Mariam was back at work right after the weekend.  They’d offered her a few more days off, but she missed getting paid.

She’d been pleasantly surprised by how her co-workers were behaving this morning.  It was all how are you and glad to have you back and don’t take on too much.  Even Wayne, who could usually be relied upon to rant for hours at the slightest provocation about how George Lucas had broken his heart and betrayed their entire generation, had told her to leave any table-waiting duties to him.  “Can’t have you pulling your stitches,” he told her, leaving her by the till.

She spent the morning pulling pints, noting down food orders, and collecting in the money.  It wasn’t bad work.  The Student Union was a crowded, dimly-lit place just to the left of the main university building, and it had a bar, a sandwich counter, and not much else.  When there was a lull between customers (not often), you could amuse yourself by checking out this week’s posters.  Just about every square inch of wall space was covered in them- adverts for events and clubs, political statements, charity appeals.  They got so many on, Mariam was surprised they didn’t try and put some on the ceiling and the floor as well. 

She’d just started reading about a benefit gig in a nearby pub when That Guy came up to the counter.  Afterwards, he was always just That Guy in her mind, pronounced with all the disdain her brain could muster, but at first he seemed perfectly normal.  Then again, didn’t most of them?

He asked for a pint of John Smith’s, and watched her pour it, eyes focused on her forearms.  She probably wouldn’t have noticed that if she hadn’t been so conscious of the bandages under her sleeves, but she was positive- whenever her arms moved, his gaze followed.  It was like hypnotising somebody with a watch.

It wasn’t until she’d already passed him the pint that he finally spoke up.  “I just want you to know- I think that’s pretty pathetic.”  He pointed to her right wrist, where her shirtsleeve had ridden up to reveal a centimetre or two of bandage.  “You’re just going to make your family worry themselves sick about you, and for what?  A little bit of attention?”

Mariam goggled at him.  She had got a bit of extra attention after what had happened at the park, but…  “You think I wanted that to happen?”

“I mean, cutting yourself,” said That Guy languidly, “Fucking emo chicks…  You don’t know how good you have it.  There’s people in the world with real problems.”

Mariam reached out and snatched the pint out of his hand, pulling it back across the bar.  It felt a bit childish, but it also felt satisfying.  “We have a policy against abusive language,” she recited, remembering her training back in October, “I’m refusing you…”

She would have ended by kicking him out of the Student Union and telling him not to come back until he’d read every single local paper from the last three days, but at that point, another person appeared behind That Guy.  He seemed to materialise at his shoulder.  The other man was tall and broad-shouldered, with the kind of hair that curled at the ends and always looked wet, and he was carrying a handful of mauve flyers.  He made eye contact with Mariam, then grabbed That Guy’s arm and wrenched him two steps backwards.  “So you’ve got nothing better to do with your life than go around bothering random women?”

That Guy struggled in the other man’s grip.  “She’s a fucking emo!  Just look at her arms!”

“She was caught up in a bombing on Thursday, arsehole, and she’s back at work already.  I’ll bet that if that happened to you, you’d still be at home squealing like a baby.”

That Guy struggled some more.  “Let me go!”

The other man let him go.  That Guy scurried towards the exit, elbowing his way through the crowd.  If one of them had wanted to chase him, they could probably have caught him in five seconds flat, but as far as Mariam was concerned, the further away he was from her, the better.

She looked back at the other man, and grinned.  “Right, I’d say you’ve earned a drink on the house.  What’ll it be?”

The man held up his hands.  “It was nothing, really.  Just, I overheard you and the other bar staff talking about what happened, and I figured you’d been through enough already without having to deal with creeps like him.”

Mariam’s face felt hot.  She tried to ignore it.  “I wouldn’t be that quick to turn down a free drink.  Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure.”  The man put out a hand.  “Shaun Mandeville.”

Mariam shook it.  “Mariam Gharib.  What are those leaflets you’ve got, then?”

Shaun looked down at the papers in his hand and gave a start. As if he’d completely forgotten they were there.  “Oh!  They’re for a group called The Oakmen.  I’m meant to be giving them out.”

“And that’s, what, a band?”

“Hm?  No, we’re just a social group, really.  A way for people to meet up and talk.”  He scrunched his nose in a way that made Mariam think of a rabbit.  “People don’t talk enough these days, do they?”

“I guess not,” said Mariam.  She nodded towards the flyers.  “Can I have one?”

Shaun’s face lit up.  “Of course!”  He peeled one off from the stack and handed it over.  “Next meeting’s on Friday, in the back room at the Skillet.  Come along.”

*

Rosalyn lay on her bed in the attic, listening to Stevie Wonder and trying to forget about the word “fate.”  Mainly because she was pretty sure she’d tempted it.

She’d kicked up such a fuss about it, too, all starry-eyed and convinced the universe was trying to tell her something.  All fun and games until somebody lost an eye.  Isaac had been lucky not to literally lose an eye, in fact.

Obviously, Rosalyn knew she hadn’t willed the explosion into existence just because she’d wanted life to be exciting.  If she told anyone she had, they’d tell her to stop being ridiculous.  And, in fact, she’d been to two therapists, one here and one back home, so that she could stop being ridiculous at times like this.  But knowing something intellectually wasn’t the same thing as feeling it in your bones.

People like her should just avoid talking about fate and messages from the universe in the first place, she decided.  It never led to anything good.

There was a knock on her door.  “Come in,” she said, sitting up and turning off the music.

Isaac came in.  The bandages were off, but his face still looked pink and blotchy, and the stitches stuck out a mile.  “Have you still got that note?” he asked, breezily.

Rosalyn did still have that note.  She’d thought about chucking it out, just to draw a line under the whole thing, but that had seemed wrong.  It hadn’t seemed like her decision to make.  “Yeah, I put it back in the book.  Why?”

“Well, you said it was a receipt from some fabric shop, right?” He walked to the centre of the room.  “So it’s probably got a date on it.  Maybe even the shop’s address.”

“Yeah, maybe.”  She got up and took the book down from the shelf.  The note was back where she’d found it, in between pages 74 and 75.  It hadn’t felt right to move it somewhere else.

She handed it to Isaac, who turned it over and raised his eyebrows.  “Jesus!  April 1994!”

“Really?”

“See for yourself!”  He handed it back, and she looked through the small print at the bottom of the receipt until she found it.  Thursday 14^th of April, 1994.  This note had sat in the book, undisturbed by the outside world, for nearly twelve years.  Until Rosalyn had come along.

“You were right- there’s an address, too,” she told him, “Fabric City, 21 Browning Road.  Do you know where Browning Road is?”

Isaac clicked his teeth.  “I… want to say it’s one of those streets just behind the station?  We’ll have to check it out on a map.”

Rosalyn frowned.  She should have seen this coming.  “You want to try and find the shop?”

“Well, it might not be there anymore, but there’s no harm in checking.”  He shrugged his shoulders so extravagantly that the whole of his jacket moved up and down with them.  “Neither of us have lectures today, so why not?”

Rosalyn knew why not, but she couldn’t say so out loud without sounding mental.  There wasn’t any harm in checking.  But people like her probably shouldn’t.  “I don’t know…”

“Rosalyn.  Come on.”  Isaac gave her a warm smile.  “We had a bad shock last week, but lightening doesn’t strike in the same place twice, does it?  Worst case scenario, we’ll get to Number 21, find out it’s turned into a Starbucks, and have to head back home.”

“Well…”

“Rosalyn, there’s this really annoying proverb about falling off horses.  Please don’t make me use it.”

Rosalyn laughed.  “Oh, alright, then.  I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Isaac grinned.  Before Rosalyn knew what he was going to do, he’d already picked her up bridal-style, with his right hand between her shoulderblades and his left arm hooked under her knees.  “Where to, miss?”

*

There were free copies of the university paper (which was called “The Bell” for some reason Natalie had never bothered to find out) on every table in the canteen.  Not so strange- it came out every Monday.  But this week, the front-page headline read, Two Berrylands Students Injured in Park Bombing.

They weren’t actually allowed to name the two injured students (and neither were the proper newspapers who’d reported on it last Friday), but it couldn’t have been that hard to find out, because all five of Pallas House’s tenants had been stopped at some point in the last four days and asked for an interview.  They’d all said no thanks.

Natalie’s parents had asked her to come home.  She’d appeased them by promising to try and get down there this weekend.  She was pretty keen to stay with her housemates for the time being.

Natalie’s friend Felicity finally worked her way through the crowd and sat down opposite her.  She put her coffee down on the table, nodded backwards and said, “That’s my biggest argument against Anarchy, right there.”

 “Hm?”

“It’s like this- when I’ve got up at six in the morning, travelled an hour on a crowded train, sat through one of Bryn fecking Cornwell’s lectures and queued for ages to get a cup of coffee, and then some berk elbows into me and makes me spill half of it and burn the skin off my hand, the only- the only– thing that’s going to stop me from throwing it into their stupid ugly face is the knowledge that I might get arrested for it.”  She shook her scalded hand in the air.  “So, you know, it’s important to have laws.”

“Is your hand OK?” asked Natalie.

Felicity grimaced.  “I’ll live.”

“I don’t think the lecture was that bad.”

 “Oh, come on.  It was meant to be about Plato’s Republic.  How did it end up being about how the English language is dying out because of netspeak?”

“It could have been worse.  Remember that story he set us that was all about necrophilia?”  It had been called ‘The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California,’ and it had been about two drunk guys stealing a corpse and waxing poetic about how they were having sex with it.  Natalie had written a response story called, ‘The Wanking Dugong of Chessington, Surrey.’  She was still pretty proud of that one.

Just then, a girl Natalie didn’t recognise shuffled up to the table, hugging a set of mauve leaflets to her chest.  “Oakmen meeting on Friday,” she announced, throwing a couple of copies in front of Natalie and Felicity.  Then she shuffled off to bother people at the next table.

“Oakmen?” said Felicity, “That’s, what, an environmental thing?”

Natalie picked up the leaflet and read it.  She started frowning almost immediately.  It was the kind of leaflet that poked you in the face with capital letters and exclamation marks.  Then she read the second-to-last sentence, and made a noise like a cat coughing up a hairball.  “Apparently, it’s for people who want to talk about how much they love their favourite spoon.  Their favourite spoon.” 

She couldn’t have said why that particular sentence had struck her in the way it had. It made her think of a poster she’d passed on the way to school a few years ago, an advert for a nightclub that had said, SPICE UP UR MISERABLE LIVES!!!  By the fifth or sixth time she’d passed it, Natalie had been prepared to defend her miserable life to the death.  This was like that- supposed to be lighthearted, but with a weird undercurrent of aggression that affected the whole thing.

Felicity raised her eyebrows.  “Do you think it’s one of those ‘trying too hard to be random’ things?”

“It’s one of those ‘really wanting to be told they’re funny but not quite understanding how jokes work’ things.”  Natalie crumpled the leaflet in her hand, squashing it into a crinkly mauve ball.  As she did it, though, she caught sight of the girl who’d given them the leaflets.  She was still looking right at them.

All of a sudden, Natalie felt very small.  They’re just trying to have fun.  And it’s not as if ‘The Wanking Dugong’ was exactly Monty Python, either.

For a moment, it looked as if the girl was going to come over to their table and demand to know what their problem was, but instead she just pulled a face and moved on to the next table.