Debatable Space (7 page)

EXCERPTS FROM THE THOUGHT DIARY OF LENA SMITH, 2004–

My first best friend was Carla. When I was seven years old we played together every day. We made up worlds and stories. I
was Ebony, an African princess. She was Melissa, the Queen of our Queendom, the fabulous country of Alchemy.

Carla had beautiful blonde hair, a button nose, and a great stare. But I had all the ideas. I made up the stories, I made
up the maps. I created costumes for us both. I painted my bedroom in black and gold to make it a suitable Queen’s Throne Room
for Queen Melissa. And whatever I said or did, whatever brave or original idea I came up with, Carla always nodded, very seriously,
and stared her formidable stare. So I would know that every idea I had was actually
her
idea, every thought was her thought. I was her willing slave.

When we were ten, we decided to hold a joint birthday party together, even though my birthday was in February and hers was
in October. We wrote all the invitations, we used our pocket money to buy balloons, we made each other presents out of papier
mâché and brightly coloured paper. We made fairy cakes with our mums and stole as many as we could. Then, on the day of our
party, we both locked ourselves in my room and played with our imaginary guests and handed out imaginary party bags. We gorged
ourselves on cake, and that night I was sick in bed. When Carla’s parents came to take her home, she had a wicked little smile
on her face. They knew she’d been up to something, but they never knew that she’d just had her “official” birthday.

We rarely quarrelled, and she only once really really lost her temper with me. It happened when I scored more baskets than
her in basketball at playtime. I made two mistakes. First, I scored more baskets. And then I laughed, triumphantly. So Carla
went very very quiet and didn’t speak to me for the whole rest of the week. We still met, and played together, but instead
of speaking she would give messages to her blonde Bratz and ask the poor doll to pass them on. By the Friday of that week,
I was devastated and I gave her all my pocket money to buy back her friendship.

Carla never bullied me though. She never bossed me either. She just always got her way. It was easier, we both always knew
what to do – namely, what
she
wanted. For otherwise, I feared, in my state of youthful existential panic, I might have had to
make my own mind up about things
. . .

Then Carla’s parents decided to move abroad. Her dad had a job in Germany working on bridges or something. Her mum was part-German
anyway. When Carla told me this news, I burst into tears. I begged her to stay, to join our family instead. Carla just stared
at me, calmly, with that piecing stare. And she didn’t smile. Not once. Eventually, she calmly said, “Don’t make a fuss, Lena.”
And I cried even more, for ages.

I explained it all to my mother, how I wouldn’t be able to cope without Carla and how life was no longer worth living. But
my mum just said, “Never mind, you’ll soon make new friends,” and I cried my eyes out again.

I cried again on the day that Carla left. I was eleven by then. My mother was genuinely frightened at my behaviour. I was
not just upset, I was hysterical.

I met Carla years later at a friend’s dinner party, when we were both in our early thirties. She didn’t actually remember
me. She was still very nice, but by that time the stare had worn off and she was a frazzled but cheerful mother of four. And
she didn’t remember Princess Ebony, or the Queendom of Alchemy, or me.

Some best friend.

My second best friend was also a woman. She was called Helen Clarke, and we both studied History at university in Edinburgh.
Neither of us was Scottish, neither of us was quite sure why we’d chosen a university so far away from our families and friends
back home. But it was a magical time. The city was dominated by a castle on a massive rock, looming and glowering over the
Georgian and Victorian buildings of the city. We studied the history of the town, we read all the books which were set there
like
Jekyll and Hyde
and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
and the novels of Ian Rankin. And whenever I read a book, Helen read it next; our fingerprints jointly stained score upon
score of battered paperback novels.

I loved History. I read voraciously. I rarely forgot a fact. But Helen was the scholar. She came covered in clouds of glory
– we all knew she had been offered a place at Oxford and had turned it down. Her mother was a Professor of History at Cambridge
University, her father was a senior civil servant. I stayed with them once. All the curtains were chintz, there were knick-knacks
in every room, not a trace of dust, and everyone spoke ironically and at length. I adored them. I compared them with my own
suburban parents, with their boisterous enthusiasms and their silly holiday games. And I yearned for my own family to die
painlessly and heroically in a freak asteroid strike. Then I could adopt Helen’s parents as my own
de facto
family.

At Finals, Helen got a decent 2.1. I received a glittering First, and was marked down by my tutors for great things to come.
Strangely, after that, I saw very little of Helen. She moved back home without saying goodbye, and never turned up for any
of our college reunions. Ten years later I was still sending her long, detailed letters (yes, I wrote letters, not emails
in those days!) every Christmas, describing lyrically and entertainingly my intellectual trials and tribulations, my boyfriend
troubles, my thoughts on life and everything. Helen never wrote back, we never met. We spoke on the phone a few times, but
somehow an actual meeting always proved problematic.

Eventually I got the message. I stopped writing the letters, making the phone calls. Now, I can hardly remember Helen’s face.
But I remember that sense of specialness. We were the terrible two. Yin and Yang, left and right, a bonded pair.

And then – we weren’t. It was over, and we were strangers.

I still get distressed over it, to be honest. Why wasn’t Helen more needy? How could she cut me out of her life so easily?

Of course, I moved on. I made new friends. Except they weren’t really friends. Not
real
friends. That intensity was missing.

It’s not that I was a social cripple. I was a reasonably good raconteuse. I could banter, amusingly. I was amiable, easygoing,
sweetlooking. People took to me, by and large.

But I always found it hard to make best friends. Something in me resists it. Perhaps it’s because I felt let down – first
by Clara, then by Helen. Or perhaps I am too independent, I find it too hard to love.

My third best friend was Tom, who was also my lover. Tom was different. He was special. He was the only friend who never,
ever let me down.

Although, I suppose, when I think about it – I’m the one who let
him
down.

As a child, the freckles made me cute. People always praised them. “Look at those lovely freckles.” “Isn’t she cute?” I took
it as praise. And maybe it was meant as such. But in retrospect… I cringe. “
Cute?
”

Freckles were my curse!

Does that sound extreme? Maybe. And, okay, as a teenager, admittedly, the freckles were a neutral thing. I was more embarrassed
by my thick square glasses, in an age where contacts for teenagers were the norm. My eyes were particularly poor, combining
astigmatism with myopia, and I was considered a bad candidate for lenses. So I had glasses, and freckles, and pale skin that
never tanned but only ever burned.

One summer when I was fourteen I played on the beach with my family and that night the skin peeled off my forehead and legs
and face. My mother warned me to be more careful in the sun. So I wept, and the tears burned my raw peeling cheeks.

When I was sixteen, I was so badly sunburned I had to spend two days in bed. My mother said, casually, “Well, I
did
warn you.”

I read an article in a magazine. And I learned: people with freckles don’t tan properly. So that was why. The freckles were
to blame.

It’s not as if I was careless or stupid in my dealings with the sun. I didn’t
seek out
blazing sunshine with all its ensuing pain. I just found it hard to always wear a hat, sit in the shade, avoid hot days,
never wear skirts in summer. I longed to be a vampire, because at least then my sun affliction would be a symptom of my dangerous
and evil nature. Instead, I was merely pale. And, did I mention this?
Freckled
. Who ever heard of a vampire with freckles?

A fact: a freckled person can never, ever, be cool.

What’s worse, the freckles grew and multiplied in sunlight. Some summers, I was covered in blotches, like some alien in a
Star Trek
episode. And so as I hit twenty, the pale spectacled mutant-freckle look was becoming the bane of my life. It defined me,
it limited me. And it controlled how others perceived me: I was never smart, tough-cookie, wisecracking brain-like-a-razorblade
Lena. I was just poor old
freckly
Lena.

I came to hate suntans. I hated the vulgar display of long-legged beauties with their bronzed skins, and men with six-pack
torsos who wear no T-shirts in the blazing sun.

Florence was my favourite city, I used to go there every year when I was in my twenties. But it was spoiled for me by all
the bare skin on shameless display. The city was swarming with gorgeous, smiling, happy, slim, sexy, tanned young people,
in their revealing shorts and skimpy T-shirts. They were everywhere, and I loathed them.

The purest joy I knew was when I went to see the Donatellos and the Giambolognas in the Bargello and Michelangelo’s
David
in the Accademia. I adored the look and texture and sensual joy of those naked muscular bodies which were, arguably through
historical accident, but that’s not an argument which concerns me here, entirely
untanned
.

And even now, many years later, I am offended at the basic unfairness of this whole skin thing. It affronts me that some people
can absorb sun like oxygen. They never sear or scald, they are at ease with their own bodies. Whereas I… I… I .
. .

Move on, Lena.

And yet, I’ve always been fit. Wiry, lean –
fit
. At university I was a famously keen runner. During my twenties I would run ten or twenty miles a week. But for reasons I
can never comprehend, I never managed to be happy in the body I wore. The moment I entered a room, my posture and poise projected
the unmistakable message: It’s Only Me.

And, most monstrous of all, added to the unfairness of having freckles and pale skin in an Ambre Solaire-worshipping culture,
it was also unjust that after years of keeping fit and watching my diet, of not gorging on rich foods, not drinking rich red
wines, not splurging on melty fat-rich suppurating cheeses, and not oozing cream éclairs down my delirious throat, and not
having pig-out midnight feasts of icecream from the carton, of shunning cooked breakfasts with greasy sausages and crispy
fried bread and never eating rich meat sauces with wine or madeira or port or brandy, after all those many years of moderation
and restraint and holding back, it was simply not fucking fair that at the age of forty-four I should suffer a massive and
fatal heart attack.

That, and freckles. Those are the two things about my life that I most resent.

After my first degree at Edinburgh, I chose to move to Oxford to pursue my DPhil. My subject was the history of science, focusing
on the remarkable rivalry between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The work I did in those years proved to be the foundation of my future work on systems and psychology. I found it absorbing
and exhilarating. At first, I was under the spell of Newton; that powerful personality, that radiant intelligence. Scientist,
alchemist, thieftaker (now that’s a story for another day . . .), cheat, and bully. I loved him.

And yet later, of course, it was Newton’s nemesis Leibnitz who became the object of my fascination. Leibnitz, a German genius,
a philosopher, a mathematician, and, in the view of many of the finest minds in science, the original inventor and describer
of the principle of relativity. In his arcane and complex philosophy of monads, Leibnitz set out the basic principles of a
relativistic universe long
long
before Einstein.

However, after three heady years of reading primary sources and attempting to fathom the intricacies of calculus and mathematical
modelling, my priorities shifted. I had to get a job. The job I took wasn’t much different to my research work – I became
a research fellow in the college where I had previously been a DPhil student. But the horizons of my world shifted. I was
introduced to bureaucracy, university politics, and the entire microcosm of tedious make-work.

I had an office. I had a university email address. I bitched about the photocopier. I bitched about how many emails I had
to read. I sent emails bitching about how many emails I was receiving, and received back emails bitching about… you get
the idea. I attended course committee meetings, and I spent hours of my life assembling and stapling paperwork in order to
be prepared for meetings in which nothing of any substance was actually said.

I gave my heart and soul to the students and had my trust betrayed. I was mocked and belittled by fellow tutors. I was stuck
in lifts with men smelling of tweed and middle-aged women who spent their early mornings crazed in the company of cheap perfume.
I found myself, in my late twenties and early thirties, a dowdy spinster surrounded by bare-armed tattooed young female students
with lurid hair colours and pierced tongues. And I found myself unable to sexually desire the gorgeous male students who surrounded
me because I felt they were old enough to be my sons – even though they
weren’t
old enough, and I had no son.