Click

I look cautiously around, check that no one is watching. Then I flip the newspaper, curling my shoulders inwards and craning my neck down to peer at her face. I look at her snub chin, the almonds of her eyes, ripe berry of her mouth. I see there is a lock of hair in her face. I reach my hand out. I attempt to brush it away with the tip of my finger.

iv.

The following week I turned up five minutes early to the professor’s lecture. I hovered at the end of the corridor – the one leading to the theatre – and scanned the crowd waiting outside. I couldn’t see her at first, it was so busy and loud – all the faces blurred into one another – and so I edged forward, past the bent knees and bulging rucksacks and forearms crossed over folders. I avoided eye contact with those I vaguely knew, pulling my hair over my face.

Soon there was a commotion behind me: the professor.

He bustled through the group of students, papers waving theatrically in his hand, a murmuring of ‘excuse me’ as he pushed his way forward. Then, at the door, he wavered. I watched him intently. There was a strained look on his face, a kind of suppressed smirk. He looked as though he might have been rehearsing a line in his head. But he said nothing, only glanced sideways briefly, then straightened his shoulders and walked into the lecture hall.

My eyes tracked across in the direction of his glance. She was sat against the wall, reading a book. I noticed she was wearing the same style of dress as the week before, but a deeper shade of blue. Her hair was in a low, neat bun at the nape of her neck and her face was knotted into a little frown. She flipped over a page in the novel and raised an ironic eyebrow.

At that moment the crowd began to trickle into the lecture hall, and she stood up. I watched the dark blue fabric lift and drop as her legs unfolded and straightened. She began to move towards the theatre with them, and I followed where she was going, keeping a good distance behind. There was a spare seat next to her. Avoiding eye contact, I shuffled in and sat down.

Around us I heard the familiar hum of student voices – those awkward few minutes before the start of a lecture which are never quite long enough to make conversation. I stared at my hands. I wondered how to introduce myself. I wondered what I could say that would sound natural. I had never been good at introductory conversations: the ‘hello’ itself was fine, but the segue into small talk always felt stilted. I was terrified of the inevitable silences that would follow and so would pre-emptively fill them with vacuous babble – babble that I found impossible to sustain, so my sentences trailed out, and I would end up awkwardly cutting myself off … Anyway, I kept my mouth shut.

The lecture began. I paid attention this time, partly because the title irritated me: ‘Female novelists in the nineteenth century.’ That categorization was annoying. I had never been a fan of what-was-called women’s fiction, in the same way that I’d never been a fan of what-were-called women’s magazines. I liked the idea instead that literature transcended the boundaries of gender, and thought that to lump together the work of (in this instance) Gaskell and Eliot into a ‘women’s literature’ category was to strip them of a creative freedom that male novelists were automatically afforded. That said, I mostly read men.

There was also a particular reason – a particular detail – which jolted me to pay attention that day. It was a sound bite I happened to pick up on in the first five minutes. After introducing the topic of the lecture, the professor said: ‘Now, who exactly, made up the readership of lady novelists during this period?’

Not female novelists, as the lecture title indicated, or even women novelists, as I might have found acceptable – but lady novelists. Nice ladies. Polite genteel women who behaved themselves. Every time he casually dropped it in, I felt my face flush and my throat constrict in anger.

Now he peered over at the students in the front row, and tapped the pen against the lectern. I resisted the urge to charge to the front of the lecture hall, grab the pen and shove it up his nose.

‘A particularly interesting detail,’ he continued, ‘in fact I should say, a particularly controversial detail featured in the writings of both lady novelists is the—’

Someone cut in: ‘Women.’

The interruption jolted me alert. I felt a prickle of panic at the nape of my neck. The professor stopped speaking.

‘Pardon?’

I looked around. A hundred eyes were now staring towards my row, wide circles of panic and irritation. I thought for a moment that Marina had spoken, but when I turned towards her, I saw that she was looking back at me.

I realized, with horror, that the voice had been mine.

The room spun. To steady myself I turned my eyes away from Marina and looked forwards. The professor had stopped talking. He was squinting in my direction through his glasses. His eyes flicked from me to Marina, seemingly attempting to establish who, exactly, had interrupted him.

He cleared his throat.

‘Pardon?’ he said.

In my periphery I saw Marina fix her gaze upon me. My lower lip felt numb. What the hell was I going to say now? Why had I put myself in this situation? I brought my hands together under the table, laced my fingers so tightly that my knuckles ached.

Suddenly another voice piped up. I recognized a cool, affirmative tone.

‘They’re not lady novelists,’ Marina corrected confidently. ‘They’re women.’

The professor rolled his eyes.

‘Marina, if you have an issue, please send an email and copy in—’

‘If you’ve bothered to make us sit through a lecture specifically about quote unquote gender and the novel then surely it’s worth explaining some of these terms. Otherwise just stick to the one you’ve used in the title.’

My toes scrunched in my shoes. I felt excruciatingly hot. The backs of my knees were slick with sweat, my face unstable. Under the damp of my fringe I looked in Marina’s direction. She was looking straight ahead, not registering my presence. Her mouth was curled in the very corner: in what almost looked like a smile. She seemed … pleased.

The professor, on the other hand, was uncomfortable. His forehead was a blotchy red. His cheeks were pink and seemed to expand with the silence, pushing the collar of his shirt tight against porcine jowls. Now he scratched them, laughed breathily and said: ‘For your information there is an entire section on this in the reading material provided.’

‘Then—’

‘Marina, for the moment I would like to just get on with it …’

‘Well to be honest—’

‘Marina.’

Another, shorter, silence as the professor jigged from one foot to the other. I glanced around. Other students looked either bored or riveted. They chewed their nails. The professor rustled his papers and continued on a different tack: ‘If you’d like to discuss it having read the secondary material then there may be an opportunity at a later date. In the meantime’ – here he leaned a large, flat hand into the lectern – ‘I would like to just get on with it. And if anyone else has a similar issue, please wait until the end to raise it with me.’

***

That’s when it started, I think. That was the first time that I became aware of it happening: my body folding in on itself, the hardened core at the centre of my identity dissolving and becoming replaced by something else … something corruptible and soft; unfamiliar. Until that lecture I hadn’t been aware of it, but I’d always had a fear of being found out. To some extent I still have it. It is not just that I am worried that someone will discover an unpleasant secret of mine and reveal it to the world. It’s more specific than that. It is, I suppose, a fear which stems from me. It’s a sense that I’m not completely in control of my own actions; that, by accident or otherwise, I will be the principal agent in my own downfall. When I’m not paying attention, drawing a tight restrictive circle around myself, I’ll say something tactless or do something stupid, which will reveal my true nature as incompetent. Or evil.

I think again about the headlines in recent days – the torrid accusations, the glimpses of my face, the glimpses of my name. All of it makes me question myself. I am worried about what they are saying. I am worried about how they are depicting me. I am worried about whether that representation will cause me to lose sight of who I am again, that it will make me do something that I don’t understand.

***

It was that moment in the lecture when my self-doubt began to set in, I’m sure of it. Before then I had always thought of myself as someone reserved and watchful. I was a person with control over their inner thoughts and emotions. Though my silence unnerved people around me, I had always felt bolstered by it.

But because of that lecture slippage, I felt that my sense of self-preservation was gone. I had acted so out of character, and with such potentially humiliating consequences, that I couldn’t understand what sort of person I was anymore.

I scared myself.

v.

I was relieved when the lecture ended. My stomach hurt, the skin between my fingers was clammy. I no longer had any desire to talk to Marina. All I wanted was to leave. I gathered up my things, packed them into my bag and walked down the stairs out of the lecture hall. I went towards the toilets. There was an unused disabled one around the corner which I knew was always empty. I would be able to collect myself there.

I stood at the sink and splashed my cheeks with cold water. It hit my skin and fell back into the basin, leaving reddish marks. I dabbed at them with the edges of my sleeve. Then I turned to the mirror and studied my profile. My immediate reaction was one of embarrassment: how contrived I looked. Since I had arrived at university I’d made a conscious effort to wear more make-up every day: a mask to accompany my new identity. But now, in the shallow light of the bathroom, it was patently obvious how ridiculous it looked. The dark, sweaty sheen of foundation drooped around my jawbone; there was an ugly blue smear underneath my eyes. My lips looked bright and my teeth yellow.

In the past I had refrained from wearing lots of make-up, mainly because I thought that my face possessed a sort of masculine quality that meant I couldn’t decorate it without it looking try-hard. Here I realized it was more than that: the make-up seemed to expose rather than conceal; it brought out every pore, every wrinkle, every hideous bulbous feature. I rolled a piece of hand towel off the dispenser and began to mop away the product. With every wipe, I felt a calm sift through my body. I felt that I was effacing the features, the morning: the memories of the lecture.

The door creaked open behind me and I stiffened. A small, slim silhouette slipped in and approached the sink. She stood next to me, and as she bent forward I saw the curl in the bottom of her hair. I remained still, like she couldn’t see me.

For a few minutes we pretended not to recognize each other. We stood in silence, me removing my make-up, she adjusting hers. Then, suddenly, she said: ‘Aren’t you going to say thank you?’

It was delivered as a statement, not a question. I turned to look at her. She was still staring straight ahead, towards the mirror, so her tiny face was turned to the side. I noted how small her nose was, how her top lip puckered up towards it like a wave.

‘Sorry?’ I croaked.

Her eyes shot out at me from under a curl of her fringe. They caught the light streaming from the window.

‘Fine,’ she said, wincing, then looking back at the mirror. ‘But next time have some backbone. At least have something to say, if you call out the professor like that. It’s just embarrassing otherwise.’

Her little hand flicked up and down across her eyelashes, wiggling the brush. I watched the tiny threads of black thicken into clumps, the green crescents behind them darken in the shade. Briefly I wondered why she wore so much make-up, whether she looked the same without it.

There was a silence. To fill it I said, idiotically: ‘I’m Eva.’

‘Marina.’

I saw myself shift awkwardly in the mirror. There were questions written all over my face. I wanted to ask what she thought of me for interrupting the professor. I wanted to ask how she felt confronting him herself, yelling out in the middle of a lecture. I wanted to ask what her issue was with him. But these seemed like stupid, clumsy things to say at that moment so I changed tack.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know that you studied this subject.’

‘What makes you think that?’ she said.

I thought of the way she had looked at me when I first saw her, and the effort of not bringing that up made me flustered.

‘Well,’ I coughed a little. ‘I haven’t really seen you here before.’

She groaned. ‘It’s a long story.’

At this point I was standing diagonally behind her, leaning against the sink. I watched her fingers smudge along the corners of her eyes. The crease along her brow deepened. Her eyes narrowed. Then they turned slowly to look at me.

There was a cool frankness in her expression, as though she were expecting me to ask her something. I sensed that now – now was my chance.

What is it that causes us to confess things to strangers? And why, in a confined, gossipy place like Northam, would Marina tell me of her problems, of her saga with the professor? Sometimes it is possible to establish a certain affinity with someone in a matter of seconds. Something about the way they move or speak or dress seems to offer a glimpse of their underlying personality which – due to some correspondence in our own personalities – invites us to reveal certain things.

Despite my quiet nature, I was not used to extracting confidences from people, and so for a while I assumed that it was a connection of this kind which had caused Marina to speak to me. I thought – foolishly I’m sure – that my lecture outburst had caused her to recognize me as a kindred spirit. She had seen past my nervous exterior to the potentially interesting friend beneath. She had wanted to extract that person. She had wanted to help me come out of my shell.

Now I know the opposite is true. She hadn’t wanted that at all. Instead she had seen how much conviction I lacked, and recognized in it an opportunity.

I was someone who, quietly, shared many of her opinions, but had no confidence to contradict her where they diverged. I would be there to bolster her brilliance, that was all, a sickly weed next to a burgeoning flower, and by feeding off my energy she would emerge more beautiful, more charismatic. Without allowing me to realize it, she would steal all of my secret characteristics, all my good arguments and ideas. She would scrape them away and use them for herself, leaving me as an empty, silent husk – someone with no voice and no personality.

***

I stood there silently, studying her eyes and mouth and cheeks. There was another silence as she bent forward and pulled another eye pencil out of her pocket. I thought about the structure of bones under her face.

Then: ‘I have a long time,’ I offered.

She looked back at me in the mirror, squinting with suspicion. She rubbed the pencil along the insides of her under-eyes.

‘Well,’ she said suddenly. ‘It’s to do with Montgomery.’

Her fingers continued to move around her face, rubbing the pencil along the tops of her eyelids, smeared the kohl with her fingertips. As she did so, she gave me the background.

Marina had known Professor Montgomery for some time, she said, as a family acquaintance. Her father was an academic too, and they had entertained a rivalry since their university days. She had seen the professor at family parties and symposiums that her father hosted, and he had always seemed pleasant, in a small talk kind of way. Then, when she applied to Northam – originally for languages – she had been offered a scholarship to study the course with English literature. She guessed that the professor had had something to do with it, but that hadn’t put her off at the time. It would have been stupid to turn it down. The tuition fees had risen, and besides, ‘English is fine.’

But when she arrived she had found the professor insufferable. He was strangely controlling – always asking her to see him in his study, always giving her extra assignments. She felt that he was overfamiliar in his manner, vain about his professional success (constantly name-dropping other academics), and even his arguments were heavy-handed and boring. There was too much historical speculation, she said, and not enough of genuine interest. Those were the exact words that she used: genuine interest. As she said them she reached across to grab a piece of towel from the dispenser behind me.

A few weeks into term, she’d stopped going to English lectures altogether. She asked the board to switch to languages full-time. But the scholarship was contingent on her taking English as well, and so she had had to go to the professor directly to ask for permission. Having reviewed her attendance record, the professor was now waging a ‘petty’ war against her – neither allowing her to return to his course, nor to keep her scholarship only doing languages. Marina shook her head. It was just politics, she said, a way for him to exert power over her, and so to spite him, she was going to the lectures and seminars until she got her way. She said that she hated how nepotistic the place was, and how everyone in the humanities department pandered to the professor. She hated especially how one eminent academic – here she put her fingers in quotation marks – could have a monopoly like that in the twenty-first century.

‘Anyway, that’s the long and short of it,’ she said, making a grimace. ‘Unbelievably tedious.’

I wasn’t sure whether that description was supposed to refer to the story, the people in it, or her take on the situation. Whichever it was, it didn’t apply to her. She was a fantastic speaker: vivacious and precise. I wondered where she had learned to speak like this, so confidently and unapologetically.

‘How many languages do you know?’ I asked, somewhat out of the blue.

‘Enough to get by.’

‘French?’

No reply.

‘What about like … Russian, Chinese?’

She nodded primly. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was lying. Either she was a self-effacing genius or a narcissistic fantasist – and whichever it was, I felt unable to ask more questions.

There was another lull in the conversation. I stood there awkwardly and began to run imaginary sentences through my head.

Suddenly Marina said: ‘What are you doing this evening?’

The question had come out of nowhere. It was unclear whether it was a leading conversation or a piece of small talk.

‘Nothing,’ I managed.

‘There’s a house party down the road I’m going to.’

A prickle of anticipation shot through me.

‘Maybe you should come,’ she added.

The conversation was too perfect, surreally perfect, and it made me, for a moment, feel detached from myself. It was like I was watching a film of my life rather than participating in it. I tried to act accordingly: keep my face stable, not too eager.

‘Sure.’

I passed my phone across to her. My hand was shaking slightly. As she bent her head forward, I looked at her roots. Natural blonde. I studied the small translucent curls along the top of her crown, admired the way they framed her forehead.

She said would add me on Facebook and message the details later. Then she smiled, drew her bag over her shoulder and left.

I remember clearly how I felt once she had gone. Everything seemed to be in sharper focus. I looked at myself in the mirror again and this time my appearance had changed: my features were more pronounced, my face slimmer. My eyes had an interesting bright spark in them.

I walked back to my room dopily, registering details I hadn’t seen before – the way the grey clouds sloped into the horizon beyond the buildings. The way the silver willows curved into the lake, the way their thin branches dragged in the water. It was a beautiful campus, in its own way, I decided. The buildings had all been painted an unimaginative shade of brown, yes – and, yes, they were boringly arranged: a long rigid line of rectangles, like a queue for something that would never arrive. Demolition, for example. It was not exactly inspiring, and yet looking at it then I thought it had a pleasing symmetry and simplicity. Perhaps Northam offered a new opportunity after all. Perhaps I was on the cusp of something exciting.

In my room I looked at the small damp bed, the desk beside it. The clock read 3.51. I suspected that the party would start at around nine, which meant I should arrive at around ten, and that meant I now had a maximum of five hours to compose myself. I would just peek at Facebook, I told myself, and then shower and decide what to wear.

I lifted the lid of my laptop. Just a few minutes.

Two minutes later I looked at the clock and saw that it was now eight in the evening. I refreshed my Facebook page. There was still no message from Marina; no friend request, nothing. I paused.

I wondered whether she had forgotten, whether she had even been sincere in the first place. Maybe it was for the best, I reasoned. What kind of person invites someone to a party after meeting them in a toilet anyway? My mother would have a field day.

At the thought of my mother, I felt a wave of rebellious energy. I bit the bullet and sent Marina a friend request.

The minutes ticked by. I waited for her to accept. Nothing.

So I began to draft an accompanying message. Even in the first sentence I was aware of how weird I sounded: ‘I’m Eva, the girl from the toilet earlier …’ – it was difficult for me to carry on past that. Everything I wrote either sounded too eager and blunt: ‘so is there a party going on tonight???’, or falsely casual: ‘what’s the deal with the …’ I typed them out over and over again, deleting, redrafting and then eventually settling for the first thing I had written. I added in extra details, such as where I was living, where we could meet and what I could bring. I cringed at how long it was but forced myself to hit send anyway.

Ten minutes crawled by and no response came.

Now it was quarter to ten. I walked to the campus corner shop and bought a bottle of wine. It was one of those cheap bottles with a screw cap, a label depicting a pastel cartoon of some berries, and garish Italian font scrawled all over it in an unsuccessful attempt to make it look drinkable. I thought about guzzling it down right there in the middle of the pavement, just to get it over with. But before I could wrench off the lid, my phone vibrated in my pocket. Marina’s name flashed across the screen.

yeah there now

58 st clements

Was that supposed to be an invitation?

I hovered in the lamplight. I thought about going back to my room. Then I thought: fuck it. I unscrewed the cap of the wine, took a large swig, and began walking towards St Clements before I had time to think about turning around.

***

Someone is watching me.

He is sat a few tables away, beside the bookcase marked T-V. It is dusky over there, there is not much light. But I can still see his eyes staring out at me from the darkness.

At first I wasn’t entirely sure that it was me that he was watching. I thought that I was imagining it, or perhaps that he was looking at the clock behind me – but now it has become impossible to think otherwise. Every time I look up, his eyes burn into mine. I can feel them settle on me again when I look down. Now he is actually grinning: a slash of yellow teeth, like a slice of lemon. I can see him getting up. He packs his books into a satchel. He begins walking towards me. I feel panic. My hands grab at the stack of newspapers and clasp them into to my chest.