Chapter 9: Welcome to Westy

Hey paul I’m arriving in westmouth today campus heights flat 15 come say hi? Show me around the place?

“Who’s Lily?” Mark said as he read the text message over my shoulder.

“An old friend,” I replied. “Her dad and my dad were friends at Uni together and we had a sort of a thing for a little while in sixth-form. Nothing serious but...”

“Let me guess, blonde hair—”

“Cut it out. Not every girl I’ve gone out with has looked the same.”

“Maybe. But you do have a type, and I bet this Lily fits it to a tee.”

“Fuck you. Shouldn’t you be out mending that hunk of junk on the driveway? And how come your car is on the driveway while mine is parked on the road?”

“Easier for me to work on it that way, innit?” he said, stuffing a slice of toast in his mouth before going outside to work on his car.

I tapped in a message to Lily telling her I’d pop by later that evening to give her time to settle in, then I’d take her and her housemates to one of the campus bars to meet up with my friends. Then I sent a message to Emily to let her know so she could make the arrangements with our friends—well, her friends who were friends with me by association.

I hadn’t seen Lily Williams since before I left for my year in America. Actually, I think it was at Clarissa’s funeral, but I’d spent that whole day so zoned out from what was going on that I’d be lying if I said I had a clear memory of it.

She’d been in year thirteen, finishing her A-Levels, while I was in The States and then she’d taken a gap year helping out in a school in some country in Africa—I forget which one—during my first year in Westmouth. Oh, we’d been staying in touch with the odd text message here and there, but not really as many as there perhaps should have been for someone who held a special place in my wounded heart.

We were never going to be soul mates, but the short time we’d had together—even if it was fake—was still special to me.

So I was more nervous than I’d expected as I walked to the campus to meet up with her again. She’d told me more than once that my being at Westmouth was one of the reasons she’d applied there too. Not the main reason, but a factor.

I may have mentioned this before, but pretty much the whole of the northwest quarter of the campus was given over to student accommodation. Wintersmith Hall, where I’d lived not so very long ago, and her sisters were in the most north-western corner and then to the south of them were twenty separate five-bedroom apartments—where Emily had lived in her second year and, so she’d told us that time we’d had a meal together at Mille’s before the start of term, so had Chloë’s boyfriend in her first year. In addition, there was another group of traditional halls of residence like Wintersmith in the south-eastern corner of the accommodation quarter and then more groups of self-contained apartments ranging from four to eight bedrooms dotted around the rest of the quarter.

Lily was in one of the eight-bedroom apartments in a large block on the northern edge of campus called Campus Heights. It was between Wintersmith and the north entrance to campus, and it was the largest single student accommodation building on campus. There was a larger building in the Student Village on the other side of Westmouth Hill Road which contained one-bedroom studio apartments that were rented in the main by the final year students, mature students and couples.

I’d walked past Campus Heights countless times while I was living in Wintersmith. It was on my route to both The Union and the library on the Grand Plaza in the centre of campus and the Law Department building in the north-eastern quarter. But I’d never really taken much notice of it or realised how big it was.

At eight stories high, it was twice the height of Wintersmith and the second tallest building on campus—only the Physics Tower (which was home to the Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics departments) was taller, and that was only by three floors.

There were two entrances to the building. Turns out that this was because there were four apartments on each floor—one on either side of each entrance. There was a stairwell and a lift in the building’s two foyers.

I bet the people on the eighth floor were glad of the lifts.

Lily’s apartment, number fifteen, was on the fourth floor and accessed via the eastern entrance.

I took the lift. Obviously.

The lift juddered to a halt and the ding of a bell indicated I’d reached Lily’s floor. The doors slid open and I stepped out onto a small, plain landing with the stairwell in front of me and one door on either side. I approached the door to my right and pushed the small black button to ring the bell.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Rather than ring the bell again because I assumed it was either broken or the girls inside were so busy talking that they couldn’t hear it anyway, I pulled my phone from my back pocket to text Lily and tell her I was there.

But just as I unlocked the phone, the door opened.

“Yes?”

How was it possible for one word to carry so much meaning? Contempt. Annoyance. Dislike. Distrust. Maybe a touch of arrogance. Maybe I was reading too much into it, but there was certainly something about the way she’d said that one word that immediately rubbed me up the wrong way.

Which was a shame, because the young woman that had said it was, to coin a phrase that had haunted me for nearly two years now, just my type.

Seriously, this girl was stunning. And I suspect she knew it. Her expression certainly suggested she knew it. And suggested that she thought she was above the likes of this person who’d just rung her doorbell.

Long blonde hair framed her face in perfect waves. High cheekbones. A delicate little nose. And eyes. Oh, man, those eyes. Big and round and as blue as the—

“Well?” She was holding the door open with one hand and had the other on her hip, which jutted out to the side slightly in that pose that only girls seem to be able to pull off. Seriously, any guy that tries it just looks like an idiot.

“Oh ... Right ... Erm ... I ... I’m looking for Lily. Lily Williams. I’m—”

“PAUL!”

I barely had time to register the blonde streak racing towards me before she slammed into me with such force that I staggered backwards a couple of steps.

Lily proceeded to crush me in a bear-hug with everything she had.

“Oh, Paul! It’s so good to see you! So good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too, Lils.”

She pulled back from me and grinned. “You’re the only person that ever called me Lils.”

I shrugged and smiled.

“Come on,” she said, taking my hand in hers. “I’ll introduce you to my flatmates. You’ll like them.”

The girl who’d opened the door was gone and Lily dragged me down the long corridor towards the door at the end. With eight bedrooms, this was more of a mini hall of residence than an apartment. Four bedrooms on either side of the corridor, one bathroom on either side and then a large kitchen and dining area at the end.

There were six of Lily’s flatmates in the kitchen, each of them with a drink in their hand. The girl who’d opened the door wasn’t among them but there were two other young women and four young men. Lily introduced us all and told her flatmates that I’d offered to show her around. I quickly explained that I was taking Lily to meet some of my friends in The Cap & Gown over in the Student Village and then we were going to work our way back towards the Student’s Union via a couple of the other campus bars—much like the Wintersmith Committee had arranged for the residents this time last year.

“You’re all welcome to join us, if you’d like,” I added.

“Thanks,” said a guy whose name I’d already forgotten. “That’d be cool.”

“Yeah, thanks,” said Rina, a dark-haired girl with a lovely smile. “It’d be fab to go out and relax after today. It’s been so stressful.”

I smiled. “Trust me, it’ll get worse for the next week or so, but then it gets better.”

“What gets better,” came that voice laden with contempt from the doorway.

“The stress,” said Lily. “Alannah, you already know Paul. Paul—”

“I know who he is,” she said. “I don’t know him.”

Lily shook her head. “Paul, this is Alannah. Alannah Carrington. You remember her, right? She was in the year below me at Micester High.”

I shook my head. “I ... No. I don—”

Alannah huffed. “Yeah. Why would you, huh? I mean, back then I didn’t look like this.”

I frowned. “Hey, that’s not—”

“Mousey Alannah Carrington. The girl with thick glasses and braces on her teeth. Hardly likely to catch the eye of The Paul Robertson—King of the Townies. The Good Man with a hundred girls ready to throw themselves at him.”

“Alannah, I—”

“Don’t. Okay. Just don’t. Here’s an idea, okay? You stay out of my way, and I’ll stay out of yours. Deal?”

“Lana,” said Lily. “Don’t be like that. Paul’s not Del Stevens, you know.”

Alannah huffed and rolled her eyes.

“You’re coming out with the rest of us though, right?” asked Rina. “I mean, you’re not going to stay here on your own, are you?”

Alannah shrugged. “Well, I suppose if the rest of you are going...”

“Great,” said Rina.

“Come on, then,” said Lily. “Drink up. Let’s get going.”

Lily walked with me at the front of the small group as we made our way back through the campus towards the footbridge over Westmouth Hill Road that led to the Student Village. I noticed that Rina and Alannah were right at the back of the group.

We chatted while we walked. Well, to be more accurate, Lily chatted. She was telling me about her Gap Year, some of which she spent with a charity group building a school in some African village. You know me though; I wasn’t listening well enough to be able to recount her story. In my defence, I had an excuse. I had something on my mind.