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  As she walked past me, she looked right into my face and her frown deepened.

  Her eyes were green, I noticed, with small flecks of gold in them.

  Alone in the lecture hall I reflected on the confrontation I’d just seen. Marina’s blunt manner amazed me. At school, those who engaged in backchat with the teachers were mostly layabouts without much wit, whose interjections consistently fell short of the mark. I’d often felt a prudish satisfaction watching their snark dissolve into humiliated silence: the corners of their mouths drooping, their eyes turning to the table.

  With Marina it wasn’t like that. She seemed not only to be tolerated but respected by the professor. His reaction had not been reproachful or even impatient, but nervous. It was as though he suspected that she had the power to publicly humiliate him in some way. He had solicited her approval even while he was rebuking her.

  iii.

  I thought about this as I walked down the corridor until I realized I was in front of the pinboard. I looked up at the timetable showing the times and places of all the seminars, scanned them quickly. I wondered how many clashed with my commitments. Might I be able to turn up to some of them, just to see if she was there? Then I thought: that is impractical. She’d said she wasn’t on the English course. There was no reason to think that she’d be attending any of the other seminars.

  A better bet would be to find her outside of lectures: in the library for example. I went to the library, but she wasn’t there. Not in the open downstairs area. Not in the creepy silent room. Not on the nooks of the upper floor by the archives. She wasn’t in the café, nor the dining area, nor the bar. She wasn’t in the campus shop.

  On my way back to my room, I took a detour to the other side of campus, towards the bougie accommodation. Two girls were sat on a bench, and I overheard one of them complaining to her friend about having sunburned the ‘rooves’ of her feet while on holiday in St-Tropez.

  ‘Rosa,’ the other girl said, ‘Is rooves actually a word?’

  ‘Obviously it’s a word. It’s the tops of houses.’

  ‘Or feet?’

  ‘Or feet.’

  I glanced up towards the tops of the buildings. They were slate grey and dusty in the autumn sunlight. High in a window I noticed the outline of a silhouette: a pair of hands adjusting a string, the slow mechanical movement of the curtain moving upwards to reveal a blue midriff. Instinctively I ducked behind a lamp post, and then – a second later – peered out again. The window was now ajar. A small hand was dangling out, clutching a cigarette.

  I could hear someone laughing loudly. A slim almond-shaped fingernail tapped the butt of the cigarette, and sprinkles of ash fell from the sky.

  It was her, I was sure of it.

  I bent forward, squinting, and saw a trickle of wavy blonde hair spill across the sill. A head turned, and took a drag from the cigarette. It could feasibly be her, I reasoned, noting the outline of her side profile, comparing it to my mental copy of her profile picture. But she moved too quickly to draw any solid conclusions. Her features blurred together, made her look anonymous.

  Abruptly the window snapped shut and the cigarette fell from the sill. It danced through the air down all four floors and landed near me on the concrete. I stared at the blunted end. There was a gentle smudge of lipstick along the butt.

  For a second, I thought about picking it up. Then I became aware of a stilted silence nearby.

  Turning, I saw that the two girls on the bench had stopped their conversation and were staring at me. Their faces registered a certain amusement, as well as a certain distaste. I realized suddenly how weird I looked. Sheepishly I emerged from the lamp- post and walked past them silently, expressionlessly, without even glancing in their direction.

  The next day I walked past that window, and the day after that, but the blinds were drawn.

  I didn’t see anyone there again.

  ***

  I dreamed of Northam again last night. The open window. The gentle night breeze. Marina smiling down at me. Her mouth forming the words, her neck snapping back in a fit of laughter.

  The dreams are always silent. I don’t hear her laughter. I don’t hear her say the words. But I always know exactly what she is saying. I know how her voice sounds saying it. And I know exactly what her laughter sounds like: the notes quickly rising to a shriek.

  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 g
enteel 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.