‘Of course.’ She smiles. ‘It’s medicinal, you know.’
She turns away and busies herself with pouring the measures, the ice.
For something to do, more than anything, I pick up the little box on the dressing table. It’s a pretty, painted thing, one of those Chinese puzzle boxes. My granny used to have one. I turn it upside down. It’s the same style, I think, as hers. I used to play with it – once she showed me the secret, the way to open it, I was obsessed. Can I still remember? I’m not sure. Tentatively, I push at one of the bottom panels; it doesn’t budge. I turn it around and do the same on the other side. It moves. I feel a sense of simple satisfaction. What’s the next bit? Oh yes, the panel on the shorter side. My fingers move of their own accord, pushing, twisting. Almost there – I just need to find that lever, pull it out. If it’s the same, it will spring open. Aha! Here it is.
‘Oh,’ Emma says, in a strange voice. She’s turned towards me, holding both whiskies. ‘Oh, no – don’t do that!’
It’s too late. The box has sprung open, disgorging its contents onto the floor with a clatter. There’s so much, it’s amazing to think it’s all been inside there, that little box.
I hear the crash of breaking glass and look up, confused. Emma has dropped both of the whiskies. Shards of broken glass scatter the floorboards, the liquid spilling around her feet.
‘Oh shit,’ I say, ‘I’m such an idiot.’
But she hardly seems to hear. She hardly seems to notice the whisky. Instead she’s on the ground, scrabbling at the fallen objects among the shards of glass, half-shielding the mess with her body.
‘Careful,’ I say, ‘You’ll—’ and then the words leave me.
She does not want me to see. But I have seen. Several items I recognise. An earring, lost at the Summer Ball some eleven years ago: the evening I finally got together with Julien. I remember him reaching up to my earlobe, giving it a tug. ‘Is this a new look? The single earring? Only you could pull it off.’ It feels now as if it happened to someone else.
A pendant. A present from Katie for my twenty-first. It had given me such a pang to lose it, because it was the one she knew I really wanted from Tiffany’s, and it must have cost her so much money.
A Parker fountain pen. I don’t recognise that. Oh no, wait, I think I do. I’d lost it somewhere, in the first few weeks of university. I wasn’t very good with my belongings, but I had been sure one morning it had been in my bag, and by the afternoon it was missing. I spent a few fruitless hours retracing my steps. Someone must have picked it up, I thought. Well: someone had.
Even my lighter – the one with the crest, lost only the other night.
‘Emma,’ I say. ‘Why do you have all this stuff? It’s all my stuff. Why is it here?’ I’m thinking of the little notes left in my cubbyhole. The odd item being returned. But not these: these were clearly considered too precious for that.
‘I don’t know,’ Emma says, not looking up at me. ‘I don’t know why all this is here. I had no idea what was in that box – it’s Mark’s.’
Set aside the fact that I can’t for a moment imagine Mark owning such a thing. I’m looking at the way she’s cradling the things to her chest – the pen, the earring, the necklace. I’m thinking of the look on her face – the sheer terror, that’s what it was – when she saw me playing with the box, just before I pulled it open. Her shouted warning. The dropped whisky glasses.
I’m thinking, too, of the other night.
‘Manda,’ she says, ‘It’s so silly. I can explain.’
‘No, Emma. I don’t think you can.’
I’m just working out what it was that unsettled me so much, in what she said the other night. When she talked about that party – the one where I got stuck in the toilet. When she claimed it must’ve happened in London, when she was there, or that one of the others must have told her. But none of them could have. None of them were there. Because it didn’t happen in London; it happened in Oxford.
It was the very first week. Now I remember it very clearly. That’s why I was so mortified by it – I needed to make a good impression on everyone – and why I never told any of the others. But Emma, somehow, was in Oxford. At that party. There is no other explanation for it.
I take my phone out of my pocket.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks, looking up from where she’s scrabbling on the floor.
‘Finding proof.’
For a moment an expression flashes across her face – something violent and urgent – and I think she’s about to lunge forward and knock the phone out of my hands. Then she seems to get herself under control.
‘What proof?’ she asks. She might be faking calm, but her voice is strange – high, shrill.
I don’t answer. I’m briefly almost grateful to Julien for insisting that the Lodge’s Wi-Fi be switched on. Still, it takes a while to open Facebook, and all the while I can see Emma, looking ready to lunge for my mobile. Eventually, when it loads, I click on ‘photos of you’. I scroll through the photographs. I can’t believe how many there are, and how many terrible ones, as I plumb the depths. After all this, when I’m starting afresh, I will have a cull. As I scroll, my face gets younger and younger – my cheeks are fuller, my eyes seem larger. I can’t believe how much I’ve changed; I didn’t realise. How much all of us have changed. There is Julien, the beautiful boy I fell in love with, the boy who became the man who has just ruined my life. But I don’t have time for that. I’m looking for something else. I must have swiped through hundreds of photographs, half of them failing to load. It doesn’t matter. It’s further back than this. And then, finally, I’m in the right territory. First year freshers’ week. A week of strangers, of trying to pick among them the people who might be your friends. Every face unknown, so that it would be difficult to remember any one face in particular. This is how she has hidden from me. I’m suddenly certain of what I’m going to find. And there, there it is: a photograph from that very party, I’m certain now, the one where I got stuck in the loo. A sea of milling almost-adults. Terrible quality, but it will do. Because there is a face among them, looking right at me, that I would never have noticed had Emma not given me her prompt. Mousey-haired, rounder-cheeked, the features less decided, the eyes obscured by Harry Potter glasses. Much younger looking, much dowdier looking. I look up and compare her to the woman in front of me. And despite all of the changes, it is her, it is unmistakably her.
‘It wasn’t Mark,’ I say. ‘It was you, Emma. You took these things.’ I can’t work out how, but this much is clear. ‘My lighter,’ I say, seeing it gleam in her fingers. ‘Give me my fucking lighter, Emma.’
She hands it to me, wordlessly. Now she is looking at me – intently, as though trying to read my mind, work out what I’m going to do next.
Again, I think, I’d quite like to be cool in this moment. To light a fag with this very lighter, and sit back, and ask her to explain it all. How she, Emma, Mark’s drippy little girlfriend, who I’ve only known for three years, came to be my stalker. But I can’t. Two revelations in one night. It’s too much. I feel, suddenly, like everything I thought I knew has been ripped from under me.
EMMA
So. Miranda and I do go back quite a way, after all. No, not as long as Miranda and Katie, her utterly false ‘best’ friend. But further than Julien or Mark, certainly. To explain, I have to take you back more than a decade.