Freshers

Lauren Pattle

The journey from Essex to Bristol was three and a half hours long. Since Harper’s mother had recently sold her car, her father was driving them in his van. Her mother told people that she’d sold her car because she never drove anywhere, but really it was because they couldn’t afford the insurance. Harper sat in the window seat of the three-person cab, the right-side of her body pressed uncomfortably against her mother. Despite the majority of the journey being on fast A-roads and motorways, her father had his window rolled all the way down so that he could chain-smoke cigarettes out of it. The inside of the van rattled and drowned out the sound of Talksport, the only radio station that had ever been programmed. Harper gripped her seatbelt and stared at the blur of fields outside. Three hours down, half an hour to go.  

The University of Bristol had never been part of her original plan. She’d applied to Oxford and made it to the interview stage but wasn’t then offered a place. Bristol was her back-up choice, her insurance. Like Durham and Warwick, Bristol was a place for Oxbridge rejects. Aside from this, it also had a reputation for attracting private school kids from the south of England. Harper didn’t know anyone who’d been to private school, but she imagined they’d be unimpressed by her state school education. Her teachers had approved of Bristol, though. They said it had a strong English department. And so, encouraged by the people she trusted most, she’d accepted her offer.

When they arrived at her halls of residence, Manor House, the car park was still empty. She was relieved to see that the only other students in the car park were those wearing University of Bristol sweaters, with Resident Assistant written across the back. She climbed out of the van, followed by her mother, and her father on the opposite side. They stood a few feet from one another and looked up at the grand sandstone building that would be her home for the next year.

‘Fancy digs,’ her father said, his tone somewhere between pride and resentment. 

‘Very,’ her mother said, zhuzhing her hair in the wing mirror.

Her mother was overdressed, as usual, wearing a floral top with a plunging neckline and a pair of open-toe heels. Her father was wearing sunglasses that were too big for his face, a West Ham shirt, and his going-out jeans; the only pair that weren’t splattered with paint and dried cement. 

Keen to capitalise on being the only ones there, Harper rushed her bags out of the van, saying she was desperate for the toilet. 

‘Just wait till you’re our age,’ her mother said, her heels clipping as she jogged to keep up.  

Harper buzzed them into the building with her new key card, which she wore on a lanyard around her neck. 

‘Nine grand and you don’t even have a lift,’ her father said, staring up at the tall staircase and shaking his head. He said it as though he were the one paying the nine grand, and not Harper, via her student loan. She wanted to explain that the nine thousand pounds was for her tuition, not the accommodation – but she knew better than to correct him. He saw corrections as a personal slight and would either snap at her for being a smart arse or mutter some profanity under his breath. 

The previous year, the tuition fees had been under three thousand pounds. Harper had watched the protests on TV, and worried about whether she’d be able to afford a degree when it became three times as expensive the following year. But thankfully there were loans and grants for people like her whose parents didn’t make a lot of money. Neither of them had been to university. Her father was a builder, working for his friend’s company. They did extensions for people who wanted bigger kitchens. And her mother was a beautician for a makeup counter in a department store; she’d worked there since the counter opened. 

They hauled Harper’s bags up the three narrow staircases it took to reach her floor and left them in a pile outside her new bedroom door. Her father paced the hallway. He was rarely stationary and always made her feel as though she was doing something wrong when she was standing or sitting still. He became especially frustrated when she was studying. She knew he wanted to tell her to get up and do something useful, to stop being such a homebody, but he couldn’t – she was protected by her books.

Her mother wanted to help unpack and make up the bed, but Harper refused, contented that she alone had the power to open and close her bedroom door with the key card around her neck.

‘Fingers crossed your roommate isn’t a weirdo,’ her father said, winking at her. 

Harper looked away, forcing herself not to react. 

‘Only joking!’ he said, squeezing her hard in the waist. He was always making jokes and telling Harper that she needed to learn to take them. 

She ushered them down the corridor and through to the sterile kitchen which smelt of bleach and artificial lemon. They filled the middle shelf of the fridge with milk, butter, cheese, a pack of breaded ham, an iceberg lettuce, and a tub of coleslaw. They’d done Harper’s food shop at the local Aldi, even earlier that morning. Her parents had been impressed with the size of the store and said she was lucky to have it so nearby. Other parents were probably impressed by the nearness of the Clifton Suspension Bridge.  

‘You could just have picky bits tonight,’ her mother said as she stacked the items in the fridge.

They often had picky bits when her mother worked late. It was a plate of anything cold and pre-cooked – mini sausage rolls, picnic eggs, that kind of thing. Sometimes Harper cooked a proper meal, if they had the ingredients to do so. But her father never cooked; he wouldn’t even assemble a plate. Harper wasn’t sure if this was out of principle, or because he didn’t know how. A part of her – which she resented – felt sorry for him when her mother wasn’t home and he was in the kitchen opening and closing cupboard doors, looking hopelessly into them.

Once the perishables were in the fridge, they turned to face the kitchen cupboards. Her father opened and closed each one, trying to decide which was the largest. Harper picked one at random and her father agreed that it was the best choice. They stood at equal distances from one another and then took it in turns to look out of the small window which overlooked the car park and the city beyond.

‘That motorway’s done a number on my van,’ her father said, squinting out of the window. ‘I’ll have to wash it when we get back.’

As they walked back to the now-empty van, her mother and father discussed how they could avoid the roadworks they’d encountered on the way there. They hugged briefly, her father barely touching her as he patted her back, and her mother craning her neck to one side to avoid smudging her makeup.

‘I’ll call you this evening,’ her mother said, her voice level. 

Harper nodded and waved them goodbye.

At first she felt guilty, as though they’d dropped her off at a luxury resort which only she had access to. It didn’t seem fair that she got to stay, and they had to go back to the house. But the feeling quickly subsided and was replaced by a surge of relief that they had come and gone without being seen, without her father saying something offensive and her mother overcompensating with pointless chatter. At the opposite end of the car park, she watched as another goodbye took place. The mother, who was crying uncontrollably, refused to let go of her daughter. Harper and her parents never cried, or at least not in front of one another. Displays of emotion had been actively discouraged since she was a child; if something was upsetting her, she was told to grow up, or else reminded of how lucky she was to have a roof over her head and food in the fridge, as if having those things meant nothing else could ever be wrong.

She buzzed herself back into her room, letting the door swing shut behind her. Hers was the only shared room on their twelve-person girls-only floor. Neither the shared room nor the girls-only nature of her living situation had been factors she would have chosen for herself. But it was what she could afford with the money from her grant. Initially, she’d struggled to see past her disappointment – living solely with girls felt like a step back from adulthood. But she’d talked herself around; without the opposite sex, she wouldn’t have to worry as much about how she looked in the mornings before putting on makeup, or about the clothes she wore in the communal areas.     

She hadn’t noticed at first, but one of the two single beds in her room was already piled high with towels, clothes, books, and even shoes. The tower of mess suggested this person hadn’t been brought up, like Harper, by parents with lots of rules about how things look. She went over to the bed to get a better look and, without thinking, began pawing through the pile of belongings. Almost all of the clothes were black or grey. On top of the clothes-pile were two A4 sketchbooks, one of which was already half-filled with charcoal drawings of distorted-looking bodies. The drawings were impressive, but dark and heavy too. There were quotes on some of the pages, with words like shame and rage emboldened. She wondered what kind of person made this kind of art. If she’d expressed herself through a similar medium her parents would’ve made a joke of it. As she flicked through the pages – quickly now, afraid that her roommate might walk in – a towel toppled off the pile of stuff and onto the floor. She picked it up and saw that the washing-label had CAMERON written across it in faded black marker pen. She put the towel back on the pile, exactly as it had been before, and returned to her side of the room, her heart pounding. 

An hour or so later, the door swung open and the person Harper assumed was Cameron walked in. She was wearing a black knitted jumper, a black pleated skirt, and a pair of thick-soled Doc Martens. 

‘Alright,’ the girl said smiling, ‘I’m Cameron.’ 

‘Hi,’ Harper said, returning the smile, ‘I’m Harper.’ 

‘Are we doing shoes off?’ Cameron said, gesturing to Harper’s shoe-less feet.

‘Oh,’ Harper said, ‘it’s up to you.’ 

‘Shoes off works,’ Cameron said, untying and pulling off her boots. ‘These take an age to put on, but my feet thank me when they’re off.’ 

Aside from the black clothes, Cameron had short black hair – the back of which was completely shaved off – thick black eyeliner, dark purple lipstick, and a stack of tangled necklaces. She looked how Harper had expected, and yet nothing like anyone she’d ever met before. The extreme shortness of her hair surprised Harper most. Her own hair was long and highlighted. Her aunt was a hairdresser so did it every couple of months for free. She and Harper’s mother agreed that it looked best when it was artificially lightened, though Harper suspected that she’d suit a short bob in her natural shade of brown. But that had always been out of the question. 

She and Cameron sat on the floor to unpack their bags and re-fold their clothes, taking it in turns to share facts about themselves.

Cameron grew up in Leeds, with three older sisters. She joked that only proletarians would opt to live in a shared room, so she’d known before moving in that Harper would be sound. Harper smiled at the Marx reference. She thought Cameron was sound too. She liked her northern accent, it was soft and wearied. And talking to her was surprisingly easy – easier, even, than talking to friends she’d known for years. 

Mid-way through unpacking her final bag, Harper realised she’d not brought a towel. Cameron was standing on her side of the bedroom, putting away clothes. The way she was organising her shelves looked better – somehow more aesthetic – than the way Harper had organised hers.

‘You don’t happen to have a towel I could borrow?’ Harper asked. ‘I’d give it back tomorrow.’ 

Cameron squatted down to reach into the bottom of her wardrobe.

‘Keep it,’ she said, pulling out a towel and handing it to Harper, ‘I have a surplus.’

The towel was clearly still brand new. It was soft, unlike the rough towels Harper was used to, that had been boiled by her mother who didn’t trust washing-machine temperatures below sixty degrees. Before she took the towel to the bathroom, Cameron wrote Harper’s name across the label in the same capital letters as hers. 

By the time everything was unpacked, the light outside was waning and Cameron had switched on her bedside lamp. Harper stood in the doorway to assess their room. Cameron’s side was brimming with personality. Her desk – though crowded with sketchbooks and tubes of paints – was organised meticulously, with each item stacked into a clean right-angle. She’d decorated the walls in a methodical way too, with the edges of each of her prints and band posters aligning perfectly. Beneath the posters, she’d placed a colourful rug, across the length of which she’d lined up several pairs of black platform shoes, each a slightly different height. How did Cameron instinctively know what to put where, and how to make it all look so effortless? Harper’s side of the room, in comparison, looked bare. Her desk was all she’d managed to decorate, with the university-branded miscellanea they’d been given as part of their freshers’ arrival pack; a notepad, a pen pot, and a small A4-sized pin board.  

Everyone on Harper’s floor bought tickets for a club night called Freshers Fest, taking place that evening. Someone suggested that they leave their doors open while they got ready and everyone agreed that this was a fantastic idea. Harper got changed behind the door of her wardrobe, not wanting to be naked in front of the others. Her breasts were different sizes and too far apart, but pushing them together with a padded bra made her feel like a fraud. And her bikini line was still bright red from the at-home waxing she’d done the previous evening. She pulled on a t-shirt and skirt with such urgency that, as she yanked the top over her head, she stretched out the collar. Cameron stood in the middle of her side of the room, with nothing but her knickers and socks on. She’d laid out a number of black outfits on her bed. She turned to face Harper, her naked torso on show, and asked which top she liked best. Harper glanced at Cameron’s naked form. Their bodies were similar – the same height, the same short waist, even the same looking breasts. But for some reason, Cameron’s body seemed better, more desirable in its naked candour. Harper made a special effort not to look below Cameron’s chin and pointed at one of the identical black tops.

Once dressed, everyone regrouped in the kitchen, and took up seats around the long plywood table. A few of them were still holding on to compact mirrors and mascara wands and talking about which shoes they intended to wear. It seemed that everyone here had a lot of shoes. Someone suggested they play never have I ever, and only then did Harper realise that she’d forgotten to buy any alcohol that morning with her parents, which was strange since both of them were drinkers. Her father was rarely without a can of Carling, and her mother always had a glass of white wine with dinner, and a bottle if she didn’t have work the next day. For the past few years, they’d been offering her drinks to build her tolerance, but she’d never been interested. She only ever drunk at parties or on nights out because that’s what everyone else was doing. The taste of alcohol was bearable, but certainly not something she’d ever craved. 

Registering her empty handedness, Cameron handed Harper a can of Strongbow, telling her to have as many as she liked. Harper pretended to be hugely grateful. They played a few rounds of the game and Harper took small sips of cider whenever she had to drink. 

For Cameron’s turn, she said, ‘Never have I ever smoked weed.’

Harper was surprised at Cameron’s honesty, and, although she also hadn’t, she took a swig of her drink. A few of the others also drank and she wondered if any of them were lying too. 

*

Mid-way through freshers week, Harper woke up with a blocked nose, a sore throat, and a headache which felt sharper than the kind that was brought on by drinking. She stayed in bed until Cameron left and then forced herself to get up. This was, she realised, the first time she’d been ill and not had her mother to look after her. Periods of mild illness had been the times where she’d felt closest to her mother; though her bedside manner was brusque, she was a diligent attendant, lending Harper copies of her magazines – either OK! or Heat – and making her overly sweet honey and lemon teas. She’d cancel her shift at work despite Harper saying she was fine to stay home alone, and then talk all day about the shit she was going to get from her boss the following morning.

Harper had a scalding hot shower, standing under the water for several minutes after she was clean, breathing in the steam. Once dressed, she went out to the local shop for supplies. As she traipsed up and down the aisles, she realised that the majority of people there were students too. For the first time, hers was the core demographic, all of them carrying baskets and reading ingredient lists on the backs of packets. It felt strange and unreal, as though they were merely playing at adulthood. Leaving the shop, she thought about the day she hadn’t got into Oxford, and her parents saying maybe now was the time to get a real job, so she could start her real life in the real world.

She spent the rest of the day in her room, reading A Room of One’s Own. After her rejection from Oxford, she’d stopped reading for a few weeks. Books were supposed to have protected her, but suddenly they’d become the enemy, since they hadn’t helped her to stand out in the interview. Her revolt didn’t last long, though. The latest volume in a series she’d been reading for past the three years brought her back to her senses, and over the summer, she’d finished almost all of the recommended reading, sourcing texts from libraries and second-hand stores. Though some of the novels were denser than she was used to, she’d enjoyed the reading, especially the stories by Austen, and the Brontës, stories about passion and desire and irrational love, things she wished she could relate to, things she wished she’d experienced. A Room of One’s Own was the last book on the list left for her to complete. 

A few hours into reading, her phone started ringing. It was her mother, calling on her afternoon break. Harper answered the phone and said that she had a cold. Her mother sounded cross and said that she felt helpless.

‘Your father was on one yesterday,’ her mother said.

Apparently there’d been an altercation with the neighbour, something about a missing bin. She could tell her mother was abridging the story, too embarrassed to say all of the details out loud, yet knowing Harper could fill in the particulars for herself. Without warning, her mother ended the call, saying she had to get back to work – she’d call again tomorrow. Harper stared at the cover of A Room of One’s Own, a vague sense of guilt encasing her. She was the only other person who knew what it was like to live with her father. To step quietly around his rage. 

An hour or so later, Cameron came in and said there was going to be a party upstairs that night and that they were invited. She looked excited in a way Harper hadn’t seen before. Harper did not want to go to the party; she wanted to go to bed early and read until she fell asleep. But, she realised, if she said no to a party tonight, she might never be asked again; Cameron might write her off as boring. So she pretended to be excited too. 

The party was two floors up, above the boys-only floor. When they arrived, the flat was already busy, a group of boys standing on one side of the kitchen and a group of girls on the other. She stood with Cameron, not having the energy to introduce herself to anyone new. They spoke to a girl who complimented Cameron’s platform boots and made Harper wish that she had interesting shoes. She held onto the same bottle of beer for the duration of the party; she kept waiting for someone to comment on how slowly she was drinking, but no one noticed. A headache flourished between her eyes, and she was relieved when the others from her floor finally suggested that they head back downstairs.

*

On the last day of freshers week, there was a tour hosted by the Humanities department, culminating with a visit to the main campus library and a demonstration of how to use its facilities. Harper wanted to visit the department before term officially started – to gain a sense of where each of her classes would be – so was pleased when Cameron said she’d also like to go. The tour was longer than anticipated, and Harper was uncomfortable for the duration of it, having worn too many clothes for the mild September weather. She struggled to pay attention to the tour guide when she pointed at buildings and explained what went on inside them. Once they reached the library, they were handed plastic cups of tangy white wine and told to mingle while the tour guides tried to locate the librarian. Harper was disappointed that she was being made to drink again, and that there was not going to be a demonstration of how to use the electronic check-out service. She felt sorry for the freshers wandering around by themselves and was relieved to have Cameron by her side. She was happy to have Cameron now, but later, she knew she’d be longing for her own room; a place where she could tweeze her upper lip, talk to herself out loud, touch herself while reading the young adult romance novels she liked to read in bed. 

*

On the day of her first Reading Identities seminar, Harper felt that her real life at university finally started. It wasn’t the real life her parents had alluded to, the one characterised by hard work and evenings in front of the TV. But real in the sense that it felt like she’d finally arrived at the place she was supposed to be.