Life (4 page)

She unearthed a small tin of processed peas from her clothes cupboard, pondered briefly (it was the only treat left this week), opened it, and drained it into the washbasin; added a dollop of mayonnaise from a rather festering jar and buttered two slices of bread, while licking fingerfuls of the green and primrose mixture. She applied salt and vinegar. Wonderful! Crumbs and butter gobbets fell among the clean socks and knickers she’d brought up from the Laundromat but forgotten to stow away. Lying on the bed with her sandwich in one paw and her life’s companion, Pele (a blue and once furry toy rabbit, scoured by age), tucked under one arm, she leafed through a crumpled notepad of lined paper to find the latest record of her grief:

“Dido and Aeneas in the Underworld”

I remember

The pyre, and how I climbed it

The sword, and the little mastheads sinking below the sea

I remember too the blow I got

Deep in my side and how I ran confused

Lost, and my hooves snicked on the herby stones

You should have been behind me…

Deeply affected by her own words, she sobbed aloud around masticated primrose-green and whole-meal mouthfuls. “Oh God. OH GOD. God, God, please don’t do this to me, I can’t bear it. AWOooooooh! AWOooooooh!”

The people in the cells on either side woke and groaned. An Iranian Media Studies student pulled her pillow over her head and stuck her fingers in her ears. The American Exchange smacked the on switch of his ghettoblaster and slammed it against the wall, full blast drastic thrash right in the monster’s ear hole. Made no difference. He switched it off and lay grimly enduring. Amplified music in the small hours was a chucking-out offence, whereas there was no obvious sanction against Howling Wolf’s behavior. He was a timid soul.

Ramone did not have a bedtime. She fell asleep at about four, dropping like a stone into oblivion in the middle of a sentence in
Anti-Oedipus.
It was the only way she knew.

ii

Anna Senoz preferred male company, because guys tended not to interrupt her when she was explaining things. Patrick Spencer Meade, the American Exchange student, had noticed this. When she talked to fellow females they would speedily glaze over and soon it would be
yes, yes, yes, but what about my new hairdo?
Okay, to be fair,
yes, yes, yes, but what about ?
Result: Anna bewildered. She didn’t know how to leave a thought unfinished. She had no idea why the average male undergraduate let her gab in peace. She had no idea she was sexy. Picture it: Marilyn Monroe is sitting beside you—a
brunette
Marilyn, which is so much classier, and
brainy,
which to the male is subconsciously incredibly attractive, resist the dreadful idea as he will. Holy baloney! Those lovely, clear, taffy-colored brown eyes are gazing into yours, that body is staying nice and close, as she explains to you the role of small particles of molybdenum in the process of photosynthesis. No sir, you are not going to interrupt, not for your life.

The guys didn’t know what was going on either, not consciously. Anna’s signifiers were neat and sober clothing, hardly-there make-up, an air of cool comradeship. There was nothing about her dress or manner that said THIS WAY TO THE HONEYPOT. The guys, who jumped up slavering whenever anything marked GIRL walked by, if the body under the labels belonged to Dumbo or to a stick insect, never mentioned Anna in their parodic, hard-on discussions of female first-year talent. But they kept quiet for her, and in a puzzled way they
gravitated.
He guessed they had to be aware, at some level, of her wide shoulders, hand-span waist, and curvaceous little bottom; of the pert, round-as-apples breasts under her clean and modest tee-shirts.

Or maybe Spence was partial.

She had been pointed out to him at an early stage in his Exchange Year, by Charles Craft whom he’d met at the Computer Club. She was the girl in Biols who had read everything on the reading list and then some, the one who spent hours in the library reading science journals that had nothing to do with any first-year course. Charles had laughed unpleasantly and called her Mr Spock. Spence, who’d already discovered to his personal cost that Craft was full of shit, had detected envy and insecurity, and looked on the cause of these emotions with approval. Then, one weekend, they all went up to London for a critically vital music gig.
They all,
meaning those members of the loose group of friends who had the funds for a daunting ticket price, plus Spence and Anna Senoz, poor but scraping by. They’d hardly spoken to each other at this point.
They all
had stayed at Rosemary McCarthy’s parents’ house. Rosey and Wol (otherwise Oliver Tim) had cooked a large Sunday meal. Spence and Anna, both of them maybe feeling socially marginal, had independently decided to clean the kitchen, which was in a heap big mess. Stacked the dishwasher, cleaned pans. She washed, he dried. They didn’t talk. He felt that she was shy and wondered idly why she didn’t know she was gorgeous. Mean older sisters putting her down? Father who considered girls second-rate? Was she a previously unappetizing teen, who had just blossomed into glory? She handed him a large cast-iron frying pan, which still had a gob of burnt Bolognese sauce adhering to its butt. Spence returned the article, silently pointing out the failure in her technique. Anna nodded and flashed him a beautiful smile before bending to the task of scrubbing it over again.

Hey!

It isn’t often you get to be in at the birth of one of your own legends.

She made him think of his mother. Louise Davinia Spencer Meade, the poor widow-woman he’d left behind him in Annandale, Illinois, lending her large spirit and presence to whatever attempt at counter-culture you could find in a small town on the Manankee river. Spence’s Mom—who liked him to call her Louise, or LouLou, but he preferred Mom—was a vintage feminist. She’d have been proud of him. The menfolk of Annandale were an unregenerate lot, stubbornly resistant to the siren allure of female intelligence, which was one reason why Louise had remained more or less single since her husband died. The other was Spence, of course. She adored him, as he well knew.

Spence remembered his father only as a querulous and smelly sick person of whom his mother was inexplicably fond. He had come to feel grateful, as he grew older, that the man was dead, not merely divorced and hanging around wanting to take his son to the ball game alternate weekends. He didn’t like to think of the life he’d have had, between Mom and a male rival. Sometimes, in the darkest dreams of kid fantasy, he’d entertained the idea that she had actually
killed
his Dad. This surely wasn’t true, but it gave a fellow pause, nonetheless. She had brooded over his childhood like a sweet, capricious thunderhead. He dreaded her rages (which were hardly ever turned against him, but against abstract principles, things the government did, programs on the tv) and lived for her smiles, her gallant
joie de vivre.
When he flew over the Atlantic for the first time, the dazzling soft masses of cloud below his plane had looked poignantly familiar. She had weaned him late, hippie earth-mother style. He did not remember, or barely, his possession of her large breasts. But there was Mom: snow crème and eiderdown.

He was sure she wanted him to have a healthy sex life, but he felt strange about feeling anything serious, so far from home. He needed good clean casual sex, not a love affair. So he had decided not to do anything about Anna; or rather he’d procrastinated, through the dull British winter and the chill but pretty springtime: missing his Mom, thinking about Anna, enjoying his friends, paying little attention to his studies, and hating his cell in Woods. Everything in Britain seemed to Spence unclean, especially the food. The university residence hall was
disgusting.
Noisy, too.

“At its inception, a telephone network was perceived as a tool of commerce, without application outside the exclusively male sphere of business or the schematically male emergency services. Telephone communication as a social phenomenon in its own right was unforeseen, until the telephone was discovered or imagined into cultural being by women or women-analogic social males. In 1881, when the first public telephone service was initiated in Paris, Marcel Proust was ten years old. Some ten years later, according to the chronology of
In Search of Lost Time,
Proust—as a homosexual and a Jew, a doubly marginalized male—became one of the first of those to re-present and real-ize this novel technology, by fervently mythologizing the Young Ladies of the Telephone—the obscurely necessary, menial yet all-powerful, female agency interposed between the telephone and the world: midwives of an applied technology balanced on the brink of meaning. Proust’s paen of praise for the telephone operators of Paris is not, of course, a serious expression of respect. Yet it is literally true that women, the secret arbiters of cultural significance, by annexing for their own use this male instrument, transformed the concept of telecommunication. It was another socially marginalized male, a science fiction writer, who invented the term ‘cyberspace.’ Here on the threshold of the third millennium, can we doubt that a similar female agency, erased but necessary, will emerge in the new industry of telematics? Note how often, in popular mythology texts, the
voice
of the computer is female: the voice of the dominatrix, teacher, mother…”

The other students gazed out of the window; or doodled or frowned in feigned concentration. The tutor, semi-recumbent behind his four-square, sixties desk of blonde and grainy pine, occasionally lifted his lizard lids a trifle and thought, it’s never the pretty ones. Ramone Holyrod had lost some puppy-fat over the course of the year, but the improvement was slight. It’s always the childish ones, he added. The adult-looking undergraduates are the monkey-do accomplished (we won’t say intelligent, that would be a premature judgment indeed); but the most childish, the most unfinished are the only ones with any kind of originality. He wondered if there were any scientific rationale to back this idle observation. One would have to include young Spence of course, whose face was as formless as an egg—an egg with a mop of Dylanesque ringlets on top of a stringy male child’s body—but whose sense of humor was surprisingly sharp. But that could be the accent. Quite possibly Spencerisms would not be in the least entertaining if expressed in graceless UKC1ese.

Ramone had finished.

“Very nice,” said their tutor.
Very nice
meant I wasn’t listening.
Interesting!,
which never came Ramone Holyrod’s or Andrea David’s way, meant Good. Lucy Freeman heard it often. She was the pretty one. “Comments, anybody?”

Ramone gritted her teeth and glanced fearfully at Spence, who was a computer nut and probably knew what a modem did. But the American Exchange was preoccupied. Martin Judge, the other male member of the group, took issue, as usual. “I don’t understand why you have to bring sex into everything, Ramone.”

Relieved, she turned on him, “What do you think I
should
bring to a discussion about Technology in Society? Jars of marmalade? Sex is in everything. I didn’t put it there. The most significant thing in your entire social and cultural life is your assigned gender. Everything else comes after that fact, including your relationship with technology. Don’t you accept that?”