Joanne Sefton - The Guilty Friend

She lived in Kennington, in a street of rather twee Victorian terraced cottages, which did their best to ignore the roar of the traffic and the ugly jumble of the city that had grown up around them. It was pleasant and convenient and still more affordable than similar spots north of the river. The street housed young professionals and gay couples and a few older residents. The sort of people who bought these houses moved further out if they had children.

Except for the scattering of junk mail by the front door, everything in the house was as she had left it that morning. Eusebio was on an assignment and wouldn’t be back for a week or two. There were some leftovers from a pasta she’d done last night. That would do, with a bit of chopped-up tomato and cucumber she could call a salad. She didn’t like to open wine on a weeknight, but the conversation with the Durntons had taken its toll, so maybe tonight would be an exception.

An hour later she was sipping a pinot in front of a rolling news channel, the debris of her meal still littering her coffee table. It was all about the bombing, of course. There was a still photo of woman in a burn mask leaving the scene. Misty leant forward and squinted at the screen. They’d been using the image a lot, but this time, without her food to distract her, something else caught her eye. That woman in the background.

‘Alex?’

The word escaped her lips even though there was no one to hear it. It was the first time she’d spoken that name aloud in years.

Her mind flashed back, suddenly flooded with images of glossy black curls, champagne, rebellion, extravagance and that million-dollar smile. Alex was the reason she was doing this job, the reason she was living this life. Every time she helped someone recover, it was a temporary salve on the unhealable wound that was Alex Penrith. Every time she lost a girl like Bella Durnton, it was like losing Alex all over again.

The woman fleeing the attack – the dust and filth-covered woman with her determined eyes, frozen in an instant as the backdrop to a horror story – was an uncanny fit with Misty’s images of Alex fast-forwarded through three decades. This woman was older than the Alex she remembered – although the grime and dust that flattened her features made it impossible to tell how old. She shared Alex’s distinctive curly hair, her elfin features and something about the way she held herself. The essence of Alex sang out from the screen. But despite the likeness, it couldn’t be her.

Because Alex had been dead for almost thirty years.

Misty blinked and blinked again. She’d waited for this moment for two years, perhaps for her whole life. After pouring so much energy into hoping and fantasising and anticipating she was finally here. In her tiny bedroom at home, or out walking through the scrubby fields with Mack, her dog, there had been no space in her imaginings for even the slightest whisper of doubt. Only now, sitting on a narrow lumpy bed, next to the suitcase and two cardboard boxes that contained her possessions, did the doubt start to creep in.

Her mum, Elspeth, had driven her down in their battered Mini Metro; she didn’t like to drive that sort of distance but Misty’s dad couldn’t get time off to come with them. They’d sucked Polos and alternated Ray Stevens and The Cure in the cassette player because the radio picked up nothing but static. Normally, she felt her irritation with her mum’s jangly American country tapes was entirely justified. After all, she had Johnny Mathis to thank for her name, which had caused enough bother through high school. If there were any other girls christened Misty in Rochdale in 1968, she’d yet to meet one. Today, though, even the music couldn’t spoil her good mood. Elspeth was in high spirits too – it felt like a holiday.

As they got closer to Cambridge, though, Elspeth’s chatter had died away. Perhaps she was concentrating on the unfamiliar roads but Misty sensed it was more than that. Her mother, the most down-to-earth, suffer-no-fools person she knew, was daunted. Was it just that Misty was flying the nest? That tonight Elspeth would drive back by herself to a house from which her eldest child was missing? Or was it just the thought of Cambridge and everything that came with it?

Misty was excited, not daunted. When they arrived, she was the one who announced herself to the porters and collected her room key, whilst her mum waited in the car, fretting about a parking ticket and who knew what else. With a temporary college permit in the windscreen, Elspeth agreed to come inside for just long enough to see Misty’s room and have a cup of tea. They’d picked up some supplies at a petrol station on the A14: milk, bread, teabags, a tub of margarine and two tins of ham. Misty put the kettle on and opened the cupboards. One had some breakfast cereal and a bottle of red wine in it but the others were empty. There was one carton of milk in the fridge. So, either Misty was the second to arrive, or else the others were even more cavalier about sustenance than Miss Muesli and herself.

She had the two mugs of tea in her hands when the kitchen door swung open towards her.

‘Oh. Hello. I thought I heard someone else. I’ve been waiting all day. I’m Alexandra Penrith.’

The girl was half a head taller than Misty, slim, with lustrous dark curls and the poshest accent Misty had ever heard. She stuck out her hand in a rather formal way, but her smile was broad and genuine.

Misty shrugged, glancing down at the mugs she was holding and they both giggled. Alexandra dropped her hand and turned to hold the door open instead.

‘I’m Misty Jardine. My mum’s just leaving,’ said Misty. ‘I mean, once she’s had this.’ She nodded down at the tea. ‘What room number are you?’

‘Six. And you?’

‘Two.’

‘Great. Come and find me when you’re ready. I’ll be unpacking and accosting random strangers.’

You could arrive on Friday or Saturday. It turned out that only three girls from the corridor of eight were there the first night. The third looked around fourteen, whispered that she was called Emma and was studying maths and locked herself in her room. Misty and Alexandra – who said she preferred to be called Alex – chatted awkwardly in Alex’s room. She’d brought actual furniture – a desk with elaborate carving that looked Indian to Misty’s untrained eye and a pair of woven cane chairs, laden with sari-silk cushions. The bed itself looked the same as Misty’s, but it was piled with more of the jewel-coloured cushions and swathed in an intricately embroidered throw.

‘Wow, this is incredible,’ said Misty, forgetting to try to be cool.

‘Well, I just couldn’t tolerate the awful stuff here, so Daddy arranged with the porters to stash it in storage. It’s so important to be able to express yourself, isn’t it? They don’t know about the picture hooks yet –’ she gestured towards a couple of frames hanging above the bed; Misty definitely remembered there being something in the information leaflet about it being expressly forbidden to attach anything other than Blu-Tack to the wall ‘– but I’m sure I can talk them round.’

Misty thought of the two posters waiting to go up in her own room. One was Morrissey, the other a cute Labrador puppy. Both were a bit tatty having been up in her room at home. Would they count as self-expression in Alex’s book?

They missed the canteen – which Alex informed her was called the buttery – which was on reduced opening hours because it wasn’t yet officially term time.

‘Well, we could get something in town?’ suggested Alex, as they stood in a drizzly quad in front of the locked buttery door, clutching the mimeographed maps of college they had been given on arrival.