The Reunion, page 13
I push my fist so far back into my throat I almost gag. She of all people knows that photo wasn’t posed. She’s the one who took it. I picture her, stupid pink Nokia in hand, stumbling across me on her way back from Henry’s room. That phone’s memory was already jammed full of pictures of me. Of us together, getting ready, laughing it up in the bar, sprawled across the grass. I bet she couldn’t believe her luck when she saw me lying there. Her chance to get her own back came practically gift-wrapped. My resentment threatens to combust.
I slide my hand into my handbag and finger the photographs as if to check and make sure they’re still there. Do or die, as Helen would say. Freja is standing outside this cubicle, just as gift-wrapped as I was when Lyla found me on the quad. I’ve got to take the chance; I can’t be squeamish now. Anyway, she has the right to know what her husband’s been up to. I slide the photographs out.
‘Was he the ex-boyfriend she was trying to win back?’
‘He wishes.’ Lyla brushes past it. ‘He’s been in love with her since we were all freshers. Sweet, really.’
Her tone implies otherwise. How dare she patronise Nick, especially when she couldn’t get enough of him outside. I can’t believe how confident and self-assured she is, after everything she’s done. She should be behind bars, not swanning around like she still rules the college. I can’t wait to bring her down to her knees, destroy everything she’s built up.
‘It is hard to know what is going on in a marriage from the outside,’ Freja says. ‘I feel sorry for her. How hard it must be to come back and then have this happen to you.’
Second thoughts about what I’m about to do creep into my mind. I don’t want to hurt Freja. There are kinder ways to deal with what I’ve found out about Henry. I should look into them. But I don’t think I can let Henry walk away.
‘I suppose.’ I can hear the shrug in Lyla’s voice. ‘We’d better get back. Once more unto the breach and all that. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother coming back. I can see the people I want to whenever I feel like it. Frankly the rest…’ She trails off as if we’re not worth wasting the words on. ‘By the way, I would suggest going to the loo while we’re here. Once the meal has started you won’t be able to get up from the table until the head of the top table does. And Will likes to make people wait as long as possible. I believe it’s his life’s ambition to get someone to wet themselves.’
‘You and your funny Cambridge traditions,’ Freja muses. ‘Being here is like being in another world. Or another time period at least. I will take your advice, though. Give me one minute.’
I wait for the sounds of both locks clicking. Then I take a deep breath and slide off my haunches on to the floor without making a sound. I feel like a silent assassin. I smooth down the edges of the photographs and push the weight into the toes of my shoes. There’s something grubby about what I’m doing but I don’t see that I’ve got any choice. I move each foot soundlessly and hold my breath as I slide the cubicle lock. I ease the door open, praying it doesn’t creak and stand directly in front of it, eyeing the two occupied cubicles. I bend over slightly, wondering if I’ll recognise which cubicle Freja is in by the shoes. I wish it were Lyla who would be hurt by these photos, not her. I push down my doubts and picture Henry’s smug face, the way his eyes glanced over me dismissively at the hotel. I’m doing Freja a favour, even if my motives aren’t altruistic ones. And at least this way she’ll see these photos before everyone else does.
Unwittingly, Lyla helps me out.
‘Is there someone out there?’ she says imperiously from the middle cubicle.
She must have heard the lock. I freeze, photos splayed in my hand. I pull myself together and don’t say a word. She’s hardly going to come rushing out with her knickers around her ankles. I shuffle the photographs back together and run my finger along the top picture, trying to smooth out the creases. Not that it matters. Whether the corners are folded over or not, you can clearly see Henry’s face thrown back in ecstasy, his hands pressing the head of the person on their knees in front of him into his groin. That person is definitely not Freja. And that’s the least of his problems. I remind myself I’m doing her a favour. I step forward.
‘Hello?’ Lyla calls again. She sounds irritated now. ‘Is someone there?’
I don’t bother to answer. I thrust the stack of pictures under the door of the first cubicle, give them a good hard shove and mouth a silent sorry at the door. Henry’s blissful expression glistening in the overhead lighting is the last thing I see before they disappear under the cubicle door.
‘What is this?’ I hear Freja ask. ‘Lyla, did you pass me something?’
‘No, why? Did you need something?’
‘No, it’s…’ There’s a sharp inhalation of breath and then her voice falls away. I hurry over to the door, not caring that my heels are ringing out on the tiles. As the door’s sliding closed, I put my hand out to block it. I hear the sound of one of the toilets flushing as I lean back into the bathroom and flick the light switch. The room plunges into darkness and I hear Lyla shriek. She used to be afraid of the dark as a child. Sometimes knowing your enemy as well as you know yourself can only be a good thing. It’s satisfying to hear the fear in her voice.
I squash down the flickers of guilt – it’s not as if any of these people spared me an iota of compassion back then – and straighten the creases from crouching out of my dress. Then I make my way towards the Great Hall. One down, two to go.
Seventeen
Then
The sunlight is already sliding through the gap in the curtains by the time I get back to my room. My mind is too churned up to sleep so I figure I may as well check my emails. I go over to my desk. The pocked wooden surface is covered in a light dusting of face powder and last night’s bottle of Cava is open. Hardly conducive to the revision I need to do for Monday’s exam. The smell of cheap alcohol makes me gag. I’m never drinking again.
I force the sash window up and tip the residue of the wine on to the gravel below. Then I pull the window shut and close the curtains. I hurl the bottle into the wastepaper basket and fire up my laptop, pressing keys at random to unlock it and studiously avoiding looking at my screensaver.
The desktop lights up like a switchboard. MSN messenger winks at me, letting me know who is lurking online and the number of emails coming in starts rising like a death count. By the time it calms down, the figure by the Outlook envelope is 433. What the hell?
I feel a tingle of unease. I bring up my Hotmail account. It predates my college days and not many people know I have it. Even this account has thirty-six fresh emails, bolded titles indicating they haven’t been read. I scroll through the list of addresses. Some of them have the university’s familiar @cam.ac.uk address. Most do not. I don’t recognise a single name, except for the final one. Helen’s work address. Why is my sister emailing me so early?
Dread mushrooms in my stomach. I can write off the other emails as some kind of college virus; some weird chain-mail circular. But I can’t ignore Helen. She’s all I’ve got left. I lean away from the laptop as though it’s contagious. Then I click on the email.
‘CALL ME,’ it screams in bold letters. I go back over to my bed and fish my mobile out of my handbag. I haven’t looked at it since last night. There are five missed calls from Helen and a series of texts that I don’t have time to read. All before 7 a.m. I brace myself for bad news and dial her number.
She answers on the first ring. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘Seen what?’
‘The link. You need to click on the link.’
‘I didn’t even realise there was a—’
‘Check it.’
I look back at my laptop. My desktop has flicked back on to the screensaver I was trying to avoid; a picture of Henry and me by the pool in Tuscany. I can practically feel the sun on my back from looking at it. My smile is a mile wide. Lyla took it.
I click on the email and see the telltale blue link underneath the giant ‘CALL ME’.
I think about the last time Helen called me this early in the morning. To tell me that Mum had gone into hospital and this time she wouldn’t be coming out. She didn’t sound as serious then as she does now. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘You need to.’ Her voice brooks no argument. ‘I’ll wait.’
‘But…’
‘Just do it.’
My hands are quivering so much I have to click on the link twice to open it. When I do a huge image of the college grounds fills the screen, the chapel gleaming at sunrise. It’s so beautiful it could be an advert for the college magazine. Except for the sack of flesh spilling off the bottom step on to the pathway. I take in my bare chest, the empty wine bottle, one red shoe off at an angle and the golden hair spilling across the steps. I don’t need to zoom in to know it’s me this morning. I slam the laptop shut as if it’ll make the picture go away. But I know it won’t. This is bad. Worse than bad.
‘You see it?’ Helen speaks into the void.
‘I’ve seen it.’ Any hopes that I could forget last night ever happened are vanishing. Where the hell did this picture come from? Did Will take it? I think of the footsteps on the gravel crunching away. It could have been anyone. ‘Fuck.’
‘Tell me in what universe did this seem like a good idea?’
‘You don’t think I knew this was being taken?’
‘Well…’
I jab at the keyboard, trying to zoom in on the photo. ‘You can’t seriously think I’d pose topless in the middle of college?’
‘Emmy, you were the front page of that bloody charity thing last year. What am I supposed to think?’
‘I’m passed out. My eyes are closed. I can’t believe you think I would do this.’ My voice gets louder with each sentence. If my own sister doesn’t believe me, what chance have I got?
‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ Helen softens. ‘I’m just giving you a worst-case scenario. So what happened?’
‘I don’t know.’ I shake my head as if I can make it all go away. ‘I got pissed, okay? Really pissed. And I did something stupid.’
‘My sister, the master of the understatement.’
‘Shut up, shut up.’ I squeeze my eyes shut and bite down. ‘I didn’t know any of this was happening. I blacked out. I saw Henry with someone else and I threw a – anyway that doesn’t matter. I started snogging… someone. We were drinking and laughing and then it got all hazy and I – I blacked out.’
‘Did he take advantage of you?’
‘Will wouldn’t…’ I stop.
‘Will? This was Will?’ Helen sounds incredulous. Then furious. ‘He got you drunk and took advantage of you and then he took a picture to get off on it. I’ll bloody kill him.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I say, although I don’t know it wasn’t like that. I just hope it wasn’t. ‘He doesn’t even have a camera. He hates taking pictures. He’s always taking the piss out of Lyla and her camera phone.’
Things click into place so neatly I wonder I didn’t see it the second I opened the link. I think of Lyla standing there, sticky orange liquid dripping off her like she’d been slimed. The one person I know that does have a camera on their phone. And I’ve definitely given her a reason to want revenge.
‘I know who it was,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘And it’s not what you think.’
‘I don’t think you get it, Emmy.’ Helen’s got her victim-support voice on. I’ve heard her use it during multiple interviews. It’s why she’s so good at what she does. ‘Will’s taken this without your consent. God knows what happened when you blacked out. You need to report this. And –’ she pauses ‘– you need to go to an STI clinic.’
‘No.’ I shake my head furiously. I’m mortified. ‘We didn’t have sex.’
‘Don’t be naïve.’
‘I mean it. I know we didn’t have sex. I was wearing these shorts and I was pinned into – anyway…’ I’m too exhausted to go into it. ‘We didn’t have sex. Trust me.’
‘Emily, he molested you and then took a picture of you to get off on it. You need to go to the police.’
‘You aren’t listening. He didn’t take the picture.’
‘I thought you blacked out. You don’t know what happened. And you don’t have to defend him, you know. This wasn’t your fault.’
‘I’m not defending him.’ Except I am. I don’t know why. Maybe I don’t want to face up to the idea that someone I thought was a friend could do that to me.
‘Look, this is a shitshow either way. Do you want me to come up there? I can take you to the police station and you can report him for taking the picture at the very least.’
‘No.’ The last thing I want is for Helen to come here. I don’t want to go to the police. I don’t want to see anybody. I want to curl up in a ball until this goes away. Helen does not do curling up in a ball. ‘I told you, he didn’t take the picture.’
‘Then who did?’
‘Lyla,’ I whisper.
If I thought Helen’s reaction to hearing Will’s name was extreme, this time she goes nuclear.
‘Lyla. Lyla your friend. Lyla who has your back, dresses you up like a fucking doll, buys all your drinks, crashes your holiday.’ I can hear her banging the desk, the way she’s told me they do when people leave the newsroom. ‘That fucking Lyla?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why?’
‘We fell out. This is her trying to get her own back on me for something.’ Even as I’m saying it, I start to feel better. ‘I can sort it.’
‘It doesn’t look like that from where I’m sitting.’
From where she’s sitting. The bubble bursts. I’ve been so busy wondering where the picture came from that I’ve missed the main point.
‘Where are you sitting, Helen?’
‘I’m in my office.’
I knew it. You don’t get to be an associate editor on Britain’s biggest paper at Helen’s age, raking in six figures, without going into work at the crack of dawn.
‘So how have you got this?’ Horror pitches my voice higher than normal. ‘Where has it come from?’
‘It’s come from your college intranet,’ Helen says crisply. ‘One of the student chat rooms.’
‘What?’ The bottom of my stomach falls out.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got someone in IT trying to figure out the IP address so we can work out exactly where.’
‘But why would they send it to you?’ Even to my own ears, my voice sounds shrill.
‘Emily, it’s been sent to everyone. My news desk, the Daily Mail’s. The link’s gone viral.’
Even to my own ears, the sound I make next sounds like that of a dying animal. It feels like the walls around me should be caving in. I know already this is something I can never come back from.
‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to run it. And I can shut this story down before anyone else sees it. I’ve got a team on it already.’
‘It’s too late.’ The reality of it all slams into me. ‘I’m on the Internet. With my boobs hanging out. Everyone here will have seen it. Everyone.’
‘Now, Emily, don’t—’
‘My life is over.’ I hang up the phone and lurch back to the sink. I’m going to be sick. With any luck, I’ll choke on it.
* * *
The sink is filled with watery bile that reeks of spirits. I’m slumped next to it. There’s a gap between the unit it sits on and the floorboards. I picture folding myself into it and disappearing. The gutters are where I belong. My phone bleats in my hand. Helen has been calling me non-stop since I hung up on her. I don’t answer. What is there to say?
Sounds outside my room suggest the rest of the corridor is starting to wake up. There are doors slamming and snatches of laughter as people get on with their usual morning routine. I wonder how many of them have seen the picture and what they’re saying about me. Some of them will be going to the library. It’s where I should be. I’ve got an exam on Monday. But how can I think of anything like that when my life is crashing down around my ears?
My hand vibrates as a text message chimes through. Helen never gives up. I click on the envelope, even though there’s nothing she can say that will make me feel better.
Go and see college authorities.
Get the picture taken down.
We can contain this. xx
I shake my head at the phone, like she can see me. As if. This genie is well and truly out of the bottle. The emails still pinging into my inbox prove that. The administrative offices are on the other side of the quad. How am I going to get over there without being seen? Who cares if the photo has been taken down, anyway? They’ve reached the national newspapers. It’s only a matter of time before they surface somewhere else. Nothing ever dies once it’s been online. Self-loathing courses through me. There goes law school. How can you be taken seriously as a lawyer if there are pictures of you with your boobs out on the Internet?
I kick my heels against the skirting board and feel the reverberation pulse through my entire foot. Good. I’m so disgusted with myself I want to cause myself physical pain. Just to feel something other than shame. I haven’t even looked at the picture properly yet. I feel strangely carefree. I may as well. I’m at rock bottom. It can’t get any worse.
I heft myself up against the desk and flip open the silver laptop. I stare at my desk while I wait for it to connect to the intranet. Prime ministers aside, how many students have worked on it through the annals of Cambridge’s history? Have any of them ever fucked up as badly as me? I doubt it. Because any residual hope that the comments might not be as awful as I thought bleeds away the second I access the chat room.
The part of the college intranet that it’s been posted on is intended as a shared space, for students to post study items for sale or share tips about the college at large, so anyone can add a photo or a comment. Usually, a post might get three of four comments. This one has hundreds. They’re all obscene.
