During the first few weeks, I saw Tijana every day. We went to the Freshers Fair together and debated buying membership to the union, finally deciding in favour when someone at the stall told us that not only was Ben and Jerry’s sold at the union at cheaper prices than those at Sainsbury’s, but it was sold there long after Sainsbury’s closed, too. When students handing out flyers for the Assassin’s Guild started circling us, an expression of distaste crossed Tijana’s face and she was, quite suddenly, gone. I wasn’t fast enough. One of them, a very large guy, and brooding, not unlike like a manatee with matted hair, was wearing red-and-white-checked trousers and a top hat with a tag in it for ten shillings and sixpence. He started hovering across my path, his arm out, doing something very like cornering me, smiling and cajoling, saying I looked like the sort of girl who was really game. Game for what? Pretend murder. I smiled, took a flyer, then pretended I saw someone I knew and strolled away without looking back.
Someone else called out to me from a stall — their accent was African—“Hello my sister!” I knew he was only joking, but I bridled anyway. He was tall and shaven-headed, good-looking if you liked tall and shaven-headed, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt as a nice touch of irony. He waved his clipboard at me. “You should put down your e-mail address for the Nigeria Society mailing list,” he said.
I frowned and said “No,” and tried to pass him, but he pressed a leaflet into my hand anyway. I walked away with it, wanting to drop it on the floor, but I thought he might still be watching, then wondered why I cared if he was watching, then wondered why I was so upset. Because I was upset.
Tijana caught up with me, looking pleased with herself. “What were those strangely dressed people?” she asked. I told her, but she’d already lost interest and plucked at the leaflet in my hand. “What’s that? The Nigeria Society? Did you sign up?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
(I will really resent you if you persist with this)
“Too busy.”
“For what? Don’t you want to meet people? I think you should join.”
“Yeah? And why don’t you join the fucking refugee society?” I knew as soon as I said it that she would probably never speak to me again. If I were her I would never speak to me again. I walked away to spare her the trouble of having to get away from me. Wanker. I was such a wanker. I gritted my teeth and ran across Parker’s Piece, slapping savagely at lampposts as I passed them. I was almost back at college when I noticed Tijana was walking silently behind me. She smiled when I looked at her.
“I didn’t mean to say what I said,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I could hear you calling yourself a wanker this whole time.”
She tutted, hugged me and kissed my cheek. I hugged her back, harder.
In the first couple of weeks I only caught glimpses of Miranda — Miranda in the phone booth across from our college, dialling, waiting and hanging up, dialling, waiting and hanging up. I saw her leaving the college library one morning, her arms crammed with more books than we were allowed to take out.
“How’s it going?” I asked her.
“I’m just trying to read everything I can,” she said. She seemed out of breath.
“You’ve got all term,” I said, and she nodded politely and wobbled away.
Miranda wasn’t among us gowned girls in cocktail dresses at formal hall. She didn’t come to the Freshers Week events, she didn’t watch TV in the common room, she wasn’t anywhere. I remembered something from a short story I’d read, about how the girl you want is the girl you see once and then she is nowhere to be found. The girl who does not appear in the crowded room.
Tijana and I got into the habit of 2:00 AM visits to the Van of Death. Apart from the men who worked the van, we were often the only sober people there. Everyone else was on their way back from a club or something. As we stood in queue, watching fat melt and resolidify between busy spatulas and the heat of the grills, I heard someone behind me, probably an English student at our college, mention the name Miranda Silver. I eavesdropped intently then, but all the guy said was that she was an affected little goose. “She almost didn’t go to matric dinner, you know. She said she didn’t care for dinners, and compared cutlery to cages.”
He sounded indulgent of her, but that didn’t change the fact that “affected little goose” was quite an affected thing to say in and of itself. We got to the top of the queue, and, as usual, Tijana ordered salad in a bap, which I continued to consider a pointless choice. She eyed me sternly, daring me to say anything as she opened the bap and splashed chilli sauce all over the inside of it. I talked. I touched on a variety of subjects unrelated to Miranda Silver — the parallels between hall food and the meals served in old people’s homes, the fact that getting drunk was already boring, concerns surrounding my inability to actually answer either of the essay questions I’d been set so far.
Tijana took one of my chips and said, “Miranda was at my old school.”
“Not friends?”
Tijana said, “No,” and she smiled at her own seriousness.
At college, my inability to sleep became terrible. Very quickly I learnt to seek Tijana out late at night. There were other people that I had begun talking to, people on my course, people who lived on my staircase and swapped CDs with me, but no one I could legitimately ask to climb graveyard gates at 4:00 AM with me for Fortean experiments in spirit photography. No one but Tijana, who yanked her hair up out of her face in a Buffy-esque ponytail and said, “Let’s go.”
She trembled all over as the notched shadow of the church fell on her, but she kept her hands steady enough to set my tripod up properly. She insisted on setting the tripod up, as if my doing it would somehow skew the results. We drank sugared tea from flasks and talked and measured each other’s Nosferatu-like shadows while the camera clicked serenely and independently.
Once I rolled her onto her back on the grass and looked into her face to learn her opinion about that. She laughed. I kissed her. She kissed me back, hard, and wrapped her legs around me as if she wanted to climb up me. Her skin was fever hot. When I kissed her neck I felt her breath catch in her throat. She rolled me over and sat up on top of me, and we kissed and fumbled with buttons and put hands and lips to bare skin until one or the other of us said, “I can’t,” and if it was me I don’t know why because I wanted to. Maybe I’m just remembering it wrongly to help me get over the rejection.
Once before I have been the scared one, in a best friendship brought from primary school to secondary school. It was the hugest secret that Catriona and I had ever had. It had to be. Adorned with yin-yang “best friend forever” necklaces and whatever else glittered on the racks of Claire’s Accessories we were, are, Faversham girls. By the time she and I were nine we were using the word “dyke” as a deep insult, even though our parents told us not to — we’d even use it on boys. There was something in the way my mum would say, “Don’t say that,” that let me know that calling someone a fat dyke wasn’t as bad as swearing.