The Guilty Friend. Joanne Sefton

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Chapter 3

       Misty

       1987

      Misty blinked and blinked again. She’d waited for this moment for two years, perhaps for her whole life. After pouring so much energy into hoping and fantasising and anticipating she was finally here. In her tiny bedroom at home, or out walking through the scrubby fields with Mack, her dog, there had been no space in her imaginings for even the slightest whisper of doubt. Only now, sitting on a narrow lumpy bed, next to the suitcase and two cardboard boxes that contained her possessions, did the doubt start to creep in.

      Her mum, Elspeth, had driven her down in their battered Mini Metro; she didn’t like to drive that sort of distance but Misty’s dad couldn’t get time off to come with them. They’d sucked Polos and alternated Ray Stevens and The Cure in the cassette player because the radio picked up nothing but static. Normally, she felt her irritation with her mum’s jangly American country tapes was entirely justified. After all, she had Johnny Mathis to thank for her name, which had caused enough bother through high school. If there were any other girls christened Misty in Rochdale in 1968, she’d yet to meet one. Today, though, even the music couldn’t spoil her good mood. Elspeth was in high spirits too – it felt like a holiday.

      As they got closer to Cambridge, though, Elspeth’s chatter had died away. Perhaps she was concentrating on the unfamiliar roads but Misty sensed it was more than that. Her mother, the most down-to-earth, suffer-no-fools person she knew, was daunted. Was it just that Misty was flying the nest? That tonight Elspeth would drive back by herself to a house from which her eldest child was missing? Or was it just the thought of Cambridge and everything that came with it?

      Misty was excited, not daunted. When they arrived, she was the one who announced herself to the porters and collected her room key, whilst her mum waited in the car, fretting about a parking ticket and who knew what else. With a temporary college permit in the windscreen, Elspeth agreed to come inside for just long enough to see Misty’s room and have a cup of tea. They’d picked up some supplies at a petrol station on the A14: milk, bread, teabags, a tub of margarine and two tins of ham. Misty put the kettle on and opened the cupboards. One had some breakfast cereal and a bottle of red wine in it but the others were empty. There was one carton of milk in the fridge. So, either Misty was the second to arrive, or else the others were even more cavalier about sustenance than Miss Muesli and herself.

      She had the two mugs of tea in her hands when the kitchen door swung open towards her.

      ‘Oh. Hello. I thought I heard someone else. I’ve been waiting all day. I’m Alexandra Penrith.’

      The girl was half a head taller than Misty, slim, with lustrous dark curls and the poshest accent Misty had ever heard. She stuck out her hand in a rather formal way, but her smile was broad and genuine.

      Misty shrugged, glancing down at the mugs she was holding and they both giggled. Alexandra dropped her hand and turned to hold the door open instead.

      ‘I’m Misty Jardine. My mum’s just leaving,’ said Misty. ‘I mean, once she’s had this.’ She nodded down at the tea. ‘What room number are you?’

      ‘Six. And you?’

      ‘Two.’

      ‘Great. Come and find me when you’re ready. I’ll be unpacking and accosting random strangers.’

      You could arrive on Friday or Saturday. It turned out that only three girls from the corridor of eight were there the first night. The third looked around fourteen, whispered that she was called Emma and was studying maths and locked herself in her room. Misty and Alexandra – who said she preferred to be called Alex – chatted awkwardly in Alex’s room. She’d brought actual furniture – a desk with elaborate carving that looked Indian to Misty’s untrained eye and a pair of woven cane chairs, laden with sari-silk cushions. The bed itself looked the same as Misty’s, but it was piled with more of the jewel-coloured cushions and swathed in an intricately embroidered throw.

      ‘Wow, this is incredible,’ said Misty, forgetting to try to be cool.

      ‘Well, I just couldn’t tolerate the awful stuff here, so Daddy arranged with the porters to stash it in storage. It’s so important to be able to express yourself, isn’t it? They don’t know about the picture hooks yet –’ she gestured towards a couple of frames hanging above the bed; Misty definitely remembered there being something in the information leaflet about it being expressly forbidden to attach anything other than Blu-Tack to the wall ‘– but I’m sure I can talk them round.’

      Misty thought of the two posters waiting to go up in her own room. One was Morrissey, the other a cute Labrador puppy. Both were a bit tatty having been up in her room at home. Would they count as self-expression in Alex’s book?

      They missed the canteen – which Alex informed her was called the buttery – which was on reduced opening hours because it wasn’t yet officially term time.

      ‘Well, we could get something in town?’ suggested Alex, as they stood in a drizzly quad in front of the locked buttery door, clutching the mimeographed maps of college they had been given on arrival.

      Misty had £22 in her purse. It had to last her until she sorted out a bank account and her grant came through. College food would go on a college bill that she could pay off at the end of term. She might not have got her head round the terminology but she was straight on that much. She thought of the tinned ham and loaf of bread in the cupboard. It wasn’t appealing, but she wouldn’t starve. Would Alex despise her if she suggested a ham sandwich?

      ‘Are you okay?’

      Before she could answer, they were interrupted by a cough behind them.

      ‘Is the buttery closed, then?’

      They turned to see another girl. Like Alex, she was wearing stonewashed jeans, pearl studs in her ears and a blazer-type jacket. Misty couldn’t decide whether to feel insecure, but settled on mildly amused.

      ‘I’m Karen Cooper. I just arrived today.’

СКАЧАТЬ