Various Pets Alive and Dead (6 page)

But that’s not what Chicken wants to hear, so he says, ‘I’ll bring it up in the quants’ meeting tomorrow, Ken.’

‘Good man. I’ll go and tell Maroushka.’

He advances towards Maroushka’s desk, the gym-toned muscles flexing beneath the expensive cloth of his bespoke suit. One day, the thought slips into Serge’s head, I’ll wear a suit like that.

‘I really shouldn’t have shouted at that pink-legged woman. It achieved nothing, embarrassed Serge and left me in a foul mood,’ thinks Doro, watching her reflection in the train window floating across the mile after mile of dispiriting countryside as she heads back north on Tuesday evening. London is less than an hour and a half away from Doncaster, yet it seems like a different country in a different era. She can’t understand how anyone can put up with it – such a crush of traffic, the streets filthy, the people ignorant. It was just the same when she and Marcus lived there, forty years ago. She’s glad to get away.

Glad to get away from Serge too, who seemed not himself today – tense and manic, rattling on about incomprehensible things. Just listening to him is exhausting. If only he’d settle down and finish off his PhD, which has been hanging over him for aeons. Clara too seems preoccupied with the minutiae of her job. She wishes she could talk to her children in a friendly, open way; she wishes they wouldn’t always patronise her and humour her, treating her like some relic whose life is in the past. The bold, radical and outrageous values of her generation are regarded by her children as quaint lifestyle whims on a par with tie-dyes and loon pants, which make them keel over with laughter.

She’s tried to explain about solidarity and class consciousness, but the words have no meaning for them. The language itself has changed. ‘Revolutionary’ is what you call the latest mobile phone technology. ‘Struggle’ is trying to get home on the bus with your bags of shopping. They think listening to indie music is what makes you a rebel. They think they invented sex. She was the same at their age, of course, and that’s the worst thing about it – they make her feel old.

She remembers her own parents with a mixture of fondness and guilt: how she’d loved their non-judgemental Quaker kindness, and appreciated their cash bailouts when times were hard; how she’d mocked their bourgeois conformity and outdated sexual hang-ups as she’d plunged headlong into the student movement of 1968.

‘A young woman really should wear a brassiere,’ her mother had admonished (she pronounced it ‘brazeer’) when Doro had binned her bra, whose tight cotton straps (those were the pre-Lycra days) cut red welts into her shoulders.

‘It’s a symbol of patriarchy, Mother.’

‘I’m sure if the patriarchs had had bosoms, they wouldn’t have let them bounce around, Dorothy.’

She has never quite forgiven her mother for christening her Dorothy.

‘Why should women constrict themselves in bras in order to please men?’ she’d sneered. ‘It’s false consciousness. Adopting the values and beliefs of the oppressor.’

Bras and false consciousness had been a subject of intense discussion in her women’s consciousness-raising group in 1968, when she and six women from university, including Moira Lafferty (then still Moira McLeod), had met every Wednesday evening to pour out their feelings about their bodies, their boyfriends, their families and their hopes for themselves. That was when she’d dumped Dorothy, along with her bra, and started calling herself Doro, which sounded interesting and powerful. Moira, who was both Doro’s oldest friend and her most long-standing rival, was a bit flaky on the ideological front and prone to false consciousness, even then. Moira was the one who argued that since men screw around, women would become liberated by doing the same, and the others nodded, lacking the confidence to dispute something about which they knew so little. Moira was the one who clung on to her bra when the rest of them binned theirs in solidarity with their sisters in the USA, chortling about the myth of bra-burning.

Now Oolie hates to have her overgenerous bouncy breasts restrained, and Doro’s the one who insists.

‘Which oppressor?’ her mother had scoffed.

‘Well, Daddy, I suppose.’

Which made them both laugh, for it was hard to imagine anyone less suited to the role of oppressor than her gentle, diffident historian father.

‘Don’t be silly, darling. It’s not about men, it’s about gravity.’

Doro shared a flat in Islington with two other girls from her course, Moira McLeod and Julia Chance. Julia, a thin Celtic beauty from Wallasey, was engaged to Pete Lafferty, her childhood sweetheart, who spent most weekends at their flat. Within six months, Julia and Pete had split up and Julia had gone back to Merseyside with a broken heart and a fistful of Moira’s auburn hair.

Observing this, Doro was reluctant at first to bring Marcus Lerner back to the flat. She’d met him only a few months ago, when he’d pulled her out of a hedge in Grosvenor Square where she was cowering, terrified by a rearing police horse, on an anti-Vietnam War demo in March 1968. Out of the turmoil of flailing batons and horses’ hooves, he reached out his hand and gripped hers.

‘You all right, sister?’ He had blazing blue eyes and wild curly brown hair; he wore a black leather jacket and a red bandana around his forehead like a real revolutionary.

‘Fine, thanks, comrade,’ she said, dreading the moment he would realise she was just a third-year sociology student, and not a revolutionary at all.

‘Let’s get you out of here.’

He sat her on the back of his scooter, and she thought he was going to take her home, but instead he whisked her off to his room in a house near Hampstead Heath. It was a small attic room with a mattress on the floor, bookshelves made out of old floorboards supported by bricks, and a wooden door balanced on four columns of bricks for a desk, on which were spread the handwritten notes of Marcus’s PhD. The curtain was an unwashed pink sheet with a lung-shaped stain in the centre. Doro found it all deliciously romantic. When he told her in a deep serious voice about the revolutionary movement in Paris, from whence he’d just returned, and the struggle of the masses for freedom and dignity, she eagerly offered up her virginity to the cause.

Afterwards, they lay watching the candlelight flickering across the damp-stained eaves, and listening to the scurrying of mice and the thud-thud-thud from the room below, which Doro thought was an insomniac DIY enthusiast but turned out to be another PhD student called Fred Baxendale, who was writing his dissertation – something obscure about Karl Marx’s
Critique of the Gotha Programme
– on an ancient manual typewriter.

She bumped into him the next day coming out of the mouldy bathroom on the first floor, wrapped in a small towel. To her surprise, he was a pale, skinny man wearing a knitted cap pulled down over his ears, under which wisps of mud-coloured hair protruded. From the way he’d been banging at that typewriter, she’d expected a muscle-bound Titan.

‘Hi, I’m Fred.’ He extended a hand, gripping the edges of the towel together with his other hand.

‘Hi, I’m Doro,’ she said, averting her eyes, fearing the towel might drop.

Fred the Red, as he was known, played classical guitar and had an occasional sleep-in girlfriend who was also thin and pale with close-cropped mud-coloured hair. Marcus said they were both Althusserians, and Doro nodded, having no idea what he was talking about but imagining something to do with mould or mud. Whichever, Doro was in love – not just with Marcus, but with the whole muddy mouldy set-up, the stained sheets, the roll-up cigarettes, weak tea and burned toast, the hours of conversation which slipped seamlessly into sex and back into conversation again.

When Marcus discovered she was not a revolutionary but a sociology student, he didn’t seem to mind. A few months later, when she’d graduated and started her first job as a part-time liberal studies teacher, she moved into his room, leaving the Islington flat to Pete Lafferty and Moira, who got married and separated all within six months. Single again, Moira moved into the house in Hampstead, temporarily occupying the first-floor room next to Fred’s, which belonged to a student who was spending the year at the Sorbonne. The house itself was owned by a Brazilian academic who had returned home in 1963 without making any arrangements for the payment of rent. So it was free for them to live there, but the house was sliding into dereliction. None of the windows closed properly, the ceiling in Fred’s room was bowing under the weight of Marcus’s bricks and books, and the black mould in the bathroom, having colonised the grout between the tiles and around the bath and basin, was starting to creep across the ceiling. Moira, who spent hours in the bathroom with herbal shampoos and conditioners, did her best to control the mould with an old toothbrush dipped in bleach, but it was a losing battle.

Because the house was rent free, no one ever moved out, but more and more people moved in. When the student whose room Moira inhabited returned with his French girlfriend, there was an accommodation crisis which turned into a fight. Moira refused to leave. The other couple put a mattress on the floor and moved in alongside her, probably thinking they would drive her out with their full-volume love-making. Doro tried to persuade her to find somewhere else, but Moira’s objective was to get off with the student and replace the French girl. When this failed (and Doro suspected she also tried to get off with Fred and Marcus) Moira resorted to recruiting a succession of volunteers to out-love them. The queues for the bathroom were swelled by a succession of naked bewildered guys who couldn’t quite figure out why they were there, but sensed there was an agenda other than sex. The Brazilians on the ground floor, friends of friends of the original Brazilian, also seemed to multiply in numbers and volume. The lavatory now had to be flushed with a bucket because the ball-valve lever was broken from all the action it was getting.

One night, shortly after eleven, when everyone was in bed, and the whole house reverberated with cries, shrieks, groans, gasps, thuds, thumps, guitar music, expletives and bossa nova, Doro became aware of another sound, a subtle creaking that seemed to be coming from the floor in the corner of their attic room. Marcus was sleeping off a particularly animated half-hour of sex. She went over to investigate. As she stepped out gingerly with her bare foot, she noticed that the floorboards beneath the lino seemed to yield a bit. The sensation was odd enough to make her pause. Then the creak turned into a groan, and suddenly the floor started to slip away. She clung on to the door frame to stop herself sliding too, and watched in horror as a great crack opened up between the wall and the floor, through which a ton of bricks, books and floorboards thundered down into the room below.

‘What the f—!’ she heard Fred’s cry, and a muffled squeak from the Althusserian girl. Then silence.

Marcus, now fully awake, reached out a hand to pull Doro away from the hole in the floor, and they raced downstairs to find Fred and the girl writhing under a heap of mud-coloured bedclothes covered in books (the bricks and floorboards had mercifully mostly fallen against the far wall), showing flashes of pale naked limbs and tousled mud-coloured hair as they tried to work out what had happened. The girl discovered a huge gash on her shin, and started to cry. Doro sat on the edge of the bed and put her arm around her.

‘It’s nothing compared to what’ll happen in the revolution, sister.’

After the collapse of Fred’s ceiling/Marcus’s floor, the accommodation crisis became acute. Marcus and Doro dragged their mattress downstairs to the damp basement kitchen, which was the only available room, and were woken each morning by everyone else stepping over them as they congregated to make breakfast. Over cups of tea, burned toast and lumpy porridge around the kitchen table, a vision emerged of a place where they could all live together in a non-bourgeois non-private non-nuclear non-monogamous community, where they could put theory into practice and reach out to the masses; a community based on Marxism, vegetarianism, non-violence, non-competitiveness, creativity, communal ownership, home-grown vegetables, free love, Althusserian ideas (optional) and rejection of stereotypical gender roles (i.e. no housework); a place adorned with Capiz shell lampshades and macramé flowerpot holders, where everything would be shared from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Doro sighs. It was an adventure and, given the chance, she’d probably do it all again. But with fewer lentils.

As dusk falls, the train pulls into Doncaster station, and there’s Marcus waiting for her on the platform. His brown curls are now white, but he still stands tall, his eyes are as blue as ever, and he’s wearing that red T-shirt she bought for him many years ago with the slogan ‘
I am a Marxist Groucho tendency
’.

Long long ago, before Serge and Clara were born, their previously normal parents were suddenly overwhelmed by insane ideas. This is what Clara told him. They decided pirates’ property was robbery and family life was impressive, she said, and they abandoned their house and hamster and went to live in a commune. As the oldest of the commune kids, Clara’s role was to interpret the Groans’ baffling pronouncements, though being slightly deaf at the time, she sometimes invented things.

The trouble is, although her hearing’s okay now, Clara’s still bossy, and still makes things up. Like she’s convinced he was entirely to blame for that hamster debacle, and even though he’s almost twenty-nine now, she treats him like an Asbo. Which is why he doesn’t always tell her stuff.

For example, he lied to her yesterday about not being in contact with Otto. In fact, a year after Otto was taken away from Solidarity Hall, following the fire, they bumped into each other at Glastonbury, and have kept in touch. At Cambridge they linked up again. Although he was two years ahead of Otto, and in a different college, and couldn’t understand why Otto had chosen computer science, which seemed pedestrian compared with maths or physics, they sometimes went out and got wasted together, and had intense conversations which neither could remember afterwards. The thing is, he was well within his rights to withhold this information, because he knows Otto won’t want to come to any saddo reunion. And because even if he did, he can’t be trusted not to blab to Clara about Serge’s career change – not out of malice or envy, but because he’s a blabby kind of guy.