The Last Time I Saw You (2 page)

My first day at Leeds was one of those rare, lethal occasions I couldn’t keep Mom and Dad apart—both of them were determined to propel me into adult life, and it would have been too cruel to play favorites and condemn one of them to the parental scrap heap. We squashed my stuff into the trunk of Dad’s brown Volvo (a vehicle that I knew embodied why Mom left him: by then she was tearing it up in a zippy Japanese candy kiss of a car) then squashed ourselves in after it, all set for four hours of sticky, congealed tension.

“Would you mind if I opened the window a crack, Jeremy?”

“I’d prefer you didn’t, if you don’t mind, it negates the air conditioning.” Translation: you’re irresponsible and flighty, same as it ever was.

“I do so love to be able to breathe.”

Translation: you stifled my womanly magnificence for quarter of a century.

I sat in the back feeling nauseous, for so many reasons I couldn’t have identified the root cause—polishing off a family pack of malt balls solo, the irony too great to risk offering them around, probably clinched it. As the junctions crawled past, fear knotted my intestines and compressed itself in my chest, the reality of being hundreds of miles from all that was familiar starting to hit home. It wasn’t just the prospect of losing the prickly, scratchy comfort blanket of my family, it was also the idea of being severed from James. He and I had done everything together the last couple of years—everything other than the thing I most wanted to do—and now he would be at the University of East Anglia, right at the other end of the country, girls vying for his attentions. The thought was almost too much to bear.

But it was me who had chosen to go so far north: I knew very little about myself at that age, but one thing I did know was that I was clever, and that had given me options. I was denying something that another part of me had intuitively sensed, that I needed to find my own place in the world, far away from everything that currently defined me.

Many moons later we finally parked, Dad efficiently hauling my suitcases out of the recesses of the trunk, Mom critically surveying the shabby façade of my halls through her gigantic sunglasses. Dad dragged my luggage up the stairs, refusing any help as if to do so would emasculate him even more, Mom and me clattering behind him. Sally was the very first person I saw, hanging out of the kitchen with an oversized cartoon mug in her hand saying “
WORLD’S
BEST
DAUGHTER
. The sight of Dad’s red, sweaty face made a spontaneous grin break out across her own.

“D’you want a hand with them?” she said, taking in the bizarre tableau we made. Her voice was a little nasal,
infused with a merriness that felt a million miles away from our dreary middle-class repression. There was an instant confidence about her, like she could read it all in a heartbeat and know exactly where to put herself. She wore a stretchy, red Lycra minidress, offset by a pair of black woolly tights that rescued her from looking like she’d just come from a night out clubbing. Her black hair—dyed? Couldn’t quite tell—was cut into a complicated layered bob, held fast by a thick coating of hairspray, the volume speaking of hours spent with her head upside down blasting it with a dryer. She was skinny—the way the Lycra hugged her jutting hip bones advertised the fact—but there was a soft padding around her bottom, the final frontier that she was yet to overcome. Her eyes were a bright blue, constantly roving around, intelligence-gathering. They’d alighted on me, and I gathered my parka closer around me, embarrassed by my ill-fitting jeans and warm green sweater: I’d just thought north equals cold, whereas Sally, she’d constructed a look, each component part balanced on top of the last, like an elaborate game of Jenga.

You couldn’t keep your eyes off the ultimate effect—she was magnetic, compelling—but it was more attractive than pretty: prettiness suggests a softness that Sally rarely surrendered to. I was probably prettier, in a quiet way that I was yet to even really notice; my blondy-brown hair was thick and long, but I had no idea how to style it, so it simply hung there like a rug on a washing line, my makeup collection consisted of a few cheap bits and bobs from Boots, so my hazel eyes never got emphasized, and I was scared of lipstick because it always ended up painting my teeth. As for my perfectly decent body—permanently encased by baggy knitwear, it never got a look-in. No wonder Sally was mapping me so carefully with
her eyes: she always knew when someone was ripe for transformation. Transformation or corruption? Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

“Very kind, but I’ve got it under control,” said Dad, dropping the cases a little too heavily to convince. He was transfixed, his eyes locked on her. “Jeremy Berrington,” he added, sticking out his hand.

“Sally Atkins,” she said, leaning forward to kiss him on the cheek at the exact same moment. She was mocking him, but so very subtly that he couldn’t quite catch it.

She unsettled me, the way she exposed us with a few light brushstrokes. “I’m Olivia, and I think that’s my room,” I said, pointing to the door.

“I’ll come find you later, yeah? Few of us were gonna head down to the bar. Tryouts,” she added, with a naughty laugh.

“Absolutely. I think we might head out for supper, but if I’m here then count me in.” I hated the way I sounded, like a pastiche of the geeky grammar school girl that I was, more me than me.

“Come on, Mom and Dad, you know it makes sense,” she said, voice a lilting tease.

I looked at them, imagined the awkwardness of dinner, our glasses chinking in a celebratory toast with too much undertow to ever ring true. Mom was smiling at her, taken by her cheek.

“I’ll see how it goes,” I conceded.

“You do that,” she said, tenacious. She held my gaze, grinned at me, and suddenly it felt imperative that I grabbed the opportunity with both hands, that I didn’t miss my moment. A girl like that wouldn’t hang around—my friendship window would slam shut and I’d be left shivering in the cold.

Dad deposited my suitcases in my bare matchbox of a room, and we all stood there for a second.

“Nice girl,” he said, and I waited for the inevitable postscript. “Quite a strong flavor.”

“I like her,” I said, defensive.

“She’s a live wire, but she’s quite right. Livvy needs to dive right in, like an otter heading upstream.”

Mom’s ridiculous analogy clinched it. Soon I was hugging them goodbye, unable to look as the Volvo made a heavy left turn around the corner. I looked up at my unprepossessing new home to see Sally watching it all from the window, blue eyes darting around so she wouldn’t miss a thing.

It wasn’t that I’d stopped being scared, if anything I was more scared, but at least now I knew I was in the right place. Or at least I thought I was.

“What’s this shit?” said Sally, laughing, and bobbing her head along to the music. It was “You’ve Got a Friend” that was playing, at least until I’d scrambled across the room to my stereo and turned it off. “
Tapestry
,” I said, slightly pompously. “It was one of the best-selling albums of the seventies.”

“That’s great and everything, but there’s a vodka and tonic with your name on it going begging.” She paused. “I know this’ll sound stupid, but what is your name again?”

“Olivia. Livvy.”

“Which is it? No, scrub that, I can’t call you Olivia. O-liv-ia,” she repeated, in a faux posh voice. “No, definitely Livvy.”

I bristled a little: surely it was my prerogative to give her permission to use my nickname, but I let it pass.

“What course are you doing?” I asked.

“English.”

“Me too!”

“Great minds . . .” she said. “I heard we only get about three tutorials a week and there’s study guides for the rest.”

“Quite.”

Not quite. I loved English, loved the books but also loved the writing. I’d had a tiny article published in a newspaper the year before, and I’d nearly died of pride.

“Come on then,” she said, impatiently shaking my parka at me and setting off down the stairs.

A few of our new housemates were waiting on the doorstep for us; there was Phil, a pimply engineer, a girl called Catherine, and Lola, a chubby, smiley history student who reminded me of the kind of friends I had at home. A couple more people arrived, and I tried to remember everyone’s names, but it was only Sally I could really hold onto. We set off in a gang, but she firmly interlocked her arm in mine, declared us a huddle.

When we hit the dingy, neon-lit student bar she looked around with wide-eyed disdain and I suddenly saw the world through her eyes, even though our worlds had collided less than two hours before. Everyone looked so young and green, their nerves palpable, their bodies straining forward like coat hooks
as they fought to work out who they were going to be, what territory they should colonize.

“Dunno about you, but I reckon this is a double-shot scenario,” she said. “Back in a flash, don’t move.”

I didn’t even really like vodka—I’d only been drinking for a couple of years, and I tended to go for gin and orange because it disguised the taste—but there was no time to tell her that, and even if there had been, I’d never have done it. We’d already laid down some silent laws, and I was following them to the letter. I turned back to our housemates, by now engaged in an earnest pissing contest about their relative A-level grades, then turned away. My learning had already begun, but it wasn’t about renaissance poetry: thanks to Sally I knew that it wasn’t cool, that it was faintly tragic, and I was invisibly spiriting myself away. I wish I could go back in time and swivel myself back around—let myself be naive and young and full of pride at my hard-won two A’s and a B—but instead I shifted from foot to foot and counted the minutes until Sally reappeared. She was mercifully fast, having inveigled her way to the front of the scrum without even breaking a sweat.

“Chin chin,” she said, chinking glasses with me, oblivious to the drinkless ignominy of the wider group. I took a swig, returned her wide, cheeky grin, and reveled in the sensation of the vodka hitting my bloodstream. I could feel it in every cell, every particle, like it was something far stronger. And in a way it was.

Sally would take me shopping, make me try on clothes I never would have dreamed of wearing, and convince me I looked like a million dollars. It wasn’t like I didn’t have a group of friends at home, but this felt different, there was a visceral intensity to it that I couldn’t quite articulate. Part of it stemmed from the fact that we were living in next-door rooms, but Jules and I had never been close like this: at that stage I was still more of an irritant than a confidante. I loved the feeling of having a person who was more mine than anyone else’s—I hadn’t had a serious boyfriend yet, and I suppose I was getting some of the intimacy without any of the scary stuff. Surprise, surprise I was a virgin.

Surprise, surprise Sally wasn’t. Unlike me she had taken a year off, horrifying her parents by moving in with an older man she met in Barcelona. The relationship sounded passionate and real and scary, their sex life unimaginable to a suburban innocent like me. She would be jokily explicit, and I would try to laugh along like a woman of the world, hoping
she wouldn’t question me too closely about the boys I mentioned in return, none of whom had merited more than a top-half grope, most likely through a turtleneck.

Of course I’d been secretly saving myself for James, lost in my impossible fantasies about him rapping on the door and begging my forgiveness for taking so long to realize we were destined. I didn’t want to tell Sally how much of my energy it had taken up—still took up: she was funny, but her jokes could be spiky, could wound in a way I was sure she didn’t intend.

I was still trying to get the measure of her, our friendship a new instrument that I’d not yet mastered. She, however, had worked out exactly how to play me, enjoyed finding out what notes would squeak out if she suddenly changed her technique. We sat in the corridor one day, hungover, waiting for our English tutorial to start, watching a pregnant mature student huffing and puffing toward us.

“Have you ever been pregnant?” asked Sally innocently.

I tried not to look aghast.

“N- no,” I stammered.

“It’s so weird,” she said, staring into the middle distance. “Like all your senses have been turned up to the max. Even the colors look brighter.”

I sat there, panic gripping me, trying to come up with an appropriate response, horribly conscious that we were surrounded by people in easy eavesdropping distance. Our TA emerged just in the nick of time, and Sally swept toward his study, barely looking back. I scuttled after her, hoping she didn’t think my muteness was down to indifference, determined to work out how to ask her all about it as soon as we were alone. But when I tried she was coldly dismissive and I backed away, feeling like I’d failed a test. I wanted
to apologize, but, ironically for someone who loved words as much as I did, I couldn’t think of a combination that wouldn’t make it worse. She was in pain, and I was too inadequate to help her. I vowed to myself that I’d try harder next time.