Chapter 21: Before

BEFORE

“So, drink then?” Hannah said, coming into the living room, where April was scrolling through her phone. Hannah had finished putting away the last of her belongings, and the set finally looked like home again.

“Sure,” April said. She stretched, catlike, spreading out all her toes and fingers. “Pelham bar? I don’t think I can be arsed to go into town.”

“Sure. But can we go via Cloade’s? I met Ryan on the way over and he said to knock on if we were going for a drink.” She said the last part with a slight flush, knowing that she was giving herself an alibi for calling past Cloade’s that had nothing to do with Will, but knowing too that of course April would collect Will while they were over there, so it would come to the same thing. By picking up Ryan, she was ensuring Will’s company.

“No probs,” April said. She grabbed her phone, keys, and purse, glanced at herself in the mirror, and followed Hannah down the staircase and across the quad to Cloade’s.

As they crossed the courtyard in front of the big, blocky modern building, Hannah found herself glancing automatically up at Will’s window, as she always did—second from the right, sandwiched between Hugh’s and Ryan’s. It was dark, but next door Ryan’s was bright, and the window was open, in spite of the cold air.

“Bet they’re smoking,” April said with a slightly wicked look that made Hannah’s stomach shift a little uneasily. She had come to know that look of April’s, and it usually foretold some kind of mischief. The only question was how far she would go.

When they reached Ryan’s room Hannah raised her hand to knock, but April put her finger to her lips. Her eyes were full of laughter.

“Can you smell it?” she whispered. Hannah nodded. The smell of weed was filtering under the door, in spite of the dense municipal carpet, along with the sound of Bellowhead’s “New York Girls.”

“Don’t say anything,” April whispered, and then she raised her hand and knocked, a sharp peremptory rat-a-tat, quite unlike her usual single thump.

“Er, who is it?” Ryan’s voice came from inside. April winked at Hannah and then, to Hannah’s enormous surprise, she spoke, but in a voice quite unlike her own—plummy and rather prim.

“Mr. Coates, this is Professor Armitage. We have received a complaint that the scent of the marijuana weed known as skunk has been detected emanating from your room. Could you please open the door?”

“Shit,” Hannah heard, very muffled from within, and the sound of people scrambling to their feet. The music was abruptly silenced. Then, still Ryan, but more loudly, “Um, just a minute, Professor—I’m—I’m just on the bog. Hang on a sec.”

More flurried noises came from behind the door—the sound of the bathroom door opening and then a toilet flushing.

“Open the window,” she heard, whispered urgently from within, and then, in reply to some remark she couldn’t hear, “Well open it wider, you dickhead.”

April meanwhile was creasing up with silent laughter. She recovered herself enough to say, “Mr. Coates, Mr. Coates, I must ask you to kindly open this door immediately!” though there was a suspicious wobble in her voice at the last word as the toilet flushed again.

“One sec!” came Ryan’s voice, this time with a note of desperation, and then the door opened and Ryan, face red and hair tousled, his clothes giving off a strong smell of weed, was standing in the doorway. For a second he just looked at them both, puzzled, trying to make sense of the situation, but as April burst into an irrepressible guffaw, realization dawned, and his whole face flushed purple with barely suppressed rage.

“You little fucking bitch,” he said, grabbing April’s arm and dragging her inside the room. April was still howling with laughter, but she was also trying to pull herself out of Ryan’s grip.

“Get off me, you bastard! That hurts!”

“It fucking should hurt.” He shoved her, and she sprawled backwards into an armchair, looking up at him with a mixture of annoyance and defiance, rubbing her arm. “I just flushed a perfectly good eighth down the bog because of you, you stupid little cow!”

“Hey, hey, Ryan, calm down,” Will said. He came across to stand between Ryan and April. He looked torn between relief and irritation. “Come on, it was just a joke. April didn’t know we’d flush it.”

“Yeah, I had no idea you’d be that stupid,” April retorted. “Why didn’t you just drop it out the window like a normal person?”

“Because I thought I was about to get sent fucking down,” Ryan said through gritted teeth. He was standing over April as though he would have liked to hit her, and Hannah wasn’t certain whether he would have done so, if it hadn’t been for Will. “I daresay this is all very funny to posh birds like you, in’t it? But those of us without a rich daddy to pay people off have to live with the consequences of our actions. If I get expelled, that’s it. Kaput. I am royally fucked. And you know what, I understand why you wouldn’t get that—but you.” He rounded on Hannah. “I didn’t think you were such a silly little bitch. Maybe living with her, it’s rubbed off.”

“Hey, leave her out of it,” April said, standing up and facing Ryan. “She had nothing to do with it so pick on someone your own size.”

“That’d be you, would it?” Ryan said, with a kind of snarling laugh. He gestured at the disparity between them—April probably no more than five foot four, and eight stone soaking wet, Ryan over six foot and built like the rugby player he was. “Well, you’ve got balls, at least.”

“Two more than you have,” April retorted. They stood for a moment, glaring at each other, a kind of palpable tension crackling in the air between them so strong that Hannah felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “Wanker.”

“Bitch.”

“Hey, hey,” said a voice from the corridor, and they both swung round to see Emily standing in the doorway, hands on hips. “What’s with the rampant misogyny, Coates?”

“Rampant misogyny my arse,” Ryan snapped. “She just made me flush an eighth of weed.”

“Yeah, I made him,” April said sarcastically. “With the power of my miiind, woooh!” She made wavy ghost fingers in front of Ryan’s face, and he slapped her hand away irritably. “I knocked on the door while he was having a spliff and the idiot was so scared he flushed his entire stash.”

“Nice move, Coates.” Emily raised one eyebrow. “With cool like that, maybe better not take up drug smuggling.”

“Both of you can go shove something painful where the sun don’t shine,” Ryan growled. “And you”—he stabbed a finger at Will—“don’t stand there like you don’t know she isn’t a complete pain in the arse. That’s the best part of fifty quid I’m down. And some of us actually have to work for our cash instead of milking the stock market for unearned money off the backs of the workers.”

“Oh, well now we’re getting down it, Mr. Capitalism Is Robbery,” April said. “Fifty quid, is that the real problem? It’s all the same with you socialist types, isn’t it—money’s a construct and debt is a tool to subjugate the proletariat, until someone owes you a tenner, at which point you never stop harping on about it. Look, here we go.” She pulled out her purse and began riffling through the notes. “Twenty, forty, sixty—here you are—fifty quid for the stupid weed plus a little extra for your trouble. Buy yourself something pretty, sweetheart.”

She held out the cash. Ryan stood there glaring, a vein visibly pulsing in his temple and the muscles in his jaw working. His expression flickered between fury and something else—something Hannah couldn’t quite pin down. Not humiliation, he didn’t look humiliated. More like a strong desire to slap April’s face.

But then he seemed to make up his mind. He reached out and took the money, with a little comedic bow and a mocking tug of his forelock.

“Why thank you, milady. Your ’umble servant, I’m sure, and a pleasure to be rogered by you any day of the week.”

Hannah let out a breath and exchanged a glance with Emily. It felt like a crisis had been averted, though she wasn’t completely sure what or how. Would Ryan really have punched April in front of all of them, including Will? It didn’t seem likely, but there had been something in the air between them, something electric and powerful and very dangerous.

“I say,” said another voice from behind her, this one mild and hesitant. “What’s been happening here? Smells like a bonfire.”

Hannah turned to see Hugh standing in the doorway, blinking owlishly through his glasses. As she watched, he blew his fringe up out of his eyes and gave a rather fatuous grin.

“Been indulging in a spot of the old Mary Jane?”

“Jesus Christ,” Ryan muttered under his breath. “Where the fuck have I ended up, some kind of P. G. Wodehouse novel?”

“Hello, Hugh,” April said. She stalked across the room to kiss Hugh on either cheek. “Thank you for the Christmas present.”

Christmas present? Hannah was disconcerted somehow. She hadn’t thought Hugh and April were close enough for that. She flicked a look at Will to see what he made of the odd remark, but he was picking up tobacco from where it had spilled across the desk, and didn’t seem to have heard. Hugh said something to April in return, his voice sounding a little uncomfortable, but too low for Hannah to make out, and April laughed, not entirely kindly.

“Look, why did you come up here?” Ryan said now. “It wasn’t just to make me flush my stash like a fucking dickhead, was it?”

“No,” April said coolly. “Hannah and I are going to the bar. Are you coming?”

Hannah had expected Ryan to give April the brush-off, but instead, somewhat to her surprise, he nodded.

“All right. I need a pint. And you—” He pointed a finger at April. “Fifty quid or no fifty quid, you’re buying. Got it?”

“Got it,” April said. She linked arms with Ryan and gave him a little squeeze, and then said in her plummy fake professor voice, “You love me really, Mr. Coates, you know you do.”

“I do fucking not,” Ryan said. But the edge was gone from his voice, and when April dug him in the ribs, he tickled her back, making her laugh and squeal and writhe away, and then chased her all the way down the stairs and across the quad, the rest of them following in their wake.

“Assault!” April shrieked as they rounded the corner of the library. “Bad touch!”

“Oh my God,” Will groaned as the two disappeared through the dark shapes of the rose garden. “I swear, she’ll be the death of me. She’ll kill me, Hannah. She really will.”

“But you love her,” Hannah said lightly. “Don’t you?”

Afterwards she wondered if it was her imagination, the way Will paused and then looked away before answering, not meeting her eyes.

“I do,” he said at last, and then gave a laugh. “Of course I do. You know what they say—can’t live with her, can’t live without her. Right?”

“Right,” Hannah echoed. Hugh and Emily had outpaced them, and she and Will were alone in the winter-clipped rose garden, and the college was silent and empty in the way only a sprawling building full of several hundred students and dons could sometimes inexplicably be. “Of course you do.”