Oxford interviews. Autumn. The Academic interview I’d be fine on, I knew. No worries there. I knew the slight concern, held by my parents, certainly, was the Personal interview. What if they had in some way got hold of my record: the trouble at my previous school? If so, I had been drilled. It had all been a terrible misunderstanding, you know how teenage girls can be – et cetera. No mention of the psychiatrist (it wasn’t their right to ask about that, apparently), or his diagnosis.
Would they, essentially, see past the brilliance of my academic record, and see the real me (whoever that was)? And would that be a problem? Because, in actual fact, you don’t get seven As at A level without having certain – one could say – obsessive qualities. The academic output was the positive manifestation of it. The other thing, with that stupid girl, was the negative.
When it came to the dreaded interview I got away with it. I got the ‘interests’ question, of course. As I answered – tennis, French cinema of the Nouvelle Vague period (all borrowed from interviews with various film directors and learned, rote), cooking – I wondered what they would make of it if I told them my real hobbies. Observation, close study, collection. The only issue was that the things I had liked to collect were rather unusual. I liked to collect personalities.
Here’s the thing. I have never really felt like a real person. Not in the proper sense, the way other people seemed to feel it. From quite a young age I had discovered I was very good at certain things – particularly learning, academia. But a machine can learn. What I seemed to lack was a personality of my own. I lacked any sense of ‘me’. But that’s OK. What you don’t have you can always borrow, or steal.
So I was always on the lookout for particularly colourful personalities, like a parasite searching for a host. There was the girl at the first school, which ended in a rather unfortunate way when she told her parents that I followed her home from school and sometimes sat in the treehouse opposite her window, watching her. This was rather unfair. I was only doing my homework, just like any other child. I could do all of my real homework on the short bus journey from school. The real swotting for me was in learning her habits, studying the way she was when she was on her own, what her bedroom looked like, what music she listened to. Then I would go home and emulate these tastes and habits: buy the same CDs, the same clothes.
I was moved to a different school, after the meeting with the headmistress. Then another, when the same thing happened at the next. ‘Oh,’ I said, blithely, in the interview, ‘my father’s job changed a lot, so we moved around the country following him.’ She gave me an unconvinced look at this, but – as I suspected – my academic performance far outweighed any other concerns.
It was in the Junior Common Room of the college that I met Miranda. She seemed lit up from within. Had absolute confidence in who she was. She drank a beer with some of the guys, and played pool with them, and then seemed to get bored – perhaps it was the slavish adoration with which they were looking at her. Then her gaze landed, incredibly, on me.
She came and sat down next to me in the empty seat across the table. ‘Hi. How did your interviews go?’
I was so stunned I couldn’t speak for a second. Looking at her was like looking directly at the sun. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful. It was that she was so very much herself – complex and contradictory and multi-layered, as I would learn – but absolutely, uniquely, triumphantly her own person.
‘I have the same feeling,’ she says. ‘I mean, I think the first went really well, of course’ – I remember the fabulous arrogance of that, even now – ‘but I’m not at all sure about the second one. There were some horrible questions about the use of metaphors in Donne’s Holy Sonnets and I totally froze up – I don’t think they seemed very impressed. But maybe I winged it. That happens sometimes, doesn’t it?’
I nodded, though I wasn’t even really sure of the question. The question, really, was immaterial. Because I would have found it absolutely impossible not to agree with her.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I really need a drink. No more beer for me; I want something stronger. Do you want a drink?’
I nodded, still numb with blissful surprise. We had another Academic interview in the morning, but that seemed completely meaningless now.
She bought us two Jim Beam and Cokes, which at the time seemed the most sophisticated thing I had ever experienced: the sly, sticky warmth of the bourbon beneath all the sweetness of the soda. She drank hers with a straw, and somehow made it look cool. I kept waiting for her to really see me, or rather the lack of me, the thing that was missing; the void inside. She’d be appalled, she’d be disgusted – she’d realise her mistake and go off with any of the other bright young things who were so much more her type. But it never happened. What I hadn’t come to appreciate then was that Miranda is – was – someone who spends so much time negotiating the various disparate parts of herself that she doesn’t have very much time to properly see anyone else. To notice any discrepancy, or lack. And that has always suited me just fine. In addition to this, Miranda likes a project. She doesn’t like to go for the expected thing. She has eclectic taste, is a collector in her own way. Before anything else we had that much in common.
It didn’t seem to matter to her what I said – or indeed what I didn’t say, as I sat there, dazzled. She was happy to have a mirror, a sounding board.
Already she made all the others, the ones before, the causes of so much heartache and shame, seem like paper cut-outs of people. Here, finally, was something to emulate. Here was a proper project, worthy of all my resources and attention. Or, as other people, normal people, might have put it: here was someone who could be my friend.
We went dancing in a club she’d learned about from a third year who was meant to be supervising us, but spent most of the evening trying to chat her up. As soon as we got in there, she shook him off with an ‘as if’ roll of her eyes, and grabbed my hand. We danced on a little retro multicoloured dance floor, sticky with spilled drinks. For once I wasn’t aware of my fatness, or my weirdness, or – briefly, joyously – the absence inside, because I was borrowing from her light: I was like the moon to her sun, and it was meant to be.
I didn’t believe I would see her again when I got accepted to Oxford. It would be too perfect, and I wasn’t used to the things I wanted happening. Besides, for all her brilliance, I wasn’t sure that she would have been bright enough – in the Oxford sense – to have got in. But there she was, at registration. My Best Friend To Be. My inspiration, my living mood board. The fount from which I might draw in the hopes of constructing a personality of my own.
I stood in line and waited for her to notice me. The moment would come, of course, I just had to be patient. It was impossible that she wouldn’t notice me, we’d had that electric connection. Best friends at first sight. I imagined precisely how it would happen. She’d slouch along the row of freshers, all so raw and shufflingly awkward, already looking like she’d been there for years, like she owned the place. Her hair a gleaming sheet of gold, her leather bag of books pre-battered, her silk scarf trailing almost to the ground. Dazzling. And then she’d stop and do a double take when she saw me. ‘It’s you! Thank God, I haven’t met anyone else I’ve wanted to chat to. Fancy going for a coffee?’