Sitting in the college canteen, with its off white speckled walls and scuffed linoleum I watch Rebecca suck up Ribena from the carton. Watching the sweet purple liquid being drawn up the straw then fall away when she stops drinking. She pulls out the glued down flaps and I imagine it could take off in flight. Fluttering helplessly around the room, knocking its body against the windows in a vain attempt to be free. Every day she has a carton of Ribena and two tuna mayo sandwiches cut into triangles for lunch. She starts with the Ribena then moves onto the sandwiches when she’s drank half.
‘Quit staring’, Rebecca whispers with a hint of annoyance but still in good nature. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just…’ My voice fails me but I’m glad. I wouldn’t know how to finish that sentence anyway. ‘I know’, she reassures me with a gleam in her eyes and a tiny smile that lasts only seconds; so brief that I’m not even sure if I saw anything. She starts tearing the crusts off her sandwiches. She’ll throw them away once she’s satisfied they have been thoroughly removed and no crust remains. ‘You know it makes me uncomfortable when you do that’, Rebecca says in a much less reassuring manner now. I turn away from her moving my hair so it partially covers my face as I do so. I force my eyes to fix upon the clock furthest from Rebecca. She must think I’m foolish; I probably look like that sulking little girl I saw in the supermarket earlier today. I hear the last sip of Ribena splutter out, she’s probably hopelessly probing the corners of the empty carton with her straw.
‘So what class do you have next?’ She must feel guilty about being so blunt. ‘Philosophy’, I say while still staring intensely at the clock. This clock is permanently the wrong time, but in different ways. Sometimes it’s too fast and other times too slow. But never the right time. After a pause and the sound of her rummaging through her bag looking, for what I presume to be cigarettes and a lighter I ask, ‘Yourself?’ Realising I made a mistake by not asking her. ‘Classics’. I know she enjoys that class.
Recently we’ve only had these brief conversations. I turn back to her and she crumples up the carton with both hands. I don’t like Ribena. In hospital I drank a carton too quickly and was sick, I had to wait another day to get discharged. I’m staring again I think.
