Read Online Where the Rain Gets In by Adrian White - Free Book Online Page A

way of calming unsettled minds. She liked the solitude and
she liked to push herself hard against the machines. What it did for her head,
she didn’t know – she was in such a mess anyway; it could do her no harm. The
facilities in the college were free and close to where she lived; she often
carried her gear with her so she could call in on the way home from the
library. There was a pool there too, but this was obviously out of bounds for
Katie.
    A few weeks after meeting Mike and
Eugene in the White Horse, Katie saw their friend Bruno at the gym. She
recognised him immediately, but tried to make out she didn’t know who he was.
Bruno came over anyway.
    “You’re Mike’s friend, Katie,” he said,
and stood by her machine. He wasn’t built like the rest of the guys in the gym.
He was tall but not hugely built, more hard and wiry like Katie.
    Katie stopped what she was doing. She
wasn’t comfortable with Bruno watching her, and she could feel his eyes on her
body.
    “You’re Bruno,” she said.
    Katie waited for him to speak or move
away, but he did neither. She didn’t want her sessions at the gym to be spoilt
by Bruno being there each time.
    “Well, I’ll see you around,” she said.
    Katie had no choice but to start up
again on the machine. Bruno watched for a while, and then walked away.
    When Katie next met Mike, she asked him
about Bruno.
    “Who is he? What does he do?”
    “He does law, the same as us.”
    “But he’s never at any lectures,” said
Katie, “or in the library.”
    “No,” said Mike, “I don’t think Bruno’s
quite cut out for college life. I can’t see him making it through the first
year, somehow – the first term, come to that.”
    “But why?” asked Katie. “Why bother
getting on to the course in the first place?”
    “You’d have to ask him that,” said Mike.
    “I saw him at the gym; he gives me the
creeps.”
    “Yes, he told me,” said Mike. “He also
said you were rude.”
    “I don’t like him,” said Katie.
    Mike smiled.
    “Who do you like, Katie? Here,” he said,
“I’ve bought you a present, so you have to at least pretend to like me.”
    Mike handed her a ticket; it was for a
Buzzcocks concert for the following week. Katie was delighted.
    “Mike, thanks – but let me pay you for the
ticket. Will you be there?”
    “If you paid me for the ticket,” said
Mike, “then it wouldn’t be a present, would it? And yes, I am going, but I have
to warn you – Bruno’s going too, and there’ll be a big crowd of us.”
    “Oh, I don’t care,” said Katie, “I’ll be
there.”
    In all there were twenty of them in a
row together, the strangest collection of people Katie had ever seen,
particularly for a Buzzcocks concert. Katie saw Eugene and Rory; they were sat
with two other students – who could only have been mathematicians – looking
expectantly at the empty stage. Katie wandered through to the bar, but Mike was
nowhere to be seen. Bruno was the only person she recognised.
    “Did Mike buy tickets for all these
people?” she asked him.
    “Mike doesn’t buy anything,” said Bruno
above the noise, “least of all tickets.”
    “So how does he – ”
    “He’ll have persuaded somebody,
somewhere, that it was a good idea to let him have twenty tickets. Though why
he thinks it’s a good idea to invite some of these characters to this, I
wouldn’t know.”
    “Why does Mike like mathematicians?”
asked Katie.
    “It’s not just mathematicians,” said
Bruno. “Any egghead will do. I think Mike wishes he was good enough to be one
of them.”
    “A mathematician – Mike?”
    Bruno shrugged.
    “He’s good, but he’s not that good and
he knows it. Most of these guys here” – he nodded in the direction of the
others at the bar – “are all business types, accountancy or banking and
suchlike. A few medics but they tend to be chemists who just happen to be
studying medicine.”
    “Now there’s something I never
understood,” said Katie.