Autumn and Winter 2005

After signing the tenancy agreement in their new kitchen, Alex and his flatmates went to a nearby Burger King to celebrate.  The conversation flowed, taking in everyone’s taste in music and TV, a couple of opinions on things in the news, and the reasons they weren’t staying in halls for their first year (somebody hadn’t wanted the university breathing down their neck, somebody else had forgotten to file the paperwork until it was too late, and Alex was technically a mature student and therefore not allowed).

“I bet they don’t ask for your ID when you go to the pub,” muttered Isaac, a scrawny boy whose face made Alex think of a good-natured chipmunk.

It was only by sheer luck (Roxanne having insisted that he come out and be social last Christmas) that Alex wasn’t forced to admit that he’d never tried to order a drink in a pub.  “I think some places are more militant about it than others.”

At first, Alex had found himself carefully stepping around certain subjects- no sense in alarming potential new friends by telling them he used to be in a cult and his friend’s rich brother was paying his tuition – but, as dinner wore on, he’d found that he didn’t really have to.  The other four didn’t poke at holes in his stories or ask why he didn’t have this or that thing in common with them.  He was older.  He probably knew something they didn’t.  They bowed to his experience.

Not one of them had had their nineteenth birthday yet.  Alex didn’t know why that was so strange for him to contemplate, but it was.

*

Sometimes it was easy to tell that Denny was having a bad day.  Today, his knuckles were covered in tooth marks, some of which had clearly broken the skin.  Alex had seen him do it hundreds of times, looking like he was trying to shove his entire first in his mouth to prevent any words from coming out.

“Good thing you can’t chew all the way through the bone,” Alex told him, looking at the red, bumpy mess.

Denny laughed bitterly.  “If anyone ever managed to do it, it would be me”

*

Alex didn’t think he was supposed to hear the conversation, but Natalie had left her door open and by the time he realised what it was about, it was too late.

“We were this close!” said Mariam, pacing round Natalie’s room, “We were about halfway to the bed, and then he let it slip that he’s a virgin.  So I had to shut it down.”

“Why?” asked Natalie, sitting on her bed with a magazine on her knees.

“Because his first time shouldn’t be with a girl he barely knows after six pints of cheap beer!”

“I don’t think Isaac…”

“He would!” snapped Mariam, “Boys are supposed to say they don’t care about that, but they do!  Trust me, I’ve got three brothers, I know this stuff.”  She noticed Alex standing outside in the hall.  “And I don’t want to hear any contradiction from you.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” replied Alex.  His own first time had been with the older sister of a friend while said friend had been asleep upstairs, but it would have felt somehow crude to mention that to Mariam and Natalie.

Natalie smiled.  “We’d appreciate it if none of this got back to Isaac or Rosalyn.”

“Of course,” said Alex.

*

“It’s called the Prisoner’s Dilemma,” said Rosalyn, sitting at the kitchen table with her notepad and her dinner in front of her on the table.  She was doing an impressive job of keeping them apart.

Alex nodded.  “I’ve heard of it.  It’s where you have to make decisions based on whether or not your friend is going to sell you out, right?”

“Yeah, kind of.  The way our lecturer put it, if you stay quiet you both get a year in prison, if you both betray each other you both get two years in prison, and if one of you betrays the other they go free but the other one gets five years in prison.”  Rosalyn reminded Alex of a robin.  Part of it was the red hair, and part of it was her height and her quick little movements.  “Apparently most people say they’d keep quiet.  Though they might just be talking about what they’d like to think they’d do.”

“Do you think you’d keep quiet?”

“I think so.  I think it comes down to whether you’d rather be kept up all night by being furious or by feeling guilty.”

“And being furious is a lot more fun.”

“Yeah.  That’s what I think, too.”

*

Alex still called Roxanne every evening.  It seemed like the least he could do.

“I was hoping they’d be closer to your age,” she said a few weeks after Alex had moved in, “They’re definitely all eighteen?”

“Well, Mariam’s birthday’s next week,” said Alex, “And either Rosalyn or Isaac turns nineteen before Christmas.  I can’t remember which one…”

“But you won’t have anything in common with them.  They’ll be out chugging WKD and vomiting into the gutters until three in the morning.”

“They don’t do that,” said Alex, mostly truthfully.

“Their parents might as well be paying you to babysit.  And that’s on top of what the Lambtons have got you doing.”

“It’s not like that.  Either of them.”  Alex swallowed.  “They’re not getting me to do it.  I want to.”

Roxanne made a sceptical noise, and changed the subject.

*

“You have no idea what it’s like,” snapped Denny.  There was a feeling of heat to him- the red in his cheeks, the tears.  “You have no idea how fucking exhausting it is.”

“It doesn’t need to be.  It…”

“Yes!  It!  Does!”  He sniffed and swallowed at the same time, trying to draw everything back inside at once.  “You don’t have to wake up every morning and remember what you’ve done.”

“Denny, we’ve been over this.  I showed you the papers.  Amy Kirwan is aive.  She’s still working in the same shop.  She’s fine.”

“And the boy who went missing from my school?  Is he fine?”

“Well… no, but…”

“See?  You can come up with as many excuses as you want, but the truth is the truth.”

*

It seemed as if Alex was just going from one tearful, furious face to another.  Natalie had just come off the phone with her sister, and she was all but spitting with rage.

“Her boyfriend’s birthday is coming up,” she told him, her teeth clicking on the consonants as if she was trying to bite the words off one by one, “And when she asked him what he wanted, he asked for her to get a boob job.”  She was sitting against the wall outside the bathroom, her arms folded so tight that it looked as if she was about to cut off her circulation.  “He wants her to change her body, permanently, as a present for him.  Because he isn’t happy with it.”

Alex was crouching beside her, just far enough along the wall to be polite.  “Do you think she’ll do it?”

Natalie shook her head.  “He said it was just a joke.  But you know the kind of joke where you half-hope the other person takes you seriously, right?”  Her nostrils were flared.  Alex almost expected to see smoke coming out of them.

“How long have they been together?  Maybe…”

“Oh, they’ll split up eventually.  But her next boyfriend will be exactly the same.”  Natalie unfolded her arms and brushed her hair out of her face.  She had wavy, reddish hair, like an ancient warrior woman.  “Andrea’s got a Master’s degree in Archaeology, she was practically headhunted by the British Museum, but she settles for guys who treat her like a fucking blow-up doll.”  Natalie held her hands out in front of her, as if she was imagining strangling all of Andrea’s bad boyfriends, past, present and future.

Alex reached out and patted her on the back.  “Well… no matter how badly they treat her, there’s one person in the world who cares about her as much as she deserves.”

“Whole lot of good that’s doing her now,” Natalie sniffed.

*

The bookshop was like a warm, bright little nest in the middle of the frosty high street.  It was one of the big chain stores, the kind where they had a coffee shop on the top floor and a selection of DVDs in the basement, but the staff were easygoing enough to let groups of university students spend whole afternoons there without buying anything.  Alex suspected that, if the central heating was warm enough and you had nowhere else to be, it would be easy to fall asleep in one of those round red armchairs at the end of the aisles.  It was the sort of place that welcomed you.

This evening, in what must have been some sort of reward for tolerating students’ quirks all this time, the shop had been chosen to host a book launch.  The author was one of Natalie’s professors, which was how she and her flatmates had managed to score free tickets.  They sat in the back row, their damp coats hanging on the back of their chairs, and did their best to listen.

After about half an hour, Isaac leaned over and whispered, “This is shi-i-it.”

Alex made a weighing motion with his hand.  “It… has its moments.”  The professor, Viola, was reading an extract from a novel about a couple coping with their teenage son’s sudden death.  She’d made it clear from the start that it wasn’t autobiographical and was based on a case she’d read about in the papers, which was probably why Isaac felt comfortable making fun of it.

“I say we take a shot every time she says, ‘every parent’s worst nightmare’,” said Isaac.

From his right, Natalie leaned over and said, “Bet you a fiver she says, ‘He had his whole life ahead of him’.”

“I’m going to bet on, ‘Our house no longer feels like a home’.”

“You’re on.”

Mariam sighed.  “Guys, people do actually say those things.”

“Yes, when they’ve actually lost a family member and they’re grieving.  I expect a bit more originality from somebody who’s been paid to write a book.”

Alex knew a little about houses that didn’t feel like homes, so he had more patience than Isaac did on that front.  On the other hand, you could never count on anyone having a whole life ahead of them.  Or a life worth living if they did.  “We should be charitable.  She’s giving us free wine.”

“Can’t argue with that,” said Isaac with a grin, and became a bit quieter.

*

If he’d been asked to pick out Rosalyn’s mother from a random selection of forty-year-old women, Alex would probably have chosen somebody small and cautious-looking, like Rosalyn herself.  He almost certainly wouldn’t have picked a woman with long, bleach-blonde hair, stiletto heels and gold jewellery, who reminded him a little of a gangster’s moll in a 1940s movie.  But a week and a half before Christmas, that was who turned up.

“Tea or coffee?” he asked, turning on the kettle.

She clucked her tongue.  “Look at you!  So polite!  Black coffee, please, Alex.”  She sat down at the kitchen table, opposite Natalie.  “And please tell me my daughter doesn’t make you make the tea every time.”

Alex laughed.  “No, no.  Rosalyn is a very considerate girl.”  He got out five mugs- one for Mrs Pepper, and one each for himself, Rosalyn, Natalie and Isaac.  Mariam had already left the day before, after a drawn-out phone conversation with her father in which she refused to let him spend eight hours on the road coming to get her when there was a perfectly good train from St Pancras to Leeds.  Rosalyn and Isaac’s parents would be picking them up in the next few days.  After that, Alex would say his goodbyes to the Lambtons and go to Roxanne’s for a week.

He worried about leaving Denny behind, but he’d also have worried about leaving Roxanne alone at Christmas.  Given the choice, he’d have had them both living in the same place.

Mrs Pepper nudged Rosalyn.  “Did you pay him to say that?”

“Mum!” protested Rosalyn, half-amused and half-aghast.

Alex felt a strange warmth inside of him, tinged with a little envy.  It wasn’t just that Rosalyn seemed to have a kinder mother than he had; it was the whole first-year student experience, discovering the wider world before you had a chance to become jaded.  Alex should have been here, doing this, four years ago.  He should have stayed in school, gone out with Melanie Spencer, been there for Marley and Serena, and then started his own life.  And the only thing preventing a wave of despair from coming over him was the knowledge that, if he had, there might not have been anyone to help Denny when he’d needed it.

He finished the tea and handed it out.  “Did you have a long journey?”

“Not too far.  Up from Colchester.”  Mrs Pepper took a sip of her coffee.  “I keep telling Rosalyn that she needs to learn how to drive.  Maybe one of you can teach her.”

Alex smiled.  “Maybe we will.”