The Things We Do to Our Friends(7)
The lectures took place in a hall that seemed, on first inspection, too grand for us lowly first years. A lavish, oversized dome with a mural of lazing figures, their bodies plump and softly winged. It felt like staring into the heavens, but down on ground level, it was nothing special. Wood, dust, and stale breath. No one else was interested in the ceiling, but I sat on my own and often looked up as somewhere to divert my attention, so I didn’t stare at the rest of the class. Everyone else was bleary-eyed most of the time, taking out pens and pencils in a syrupy state of hungover lethargy.
Tabitha and Imogen sat at the back with their feet up, pushing them against the chairs in front of them. First, I’d hear Tabitha’s excessive squeal once or twice: To the back! And then they would race like naughty schoolgirls to create a private nest. Bags in a messy ring around them, spilling out their things everywhere (so confident!), marking their territory to ward off anyone else who might dare try to sit with them.
I got in the habit of looking for them in each lecture. Peering to the back of the darkened room and waiting until my eyes adjusted, until I saw them, a pile of legs and notes and coats. On one particularly brave day, I hovered near them, and then on another I actually sat to the left of Imogen. Sometimes I wouldn’t sit close to them, but I hoped they’d notice my absence.
And then, one day, Tabitha moved a bag so I could sit in the seat next to her, and finally they started chatting with me.
“Clare! From the bar!” Tabitha crowed, bringing me into the fold.
Oh, the rich joy of Tabitha. She brought a chaotic energy to every conversation, constantly moving in a way I’d only seen in adverts. You could almost imagine her waking up to the beep of an alarm, arms over her head in an exaggerated stretch, pulling the curtains open to the tune of a jingle (the jazzy twang of a commercial for a Swedish brand of shower gel), and getting ready for a new day all in thirty seconds. She had an airbrushed quality suited to a model or an actress, someone you watched as opposed to someone you interacted with. This was emphasized by the presence of Imogen, who was pretty enough and always put together neatly, but who had an underlying unpleasantness. She didn’t smile much and, when she did, she always covered her mouth with her hand, the way she had that first night, as if she was embarrassed by her teeth. A constant snarl was ready to bubble up under her hand. Early on there was a niggling guilty thought that maybe it was why Tabitha hung out with Imogen. The contrast made her shine brighter.
They didn’t attend anywhere near all of the lectures, and they were in different tutorial groups from me, but things were changing, I was sure of it, and I sensed they gained a certain enjoyment from having me around. One time I saw them waving to me to come over. When I sat, I felt Tabitha’s arm pulling me into her.
“Sit closer, Clare; you’re my favorite.”
I felt the sting as Imogen pouted at the remark, hiding behind her notepad. They were always scribbling something, sometimes their own notes—Tabitha’s were meandering and unintelligible afterward, while Imogen’s were tidy and comprehensive—and sometimes notes to each other or me.
Then they put their notes to one side to paint their nails on their laps, with the bottles spread out on the desks. One nail deep red, one pearly pink, one the sickly green of an unripe banana and so on, until their fingers became jewels when they moved their hands. So unlike the others in our year, who were always texting with glazed-over expressions, in a world of their own—Tabitha and Imogen barely used phones.
I remember something that happened, and it was a little odd. Tabitha had been talking about the lecturer for the entire time. She chatted away about how she was surprised by how attractive he was, and she claimed she was going to give him her number at the end of the lecture and see what happened.
I was shocked, mainly because he seemed…old. He must have been about fifty. It came so out of the blue that I didn’t think she could be serious about it, but she wrote her number out with a flourish.
“Just a bit of fun!” Tabitha said. “You do like fun, don’t you?” she said to me, suddenly very serious, as if we were discussing a fatal medical condition.
I agreed.
Of course I liked fun.
Nothing came of it. The whole thing felt like a bit of a test, and the idea seemed to tail off.
Our discussions never touched on anything serious. They were the back-and-forth kind of conversations that you have to pass the time. Imogen’s face was often flooded with impatient displeasure, and I wanted to ask her straight out: What would make you happy? What do I have to do to please you?
Generally, she stayed on the offense with lots of brisk (bordering on rude) questions as if she was interviewing me:
Do you think it will get warmer…ever?
How long for you to walk here? Where do you live?
Do you have all the books? Why not, Clare?
When she’d finished a round of inquisition, her own tirade of complaints began. She was tired and she hated the food here—hated haggis, which she seemed to cook frequently for some reason—and the weather, and the lectures, which were too easy, and the hills, which were too steep…Eventually, Tabitha would quieten her with an abrupt technique—she would cut her off by starting an unrelated anecdote about a friend or a friend of a friend. It could begin as a light, comedic tale of the slapstick variety, and then it might morph quite rapidly into an awful tragedy—usually a gruesome medical kind—followed by a neat resolution, all delivered in the same upbeat tone.