There were a few people who were jealous of her. There always are. I remember one night when Portia was cornered by some big rugby bloke in a pub. She politely declined his offer of a shag, to which he responded by screaming obscenities at her and telling her she was a rich bitch and the most hated girl at university. He made some references to her being a Daddy’s girl, and then said she was the university joke. Eventually, when she recovered from the shock, she slapped him as hard as she could and ran out to the garden of the pub.
I found her there. I hadn’t known what was going on. I’d been in the other room, chatting to people, and it was only when I noticed Portia hadn’t come back that I went looking for her.
She was curled up in, a heap at the bottom of the garden. It was raining and she was soaking wet, her hand covered in blood, her skin torn through to the bone. She was sobbing quietly, and I took her in my arms. After a while I insisted she go to hospital for stitches. Even there she refused to say what had happened, and the next day the rumours flew that he, the rugby oik, had hit her, had pushed her down the stairs. She never said anything about the incident, neither confirmed nor denied, thereby making the rugby bloke into something of a pariah with women.
Months later we were sitting in a café on the high street, when Portia suddenly said, ‘Do you remember that night? The night of the bloody hand?’
I nodded, curious as to what she was going to say, because she’d never spoken about it before.
‘Did you think he’d hit me? Pushed me down the stairs?’
I shrugged. I didn’t know.
‘I did it myself,’ she said, lighting up a cigarette and examining the tiny scar on the knuckle of her right hand. ‘It’s this thing I do,’ she said nonchalantly, dragging on the cigarette and looking around the room as if to say that what she was telling me wasn’t important. ‘I have a tendency to hurt myself. Physically.’ She paused. ‘When I’m hurting inside.’ And then she called the waitress over and ordered another coffee. By the time the waitress had gone, Portia was on to something else and I couldn’t get back to the subject again.
It was the first indication I’d had that Portia wasn’t perfect. That there might be things in her past that weren’t perfect. It was only as I got to know her better that I realized the effect her parents had had on her.
It wasn’t that they didn’t care, she said. It was quite simply that they hadn’t been around enough to care. Her mother lay in bed all day, in an alcoholic haze, and her father disappeared to London, leaving Portia to fend for herself.
This cutting, this occasional self-mutilation when life became too hard, was clearly an act of desperation, of Portia screaming to be noticed, to be heard. But if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know, if you know what I mean. She was funny, generous and kind. When she got fed up with my persistent moaning about my mop of dull mousy hair, she whisked me to the hairdressers and instructed them to do lowlights.
The girl at the hairdressers didn’t like Portia, didn’t like her imperious manner, but Portia’s mother went to Daniel Galvin, so Portia knew what she was talking about. When Portia said not the cap, the foil, they listened, and when she chose the colours of my lowlights, they listened. And when they finished, Portia showed them a photograph of a model in a magazine, and they cut my hair so that it fell softly around my face, feathery bits brushing my cheek. I had never felt beautiful before, only ever mildly attractive on a very good day, but for a few minutes, in that crappy local hairdressers surrounded by old dears with blue rinses, with Portia smiling just behind me, I felt beautiful.
Portia was the most sought-after girl at university. As the builders at the end of our road one summer used to say, ‘She’s got class.’ When I walked past they’d scream, ‘Cor, fancy a night out, love?’ To which I’d smile coyly and continue walking, faintly irritated by the interruption, but nevertheless flattered that they had even bothered to notice me.
When Portia walked past they’d fall silent. Downing their tools one by one, they’d step to the edge of the scaffold to watch her glide by, her face impassive, her eyes fixed on the middle distance. And once she’d passed they’d look at one another with regret, regret that she wouldn’t talk to them, regret that twelve feet up a collection of steel poles was the closest they’d ever get to a woman like Portia.
But the thing was that underneath, beneath the designer trappings and soigné exterior, Portia was just like me. We were both eternal romantics, although we hid it well, and both desperately needed to be loved.
Portia had been practically abandoned by her parents since birth, and, though my background wasn’t quite so dramatic, I was the product of people who should never have got married, of people who spent their lives arguing, shouting, who led me to believe, as a young child, that it was all my fault.
My parents were still together, very much so, but I suppose every family has its problems, and mine no less than anyone else. We just don’t talk about it. Everything is swept under the carpet and forgotten.
Perhaps that’s why I loved Portia so much. She was the first person I’d met with whom I felt able to be completely honest. Not immediately, but she was so warm and so open herself (years of therapy, she said) that it was impossible not to fill the silences after her stories with memories of my own.
We gradually allowed more people to enter into our world. Only a select few, only the people who shared our humour, but eventually, by the end of the year, we were a small group of misfits, all from completely different walks of life, but all somehow feeling as if we had found another family.
So there was Eddie, Joshua, Portia and Si. It never occurred to me that we didn’t have any close female friends, but with each other we never needed them. Sarah entered halfway through the second year, by virtue of going out with Eddie, but, although we made her feel welcome, she never really belonged.
I longed to bring someone into the group in the way that Eddie had brought Sarah. And I had my fair share of flings. Of going on drunken pub crawls and ending the evening in a strange bed with a stranger, waking up knowing that you weren’t going to see one another again, but praying that, nevertheless, you would. But they were only flings. The grand passion of which Portia and I talked, relentlessly, eluded me during those years, and one-night stands were the best I could get.
I remember how philosophical Portia was after her first one-night stand. She had lost her virginity the summer before starting university, on holiday, with a strapping Swede on the Greek island of Mykonos, and had said that one-nighters weren’t for her.
I dragged her along to a pub crawl one evening, and tried not to look too horrified when she staggered up the road with a boy who had already worked his way through our entire hall of residence.
And possibly more horrifying was seeing Portia drunk. She simply wasn’t the type. It didn’t suit her.
‘Don’t worry,’ she slurred, throwing her arms around me just before she left, ‘I’vegoddacondom… hic’ and with that she was gone. I sort of knew what she was doing. When we talked about our own one-night stands, Portia always seemed to feel slightly left out, and I suspected she was trying it, just to see what it was like.