The Things We Do to Our Friends(4)
“Well, we’re pretty informal here. We’d start with a trial shift, which I’m happy to do if that suits you?”
“Great, when?”
“Saturday at seven. There’s no uniform or anything. We’ll have you in for an hour or so and see how you get on; if it works out, then we have shifts available in the evenings, so it fits most of you around your lectures.” He lumped me in with “most of you.”
“Amazing,” I blurted out, then felt as if I’d overreacted. I hadn’t got the job; I’d just been invited for a trial which I didn’t think would be paid, but it was a start. I was about to leave, and then I circled back. “Sorry, what was your name?”
“I’m Finn. I manage this place,” he said.
“I’m Clare.”
“I know. It says here.” He held up my CV, deadpan. “Also, one last thing, Clare. We have a lot of students working here, but if you’re going to fuck off back to London or something for three weeks at Christmas and for reading week then that’s not going to work.” The sentence ended in a low snarl, but he wasn’t angry at me, I could tell. He wasn’t unkind.
“No, I’m not going to do that,” I said.
And it was true, I wasn’t.
I couldn’t.
3
Tiny baby steps, but I was proud of how I’d done. I’d been more relaxed for some reason and, as a result, I thought I’d come across well. The hard lump that had been living in my throat, threatening to explode upward into tears or a scream, had faded. If I could do two shifts a week, that would be enough for food out, for drinks and a social life, even for a laptop, so I didn’t have to type my essays up at the library. I could go back to Hull for maybe just a few days at Christmas; it would give me an excuse to return to Edinburgh sooner. That day, I walked back slowly, and I was deep into prematurely planning out the logistics of my new life when I arrived at the flat.
It had been disappointing when I’d stepped inside on that first cold day to meet my flatmates. I’d expected something grander, showing its history in every nook and cranny. I wanted high ceilings. A room with a little wooden desk full of knots set up against a huge, shuttered window that looked out onto the city’s rooftops. But I was probably imagining some collegiate fiction from tales of Oxford or Cambridge, and, really, I should’ve been grateful.
Compared to the house back in Hull, the place was spacious, but still, there were too many cramped corridors and boxy cupboards filled with half-empty bottles of bleach and dusty fire extinguishers.
Dark, student accommodation purpose-built in the seventies, where the windows in each room looked straight out onto the walls of the opposite buildings, and the kitchen floor was stained lino that never felt properly clean. The furniture was basic, each piece chipped from years of use: some institutional-looking armchairs in a line against the wall like a waiting room and a plastic table bolted to the floor in case someone inconceivably decided to steal it.
The flat may have been disappointing, but the city wasn’t. Edinburgh was a demanding host; she didn’t welcome you in with open arms. I was living in the center of the Old Town, in a glossy theme park. Gothic Edinburgh sanitized for tourists, molded and photographed for piles of cheap brochures with big bubble letters in red, screaming: HAUNTED GHOST TOUR/FRIGHTS GUARANTEED/FREE ENTRY/SPANISH+FRENCH TRANSLATION.
I ignored the somewhat tawdry surface of my new home, because if I burrowed a little further down, it suited me well. It was a city made to explore on foot. Walking down steep wynds to discover a graveyard or a tiny pub or shop full of tartan tat. The buildings became more and more crooked as they soared upward, haphazardly leaning against each other, cutting the sky into fragmented shapes in the hashed-together Old Town. Spires knotted against guttered roofs to form a dark tangle.
I liked that the people weren’t intrusive in the slightest. Perhaps they were used to the transient nature of all the visitors, but even if I went to the same café every day, I knew I’d be greeted by a blank stare.
Right from the beginning, I spent most of my time out of that flat. But, sadly, sometimes I needed to return, and with that came my flatmates.
That day, after my first visit to the bar, I came back to find the living room damp with steam. It smelled of pasta with an undertone of plastic and something dairyish. Ashley’s head sprung up from the table, away from her notes. A gooey meal sat in a bowl next to her. The whole thing had a tangy edge, as though it was “about to turn,” as my granny would have said.
“Clare!” she exclaimed. Her hair was scraped back into a knot, and she was wearing a loose pair of pajamas, with a stained tea towel slung inexplicably over her shoulder.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Good, good. Just catching up!” she replied. There was a floral binder laid out on the table with notes highlighted in different colors. She studied geology, and the allure of the subject so far seemed to be the invitation to color in rock formations. I had no idea what she was writing; lectures had started only a few days ago and nothing had happened yet.
As if reading my thoughts, she continued, “Just bits and bobs, you know how it is when you’re not on top of things. I don’t want to fall behind in the first week. That would stress me out, and the term is only ten weeks long.”
I nodded. I knew that, but ten weeks felt like a lifetime.