Manchester. Do you want me to say hello if I see him again, pass on your mobile number?’
‘No!’ I say, with a note of panic not entirely absent from my voice. I feel I have to explain this, so I add: ‘It could sound as if I’m after him.’
‘If you were only friends before, why would he automatically think that?’ Caroline asks, not unreasonably.
‘I’m single after such a long time. I don’t know, it could be misinterpreted. And I’m not looking to … I don’t want it to look like, here’s my single friend who wants me to auction her phone number to men in the street,’ I waffle.
‘Well, I wasn’t going to put it on a card in a phone box!’ Caroline huffs.
‘I know, I know, sorry.’ I pat her arm. ‘I am so, so out of practice at this.’
A pause, with sympathetic smiles from Mindy and Caroline.
‘I’ll hook you up with some hotness, when you’re ready.’ Mindy pats my arm.
‘Woah,’ Ivor says.
‘What?’
‘Judging from the men you do date, I’m trying to imagine the ones you pass over. I’m getting a message from my brain: the server understood your request but is refusing to fulfil it.’
‘Oh, considering your rancid trollops, this is rich.’
‘No, it was that thundering helmet Bruno who was rich, remember?’
‘Aherm, he also had a nice bum.’
‘So there you go,’ Caroline interrupts. ‘Have we cheered you up? Feeling brighter?’
‘Yes. A sort of nuclear glow,’ I say.
‘More serious Slush Puppy?’ Caroline asks.
I hold my glass up.
‘Shitloads, please.’
3
I met Ben at the end of our first week at Manchester University. I initially thought he was a second or third year, because he was with the older team who’d set up trestle tables in my halls of residence bar to issue our accommodation ID cards. In fact, he’d started off as a customer, same as me. In what I’d later discover was a typically garrulous, generous Ben thing to do, he’d offered to help and hopped over the tables when they’d complained they were short-handed.
I wouldn’t have been upright myself, but my hangover had woken me and told me it desperately needed Ribena. The grounds of my halls were as deserted at nine a.m. as if it was dawn. Draining the bottle as I walked back from the shops in the autumn sunshine, I saw a small queue snaking out of the bar’s double doors. Being British, and a nervous fresher, I thought I’d better join it.
When I got to the front and a space appeared in front of Ben, I stepped forward.
His mildly startled but not at all displeased expression seemed to read, quite clearly: ‘Ooh, and you are?’
This startled me back, not least because it somehow wasn’t leery. On a good day (which this wasn’t) I thought I scrubbed up reasonably well but I hadn’t had many looks like this before. It was as if someone had cued music, fluffed my hair, lit me from above and shouted ‘action’.
Ben wasn’t at all my type. Bit skinny, bit obvious, with those brown doe-eyes and that squared-off jaw, bit white bread as Rhys would say. (He had recently come into my life, along with his definitive worldview that, bit by bit, was becoming mine.) And from what I could see of Ben’s upper half, he was clad in sportswear in such a manner that implied he actually played sports. Attractive men, in my eighteen-year-old opinion, played lead guitar, not football. They were scruffy and saturnine, had five o’clock shadows and – recent amendment due to research in the field – chest hair you could lose a gerbil in. Still, I was open-minded enough to allow that Ben would be plenty of other people’s type, and that made the attention pretty damn flattering. The low clouds of my hangover started lifting.
Ben said:
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
A beat while we remembered what we were here for. ‘Name?’ Ben said.
‘Rachel Woodford.’
‘Woodford … W …’ He started riffling through boxes of cards. ‘Gotcha.’
He produced a rectangle of cardboard with the name of our halls and a passport photo affixed to it. I’d forgotten I’d sent a handful from a not very flattering session in a shopping centre photo booth. Really bad day, Meadowhall, pre-menstrual. Face like I’d woken up at my own autopsy. Might’ve known they’d come back to haunt me.
‘Don’t laugh at the picture,’ I said, hastily, and potentially counter-productively.
Ben peered at it. ‘I’ve seen worse today.’
He clamped my card in the machine, took the plasticated version out and inspected it again.
‘I know it’s grim,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘I look like I’m trying to pass a dragon fruit.’
‘I don’t know what a dragon fruit is. I mean, other than a fruit, I’m guessing.’
‘It’s spiky.’
‘Ah OK. Yeah. I ’spose that’d sting a bit.’
Well. That had gone beautifully. Seduction 101: make the attractive boy imagine you straining on the toilet.
This was straight from my greatest hits back catalogue, by the way. Quintessential Rachel, The Cream of Rachel, Simply Rachel. When put on the spot, the linguistic function of my brain offers the same potluck as a one-armed bandit. Crank the handle and ratchet the tension, it rings up any old combination of words.
Ben gave me a smile that turned into laughter. I grinned back.
He kept the card out of my reach.
‘You’re on English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Me too. I haven’t got a clue where I’m meant to be for registration tomorrow. Have you?’
We made an arrangement for him to stop by my room the next morning so we could navigate the arts block together. He found a pen. I scribbled my room number down for him on the nearest thing to hand, a spongy beer mat. I wished I hadn’t spent last night painting every one of my fingernails a different colour, which looked pretty silly in the light of day. I printed ‘Rachel’ in un-joined up letters neatly below, as if I was writing out a label for my coat peg at primary school.
‘About the picture,’ he said, as he took it. ‘You look fine, but you might want to jack the seat up next time. It’s a bit Ronnie Corbett.’
I slid it out again
