holding court, his shirt off to show the expanse of his muscled back, tapering into that surprisingly neat waist. Despite the fact that it was only the beginning of the summer, he had somehow managed to acquire an even, golden tan. I couldn’t help comparing myself: the angry flare of heat rash across my chest and upper arms, the rest of me pale as milk. Miranda was looking at him too, in a not dissimilar way to how she’d looked at her glossy new pony, Bert, at sixteen. Then she turned to me, and caught me looking.

  So I glanced away, towards Mark. He was wearing try-hard Ray-Bans that didn’t particularly suit his broad face. If you glanced quickly at him he might have appeared to be daydreaming, staring into space
. But as I continued to look I saw that his sunglasses weren’t as opaque as I had thought. And I could see that his eyes were fixed in one prolonged sidelong look at Miranda. He did not look away once. Every time I glanced that way he was looking at her. And when she pulled off her vest to expose her bikini top, I saw his look intensify, indefinably. I saw him shift in his seat.

  Later I told Miranda what I had seen. ‘Seriously Manda,’ I told her, ‘it was weird. He wasn’t just looking, he was staring. He looked like he wanted to eat you alive.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh Katie, you’re so paranoid. He’s harmless. You were like this about Julien, too.’

  It was almost enough to make me doubt what I had seen. Even to ask myself: was I just jealous? I was fairly certain it wasn’t that. But I was humiliated, cross with her for not taking me seriously.

  ‘And you two!’ I’m jolted back to the present. Miranda’s looking at Julien and me – the two outside the bubble, the only ones not dancing with abandon around the room.

  ‘Julien,’ she says, ‘dance with Katie for God’s sake. She won’t do it on her own.’ There is the faintest edge of steel to her tone.

  There is nothing I feel less like doing, but Julien gets up, takes my hands in his. I am suddenly reminded of watching them dancing at their wedding. Five, six years ago? Miranda made him take dancing lessons, beforehand, so they could foxtrot their way around in front of us. It was all quite typically Miranda, the wedding. She wanted to do something tiny, she claimed, different. She wanted to elope!

  In the end it was at her parents’ manor house in Sussex. Two hundred guests. Those spindly gold chairs you only ever see at weddings, the round tables, the ‘starry night’ LED ceiling above the dance floor. And then, the cherry on the tiered, sugar-flowered cake: the couple’s dance.

  Julien, who up until then looked very much the part of the dashing, handsome groom, had shrunk into himself. He had missed steps, tripped on Miranda’s train (almost as long as Kate Middleton’s), and generally looked as though he wished himself anywhere but there. He wears the same expression now.

  MIRANDA

  I watch Katie as she dances – or makes some half-hearted attempt to do so. She looks as if she’s actively trying not to have a good time. She’s been off since we got here, now I think about it. Fine, she’s always been a bit quiet, but never such a sullen, monosyllabic presence. I have the sudden uncanny feeling that I’m looking at a stranger.

  I’ve always known exactly what’s going on in Katie’s life. She has always known exactly what I’ve chosen to share of mine. But lately, I don’t have a clue about her. She’s made all these excuses over the last couple of months not to see me. I’ve told myself they’re genuine: she is always so busy, busy, busy with her fucking work. Busy being a proper grown-up, unlike me. Or having to go down to Sussex to see her mum, who’s been ill (read: all that drinking has finally caught up with her). I’ve even offered to go with her to see Sally; I have known the woman for going on twenty years, for God’s sake. Even if she never liked me – she used to call me Miss Hoity Toity to my face, her breath wine-sour – it seemed like the right thing to do. But Katie shrugged off the suggestion so quickly it was as if the idea appalled her.

  The thing is, I’ve needed her recently. I know I’ve always given the impression of being self-sufficient, of not wanting anyone to poke their nose in. But, lately, it’s all become a bit much. Katie’s the only one I can talk to about the problems we’ve been having. I can’t tell her everything about Julien’s issues, because it is so important that no one else finds out about that, but still.

  I’ve told her about the fertility problems now. Or rather, I told her something. The truth is that we haven’t only just started trying. It’s been over a year now – a year and a half, in fact. Two years is enough for the NHS to offer you IVF, isn’t it?

  I could also have told her about the lack of sex – which isn’t exactly conducive to getting pregnant. The sense of distance that seems to have been growing between Julien and I over the last year … maybe even longer.

  If I’m completely honest with myself, I know the reason I haven’t shared is that I enjoy the idea of being the one with the perfect life; the friend who has it all. Always ready to step in and offer advice when needed, from her lofty position. It would take more than a few arguments, a few months of infrequent sex, for me to want to give that up.

  Maybe this distance between Katie and me is inevitable, a part of growing up, becoming adults with our own lives. Responsibilities, family, coming in the way of friendship. It is only going to get worse, surely, not better. I suppose I can’t blame her. I know that friends grow apart, grow out of enjoying each other’s company. I look at Facebook sometimes, those decade-old photos from our time at Oxford, and there are photos of me with people – faces that recur in many of the snaps – who I hardly recognise … let alone remember names for. It’s slightly unnerving. I’ll scroll through the images: parties upon parties, in houses and bars and Junior Common Rooms, my arms draped around people who might as well be complete strangers. The photos from the first year are the most obscure. They say you spend your first year at university trying to shake off all the ‘friends’ you make in your first week, and that was true for me: I made the mistake of chatting with an overly-intense girl at interviews; of drunkenly talking to a guy at a freshers’ welcome do who then used to ‘bump into’ me in various spots around college so he could suggest we go for coffee.

  After uni you spend the next few years winnowing those remaining friends down, realising that you don’t have the time and energy to trek across London or indeed the country to see people who have barely anything in common with you any more.

  I never thought it would happen to Katie and me, though. We’ve known each other since we were children. It’s different. Those friends are always there, aren’t they? If you’ve already stuck together this long?

  Still, if I didn’t know better, I would say it’s like Katie has outgrown me. And at the back of my mind is an insistent little voice. An unpleasant voice, the worst version of myself – saying: ‘I made you who you are, Katie. You would be nothing without me.’

  Anyway. I’m not going to let her spoil my mood. I take a long gulp of my drink, and wait to feel the pill start its work.

  In the next hour there’s a general loosening. Giles begins tearing through the pile of board games stacked near the fire. He unearths a box of Twister with a cry of triumph.

  ‘Oh fuck off!’ Julien shouts, but he does so with a grin. It’s a long time since I’ve seen him smile, properly. It’s probably just the pill, but it makes a bubble of something like happiness expand inside me. Maybe it’s time to let him out of the doghouse, after all. It’s been a year, now. And it’s exhausting: him acting so guilty all the time, me feeling disappointed in him.

  It takes several attempts and lots of giggling for us to even get the plastic mat laid out. Everyone is suddenly pretty high.

  ‘I’ll be caller,’ Katie says, quickly. She didn’t have a pill – neither did Samira, but she at least has a good reason: the baby monitor clipped to her chest like a policewoman with a radio. In this moment Katie’s face – the expression she wears, of adult exasperation in the face of childish silliness – almost pierces through the bubble of joy inside me. I want to say something, call her out on it, but I can’t find the words to do it. Before I can, Mark has grabbed my arm and launched me forward to land: left hand, red. Julien goes next: right foot, green. Then Emma, Giles, Mark. Bo, then Nick: even Nick isn’t above Twister, for God’s sake. Soon Julien is half straddling me, and through the fuzz in my head I think how curiously intimate it feels. Probably the most intimate we have been for a while, that’s for certain. We’ll have sex tonight, I think, in that big, draped four-poster bed. Not baby-making sex. Just for the sheer fun of it.

  Emma topples and puts herself out of the game. She staggers to her feet, laughing.

  A few more moves. Nick staggers a foot outside the mat and
goes out, then Giles collapses trying to cross his left leg over his right. It’s just Bo, Mark, Julien and me in the game now.

  I become aware of a hand on the side of my torso, just below my right breast, and moving upwards. It’s on the side that’s out of sight of the others. I smile and look around, expecting to see Julien. Instead I find myself following the hand to Mark’s arm. We are faced away from Emma, and because Julien is above me I’m fairly certain no one else can see. There is a moment while Mark and I look at each other. His eyes are glazed like a sleepwalker’s. My head suddenly feels the sharpest it has since I took the pill, since even before I started drinking. Wrong, is all I can think. This is wrong.

  It’s like he has forgotten the rules. We flirt, yes, and he fancies me, and I quite enjoy it, and he does things for me, and his reward is looking. But he can’t touch. That’s different.

  I shrug myself out of his grip. As I do I must unbalance him – he sways and crashes to the mat.

  ‘Mark’s out!’ Emma cries, in glee.

  I feel a bit sick, all that rich food and the booze and then the pill. I roll out of my position, amid catcalls of ‘spoilsport!’ and summons back to the mat, and stumble down the corridor to the bathroom. I want to wash my face – this is the mantra in my head – I want to wash my face with cold water.

  I look at myself for a while in the mirror. In the bright light, despite all my efforts, I look older than thirty-three. It’s not lines – I’ve made sure there are as few of those as possible – it’s something intangible, something strained and tired about my face. I feel a strange sense of disconnection between the person looking back at me and my internal self. This isn’t me, is it? This woman in the mirror? What was I thinking, getting that stuff? I forgot how after the hilarity and the ease it can quickly make me feel so off. But then who am I kidding? I’ve been feeling like this more and more recently, pills or not.