Chapter 27

27

London, 1981

Grace was in the queue at the university canteen when she heard, from just across the room, Paul's unmistakable public-school bray. ‘Mate, she's terrible. She just lies there. It's like doing it with an ironing board.'

Jeers, laughter.

Grace bowed her head, tucking her chin to her chest, but from the corner of her eye she could see his straw-blond mop of hair, his pudgy frame: Paul, the man with whom she has been sleeping for the past three weeks, the man to whom she lost her virginity.

‘Seriously, it's a disappointment. I thought the ugly ones were supposed to try harder.'

More laughter, uproarious. People were turning around, looking, listening.

‘Like, they're supposed to be grateful.'

Grace was rooted to the spot by terror: if she moved now, she might draw attention to herself. Someone might see her. They might see her, they would realize that she'd heard, that she'd been present for the verdict, for her humiliation – and how much sweeter would that taste to them?

‘You're an arsehole, d'you know that?' Another voice, clear as a bell, cuts through the noise. ‘Yes, I'm talking to you, Paul Connolly, you fat wanker. Do you seriously imagine anyone could be grateful to have you sweating away on top of them?'

Salvation! In the unlikely form of Nicholas Riley, a slight boy, pale as milk, with a sprinkling of freckles across his nose. Handsome in a quiet way, clever and funny with enough of a mean streak to make him interesting. Nicholas had been sitting alone at the next table over from Paul and his friends and when he spoke up they turned on him, a few of them even getting to their feet, swaggering over towards him, spitting venom. Grace slipped silently from the queue, replaced her tray on the stack and fled, hungry but relieved.

After that day, Grace tried to avoid Nicholas. She dreaded the embarrassment of having to acknowledge the incident at all, to concede that she had been present at the theatre of her own public shaming. And yet she saw him everywhere – it was as though he sought her out: he was in the row in front of her in lectures, he was on the lawn in Russell Square at lunchtime, he was behind her in the ticket line for the cinema at the Brunswick Centre.

‘It must be written in the stars,' he said, tapping her on the shoulder. ‘We're meant to be.' He winked. And in that moment she knew: they were going to be friends.

He made her laugh. ‘You're not like other girls,' he used to say, which made her laugh more than anything: it was a stupid cliché, the sort of thing people said in idiotic romantic films, but it was actually true of Grace. She wasn't like other girls. She was different in a way that was difficult to pin down, but Nick didn't care. He never asked her to explain herself, or to apologize for anything.

Nick had another friend, Audrey, and she wasn't like other girls either, but she was unlike other girls in a more conventional sense. She wasn't weird , just a bit quirky. Audrey was in the year above, studying psychiatry; she was tall and angular and intimidatingly clever. ‘Audrey doesn't like people,' Nick said. ‘That's why she wants to be a shrink. To figure out why everyone's so fucking awful.' But Audrey liked Nick. She liked Grace, too, and Grace liked her back, though sometimes she wished Audrey didn't exist, because whenever Audrey was in the room, Nick turned slightly away from Grace.

The three of them got a flat together, a squalid, mouse-infested place above a newsagent on Goodge Street, and for a time they were inseparable. They studied tirelessly, holding themselves apart, drawing further away from the other students, from their own families. At last, Grace had found her people; she discarded the shame of loneliness like an old coat.

In the summer, they hopped into Nick's Vauxhall Astra and drove to France. They spent a week camping on a clifftop in St Malo, they played cards and drank cheap red wine until they threw up. At Christmas, none of them went back to see their families; they stayed in the horrible flat instead, eating pizza or takeaway curry, watching films on VHS.

In early January, Grace fell ill. She had abdominal pain which grew increasingly severe, she developed a fever, she became delirious. Nick called a taxi and accompanied her, sobbing from the pain, to University College Hospital, where they diagnosed a ruptured cyst and an infection. She was admitted right away and remained there for eight days, receiving fluids and antibiotics through an IV drip.

It wasn't until around the fourth day that she was sufficiently alert to find it strange that neither Nick nor Audrey had come to visit. She wondered, in fact, whether they had come, whether in her delirium she had forgotten, but the nursing staff, who kept asking if she wouldn't like them to call someone, insisted that no one had been by.

There was no phone in the flat, so when the time came for her to be released from hospital, there was no one to take her home, so she left alone, shrugging off the nurses' pitying looks, walking out into a bitter wind.

When she arrived back at her building, she took a moment outside to compose herself, to practise her indifference. She climbed the stairs and unlocked the door.

The flat was cold in a way that suggested the heating hadn't been on for days, silent in a way that speaks to absence. Audrey's and Nick's things were gone; they had left no notes and no forwarding addresses. Grace didn't know where their parents lived, she had no contact numbers for them either. They had told no one at the university that they were dropping out, and they'd skipped out on the rent.

She couldn't understand it, and there was no one to explain it to her. She had begun to understand herself as part of their band of three, and now what was she? She was acutely aware that what she was feeling was wrong – it had been a friendship, after all, not a love affair – there was no call for heartbreak. No one had died, this was not cause for grief.

And yet, the return to classes was agonizing, she was sure everyone was talking about what had happened, certain that everyone knew: Grace had loved them, Nick and Audrey, and they had not loved her back.

She tried to throw herself into her studies, but she was exhausted. Whether from depression or illness, she could barely get out of bed in the mornings. She began to have worrying thoughts – persistent, intrusive. She imagined harming herself, all the time; she imagined taking her own life, she thought about how it would make Nick feel. She worried that he wouldn't find out about it, that he wouldn't even notice; she worried that she'd end her life for nothing.

She worried that one day he might come back and see what had become of her.

She was very frightened.

She did what she was supposed to do: she went to her doctor and asked for help, and he gave it to her. She was referred to a psychologist, a kind, patient woman from whom she always held something back. Still, she did as she was advised: rest, allow yourself to recuperate. She deferred her studies for a year, moved out of the flat and into a bedsit, got a secretarial job, volunteered at a care home, spoke to the psychologist once a week. She ate better, she exercised, she slept.

She went back to university, she worked hard, she finished her degree.

She did everything right.

The thing that stayed with her, afterwards, was not so much the shock of the abandonment, or the hurt or the rejection, it was the excruciating shame of it all. The humiliation that came with realizing that there were rules she did not understand, that no matter how she tried, she never managed to feel the right things in the right way.

She moved away from London as soon as she could, up north to Edinburgh and from there out west. Small towns, rural places would be more forgiving, she thought; she'd be able to try again, to do good, to get things right, she'd escape her wrongness .

Only it followed her, it kept following her, all the way to Eris.