All These Perfect Strangers (9 page)

‘Is he drunk?' said Rachel dismissively. ‘The movie hasn't even started yet.'

The room darkened, the projector clicked up to speed and the crowd began adjusting to the classroom dissolving into a cinema. People sniggered at the old Hollywood-style theatrics and there was a cheer from below us as the first cigarette was lit up, less than five minutes in. Eventually, the pull of the story took over, the rustling died and everyone became transfixed. Except me.

I found Rogan's profile in the gloom. I wanted to sit next to him, feel the warmth of his arm, put my head on his shoulder. But then Rachel shifted in her seat and I didn't want her to notice where I was gazing so I turned to the screen. The next time I looked back for him, he was gone.

Kesh made us wait through the credits to see if Raymond Chandler had a cameo appearance in the movie, so by the time we were standing up, the lights were on and the room was a lecture hall again.

‘Great movie,' Kesh said, as we shuffled slowly towards the exit, hemmed in by bodies.

‘Phyllis's wig was shockingly bad,' said Rachel, turning around to talk to us as she began elbowing her way through the crowd.

‘Is that all you can say about it?' Kesh followed her, smiling apologetically at people forced to a standstill.

‘It was distracting,' Rachel replied, deciding we needed to walk through a row of seats to the other side of the room, because she was sure that it would be faster. ‘The movie was good, except for her fringe.'

‘Were you thinking about her fringe when they murdered her husband?' I asked.

Rachel was too busy pushing through the crowd to answer, and we made our way out the doors, running into various members of the Smoking Aficionados lighting up their cigarettes. They were drunkenly debating where to head to next.

‘Are you going back to college?' asked Michael.

‘
We
are,' said Rachel, in a voice that didn't include him. She crossed over the road.

‘Looks that way,' I said. I waited for Michael to say something about allowing Rachel to decide everything but he stayed silent and together, with Kesh, we caught up to Rachel. She pursed her lips when she saw Michael but said nothing. We took the usual shortcut back to college, around the rear of the Law School where the path skirted the bush-land that ran along the edge of campus. With the moon coming out from behind clouds, the shadows had sharp edges while the buildings lurked behind them, insubstantial and ghostly.

‘Imagine if Walter had never met Phyllis,' Kesh said. ‘He wouldn't have become a murderer.'

‘Maybe Phyllis wouldn't have killed if she hadn't met Walter,' said Rachel.

‘But she'd already killed the first wife,' said Michael.

Rachel answered dismissively, ‘Says who? That idiot daughter? I wouldn't believe a word she says.'

We moved from the edge of the Law School to walk between a narrow corridor of demountable buildings out towards the carpark. There was no one else around.

‘It all could have been different.' Kesh spoke almost in a whisper. ‘Poor Walter.'

‘You can't blame it all on Phyllis,' said Rachel. The ‘Phyllis' echoed back to us from a nearby building. ‘She wasn't the one who strangled her husband,' she continued more softly.

‘You don't always have to be the murderer to be guilty.' As Kesh spoke, she smiled at me, probably for support, because Rachel was already snorting her disbelief.

‘Do you really think that?' I asked.

Kesh was the type of person who didn't like arguments, but here she stuck to her guns. ‘Of course.'

She stopped to face me and I opened my mouth to question this, which was why neither of us saw the girl straight away. I imagine she'd been staggering in our direction and heard our voices, but for us she suddenly materialised in the spotlight from the nearest street lamp.

She was a ghostly pale figure, her skin, hair and clothes bleached of colour from the overhead light. But, turning towards us, she began to change. From white to red. Blood was running down her cheek, neck and onto her clothes. She put her hands out and I stared at her face and her clotted blonde hair, glued to the skin. A tight curl of flesh hung limp, below the cut on the side of her head, a hole where her ear should be. The girl looked at us, opened up her mouth and screamed so loudly that when she collapsed, the noise still hung in the air around us.

*

‘It was chaos afterwards,' I say to Frank.

‘What did you do?' he asks.

I don't tell him that I'd just stood there, transfixed by the blood and thinking another person was going to die in front of me. ‘I helped Kesh,' I say. ‘She was giving her first aid. I tried to keep Alice warm. That was her name, the girl who got attacked.'

Kesh had knelt next to Alice and kept talking to her, holding one hand against Alice's head, trying to stop the bleeding. The girl was hysterical but Kesh just kept speaking to her calmly as blood poured over her hand. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I didn't move when Kesh told me to take off my jumper and lay it over Alice. Even when she shouted at me to get help, I could only stand there. I don't tell any of this to Frank. And besides, help arrived anyway.

‘One moment we were alone, and then in a blink everyone was there. People from Film Group. Students from college. Security guards. Eventually, an ambulance. Even Dale turned up.'

‘Who's Dale?'

‘A friend of mine from Law School. He's a policeman.'

The poker face disappears, Frank giving me an astonished eyebrow flick. He pretends that he does not judge his patients, but he does in hundreds of little ways. The eyebrow flick. The pressing heavily on his pen as he writes. Sometimes even an escaping sigh when he thinks I've really got things wrong.

I continue as if I haven't noticed. ‘He'd been at the library, heard the sirens and came over. Mostly he did crowd control but he insisted on walking the three of us back to college. Didn't leave until we were safely inside.'

‘Three?'

‘Rachel came back as well.'

‘You haven't really mentioned Rachel. What was she doing while you and Kesh were helping Alice?'

‘I don't know.'

·  ·  ·

Sitting in my bedroom, after my appointment with Frank, I'm writing in my diary. I have decided to do this after every session, to try and remember exactly what I say to Frank and what he says to me. Writing down how my lies turn into his truth. Actually, what I told him about Rachel was true on the night. I had barely noticed her or Michael because I was focused on Alice. Rachel eventually turned up after the ambulance had left and Dale was saying it was time to head home. She stood there not saying a word. In fact, she was silent the whole way back across campus and that was what got my attention. When I turned to her there had been a look on her face that I will never forget. She was scared and upset like the rest of us, but it was mixed with something else. Calculating is the only way I can describe it. I didn't understand it then but I worked it out later. Rachel had seen someone in the shadows. Watching. Perhaps there was a flicker of recognition because she had run towards them, chased even as the person turned and fled. It wasn't much and she wasn't certain, not then at least. I think Rachel would have said something if she knew who the attacker was that night. But then again, maybe she wouldn't have. Rachel only revealed secrets when it suited her.

Sitting on the bus, I stared out at trees which had been green a month ago, when I had first arrived on campus. Now they were changing into the deep orange-reds of autumn. I had changed as well. Arriving knowing no one, I now had a social life and acquaintances were evolving into friends. Friends that occasionally convinced you to do something you would prefer not to. I wasn't sure why we needed to visit Alice in hospital, but Kesh, and to my surprise Rachel, had insisted.

The bus trip to the hospital had been the first time any of us had been off campus since the start of the year and I watched my new home town flit past the window with detached interest. Tall grey buildings, so many pedestrians and large multi-lane roads; everything was bigger than my home town and yet it seemed so colourless compared to my life on campus. University life had become so all-consuming that there was no reason to leave it and explore what surrounded it. We ate on campus, went out on campus, got drunk on campus and even shopped on campus, not that I had much money. Sometimes it was hard to believe there was an actual world outside of the bubble I had created for myself.

I looked over at Kesh, who was studying the directions to the hospital like she was going to be examined on it and worrying aloud that we'd miss our stop. Rachel, sitting next to her, caught my gaze and pulled a face to make me laugh, then went back to staring out the window on the other side of the bus. I turned back to my window so Kesh wouldn't see my smile.

I hadn't been this happy in ages.

The bus stop was right outside the hospital. We stood outside its front doors that hummed back and forth for the continual stream of people coming in and out. Rachel decided to have a cigarette before visiting time began, and joined a huddle of grey-faced people postponing the bad news that waited inside. She got a light from one woman, prematurely wizened like the hospital equivalent of a garden gnome, who was sitting on the bench in her pyjamas, with a mobile drip as an accessory.

‘So, tell me,' said Rachel, ‘how would you choose to pay your way through university? Become a drug dealer or have a fake marriage to get government assistance?'

‘Rach,' said Kesh, glancing at the old lady.

‘Don't worry, she'll have heard worse.'

The old lady was too busy hoovering up her cigarette to say one way or the other. Kesh pretended to be distracted by the bunch of limp carnations she had bought for Alice.

‘C'mon, Kesh,' said Rachel. ‘Play along.'

‘Why those two options?' I asked.

‘Not all of us are lucky enough to get bursaries,' said Rachel.

‘Why can't I just do some waitressing?' I asked.

‘Don't be boring,' said Rachel. ‘But I guess I can add in another option. Prostitution.'

A hairless man in front of us choked on his own smoke, and Kesh decided that she would go ask the information desk what floor Alice was on.

‘What made you even think about this?' I asked.

‘Nico, Alice's boyfriend. He's the biggest dealer on campus. The Marchmain Club is just a front. It's not-so-subliminal advertising. A line of white from the guys in white. Mind you, there's a bit more competition this year. Some motorcycle gang's on the scene.'

I tried to remember back to the Marchmains' conversation the night of the bar crawl. ‘Death Riders?' I asked.

‘That's them,' she said. ‘Anyway, answer my question. What would you choose?'

‘Seriously?'

‘Yeah, seriously.'

I thought for a bit. ‘I'd have to choose prostitution, but only if it's legal.'

‘Should have guessed. Country girls and their generous ways.'

I tried not to react to her teasing. ‘To be admitted as a lawyer, you have to be of good character, so anything illegal would be even more frowned on.' I had read a bit about ‘good character' before I decided to study law. I was already pushing the boundaries on that definition, so I had to keep myself out of trouble.

‘I would have thought being of bad character would be almost compulsory,' she said, but got distracted by Kesh waving to us from the door.

‘Florence Nightingale beckons,' said Rachel. ‘We better go tend the sick.'

·  ·  ·

Alice lay under crisp white sheets in a sterile room that smelt of disinfectant. A friendly nurse had shown us in and then left to find a vase for Kesh's flowers.

We sat there watching Alice's pale face wrapped up in bandages. She was asleep.

‘Private room,' said Rachel. ‘Parents must be loaded or else this is what our university fees go towards.' She sounded resentful.

‘We shouldn't wake her,' whispered Kesh.

Background noises of people moving, machines humming and beeping and the traffic outside filtered into the room. There was the sound of laughter from the corridor and the nurse returned.

‘We'll add these to the collection.' She took the flowers from Kesh and put them in the vase. The shelf had several arrangements already, all of them looking more expensive. There was also an enormous white teddy with a hairbrush in its lap. I wondered if that was some sort of Marchmain joke.

‘Are you friends of Alice?' she asked, moving to the end of the bed to check something on the chart.

‘Um . . . no . . . not really. It's just we were the ones who found her,' said Kesh. ‘How is she going?'

‘Not bad, considering. Operation went well yesterday but she'll still be tired.'

‘Oh, maybe we should go then,' said Kesh. ‘Leave her to rest . . .'

But the nurse had moved back towards the bed. ‘Alice, Alice dear. Some visitors for you.'

Alice opened her eyes, her vision unfocused.

‘Oh good, you're awake,' said the nurse, raising her voice. ‘Look, visitors for you. Here are the girls who found you.'

Nothing close to recognition crossed Alice's face and I started to wish I hadn't come.

‘Let's get you sitting up,' said the nurse, and she found the remote, pressed a button and the top of the bed slowly began to rise. Alice's head was a delicate egg leaning back on the pillow. I wondered at the damage under the bandage, the raw skin, the stitches, the hole.

‘I'll leave you to chat,' said the nurse.

I deliberately positioned myself behind Rachel. Kesh moved towards the bed and took the spot where the nurse had been.

‘Hello, you might not remember us, but we found you . . .' Kesh spoke to her slowly and loudly as if English was Alice's second language.