So when the pills inevitably came out, I took one. The euphoria hit me shortly after, I felt invincible. Freed from the prison of being me: Miranda’s less fun, less cool friend.
A lot of what happened after seemed to take place in a liberated, not-quite-real place. I remember the swimming pool, jumping into it fully clothed; someone eventually pulling me out, telling me I’d get cold, even though I kept insisting I just wanted to ‘stay in the water for ever’. I remember loving all of it, all of them. How had I not realised how much I loved them?
Later I remember a man, and I remember the sex in the dark poolhouse, long after everyone else seemed to have disappeared to bed. Almost total blackness, which made all the sensations only the more intense. I was driving it, I was in charge of it. When I came, I felt for a moment as though my whole body had shattered into stars. I was at once the most myself I had ever felt … and like someone else completely.
The next morning I couldn’t believe it. That daring, sexual person couldn’t have been me, could it? If Miranda had been there I might have asked her: how much of what I thought I remembered had been real? Had she seen me go off with the man to the poolhouse? Had that actually happened? Or had it, in fact, just been a particularly lurid hallucination? I couldn’t bring myself to ask Samira, for fear that she’d laugh at me and tell me to grow up.
It must have happened, I decided: there was a telltale ache between my legs that said it had. I was convinced I could smell him on me. But no one said anything the next day. I checked for any signs of joking or bravado among the boys, but there was nothing.
Luckily, there are several of us abstaining this evening. Bo – of course, Samira, Nick in support of Bo. I could see how unimpressed Nick was by this addition to the evening in his glare when Miranda proffered the bag to him, practically reaching across Bo to do so. She seemed utterly oblivious, but then she’s always given a good impression of shrugging off things, as though nothing can touch her. As her oldest friend, I know that this isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes it takes no small effort to appear so carefree.
Now she’s over by the record player in the corner of the Lodge’s living room, flicking through a shelf full of old records. Eventually, with a cry of victory, she finds the one she wants – HITS: STUDIO 54 – and places it on the turntable. As the music spills out, some husky-voiced songstress, Miranda goes to the middle of the room and begins to dance. She is completely at ease, dancing like this with the rest of us watching, sitting still. She’s so in tune with her body. I have always longed for that lack of inhibition. Because, really, isn’t that what dancing is? It isn’t about being particularly talented: not unless it’s something you do professionally. It’s more an ability to shake off your own self-consciousness. I have never been able to do that. It’s not really something you can learn to do. You either have it, or you don’t.
I remember our teenage years, blagging our way into nightclubs. Though Miranda didn’t have to blag. They always let her in on first sight: she was fifteen going on twenty-five, and already gorgeous. In hindsight, when I think about the looks men would give her, the comments they made to her, it turns the stomach. I’d creep in behind her, hoping no one would notice me. I remember dancing beside her, warmed by the vodka stolen from my mum’s limitless supplies. Copying Miranda’s moves as faithfully as her own shadow; because I have always been that: her shadow. The darkness to her flaming torch. Feeling almost as though I had shaken off my awkwardness.
Miranda is the sort of friend who makes you bold. Who can make you feel six foot tall, almost as radiant as she is, as though you are borrowing a little of her light. Or she can make you feel like shit. Depending on her whim. Sometimes on those nights out she would compliment me on how I looked – always in something borrowed from her already extensive wardrobe, baggy in the bust and hip region, a bit like a girl playing woman in her mother’s clothes. Other times she would say something like: ‘Oh God, Katie, do you know how serious you look when you’re dancing?’ then an impression – squint-eyed, grim-mouthed, stiff-hipped – ‘You look like you have the worst case of constipation. I’m pretty sure that isn’t how Sean Paul intended people to dance to this.’ I would feel all my newfound confidence desert me – I would feel worse than ever. I would take a big long swig of whatever vodka-and-something drink I was holding, until I felt the slide, the shift. And I’d understand then why my mother seemed to use alcohol like medicine.
As ever, it is almost impossible not to watch Miranda dance. She is so graceful, so fluid, you could assume that she has had some kind of special training. The only one of us who is not watching her, actually, is Julien. He’s looking out of the window at the blackness, frowning, apparently lost in thought.
Miranda gestures to us all to join her. She grabs Mark’s hand, pulls him to his feet. At first he looks lumpish and awkward in the middle of the carpet. But as she fits her body to his they begin to move together, and with her he acquires a rhythm, sinuous, even sensual, that he would never find on his own. It seems to be infectious, the thrum of the music exerting a pull over everyone. Samira gets up – she’s always been a fantastic dancer. She has that looseness, that sense of ease in her own skin. Giles grabs Emma’s hand, pulls her to her feet and dances her around the room. Giles has no rhythm at all, but he clearly doesn’t care – he’s like an overgrown, drunken schoolboy. They cannon into one of the deer heads on the wall, knocking it askew. Emma tries to right it, with an anxious grin, but as she does Giles seizes her around the waist and turns her upside down.
‘Giles!’ Samira shouts, but she’s laughing, and she turns away from them with her eyes closed, lost to the music. Emma’s laughing, too – though she’s perhaps the only self-conscious one of all of them, tugging her top down as Giles sets her back on her feet. Now Nick’s standing, too, putting his hand out for Bo, and they’re arguably even better dancers than Miranda, they move so well together.
As ever, though, it is Miranda the eye is drawn back to: the sun around which all the others are orbiting planets. Mark is in his element, leaning into the grooves of her body as they dance. Never has his crush on her been more blatant. If you can call it a crush. Sometimes I have wondered if it might be something more.
When Miranda and Julien started going out, I remember thinking it was a bit odd that his mate seemed to be acting as a kind of courier between them, ferrying messages back and forth. Mark would arrive at our college, asking to speak with her. He had something to tell her from Julien. Julien, like a king, sending out an envoy, wanted to invite her to his rugby game that weekend. Or to accompany him to some party. It was pathetic, I thought. It couldn’t really be a friendship at all, more like a form of hero worship, or slavery. Who did Julien think he was? And why did Mark put up with it? True, like Miranda, Julien has the sort of looks – and the kind of charisma – that are prone to attracting acolytes. But Mark wasn’t unattractive, or awkward and shy. He didn’t need to stoop so low. And it was bizarre. We all had mobiles by then. Julien could simply have sent a text.
But then I started to notice how Mark looked at her, I began to suspect that those visits weren’t at Julien’s instigation, after all. Mark had volunteered. He began turning up not just outside, on the quad below our block, but actually in our very corridor. Someone had let him in, he’d say, when I asked how he’d got past the door code.
Once I ran into him sitting just outside Miranda’s room.
‘She’s out,’ I said. ‘She has a meeting with her tutor until four.’ It would be an hour and a half until she came back.