‘Tea.’
He pours, hands me the mug. I grip it with both hands because my hands need anchoring, and a mug at least gives them purpose.
‘Ewan.’
‘Mm.’
‘Where were you last night.’
‘Out.’
‘Out where.’
‘Out out.’ I sit down at the table—the kitchen’s empty, but it won’t stay that way, the girl from room 4 who burns her toastshould be down any minute. ‘Party. Halls down the road. Some lads in my corridor went, I tagged along.’
Femi nods like he’s accepting the answer, then doesn’t stop looking at me. ‘And?’
‘And what.’
‘You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge.’
‘Three parties, technically.’ I take a sip of the tea. Try to make it sound like a punchline. ‘You know me.’
‘I know you.’
Femi sits down opposite me. Wraps both hands round his own mug. This is the Femi who’s about to say something he’s been rehearsing for a while, and the silence he’s leaving before he says it is the silence he uses to make sure the other person can’t pretend they didn’t hear.
‘Ewan. Are you alright?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re not fine. You haven’t been fine since we got here, honestly. I kept thinking it was homesick stuff, lad-from-London-can’t-settle stuff, the halls are shit and the weather’s shit and you were going to come round by week two, everybody does. And then you did that thing in the lecture with the theorem.’
‘Femi.’
‘Let me finish. You did the thing, and I saw it properly. And ever since, you’ve been going out almost every night and coming back in the mornings like you’ve been through a war, and whatever you’re trying to burn off you’re going to burn a hole all the way through.’
I grip the mug tighter. The porcelain is too hot. I make myself not let go.
‘It’s fresh meat, Femi. It’s freshers’ term. Everyone’s at it.’
‘Not like this.’
‘You don’t know whatlike thisis. You’ve been snogged outside a café once and you think you’ve got the graph plotted.’
It’s a shit thing to say. He absorbs it. Then he decides not to.
He says, ‘Is it the lecturer.’
The kitchen goes, not silent, because the radio’s still on and the boiler’s ticking in the airing cupboard and somewhere above us a shower starts up, but the noise inside my head goes silent. Everything I was going to say next stops happening, and I sit there with a mug of too-hot tea and a question in the middle of the table I cannot pick up.
I say, ‘What.’
Too fast, too flat.
‘Ewan.’
‘What are you. Femi, what the fuck. What are you even doing?’
