raised her feet off the desk and waggled her toes in the air, supporting herself entirely by stomach muscles. She had to be sober. No drunk could manage that.
‘Someone asked me about Bryony today,’ I said, when we’d exchanged the usual social pleasantries about the sort of day we’d had and how I was settling in. ‘That must have been really grim for you.’
‘Worse for her,’ said Talaith. I inclined my head. Difficult to argue with that one.
‘Do you know how she is?’ I asked.
‘Better today,’ said Talaith. ‘I visited. I think she knew me. The nurse who came in said they thought she might pull through.’
Something on Talaith’s face made me think that wasn’t necessarily good news.
‘She’s going to be very badly disfigured,’ I tried.
Talaith shook her head. ‘She won’t cope. She was gorgeous before and she couldn’t cope. Take looks away from someone like Bryony and she’ll have nothing left.’
‘Sounds a bit harsh,’ I said.
‘Realistic,’ Talaith insisted. ‘You wouldn’t believe the hours she’d spend on her appearance. Or the money, come to that. She was paranoid about wrinkles. At her age, most girls are just grateful they’ve outgrown zits.’
‘Not sure I have yet.’
‘All the photographs she had around the place were of her,’ Talaith went on. ‘Not family, mates, boyfriends, just her. And they were all those arty-farty studio shots, you know, soft focus, tons of make-up. Sometimes I’d catch her just staring at herself in the mirror.’
‘Sounds like you didn’t get on too well,’ I said.
Talaith shrugged and drank coffee. Mine was still too hot to touch. ‘She wasn’t too bad when she first got here,’ she said. ‘Bit highly strung, nervy. Easily bruised flower is what my mum would say, but to be honest, a lot of people here are.’
‘Really?’
‘God yes. When you think about the pressure we’re all under to get a place at any decent university, let alone here, it’s a wonder we’re not all basket cases by the time we arrive. Bryony was bright enough, but she was no rocket scientist. I think she’d been coached and hot-housed and pushed all her life. Not too bad, though, no worse than a lot.’
‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.
Plum-coloured hair danced around as Talaith shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t around too much. I was having a good time and it was obvious we weren’t going to be soulmates. She got a bit freaky, though, towards the end.’
Freaky? Nicole had got freaky too, according to her college-mates. Or what was the phrase they’d used? Well weird.
‘Freaky how?’ I asked.
Talaith looked as though she wasn’t sure how much to say. ‘She had bad dreams,’ she opted for.
That didn’t sound too bad, until I remembered that Nicole Holt had also had bad dreams shortly before she killed herself. ‘Naked-in-public bad dreams or blue-lizards-crawling-out-of-the-walls bad dreams?’
‘Well, that’s just it, she couldn’t really tell me. When I was here – and you’ve probably noticed, I’m not here that much – she’d wake me up moaning and screaming. One time I found her in the room here.’ She nodded towards a spot on the floor. ‘Very early in the morning. She was stark naked, huddled up, crying and yelping. Woke the whole block up. It was like one of those night terrors you hear about kids having.’
‘Was she taking something?’ I asked.
‘Well, that’s what we thought, to be honest, which is why we didn’t call an ambulance. One of the boys sleeping over was a third-year medical student. He checked her heart rate, her pupils and everything and we put her back to bed. I sat in the doorway until I could see she was more settled.’
‘And in the morning?’
‘She felt like shit, couldn’t remember a thing. That was the worst episode, but I’m not sure she was getting any real sleep towards the end. Kept talking about noise in the night, people talking, phone calls waking her up. Have to say, it never bothered me.’
‘I heard the police found evidence she’d been smoking something pretty powerful the night of the accident. Did she do that a lot?’
Talaith looked down at her toes for a second, then reached out and rubbed away an imaginary smudge. ‘Not that I saw,’ she said. ‘But she was pretty jumpy about people going into her room, so she could well have had something to hide.’
‘Who would go into her room?’ I asked.
Talaith shrugged. ‘She thought I was coming in at night, while she was asleep,’ she said. ‘She talked about how things were being moved round. How she’d go to bed leaving things in a certain way and when she woke up they were different.’
I figured I’d pushed as far as I could for now. My room-mate was a long way from stupid. I sat back in my chair, finished my coffee and stretched my arms behind my head.
‘So why does everyone but the vicar call you Tox or Toxic?’ I asked.
‘Family nickname,’ she replied. ‘My older brother gave it to me on account of my unusual flatulence as a kid.’
‘Oh?’
‘Don’t panic. I outgrew it.’
‘So what are you studying?’ I asked her, expecting something like psychology or sociology. Talaith (Tox) had shown a pretty thorough grasp of the human psyche.
‘Aeronautical engineering,’ she told me, then laughed at the look on my face. ‘I am a rocket scientist.’
I laughed and we said goodnight.
That was the night I started having dreams.
Thursday 17 January (five days earlier)
I WOKE UP late, feeling like I’d aged a decade overnight. I got out of bed and my body told me to get back in right now. Couldn’t be done. I had a lecture at nine and I’d have to hurry to make breakfast.
Tox was just getting back from the Buttery when I opened the block’s front door, wondering how long it would take me to get used to walking through freezing January air to get hold of a bowl of cornflakes. She held eye contact for just a second longer than seemed natural. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How you doing?’
‘Good,’ I replied. ‘You OK?’
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she replied, emphasizing the
Then the room went dark and the floor seemed to fall from beneath me.
*
‘You all right? Can you hear me?’
‘Can someone get a chair?’
I was on the floor of the Buttery serving area with no memory of having reached the front of the queue. A boy and a girl were crouched next to me; behind the counter several kitchen staff looked more interested than concerned. Nothing they hadn’t seen before.
A chair appeared and I let them lift me up and put me on it. ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I said to the pale-faced girl with scarlet glasses who’d helped lift me. ‘Don’t miss your breakfast. I’ll just stay here for a bit.’
