Chapter 7: Some Reasons Why Cathy Calloway Was my Archenemy Long Before She Shagged My Husband on My Wedding Day

In my first month at Imperial College, London, I had the biggest crush you’ve ever seen on a third-year geographer called Rollo Price. In those initial, terrifying days at uni, I thought that everyone else was from another, superintelligent world, and I was a fraud (do you ever stop thinking that?). Cathy Calloway lived in the room next door to me. For a short time, I thought Cathy was my best friend; she thought she was the coolest girl in any room she was in, and she thought everyone else thought it too.

Late at night, when everyone had finished drinking excitedly in whoever’s room we had ended up in that night after the bar, I would crap on to Cathy about how beautiful Rollo was, and how he’d looked at me at lunchtime in a way that seemed to indicate he recognised me as someone he had once seen before, rather than as another nameless face in the adoring horde, or of how I'd watched Rollo playing rugby under the cover of giving support to Big Ginger Matt, who lived in the room below mine, and how amazingly he'd tricked some boy from Bristol by pretending to pass, but not passing. ‘It’s called a dummy, dummy!’ said Cathy.

‘Oh.’

‘You’ll learn!’ she said, patting my arm. ‘You have to be careful, though. Boys hate it when you seem keen.’

‘Really?’ I said. I’d certainly read that in magazines. I was not very experienced when I got to university. I’d been to a secluded boarding school where some girls seemed to talk a lot about sex, very knowingly, very much in the way Cathy Calloway did, but not with me. I’d been kissed a couple of times at parties, but more by luck than judgement, and I mean bad luck.

‘Absolutely, darling,’ said Cathy. ‘You’ve been mooning over him for a fortnight. He’ll be bored of you by now. Do you want me to put in a good word? I’ll do that if you want? But whatever you do, you have to ignore him totally, or if you can’t ignore him, at least be rude. Okay?’

‘Thanks, Cathy,’ I said. I wasn’t certain she knew what she was talking about, but I thought she was from another, more confident planet (which wasn’t totally unperceptive, in retrospect). And so I watched her spend a week chatting with Rollo in the bar, giggling every time he opened his mouth, clutching his forearm, running her finger along his latest cuts and bruises. She would tell me that everything was going well, and she was building up trust prior to setting us up on a date, and I would believe her (which shows I was totally unperceptive, in retrospect).

Then, dancing one night at St Mary’s, where Cathy had dragged me because we knew the rugby team would be there, I got separated from everyone but a big, sweet, Canadian guy, who insisted on walking me home. I invited the Canadian in for tea, because you could do that back then without it meaning anything, and we listened for an hour to Cathy shouting ecstatically to Rollo next door that he was, ‘Amazing, again, oh, God, amazing,’ and her bed thudding against the wall again and again and again and again and again and again, and, ‘I’m coming again, oh my God, how do you do it Rollo, you’re amazing, oh my God, Rollo.’ I still swear she raised her voice every time she said ‘Rollo,’ but maybe I’m imagining it.

The Canadian said, ‘Rollo really fancied you, you know, when you arrived, but you were totally uninterested.’

Cathy said, ‘I’m sorry darling, but we were so drunk, and we danced, and it was, I mean, so strong, he’s like a wild animal, and I couldn’t resist, and some of the things he did!’ she smiled seraphically. ‘I’m just saying: Oh. My. God!’ Then she held my hand, and said, ‘You don’t mind, do you darling, because, it’s not like anything ever happened between you guys, it was just a little crush.’ But she could see that I knew, and although we never said anything about it ever, from then on, secretly, we were best of enemies.

Cathy’s brazenness should seem funny after all these years, but it doesn’t. Instead, I look back, and even now, I still think of what might have been if I had not been such an idiot. There’s nothing to be done. She shagged Rollo loudly all that year, and a couple of other guys behind his back (‘They mean nothing, darling, they’re just practise. Don’t judge me, it’s just the way I am. I know I can trust you, girls don’t tell or ALL other girls hate them!’). She dumped Rollo as soon as he graduated, and spent the next two years sleeping with professional footballer who played for Chelsea.

And now, here she was, having just returned from my honeymoon, which she’d spent shagging my husband, whose dripping head was now sitting on the floor by my knee, teetering over the cobbles on three inch heels and waving at a tall, bearded policeman. ‘It was her!’ she shrieked. ‘It was that fat bitch on the floor! She killed him in revenge. She made David Tennant kill him with a sword!’ She was shrieking, but her eyes were cold.

The policeman advanced slowly. His partner, a black woman whose dyed orange hair poked from under her helmet, tried to hold him back, but he didn’t seem afraid. He squatted in front of me and said gently, ‘Is everything okay, Mary Sue? Are you alright?’

It was Rollo.