Mhairi McFarlane - Here’s Looking At You

Anna laid it carefully over a chair and checked the office door was locked, then wriggled out of her shapeless Zara smock, swapping it for the evening gown. She twisted it into place with forefingers and thumbs very carefully, as if it was gossamer, and pulled up a reassuringly chunky zip, with only a little breathing in.

Hmmm. She turned this way and that in front of the mirror. Not quite the transformation she’d hoped for. A black dress is a black dress. She flapped her arms up and down and watched the diaphanous chiffon sleeves waft in the breeze. She heard ‘The Birdie Song’ in her head.

On the website’s mannequin, with its blank white Isaac Asimov robot face, the black Prada shift had looked ‘Rita Hayworth during Happy Hour at the Waldorf Astoria’ chic. Now it was on her, Anna wondered if it was in fact rather blowsy. Like a cruise ship singer who would launch into ‘Unbreak My Heart’ while everyone enjoyed their main of breadcrumbed veal with sautéed potatoes.

Inevitably, as she stared at herself, she remembered that other day, that other dress. And that other girl.

Eventually she picked up her phone.

‘Michelle. I’m not going to the reunion. It’s rank madness and the dress makes me look like Professor Snape.’

‘Yes you are. After you’ve been, you’ll experience an incredible sense of lightness. Like a colon cleanse. Barry! Prep that squid and stop playing Fingermouse with it! Sorry, that last bit wasn’t for you.’

‘I can’t, Michelle. What if they all laugh at me?’

‘They won’t. But even if they did – doesn’t part of you want a chance to live that moment again, but this time, you tell them all to go to hell?’

Anna didn’t want to admit what she was thinking. What if she crumbled, cried and had to face that she was still Aureliana? Aureliana, holding more exam certificates and carrying less weight.

‘Do I look alright in this dress you can’t see?’

‘Is it the Prada one you sent me the link to? BARRY! Get that off that sausage! Do you think you’re working for Aardman fucking Animations? There’s no way you won’t look good. Your problem is going to be you’ll look so good no one will be looking at anyone else.’

‘Knock knock! Permission to enter the bat cave!’ Patrick sing-songed through the door.

‘Michelle, I’ve got to go.’

‘You’re right. You have got to go .’

Anna half laughed, half groaned.

‘Come in!’ Anna called. Cave was a reasonable adjective for Anna’s sinfully messy space on the second floor.

As a lecturer, expert in the Byzantine period, she was allowed some stereotypical nutty professor licence. When it came to housekeeping, she took it. Books were piled on folders piled on more books. The disarray was an insult to a lovely room though, and Anna felt some guilt about it.

Patrick lived down the hall, teaching the wool trade in the Tudor period. They’d started at UCL at a similar time and shared a passion for their work, as well as an ability to laugh at it and talk about something else entirely. This wasn’t to be underestimated in academia. Many of their colleagues were incredibly earnest. Something about experiencing life on an exalted plane of ‘clever’ could lead to malfunctions on the everyday level. As Patrick put it, they were people with brains the size of planets who couldn’t boil an egg.

Patrick often began his day by bringing Anna a cup of tea, drinking his while sitting on the bright blue office supplies chair, once he’d moved a pile of box folders, Anna’s coat and sundry items of course. Anna usually sat at her desk, scanning her emails and gossiping.

Patrick passed Anna her cup.

‘Goodness me, new frock?’ he said, watching Anna set her tea down.

‘Ah, yeah.’ She turned back and stood with her hands on her hips and legs slightly apart, as if she was a plumber about to give her price for addressing a particularly capricious combi-boiler.

‘Is it for the Theodora show? I thought that hadn’t kicked off yet?’ Patrick added.

‘No, I wish. School reunion tonight. Not sure if I should go. I had a molto horrifico time at school.’

Patrick squinted. ‘Oh. Right. So why are you going?’

‘My friend said it would be a defiant gesture. She’s mad, isn’t she? I don’t think I can do it. It’s a stupid plan. Oh, and do us a favour while you’re over there, and top Boris up?’ Anna said, nodding towards the large, beleaguered-looking cheese plant, and a scummy-looking milk bottle of water on the windowsill. ‘I’m thinking Prada and spillages don’t mix.’

He obligingly tipped an inch of greyish fluid into Boris’s soil.

Patrick had very neatly-cut auburn hair and the quivery, undernourished look of someone who had been shucked from a shell, rather than woman-born.

His uniform was fine knit V-necks and a mustard-coloured cord jacket with leather elbow patches. He claimed it had become such an academic cliché it had gone right through cliché and come out the other side as original.

He looked up at a portrait on Anna’s office wall.

‘Ask yourself this. What would your heroine Empress Theodora do?’

‘Have them all killed?’

‘Then second best; knock ’em dead,’ Patrick said.

Anna stood on the stairwell in front of a Blu-tacked sign in a distinctly ungentrified pub in East London with two stark options spelled out in Comic Sans.

Damn, she wished she knew Beth. It was a young name. Probably off to travel the world. She could hear a very bad karaoke rendition of Take That’s ‘Patience’ drifting from Beth’s party HQ.

Anna felt the vodka and oranges she’d had for Dutch courage sizzle acidly in her gut and trudged up the creaking, threadbare stairs and along the musty-smelling corridor to the appointed door. She had the pulse-in-the-neck trepidation of someone navigating the Ghost House at a funfair, her whole body tensed for surprise. Underneath the Milanese chiffon, she was clammy.

Another, deeper breath. She remembered what Michelle had said, that this was a demonstration of strength. She opened the door and stepped into the room. It was near-empty. A few people she didn’t recognise glanced over, returned to their conversations. In her many, many rehearsals in her head, a gallery of familiar faces turned towards her, accompanied by a needle scratch noise on a record. But no, nothing.

The worst of them weren’t even here yet, if they were going to turn up at all. Was she relieved, or disappointed? Weirdly, she was both.

A sagging banner above the bar announced a school reunion: 16 YEARS SINCE WE WERE 16!!!!!! Oh dear, multiple exclamation marks. Like having someone with ADD shaking maracas in your face.

Anna got herself a glass of bathwater-warm Stowells of Chelsea white wine and retreated to a wallflower location on the left hand side of the room. She judged that everyone was only one alcohol unit away from circulating more freely, and she would be approached. She’d throw this drink down and get gone. There, she’d put her head in the lion’s jaws. Done. Extra points for doing it alone. She wasn’t quite sure why that felt so necessary, but it did. Like when the action hero growled: ‘This is something I have to do for myself.’

It was an anti-climax, but wasn’t it always going to be? What did she expect, that everyone would be queuing up to make their apologies?

The wall opposite held a collage of pictures on large coloured sheets of sugar paper, with childish bubble letters spelling out Class of ’97 above it. Anna knew she wasn’t on it. No one would’ve asked her to squeeze – squeeze being the operative word – into the disposable camera snaps.

Below the display was a congealing finger buffet that sensibly, no one was touching. When everyone was pissed enough, a few dead things in pastry might get snarfed, but the crudités were strictly for decoration.