What She Left: Enhanced Edition (5 page)

‘Hello, Miss Perspective,’ the guy from the marketing course said as we left the lecture hall.

I was impressed he’d remembered my words.

‘I’m Ben,’ he said, putting his hand out. ‘Fancy a drink?’

I hesitated, not because I didn’t fancy him but because I didn’t get asked out that often. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘How about if
we’re
something passing stopped?’

It was what I’d blurted a few minutes before in the talk when we’d been asked what made a good photo.
‘
Very funny,’ I said, realizing it sounded like I thought he was taking the piss when what was actually zinging round my head was how I did, did, did want to go for a drink with him. I was well up for it: I’d virtually been a nun in the first year.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’m buying. Well, technically the bank of Mummy and Daddy is, but it all goes down the same way.’

We filed across the car park and down the alley shortcut along the river to the high street. He was a third year, one of the cool party crowd you’d spot rolling through town in fancy dress or clutching traffic cones or giving each other piggy-backs. In the pub he bought us a pint of cider each, and he had a vodka Red Bull, too.

‘Bit full-on, isn’t it?’ I said.

He ignored that and said: ‘That talk was shite. I’ve googled that bloke and he’s hardly Henri Cartier-Bresson – it’s mostly weddings and christenings he does.’

‘Nothing wrong with taking pictures of happy occasions. Suppose you only take pictures of war zones then, do you?’ I was still buzzing from the seminar. Bandying around words like ‘perspective’ and ‘personality’, it was why I’d wanted to come to uni. That and for this, meeting new people. I could feel the cider working in me, too, making me warm and cosy.

‘No fucking chance, I’m not going to risk getting my arse shot off.’

Perhaps, I thought, taking another long slow mouthful of drink and watching him do the same, some of his confidence will rub off on me.

‘Is that what you’re going to do when you graduate?’ he asked. ‘Be a photographer?’

‘I wish, but I’m pants at the technical stuff. By the time I’ve worked out the ISO, the shot’s gone. I’d be a rubbish paparazzi!’

‘I’d rather be a binman than a pap. Actually, scratch that – binmen have to get up early. I’d rather be a drug dealer. At least they contribute something to society!’

‘What
are
you going to do?’ I asked. He was a third year and a lot of them were already applying for jobs.

‘God knows, I’m useless at most things.’ There was something childlike about him. ‘You?’

‘I’d like to go into journalism. Along with the rest of the world.’

‘Tell me you’re not going to work for
Heat
. Please tell me that.’

‘God, no, it’ll be far more upmarket! The
TLS
at the very least.’

We both took another sip. It was going down too well.

‘I’ve always thought the media should confound stereotypes, but all they do is reinforce them,’ he said.

‘Very profound,’ I told him, but was thinking: actually it is.

‘Have you ever watched rolling news?’ he went on. ‘I mean, actually sat and
watched
it. I do it a lot on account of being congenitally lazy and it’s utter shite. Even the presenters are disinterested.’

‘Uninterested.’

‘What?’

‘You mean “uninterested”, not “disinterested”. They mean different things. They’re supposed to be disinterested because that means impartial, but what you’re implying is that they don’t give a toss.’

‘Fair dos,’ he said.

‘What
are
you going to do then?’

‘Probably end up working for my father.’

The way he said ‘father’ – languidly, contemptuously – made me conclude it would be a reluctant choice, but possibly his only option. It struck me I wasn’t sure I’d like this guy if I got to know him, but reminded myself I didn’t need to. ‘And what does he do, your father?’

‘Insurance.’

‘Work in a call centre, does he?’

‘Very funny. Actually, he insures ships.’

‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’

‘You can be whatever you like. We should celebrate.’

‘Celebrate what?’

‘Whatever you fancy – I’ll drink belatedly to Charles and Camilla getting hitched, if you need a reason.’

‘I’m a republican.’

‘There’s a surprise! How about me having negotiated an extension for my patenting and intellectual property assignment? Making it through a talk by a man who reckons he’s Robert Capa? Being here, in Southampton? Me and you having met each other, yes, that’s the best reason of the lot.’

I liked the way he was sitting, half turned towards me, one leg folded up under him, his left arm along the back of the sofa behind me. The way he used his hands, too; he was so animated.

‘I’m fucked. I haven’t eaten today. For the record, I’m not suggesting we do,’ he said, then after a pause: ‘
Eat
, I mean, not fuck. Although you know …’

‘You should be so lucky,’ I said. His comment had moved our conversation on to a new plane, one where a different outcome was possible.
You could sleep with this man, Alice.
The thought billowed past me and he went back to the bar.

‘Here was me thinking you were going to whisk me off for a romantic meal,’ I said as he plonked two more ciders and two more shorts down on the table.

‘Eating’s cheating,’ he said. ‘I took a punt, got us gins, doubles. You know I said I’m useless at most stuff? Well, there’s one thing I’m not,’ he said, disappearing to the toilets. When he came back he was smiling. ‘There, that’s one of the things I can do well!’

‘What, weeing?’

‘No, what I did after I did that.’ He tapped the end of his nose. ‘Now how about a snog?’ He leant in to me and we kissed.
He’s not your type
, I thought, as I saw the woody freckled heft of his forearm. It occurred to me I’d never worked out what my type was.

‘Enough about me, what does
your
father do?’ he asked.

‘He runs his own planning consultancy,’ I said, then thought, bollocks to that old bollocks, I don’t need the approval of this boy. ‘Or he did, but that went belly up. Dad’s a heating engineer.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said.

‘What, that the business went tits up or that he’s a heating engineer?’ Something was driving me to needle him; he was provoking a mix of contempt and attraction I’d never felt before. Another couple of drinks and I might be able to do the same as him: say anything and get away with it. ‘Let’s get drunk on the shipping magnate!’ I said.

It wasn’t long before he was back at the bar. Tall, a good three inches taller than me and I’m five nine, and he’d clearly been working out, too. He returned with champagne.

‘I’m still not impressed.’

‘You won’t be wanting any then!’ he said, pouring two glasses.

Life could surprise you sometimes, a Tuesday afternoon and fizz in a pub with hardly anyone else around and this new man, Ben – I’d always liked that name – with the amazing eyes. I watched the bubbles and the word ‘decadent’ swam into my head.

‘I liked it, what you were saying about photos earlier,’ he said. ‘What that guy was banging on about, about his job being to catalogue rather than influence history, that was pretentious bullshit, but what you said was real.’

‘Seriously, what
are
you going to do after you leave Southampton?’ I asked, suddenly intimidated by where this was heading.

‘As little as possible. Maybe work in a bar.’ We kissed. ‘You … are … amazing.’

‘Bet you say that to all the girls.’

‘Course I do, but I don’t mean it with them. I mean it with you, Miss Something Passing Stopped.

Don’t move a muscle, back in two shakes of a toad’s tit,’ he said, disappearing to the toilet again.

I felt a wave of dizziness and decided I ought to go, that I was close to the point of no return, not a point that I
couldn’t
get back from, but how I did would be out of my hands. I did this periodically: it was like watching myself crossing a line.

‘You want a bit?’ he asked when he returned.

‘No.’

‘Come on, live a little, let your hair down.’

He touched my hair and I wondered what cocaine would be like, what it would make me feel like, what it would make me
be
like – just more of me, or a different person? Green Day’s ‘Holiday’ started playing and it struck me that I hadn’t done so bad. I felt a little surge of pleasure at being me. There were bubbles in my nose and I even felt a bloom of fondness towards a previous me: the girl in the grey-and-yellow school uniform who’d shout ‘I hate it all’ through her bedroom door with the Boyzone poster on it.

‘I’ve always fancied you something rotten,’ Ben said.

‘What do you mean,
always
? You haven’t known me always.’

‘I’ve known you for at least an hour. That’s long enough.’

‘Long enough for what?’

He put his hand on my leg and I touched it: hot, fleshy,
bony. We kissed again and he squeezed in and I slid into him as his weight pressed down on the sofa. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Miss Something Passing Stopped,’ he said.

The seminar guy had asked what a photograph actually
was
and when no one had answered he asked me – the young lady at the front with the purple scarf – and I’d gone red and blurted out, ‘A fragment, a bit like freezing time,’ and he said, ‘very poetic,’ and would I like to elaborate, which was when I said, ‘like something passing stopped’.

‘Shall we go back to my place?’ Ben asked.

‘For coffee?’

‘That as well.’

For one instant, I nearly walked away, but the champagne goodness was pinging around me, and no way was I going back to my place. Six of us shared it and it was a tip and if the others were out I’d be home alone, and I’d been in
my
room earlier and it was back.
IT
. The bad stuff – the feeling miserable and wound up, not sleeping, when a battered cork board on the wall could almost make you blub. I’d never given it the satisfaction of a name. IT would do.

Ben put his hand on my thigh.
Alice, this is so very unlike you
, I thought. I
never
sleep with men on first dates. I saw us reflected in the full-length mirror, intertwined on the brown sofa with a row of empty glasses on the low wooden table. ‘Shall we go now?’

‘Yes,’ I answered as casually as I could, but it came out self-conscious and like the old me, but he didn’t know the old me, and it occurred to me that maybe if I’d tried some cocaine, I wouldn’t be that me.

‘I want to sleep with you,’ he whispered in my ear as we stood up. I felt a million miles from the girl back in Corby who’d wondered how she’d touch a man and how she’d be afterwards, if she’d look different or be different, even if it
was only to the people who knew her best, Mum and Dad (not Robbie, that numpty wouldn’t have noticed if I’d grown an extra leg!). ‘There’s plenty more booze back at my place. Plenty more of everything,’ he said, touching his nose.

‘I’m a good girl,’ I laughed.

His place was cold and a pigsty and we drank white wine then vodka and he played Eminem and when the neighbours banged on the wall he banged back. Later, he sprinkled cocaine on the coffee table and did what they do in films, cutting and scraping it with a credit card. Then he rolled up a note and sharply inhaled and I watched the white powder race up into his nose.

‘Your turn,’ he said.

‘Not too much,’ I said, feeling suddenly more sober, then drunkenness crashed back over me.

‘You’ll like it, I can tell.’

‘I’m scared,’ I slurred.

He told me not to be a baby, then ‘don’t worry it’s fine, it’s absolutely fine’, and the way he said ‘absolutely’ had that same languid slow-motion quality about it, except everything did now: the way his hands worked, the shadows of the leaves from the tree outside patterning the wall, even the music was slightly warped.

I leant forward and thought:
A new you starts today, Alice
. But I can’t have been too wedded to the old one because it didn’t stop me. I felt a clean, shocking rush as I sniffed it – sniffed it all in as I’d seen on the films and it felt immediately better, everything did.

‘Good?’ he asked.

‘Good.’

And one of us said something about shipping magnates and fridge magnets and we laughed and poured red wine, I
didn’t know we were drinking red, and I thought I’ll have to be careful with this stuff, I could get to like it rather too much.

Then this morning as we lay in his bed he said: ‘This is what I call
freezing time
.’

It had snowed and his heating was on the blink. Images of last night flashed into my head: him nibbling my ear whispering I was beautiful, his shoulder blades: big boney lumps. He made tea and we read the papers and he announced he was off home today for the weekend – back to Bucks or Berks, I didn’t catch which, for his brother’s twenty-first. A marquee job. ‘Going to be a monster night,’ he said.

‘What was last night then?’