Chapter One
Ten years ago
Aurora
That very first moment you meet someone new is everything. That first impression cements them in your mind always. Or it can be what confines them to the past. It can go either way: you can forget someone instantly; or you can remember them for ever.
Meeting people on my first day of university is turning out a lot like that.
Nothing else compares to it – that feeling of leaving your old life behind and starting again somewhere new, in close confines with people you don’t know.
No longer a child, no longer living at home any more, but instead in your own space in halls of residence.
It’s daunting, or at least it is for me, as I lift boxes from the boot of my mum’s old Volvo and brace myself to cross the threshold of the building for the first time.
It’s frightening, heart-pounding. I want to grow up, move on from my old life.
I’m ready for something new, only I don’t know what it is.
But I’m desperately excited to find out while also being so nervous my stomach hurts, casting other students shy glances as I go, waiting to connect with someone – anyone.
There’s a certain frenzy about the first day of university that can’t be replicated in other locations. The excited buzz of people moving together with common goals – to experience new things, to live. Really live.
My mum hangs behind in the busy car park full of expensive-looking Range Rovers and estate cars, manually locking her car doors.
Ahead of her I lug two boxes, one positioned on top of the other, and make my way towards the front door of the old brick building with my newly collected keys.
She’s a few moments behind me and we’ve done this trip up and down the stairs to my first-floor flat three or four times already.
I’m the first flatmate to arrive. Mum and I got here really early and now we’ve almost finished unloading.
Then comes the heady task of unpacking, saying goodbye to her.
But before that joy, I have to squeeze round someone coming the other way on the stairs, carrying piles of empty packing boxes neatly folded down in that space-saving way I can never quite be bothered with.
He’s coming towards me at quite a pace, his eyes only partly visible over the top of the huge pile of flattened boxes.
If I can barely see him over his many boxes, then he probably can’t see me and I realise this far too late as he careers towards me.
‘Hey, hey!’ I warn as he lurches in my direction, but it’s too late as he crashes into me on the narrow staircase, my boxes – heavy and cumbersome – falling from my grip and into him, and he stumbles back up a stair, showered in a mist of packing materials and used, scrunched-up brown packing tape.
It rains around us stickily and I’m thrown back by his force, down one stair, two stairs, three.
God, is this how I die? Not like this, surely.
His hand grabs me quickly, righting me as everything falls to the floor, and it’s all over before it even started, but the air is knocked from me. I can’t even say thank you.
Another new male student appears behind me on the stairs, oblivious to the commotion, to my near-death experience.
He appears oblivious even to this other guy’s flattened boxes strewn everywhere, and to my sturdily packed ones on the stairs, which thankfully haven’t sprung open because my mum packed them so well, binding them in tape so thick I don’t think I’ll be able to get into them without a saw.
‘Hi,’ this newcomer says to both of us, brandishing a set of keys.
He’s tanned, tall, wearing sunglasses, a leather jacket and ripped jeans.
If my mum was here she’d be flirting wildly.
Not in a creepy way. Maybe in a creepy way.
I’m too stunned to acknowledge him, still wondering why, when my life just flashed before my eyes, there was barely any video reel – nothing of consequence to show for my eighteen years.
‘I’m Ben,’ he says to me, and to the guy who knocked me down the stairs.
‘I’m Ollie,’ packing-box guy replies.
‘Aurora,’ I say, trying to recover after my near-death experience.
Ollie looks as if he didn’t hear, as he squints at me, waiting for me to clarify the word I just used. It’s not that weird a name. I look away, back at Ben.
‘I’m in flat ten,’ Ben says merrily, and his wide smile and white teeth are mesmerising against his tan.
I’m guessing he went somewhere very nice for his summer holiday. I don’t remember the last time Mum and I had a proper holiday that involved getting on a plane. Caravan parks in Clacton have been our staple over the years.
‘I’m flat ten too,’ Ollie says.
‘Are you?’ I ask. ‘Both of you? I was starting to worry I was moving in there alone. I’ve been here for hours.’
‘Have you?’ Ben asks conversationally, but I don’t think he’s expecting me to reconfirm.
There are four bedrooms in flat ten. I’ve been assigned the one at the front, looking out over the road in this fairly dingy part of North London.
My mum arrives and takes in the scene on the stairs as she carries the final box. ‘Hello,’ she says as she hunches it even further into her grasp.
‘Here, let me,’ Ben says gallantly, and my mum allows him to scoop it from her. ‘Where are we going with this one?’
‘Flat ten,’ Mum replies.
‘Well, I say,’ Ben declares in a voice that I note now is a bit more Home Counties than I’m normally used to. ‘Are you our fourth flatmate? If so, we got very lucky.’ His gaze shoots up and down my mum’s lithe frame, skinny jeans and tiny vest top.
‘Oh, stop,’ Mum says in a voice that essentially suggests carry on. ‘I’m Sasha. I’m Aurora’s mum.’
‘You can’t be,’ Ben says. ‘Sister, surely.’
Mum giggles. Inside, I die.
‘Oh, your name is Aurora,’ Ollie says, surprising us all.
I’d almost forgotten about him, standing there in silence while Ben basked in the glow of a well-executed flirt.
‘What did you think I’d said?’
‘Aury.’
‘I don’t think that’s a name,’ Ben offers jovially.
‘Well, no,’ Ollie says. ‘That’s sort of what I thought.’
The conversation comes to a strange sort of close, and Ben heads off to our flat with my belongings and my mum trails after him, cheerfully asking questions about how far he’s driven and what he’s studying.
Alone with Ollie, I smile weakly. ‘We should …’ I gesture to our joint mess on the stairs.
‘Yeah, we should. Before someone falls and kills themselves.’
I can’t tell if he’s being funny or not, given that’s pretty much what happened to me a moment ago. I watch him for a beat, but his expression doesn’t change. He starts retrieving items and so do I.
‘I’m sorry, by the way,’ Ollie goes on. ‘I didn’t get a chance to apologise before he—’ He nods his head in the direction of our first-floor flat.
‘Yeah. He’s nice. Chatty.’ I’ve got nothing else to say about Ben, having only just met him.
‘Yeah,’ Ollie says uncertainly, glancing up again at the open flat door. It’s got a fire-door automatic closer on it that I’ve been wrangling with for ages, but Ben’s now dumped one of his bags in front of it to stop it closing. I wish I’d thought of that.
Ollie’s cute in a quiet, shy kind of way.
Maybe a bit nervy in contrast to Ben. His brown eyes look serious.
Maybe he’s got first-day nerves. This is all so strange, so alien, being here.
But I’ve met two flatmates out of three so far and they both seem …
Oh well, you know – it’ll be all right. We just need to get to know each other.
My mum already thought of this and has supplied me with a ready-made drinks cabinet full of discount booze from Asda, so that I can break the ice with everyone.
She even went so far as to check none of them actually had the supermarket label on the bottles, so I didn’t look cheap.
‘No one wants to be friends with a pauper,’ she declared on the journey from our home in Streatham to my new uni.
‘At least not on day one. Let them get to know you before you start stocking the fridge with reduced food.’
Mum is fiercely proud of being working-class and so am I, but that seemed to drift away immediately for both of us when we attended the university’s Open Day and clocked all the cars far nicer than ours in the car park.
She simply wants the best for me, while also wishing that we had a bit more money.
For as long as I can remember it’s only been Mum and me – an unbreakable duo in our two-bed flat since my dad walked out when I was seven.
She worked all the hours available to be able to put food on the table and to lace my ever-growing feet in ballet shoes.
As I grew and grew, I cost my mum so much in school shoes that I let blisters seriously settle in before admitting that any new footwear didn’t fit after only half a term’s use.
I thought the growing would never stop. I’m nearly six foot.
I know, I know – it’s a bloody nightmare.
I realise we’re all supposed to ‘own our height, own our weight’.
But I’m a gangly, six-foot-tall mousy brunette from the far reaches of South London.
As if life wasn’t hard enough, for mother nature to do all that to a teenager.
I don’t know how I missed Ollie moving into the flat while I was there.
He must have snuck in quietly, shut himself in his room and simply got on with it while I was in my room, making enough noise with the cupboard doors for both of us.
Mum’s trying to engage him in conversation, offer him a hand with his stuff, but he’s neat and orderly and has put his things away in the wardrobe and on shelves at breakneck speed.
He’s hovering awkwardly in the hallway now and we’ve propped our individual room doors open, so we can chat a bit here and there.
Ben’s parents dropped him and his boxes off and then went to find a hallowed parking space.