Chapter Text
I need to stop thinking.
When I first came to university I came with all sorts of wild notions; fantasies of friends and parties and safe, dependable fun. Dad once told me, until Mum smacked him with the egg whisk, tales of Middlesbrough polytechnic; chewing khat and slinging wet packets of flour through the Vice Chancellor’s window. That such a world might open up for me seemed, miraculously, a certain prospect. Not the class-C drugs but that finally, finally, finally, after all those years in a flat above an Earl’s Court off-license I could be my own person at last. It wasn’t to be. For, instead, here I was – I had neither flour nor controlled substances. I couldn’t even remember the last time I spent an afternoon outside my dorm-room except for lectures or topping up my adapalene prescription. My cramped, damp, death-box of a dorm-room with cobwebs like mackerel nets above the bed. They called it ‘cosy’ in the booklet.
It would be too easy, and too lazy, to blame Mum for my predicament. This evening, muffled synth-techno thumping from the neighbouring student flat across the courtyard, was gurgling away talking her down from the fanatic certainty that I’d be throwing myself into the coke-fuelled extravaganzas that they don’t promise but always imply on the student society websites. How little she knew me.
“Why did they tag you??” she furiously wrote; she referred to a poorly rendered photo from a house party a few nights prior in which I did not feature because I was, as she couldn’t wrap her head around, not there. I was never there.
“It was just so more people would see it and like it,” I’d vainly tried to explain. “She tagged everyone on her friends list.” ‘She’ being a Swedish girl in my Geography group, all smiles until you didn’t have a spare highlighter, who’d added me despite calling me a “dirty lobster.” I think that was a Swedish thing. But the explanation got me nowhere. You try explaining to a Filipino tiger mother who thinks 5G caused her nephew’s autism how social media algorithms work. I did and now I wanna die.
“I’ve told you no drinking!” squawked more messages, piling up like old shoes.
“Yes, I know, you’ve mentioned it.” Back-sass, even when beyond the range of her many-ringed fingers, felt courageous. Perhaps that was where my main area of personal development had been these past four months. During the Christmas break I’d even dared refuse to get up at five to open the shop. How proud I’d felt for that little moment of rebellion. Then she threw the iron at me and I quietened down, restored to my ordinary unprotesting self. Not much of a development, really.
But I couldn’t blame Mum for how I was, as if – hundreds of miles away – she was the one making me sit here. That was me. Vaulting over the obstacles my personality scatters in front of me like debris on a runway was never going to happen. I’d never be down for any of the escapades I’d half-believed would be advancing on me each night. The only kissing I’d come close to was an advancing Kyle Maguire’s quivering pimply lips behind the school gym after music practice. How lucky I was that he was the only person in the world I could run faster than.
No, that wasn’t me, even if rosary-clutching Mum – who, I think, had met me – seemed to think the moment I got to university I’d be inundated by hungry men. It was only acceptable with the consent of the Lord, and the last thing I was going to do was tell her I never believed in all that. I still didn’t really understand what the Holy Ghost actually was.
Instead, this was me. On another starless winter evening, with dozens of shrieking students passing blunts and retching in the begonias nine floors beneath my window, I had nothing but a PDF worksheet on igneous rock for company.
“Is ‘igneous’ a word?” I thought. I couldn’t remember anymore. It was hard to remember anything with the thump-thump-thump of the clubs just a few corners down the meandering roads, reminding me that a whole other world was just beyond. And by clubs, I mean club. It’s only Truro. But however many there were, they weren’t for me. It was irritating; I knew so well what wasn’t me, but it was proving harder with each passing day to know what was.
“This is not going in and nothing I do will ever make it go in.” There were probably a few girls set to be thinking that later tonight but I was applying it solely to the PDF. The screen was too bright but I didn’t have the energy to turn it down.
“Studying geography was a mistake.” The mistake of a girl who never thought sediment deposits would make her want to smash the window’s safety-locks and jump. That’d be one way to join the revellers. I peered through the small gap I was permitted to open the window to, cold air whipping at my chin, and watched another chortling gang pass by. I felt it – the painful twang of jealousy. Yet it confused me. it wasn’t that I wanted to be doing that; I just wanted to be doing something else. Was this wanderlust? At least now I lived peacefully for once, I thought, but was it better to live peacefully or deliciously?
“I could go to the kitchen, at least,” I thought. “It’s a start.” I pushed myself away from the desk and the chair rolled along the room towards the door – further than I’d expected my strength to achieve – and as always I avoided my reflection in the grubby mirror as I left. The dark pimples littering my cheeks might look paradoxically hot to white boys who fawn over every Asian girl they see, but for me it was enough to justify spending a grand on Snapchat filters. That’s if I had a grand. Or anyone to send Snapchats to. Or Snapchat.
“Maybe if you had Snapchat, you’d have friends.” Not even my internal monologue liked me.
Nobody was in the living area, which reeked of stale beer and the pile of week-old cereal bowls and pans full of baked bean residue in the sink, its walls bare besides old cork-board notices about an LGBT evening six months prior and passive-aggressive cleaning schedules. Someone had left the telly on and so as Bradley Walsh guided contestants through trivia about mountains – did you know the tallest mountain is actually Hawaii’s Mauna Kea but it’s mostly underwater? – I made ginger tea. Startled when the mug harmlessly fell from the drainage board without my touching it, I took it to the window to enjoy the view despite the loudness of the festivities below. I didn’t mind my reflection imprinted on the window; it was thin and vague, as if I wasn’t even there. Through my reflection’s forehead Truro’s three-pronged cathedral tickled the sky. Between it and our little campus and past the rows of former miners’ cottages turned B&Bs and health food shops, was the twinkle of blue and purple lights in the near distance from the throbbing, humming alternate universe of the town centre. Oh, to be there. To be one of the rest. To be normal.
“You could be there,” intruded a thought. “Nothing’s stopping you.” My brain, once again, was wrong. Everything was stopping me, not least that nobody ever heard of a nervous, chubby girl wandering into a nightclub on her own and doing well out of it. The only alternative would be to go with other people. But who? My friends? I had forty-three friends on Facebook; fourteen were family (one dead, one in prison, the rest a hundred miles away), ten were half-forgotten schoolmates who languished like the old cereal bowls in the sink, and the rest included my dog’s former vet and a boy from lectures who once wore a jumper plastered with ahegao. I didn’t fancy joining the hordes to Elysium – the only club I knew thanks to social osmosis and online articles about an attempted mugging – with him to snort lines and bang nines. I’d probably just flinch at the sound of the fruit machine and stare nervously at the drinks. I’d never had one before, mostly from my intense fear of puking, and that wasn’t going anywhere.
“Wasson’, Joan!” Nearly leaping from my skin, I threw tea onto the already knackered sofa. Awkwardly spinning round, I saw flatmate Dean – Topman shirt unbuttoned to his stomach like a Miami pornographer – watching from the open doorway. “Easy there,” he sniggered, evolving to full-blown laughter at my surprise and also probably my ugliness. I watched him, straight-faced, hoping it’d make him stop and maybe also cover up the chest hair crawling from the top of his shirt like a giant spider. It didn’t. Plain-faced glaring having failed, I was out of ideas.
“I need a tea towel,” I mumbled.
“Say please.”
“Please.” I hated myself for obeying and he sighed merrily, tossing our tattered floral tea-towel which I failed to catch.
“You not out tonight, then?” he asked as I dabbed at the sofa, leaning against the counter like he was it. I once read that you should always describe somebody’s appearance with just a couple of simple observations. I’ve already mentioned the chest hair. He also had a piercing.
“Just working,” I said quickly, knowing he knew I never go out. He need not rub it in.
“Oh, well, that’s cool,” he replied, clicking his tongue. “In its own way.” I looked up at him, wide-eyed. I’m always wide-eyed.
“What?”
“I said it’s cool in its own way.”
“No, I mean ‘what?’ as in ‘what do you mean?’”
“I don’t mean anything.” He smiled again. I hated that smile with its bashful laugh lines that tell you just how many times he’s victimised people with it. I hated that stupid Goblet of Fire hair. I hated those black jeans with the dangling chain that’re so tight he surely used garden shears to cut them off each evening. I hated how much I wouldn’t mind being like him.
“Have you ever actually been out, ever?” Dean asked. “I don’t reckon I’ve ever seen you out. You’re very solitary, aren’t you? Like a beaver.” I was too shy to tell him they mate for life.
“It’s not my thing,” I said sourly. Was it sour? I didn’t want him telling people I was sour. I’d finished cleaning the sofa but felt much too awkward to just strut past him back to my room. Until he left, I was trapped with him.
“So what is your thing?” asked Dean, indicating that I was stuck with human company for as long as he wanted me to be. “Besides anime.” I felt myself go red. He hadn’t seen into my room, had he?! He couldn’t have seen the Akira poster or Dragon Quest figures! I’d die if he did!
“I don’t know,” I said meekly and also boring-ly. “I just don’t like partying, I guess.” How would I even know if I liked it?
“It’s not for everyone,” said Dean, shrugging, “I mean, I started going out in college and it was pretty shit the whole time. Only picked up now I’m at uni.”
“Yeah?” I asked, willing my voice not to crack. “What did you do in college?” Why was I prolonging this?!
“A lot of beach days or beach nights and all that shit. Sex in the dunes was pretty fun.” I’d meant his A-Levels. Dean winked at me with his jade eyes and it was so tremendously awful I could have forsaken my phobia and chundered from the window onto the clubbers below. The thought made me smile internally and was still snaking through my head when I realised that Dean had stopped talking and was watching me with something that could be called curiosity. A lot of white people look at me like that. “You okay?”
“Huh?”
“You went for a sec’ there.” He smirked. He never stops doing that. One of those grotesque bad-boy smirks. Up with that I would not put. Or, rather, I wouldn’t once I developed the confidence to object.
“So how come you’re not out now?” I asked, instantly worried it was too sharp. Even accusatory. My thoughts can be so acerbic but my words can never be. They must never be. Just smile and nod, like my waitressing days, and hope he didn’t notice that I clearly didn’t know what to do with my hands during a conversation.
“It’s only six, I’m not a madman. Got pre-drinks with the flat downstairs, then we’re going Spoons, then probably Elysium. Pretend I can dance for nine hours straight then leave with my ears ringing.”
“Sounds fun.” It was nearly imperceptible, but I was sure that Dean’s face had fallen a little – inasmuch as I looked at it, given my need to avoid his eyes. It almost looked like concern. Maybe he was just a brilliant actor; the insufferable often are. Like Stanley Smith back home. He’d throw pinecones at the minibus for the elderly in the morning and nail Henry V in the afternoon.
“You could come,” he said. He actually sounded as if he meant it. He was a very good actor. “Like,” he shrugged, “our whole floor’s going so it’s odd when you don’t. And it’s only downstairs; be a good way to kind of break the ice with people, get an idea of what the whole partying sort of thing is like. In a safe space.”
“Did he just use the term ‘safe-space’?” I thought. “In a sincere manner? He never seemed the type before.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said quietly. “Got stuff to do and everything.” “Yeah! Cool girl stuff that you’d never understand!”
“Suit yourself. Don’t really need anyone who’s just gonna sit there and bring the mood down, anyway.” He yanked open the fridge, bathing himself in too-bright yellow light, and produced a gleaming bottle of Sainsbury’s-brand merlot.
“Are you gonna drink all of that?” I asked sheepishly, surprising myself. Who was this? Might I, Scared Joan, actually challenge someone? Even in as soft and indirect a way imaginable?
“No, just most of it. I’ll finish it when I wake up.” I stopped myself from laughing. I couldn’t display my awful laugh in front of someone. It’d be the end of everything. “If I don’t wake up in an alley getting pissed on by a tramp, which I hope I do. That’s a good night.” He opened another cupboard and delicately produced a wine glass. I tilted my head.
“Well, I’m not about to start drinking from the bottle; hasn’t gotten that bad yet. I’m not Withnail.” Having poured, he held the glass before his unshaven face to inspect it as if he’d find a colour other than red. “Wish I was. Do they get wine in China?”
“I’m not Chinese.”
“Same area, though.” My sister would have spat back some witty remark, my mother would have thrown her tea at him, my uncle would have killed him, skipped bail, and still gotten the sentence reduced to manslaughter but I wasn’t them. I didn’t spit back, but I also didn’t care for the whole race thing. Mum might have drilled into our heads that we were nothing but Filipino, even with the world’s whitest dad, but – if it had ever gone in – it had all long filtered out. I needed to stop thinking.
“Try it,” said Dean suddenly.
“Huh?”
“Try it,” he said again, holding the glass out toward me. “Make my day.”
“I don’t...” My words faltered.
“Alright, alright,” laughed Dean. “I know what happens when you force girls to get drunk, I don’t wanna get myself cancelled. Give it a sniff though. Just a little sniff. The teeniest, tiniest sniff.” He waved the glass under my nose and I held my breath in resistance. I would have fixed him with a glare, but that would have meant eye contact. That’s a no-no. “Sorry,” sniggered Dean, walking back across the kitchen to get the wine bottle. “I’ll be good.”
As it turned out a glare wouldn’t have been necessary because, as he took hold of it, the bottle exploded in his hand.