Life (6 page)

Anna wanted to tell him she didn’t mind about the trouser-snake. She knew those frisky creatures could take on a life of their own, at the worst moments. She wanted to tell him she knew it wasn’t personal. But Spence, though a tide of conscious color swept from his chin to his hair, didn’t seem to need reassurance. He lay ruefully smiling while footsteps pounded up the stairs, and the whole squat’s population came rushing…You’d think they’d be more cool about strange thumps and unexpected power shorts.

“What’s going on?” yelled Rob’s voice.

“Nothing serious. Spence ate some electricity.”

“Do him good… Is he dead?”

They all peered down. Spence felt like a stepped-on insect.

“Oh man,” complained Frank. “I’m fucking glad I didn’t pay you for that wiring job.”

“How much did he eat? Should we take him to a hospital?”

“I’m fine,” mumbled Spence, sitting up and holding his head. “I’m fine.”

Ramone dropped on her haunches beside him. She was cuddling the black and white rat, her eyes were shining, she was completely uninterested in Spence’s sufferings. “Isn’t he great? He’s called Keefer. The iguana’s called Betty. They let her out to eat cockroaches at night. And there’s a red-kneed tarantula. Hey, Flynn says there’s another spare room. I think I’m going to move in!”

Spence groaned aloud.

“If anyone’s got any money I could go out and fetch some beers?” offered Alice Flynn, sensing a party atmosphere.

Nobody took her up. They repaired in a body to the pub and drank pints of Fullers’ London Pride while the shadows lengthened. Anna stuck with Spence—no doubt because like a good Girl Scout she was waiting to see if he would fall down bleeding at the ears. The dose of current that he’d eaten had left the inside of his mouth bruised and peculiar-feeling, and the erection incident lurked, adding to his mortification. But she was sitting there, talking to him across the grubby wooden table—

The way Anna wore makeup reminded him of Japanese girls: specifically one Japanese girl at his High School, whose delicately penciled eyes and burnished lids had held his attention. Anna’s work was less obsessive but had the same quality: a graceful, unswerving acquiescence to the social norms. If a naked female face (such as Ramone’s) was a challenge, and full war-paint a provocative display, Anna’s message was that she wasn’t trying to pick a fight. He had noticed that she never wore lipstick. He wanted to ask her why not. So her parents smoked dope. By some asinine standards they were evil radicals, but they’d trained her to tell the difference between
unconventional
and dangerous. She’d been raised to mind her manners, pick up after herself, think for others, share the chores—and take no shit about other classes of restriction. He knew the feeling. He had a deep sense that they’d arrived here, in this south coast Brit university, on matching trajectories. Was that good or bad for him? It is opposites that attract. What lived behind that demure reserve? Maybe she was a lesbian.

“Are you a feminist?”

“No, not at all. Why do you ask?”

“Well, the way you dress, always real quietly, uh, just wondered—” He was behaving like Martin Judge. He would not have known that Judge was unendurable, until Ramone started snarling, but he trusted the rabid one’s reactions: and now hated himself. She would think he was a lout.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” explained Anna, “to dress and makeup as if you’re cruising for sex, unless you are. You can’t go around signaling
don’t you wish you could have some?
and then get angry if that’s what people respond to. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You think women shouldn’t try to look sexy?”

Anna frowned. “I don’t know about
shouldn’t.
I don’t think you can do ‘should, shouldn’t’ for other people. It’s something I’ve decided for myself.”

“But that still means
you
think it’s wrong—” He was tying himself in knots. The pub was filling up with folks enjoying a pre-club aperitif. A glorious form at that moment brushed by Spence’s shoulder: high heels, huge eyes, liquid red lips, black Basque and lacy thong under a sheer violet shift. “To dress up like her. Or him,” he corrected himself, because the form was tall and you never could tell.

“Can’t tell ’em apart, these days,” she agreed, giggling. “That’s different,” she added. “Girl or boy, if you
are
cruising why not say so? Nothing wrong with that.”

“Perfectly logical, Captain.”

He recalled Craft’s “Spock” jeer and could have bitten his bruised tongue out.

Anna sighed and gazed into her pint.

“Actually, I was thinking of Ramone.” God bless her, Ramone again. Who’d have thought she would become his virtual chaperone? He felt guilty, but ruthlessly set her to work. “She says she’s a feminist but doesn’t seem to
get
anything out of it, except angry all the time. You know she claims she’s in love with Daz? D’you think she’s really a lesbian?”

Anna hesitated, smiled faintly, and shook her head.

Spence turned to follow the direction of her gaze. Rob and Daz were playing table-footie, against Flynn and Simon, while their supporters yelled encouragement and inconsiderately blocked everybody’s access to the toilets. There was Ramone, dancing up and down and shrieking, her attention furtively fixed on the campus hunk. The poor kid. It was kind of cunning to pretend she had a crush on his girlfriend, but transparent…Rob had done it with Ramone once, for the experience. Spence had been there when he reported on the ride. She was highly sexed, made strange noises, and kept herself none too clean.
Okay if you were desperate,
was the alpha-male verdict: and he’d probably never even wondered why the ferocious soi-disant lesbian had come willingly to his bed.

Spence and Anna nodded at each other. No need to say it. Poor Ramone. Campus life was full of pitiful secrets, absurd sorrows.

“I guess we’re lucky to be fancy free,” said Spence.

She agreed. “D’you want another?” She stood up, touching the rim of her empty glass to his. “Drink up.” He drank. She took the glass, with a speculative look that sent shivers down his spine. And walked away: straight back, small waist, round bottom. He imagined those firm cheeks pressed against his crotch. His balls ached; sweat broke out all over. What did she mean by that look? Was it time to make a move? What move did he want to make?

Ramone had taken
The Sleepwalkers
back to her lair, to join the awesome stack of volumes she devoured there nightly and pathologically failed to return to the library. She’d dismissed Koestler with contempt. She preferred
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
if you like that sort of thing. Dead science is dead, she had told Anna. Whereas dead art never dies. Reading about dead science is like fucking a corpse, but less interesting. Anyway, how can you read Koestler? Do you know what kind of amateur rapist the bastard was in real life? In revenge, Anna had sought out George MacDonald, and been appalled and bored in about equal parts by
Phantastes and Lilith.
But it was so conventional, under the weirdness: all these pure hearts, true knights, womanly sacrifices, wicked female enchantments. Oh Ramone, she thought. Is that what’s hiding under your carapace? A heart full of Victorian goo? But she didn’t ask this aloud. It would have been too mean. So they tracked each other, without exactly becoming friends. Ramone would confide passionately in Daz, in Rosey, in Lucy Freeman, even in Spence. She’ll tell you absolutely
anything,
marveled her favorites. Anything but the truth, thought Anna. She admired the core of reticence and the wild whirling of the outer shell, but she didn’t feel drawn. Yet from their first meeting they had shared something (besides the secret crush on Rob) unknown to their friends: a purpose that Anna had hardly recognized in herself, before that night under the beech tree.

Deep in the English stacks, Anna had found a row of desks that was miraculously quiet. But what is it that I think I’ve got? she wondered, gazing at the back of the reading stall, half-conscious of the immemorial graffiti: sex, smells like fish and tastes like marmite; literature is internalized oppression; Elvis is king. I’m not Ramone, I don’t want to be famous. So why do I work so hard? Why do I dream of doing something important, even if it’s something only another nerd would understand? It was inexplicable.

That’s why I like her, she thought. Even if she doesn’t like me. They call me Mr Spock and think I’m unemotional: but I like marvels. I have a taste for extraordinary things. That’s why I’m here, at The Forest University of Bournemouth, instead of in Manchester: why I’m doing Biology Foundation instead of specializing. I wanted to do something different, to see another world. And to
know.
I want to know my subject, not just get a job. She returned to her reading, thrilled by a romance and a magic that was invisible to Ramone.
Studies on the chemical nature of the substance inducing transformation of pneumococcal types.
Avery, OT et al. 1944…

But what about Rob?

She hated herself for following Rob and Daz around. Tagging along, clinging, any excuse to be a gooseberry. It was shameful, miserable, how those stupid thoughts kept creeping back
: he will turn to me, he will come to me, he will be mine at last.

He WON’T.

Got to jolt myself onto a different track; that’s the only answer.

One day, Spence took a roll of thinsulate, a fat spliff of Frank’s best sensi, and his trusty volume of Kierkegaard, and headed for the hills. He was planning to do some sunbathing, a little reading, and possibly catch up on his sleep. He was still glad he’d moved out. Except for a trip to Amsterdam in March (cold as an Illinois winter, lots of dope), he’d spent his whole year on campus. It would have been a crime to go home without experiencing something different from the Woods. However, he had to admit that the Regis Passage squat was not the spot for quiet slumbers or for calm revision.

Alone, he wended his way into dry declivities. The university, second-wave redbrick, had spread from two Georgian houses and the first modern buildings to fill the whole valley: less romantic than it had sounded, but pleasing enough, plenty of frisbee space and tree-clad lawns. Spence had discovered that if you went further, the hordes vanished and interesting things started to happen. It was open country; grass-clad downs fading into the heath and pines of the ancient Royal Forest. Silence fell, remarkably quickly. When the weather was good and the sky was clear above, the air had a warm, humming mystery that was almost sinister. He settled himself on a more or less level patch below a ridge path, pulled off his tee, and lay for a while, gazing straight into the blue. He was a pilgrim and a stranger, and all the supposed friendships of this year out of time fell away.

Maybe read for a while.

About an hour later—Spence wasn’t wearing a watch—he looked up and saw someone coming towards him. The figure was still far off. He was in such a solitary mood that he almost rolled up his mat and took himself out of sight, then saw that it was Anna. She was wearing a lavender-colored dress that grazed her knees and left her brown arms bare. He waved. She waved back. Soon she was climbing up to his sun terrace, and then she sat down beside him among the summer flowers.