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!
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
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?”
“Jars of marmalade would make more sense. Whoever invented the screw-top lid made more positive difference to women’s lives than political feminism, if you ask me—”
“Okay, if sex doesn’t come into it, why did you say women’s lives—?”
“Children, children… Telephones. The subject was telephones. Ramone’s essay. Could we return to our moutons?”
At the end of the session Ramone, bright color in her pasty cheeks, bundled up her belongings into her shoulder bag. She tried to take the essay with them; she was now ashamed of it and miserable. The tutor made her leave it on his desk. His resigned glance at the butter-stained first page cut her to the heart. She stomped out. Lucy and Andrea had departed to some girly lunch-date, but the appalling Martin was lying in wait pretending to talk to Spence. She had to walk down the corridor between the two of them, feeling hatefully small and untidy, a heaving maggoty mess.
“Look, Ramone,” began Martin. “I’m sorry I upset you. It’s just that I don’t think our Technology and Society tutorials are the place for sexual politics. It’s not the subject of the course, and it’s not fair on the rest of us. I’d honestly love to sit down with you some other time and have a proper discussion about the whole sex and gender thing.”
The term shit-eating grin, she thought, was coined for occasions like this. She stared, fascinated, analyzing the precise content of that exposure, male teeth with a fat juicy turd locked behind them. It means, I’m stealing something from you. I’m being obnoxious and we both know it, but you can’t prove it and you can’t stop me. I’m getting something for nothing from a female. I’m copping a feel here.
“I know what’s wrong with you, Martin. You’re afraid for your life. You don’t want me to mention sex because by mentioning sex I insist that I’m here at the university as a woman, whereas you still think women ought to accept that they’re here as second-rate men. Your privileges aren’t protected any longer. I’m not going to keep the rules of the little boys’ club, I’m not going to pretend to be inadequate. I’m going to claim to be a complete human being. And if that’s what I am, where does that leave you, you titless freak!”
Spence wondered what ’a God’s name would happen next. Martin opened his mouth and closed it. Knots of muscle on either side of his jaws worked visibly.
“Well, see you around, Spence.” He strode away.
Spence cleared his throat. “I don’t think you can claim William Gibson for a marginal male, Ramone. In the US it’s okay for a guy to be a writer, was in the eighties anyway, as long as
he makes good money. And science fiction is some kind of heartland. Maybe it’s different over here, but to me bracketing Gibson with Proust sounds weird. I mean, not in a good way—”
She shook her head. She could not talk about her work. Her essays were creations; they stood or fell. It was over: another stillborn, another fortress leveled. They dawdled, to avoid the awkwardness of bumping into Martin again. Ramone seemed surprised that Spence was still by her side as they passed out into the May sunshine.
“Are you two going to go on like this for the whole degree course?” he asked.
“Maybe not. He didn’t say ‘until our next encounter, dear lady’ this time. Arsehole. I got to him. Maybe someday he’ll learn to leave me the fuck alone.”
This reading of the situation was enough to make a basilisk blink, but Spence let it stand. “I thought he was going to do a Dr Johnson on you that time.”
“Say what?”
Spence took a violent swing at the air. “I refute you thus!”
Ramone glowered, her hands bunching into two ready little fists. She bared her teeth: plain fury behind them, no shit. “If he did, he would get a surprise.”
He’d been trying to think where he’d seen a likeness of Ramone Holyrod. Now he knew. It was an Aubery Beardsley drawing of Messalina. Messalina, Going To The Bath: snakelocks, glowering cheeks—a dumpy Queen Victoria bundle of garments full of pugnacious forward movement… He’d have to tell someone this: it was too good to waste. Not Ramone. Much as she’d bite your head off if you dared to suggest it, he knew she longed to be better-looking. She was a pig to live with, but his heart went out to the kid. Her absurd, bantam hen bravado: he’d get a surprise! Martin Lodge was six two and built like a linebacker. You could only hope that crazy Ramone would never meet the man callous enough to hit her. Because she was asking for it.
Life Page 3