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part of the night.’
    â€˜Did you ever see this boy again?’
    â€˜No, never,’ I say. ‘Don’t even know his name.’
    â€˜Well, let’s talk about some of the other people you mentioned. Was it easy to make friends at uni?’
    And even though I am glad to have got the conversation away from Michael, I find it hard to answer this question.
    â€˜I guess so. There were so many people to meet all at once.’
    â€˜And yet all the people you talk about in detail seem to be from the same floor as you. Not such a wide group. Friends through geography.’
    â€˜They were the people I met first.’ I am trying not to sound defensive but this seems like a pretty hypocritical comment seeing Frank is married to his receptionist. ‘Geography probably shapes most friendships. You work with people, go to uni with people, that sort of thing. You do the same things at the same time. Doesn’t mean it’s not a real relationship.’
    â€˜It doesn’t guarantee a lasting friendship either. Take you and Tracey,’ he says.
    Her name is like a punch in the face.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Maybe what you and Tracey had was a school friendship. Maybe given the chance it wouldn’t have survived a change in geography. A friendship that ends abruptly can colour our view of it, we mythologise it into something that it wasn’t. Then perhaps later we can see that it had a natural end anyway. What we thought was a road would have turned out to be a cul-de-sac.’
    I bet he practised that analogy in the mirror this morning. He doesn’t understand anything. Tracey is still my friend now despite what he might think. She will always be my friend. For a moment I want to shout this at him, but I bottle it up. I have had to lock away everything to do with Tracey. None of it is up for discussion.
    â€˜I think we’ve made a good start today.’ Frank puts on a benevolent face like I’m lucky he has so much insight and wisdom to share with me. ‘See you in a fortnight.’

Chapter 5
    â€˜But really, I don’t understand what is actually sexist about the Murder Game,’ said Joyce, known only to his parents as James, as he squirted tomato sauce all over his lunch.
    There were more Jameses at college than there were in my whole town. Back home they were called Jimmy, Jimbo or Jamie. Never James. This one was nicknamed Joyce because for the first few weeks he carried a copy of Ulysses with him, a bookmark permanently fixed a third of the way in. He was tall with a bad white-man’s-afro and a voice that carried across the room.
    â€˜I think Leiza was pointing out that, perhaps, some people might argue it trivialises violence against women,’ said Kesh, apologetically. She was sitting between Toby and Rachel. Michael sat at the far end of the table, occasionally looking at people as they spoke, but not joining in the conversation. Rachel was eating toast after having been caught by the cook trying to steal sausages from the bain-marie.
    Three weeks into term, the Murder Game, billed as a way of getting to know everyone at college, had begun. You were given a victim who you had to pretend to kill by trapping them alone. For the first few days, the college moved in packs, fearful of attacks and of being waylaid in dark corners. But as the body count grew higher, and more people were eliminated, views began to change from it all being good fun to thinking that it was a childish undergraduate game. Leiza had taken a far harder line and had gone to see Marcus to get it banned altogether.
    â€˜Such a killjoy,’ said Rachel. ‘She’s pissed off that her petition has been completely ignored and now just wants to wreck everyone’s fun. I mean, she wanted the bar crawl to be cancelled and she complained about the toga party. What would she have us do? Sit round and discuss feminist legal theory?’
    Rachel had assassinated four of her