‘You studying him?’
‘Yeah. Hate poetry, though.’
‘And yet you’re doing an English degree,’ he voices. ‘You know I did wonder …’ and he stalls.
‘Go on.’
‘There was a small part of me that thought you weren’t going to come back this year,’ he reveals.
‘What?’ I explode. ‘You didn’t think I was coming back to uni?’
He shakes his head, looks at the pub with its hanging baskets and a two-for-one burger-night sign. ‘Fancy a drink first?’
‘Sure,’ I agree. ‘Anything to get out of putting together my bookshelf.’
The pub is warm on this, one of the first proper early autumnal days we’ve had this year. Ollie and I take off our coats and I buy us a round of drinks while he scouts out a table. The clientele is a mix of students and locals playing slot machines and glancing up at Sky Sports on the TV. Refreshingly, the pub is not trying to gentrify itself into some sort of gastro offering.
I walk over to Ollie while clutching his favourite, a Guinness, and mine, a white-wine spritzer.
‘Oh, you didn’t have to pay for mine,’ he says. ‘I could have—’
‘I put them on my credit card,’ I interject, to which Ollie raises an eyebrow.
‘Aury,’ he chides. ‘How much debt have you got on that card now?’
I give him an uncomfortable look. ‘A few thousand.’
‘Oh my God! A fewthousand? I did tell you not to get—’
‘I know, I know. But I really like clothes, and there are so many English set texts I need.’
‘Can’t you get them from the library?’
‘No. I can’t make notes in the margins of library books.’
Ollie looks doubtful.
‘Why didn’t you think I was coming back to uni?’ I question him.
He sits back, looks at me thoughtfully and cups his hand around his ice-cold glass. He hasn’t drunk any of it yet, though. His expression shows he’s still trying to comprehend my credit-card revelation. ‘Because,’ Ollie starts slowly, ‘you didn’t do very well at the end of your first year.’
‘Telling you that was a moment of weakness,’ I reply, remembering how I’d confessed that to him.
I’d walked into the flat with my end-of-year results in one hand and tissues in the other, as I cried my way into my room. Ollie was the only other person in the flat when I received my results and I needed to talk to someone, confessing everything: how much I’ve been struggling, how I love all the reading, but am absolutely awful at the analysing bit of my course. I felt so ashamed I didn’t even tell Liv how I had barely scraped a pass. Or Ben – at the time. Although I did afterwards, when it didn’t feel so bad, when I’d already had Ollie’s shoulder to cry on and his sensible outlook as to how to deal with it.
‘You told me to talk to my tutor honestly about how he saw it panning out for me, which I did. I’m still here, aren’t I?’ I say.
‘You still feel confident English Lit is for you? It’s probably not too late to swap for another Humanities subject.’
‘No,’ I reply a bit uncertainly. ‘I’ve just got to stick with it. It’ll be fine, I’m sure. How areyoufeeling about everything, now you’ve proved yourself a medical know-it-all?’ I ask, keen to take the heat away from me.
‘Ah, you know,’ Ollie replies, deflecting me.
‘No, I don’t. Tell me.’
‘It’s going OK,’ he confesses, trying to hide his success.
‘You’re brilliant,’ I say. ‘And I knew you would be.’
