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​

The Leavers’ Ball had been in high summer, a week after our exams were finally over. Pregnant with nervous anticipation of our results, we’d rushed back together one last time for the drinks reception in a walled courtyard garden which the school had rented specially nearby, and which had once been used to grow physic herbs for the ineffectual tending of medieval noblemen. Vee’s occasional boyfriend, Ethan, texted me to ask where she was, but Vee had already warned me she would bunk off this part because she hated group photos. She often asked me to provide her alibis, but stopped after I said she was with me when Ethan asked, even though she had been with him at that very moment. They had both found that hilarious.

 

The others were still dissecting the History final and whether they had understood the questions correctly, for all the good that did at this stage. We were under strict instruction not to pick anything or ash on the plants. As soon as the photos had been taken, we were swiftly shepherded out of the garden by the games mistress, barking that we were going to be late and chivvying us down the few winding streets to the hotel. The Boyfriends were waiting in a big gaggle by the stairs, and each of them claimed one of my schoolfellows, like crocodiles picking off gazelles in a nature documentary. Celie, Reiko, and Susanna had all paired off, and I waited to see whether Ethan would make an appearance, but suddenly she was there, without him, in a long dark green dress that highlighted her pallor and gave her blue eyes a seaglass tint.

 

There was a seating plan for dinner arranged by the Ball Committee, who were in another clique entirely and had scant knowledge of our social intricacies. I was placed next to Reiko’s boyfriend, who was pleasant enough but only interested in Xenophon and probably going straight into officer training after university. It was so loud that I couldn’t talk to Reiko around him at all, and Vee was all the way across the circular table, sitting between two girls I barely knew, looking mutinous. The wine was extremely limited, which did not help when they opened the dance floor after dinner. My schoolmates had added so many joke tracks to the playlist suggestions, including the entire discography of Eminem and imagined anthems like “Mr Jessop is a Wanker” by All of Us, that the staff had taken back control and put on a load of old top 40 songs instead in frustration. I left the ballroom for a breather on the stairs and saw Vee, perched in the middle of the burgundy carpet a little way up the next curving flight of stairs, staring intently at nothing.

 

I climbed up to sit beside her and asked whether something was the matter. She snapped that it wasn’t and passed me her steel hipflask, lipstick clotted around the opening. Eventually, she said, “It’s just relentless.”

 

“What is?” I thought she might mean the bad music, but I wasn’t sure.

 

She looked even more irritated with me, began curling her dark hair up into a chignon to alleviate the heat of the night, answered, “Them. In there. All plotting their next moves, sizing each other up, who to keep and who to bin. I don’t want it.”

 

“What do you want instead?”

 

“I don’t know. I want to go away for a while, but anywhere I travel to, people like that will be there as well, and I’ll just be another one of them, a clueless white girl trying to find herself.” She freed a hairpin from her clutch to try and make the chignon stay.

 

I put my hand on her knee to offer comfort and said, “You’re not like them, you know that.”

 

And she looked at me with fury in her eyes, and then for a moment her mouth closed over mine, her tongue tasting like coconut rum and menthol cigarettes; she was pressing me over backwards into the carpet. I dropped my sequinned clutch and fell with her, letting her bear down, and it was what I had always wanted, even before I knew that I wanted it, but then we heard footsteps above us and an older woman’s voice saying, “Excuse me? Oh really, how disgraceful,” before Vee grabbed her things and fled.

 

I shifted over to the side of the stairs, very deliberately not looking up at the woman as I gathered up my phone, keys, and makeup from where everything had fallen. I didn’t want to know what Vee would invent about what had just happened, so I simply went home instead.

 

Vee went to university a year later than the rest of us, after resitting her exams and moving to a different city. She stopped replying to texts, but she spotted me on the bus once when I was visiting home and ran after it, then just stared at me through the closed bus side doors when it paused in traffic, and I didn’t beckon for her to come on board. I deleted her off all my social media and blocked her number. When Ethan messaged to tell me she was dead, I thought it must be her messaging me from his account. I’d never been able to find her obituary, but perhaps they don’t publish those for ordinary people anymore.

​

–––

​

I kissed Mara quickly and excused myself, opening the same heavy door while tensing for it to shriek again, which of course it did.

 

The corridor was longer than I thought, veering off to the left and curving round as if I were tunnelling into the core of the hotel. The wooden panelling stretched up to meet the dark green anaglypta ceiling, and behind some of the doors I passed, other functions seemed to be taking place. I heard cheering to my left, the stamping of feet as if in a ritualised dance, live classical music which I’m fairly certain was Saint-Saëns, and a curious muffled sound, not so unlike choking, throaty sobs, which I concluded must be a malfunctioning old pipe. Had I walked down this way before? In a building like this, every floor would look the same, and I hadn’t been paying close attention to the paintings last time I was here. I noted a small oil painting depicting a bourgeois Frenchwoman in a plain blue dress, simulating her delight over a caged tropical bird, and hoped I’d remember it if I became disoriented.

 

The corridor grew quieter as I kept walking, even though there were still doors on either side. I thought it might also be getting narrower, but the building's curve made it hard to gauge from just looking back. The air smelt of old cooking oil, warm dust, and sweat, all the ephemera of bygone celebrations. The walls inched closer until I could touch both of them at the same time without stretching out my arms, and closer still until they were just shoulder-width apart, the last light flickering and buzzing in its sconce quite some way back. A single door stood before me, with a faint silhouette of a woman painted onto its surface.

 

I held my breath as I pushed, opening it cautiously, as if that would help. For some reason, there was a short additional corridor with sickly pale-pink walls that ended at a heavy oak door. Beyond this was yet another anteroom, with a high ceiling and a square footprint, as if I were inside a dimly lit lift shaft, except that each wall was identical, covered in a shimmering dark red lacquer that felt unexpectedly warm to the touch. I pushed at one wall impatiently, but it didn’t move. The next was indeed a door and opened onto a black-tiled powder room with a circular scarlet sofa that rose to a peak in the centre and a curious ornamental pool at one end, also black and hard to guess the depth of.

 

I let that door fall back and shouldered open the next one onto a room containing an ordinary, if old-fashioned pair of stalls with wooden seats and metal pull-chains, the floor carpeted with an ugly monochrome jacquard pattern. I finally relieved myself, irritated that it had taken so long to find these. I must have missed the sign for a more accessible ladies’ room quite some way back. I checked my phone to see whether Mara had messaged me, but there was no signal. Perhaps I had gone deeper into the hotel than I’d realised. I knew some conference rooms were treated with special paint to minimise the risk of distraction or the betrayal of secrets.

 

Emerging from the stall, I found there was no sink, and, of course, my handbag was far too small to hold sanitiser. I felt faint and overheated in that airless space; the complex jacquard pattern grinned mockingly from underfoot. I pulled open the door and stepped back into the shaft, pushing at the door I thought led to the powder room. It didn’t give, and I decided I must have tried to open the dummy door, wheeled around to press the surface opposite, which also wouldn’t open. I shoved it more forcefully, without success, then pushed at the next one to the right, growing increasingly confused. I gave up and wheeled back to where I thought I’d come, but that was blank and solid. They all looked exactly the same. I tried knocking, but couldn’t hear which ones were hollow. I kept turning this way and that, pushing, dizzying myself with the effort, and feeling even more frantic and nauseous as I turned, stuck where nobody could find me or hear my panic. The space was too tight to kick properly, but I still tried, braced between four unmoving walls. I spun all the way round again and slapped both hands against one of them in frustration, only to tumble through into the powder room at last.

 

Vee said, “I hope you’re going to wash those before you do your makeup again.” She was sitting on the sofa, in the same dark green dress she’d worn to the Leavers’ Ball, looking amused by my fear and exasperation.

 

I was so startled by her presence that all I could think to do was obey. I went to run my hands under the tap, lathering them with a strangely odourless soap in the deep black sink and hoping the cold water would restore some reality. I wanted to watch Vee over my shoulder, but there was no mirror in this room. When I turned back, she was still sitting there, smirking. I couldn’t make out whether her face had aged or not. It seemed to shift every so often, very slowly. She asked me, “Having fun?”

 

I found myself answering mechanically, “Yes, and you?”

 

This seemed to really tickle her, “Oh, great fun, I’m loving it.” She seemed to glint slightly, as if she were an especially detailed reflection being projected into the room from somewhere just beyond, then said, “Celie doesn’t want you here, you know.”

 

“That was already quite apparent to me, but thanks for the reminder.”

 

I wanted to point out that if anyone wasn’t wanted here, it was her; the others had hated her deep down, too. I wanted to embrace her one last time and say goodbye properly. I did neither; I wasn’t sure what the rules were, how blunt I was allowed to be.

 

“Why are you here? You didn’t uh … leave… from here — did you?”

 

“How rude, you must know I was at home.”

 

“Nobody told me anything. We weren’t speaking then, remember?”

 

“I remember everything, past and future. This is never not happening, but you aren’t here at all, either.” She grinned, stretching and appearing to grow taller with her back against the peak of the fainting couch.

 

I didn’t know whether she had belatedly gained an interest in truthfulness, or whether this was simply another game, “Stop being cryptic or tell me what’s in store for me.”

 

“No.”

 

“Do you have something you need to say, or is this just a social call?” I started walking towards the door, but my steps were slow, and the tiles multiplied with every step, so I never got any closer or further away from the exit. I clenched my fists in impotent frustration, and Vee must have noticed because she called out, “That girl you’re with? Tara or whatever her name is?”

 

I turned back to look at her, not wanting to tell her Mara’s real name, just in case.

 

“She doesn’t love you, not really.”

 

“I’m glad you’re dead.”

 

“I know. That’s why you feel so guilty. You think about me all the time, that’s how I’m able to visit you. The others don’t pester me nearly so much.”

 

With the cold certainty of horror, I pondered the times I had found my things back home, moved ever so slightly on the table, the laptop closed when I’d left it open, the additional shadow in the stairwell as I climbed. I was lonely, yes, but I had never been alone.

 

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

 

“I wish you would let me stay dead. I had a life after you, you know. None of that was about you, mostly not anyway.”

 

“I’ve never moved on from anything in my entire life, not unless I was pushed.”

 

“Come here.”

 

I shook my head, and she said it again, more softly this time, “Come here,” and I was moving over the tiles, without my feet walking at all, until we were both standing in front of one another. She had always been shorter than me, but now we were at eye level.

 

I was trembling. I didn’t know what she was about to do; in life, she had always seemed on the brink of devouring my soul, and perhaps now she would be able to. Perhaps I would let her, I had no idea how not to.

 

“Your lipstick is smudged. I’ll fix it.”