Impossible to Forget(10)

Then she set off up the corridor, her heart still beating faster than usual.

‘I’ll be staying for a few weeks,’ he called after her. ‘So, no doubt I’ll catch you again.’

She heard Angie’s door open and then bang closed as she reached the fire doors.

Staying for a few weeks? Had he really said that? Obviously, people had guests for the weekend sometimes, and there was an occasional visitor to their corridor mid-week, but for ‘weeks’, plural? Maggie wondered if that was even allowed. She doubted very much that it was. It was just like Angie to flaunt the rules. Maybe she had sublet her room to him and gone to sleep somewhere else. Maggie wouldn’t have put it past her.

Then again, what did she care if it meant that that gorgeous bloke was sleeping just the other side of the breeze-block wall?

She failed to concentrate as hard in her tort lecture as she perhaps should have done, and then hurried back home afterwards to see how the land lay, but there was no sign of the visitor. Her curiosity about him trumped her embarrassment at appearing nosey, and she knocked on Leon’s door. She and Leon were good friends now. She liked his unassuming nature and his dry wit, and she could just about overlook how he seemed to be as obsessed with Angie as everyone else.

‘Come in,’ shouted Leon, and she opened the door and let it close behind her.

Leon’s bed was still unmade and most of his clothes seemed to be on the floor, but Maggie forced herself to ignore the mess. Her eye was caught by a single black sock dangling from the keys of the alto saxophone that lived on a stand in the corner, but she looked beyond it to where Leon was sitting.

‘Oh, hi Mags,’ he said when he saw her. No one had ever called her Mags, but she allowed it because it suggested a degree of intimacy between the two of them that she liked.

‘Have you met Tiger?’ she asked him outright without bothering with any explanation.

Leon looked confused and shook his head. ‘Tiger? Is that a person or a soft toy?’

‘A person. A bloke. He’s staying in Angie’s room.’

‘Oh, him,’ said Leon with a trace of disgust. ‘The blond one who thinks he’s God’s gift to women? I’ve not met him, but I saw him earlier. Is he a mate of Angie’s, then? From a different college?’

Maggie thought about this possibility but rejected it. ‘I don’t think so. He said he was staying with Angie for a few weeks. He wouldn’t say that if he had his own room on campus.’

‘Maybe he’s shagging her and it’s easier to do if he’s on the spot.’

‘Don’t be so crude, Lee,’ Maggie replied prudishly, but actually, she found the thought that Tiger might be in a relationship with Angie wildly unsettling, even though it was the obvious solution to the puzzle of what he was doing in her room.

‘If he’s really going to be here for weeks then no doubt we’ll find out more,’ Leon said.

‘It must be against the rules though,’ Maggie pressed on. ‘Having a guest for such a long time. Do you think I should report it?’

‘No!’ exclaimed Leon. ‘Definitely not. Honestly, Mags. You can be such a goody-two-shoes sometimes.’

He smiled at her affectionately as he said this, which took the sting out of his words. Also, it was true – she was a goody-two-shoes. She was happy to claim the title. Doing as she was instructed was so much a part of who she was that the thought of being in contravention of something made her heart beat a little faster. Rules were rules and made to be followed, and her inclination to report any infringement felt almost as natural as breathing.

But then again, if she reported Tiger he would have to leave and that, she suddenly realised, would not be good. There was no denying he was attractive, but on top of that (and she certainly wouldn’t say this to anyone else) she had felt a definite spark between them. Their encounter had been over so quickly that it had barely had a chance to ignite into anything more obvious, but it had definitely been there.

‘Hmmm,’ she said to Leon. ‘Maybe you’re right, and I don’t suppose he’s doing any harm. It must be horribly cramped in there, though.’

‘I doubt they’ll have noticed,’ replied Leon.

He winked at her and she felt herself bristle. She did not want to think about whatever Angie and Tiger might be doing together in the tiny, untidy space.

Later, as she tried in vain to concentrate on her contract law essay, Maggie caught herself straining to pick up any noises coming from the next-door room that might give her more clues as to what was going on in there, but there was nothing. Either they were both very quiet in their lovemaking or there was not very much happening on that score. She really hoped it was the latter.





7


Over the next couple of days, Maggie found herself having to leave her room at the exact second she heard Angie’s bedroom door opening, but generally it was someone going into the room and not coming out and they disappeared without giving her a chance to strike up a casual conversation. Finally, though, the timing worked, and she emerged at precisely the right moment to speak to whoever it was. Her heart plummeted, though, when she saw that it was Angie and not Tiger.

Despite what Maggie felt was a tangible antipathy demonstrated towards Angie on her own part, Angie didn’t seem to have noticed, but then Angie appeared to breeze through her life without being troubled by whether she was upsetting anyone else. She continued to ‘borrow’ Maggie’s food from the fridge without ever replacing it and when Maggie’s crockery was no longer available to her, she had just moved on to using someone else’s. It was as if other people’s lives made no impact on hers whatsoever, and Maggie had decided that her own life would work best if she was friendly, but not friends, with Angie.