The Things We Do to Our Friends(21)

Then there was university. Academically, I was unremarkable through a lack of effort. My first set of exams could have gone better, but I didn’t think I’d failed. I also wasn’t sure History of Art was for me, but I wasn’t overly concerned. After all, Tabitha often talked about our “big plans,” how we were destined for more exciting things.

“Just you wait. You, Clare, are made for great things, things other people are too scared to do. Just like us,” she would say out of the blue, and when I listened to her, I was delighted, and I couldn’t help but believe that there was something on the horizon for us all.

I had picked up more bar shifts in those funny quiet weeks up until the middle of December when the main quadrant of the university was a ghost town but the restaurants and bars were packed with tourists darting around in a frenzy, throwing money at souvenirs and cups of mulled wine.

The rest of them left sharpish. Ava disappeared without fanfare a few weeks before Christmas. She set off for a night flight to LAX, under the duress of her parents, I guessed. I imagined her skulking around tree-lined boulevards looking out of place and pining for us.

Tabitha, Samuel, and Imogen all took the train back to London. They chose to take the London King’s Cross departure from Waverley ten days before Christmas, which was packed with students. About a quarter of the way into the journey, I’d been told, it turned into a party as the passengers wandered up and down the aisles, and the tables got stickier and stickier with spilled drinks.

There was one particular train that was infamous—the 15:17 departure—and while Tabitha and Samuel and Imogen were so scathing about our fellow students, they seemed to prefer to board it, then judge from afar—retreating to the quiet carriage, where I’m sure they managed to be resolutely unquiet.

I went back to Hull just a few days before Christmas. I stayed with my granny, and she came to meet me at the station as I knew she would, though I’d told her not to bother. She looked steely and grim, even when smiling. No knitted cardigans or soft perm like a grandmother from a picture book. Sinewy arms and legs, and a mismatched tracksuit because vanity was highly discouraged. She’d always found my mother to be very vain.

She had a cigarette in her mouth as usual, and she wrapped me up in a tight hug, so my nose pressed into the top of her head, and I smelled the familiar scent of old smoke mixed with bleach.

“Clare?” she said, as if she was trying the name out. It sat there uneasily. She’d always felt odd about my name. “Come on,” she said into my shoulder as she pulled away from the hug.

We walked back to her house, and I almost had to rush to keep up with her. She kept her head down. I immediately thought it was because she didn’t want anyone to see us and to ask questions.

It was a two-up two-down on an estate. The street wasn’t well kept, and bits of rubbish were scattered along the side of the road as usual, but the house itself had a fresh green door that looked like it had been painted since I’d left in September.

She opened the door, and I followed her in, dumping my suitcase at the bottom of the stairs.

“Tea?” she asked, and I nodded. Her dog wandered in from the kitchen and started yapping at my feet. It had never liked me. I refused to acknowledge its name—one inspired by a dead soap opera character. I gave the dog a quick stroke, and grease passed off its fur onto my hand, which I wiped on the side of my trousers. It felt grimy even though the room itself was spotlessly clean. My granny’s face did it. When she looked at me, she couldn’t hide what she was thinking, every thought she had about me was there for me to take, and I wanted to pick up something from the table and hurl it at her.

We sat across from each other.

“So, I’ve not heard from you much, which, I take it, is a good thing. How is it?” she asked.

“It’s fine, I’m enjoying it.” As I said the words aloud, I realized they were true.

“And you’ve made friends?”

“Yes.” I didn’t feel the need to explain any further.

She blew on her tea, deep in thought. “I just worry about you. Up there. All alone.”

“I’m not alone at all. I worry about you here on your own.”

She gave me a small smile. “You know me—I just get on with it. Nothing much changes around here.”

“Didn’t bother with a tree this year?” I asked. There wasn’t that much space for a tree, but I wanted one. For some reason it was very important at that moment that we had one.

But she shook her head. “I didn’t see the point.”

I nursed my cup of tea in my hands to keep warm. Sitting there felt wrong. It was the kind of space where you were always moving around through corridors, trying to get out. My granny was always up and down. She could never settle, especially not when I was there. I couldn’t imagine my father as a child in this house, running around. I knew he’d grown up here, but it was impossible to actually picture him because it didn’t seem set up for children at all, all hard, shiny surfaces. Every time I came down the stairs, I scraped my shins on the banister or bashed my head against the ceiling. The house seemed like it was growing smaller and smaller, the walls creeping inward on me, until one day the whole place would crush me.

I made the mistake of mentioning this suspicion to my mother once after visiting as a child, and she replied that I was probably just getting fatter.