They conclude that they’ve already met and the conversation becomes diluted with other people and other topics and soon Sophie is no longer talking to Liam at all; he’s been absorbed into another group. She finds herself alone and walks across the lawn towards the bar inside the marquee. Here she gets herself a second glass of wine and carries it back outdoors. She can just see Shaun across the lawn, deep in conversation with Peter Doody and Kerryanne Mulligan.
Then she sees Liam walking across the lawn towards the main hall and, on a whim, she follows him. He carries on walking though the hall and out of the doors on the other side. Then he crosses the back courtyard and heads towards the accommodation block. She sees him tapping the security code into the panel and, with a buzz and a click, he’s gone. She sits on a bench in the courtyard, glad of a moment to herself before going back into the fray. The wine is warm but she drinks it anyway. The evening sun is strobing through ribbons of purple cloud and she turns her face into it, her eyes closed, listening to the distant din of chatter and laughter.
She shudders slightly to right herself, and then she opens her eyes and, as she does so, she sees a pair of tanned feet overhanging the bars of a balcony on the third floor of the residential block, the edge of a paperback book, a cold beer sitting on a table.
It’s Liam.
For a moment she toys with the idea of calling up to him, of inviting herself in, of drinking a cold beer with him and asking him what he thinks really happened at Dark Place that night.
She shakes her head to herself; then she heads back through the cloisters to the party.
17
January 2017
Zach spends the night with Tallulah on New Year’s Eve and never goes home. When Tallulah wakes up for her first day back at college five days later, she awakes in a bed shared with her baby and her baby’s father. She and Zach haven’t had sex again since New Year’s Eve, but they sit side by side on the sofa at night and they kiss each other goodbye and hello and they hug and they touch.
Tallulah’s mum is pleased. Tallulah knows that she’s always felt guilty for marrying a man who wasn’t cut out for the hurly-burly of family life, who ran back home to his mum the minute she said she needed him and left them all behind without a glimmer of remorse. And Tallulah can tell that she is pleased that Tallulah and Zach are going to make a go of being a proper familyand that Zach is going to relieve some of the pressure on Tallulah as a single parent.
Tallulah kisses her mum goodbye on her first day back at college. In the front garden she looks up and sees Zach and Noah at her bedroom window, Zach holding Noah’s tiny hand up and waving it for him. She sees him mouthing, ‘Bye-bye, Mummy. Bye-bye, Mummy.’ She blows them kisses and then walks away.
At the bus stop she finds herself looking for Scarlett. Scarlett never appeared at the bus stop again after that first time and Tallulah didn’t see her to talk to after the Christmas party but for some reason Scarlett has left an imprint on Tallulah’s psyche. Their two interludes feel important to Tallulah, and she feels like something is meant to happen now, a third act, a conclusion of some sort. The bus arrives; she takes one last look across the common, towards Maypole House, sighs and gets on board.
After lunch that day Tallulah decides to visit the art block. She’s never been in the art block before; it’s a squat square building in the middle of campus, kind of ugly. The corridors inside are decorated with rows of slightly alarming self-portraits. She finds a door towards the end of a corridor that says Year One Fine Arts and peers through the window. The room is empty but locked. She passes through more corridors lined with more art and then finds one that is labelled as ‘Scarlett Jacques Y1’.
Tallulah stops. It’s a portrait of Scarlett in a crop T-shirt and oversized shorts draped inside a huge red velvet throne-like chair, wearing a tiara at an angle, high-top trainers, her hair scraped back, hoop earrings and wrists layered with rubber bands. At her feet sits a gigantic brown dog, almost the same size as Scarlett,also wearing a crown. Both of them stare directly at the viewer, the dog looking proud, Scarlett looking challenging.
It’s an arresting image; it draws the eye first to Scarlett and then to every other detail: a pile of silver and cream chargers on the floor catching the light, a small window behind with the suggestion of a face, staring as though watching her. There’s a gun on a table, an Apple phone, a dish with a fresh red heart in it that looks as if it’s still beating. On another table there’s a cake with a slice missing and the knife used to cut it has a drop of blood on it.
Tallulah has no idea what any of it means, but it’s beautifully painted, all in sun-bleached shades of pink and green and pale grey with shocking slashes and spots of red. She finds herself mouthing ‘Wow’ to herself.
‘Amazing, isn’t she?’
She turns at the voice behind her. She’d thought she was alone. It’s one of Scarlett’s gang; she can’t remember her name.
‘Yes, I mean, I haven’t seen her work before, but this painting is incredible.’
‘You know she left?’
Tallulah blinks, feels a kind of tightness in her stomach. ‘What?’
‘Scar’s gone. She’s not coming back.’ The girl makes a kind of popping noise with her mouth, as though Scarlett were a bubble that had burst.
‘But why?’
‘No one really knows. I keep messaging her and she keeps saying she’ll tell me when she can, but she can’t tell me right now, so, yeah …’
Tallulah turns back to the painting. ‘What a waste,’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ the girl agrees. ‘She’s a fucking idiot. All that work and all that talent and she’s just walked away from it. But there you go. That’s Scar. An enigma. Wrapped in a blanket.’ She smiles. ‘You’re Tallulah from the bus, aren’t you?’
Tallulah nods.
‘Mimi. We met at the Christmas party.’
‘Oh, yeah. Hi.’
Mimi cocks her head at Tallulah and says, ‘Are you doing art?’