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  ‘I have to say,’ my mother heaved a final box into the boot of the car, ‘your room is a vast improvement since your father and I were at university. There is so much space!’

  I grunted in response and got into the passenger seat. I wondered whether Marina would have to clear out her room too.

  My mother hopped into the front seat, and as she did so her bob flopped up and down.

  ‘Charming campus too,’ she said. ‘Just charming.’

  I nodded absent-mindedly and reached into my pocket. I drew out my phone. I typed in Marina’s name, and began to look at her Facebook profile, looking for evidence of what she’d been doing. There was nothing new. Nothing had been posted since a week earlier – when someone called Elena had posted a photo of her and Henry.

  I looked closely at the photo, curving my hand over the top of the phone to shade the glare of sunlight from the window. It was a candid shot, taken in the middle of conversation. Henry had his eyes fixed on her, a cigarette raised in the air. She stood nearly a foot below him. Her face was tilted up, and it bore a strange expression. There was a glow in her eyes, something between amusement and … what was it? Fear.

  I pinched the screen to zoom in closer. I realized I had never seen a photo of Marina with Henry, and the way that they looked at each other disturbed me. I held my finger against the glass and saved the picture to my photo folder.

  Outside the campus began to diminish in the rear-view mirror. Branches brushed against the back window. My mother carried on talking.

  ‘When we get home you must be cautious of your father. I don’t know what’s wrong with him at the moment. He’s just in a bad mood all the time.’

  And: ‘Malcolm Chinn is taking a horticulture course. He’s having to take his exams in a few weeks’ time. You know Malcolm, Malcolm who lives up the road. Erica’s father. You know, Erica from school.’

  ‘What a time to be alive,’ I said.

  ‘Speaking of ex-bankers, the seriously hot goss is that Timothy Graham is running for the Lib Dems – I mean, what a surprise. Not. I can’t understand why everyone is so shocked. He’s been gunning for it for … Oh blast. Blast. Hang on I forgot the … Can you hold this for a second? Bugger. Anyway, yes, what they’re saying now is that Bunny Carbuncle is going to clinch it for the Tories anyway. Fox hunting is seriously big around here. Don’t give me that look. Don’t give me that look. Is your seatbelt on?’

  I wasn’t giving her a look. I wasn’t even listening to her. I was thinking about Marina. I had started to feel a pang of something – not remorse, exactly, but something close to it, perhaps the recognition of an absence. I missed her. Perhaps I should message her, I thought. I should be the bigger person. I clicked on her profile, and swiped into private messages. I wrote in the box:

  Hi, I’m sorry about the other week.

  Hope you have a good Christmas.

  I looked out the window, vaguely aware of the fact that my mother was still talking. I clutched my phone tightly inside my pocket and waited for a reply.

  PART II

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Late December 2013

  i.

  If time went slowly during the term, then during the holidays it seemed to stop completely. This was not a relaxing pause but one of boredom and stress. Though I had only been away for a few months, now that I was back in a controlled environment – with the chirpy mother who never stopped talking, the melancholy father who said nothing at all – the idea that I would have to be there for an entire month was intolerable. As a coping strategy I retreated to an early version of my teenage self: one with a short fuse and a flippant, snarky manner. When my parents asked questions, I would either answer snappishly or avoid giving any response. I stared at my phone and scrolled through pictures of Marina. I checked my emails incessantly. And now and again, I made contrived virtual small talk with my old school friends – friends with whom I now discovered I had almost nothing in common.

  One such friend, Caroline, decided to organize a ‘girly drinks’ on the twentieth, so that we could ‘catch up about our university experiences’. She had sent the invite to seven or eight other girls, whom I had also been at school with, and to whom I had hardly spoken since I’d started university three months earlier. It was strange, being part of that set. Even during our A levels there had been little to knit us together, except the subjects we chose and the teachers we hated. Now we weren’t even in the same environment anymore, we only really had memories to bond over. Did that constitute a friendship, or a memory of a friendship?

  The bar Caroline had selected was Le Bistrotheque, a small, cutesy affair in the centre of Walford. During the day, ‘the BT’ (as it was known by our mothers) was the favourite haunt of older women, but in recent years, we had started to occupy it for nights out. Such is the pattern in the countryside: the younger generation begin to emulate their parents the moment they’re given an opportunity for freedom.

  For a country bar, the BT thought of itself as rather upmarket and cosmopolitan. There was wood panelling along the wall; large, plushy sofas in a cordoned-off area, bunting around the bar, and several elaborate candelabras plonked on the middle of each table. It sold things like whisky sours with actual raw egg, which to us as schoolgirls had seemed terribly sophisticated.

  Now, as I entered the lobby, I realized that there was nothing remotely sophisticated about it. It was fake and cheap. The drinks were overpriced and the decor was dated. Caroline and the other girls were sat in our usual spot behind the door. They clutched dinky cocktails in their manicured hands.

  When Caroline saw me she sprang from her chair and moved in my direction with alarming enthusiasm.

  ‘Evie!’ she squealed. ‘Wow, you’ve really changed?’

  I hugged her, murmuring something self-deprecating. Her hair brushed past my nose. It was silky and smelled faintly of oranges.

  ‘I mean wow,’ she continued, stepping back to look at my outfit. ‘What is this dress? You look so … edgy?’

  I should have seen this coming. Almost from the moment I had started spending time with Marina, I had changed the way I dressed. Seeing her move so easily, in pleasingly simple clothing, had made me think that my patterned, tight cotton outfits looked embarrassing and unfashionable. It didn’t matter if they were new – some of them were even pre-ordered and quite expensive. There was just something about the way they hung off me which made them seem ugly.

  I had sold my designer jackets on eBay. I gave away the clingy dresses and smart jeans that had been my uniform before Northam. Instead, I bought the loose style of dresses that Marina wore. I had a large, long overcoat that rippled over my ankles when I walked. I didn’t quite have the grace to carry off some of the heavy materials, and a lot of my clothes were awkwardly big because I bought them from charity shops, but at the time I thought I looked better like that. I did at least feel more comfortable.

  To my friends I looked weird.

  Caroline moved back, trying to keep the smirk off her face. She raised her eyebrows at Suki, who was now moving in for a kiss on each cheek. I choked on a whiff of her perfume, and instinctively drew back as she drew me forward.

  ‘Eeeeeevie!’ Suki shrieked, crushing me into her huge bosom. ‘Ohmygodohm‌ygodohmygod!’

  Suki had been the star of every drama show when we were at school together. Now, having failed to get into drama school, her need for attention and the dramatic cranked up to an unbearable pitch. Whenever she saw someone who had seen her act, she swept them graciously into her bosom and showered them with affection.

  I stood there mutely with my shoulder wedged into her breasts. Her ‘Ohmygods’ carried on for an eternity. ‘Ohmygodohmygod! Oh my god you look so glam! I can’t believe this dress you look amazing! Amazing! Ohmygod!’

  I tried my best to look equally enthused and not think about the fact that Suki and I had never engaged in a conversation beyond these greetings.

  As I wandered around the group kissing each of my othe
r friends on the cheek – Oleana, Jade, Victoria, Abigail – I heard Suki begin unprompted to talk about her ‘university experiences’. This was to say, her sexual experiences.

  ‘Anyway. I’ve actually found this great guy – as in, he’s kind of great? I met him through drama and we’re literally getting on so well. Like actually though. We’re getting on so well.’

  I pretended to be interested for a few minutes, then I went to the bar and ordered a drink. On my way back to the table I saw Suki sweep past me towards the toilet. She winked in a knowing way and made flourishing hand gestures that signified nothing. Something about the combination of that look and those gesticulations made me feel dizzy with exhaustion.

  I quickly sat down in a space next to Oleana.

  ‘Hello,’ Oleana said. She gave me a knowing grin. I gave a knowing grin back. Knowing grins were a currency in this group. You exchanged them in return for a bond.

  I asked her how she was, and she gave the usual catch-up chat: a polite, succinct round up of the pros and cons of university.

  After a few minutes of stilted conversation, a silence fell. This often happened with Oleana. She was the kind of person I always thought I should be better friends with, but we never seemed to have any common subject to latch onto however much we tried. For that reason, we bonded by bitching about our other friends.

  Now Oleana took a sip from her drink, and then leaned in conspiratorially.

  ‘You know what the weird thing is about Suki’s new boyfriend?’ she said. ‘She didn’t meet him through her drama society.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She met him on Tinder.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I’m not.’ She took a delicate sip from her glass, raising her eyebrows over the rim.

  Tinder was relatively new at this point, but I was aware of it. It was the kind of thing that was often advertised on trains or buses or down my Facebook newsfeed, and it had always struck me as something used by those starved of attention in the real world. It didn’t surprise me that Suki, of all people, had used it to ensnare someone.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She told me a while ago,’ Oleana said. Her tone changed suddenly. ‘Anyway, I suppose it’s not that big a deal. It’s just funny that she feels the need to lie about it.’

  I tried to maintain a neutral expression, but I couldn’t help myself – I smirked. To hide it I began chewing the end of my straw.

  ‘Do you have Tinder?’ I asked, after a pause.

  ‘Yeah, obviously.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘What? Everyone does. And the other apps, like Swipe. Most people have moved onto Swipe now actually.’

  ‘What the hell is Swipe?’

  ‘It’s like Tinder, but it’s different. Better in some ways.’

  I snorted. ‘Sure.’

  ‘I mean for a start,’ she continued, ‘there’s a feature where you can choose to see someone’s exact location when you match them.’

  I pushed my straw through needles of crushed ice.

  ‘That’s insane.’

  ‘Is it?’ She shrugged. ‘You can unmatch them any time. I mean – it doesn’t take that much to hack into software and trace your location anyway. If they were really creeps, if they were really going to stalk and murder you, they could just do that on Tinder or Facebook or whatever. It wouldn’t be as heavily monitored as it is on Swipe.’

  The thought crossed my mind to say something then but I let it go.

  ‘It also doesn’t link you to Facebook as closely.’ She paused to look at me meaningfully. ‘It’s just a game,’ she added. ‘All these apps: they’re just games.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘This whole thing has gone too far,’ I said. ‘The Internet. Millennials. Humans.’

  I downed the rest of my drink.

  Later that evening I sat in front of my computer. I felt numbed by cocktails and the hours of mundane conversation. The room swirled around me, sounds and images and smells of the evening lurching past in swift, ugly fragments. Only my grip on the keyboard kept me upright in my chair. I dug the heels of my hands into the desk and dragged my fingers along the mouse board. I drew up the Safari page. I typed in the letters. I drummed my fingers against the mouse.

  I needed to see Marina. I needed to see what she was doing, who she had been talking to, where she had been. I suspected – or convinced myself – that she wouldn’t have replied to my message, but it didn’t matter. My encounter with my friends from home had made me realize how valuable to me she was as a companion. I needed to just see her in order to feel less alone.

  Her profile emerged. It looked the same as it always did: the picture of a dark silhouette leaning against a car, her face hidden behind a curtain of wavy blonde hair. One steely green eye shimmered behind it – just about visible, if you looked closely – and a slim, indecipherable curl of mouth, almost a smile, crept along the bottom of her face. I felt happy. She was beautiful and understated and clever. We were friends.

  I clicked through her other photos, noting how the angle of her body shifted in each image, admiring how natural she was in front of the camera. She appeared unaware of the camera when her face was obscured, quietly irritated when her face was visible. Irrespective of her expression, however, she always managed to portray a sense of calm in each of her photos. Perhaps it was because she was symmetrical.

  Looking at Marina’s photographs soothed me then, at least for a while. But when I clicked back on her main profile to see what she’d been doing, I saw that it was the same as it had been nearly a month earlier. There were no updates. No one had tagged photos of her. No one had written on her wall. No one had recently friended her. I felt a strange mix of emotions: disappointment at first, and then – for no reason – fear.

  Before I could stop myself I clicked onto Henry’s profile. Blurrily I sent him a message.

  I know this is out of the blue

  But have you heard from Marina?

  Having hit send, I looked at the words on the screen, frozen in that tiny box, waiting to be seen, impossible to erase or edit. I sounded pathetic.

  I clicked off and walked around my room. I looked at my own childhood paintings on the wall. I looked at the bookshelf and thought about starting next term’s reading list. Then my thoughts turned, again, to the relationship between Marina and Henry.

  Once, at a party early in the term, Marina had left her phone on the chair before she had disappeared to meet a dealer. It had vibrated – once, twice, and I had bent over to pick it up. I looked at the screen and saw that there were two messages from Henry:

  oi come back ill delete it

  it was a joke

  I remembered looking at those words on the screen, feeling Marina’s phone in my hand, and consciously resisting the temptation to read their other messages. I’d rolled the thought over in my mind a few times before eventually putting the phone back on the chair. Now I regretted not choosing to take that opportunity to read that conversation, to see what their relationship was really like. Marina and Henry were so secretive.

  My eyes tracked back to the Facebook icon on my screen. There were a few times I had seen Marina type in her password. I tried to think about what it was – something Latinate with numbers after it, like ‘ancilla1930’.

  Login attempt failed. Did you forget your password?

  I realized what I was doing. I saw the words on the screen; I saw Marina’s email address in the login box. My fingers started typing again. I tried the same password, but with different capitalization and the numbers in a different order: Anc1lla1930.

  2/4 login attempts failed. Click here to reset your password.

  Suddenly I felt dirty, and panicked, like I’d committed a crime. I clicked off the tab, then off the whole browser. My hands flew to the loose skin at the front of my throat and pinched hard. I stared at the wall, feeling the short sharp breaths tighten as the seconds ticked by.

  Finally I op
ened up my laptop again. I logged out of all my social media accounts in the normal browser window. I opened an incognito window and made random Wikipedia searches. I pushed a few words into Google and then closed the browser again.

  It was as though I were attempting to eradicate what I had just done; to cover my tracks with other items in my history.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Late December 2013

  i.

  Christmas and Boxing Day passed. I received no word from Henry. To distract myself I went on Marina’s profile. I went on it again and again. Having deleted her number in a drunken fit of spite I had no way to follow up by texting or calling her: Facebook was my only available method of contact. I typed messages and then deleted them. I watched and waited.

  Looking back it seems crazy to me how many hours of my life I voluntarily wasted processing the same information. Each morning I would wake up, pull my laptop onto my lap, whip up the lid, click on the Safari bar, type www.facebook.com, and watch her profile roll up. I would scroll through her photos one by one, photos I had seen a hundred times before. I pored over details that I had seen before too: the way her mouth arched in one photo, who she was looking at in another – and clicked on the profiles of the people who had commented. Once I felt sated, I would then pick up my phone and go through the exact same process on there, sometimes with the laptop still balanced on my chest displaying exactly the same screen.

  Before long, it was only three days before New Year’s Eve: 28th December. Outside the rain fell. I heard it thudding against the windowpanes. I heard the radio on in the room next door. My parents were arguing downstairs: some fracas about preparing for a New Year’s party they were supposed to be hosting. Stress levels had evidently reached fever pitch.

  I shut out their voices by concentrating on specific sounds. Rain against the windowpane. The buzz of lightbulbs. The soar of an aeroplane overhead. But try as I might, I was soon distracted by the thump of large, heavy footsteps. I shut my eyes tightly. I heard them coming up the stairs and I silently prayed that whoever it was would not come in. The footsteps clumped past, and my hunched shoulders loosened. I detached my fingers from the keyboard. I reached across to the bedside table and grabbed my phone.