The Things We Do to Our Friends(8)
We listened to Tabitha; both of us did. One of us sat on either side, and the two of them required very little from me, apart from to watch. I took pleasure in balancing out our threesome, even though Imogen and I had got off on the wrong foot. I think I had imagined that Imogen and Tabitha were an impenetrable duo when I’d seen them in the bar, best friends forever, but I realized soon enough that for all their easiness, sharing tampons and tissues, squabbling and singing, Imogen was more of a reluctant follower, and the two of them weren’t on equal footing at all. There was space for me, an unbiased observer at that point, with none of their presumed history or alliances. Immune to their bickering, but already with my own prescribed traits.
Oh, Clare can only take notes if she’s laid all her pens out in front her just so, Tabitha would trill, and I would look down to notice that was true, and every pen was lined up to choose from. Had I always been that way? I hoped I hadn’t picked up the habit from Ashley. Clare is deviously good at remembering dates, she would declare, based on absolutely no evidence. Sometimes she said it while doing an impression of me, for some reason, and a shiver ran down my spine. She was an eerily good mimic. Clare has to have a coffee. Otherwise she can’t function, she announced every time I arrived, regardless of whether I had a coffee in my hand or not. And, more and more, I found myself leaning into my new traits.
Yes, perhaps I could remember dates better than the average person. The more I played into it, the more I saw it was true, and I needed a coffee to get me through the day. As though it had always been the case.
* * *
—
When lectures ended, I didn’t know where they went. Quick smiles, and then off in a flash, rushing away from me, which made me concerned about the sour smell of my solitude. Neither of them ever asked me about my plans. Even if they had, I would have lied to give my life some color.
So much time alone. No one should spend that much time without the company of others.
Sometimes I smoked on the bench near the library for a while and looked out for them around the campus, but I wasn’t a committed smoker—I wasn’t a committed anything yet—it was just something to do to break up the day. Eventually, I’d end up going back to the flat, which hadn’t improved. In the afternoons I’d switch between how to make cocktails, reciting the measures for daiquiris and cosmopolitans in my head over and over again, then trying to memorize the names and dates of Dutch paintings for light relief.
Sometimes I spent evenings with Georgia after her swim meets, her swimming costume slung quite territorially on the radiator producing chlorinated steam, or I watched TV with Ashley when she insisted on some bonding time.
They were poor substitutes for Tabitha.
I wasn’t into makeup, but one day I managed to track down a lipstick just like Tabitha’s, after searching in various department stores, scanning the samples laid out from the hundreds on offer. I didn’t recognize the brand she used, the one I’d seen in lectures with its angular silver logo, but I found the same color in the end. An unnatural color—an apricot hue but with a grayish sheen to it.
After I’d bought it, I hurried home. Refused to let the shop assistant put it on me in public—she had wanted to try it out on me, but she didn’t understand that the whole thing needed to be private, that the act of application was important and…ceremonial.
I pulled the top off the lipstick carefully, put it on in front of the mirror in my room, and assessed the effect.
The color was too bright. It jarred with my skin, and I was all red at the top of my cheeks and my forehead, instead of softly flushed. The lipstick hadn’t made me look like Tabitha, and however hard I tried to paint it on straight, I couldn’t even apply it in the way she did. Her trademark—she always reached into her bag and put it on without a mirror, as instinctively as scratching an itch. I grinned and I looked awful.
A gash of oily orange with that gray tint, like a slab of dead fish.
How pathetic of me to even try. How unbearably, unforgivably needy I was.
I wrapped it up in toilet roll, so it resembled some secret bleeding thing, and threw it in the bin.
That day I smashed a mirror with my hand in a single unguarded moment. Didn’t bother to wrap the glass up with the care I’d shown the lipstick, just put the shards straight in the bin. If I cut myself, or if Ashley and Georgia did, then so be it.
They heard my strangled scream of frustration, my flatmates did, but they didn’t say a word.
6
I thought about Tabitha and Imogen often, about what they did outside of the hours we spent together. Again and again, they disappeared after the lecture finished. I was almost beginning to lose hope until, one day, it happened.
“This is so boring I could die.” Tabitha turned to me.
She was drawing. She drew often and came up with surprisingly good little sketches, though she tended to revel in adding her own brutal flair. Idly copying Rembrandt’s gloomy self-portrait from the lecture slides, adding pins that stabbed through the starched ruff around his neck.
“We only ever see you in lectures, Clare, and it’s just not good enough. You should come round for dinner.” She leaned over her ruled pad and grabbed my arm (she was always clawing at me to get my attention, bending in, her arms around my shoulders or pushing me to one side; cold hands on mine, and the bone of her shoulder blade pressed up close). Abandoning her picture, she scribbled an address on a piece torn from her notebook.