Chapter 34

Nevis

They meet at a ’Spoons near Broadmead. Tash is almost unrecognisable, her face puffed and raw, her body alive with nervy energy. Before her sits a pint, half drunk, another emptied glass beside it. She’s wasted.

‘I know I look like shit,’ she says. ‘So do me a favour and don’t look, OK?’

Nevis takes off her jacket, drapes it round the chair, studiously avoiding checking Tash out. ‘You want another drink?’

‘Yeah, go on. Pint of Abbot’s.’

Nevis waits at the bar, pays with her phone and picks up Tash’s pint and a half of Guinness for herself. As she walks from the bar she finds her thoughts turning to the Student’s t-test, devised by William Gosset, a mathematician at the turn of the twentieth century and an employee of the Guinness Brewing company, to describe the probable error of a mean in different sized samples of hops. Wonders if the Dean knows the test, decides that yes, given its ubiquitousness, he must do. Considers raising it with him over their next lunch, thinks about where the Dean might take her and is aware, suddenly, as she places the pint glass on the table, that Tash is saying, ‘…so the bastards are trying to get rid of me.’

‘Bastards?’ Wasn’t this meeting to talk about Jessica?

‘Yeah, the Dean and that bitch in student welfare. They are practically forcing me to transfer somewhere else.’

Tash holds her head between her hands and begins to sob. William Gosset is chased from Nevis’s mind now and replaced by the lunchtime conversation with the Dean. So this is what he’d meant about Tash not being at Avon much longer. He already knew he was going to ask her to leave. Girls like Natasha can be very destabilising.

Tash looks up from behind hooded lids and reaches for her beer, takes a long pull and, catching Nevis’s eye, in a wobbly voice says, ‘You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone. I know you won’t, that’s partly why I wanted to meet.’

‘I promise,’ Nevis says.

‘I’ve been having an affair with Mark Ratner. He told me it was over.’ She puts a finger up to her mouth and tears off a strip of nail, spits it onto the floor. ‘I texted him, I called him, though I’m not supposed to and he hasn’t got back to me. And now Cullen and that bitch Keane are trying to split us up.’ More tears. ‘I’m so fucked up about it all. I think I love him. I don’t know what to do.’