halls of residence

The first thing I noticed when I found my corridor was the sound of the Smiths playing. It was coming from the door opposite mine, very, very loudly. I was a little pissed off, because the fourth floor was supposed to be for final year students, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend my entire year doing everything to a constant backdrop of Morrissey.

Later I found out that they used the top floor for people with special needs too, and Gareth was a mature student who didn’t really like life. Every time we met in the corridor on the way to the bathroom I’d say hello and he would look at me as if I had asked him something complicated and frightening. I think he was only really happy when the door was shut and he could get back to the Smiths.

It was my final year and it was odd living in halls. I’d never participated fully in student life – mainly because I already lived in London and had my own friends and a life there. I’d skipped a year when I got sick, and then had a year in France, so I was older than most of the others too.

The room was ok – it had a small bed, a desk, a big window, a wardrobe and a sink with a mirror above it. I don’t think I brought much with me – just clothes and books. Zachy visited very soon after I moved in and he said he thought I needed something else, and so his dad drove over with a squashy armchair covered in tomato soup coloured linen. It just fitted into the corner.

He was really, really nice to me that year. It was very strange. We’d been friends since we were sixteen, but you never knew with Zach if he was going to be wonderful or cutting – it could go either way. It was so strange that I actually asked him one day why he was being so nice and he said he owed me – he never said what for.

Zach lived quite close to my halls – we were both in Tufnell Park. He had a little flat he shared with his girlfriend Hetty. She was lovely – blonde and scatty and not very good at life, but so kind to everyone. They were both studying at St. Martins. Hetty worked part-time as an escort and she wasn’t there a lot of the time. Mostly I saw her either just leaving, or just arriving home, always in the pink tutu she wore for her job.

Zachy was constantly at mine. I often came home to find a postcard though the door – never an ordinary one – it would always be a photo of Man Ray, or Fats Domino, or someone else unexpected - with a cryptic message on the back. As well as art college, he worked at the Everyman cinema in Hampstead and each month he would deliver the posters they printed with the list of films they planned to show. That was wonderful. I could go whenever I liked for free and I often did – I just slid in and watched whatever they had on – it was always something brilliant.

Once I came home and my door was plastered with stickers saying “Pogue Mahone”, with more sheets of them under the door. It meant kiss my arse and I thought it was a brilliant name for a band. They were mostly old friends who we used to drink with in Hampstead and Temple Fortune, so I took the sheets and went off round the building sticking all the rest of the stickers everywhere too.

I will never forget one special thing Zach did for me that year. It was to do with Stephen, Joel’s brother. I hadn’t kept in touch with him much while I was in France – he had a girlfriend and I think he also travelled a lot to the States for work – he was beginning to be quite well known. It must have been September still – at least I am pretty sure it was before my birthday.

I suddenly had this urge to phone him, just to touch base – arrange a drink or something. A woman answered. When I asked if Stephen was there she was a little distant and said he had a sore throat and couldn’t talk. I sent my love, and went off upstairs again, disappointed. It’s really hard to describe the way I felt – it was a mix of awareness that something bad was happening, and also that I needed to do something urgently about it – that there wasn’t much time left.

Again and again over the next few weeks, I would join the end of the queue for the payphone at my halls. I didn’t care that the woman on the end of the phone became increasingly hostile when she realised it was me again. Eventually, I asked if I could come over, since he couldn’t talk, and she said the doctors had said he was to have no visitors. I was getting really worried by then, but I didn’t know what to do. I could hardly go and batter the door down, which was the only other thing I could think of.

I have no memory of who told me he was dead – none at all. I just remember ringing Zach and crying so hard I could barely tell him what was wrong. I think he was there within the hour. He came with a painting he’d done. I still have it. It’s a jungle scene and there are soldiers crouching in the undergrowth and it’s partly painted in his own blood. It was such a lovely gesture – I think he felt it was the best thing he could offer me. He put his arms around me while I just cried and cried. I didn’t love Stephen like I had loved Joel, but it was another ending and I couldn’t bear it.

I also felt responsible somehow – that if I had gone and battered down that door, maybe things might have been turned out differently. Zach didn’t say much. He didn’t tell me I was being stupid about the door. He was so gentle. I am not sure how I would have managed anything without him, so whatever I had done for him, he repaid me a million times that day. He had hardly known Stephen but he said he’d come along to the funeral.

On the way, bizarrely, I met Miranda – it was the last time I saw her. We spoke on the phone a few years ago and we almost met, but I decided not to at the last minute. I think I was scared she would still be the same as she was that day.

It was very strange – I was going to meet Zach near the funeral so I was alone. She said she was a drama critic for a feminist magazine, and also a part-time plain clothes spy for London Transport. It was a dossy job that quite a few people did then. All you had to do was travel on the tube and watch people, in case they hadn’t bought tickets or something.

She said she had just finished with a man because he tied her to a bed. We both agreed it seemed like an odd thing to want to do, and then we started talking about the weird time when two men we’d met at the Roundhouse had tried to blackmail us. They’d recorded a night we’d all spent in a hotel room together and they played it back over the phone and suggested our fathers might be interested in buying it.

Neither of us could remember how we’d wriggled out of that one, but it hadn’t come to anything. Perhaps we had convinced them our fathers weren’t important enough, or maybe that they wouldn’t have paid or something. Somehow, in our conversation, we both seemed to have slipped back into our fifteen year old selves, and the way we had looked at life then – as a series of baffling, odd events we just let wash over us.

She asked me where I was off to and when I said “a funeral”, she looked mildly diverted and asked if she could come along – it sounded interesting and she’d never been to one before. As soon as she said that, it was as if I snapped back into being twenty-three and I said I’d rather she didn’t. I hated the idea that Stephen could be something slightly interesting in that dispassionate way - something to while away the tedium of a boring afternoon. I just wanted to walk down the platform away from her.

When I got off the tube, there was Zachy waiting for me, looking uncomfortable. I don’t think he had ever been to a funeral before. I don’t remember the actual ceremony at all – I remember afterwards – the awkward part where you all mill around outside before going off somewhere.

The atmosphere was horrific. People gathered in little groups, talking very quietly. Marnie was there, and Stephen’s mother. I’d never seen her before – she lived far away. I was surprised at how much older she looked compared to Marnie. I joined the huddle of my friends and I found out that there were to be two rival wakes.

It was like stepping into some Victorian melodrama. I hadn’t been the only person who’d been told to keep away from Stephen. Someone quietly explained: the girlfriend had done it to everyone. She wasn’t even his girlfriend anymore. While he was sick, she had moved a new boyfriend in and they’d isolated Stephen. They had deliberately stopped giving him his medicine. There was a will leaving everything to the girlfriend, which had been faked by her and her boyfriend.

We could go to the official wake, which was being supported by Marnie and the girlfriend, or we could join the breakaway movement at The Old Black Lion, with Stephen’s mother and all of his friends. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the pub where I’d passed so many evenings before, with Joel and T. It hadn’t changed one bit – they still had Turning Japanese on the jukebox.

That was such an exhausting day – it was astonishing to come out and find it was still light. I went home with Zach, feeling tired and confused and sad.