It wasn’t as if failing to get together with Camellia was the moment that led to the breakdown, but it hadn’t helped. He’d invested so much into that, so many emotions, that to have all hope ripped away so suddenly felt diabolical. But he’d not been well long before it. Nobody knew, but it hadn’t been easy to hide. He had started drinking a lot, which helped to disguise the behaviour, as well as to dampen some of the compulsive impulses and worries that were popping up – with sometimes startling volume and insistence – inside his head.
Drunkenness helped him pretend that his fingers didn’t itch with all the billions of germs that accumulated with every single thing that he touched, that furry mould wasn’t growing on his gums, thicker with every hour that passed between brushing his teeth. Freddie didn’t even consider himself to be that bad back then, and yet he had been wrapping his hands in toilet paper just to pull the chain to flush and counting his steps from one place to another, finding solace every time he landed on an even number, a dark sense of dread every time it was odd. There were germs everywhere, and every movement he chose to make had the potential to trigger a parasitic thought in his brain that would latch on and not let go, until it grew into something he could only forget with increasingly large quantities of alcohol.
He’d seen Camellia around before they officially met, and a lot of people knew who she was. She was one of those girls who had managed to arrive on campus a ready-made celebrity, fully formed with her punky, pin-up aesthetic and complete with fan following. It helped that she was beautiful, of course. Nobody had locked down their privacy settings on their Facebook profiles back then; besides which, everyone wanted to be open and easily findable, and it turned out that she was a mere two degrees of separation away from Freddie. She was in a tutorial group with the housemate of someone he knew from rowing club (Freddie signed up in Freshers’ Week, was fawned over for his lean height for a couple of weeks before everyone realised that he was an uncoordinated mess). There were nights when he couldn’t settle the persistent thoughts in his head for long enough to fall asleep, so he’d find himself browsing through Facebook on his clunky laptop, then finding a tagged photo of her on her page. It wasn’t like how it was now, with social media and endless selfies filtered and Photoshopped to high heaven. Nobody had smart phones back then. But inevitably someone would bring a digital camera on a night out, and Camellia’s perfection was duly documented.
This was how he saw her, more often than he saw her in real life, at least until final year. Alongside the comic book girls and the sci-fi princesses, for Freddie Camellia existed more perfectly on a screen than in reality.
So when suddenly she was right there, he was hopeless.
She was on a fancy-dress bar crawl, dressed as Lara Croft via Angelina Jolie, because of course she was. A fake ponytail was attached to her tautly pulled-back hair, a water pistol secured to her thigh with a holster made of duct tape. They were at the bar, and Freddie remembered not caring that she was being served first, despite the fact he’d got there before her. Freddie watched her flirt, his own drunkenness allowing him to get away with unabashed gazing, as if she wasn’t there at all, just some computer projection generated for his own pleasure. She didn’t seem to care that he was staring at her. Maybe she was used to it.
And then, as she was scrambling for change in her purse, a sprinkling of coins fell to the floor. His body on autopilot, Freddie reached down to pick them up.
‘Aww, thank you!’ Her voice sounded harsher than he expected it to be, heavy with a Lancashire accent. Or was it Yorkshire? Freddie had never been able to tell which was which.
‘It’s OK,’ Freddie mumbled back, letting her pick the remaining coins out of his palm.
When she was done, and just before she deployed an impressive four-pint-carrying manoeuvre, Camellia stood up on the tips of her toes (enclosed in some stocky – but somehow on her, sexy – hiking boots) and planted a light kiss on Freddie’s cheek.
A few weeks later she came over to sit with him in the library as he revised. He was stunned. It was too early for his first drink, and he felt panicked at having to negotiate this encounter without his usual crutch.
‘You remember me, right?’ she had asked. ‘I was Lara Croft? You were my hero?’
‘Sure,’ Freddie replied, bashful.
‘I’m Camellia,’ she said, and it took all his strength to not reply ‘I know’. ‘What are you studying?’
‘Computer Science.’
‘You’re one of those tech guys then?’
He nodded. He felt pathetic.
‘I’m studying Law. I don’t know why. I thought it would be a good idea a few years ago, but I guess it’s too late now to change it up.’
They became library pals. It was slow-going. Some days Freddie found it too intense; her confident sense of style, and tendency to say exactly what she was thinking, was overwhelming, but it was also endearing. He learned a lot about her. She cared about big issues, she wanted to do well but often felt stupid, she got riled up by Tories and the Scientologists who would stand outside their building on Tottenham Court Road inviting people in for what she was certain were bog-standard lie-detector tests.
Camellia rarely asked about Freddie, but he didn’t mind because he didn’t think he really had anything special or important to say. He much preferred listening to her, helping her through any problem she was having. He felt the connection and was sure that she did too. He went to the vending machine and bought her a Yorkie.
He’d kissed girls before. There had been a couple of clumsy fumbles in secondary school: one with a girl who later pretended they’d never met; another who had just given him a startled, insecure blush whenever they encountered each other in the corridors afterwards. There was that one who’d caught him off guard at a club night in the Student Union and somehow latched on to his face, vaguely squid-like. He’d never found out who she was, but didn’t remember much of anything else from the rest of that evening anyway. There had also been the few times Baz had tried to set him up with the best friend of whatever girl he happened to be dating, and would confidently sing Freddie’s praises, hoping for the opportunity of a double date. It had never happened.
But he had never felt as he felt for Camellia. Adoration mixed with awe mixed with longing. He looked forward to seeing her every day. Loved the way she smiled, the way she dressed, and the way she would get so enthusiastic about whatever was bothering her.
She became a part of his routine. In the weeks that led up to exams, he’d only let himself look up at her on the even minutes, never the odd. He saved her a space and they’d both pretend that it was coincidence that there was always one free right next to him.
Camellia wasn’t the only fixed point in his life that had disappeared after the Leavers’ Ball. Many, many other things dropped off too. Struggling to find work straight away, he’d moved back from student accommodation into his parents’ house. Not only did he find it hard to fit into their routines, the only routines he had that were his own revolved around the regularity of the TV schedule. Job interviews left him frazzled and tired. Worse of all, there was no Baz to pull him out of his funk, to force him out to pubs and clubs and just generally be his best champion. Everything he had that was solid had disappeared. Camellia had been an important facet of that; his emotions felt meaningless without her around to adore.