And all the others in the queue who had seen only a fat, bespectacled shell of a person would suddenly see something else – someone who was worthy of the attention of this Goddess. I waited for that moment as a priest might await the visitation of the divine presence, tingling with anticipation. She was turning, she was coming towards me – a lazy catch of the silk scarf, a toss of it over her right shoulder. And still I waited, almost trembling now. For a moment I was so overwhelmed I actually shut my eyes, one long blink. And when I opened them she was gone. I turned, in disbelief. She had walked past me. Straight by, without even stopping, let alone saying hello.
I saw that she was turning to talk to the girl behind her: dark-haired, too thin, dowdy. Her clothes almost conspicuously unfashionable – as unstylish as Miranda’s were chic. And I understood: she already had a project, a hopeless case. This girl, whoever she was, had usurped me.
Still I had hope. I waited for her to notice me. I went to the Junior Common Room and sat at the same table and watched her at the bar, drinking her Jim Beam and Coke. I’d sit close enough that I could hear all the things she talked about. I heard once that she hated the food in the canteen – but couldn’t cook herself, so supposed she was stuck with it. So that was when I learned to cook, of course. I’d spend hours in the kitchen on her hallway, making elaborate meals as good as any you could find in Oxford’s restaurant scene. I’d wait for her to come past and loiter outside the door and say something like, ‘Oh my God, that smells incredible.’ Then I’d offer her some of it – because of course it was all for her – and we’d sit down and eat it together and we’d become the best of friends. And I could once again borrow a little of her light.
But it never happened; she never noticed me. The few times she did pass, she was too busy texting on her phone, or chatting with her awful friend, or later, chatting with her equally awful boyfriend. They deserve each other, Katie and Julien. They never deserved her.
I think of the sad, lonely girl who used to sit six seats behind her in lectures – who remembered the first day she walked into the lecture hall. As with the others, I couldn’t decide what I wanted more: to be her, or simply to be close to her. But I could see immediately that neither would be possible. Her friends were nothing like me. None of them were as pretty as she was, but they had the same gloss of cool – even awkward, lank-haired Katie, absorbing some of her allure. They would reject me, as a foreign body.
I had made no impact on her life at all, I began to realise. While she had defined the last few months for me, ever since that interview. So I began to follow her, everywhere. She would – did – call it ‘stalking’. I just thought of it as close observation. And when that didn’t satisfy, I began to take things. Sometimes items that I suspected were of sentimental value. Other times things that I knew had high significance – such as the essay she had plagiarised, or the earrings she had stolen. I wore those earrings for a week, the little painted parrots. With them hanging from my ears I felt a little more her, a little less myself, as though they contained some essence of her power, her personality. I actually smiled at baristas in coffee shops, and handed an essay in a day late, and sat in the sun beside the Isis to tan my legs. I waited for her to notice, to challenge me about them. She never did. There was a moment, in the street, when I saw her catch sight of them and stop short. Her mouth formed a small ‘o’ of surprise. Then she shook her head, as though reprimanding herself about something, and carried on her way, and I knew that she had only seen the earrings. She had not even seen me.
That’s when I realised that I could force her to pay attention. I could send the items back. I could let her know that it wasn’t just her imagination, or that she hadn’t suddenly become even more clumsy, more forgetful. Some things though, the most special things, I did not send back. They were my talismans, like the holy relics of a religion. When I carried them about with me, I felt transformed. I became her guardian angel.
She was so careless. Perhaps it was just that she had so many nice things, they didn’t mean that much to her. A cashmere cardigan casually discarded on the edge of the dance floor, or a hairband poking out of the top of the bag she left on a café table while she went to the loo, or a heeled sandal after she’d taken them off at a ball and was too drunk to remember where she left them. I was her Princess Charming. I’d return each item with a carefully thought-out note. I imagined the little frisson she would get, knowing that she had a secret admirer out there. It would be better than not having lost the thing in the first place.
I began to dress more and more like she did. I went on a diet, I had my hair straightened and dyed. Sometimes, if I caught a fleeting glimpse of myself in a shop window, it was almost like she was there instead of me. I got a Second, rather than the First my tutors had predicted. But I didn’t mind. I’d got top marks in studying, and becoming, her.
I followed her to London. I knew where they liked to drink, she and her friends, where they went out. The ironically divey bar on the high street, and then to the even more divey club on Clapham High Street, Inferno’s. And that was where, while I was sipping my lemonade at the bar, Mark approached me.
Of course I knew who he was. At first I was petrified, I thought he’d come to challenge me, ask why I was there. Then he said, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ and a whole new world of possibility opened up to me. I suddenly realised that he didn’t see me as weirdo Emmeline Padgett. He saw me as a desirable woman he’d met in a club, wearing her Miranda-esque leather skirt and silk shirt. So when he asked me my name, I said, ‘Emma.’ My favourite Austen heroine, of whom Miranda had always reminded me a little.
Something magical happened. As Emma, I became someone new. It was acting, the same beautiful dislocation from myself that I had known on stage in a school production, when I briefly managed to become a different person entirely. Emma could be capable and cool, sexy, clever, but not too much so, not the kind of clever that scared people. She would be a social creature, she would be someone without layers, without darkness. She would be everything that I was not.
And I would be legitimately close to her. Would be called, even, a friend.
That bloody photograph. I’ve thought about it before, many times. Of course I knew it was there, I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Miranda’s Facebook account. But it wasn’t my photograph, I didn’t even know the person taking it – so there was nothing I could do about it. I could have reached out, asked him to take it down, but Miranda knew him, so that might only have drawn attention to it … It might have been worse than leaving it up. I wasn’t tagged in it or anything – of course, no one would have known my name. And I looked so different. You’d have to have looked very hard, and known exactly what it was you were looking for. Why would anyone study a photograph from fourteen years ago, and some thousand photos back? I thought I had been safe. I had been safe.
‘It is you,’ she says. ‘I’ve always been good at faces.’ She shakes her head, as though she’s trying to clear it. ‘It all makes sense. But wow, you have changed. You’ve lost weight. You’ve dyed your hair. But it is definitely you.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘you’ve got it wrong. It can’t have been me. I was at Bath.’ I’ve always prided myself on my game face and my acting abilities, but suddenly everything I say sounds false, sounds like the lie it is. I shouldn’t have said that, I realise. I should have just said I didn’t know what she was talking about. In denying her accusations I have confirmed that she is right.
I make one more attempt to save myself. ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘perhaps I came up to visit a couple of weekends. I had friends at Oxford, of course.’