Northumberland had always been home for me, and yet being here already felt all wrong.
I’d applied to the elite philosophy programme as soon as Carvell had reopened – if I was going to practice law one day and be a judge, if I was going to play God in the fates of murderers and victims alike – where better to cut my teeth than a place so famously steeped in death?
Plus, it was less than twenty miles from the town I grew up in; where my parents and brothers still lived. My mum had suffered from lupus since I was twelve, and it was getting worse every year. Even the prestigious universities in Edinburgh and Durham felt too far away. What if she took a turn for the worse and it took me hours to get home? What if . . .?
I tried not to think like that.
After composing myself by Sister Maria’s statue, I headed back to the car park and yanked my suitcase out of my beat–up Ford. I frowned down at the campus map. Willowood Hall, where I’d be living for the next year, was adjacent to the central priory. Right opposite the North Tower, with its turrets and crenellations and dark, dark past.
Nerves writhed in the pit of my stomach like adders, but not because of the proximity to the site of the murders. I’d been on edge about my new roommate all summer – about what it would be like to share a bedroom with another person after eighteen years of my own space. Another person who could well be the devil, or worse, a snorer.
Friendship, for me, was a long game. Something that could not be rushed or fast-tracked. My affections were not the quick flint of a forest fire, but rather grew like ivy; a slow creep over many years, difficult to destroy with a barbed comment or a careless joke.
Ever since my best friend Noémie moved away, the thought of getting to know new people felt overwhelming. Noémie and I had known each other since primary school, and become properly close in sixth form. She’d moved back to Canada to study in Toronto, and I was already daunted by the crater she’d left behind. There had been an almost-romantic layer to our relationship. Limbs tangled as we slept, though we never kissed. Love-yous exchanged with a kind of fake casualness. I’d never entirely unpacked what I felt for Noémie, and I was a little afraid to.
Anyway, now it was too late. She was gone, and we didn’t talk any more, so what was even the point of it all?
Back in high school, I never felt like I belonged. It was cool to look like you hadn’t tried, like you’d just tossed on whatever novelty tee and dirty Converse you had lying around. I was scorned for trying too hard, for being too serious, for thinking too highly of myself. So I hoped my new roommate would be like me. I wanted someone I could discuss Sartre and Foucault and Nietzsche with, while drinking red wine and whisky. To speculate about the afterlife and the occult, and exchange beloved books and films. Someone who would make Northumberland feel so much larger than it was. Because if I couldn’t go and study at Edinburgh or Harvard or Cambridge, Carvell had to be the next best thing.
When I found the room, it was still empty; no sign of my roommate yet. There were two single cabin beds bracketing a central arched window, each with a little roll-top desk tucked beneath the bunk. The carpet was a dark green tartan and the walls were high and white. The window was open a sliver, and the smell of moss and rosemary and wild garlic drifted in on the breeze. It was at once achingly familiar and achingly sad. A connection to the Alice who used to make dens in the woods with Aidan and Max, before Mum was diagnosed, before Max left for London.
It smelled of home, and yet I was not home. Not any more.