She has to stop and check the map three more times before she reaches Queens’ College. She recognises it because of the wooden bridge that arcs over the river – the Mathematical Bridge, her father had told her, supposedly designed by Sir Isaac Newton himself to bear its own weight without a single bolt. Except now, she sees, it is in fact bolted together. Another lie.
She stands on the other side of the street and watches. The entrance to the college is through a porter’s lodge with an automatic glass door, accessed with an electronic key card. A group of students arrives in flapping black academic gowns, clutching bottles of wine. She crosses the street just as one of the students swipes his card on the reader and follows the group in, unobserved by the porters.
‘To the bar!’ a girl shouts.
The rest of them cheer. And Cosima, with nothing better to do, trails them through the porter’s lodge, past the bicycle racks and then into a modern courtyard, ringed by a grey concrete building with open staircases. The bar is on the ground floor, halfway round the central square. Another electronic glass door swishes open at her approach. The bar resembles a 1970s holiday chalet – dark wood and anoverextended conservatory. Tamping down her nerves, she orders a gin and tonic. The barman doesn’t question her or insist on seeing her (fake) ID. He simply asks if she wants to make it a double. Cosima nods. He passes her a plastic tumbler and asks for £3.50. Subsidised prices, she thinks. Nice little perk for the educational elite.
She finds a spot in the corner and wedges her backpack between two cushions. She sits and takes out her phone. It’s on the last sliver of battery. She scrolls through her news apps to see if the British Museum action has made the headlines. There it is, the third story on the BBC: ‘Eco-protestors storm exhibition opening’. No mention of her by name, thankfully. No mention of her parents. Her shoulders relax. Then her phone shuts down.
She takes a sip of her drink and then another, placing it carefully back on the low table so that it makes the least amount of noise possible. For now, her primary concern is to remain unobtrusive. Perhaps she could spend the night in one of the open staircases? She has a thin sleeping bag with her – River taught them always to take a sleeping bag, torch and battery pack on night-time actions, and while the British Museum wasn’t exactly wild territory, you could never be too careful. She fishes out the battery pack and plugs her phone in. After a few moments, the screen flashes back to life.
The thought of River makes her sad. She misses him. At the same time, she questions if she ever really knew him and it’s difficult to know where to put those feelings. Lately, it feels as though everyone close to her has been engaged in a lifelong pretence, like the masked players in one of those Shakespearean plays she’s had to study for A-level English. And now the masks are dropping, one by one.
‘This free?’
A male voice. She glances up. Messy brown hair, a likeable face. He’s wearing a Nirvana hoodie and low-slung jeans.
‘Sure. I mean, yes.’
She moves her backpack onto the tiled floor.
‘Thanks,’ he says, slumping down on the banquette with a loud groan and opening a packet of peanuts in one swift movement. ‘Helpyourself,’ he says, charitably. ‘So I haven’t seen you about, have I? I’m Alfie.’
He is so friendly and Labrador-like that Cosima can’t help but reply.
‘I’m Cosima. Cozzie.’
‘Well, Cosima-Cozzie, nice to meet you.’
He extends a hand to shake, the fingers gritty with peanut salt.
‘What are you up to tonight?’
‘I guess … looking for somewhere to stay, if I’m honest.’
She drinks more of the gin, feeling the strength of it soothe her.
‘You’re not a student here?’
‘No,’ she says, then, worried, adds: ‘I mean, my dad was.’
‘Oh, right,’ Alfie says, accepting it. ‘OK.’
But somewhere between the third and fourth gulp of gin and the second helping of Alfie’s peanuts, she realises she has a plan. The solution has been sitting there in her subconscious all along and now it slots perfectly into her frontal cortex like a Tetris brick.
‘Actually, I’m trying to find an old friend of my dad’s. I know he lectures here.’
‘Have you tried looking on a quaint little information system we call Google in these here parts?’ Alfie says, grinning.
‘I had to wait for my phone to charge, genius,’ Cosima says.
Alfie sweeps his hair to one side and starts tapping into the search engine on his phone. ‘What’s this geezer’s name?’
‘Martin Gilmour.’
He types with such rapid dexterity that she wonders if he’s studying computer science. You can always tell a coder by the way they use their thumbs.
‘Found him.’
