Life (3 page)

“It’s Oliver Tim. Everyone makes that mistake. His Dad’s family’s Korean, I mean that’s where they’re from originally. I didn’t know Daz had a boyfriend.”

Ramone rolled her eyes. “You know what our sexual behavior is like. It’s all so fucking hierarchical, teenage sex: alliances and humiliations conferred by who pokes whom, and here we are with no proper hierarchy set up. Therefore nobody wants to go public on who they fuck
in case it turns out to be the wrong move.
She’s been doing Rob Fowler for weeks. I reckon they’ve both just about decided they’re the right, nice, middle-class, clever-but-not-too-clever rank, because I saw them holding hands today, coming out of his hall of residence. The sly bastard, I hate him.”

Anna’s blood started running cold and slow.

“Girl scientists always go for Biology,” remarked Ramone. “It’s a fucking crime. They get better A level results than the boys for everything, but they ’ant got the bottle to go for Physics or Chemistry. I read about it. You have to go for the big idea if you’re into hard science and girls can’t face that. They don’t like the loneliness. And they don’t want to look unfeminine. You’ll never find a pretty girl taking Physics. They stick to the soft teamwork, modest efforts, and second class degrees of their own free will. It’s a fact.”

“Shows how much you know about science,” retorted Anna. “Do you call Biology second class? That’s ridiculous. You’re living in the past. Do you really think people are going to be worried, a hundred years from now, about missing Z particles and up and down quarks? It’ll be like phlogiston or something, people will laugh. Just look at the board, look at the evidence. They have big money, but that alphabet soup is dead in more ways than one. The boys go for Physics because they’re conformists. I mean, really, doesn’t it remind you of Alfonso of Castile?”

“Who?”

“You know. King of Castile in the fifteenth century. When they showed him the latest cat’s cradle of celestial spheres that was supposed to reconcile astronomers’ observations with the stationary earth. He said,
If God had consulted me, I would have suggested something simpler.
Haven’t you read
The Sleepwalkers?”

“I couldn’t give a shit about Alfonso of Castile—”

“I thought all Arts Students had to read
The Sleepwalkers.
Even if they had to tie you down and drug you. That and a few other old sacred popular-science texts. It’s about the Copernican revolution, the birth of the modern world-view.”

“Fuck, no. Not until they force-feed the nerds with Deleuze and Guattari.” Ramone’s long lip curled in a secret, speculative smile. “Did you get good A levels?”

“The best,” replied Anna firmly. She’s started to enjoy this game.

“So did I. I’m going to do something great, you know? That’s my single-minded purpose in life. I’m going to be famous. What do you think about animal experiments?”

“I think they’ll continue to be important,” answered Anna. “For the foreseeable future. But I’m more interested in plants.”

Ramone didn’t persist with the animal rights line.

“Are you ambitious? Will you get a first? Do you think you’ll make it?”

Anna would have liked to explain that the world rank of upper-second is the best there is. You do what you do, you do it
well.
Being famous, high-flying, is a different category, reflecting happenstance, personal need, hunger for attention… But she guessed that actual argument with Ramone would not be much fun. Better stick to verbal tennis.

“I don’t see why not.”

Ramone cackled. “Modesty will get you nowhere!” Then she sighed. “Really, I was moaning and crying because I am unhappy in love.”

The Spring night, which had been somewhere else during their volleys, returned, with the scents of new growth and the mournful sighing of the breeze.

“With Rob Fowler?”

Ramone bristled indignantly. “With
Daz.
I worship her. It was love at first sight, and now she’s in an out-and-proud heterosexual romance I know it’s a hopeless passion.”

“She
is
very pretty,”

“I don’t mind for myself so much as for Daz. When you love someone you want the best for them. Maybe I’m no good, I come on too strong, I’m not her type. But I don’t see how any intelligent woman can be interested in men, in
male undergraduates.
They detest us. You can see it in the back of their eyes. They hate and fear us, we’re the alien hordes. Any guy on campus who pretends to think you are a human being is faking it in the hopes of getting laid.”

“I only asked because you were saying ‘I may love
him,
’ just now. When you were pretending to be a dryad.”

“It was a quotation. From a writer called George MacDonald. You wouldn’t know anything about him.” Ramone gave Anna a suspicious look and raised her voice. “A weird reactionary Victorian nutcase, but interesting in a bizarre way.”

Anna didn’t know George MacDonald from a Beat Generation poet, so she merely shrugged. Touché for Alfonso.

“All the women at this place have the mentality of freed slaves,” growled Ramone. “We ought to be the Goths and Vandals, sweeping in to rapine and pillage, but no way, not a chance. It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire, but the
wrong part,
you know what I mean? Freed slaves, getting rich but absolutely no fucking idea of taking power, no self-esteem, no political perspective. You can’t bring people up for millennia to have zero rights and suddenly expect them to understand what freedom is, what it means to control, to rule, to have authority. They’re out for what they can get. All these pretty shiny rich girls, they don’t know they’re privileged, they take it all like, like
cat food.
They’re aspiring to nothing more than some smug fucking dishwasher-proof two-car garage career-housewife lifestyle. Or if they succeed in a man’s world, it’s going to be by using their stinking rotten femininity, by whoring in other words. It’s a sin to give them an education, they’re
cattle.
Are you rich?” she demanded abruptly.

“No. I’m poor. About as poor as you can be and still be an undergraduate.”

She spoke without thinking, instinctively placatory. Ramone cast a skeptical glance over Anna’s neat and tidy attire. “Yeah? I bet your parents support you… Mine don’t. I’ve got a scholarship from some rich shit foundation for the needy, and when that runs out, I starve. What do they do?”

“My father’s a fashion designer.”

“Hmm. That doesn’t sound poor.”

“If you’re unemployed, it doesn’t make any difference what your profession is.”

“Who employs fashion designers? I can’t imagine.”

Anna was ashamed to admit that she didn’t know. Another thing she’d discovered over the months, besides the depth of her poverty, was her ignorance about the grown-up world. Her parents’ lives had been a blank, beyond the veil, until the moment she left home. She felt that this was old-fashioned and embarrassing.

“He had his own business. It failed, and his partner ran out on him. I don’t know the details, but we were left with huge, horrible debts.”

Ramone sucked her teeth, affecting shock. “We? You mean they made you
sign
things?”

“Well, no but…”

“I suppose
Mummy
couldn’t be expected to go out to work.”

Anna’s mother was a doctor. She’d started out as a pediatrician, shifted into educational counseling for job security and regular hours. Her salary had poured away for years into the debt pit, leaving very little for the household bills. Anna’s parents had never dreamed of trying to escape from the trap: they had to do the right thing. She decided not to explain. She noted that Ramone’s tirades were to be treated with respect. They could knock you off balance and spoil your next shot.

The thumping beat of party music reached them relentlessly, filling up their pauses. “Fucking MDMA,” muttered Ramone. “Sometimes I wish no one had ever heard of that stuff, don’t you. What happened to
tender is the night, and haply the queen moon is on her throne?”
A gang of male students passed noisily along the path at the foot of the slope and disappeared in the floodlit, shadowy maze of buildings. Ramone lay back and started shifting about. She rolled over: Anna jumped, startled.

“Don’t worry, I’m not making a pass. I was lying on a rock.”

“Are you going to sleep out here?”

“Maybe. Why not?”

It was time to admit defeat. “You’ll get very cold.” Anna stood up and walked away, leaving the victor in possession. “See you around,” called Ramone, happily.

“Yes, sure. See you around.”

Her room was free of Margaret. As soon as she walked in, it began to be full of Ramone. Ramone’s round eyes surveyed the neat interior: basic, shabby, battered, anonymous. Ramone’s cartoon grin mocked Anna’s humble decorations. Her chimpanzee lip curled at the stack of text books, she shook her head over the well-nigh complete absence of Fiction or Social Comment or Style Statement in any form. The Narnia and Tolkien paperbacks on the beside shelf made things worse. One might as well keep soft toys. Anna felt judged, but the judgment was invigorating. She wondered if Ramone was really a lesbian, or was that part of the act? She was full of admiration, which she would do her best to conceal when she met the wild girl again. She felt that she had met
somebody.

On her desk lay the draft of an essay, which should be handed in tomorrow. She was short of an elusive reference. Charles Craft, the best of the boys and the only person on the first year Biology course to offer Anna any competition, laughed at her for acting the baby academic. First year work, he said, is make-work, it’s crazy to treat it seriously. But Anna was physically uncomfortable if she didn’t get things right…to her own satisfaction at the time. She would sleep, get up early, go to the library and check through back issues of
Plant Genetics.
Simple, no problem.

But Rob was with Daz!

Daz and Anna had met at the Freshers’ Fair. Daz was a scientist too—in computing, which made her less of a nerd. They were both serious people, interested in doing real work, yet they’d both made friends across the Great Divide. But Daz had black shiny hair half way to her knees, a beautiful walk, and a rangy coat-hanger figure on which clothes fit like a dream. Of course, Daz! Anna, who had been standing in the middle of her small space, tingling with Ramone-induced energy, dropped onto the bed. Thank God she’d heard the news before she tried Margaret’s evil recipe. So that’s it, she thought. I’d better start getting over him.

Ramone returned to her grubby cell in The Woods, by far the scruffiest hall in the valley, about an hour after Anna had left her, chilled to the bone and bruised by the rocks in that friendly looking hillside. She flung herself at her keyboard and into full flow.

Some people never leave the childhood home. They grow up, move house, marry, divorce, remarry, have children, but do all of this without separating themselves from a certain psychological landscape. The setting may change out of all recognition, buildings destroyed, trees uprooted, the old furniture sold. The human icons remain: Uncle Sam and Auntie Betty, the cousins, old family friends. People who live like this may say: I will do that thing; I will hold that opinion…, but not until my mother dies. They spend decades as adults of the second rank, dancing on the spot, waiting for their moment. Those of us who leave, who extract ourselves from the matrix, will always feel lost in the world, unsure of our place in any hierarchy. But, our emotional lives can be tranquil. The child who stays attached has axes to grind, stakes to protect, territory to mark. Her relationship with society is cluttered with rusty weapons, bad wiring, amended treaties. The child who abandons family lives in equality, having nothing to gain from subservience. We have given up the sweet recursions of the first world for the beauty of beginning. We are not free, but we see our bonds for what they are. We have no obligations.

Save it. In the folder called
Commentaries,
or
COMMENT.
Don’t call it
Anna!