by Tom Ellen
‘I look like a twat,’ he laughed. ‘It’s like the one important thing the rep has to do. Basically, if I tick you off this list, and you die in a fire, no one cares. If you jump in the lake, that’s fine. As long as you are ticked off this list.’ He smiled at me. ‘Phoebe Bennet. Tick.’
We shuffled into the hall and sat down. Frankie’s duvet was so massive it covered her and Negin entirely.
‘This is immense,’ Frankie said. ‘It’s like going to the aquarium. I love the aquarium. I even went there as my family thing for my eighteenth and we all dressed up as sea cows. Look, though. Literally everyone is here.’
There was a kind of electric buzz being transmitted from person to person, getting more intense as it was passed along. There must have been a thousand people squeezed into the hall. Everyone from the past week was in the same room. Everyone.
Frankie held the duvet across her face and me and Negin leant in. We all peered over the top. ‘I think this is drawing more attention to us, not less,’ Negin whispered.
A man got up on stage and started speaking but no one paid any attention to him.
‘There’s the boy you got with,’ Negin whispered triumphantly to Frankie, pointing with her forehead across the other side of the hall. ‘I told you you got with someone. He’s even wearing the exact same red jumper. Red Jumper Boy. Look.’
‘This is the thing about you not drinking,’ I said to Negin. ‘You remember everything. You’re like this teetotal elephant, keeping the Domesday Book of Freshers’ regrets.’
Frankie slumped down into the duvet until she disappeared. ‘Don’t let Red Jumper Boy see me,’ she hissed. ‘My face is falling off.’
Negin rolled her eyes. ‘You’ve got dry skin round your nose.’
‘Literally all the greats are in here.’ I started pointing discreetly. ‘Beautiful Eyes Boy, Hot Quidditch Marco, Interesting Thought Boy, Afraid-of-Sex Phil. So many hot boys we might marry.’
‘None of whom we’ve actually spoken to,’ Negin added.
‘I’ve spoken to Afraid-of-Sex Phil,’ Frankie said. ‘How do you think I know he’s afraid of sex? I spoke to him at the quiz. I told him about my height, he told me about his fear of sex. We bonded.’
‘Interesting Thought Boy is so enigmatic,’ Negin whispered.
We all looked at Interesting Thought Boy. He was wearing a loose-knit woolly jumper with holes in the sleeve, and scratching his chin while sort of gazing dreamily into the middle distance.
‘Yeah, good old ITB.’ Frankie nodded. ‘He’s probably philosophizing about what to have for breakfast.’
The man on stage started demonstrating how to use a fire extinguisher and then they played us a painfully bad Crimewatch-style re-enactment of a girl wearing a bodycon dress falling in a river. I just kept scanning the room, looking at all the people I had seen over the last week, penned into the same space.
I somehow missed Luke Taylor on the first couple of sweeps, but then he came into focus. At school, he had always been surrounded by people, but he was on his own, politely paying attention to the video. He was so good-looking he seemed out of place. Like a Hollywood film star who had been plonked into EastEnders.
The man was pointing at the screen and telling us how you’re only ever one Bacardi and Coke away from river death.
‘Look –’ Frankie jabbed her elbow into my ribs – ‘there is Quidditch Bailer himself.’
‘Already clocked him,’ I whispered. ‘He looks amazing today. Like, amazing.’
We all looked over at Luke. His white T-shirt and tan easily identified him on the row. He ruffled his hair, leant back and yawned.
‘I feel like we’re observing a lion in a documentary,’ Negin said.
‘When I was little I had to go and see an educational psychologist because all I drew was lions.’ Frankie mimed drawing manically. ‘I had, like, a mania for drawing lions.’
‘Can we just all appreciate Luke Taylor for a second?’ I said. ‘I know he is an up-himself arse, but just push that to the back of your mind and you know . . . objectify him.’ I could feel Negin and Frankie rolling their eyes. ‘Come on, you can’t deny it, he is insanely beautiful.’
‘I think he looks like a Ken doll,’ said Frankie. ‘He is very square. His face, I mean. And his hair.’
‘When did you stop drawing lions?’ Negin whispered.
They showed us a final clip of a boy getting an STI test and then we all filed out of the spaceship. ‘I’m going back to bed,’ Frankie yawned at me. ‘In your room. I’m also really hungry.’
‘Me too,’ said Negin. ‘Me and Becky are meeting early to get breakfast.’
I left them and wandered towards the English department, which looked like a dilapidated block of flats covered in tattered old Drama Soc posters. Everyone says making friends with people on your course is important, so you know more people than just the ones on your halls. I gave myself a mental pep talk about speaking to everyone but not seeming too eager-beaver. But then I got lost trying to find the seminar room.
When I did get there, it was already almost full. The only person I recognized was Bowl-Cut Girl, who was wearing a low-cut, electric-blue vest dress thing and no bra. The dress was kind of draped over her and looked like it could just fall off at any time and leave her completely naked.
I did a jolly smile at everyone and said ‘Hi’ as I walked in and took an empty chair. They all said an awkward ‘Hi’ back.
Then Bowl-Cut leant across and said, ‘You’re in Jutland, right?’
I nodded.
‘I’ve seen you around,’ she said, and smiled.
I felt sort of honoured. Bowl-Cut knew who I was. I smiled back but didn’t really know what to say, so I just said ‘Great!’, and then felt a bit stupid.
I got out my pencil case and notebook and laid them out on the table in front of me. Bowl-Cut was directly across from me and I could not stop staring at her. She had a tattoo that went from just underneath her boob right around her back. What did it say? I kept trying to make it out. She had scraped her rainbow hair back and was wearing no make-up but she still looked amazing. She didn’t seem nervous at all. She was sitting cross-legged on her chair like a kid waiting for story time, like she had done this shit a million times before.
Another person came in and sat down. I’d been half wondering if Luke Taylor would be in my seminar group, but clearly not. More awkward small talk about whether we had all read the books.
And then a bloke walked in and sat down. He was wearing jeans that were covered in white paint and a faded red T-shirt that said ‘The Velvet Underground’. He had thick black hair that stuck up all over the place and was also splattered with globs of paint. He looked foreign, with that kind of tan that is hardened every summer and never goes away. Like the frontman of a band that sings about being heartbroken in black and white.
‘OK.’ He nodded to himself and smiled at all of us. ‘The literature of memory. That is a kind of crazy thing, right?’ He was French, maybe Spanish. Some incredibly fit kind of accented nationality. He was the . . . what is it even called? It’s definitely not the ‘teacher’. The seminar leader? The professor? He definitely couldn’t be a professor. He was like, twenty-five, max.
Bowl-Cut looked me dead in the eye and mouthed ‘Hot tutor’. Tutor, that was it.
I smiled in agreement. It is a wonder that I have only slept with two people, because I fancy so many people at a time. If I was Bowl-Cut and wore artfully draped boob curtains I would probably have slept with a hundred people already.
He took the lid off his board marker. ‘Just say anything, guys. When I say memory, what do you think about?’
‘The past.’ Bowl-Cut didn’t even put her hand up. Were you supposed to put your hand up?
Hot Tutor nodded and wrote it on the board. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Mary,’ she said.
I could not believe it. Mary. And I could not wait to tell the others. How is anyone even called Mary now? Mary, th
e most boring Bennet sister. Mary, the mother of God. Mary, the woman who used to babysit me after school when my mum went to Slimming World.
Hot Tutor tapped the board with his marker. ‘So, what else do you think about when I say memory?’
‘Nostalgia,’ said a girl with French plaits.
And then Luke Taylor walked into the room. Just like that. On cue.
‘Sorry. I got lost.’ There was no chair for him to sit on. I had a wild thought about offering him mine, then realized just how insane that would be. Hot Tutor went and got him one from a stack at the side, and everyone shuffled up to make room for him. Bowl-Cut Mary smiled at me again as if to say, ‘Wow, all this hotness in one room,’ which made me instantly feel both terrified and certain that she was going to get with Luke Taylor, and also made me want to message Frankie and confirm that fancying Luke Taylor was a universal thing, not just confined to me.
‘What’s your name?’ Hot Tutor asked.
‘Luke.’ He looked slightly flustered. Had I ever seen Luke Taylor flustered? Luke Taylor looked attractive flustered.
‘What do you think of when I say the word memory, Luke?’
Luke seemed slightly alarmed. ‘Erm. I don’t know. Maybe extremes? Like things that are good enough or bad enough to stay in your head?’
Hot Tutor wrote it on the board and I copied it down, word for word, slowly. We wrote down our earliest memories and the colours we associated with them and then a memory of school and a memory of a holiday. We talked about whether you can manufacture memories and why so many of us remembered the same things.
Bowl-Cut Mary re-tied her hair and I saw that her tattoo said, I love, I have loved, I will love. Bowl-Cut Mary had fucking lived. How had she had time to have loved? And how could she be so confident about the will love bit too? I needed to get on with things.
I started to wonder whether Luke would talk to me at the end and whether he would mention the quidditch. And then Hot Tutor said we could take a five-minute toilet break. Some people got up and left. I got my phone out. Luke was sitting across from me studiously copying things down from the board. I thought about speaking to him, saying some jaunty ice-breaking thing, but I couldn’t think of anything. He had typical, scrawly, boy handwriting.
I opened my camera and slowly shifted my phone up, trying to look natural. And then I pressed the button and quickly put the phone down. I copied out the same sentence I had already copied out and then picked up my phone again.
‘Up close indisputable proof. Luke Taylor is the HOTTEST BOY ON EARTH.’ I made the o’s with a pair of eyes for effect and sent the picture to Frankie.
Hot Tutor walked back in. Luke checked his phone and then put it away before copying one last thing off the board.
‘You and someone else might both experience the same event,’ said Hot Tutor. ‘But the memories you form might be entirely different. Your memories are not about what actually happened, but about you. Who you are and how you experience the world.’
I thought about Flora and the night with the bikes and whether she remembered it, too. I suddenly wanted to ask her. Things were turning quite deep. People were talking about their earliest memories.
‘Me and my sister had this teddy called Norvin,’ Bowl-Cut Mary said. ‘And it’s weird because she swears he was orange but I know he was purple. And we are both one hundred per cent sure.’
Hot Tutor smiled. ‘What does that memory say about each of you?’
Bowl-Cut Mary shrugged. ‘That one of us is wrong?’
He nodded. ‘Let me tell you something. The night Ted Hughes met Sylvia Plath at a party at Cambridge, they both went straight back to their rooms and wrote about this amazing, intense, explosive connection. It was so important to both of them that they immediately documented it. The beginning of a love affair. Hughes writes about the blue velvet ribbon Plath was wearing in her hair, and she writes about the red velvet ribbon she was wearing.’
‘She must have known what colour her ribbon was,’ Bowl-Cut said. ‘It was hers.’
Hot Tutor nodded. ‘Maybe. You would think. You know, in all Plath’s poetry she associates herself with the colour red. And in all Hughes’ poetry he associates her with the colour blue.’
‘What does it mean?’ another boy said.
‘I don’t know.’ Hot Tutor shrugged. ‘That he always saw her one way, but that she saw herself another. What do you think, Luke?’
Luke still looked a bit flustered. ‘I don’t know. That sounds scary. Like no one is really seeing anyone else.’
Hot Tutor nodded and we read a Ted Hughes poem called ‘Red’ and because I get emotional about everything I almost started to cry. When Hot Tutor turned to write something on the board I sneaked a look at my phone.
And then I had the most intense physical reaction I have ever experienced. My whole body seized up and saliva flooded into my mouth. For a second I thought I might faint or be sick.
‘Memory and writing cannot exist without each other,’ Hot Tutor was saying. I could barely get a grip on what was happening.
I stared down at my notebook and curled my hands into fists to stop them trembling. I looked at my phone again to make sure, and it was like a knife twisting in my chest.
The worst moment of my life had happened. And I was still living in it.
I had sent the message to Luke.
I had sent the picture of Luke . . . to Luke.
It was like everything suddenly tripped into slow motion. I almost felt like I’d floated up out of my body, but then I realized my left leg was literally shaking under the table, and that brought me back down to Earth.
It took everything I had not to look at Luke. To see whether he was checking his phone. Maybe he’d already checked it. I felt simultaneously boiling hot and freezing cold. I needed to get out. Not just of the room, but of the entire uni.
I looked up at the clock. There were still thirty-seven minutes of the seminar left.
I could hear a weird buzzing in my head, and my cheeks felt like they were on fire. If I said I was ill it would draw more attention to me. I tried to breathe evenly and keep copying stuff off the board but my brain wasn’t communicating properly with my hand.
And then I realized Hot Tutor was staring at me. Everyone was staring at me. Luke was staring at me.
‘Phoebe?’ Hot Tutor said, smiling. ‘What do you think makes a moment stay in your head for ever?’
LUKE
Phoebe was up and out of the room faster than I had ever seen a human being move.
As soon as the tutor bloke said, ‘See you all next week,’ she just snatched her bag off the table and bolted out the door. I’d barely even noticed him saying it. But then, I’d barely noticed anything he’d said once I’d looked at my phone and seen that message staring up at me. My first ever university seminar and I learnt practically nothing because I was obsessing over a twelve-word text.
As far as I could see, there were two possibilities. One: it was a joke. Quite a weird, inexplicably harsh joke but, still, a joke. She was winding me up. She wanted to embarrass me. Or maybe she thought I’d find it funny. Whatever, Possibility One meant that she was clearly mental.
Then there was Possibility Two: that it was a genuine message, genuinely meant for someone else, genuinely saying that Phoebe Bennet thought I was ‘the hottest boy on Earth’.
I much preferred Possibility Two.
I re-read it over and over again as I walked back down the covered walkway to B Block. I dodged the ducks and nodded at randoms I recognized from Freshers’ Week, and slowly let the whole concept of Phoebe shift and transform in my mind.
It was weird. It was like the message had suddenly lit her differently in my brain. I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. She was definitely hot. She was really funny. That hour we’d spent together on the first night was one of the only times I’d felt relaxed and easy here. She had this openness and positivity about her that sort of drew you in, made you feel more open and positive, too.
Even the occasional rush of Abbey-guilt couldn’t stop me smiling as I thought about her. By the time I was back at B Block, punching in the entry code and clambering up the echoey staircase, I officially fancied Phoebe Bennet.
The corridor was totally empty. The chemists were all in labs from nine to five and a knock on Arthur’s door revealed he was out, too. I braved the socks-and-sewage brie stink and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. There were three sides of A4 propped up on the table, addressed to Arthur, with the heading: ‘UNACCEPTABLE CHEESE SMELL’. I started reading and had just got to the final paragraph about ‘missing Twiglets’ when Rita walked in. She immediately heaved and covered her nose.
‘My god, that cheese is not messing about, is it?’
I waved Barney’s essay at her. ‘He’s already had a formal written complaint about it. Do you want a tea?’
‘Yeah, that would be nice, cheers. Just sat through an incredibly boring lecture, so I need one. Is Arthur in?’
‘Don’t think so. I’ve just knocked.’
‘Oh.’ She frowned and looked around at the cold, sticky, pasta-sauce-spattered kitchen, still holding her nose. ‘Well, we can’t very well have a nice cup of tea in here, can we?’ She unpinned the laminated fire safety sheet from the notice board and inserted it carefully into the crack of Arthur’s door.
‘Er . . . Rita. What are you doing?’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, biting her lip in concentration. ‘I used to do it all the time last year when Arthur wasn’t in.’
‘Is that definitely legal?’
‘I’m a law student, Luke,’ she said, as if that somehow answered my question. She jiggled the laminate gently and tried the door handle at the same time. Suddenly there was a soft click, and the door swung open. ‘Ta-da,’ she said, flopping on to Arthur’s bed. I followed her in, and as we sat sipping our tea, I decided I had to tell someone about the text.
‘Bloody hell,’ she murmured, reading it with raised eyebrows. ‘She’s not very subtle, this girl, is she?’
‘So do you think it’s for real, then? Like, she actually means it?’
