Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  She had been stupid enough to confide that she was in love.

  “Do you sleep with him?” demanded Margaret.

  “It’s not like that. We’re friends, we’re in the same…social group, I suppose. He…he isn’t interested.”

  She must learn that you didn’t have to answer those kinds of questions. You could ignore them, or change the subject, or lie. Everybody did it.

  Margaret laughed. “You don’t have to wait for him to be ‘interested.’ Make him an offer. Men will fuck anything, the pigs. Didn’t you see that thing on the news last week, a ninety-three-year-old great grandmother gang-raped by a bunch of thirteen-year-olds? Or something like that. It’s always happening. I don’t mean to be crude, but if she can get some, what is your problem? Offer sex, you don’t have to worry about anything else. He’ll fuck you once, he’ll fuck you twice, he’ll get used to the idea, you become a habit, and bingo!” Margaret waved her white hand in the gloom of Anna’s sleeping cell, spreading the fingers daintily. “The engagement ring!”

  “You’re nuts,” muttered Anna from her bed, wishing to God being drunk made Margaret fall asleep like a normal person.

  “What d’you say?”

  “I’m going to sleep.”

  If Margaret was right about the way things had to be between men and women, then Anna wanted no part of the business. The idea that you could carry on in such bad faith to the point of marrying someone was disgusting. Margaret said they expected nothing else, wouldn’t understand if you were honest. Anna couldn’t believe that the boys, the men, she knew were really like that. Straightforwardness and fair-dealing must be better. It only needed somebody to make the first move. If it was true that human beings were the helpless puppets of their sex hormones, then why didn’t Anna herself have six children by this time? Surely men must be human as well as sexual, same as women? Surely they must be. Suppose Margaret was right? Anna shuddered. Then too bad; she would stay celibate her life long. Can’t play; won’t play!

  Getting married young was crap anyway. When she married—if she married, it wasn’t essential—it would be at the end of an extended and intense single life, and with somebody she had met long after this callow apprenticeship as an undergraduate. The cold kiss of dew on her bare ankles, she lifted her face to gaze at the stars: distracted by reasoned argument and comforted by exquisite dreams. The house in the country where she and Rob would live together. Their cats, their dogs, their two children, Richard and Delphine. But as she approached one of the beeches, a solitary tree that she regarded as her particular refuge, a dart of anguish pierced her: he doesn’t love me and he never will.

  It was the truth. She could read the game-board; she knew her hopes were doomed. She could see other couples moving together, possible or probable configurations: not Anna with Rob. Either he had a girlfriend elsewhere, though he’d never mentioned one, or he was gay and shy about letting people know, or (the most likely) he simply did not want to do it with Anna. These things happen at first sight, or at least soon: chemicals are involved. Sexual attraction is not something people ponder over for weeks. He must know that Anna wanted him. She hadn’t offered herself on a plate, the way Margaret would advise, but she’d made her moves. She had gone as far as self-esteem allowed, done and said all the things people do and say that code for would you like to do it with me? The answer was no.

  She huddled down between two of the tree’s massive roots, feeling very glum. It was not to be. She’d been wanting him for too long, anyway: weeks, months. If he turned to her now it would be no use. She’d transformed him into the object of desire; she couldn’t make him human again. How could a happy relationship be built on such an unequal foundation? Perhaps she should try a modified version of Margaret’s way, smuggle herself naked into his bed one night. That way at least she’d get to fuck him once. And then walk away. That would be noble. But if he turned her down? If he said, um thanks but I have an essay to write, or um thanks, er, meet my girlfriend/boyfriend. Awful, awful: and not untypical for the results of taking Margaret’s advice.

  Her worldly wise little sister! If Margaret was so smart, why wasn’t some merchant banker loading her with jewels right now? No, Anna would be Rob’s friend, not even a close friend; that was best. Free to look, free to stay near that gorgeous body, to catch a smile from those wonderful lips… Oh, but the night was beautiful. If you managed not to hear the dance music from someone’s late night party. It was the end of April, dry and fair. The beech tree was in fresh and trembling leaf; the breeze that touched her face carried scents of sap and blossom. It was bliss on a night like this to be alive. And free, and at the beginning of things…

  Suddenly she heard a strange voice, a woman’s voice chanting softly.

  I may love him, I may love him

  For he is a man and I am only a beech tree…

  And then, a low musical wailing.

  Ooooooooooooh, Oooooh…

  Oooooooooh, Ooooooh…

  Anna said sharply, “Who’s there??”

  There was a rustling pause. She wished she hadn’t spoken, she’d probably interrupted a pair of lovers—damn it, how embarrassing. But there had been something truly scary about that long moan. Maybe it was murder not sex that was going on. Then what would she do? Her skin crept, her heart thumped. A figure emerged from around the bole of the tree. It was a girl, a girl with long draggled hair, a round and pallid face, a nose ring, and wire-rimmed glasses. They stared at each other. Involuntarily, Anna brushed a hand across her cropped, dark curls and touched the bridge of her own nose. Her skin felt warm.

  “Hi,” said the girl. “I’m sorry, did I frighten you?”

  She was small, shorter than Anna. She was wearing a long skirt, and her feet were bare. A large, fringed shawl was wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes were round behind the round-rimmed glasses, her mouth curiously wide and thin lipped. It was almost comical, a cartoon sketch of a face; and yet somehow arresting. The question, did I frighten you?, was definitely aggressive. Anna admired this: you had to admire a person caught moaning behind a tree who was instantly ready to snatch the initiative.

  “No.” Anna knew she was now expected to get up and go away, but she sat her ground. The girl sat down too, tenting herself in the shawl like a savage in a blanket or a cloak of animal hide. Her bare feet were dirty. The colors of her shawl and skirt were lost in deep twilight, but the skirt seemed to be covered with unraveling machine embroidery, and the tasseled fringe of the shawl was a mess. Someone who did not iron or mend. A hippie, possibly a tree-hugger.

  “Do you often wander around the campus late at night?”

  “Sometimes,” Anna answered coolly. “Do you?”

  “Aren’t you afraid of rapists?”

  “No. Aren’t you?”

  “I’m all right. I can scare people.” She raised her shawl in dark wings and shook out her unkempt locks. “Oooooh! Oooooooh! I was practicing when you came along.”

  Anna nodded politely.

  The strange girl laughed aloud. “Actually, I was masturbating. You yelled out at just the wrong moment.”

  “Well, don’t let me put you off. Go ahead.”

  Silenced, for a moment, the girl started to pick at the skin around her toenails.

  “Are you a first-year?” asked Anna.

  “Nah. I’m a drug dealer. I hate students. I prey on them. I take all their money and ruin their little lives. Are you? You look clean enough.”

  Anna folded her hands around her ankles beneath the neat hems of her jeans. Her deck shoes, blue and white gingham canvas, were very clean. She had cleaned them herself. She wished she had not. “I think you’re a first-year. I think I’ve seen you around.”

  The girl wrinkled her long lip, looking like a very intelligent chimpanzee. She shrugged. “Okay, you’re right. I’m Ramone Holyrod. I’m doing Modern Cultural History. I bet I’ve seen you around too, it’s a small world. But I don’t remember.”

  One of those do-nothing made-
up Arts courses, thought Anna the Unmemorable. Just what I would have guessed. “My name’s Anna Senoz. I’m doing Biology.” She noticed that the other girl had said I’m Ramone, not “my name’s Ramone.” As if being Ramone Holyrod was important.

  “Oh, a scientist!” Ramone Holyrod had the conventional reaction: Anna was disappointed in her. Suddenly she laughed. “Hey, I do know you. You’re a friend of Daz’s, I’ve seen you with her and her boyfriend, and that rich guy, Tim Oliver, and the American Exchange student, whatsisname. He’s in my tutor group.”

  “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.