Page 111 of Oleander

Then, because I was some kind of pain enthusiast, I pulled up Cas’s Instagram. There was a video posted last night. He was playing piano in a large, bright apartment – their apartment my mind supplied – with views out over the city. He wore a white shirt too big for his frame (my mind told me, helpfully, that it was Blackwell’s) and a pair of loose check pyjama bottoms. He looked painfully beautiful. Painfully far away. Painfully not mine.

I cried for a half hour after.

I got more drunk that night than I’d ever been in my life and woke up beside a girl whose name I didn’t remember, guilty and ashamed. That same shame and guilt I was beginning to associate with sex.

It was the worst birthday I could remember.

It was the start of a pattern. I had lectures two and a half days out of five, and an afternoon of this was tutorials: smaller groups and a professor would meet in a room – normally, his or her office – and discuss rather than sit and be lectured at. I had two of these on a Thursday afternoon. One was Post-War European literature with a very stylish, very intelligent Greek woman called Professor Gerotzi. The other class was one I’d picked at random from the list but which turned out to be one of my favourites: film criticism run by the youngest professor Oxford had ever had. Mr. Alexander: a youngish, good-looking, American who’d won an Oscar for best original screenplay at twenty-four for a war film called ‘Butchers and Heroes’. He was a guest lecturer for the academic year, and I’d been lucky to get into his class by all accounts.

Our assignments for Alexander’s class involved mainly watching films. Some we’d have to watch online using the university’s access codes as they were often 1960s Bolivian things no one had ever heard of. Other times, we’d go together as a class to the local cinema and watch a showing of something popular and terrible.

On Thursday after tutorial, I’d meet Bast, Nikita and Irish Conn (who was straight as a flagpole and absolutely not interested in me) with a couple of the girls from 1st in the Lord Avery and get plastered, laugh, and try to fill the hole in my heart with cheap rosè wine.

It would work until I got back to the dorm, where morose and alone with my own thoughts, I’d have a wank to hazy thoughts of his mouth and tongue and the sounds he’d make when he came. After, I’d lie warm and sated for about three minutes until the bone-cold ache rushed in again, quick as a rising tide. Sometimes, I’d think about the scene in his bedroom I’d walkedin on, a piercing pain in my gut so sharp it could take my breath away.

The best thing to do, I’d found, was to drink enough so that the moment my head touched the pillow, I’d sink into undreaming sleep.

I drank, and I forgot. And then I remembered, and then I drank again. It was a perfectly acceptable cycle for a student. Everyone went out drinking; no one thought anything of it if you got so drunk you couldn’t remember getting home.

Alcohol wasn’t perfect, it couldn’t keep him out of my head completely, but it came bloody close. And next to Bast and Nika and Irish Conn, alcohol became an understanding and consistent friend to me that first year.

It was easy to get out of going home to Jersey that first December. I had two papers due the first week back, (Bast and Conn were going home until after New Year but Nika was staying) and with Luke and Beth enjoying their new childless life again, they didn’t seem too fussed when I said I’d stay at school over Christmas.

I’d miss visiting with Gideon. He’d been a steady friend that first year, even if his little tokens about where they were and what they were doing pecked at my heart like carrion. But now that I was away from the place, the thought of going back there made me feel physically ill: like returning to the scene of some horrendous accident. Some place where a terrible trauma had been done to me.

I couldn’t face it: that long drive up to the house, the view of his bedroom window from mine, the library, the hut. No. I couldn’t do it.

I wondered how many months I could avoid going home. Right then, I started thinking of an excuse for Easter and summer.

Two

Iran into Finn in February, my sixth month there, when I’d been hungover and on my way to my third interview that week for a part-time job.

I didn’t particularly need a job; the stipend that was deposited into my bank account each month from persons unknown was enough to feed, clothe, and water me (and by water, I mean get me drunk). But most of the people I knew here had part-time jobs of some sort, and it felt like something I should do if only to stop me drinking every night.

I’d wanted a job in the second-hand book store in Millner Close, but they weren’t hiring, so I left them my CV and expanded my options. I’d already been turned down by a popular Italian restaurant for not having any waiting experience and the local Whole Foods because they really needed someone who could cover Thursdays – which was the only day I couldn’t commit to. All in all, the job hunt wasn’t going great.

“Jude! Hey, Jude!” A voice had shouted from the bottom of the steps into the Bodleian while I’d pulled up the map up on my phone for the fifth time that day. (I’d gotten it down from around a dozen since I got here.) I’d glanced up to see a tall, good-looking guy leaping up the steps two at a time.

“Er, Hi, hello?” I squinted.

“Finlay,” he pointed at himself. “Finn. Finn Haldane.”

The name sounded only vaguely familiar. I wondered if he was in one of my tutorials.

“We met at Caspien’s birthday?”

As usual, I started at the sound of Caspien’s name. I’d only been to one of his birthdays and that …

“The distant half cousin,” he added helpfully before my thoughts had caught up.

I blinked again and looked him over.

“Yeah, sure, I remember now.” And I did. But the guy standing in front of me was not the slouching, skinny, brace-wearing, glasses-wearing boy I remembered from two years ago. “Did you do something to your hair?”

He threw his head back and laughed. His teeth were two perfectly straight white lines. His laugh was warm and rounded.

“Sorry, I forget sometimes how different I look.”