Where Did It All Go Right? (49 page)

I tiptoed out of her room at eight and went straight to breakfast, feeling understandably delicate. I sat with Stephen, but decided against telling him where I’d spent most of the night, even though I hadn’t laid a finger on Teri. Catherine shot me dark, disapproving looks across the fish fingers, having made her assumptions and cast me as the villain, like it was any fucking business of hers. I’d made her a collage of Scotland – what more did she want?

While Teri sensibly slept, undisturbed, for the rest of Saturday, I gathered up all the strength in my spare tank and honoured a commitment I’d made to Stephen for our Rob-free weekend: to go clothes shopping. This meant getting dressed up in secondhand suits we
can
afford, and trotting off down the King’s Road and South Molton Street to look at first hand ones we
can’t
. Stephen’s constant refrain while perusing the racks: ‘Fuckin’ lovely, that!’

It was probably the lack of sleep, but I kept thinking that perhaps last night had never happened and in fact I’d never been to Teri’s tomb and drunk bad wine and instant coffee until 5.30am.
Everyday
sounds like ringing tills and pelican crossings seemed unnaturally amplified and I thought I could hear my own blood being pumped around my head. At one stage I felt like I might pass out in the oppressive, stuffy heat of a boutique which only seemed to be selling three different jumpers, two pairs of shoes and a range of military cap badges. Thankfully, I kept it together. Wouldn’t want to embarrass Stephen in his imagined natural habitat. We bought a crêpe from the crêpe stall on the way home and saw Tom Selleck filming a London-based episode of
Magnum P.I
. on Albert Bridge. This lifted my spirits and I’ve been awake ever since.

And now Teri’s in my room and she’s asking me a question and I’m saying yes and she’s doing what she just asked me if she could do. I think I’m in love, but I don’t know what sort of collage of Portsmouth I can do at the other end.

Teri and I were not built to last. Because of the boyfriend, we never really went public. She would leave me notes in empty Silk Cut packets outside my door. Sometime she just left empty Silk Cut packets, meaning she’d dropped by when I was out. Sometimes she left a packet when I was clearly in, which was a little more spooky. I got off on the intrigue though, and loved the fact that she wore men’s pyjamas. Then one time when I ventured down to her room after lights out, heard a low, male voice behind her locked door and made a swift exit up the fire escape. The boyfriend had dropped in unannounced. My enthusiasm for the relationship waned after that. He was fine as a concept but not as a physical threat.

One evening, with nothing better to do, I watched
Falling In Love,
that night’s rented video in the hall coffee bar and, in characteristic style, I found portent and omen in what was really just a boring film about Molly and Frank, two middle-class suburbanites having an affair after a chance meeting.

‘I’m very married,’ says Meryl Streep, before embarking on the fling.

‘I am too,’ replies Robert De Niro.

When all was said and done, Teri was very married and I was playing with fire. The Silk Cut packets soon packed up and I was free to fall in love again.

Her name says it all: Dawn. It’s late May. The weather has turned prematurely hot and the roof of Ralph West is the place to be. Dawn has broken, like the first dawn, flooding light and magic across my grey, post-Portsmouth existence. She is a dishevelled and buxom illustrator from Central School of Art and Design, larger than life and twice as colourful, with her Medusa-like orange hair and the messiest, paintiest room in halls. It’s like a work in progress: wherever you stand or sit or recline, there’s a tube of paint or a bottle of ink or a felt tip pen within easy reach – in case inspiration strikes. Paint without a top, ink without a lid, pens without caps. Dawn gives the impression of being dizzy, although it might be an act; her outfits look as if she coordinates them using a lottery system and she ties up random fistfuls of her voluminous Kia-Ora hair depending on the day. I find her fascinating, although I think what clinched it was the spooky black-and-white childhood photograph she has on her pinboard. In it, aged about five, she is being hugged by a man in a horribly realistic polar bear suit. It’s winter, there’s snow on the ground, other people are skating on a frozen pond, while Dawn beams winningly for the camera – despite the fact that she is being attacked by a bear. I fell in love with the girl in this picture. Though in real life she dwarfs me, I want to protect her from the polar bear.

Protection was, in fact, the one thing missing from our rapid, dizzying halls affair. After a couple of weeks of intensive negotiations, forever rolling onto dirty paint palettes and laughing like idiots, Dawn went home for the weekend – somewhere and nowhere like Farnham, to attend a ball. I missed her, like you might a regular girlfriend. Then she returned and informed me that she was late for her period. It stole the sun from our hearts.

Dawn and I lived the next week in mutual terror, one nail-biting day at a time. Life at Chelsea tried to go on, but everything was loaded with significance. I worked therapeutically hard on our latest project, a calendar. Mine was based, with typical lack of adventure, on lyrics by The Cure, each couplet illustrated with a painterly smudge over some photocopies. I dedicated one month
to
Dawn using a Xerox of her polar bear picture. Months and the crossing-off of dates suddenly held added melodrama.

A few of us attended a mixed-media performance of Mayakovsky’s pre-revolutionary Russian poem
War And the World
. Set in the First World War, there was a lot of blood in it, which of course spoke directly to me. And then Rob and I drove to Rotherhithe in pre-revolutionary Docklands to research another college project and had Shake broken into and stolen by joyriders. This, at least, took my mind off Dawn and the fact that she was going to have my child.

Up in her bomb-blast room on the fourth floor, Dawn started painting pictures of a girl using lots of red paint. I didn’t even need to ask any more; just pop my head round her door and smile hopefully, at which she would gently shake her head.

Then, the day after the car theft – the day Rob and I went back to Rotherhithe to collect the windowless, abused Metro from the Metropolitan police – Dawn came through with the good news. A shadow lifted from our lives and I withdrew. Something I should have thought of a lot sooner.

Of my spring-term dalliances, Dawn lasted the longest. I was finally tiring of the endless game of chase and longed for something with a longer shelf-life than a fortnight. Of the three, Dawn was also the most fun – the most like a mate as well as a mate. And not forgetting we were for a while almost mum and dad – a textbook teenage pause for thought. We shared something during that scare, something more intimate than student sex, something proper couples experience – co-joined woe. Though Dawn and I never walked up the road arm in arm or carved our initials inside a love-heart under the desk, we went to the next level (which is entirely different from getting to next base). And then, released from biological bondage, we ran to the hills.

Exit, pursued by a bear.

So who out of our three real suspects wishes me dead or in agonising pain? Who left the hex on my door this Tuesday afternoon? Who’s the black magician?

My desire to remain on amiable terms with all three of my new
ex-lovers
is, I think, noble and heartfelt. There is, I admit, a measure of self-preservation in this – all four of us live in the same building after all, domestically entwined if nothing else. Indeed, at one potentially sticky point, I had Catherine, Teri and Dawn all in my room at the same time. I detected no animosity though and fondly imagined them happy to be members of a select halls cult. Perhaps they could organise coffee mornings to swap experiences.

But I was wrong. One of them has unfinished business with me. Bad business. She wants me to suffer and by leaving an evil spell outside my door she has her wish. I’m lying on my bed trying to write a late-night letter to Mum and Dad but my eyes are repeatedly drawn to the little black doll sitting propped against the biscuit tin of Pantone markers on my drawing desk. I removed the pin, bent it back into shape and threw it away but I feel compelled to keep the figure until I figure out who left it and why. I don’t believe in evil spirits, but I am scared of the skeletons in the trees, and the secrets hidden within that black cowl have infected the room with unease. What really worries me is not that the voodoo will actually work and cause searing pain in my stomach – how can it now that I’ve pulled the pin? – but that one of my recent relationships is spinning out of my control and coming back to haunt me. I like to keep a lid on these things.

Was that a scratching at the door? It certainly wasn’t a knock. Nah. Imagined it. There it is again, scritch-scratch, like a wind-blown twig on a window. I turn the volume down on the now disturbingly other-worldly Cocteau Twins.

‘Hello?’

No answer. I leap off the bed and open the door wide, expecting to find another effigy at my feet. In fact, it’s a full-size girl.

‘Hi, did you get my…?’ She spies the doll on my desk and answers her own question. And mine.

‘Did you like it?’

‘Was I supposed to like it?’ I ask, not unreasonably.

We keep our voices down as it’s after lights-out, but I’m not inviting her in.

‘It’s a peace offering,’ Teri reveals, sweetly. ‘I made it at college when the teachers weren’t looking.’

‘What’s the pin for?’

‘Pin?’

‘It had a pin through the middle.’

‘No it didn’t. It’s supposed to be me, that’s why it’s in black.’

‘Well somebody stuck a pin in it.’

She wrinkles her nose. ‘That’s really horrible. God.’

It dawns on her that her peace offering has backfired. ‘I just wanted to show that there’s no hard feelings. I know things were all a bit funny when it ended and I know it freaked you out when Mark turned up.’

‘Not as much as it freaked me out when a voodoo doll turned up.’

We both smile. Amiably, like friends. The doll looks like a doll. A soft, cuddly Teri doll thoughtfully run up on a fashion course out of off-cuts and college thread. I want to kiss Teri and invite her in and revisit old times but that’s wrong and I don’t. Instead I thank her kindly for the offering and say, ‘See you around,’ and she spirits away.

I lock the door again. (We always lock our doors. There are some funny people in the halls.) Turning the Cocteau Twins back up to a level that won’t alert Lenny the night porter but will erase the silence, I put my Basildon Bond pad away and recline on my bed, single but no longer singled out for revenge. I begin to drift off and sink beneath the waves of undulating, chiming guitar. The spell is broken when the needle hits the run-out groove. Then I shake myself just sufficiently awake to get out of my clothes.

The unlikely phrase, ‘Can I take my clothes off?’ echoes through my head. I think perhaps it always will. Then another question: if Teri left the doll, who stuck the pin through it?

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Copyright © 2003 Andrew Collins

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ISBN 9780091894368