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Don’t laugh.
She can tell, embarrassingly, that he’s doing his best not to. He’s trying to stifle an expression somewhere between a grimace and a chuckle, and the tops of her cheeks burn realising how wrongly she’d calibrated the question. She turns away from him in bed, keeping his arms tucked around her.
I’m not laughing.
A silence where she grits her teeth, wills him to speak first. He does.
Why are you asking?
Honestly?
Yeah.
I think I’m kind of obsessed with unhappiness.
And also, though she doesn’t say this out loud, because as a teenager – and in fairness, at nineteen it’s a moment in life she’s still straddling – it was a fool-proof, fail-safe way to get someone to fall in love with you. Ask them what the unhappiest they’d ever been was. Then, whatever they said (four times out of five it was their parents divorce) act like you couldn’t believe they’d been carrying such a huge horrible weight of pain around with them. Call it suffering, and stroke their soul.
It’s not funny.
No, no. It’s just – kind of a weird question. Kind of supposes I’ve previously catalogued all my sadnesses. Do you want me to ask you?
No.
What’s the unhappiest you’ve ever been?
A pause.
When I first left school. I think that was the first time I’d ever felt lonely.
That makes sense.
I don’t feel lonely any more.
Really?
Not – sorry, I don’t mean because of this. She gestures at them, lying in bed now not-touching at all. And I don’t mean never lonely. But not in the same way. Being at university, having my time built around something, that feels good.
He wants to tell her that right now is the loneliest he’s ever been, but he doesn’t want to risk any more questions. Or worse, for consternation to spread across her face which, although he knows she doesn’t mean it to be, feels more mocking than kind. He dreads having to explain why, dreads the possibility of the conversation returning to the colours of their skin.
That’s nice, he says.
_______________________________________________________________
What’s worst, Billie thinks, is that she can remember who she was before, and she knows who she is now, and the distance between those two things makes her wish she could will herself into non-existence.
When she arrived at university, she felt herself explosive, exploding. Brilliant and bright and many-coloured. She was here there and everywhere, she was far away from her parents and she flung herself into the work, into the people, into the city.
Bristol for her was everything London wasn’t and Billie all of a sudden became everything that she hadn’t been in London.
Most of the first term revolved around Poppy. Out one night at the pub with friends she saw a girl sitting by herself, very confidently, as if she was waiting for someone. All through Billie’s first pint she looked at the girl, who was reading a little, skimming through her phone, and occasionally looking around, smiling as if enjoying the scene. She wore a long flowing skirt with a shapeless sweater and looked mixed race, maybe half white half East Asian, although Billie was worried she might be guessing wrong and also that maybe she was a bad person for guessing at all. Feeling bold from the pint and the way she’d been holding sway over conversation at her table, she bounced across the room, bumping against a couple of peoples’ tables as she did so.
Hi! What’s your name?
I’m Poppy. You?
Billie. Want to come and join us?
Poppy smiled and nodded, and as they walked back together, shoes sticking slightly to floor that was stained by years of spilled drinks. Billie filled her in
We were just talking about 69. Freya (she pointed) said she doesn’t think anyone does it between the ages of 18 and 50. Before you know what you’re doing, and then again when you really know what you’re doing.
Poppy raised an eyebrow as she sat next to Billie, crammed up against each other in the corner of an alcove.
I think maybe it’s just out of vogue? I think it’ll come back in a big way in five years time, and our late twenties will be a mess of arms and legs and elbows and knees.
Or, more voices joined in, it was phased out by porn. I bet it’s quite a messy angle to shoot from? Same as why everyone shaves now. Because it makes everything more visible for the camera.
Or maybe everyone else is doing it, and we’re missing a trick?
Amidst the general laughter, a voice, quieter but somehow more firm than the rest, still with a sense of humour
Or maybe you’re talking about hetero sex?
And Billie, for reasons she’s still not quite sure, but thinks have something to do with the bravery of how Poppy stood up to a whole table of people she’d just met, and did so with a seeming shrug and an open palm, though they maybe also have to do with the fact that Poppy was not only very pretty but now obviously intelligent also, and the idea of having her as a friend therefore appealed to Billie’s only sense of vanity; maybe for those reasons and maybe for others, that night Billie fell in love.
She fell in love with Poppy and with all of the next days, where their conversations raced on into the nights, always one step ahead of each other, considering and reconsidering each point, sure for some reason that it mattered that they got to the bottom of things, that them working things out would somehow make all of the difference to the world.
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Maybe what’s worst, Billie thinks, isn’t remembering who she used to be, but remembering how she used to feel. Remembering the feeling, and knowing it’s only a year since she felt like that.
They’d met at a rally. A group had gone down for the day to London – Billie and Poppy and Freya and Stella and Zoe. It was two thirds of the way through their first year, a weirdly sunny day for so early in the year, and they were hemmed in by the crowd which felt exciting – roar of the, swell of the – all that.
They were kettled, which was obviously the best thing that had ever happened, with the policeman looking like every stereotype of brutality they could have hoped for, big and burly and truncheoned.
There was a bit of chanting and Zoe got scared and doe-eyed went up to a policeman
I’m so sorry Sir, I don’t know what happened. I was on my way to the opera. Please, I have to meet my parents!
They were on Trafalgar Square, so it was just about believable.
And then Billie heard this whistle. He was standing there, with a girl half-tucked into his jacket. Without knowing why, she was sure they weren’t together. He let out this long whistle and said to the girl
Can you imagine if I’d tried that?
Freya heard and it turned out she knew him. That he’d come up for the day too. She shouted, pointed, dragged the groups together. Introduced them.
Billie Amal, Amal Billie.
Amal.
For so long that first time seeing him looped constantly in her mind. She tries now not to think of it too much because she knows from experience spending too much time on a memory turns it from real to fabricated, and what she felt then was real, was the kind of feeling that jerks you from the every day.
Not that it was love at first sight. And obviously, you can find people attractive however many very many times a day. So not lust either. It felt like a tug of expectation – as if here, in this new person – was possibility.
He barely caught her eye – his gaze slid past hers rather than settling on it but something caught, something shifted.
Something that retrospectively she would call love, would call fate, would call knowing. But in that moment – it was possibility.
They went to the pub afterwards, and they didn’t talk. But she watched, hugging the force of the secret to her. What he ordered. Who bought him drinks. How he was with the people around him.
The next day, she crossed the narrow hall of their student accommodation and without knocking walked straight into Poppy’s room, got into bed with her and swaddled herself in her duvet.
I think – I think I’ve fallen in love.
Mmm.
Did you see the way he didn’t buy himself a drink? How relaxed he was? He didn’t feel the need to talk, did you see?
What’s the time?
Everyone else did the speaking and then all of a sudden he’d just lean in, say one thing and that would be the most interesting thing anyone had said. Poppy, can you even imagine what it would be like to be that cool?
Go away.
We need to get up anyway. Can you text Freya and ask how she knows him?
I don’t want to get up.
Are you jealous that I fancy someone?
B! No. Don’t be so self-obsessed.
I actually think a small dose of narcissism is a very good thing.
Billie did think this. She still thinks this. People like Poppy, who in general, though in Poppy’s case not in the early hours of the morning, have too much empathy, sometimes frighten her. She can’t imagine what it would be to not be the main character of her own life.
______________________________
What’s worst then, is how much the friendship has changed. Billie and Poppy chose to live together in second year, an overwhelmingly obvious decision at the time that now she often wonders if Poppy regrets. Sometimes, she thinks Poppy tires of her half-way through a point she’s making. Whenever they talk, Poppy’s sighs are longer than her sentences.
Billie, you’re just not listening –
I am!
You’re not or you’d know that you’re not replying to what I said. You’re having an argument with yourself, not with me.
Then there was the time Billie is embarrassed to think of, where she had failed to congratulate Poppy on something important, an award she won or part-won or got to the second round of or something. She had forgotten about it because she needed to tell Poppy something about Amal, something that she had found out and that was important, because it explained so much. So she’d spoken to Poppy on the phone for twenty minutes and then hung up, and Poppy had told her off, actually told her off.
But the real problem is that Poppy doesn’t understand.
The other day they were lying on the sagging sofa in their flat, feet tucked under each other for warmth. Billie was reading a book and read out loud a line to Poppy,
Listen – the centre lies in two things, he and she
Poppy frowned and pointed out the heteronormativity of the sentence, how solipsistic it was
And it’s not necessarily untrue, and she’s not being unkind
but she doesn’t know, she hasn’t been in love. Billie doesn’t want to patronize her but it’s hard not to, because Poppy hasn’t been in love and so hasn’t crossed to the side where of all these things make sense. She wonders if Poppy can see the change that’s taking place in her, if maybe for Poppy, who knows her so well, it’s visible. Maybe that’s why Poppy’s argumentative, because she can see how many great and unknown things are transpiring inside Billie, how she is transmuting feelings into knowledge.
The problem is that with Poppy not really talking to Billie, there’s no-one to, kindly but firmly, point out how ridiculously self-involved she is being.
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What’s worst is having lost the sense of certainty that had guided her over those days. When she had left every lecture, every meeting, and every session in the library, thrilling. In every decision she made she was pursuing the best version of herself, ready to hand it over to him.
After meeting him at the rally, she started researching which events he was going to. She started turning up to those events.
B I love you, but you are basically stalking him.
It’s not stalking! Just a fine-tuned appreciation for how Facebook works.
She and Poppy made a trade. Poppy would accompany her, and in return she would go to the Marxist society pub-crawls with Poppy. The guy who ran them was head-over-heels in love with Poppy but they were both shy, so would spend long evenings discussing Israel Palestine and intersectional feminism whilst Billie stood around growing drunk and belligerent.
But it was worth it.
They went to club nights where the music was too loud and they both felt sorely out of place till they were drunk enough to entirely forget had ever felt that. They went to lectures on the suppleness of pronouns where they learnt how “we” and “I” could exclude. They went to jumble sales for charity where Poppy bought waistcoats and more long flowing skirts and Billie bought bizarrely coloured old trainers and they both bought large sweaters and jumpers.
And at all of these events he was there, and she would watch. And though they didn’t talk she knew, she knew she knew she knew there was something.
One night, they went to a BAME poetry night. She and Poppy had looked carefully at the event before going, half-jokingly wondering if it was appropriate for Billie to go.
What if I’m intruding?!
You can come as my ally.
I’m actually often asked where I’m from.
Because you look vaguely mediterranean.
Debatable.
It’s not debatable.
Well if we were approaching this from an intersectional angle, then you’re basically a straight white man.
That’s so unacceptable.
Class cancels out race!
Still unacceptable.
Anyway, I have a half-Vietnamese best friend and a black boyfriend.
Billie seriously. Fetishising minorities? Also, not your boyfriend.
They were interested in their similarities and they were interested in their differences. Both were intelligent, pretty, middle class – both were fiercely left wing and feminist. Poppy’s parents were both lawyers, whilst Billie’s were a psychoanalyst and social worker. They found identity interesting in how it allowed them to map any distinctions in how they encountered the world, and most of the time didn’t take it much more seriously than that.
And that night they made their way to the night, laughing down the street, hoods up against the rain. The lamplight lit the puddles and the flecks of falling water seemed to dance, everything illuminated and the glamour they saw in it all was the glamour they were feeling in themselves. They entered, unbundled from their coats.
Amal knew who she was by that point.
His eyes would slide away less quickly.
And that night, he sat next to her. In between acts, they commented on them. She laughed at everything he said, utterly involuntarily. She noticed how close their arms were, their legs were, nearly touching, the pressure building elementally. The pleasure she was taking in this didn’t even diminish when she realised the chairs were fairly small and she was equally close to the person on the other side.
Afterwards they went to the pub, and quickly, other people faded away. She was occasionally aware of Poppy, doing excellently in conversation in her peripheral vision.
Later, she would try to explain to Poppy the strangeshimmer of the room, how it felt like all the energy there was concentrated on her and Amal. As if the attraction between them was strong enough that everyone else was orbiting it.
They didn’t touch, but somehow as person after person left, they knew to stay.
And then, like it was inevitable, they went back to his.
At 19 years old, Billie has had a fair amount of sex. In fact, she’s had more partners than the average person in the UK has in their lifetime.
She’s had good sex and bad sex. She had a horribly uncomfortable one night stands where she wanted to say no, but felt a bit rude, a bit like she was sending back dinner.
There was one time where she didn’t want to have sex, not at all, and she wanted to say no but was worried that if she did say no then the man wouldn’t stop, and she didn’t want to have to deal with something murky or awful so she decided to “consent.” She made lots of noises during and got up quickly afterward to dress and made an awful cruel self hating comment about her own nakedness as she did, feeling frustrated at her own self-consciousness.
She’s had sex where she’s come, and lots more times where she hasn’t; she’s had sex with eight people.
This wasn’t like any of those times.
There was a lot of silence.
But there was also.
Even to Poppy she can’t explain the difference. Between sex, and sex.
Between when it’s just a thing, and when it’s the thing.
But this. This was the thing. Deep bellied. And like during it furrows of stars were being ploughed through her head. With the lights out, in the darkness of the room, it felt like everything was happening behind her eyes.
Things.
And stuff.
And floods of movement.
It wasn’t fun. A lot of it was in silence.
But there was something unfathomable, and dark and mysterious.
It was the most serious thing she’d ever done.
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What is worst, really the worst, Billie thinks, is that she never remembers having this ease again.