6
It was during the Easter term in her first year when Maggie met Tiger. She ran into him, quite literally, as he headed into Angie’s room and she headed out of hers. She was racing to her afternoon lecture, uncharacteristically late, having become absorbed in an episode of Neighbours. She’d opened her door and launched herself at speed at exactly the moment a tall, tanned Adonis of a young man, dressed only in a barely adequate hand towel, had stepped across the corridor to open Angie’s door. Maggie’s momentum meant that she ricocheted off him, dropping her bag and very nearly ending up on the floor herself. A lever arch file full of notes sprang open as it hit the ground and disgorged its contents in a disorderly muddle on the carpet.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she began, bending to retrieve her notes whilst making sure that her gaze didn’t settle on the skimpy towel.
‘Hey. Someone’s in a hurry,’ said the man. ‘It’s not good for you, you know. Stress.’
He bent down to help her with her things, holding the towel in place around his waist with one hand, and their heads almost touched, his blond and tousled, hers dark and tightly pinned back. She could smell peppermint toothpaste on his breath and his skin was still damp from a recent shower, but she was so flustered that she barely allowed herself to make eye contact with him.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I’m late for my lecture. Or nearly late.’
‘I’m sure they won’t start without a beautiful creature like you,’ he said.
It was the corniest line Maggie had heard in quite some time, but somehow when it came out of his mouth it sounded entirely reasonable. She could feel her cheeks flame.
The papers regathered, they stood up and he raised a hand – the one not protecting his dignity – in a wave of sorts.
‘I’m Tiger,’ he said. ‘Mate of Angie’s. And you are . . . ?’
‘Maggie,’ she managed. ‘I live next door,’ she added, and then could have kicked herself, as that much was probably obvious. ‘And I need to go. Nice to meet you . . .’ She wanted to repeat his name, to attach some significance to the delivery of it, but was stymied. Surely, he wasn’t really called Tiger. Who would do that to their child? Instead, her sentence seemed to float in the air unfinished.
Then she set off up the corridor, her heart still beating faster than usual.
‘I’ll be staying for a few weeks,’ he called after her. ‘So, no doubt I’ll catch you again.’
She heard Angie’s door open and then bang closed as she reached the fire doors.
Staying for a few weeks? Had he really said that? Obviously, people had guests for the weekend sometimes, and there was an occasional visitor to their corridor mid-week, but for ‘weeks’， plural? Maggie wondered if that was even allowed. She doubted very much that it was. It was just like Angie to flaunt the rules. Maybe she had sublet her room to him and gone to sleep somewhere else. Maggie wouldn’t have put it past her.
Then again, what did she care if it meant that that gorgeous bloke was sleeping just the other side of the breeze-block wall?
She failed to concentrate as hard in her tort lecture as she perhaps should have done, and then hurried back home afterwards to see how the land lay, but there was no sign of the visitor. Her curiosity about him trumped her embarrassment at appearing nosey, and she knocked on Leon’s door. She and Leon were good friends now. She liked his unassuming nature and his dry wit, and she could just about overlook how he seemed to be as obsessed with Angie as everyone else.
‘Come in,’ shouted Leon, and she opened the door and let it close behind her.
Leon’s bed was still unmade and most of his clothes seemed to be on the floor, but Maggie forced herself to ignore the mess. Her eye was caught by a single black sock dangling from the keys of the alto saxophone that lived on a stand in the corner, but she looked beyond it to where Leon was sitting.
‘Oh, hi Mags,’ he said when he saw her. No one had ever called her Mags, but she allowed it because it suggested a degree of intimacy between the two of them that she liked.
‘Have you met Tiger?’ she asked him outright without bothering with any explanation.
Leon looked confused and shook his head. ‘Tiger? Is that a person or a soft toy?’
‘A person. A bloke. He’s staying in Angie’s room.’
‘Oh, him,’ said Leon with a trace of disgust. ‘The blond one who thinks he’s God’s gift to women? I’ve not met him, but I saw him earlier. Is he a mate of Angie’s, then? From a different college?’