Homesick by Roshi Fernando Page B

camera up from his bedroom. They took the detour through into the courtyard at the back of Blew and walked into the car park and then across to the playing fields in front of the college.
    “Will you miss it?” Preethi asked Freddie. He stared up at the red and black bricks, the shining windows, the whole building, burnished and pompous.
    “No,” he said, and turned away, shrugging. There wasan element of Freddie that no one could really know, Preethi thought.
    Cassie had spent the last two years studying and, having done seventh term, was off to Magdalene to read medicine. She was
that sort
. Preethi and her friends thought her rich, spoilt even, but felt sorry for her, for she was on a trajectory that would never give her the self-knowledge and peace that they knew already—the peace that came from failing a little, failing enough for highly strung parents and teachers not to have too high expectations. Cassie had never had a party in her house (neither had Preethi, but for different reasons). When they had arrived at the front gate, Cassie had looked about her at them all, worried, Preethi could see, and unable, because she lacked experience, to make the self-deprecating joke, the easy “Don’t break anything” or “It’s all inherited,” that others in the same position would have. Cassie’s father was a banker from up north, and sometimes her cut-glass was muddied with a Yorkshire smudge: everything in front of them was self-made, not effortless, paid for with resentment and sweat and pride.
    The white house was three storeys tall. One of Cassie’s friends, Suzie, had once told a hushed sixth-form common room that she had delivered maths homework to Cassie, lying in bed with shingles in a flat of her own at the top of the house: “She has a little red sofa, and a kitchenette with a toaster and a kettle and a mini fridge!” Preethi and the other girls looked at one another, standing outside the white house, and wondered which one of them would ask to see the flat. When they went up the stairs into the hall, Cassie nervously volunteered a walkabout tour of the house but refrained from showing them her quarters.
    When they walked into the basement kitchen, their supperhad been laid out on gold-rimmed white plates: slivers of ham and tomato salad and crusty baguettes and pâté and cheese. And a case of wine. They all gasped, and Cassie looked embarrassed. The tour upstairs had already made her falter: glass-fronted bookcases in the library, the wood-panelled sitting room, each shrinking her more. Preethi, in the spirit of the day, linked her arm with Cassie’s.
    “It’s all right, posh girl. We’ll still talk to you on Monday,” she whispered, and Cassie squeezed her arm closer.
    Ollie sauntered into the kitchen, picked up bread and cheese, and ate it as if it were a normal moment in his day.
    He stood now, in the dark, with a bottle of beer on the veranda, and lit another cigarette. Freddie and Preethi were in the kitchen with the others, Freddie with his back to the French doors, Preethi facing him, joining in the conversation, allowing Freddie to stare at her. Occasionally she would look at him, then blur her gaze beyond him, as if to stare into the distance, understanding his need to drink her in, as she watched Ollie.
    When they were full, they all erupted into the June night and lay on the lawn, making a crisscross of limbs, a few girls laying their heads on each other’s bellies. The music—“American Pie” and “If You Leave Me Now” and “I’m Not in Love”—gently pervaded, and someone asked, “So where are you guys planning to travel to this summer?”
    Freddie said, “We fly to Delhi, stay at Shiv’s parents’ house in Kashmir, then take the train down and somehow get to Sri Lanka. And then we’re taking a plane from Sri Lanka to Australia.”
    “Is Daddy paying, Ollie?” Ollie punched a bloke in the dark. It was Simon, who was jealous of the boarders and came from Forest