On the second Friday after we broke up (but is it really breaking up when you were only ever the bit on the side?), I went to the pub with some of my classmates. Our psychology tutor, Daniel, had invited us there for farewell drinks. He was going overseas on a paid scholarship.
‘Oxford,’ said Katie. ‘It sounds so … Harry Potterish.’
‘Without Horcruxes,’ I said, and she gave me a mystified look.
Daniel caught my eye, laughed. ‘I’ll let you know if I’m issued with a broomstick.’ He bought us a round of pints and we sat in the old-style pub, nibbling on chips while rain streamed down the windows. There were six in our tutorial group — five girls and a token guy, Caleb, who thought he was very erudite but came across as a bit of a tosser. He’d written an Oscar Wilde quote on my cast when my leg was broken, but had left out the best half of it.
Alex had completed the quote. Pity he couldn’t live up to it.
Most people exist, that is all.
I didn’t want to be one of those people.
‘What will you be researching?’ Caleb pushed his glasses up his nose. I had my suspicions that they contained plain glass rather than corrective lenses.
Daniel wiped beer foam off his upper lip. ‘I’ll be doing research into brain changes in schizophrenia.’
‘Brain changes?’ I dipped a chip in tomato sauce. ‘You mean anomalies they’re born with, or changes they develop?’
‘Both. We know there are some genetic predispositions to schizophrenia, but lots of evidence points to environmental influences as well, such as trauma in early childhood.’ Daniel took off his black-rimmed glasses and cleaned the lenses with the bottom of his shirt.
I’d only seen Alex in glasses a couple of times, both times when he was hungover.
I had to stop thinking about him.
‘What sort of things would you see?’ I asked.
‘Well, at an autopsy, and on an MRI, you often see changes in the temporal lobes — as in, they’re shrunken.’ Daniel tapped the side of his head, just above his ear.
‘Is that why they get auditory hallucinations?’ I asked, aware that others had grown bored of the conversation and had moved on to how Game of Thrones was going to end.
‘The temporal lobes are where those would originate, yes.’ Daniel spread his hands. ‘But what comes first, the chicken or the egg?’
‘As in, does the schizophrenia itself cause the brain damage, or does the brain damage cause schizophrenia?’ I picked up a coaster and turned it between my fingers. ‘Do you think you can change the structure of your own brain by repeating the same behaviours over and over?’
‘You can certainly build neural pathways that way. It’s called learning.’ He grinned. ‘I think you have the brain of a researcher, Ronnie.’
I smiled back, glanced away. I’d forever be trying to solve the mystery of what happened to my brother’s brain, but I didn’t know Daniel well enough to go into that, certainly not in front of my classmates.
‘I mean it,’ Daniel said, once we’d all bought a second round of drinks, apart from Katie, who said she was off to meet her girlfriend. ‘You should think about doing a higher degree.’
‘As in a master’s?’
‘A master’s, and then a PhD.’
‘Keep talking,’ I said, so he did.
‘Technically we shouldn’t be doing this,’ he said two hours later. Once the group had dispersed, Daniel and I had looped around the block — Daniel clockwise, me counter-clockwise — and met at a crowded bar in the Octagon, where he’d bought me a gin cocktail. From there we’d gone on to dinner at an Indian restaurant, where we’d shared a bottle of wine over a tikka masala.
‘Story of my life,’ I said.
‘Huh?’ His blue eyes were slightly bloodshot. That was probably the nicest thing about him — his eyes.
I shook my head. ‘Never mind. Anyway, you stopped being my tutor as of five o’clock this afternoon.’
‘True.’ He upended the rest of the bottle in my glass. ‘But some might still say there’s a power imbalance.’
I thumbed a dribble of wine off the side of my glass. ‘Do you feel powerful?’
‘Are we back to your Hogwarts fantasy again?’ Daniel asked, and I laughed.
‘Do you believe in magic?’ I was flirting shamelessly, but so was he. I suppose we both knew what we wanted.
He draped an arm over the back of his chair. ‘That is the worst pick-up line I ever heard.’
‘No, really? You’ve never had worse than that?’ I prodded the new earring in my right ear, number four. I’d had it done the day the deadline with Alex had expired.
Daniel tore a strip off his naan bread. ‘I do get “You’ve got nice eyes” a lot.’
‘Fishing for compliments now, are we?’ I wasn’t usually that direct, but I was drunk by then.
‘You don’t think I have nice eyes?’
‘I wouldn’t use the word “nice”,’ I said, and when he dropped his jaw in mock shock, ‘because nice is such a vanilla word. But they are a striking shade of blue. How’s that?’
‘I’m all embarrassed now.’ His knee touched mine. I didn’t move away.
‘Liar.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to give you such a shallow compliment.’
I tilted my head. ‘So, I don’t get one?’
Daniel took his glasses off and set them on the table. ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t going to give you one. But what I was going to say is that I think you have an amazing mind. And don’t take that the wrong way because it doesn’t mean I don’t find you physically attractive. Because, believe me, I do.’
‘You hardly know me.’
‘Pity,’ he said, and kissed me. I tried to pretend it was Alex. It didn’t work.
‘Please tell me you don’t already have a girlfriend,’ I said once we’d left the restaurant, his arm around me.
‘Nope. But I am flying to London on Monday.’
‘Perfect,’ I said.
‘Well, look what the cat dragged in,’ Ashleigh said when I entered the flat the following morning. ‘Where’ve you been?’ She and Nisha were slouched on the couch in their pyjamas, eating Coco Pops.
‘I met a guy,’ I said, and went upstairs to wash all traces of Daniel off my body.
‘I meant what I said last night,’ he’d said, after making me coffee in bed that morning. ‘Every word of it.’
‘Me too,’ I said, feeling somewhat less flirtatious than I had the night before. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask for a long-distance relationship.’
‘I’m wounded,’ he said, putting a hand to his hairy chest, and I couldn’t work out if he was joking or not. ‘You can have a shower here if you like.’
‘It’s OK, I’ll go home. Thanks.’
The thing about crying in the shower is that you can pretend it’s not happening, until it turns into full-on sobbing, that is. I hadn’t felt so revolting since Justin Banks had forced himself on me in the hostel two years ago. If you didn’t want to do it, he’d said, then you shouldn’t have come back to my room.
What if Daniel had done the same? But no, when I’d said I couldn’t go through with it, he’d been quite good about the whole thing — even though we were both naked by then.
‘Sorry,’ I’d said. Daniel didn’t even call me a tease, just drew the blankets over us and said, ‘Have a good sleep.’
Once in my bedroom, I semi-dried my hair, then crawled into bed and fell into a deep sleep. When I woke, my phone told me it was 2.13 p.m. My stomach growled, reminding me that I had missed both breakfast and lunch. After clearing a message from my mother, a loving ‘Are you still alive?’, I trundled down the stairs to forage for food.
‘Hey, Ronnie,’ Nisha said. She and Skye were sitting at the table with Van, playing cards. Van was barefoot, as usual; the soles of his feet were black. ‘Heard you had a romantic rendezvous last night.’
‘You could say that.’ I took a pottle of instant noodles out of the cupboard and put the kettle on to boil.
‘A new man?’ Skye reached for a chip. ‘Tell us all about him.’
I was about to say not much to tell, when I saw movement from the hallway; Alex entering from outside.
‘Well,’ I said, turning my back on him, ‘he’s a psychologist. Just finished his PhD.’
‘Wow.’ Nisha extracted three cards from her hand and laid them face down on the table. ‘Was he good in bed?’
‘Actually, he was,’ I said, and peeled the cover off the instant noodles.
Van took a cigarette out of his top pocket and opened the window behind him. ‘What’s his name?’ he asked, at the same time as Nisha said ‘When are you seeing him again?’
‘Daniel, and not sure.’ I tipped water over the noodles, picked up a fork and took it up the stairs. A few minutes later I heard voices from the bedroom above, Ashleigh and Alex. I turned on my Bluetooth speaker, selected ‘Back to Black’ and turned it up. In the music video, Winehouse and her troupe visit her grave, a grave with a headstone that reads ‘Here lies the heart of Amy Winehouse’.
If only I’d done the same with my own heart — encased it in stone.