Fatima shook her head.
‘No. But I’ll have some of that.’ She nodded at the bourbon, and Kate passed her the bottle. Fatima took a long swig, shuddered, and then wiped her mouth with a grin.
‘Isa?’ Thea said, still holding out the cigarette.
I didn’t smoke. I had tried it once or twice at my school in London, and hadn’t enjoyed it. And more than that, I knew that my parents would hate me smoking, particularly my father, who had smoked himself as a younger man and had periodic relapses into self-hatred and cigars.
But here … here I was someone else … someone new.
Here I was not the conscientious schoolgirl who always got her homework in on time, and did the vacuuming before she went out with her friends.
Here I could be anyone I wanted. Here I could be someone completely different.
‘Thanks,’ I said. I took the cigarette from Thea’s outstretched packet and when Kate flicked her Bic lighter, I leaned in towards the flame-filled cup made by her hands, my hair falling across her honey-brown arm like a caress, and I took a cautious puff, blinking against the sting in my eyes, and hoping I wouldn’t choke.
‘Thanks for earlier,’ Thea said. ‘The smoking I mean. You … you really saved my bacon. I don’t know what would happen if I got expelled again. I seriously think Dad might get me locked up.’
‘It was nothing.’ I breathed out, watching the thread of smoke float up, past the rooftops of the school, towards a glorious white moon, just a shade off full. ‘But listen, what did you mean, that thing you said at dinner? About the points?’
‘It’s how we keep track,’ Kate said. ‘Ten points for suckering someone completely. Five for an inspired story or for making another player corpse. Fifteen points for taking down someone really snooty. But the points don’t count for anything important, it’s just … I don’t know. To make it more fun.’
‘It’s a version of a game they used to play at one of my old schools,’ Thea said. She took a languid puff of her cigarette. ‘They did it to new girls. The idea was to get them to do something stupid – you know, tell them that it was tradition for all students to take their bath towel to evening prep to make it faster for evening showers, or persuade them first years could only walk clockwise round the quad. Pathetic stuff. Anyway, when I came here I was the new girl all over again, and I thought, fuck them. I’ll be the one who lies this time. And this time I’ll make it count. I won’t pick on the new girls, the ones who can’t defend themselves. I’ll do it to the ones in charge – the teachers, the popular girls. The ones who think they’re above it all.’ She blew out a plume of smoke. ‘Only, the first time I lied to Kate, she didn’t hit the roof and threaten to have me ostracised, she just laughed. And that’s when I knew. She wasn’t one of them.’
‘And neither are you,’ Kate said conspiratorially. ‘Right?’
‘Right,’ Fatima said. She took another swig from the bottle and grinned.
I only nodded. I brought the cigarette up to my lips and puffed again, inhaling deeply this time, feeling the smoke going down into my lungs, and filtering through my blood. My head swam, and the hand holding the cigarette shook as I put it down to rest on the meshed wire of the fire-escape platform, but I said nothing, hoping only that the others hadn’t noticed the sudden head rush.
I felt Thea watching me, and I had the strangest conviction that in spite of my composure, she was not deceived and knew exactly what was passing through my mind, and the struggle I was having to pretend that I was used to this, but she didn’t tease me about it, she just held out the bottle.
‘Drink up,’ she said, her vowels sharp as glass, and then, as if recognising her own imperiousness she grinned, softening the haughtiness of the command. ‘You need something to take the edge off the first day.’
I thought of my mother, asleep under a sheet in hospital, poison trickling into her veins, my brother alone in his new room at Charterhouse, my father driving back through the night to our empty house in London … my nerves sang, tight as violin strings, and I nodded, and reached out with my free hand.
When the whiskey hit my mouth it burned like fire, and I had to fight the urge to choke and cough, but I swallowed it down, feeling it scald my gullet all the way to my stomach, feeling the tight fibres of my core relax, just a little. Then held the bottle out towards Kate.
Kate took it and put it to her lips, and when she drank, it wasn’t a cautious swig like the ones Fatima and I had taken, but two, three full-on gulps, without pausing, or even flinching; she might have been drinking milk.
When she had finished, she wiped her mouth, her eyes glinting in the darkness.
‘Here’s to us,’ she said, holding the bottle high, the moonlight striking off the glass. ‘May we never grow old.’
THEA, OUT OF all of them, is the person I have not seen for longest, and so the image in my mind’s eye as I descend the stairs, is the girl of seventeen years ago, with her beautiful face, and her hair like a storm front coming across a sunlit sky.
As I round the corner of the rickety stairs, it’s not Thea I see first, but the watercolour that Ambrose did, in the corner of the staircase, Thea, swimming in the Reach. Ambrose has caught the sunlight on her skin and the prismed light filtering through the water, and her head is flung back, her long hair slicked to her skull making her even more arresting.
It is with that picture in my head that I turn the final curve, wondering what to expect – and Thea is waiting.
She is more beautiful than ever – I would not have thought that were possible, but it’s true. Her face is thinner, her features more defined, and her dark hair is cropped close to her skull. It’s as if her beauty has been pared back to its bones, shorn of the two-tone waterfall of silky hair, of make-up and jewellery.
She is older, more striking, even thinner – too thin. And yet she is exactly the same.
I think of Kate’s toast, that night long ago when we barely knew each other. May we never grow old …
‘Thee,’ I breathe.
And then I am holding her, and feeling her bones, and Fatima is hugging her and laughing, and Thee is saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, you two, you’re crushing me! And watch out for my boots, the fucker chucked me out of the cab halfway up the Reach. I practically had to wade here.’
She smells of cigarettes … and alcohol, its sweetness like overripe fruit heavy on her breath as she laughs into my hair, before letting us both go and walking to the table in the window.