Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Hnnph.” Ramone poked Spence in the ribs with a piece of driftwood. “You think Anna is self-confident? You are so wrong. I’ll tell you what Anna is like. She’s an over-intelligent, literal-minded good girl. She believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Ten Commandments. She tries to be legal, decent, honest…and when she runs foul of the real world that expects her to turn her girly trick and take the money, she blames herself and tries harder. I’ll tell you something, Spence.” Another jab in the ribs. “You think I’m a pathetic raving in-your-face maniac, but I’m okay. It’s women like Anna who suffer for being born female.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  Ramone picked shreds of tar from the grain of her weapon. “It’s a fact. You know, much as I despise my parents, I owe them. I’ve come to see they gave me something money can’t buy. No one ever gave my Dad any shit and got thanked for it. When anyone insults me, I don’t wonder where I went wrong. I smack them in the mouth.”

  He had never heard Ramone speak about her family. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “Several, my mum’s favorite occupation was natural childbirth. They’re all pigs.”

  He studied one of the glaucous blue-leaved shore plants, a thing so thorny and hostile you could read the cruelty of its environment written there, as if in mirror writing. “Did your Mom used to give your Dad shit?” he asked, casually. “Did you and the other kids?”

  Ramone laughed. “Fuck off, Spence.”

  She continued her tar picking. Spence pictured Anna as a Dorothea Brooke, a highbrow young goddess hellbent on abnegation, taken in by some Victorian ideal of a woman’s noble destiny. It fit ominously well. Had she found her Mr Casuabon, her worthless idol? Maybe she had. Maybe she was at this party on a handmaiden’s weekend off. More birds passed over: big geese flying in formation, their wings making an exhilarating noise. They both looked up, faces briefly transfigured.

  “Why’d you come back from Morocco for, anyway?”

  “I got a job offer, working on the net: decided to take it up.”

  “Groveling to the bosses after all, eh? So now you’re going to make your fortune.”

  “Nah. The only things on the net that make money are gossip, genealogy, and porn: the good old meat and potatoes.”

  Ramone smiled bitterly. “I noticed that. The mediation is coded female. I prophesied that. D’you remember an essay I wrote, in first year?”

  “Um, no.” He decided, since he was trapped like this, to make use of her. “Is it true about Anna and Charles Craft? Wol tells me they were an item, in final year.”

  Ramone gave him a strange look, dull and deep.

  “Something happened to Anna,” she said at last. “No one knows what. She was her favorite lecturer’s pet. She was supposed to get a first, she had a prime postgrad place with her name on it. Straight after finals she headed off to Manchester. None of us heard from her for months, and she didn’t get that great a degree. Then she reappears working for a baby-farming outfit (and I know she would never do that of her own free will) and doesn’t want to have anything to do with anyone she ever knew. Daz kept trying to get her to come to London, but she wouldn’t. I used to write to her from Paris. The only answers I got were fucking little good girl thank-you notes so I gave up. It was me who put Wol and Rosey up to asking her here. We didn’t think she’d accept. Didn’t you know about any of this, Spence?”

  He shook his head. “Me, I know nothing.”

  “Thought you didn’t. Knowing won’t help though. You’re not going to score. She’s off sex. I know. I knew the moment I saw her.”

  Spence sighed in exasperation. “Knock it off. I don’t have a relationship with Anna, except that she’s an old friend I like and admire. But if I did I don’t see how it’s your business. What’s Anna to you? You have a love-life… You and Daz and that revolting cowboy comic-artist. A hot threesome, I hear. Isn’t that enough?”

  Ramone grinned slowly. “Oh, more than enough: believe it. But you want Anna, so do I: and I’m going to win. Forget Charles Craft, Spence. I’m your rival, and the prize is Anna’s soul.” Glaring at him, she flung her piece of driftwood—obviously meant to represent Spence’s chances in this imaginary contest. It should have plunged hopelessly into the sea: but Ramone could not throw, and the breeze was against her. It landed by Spence’s feet.

  “I’m going back. I’m fucking freezing, and Tex has had time to roger your girlfriend up, down, and sideways. He’s a quick worker.”

  Spence watched her marching off in the wrong direction, into the cruel wind and gathering rain, until his soft heart got the better of him, and he got up and ran after. “Hey, Ramone, you’re heading the wrong way!”

  Anna allowed Tex to draw her, if that was what he was doing, for about ten minutes. When he suggested they should go upstairs, so she could undress and he could “get her tits,” she made her excuses and left. Outside the Common Room she met Yesha.

  “Don’t go in there, Yesh. The cowboy is looking for life models. I just escaped.”

  “Oh God! I know. He did that number on me. Did he want you to go upstairs? That’s where he keeps the baby oil, he sez.”

  “Is he really from the States?”

  “Nah. He’s from Sheffield. His real name is Arnold, Arnold Yutt. Daz told me.”

  The two young women burst into angry, defensive laughter.

  “He was Daz’s boyfriend first,” went on Yesha in an undertone. “Ramone met him at the comics convention in Anglouême, when she was living in Paris working as a film extra or something. They started collaborating on this horrible French comic called Mère Noire, have you seen it, it’s disgusting, so anti-women. I thought she used to be a feminist. Anyway, Wol says Ramone’s now trying to cut Tex out—”

  The day passed easily. People drifted in and out of the kitchen, where Wol started opening bottle after bottle of very drinkable Beaujolais Villages. White powder was cut on the massive tabletop, white pills passed from hand to hand. Spence and Anna did not partake of any Class A, Spence because he was trying to live a purer life, Anna because she couldn’t buy her round. But they were as convivial as the rest. Gossip was gossiped, reminiscence flowed. Marnie Choy and her very young boyfriend Kieran, a children’s television presenter, told tales from behind the tv scenes. Shane Clancy, once the star of the Drama Club, told jokes against himself, about the joys of impersonating a noted brand of toilet cleaner, in a giant plastic squeezy suit. Shane’s rich boyfriend and Lucy Freeman’s fiancé, Duncan-the-suit, recounted hideous stories of the trading floor… Ramone had vanished again after her walk with Spence; Tex too. Daz had not been seen at all. Late in the afternoon there were sounds of a violent row upstairs, with monkey screams and parrot shrieks. It subsided, and no one commented except by exchanging glances. At dusk Ramone came down, alone with the animals. And so they came to the last banquet, only slightly more modest than the other two: crudités with home made mayonnaise and Rosey’s famous ciabatta, the braised quail en canapé but sans foie gras, a great dish of imam biyaldi, little new potatoes in rosemary and olive oil—

  Ramone, trapped between jolly Marnie Choy and Lucy Freeman, who hadn’t even changed her hairstyle since she was a darling little first-year, was asked by Lucy, “Are you still a feminist?”

  She couldn’t stand to look into Lucy’s soft, taunting face. She looked away—and there was Spence at the end of the table. Tugging roguishly at the beads strung in his fibrous locks, thin and brown and laid back, he was busy regaling Rosey and Shane with tales of his Moroccan amours. She glimpsed what Anna saw: ambiguous sexuality, sweet nature, and a dick, the best of both worlds. Fuck, it was so unfair.

  “Nah,” she mumbled. “It’s a load of fuck.”

  “I’ve seen Mère Noire,” put in Marnie. “And if that’s feminism, frankly I don’t get it.”

  “I said it’s a load of fuck. Feminists are clit-sucking, cunt-fisting shite. ‘Women are powerful!’ Are they, fuck. I don’t want to be a woman. I hate w
omen, I wish they didn’t exist. Feminism is like Satanism. I mean, what the fuck difference does it make. Say your prayers forwards or backwards, you’re still licking God’s same fat arse.”

  “Oh,” said Lucy, pushing back her long blonde hair, “I see.”

  “Why’n’t you ask me about living with Lavinia Kent? I could be interesting about her. She used to shave my head for me. With a cut throat razor.”

  She saw that these people would go on inviting her to their house-parties, their cocktail parties, their weddings. Especially when she was famous. None of them would remember what being an undergraduate had been like for Ramone: the humiliation, the despair. She smiled in ineffable contempt, reached for another quail, and served it to Sambo the marmoset, who was curled on her lap under the tablecloth, scared by all the row. Bill the parrot rolled up and down between the dishes with his swinging sailor’s gait, squirting dollops of quick-drying concrete shit and pecking at the food: Ramone’s familiar spirits, her fear and her contempt…

  The meal ended, they cleared the table. Ramone, ignoring the domestic chores, went off back upstairs with her pets. The rest of they all settled around the fire. The mood was quiet this evening. Hangovers, deadened by further alcohol, had begun to fight back. Wol kept on opening bottles, joints were rolled, but everyone was sleepy. Nobody wanted to play charades or murder in the dark. One by one the couples slipped away, until Anna and Spence were left alone—to keep the appointment that their eyes had made, meeting with rueful amusement over the white powder on the kitchen table, with tenderness across the banqueting board. Spence thought of Anna the night before, drunk as a skunk: settling down with a dictionary from the shabby collection of books in the Carstairs games cupboard, to locate the last, recalcitrant, word in that Telegraph puzzle by searching the tome line by line. Only Anna! In vino veritas, he thought. It was so touching to see her trying to pass for an ordinary human, when she was sober.

  She was sitting by the fire; he was curled in his armchair again. “Why did you come back?” she asked. “Ran out of money?”

  “No, I got a job,” he repeated patiently. People kept asking him this. Where did they get the idea he’d intended to spend his life in North Africa?

  “You mean in the States?”

  “Notionally. It’s something I was doing with some guys, when I was in college: now they can afford to pay. It’s a firm called Emerald City, kind of a net service. Search engineering.”

  “Why ‘Emerald City’?”

  “Hahaha. Remember The Wizard of Oz? Well, I’m the little guy behind the curtain.”

  “What curtain? I remember the nasty monkeys that gave me nightmares, on television when I was five or something. I don’t remember a curtain.”

  “Never mind.” He came to join her on the hearthrug and began to roll another spliff.

  I’ve enjoyed this, thought Anna. I wouldn’t like to do it often, but I’m glad I came. Wol’s insatiable gossip, Rosey’s temper: Marnie, Simon…a whole world that had been cut out of her life because of what happened with Charles. It was good to know that she could still behave like one of they all. Even if it had totally derailed her budget.

  “What about you? What have you been doing? I hear you’re doing a doctorate?”

  Anna laughed. “I don’t know where to begin. Mmm, well, for a start, there’s a mouse called Jamie Lee. Began life as a female embryo, but she was born anatomically male. Unlike a previous mouse called Harry, she has physiologically viable sperm. But it is unable to wiggle, and we don’t know why. We think we need to increase a diffusion in the spermatogenesis precursor cells. I’m working on the methylation problem. I’m usually the sequencing queen, but the time for sequencing is past… Now you’re sorry you asked.”

  “No, no. I’m fascinated.”

  “Then why are you grinning like that?”

  “It’s just, it sounds kind of comical when you talk about ‘her sperm’.”

  “Can’t help it, Spence. Nothing is sacred. Sex is now something we can take apart and change around. Like a lego set: we don’t have to stick with the model in the picture on the box. We can make anything we like. With lab mice, anyway. Well, almost.”

  “But why are you changing female mice into male mice? I mean, why the preoccupation with male sexual function? Not that it worries me.”

  “Because that’s what we do in my lab. In other places they do different things, either for profit or for pure research. If you’re in HAR, assisted reproduction, there’s more science to be done in male infertility. The other answer is, it’s a game, and we like a challenge. Changing a male mouse into a female mouse wouldn’t be much of a trick, because all you have to do with a mammal embryo is snip out the testes. In eutherian mammals, the group that includes us, female is the default. It’s different with birds. And you wouldn’t believe what happens with kangaroos.”

  He laid the joint on an ashtray and pushed it towards her. “God bless the drug.”

  “God bless the drug.” They smoked in companionable silence. “I didn’t want to be doing sex biology,” she said, after a moment. “But it’s interesting. Chromosomal sex is as good a route as any to getting an insight into the way…the way what happens in the DNA, the chemical bases, can be such a jumble of random differences, colliding with each other in confusion, and yet throw up mechanisms that work and look, well, inevitable.”

  “Like sex? Did you find your lost word on Saturday night by the way? I fell asleep and missed the thrilling conclusion.”

  “Oh, yes. It was poi—a paste of fermented taro root.”

  “Ah, poi, of course. I knew that all along.” He drew in a last lungful of smoke, tossed the roach into the fire and leaned back. “Do you want to hear about the night I slept with a camel? Or shall we just go to bed? I know it’s my turn to ask,” he added tenderly.

  She said nothing.

  “I guess we’d have to use a condom.”

  Anna gave him an old-fashioned look. “We’d have to anyway. I’m not on the pill.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  As they kissed, Spence mulled over the implications. Why was she not taking the pill? Was she trying to get pregnant? He would not dream of asking but he longed to know who was it had the right to hold her, to push up her shirt and suck at her breasts like this, the way she loved it, to pull her close and feel her shiver and press herself against his erection, like this only every night? There must be some brainy big-dicked sex-biologist, father of her child to be, but please God, not Charles.

  “Your place or mine?”

  “Yours. I only have a single bed. You have a double.” She smiled, frankly and happily. “I checked. I think of these things.”

  She had to go to her own room to fetch her contact lens kit. “If I ever have any money,” she grumbled, when she returned (the world blurred and dimmed) “the first thing I’ll do is get my eyes lasered.” Spence was sitting cross-legged on his double bed, already naked. She used to like him to watch her undress, to see him getting harder than you’d believe possible at the sight of the secretly gorgeous form that was revealed, all for him. But he saw as if through a veil that had become transparent that Ramone was right. Something had happened. He saw the injury half-healed behind her eyes.

  “Anna, what’s wrong? Did I do something wrong?”

  “No,” she said, “everything’s fine.” The memory of being raped makes you feel ugly when you are naked. And that made two things she ought to tell Spence but couldn’t.

  She lay beside him and kissed his mouth, his lips were so soft. She remembered the perfect freedom: the nights and days. The pleasure of kissing and caressing another human body, so sweet that the people who said you ought not to do sex unless you loved the other person must be right. When you considered the idea of caressing a child without love, that showed you the enormity of loveless sex. She supposed this meant she loved Spence: yes, certainly, until our last goodnight. However many sexual partners I have, though I bet it won’t be many, I swear, for your
sake my dear, that I will never touch them without tenderness; they will all be my friends. The house in Regis Passage. The door that wouldn’t shut, incessant voices and footsteps, faces looking in. It wasn’t only exhibitionism that had made them willing to fuck on dance floors, in alleys, in doorways (though there was that!). Might as well do it in the street, you’d be as private as in that ramshackle little room. The important thing was never having to hold back. One night on the promenade… They were walking with some of they all, fell behind, and started kissing. How wonderful it was to know, as your blood began to beat, that it wasn’t going to stop, there were no forbidden places, there would be no halt, no check. It was nearly dawn. They backed into the porch of one of the beach huts, she took off her knickers for once, stuffed them in her bag and got up on the railing. He stood between her knees, peeling paint and salt-grey wood under her bum. She felt the cool morning air on her nipples and on the mouth of her cunt, like delicious sensations that were happening in another world, far from the dark inside where she was concentrating, like a baby at the breast, on the single-minded rhythm…and now another world interlayered with these two, Spence in her arms: the new breadth of his shoulders, new muscles in his flanks and arms, not a skinny, leggy man-child any more, but a grown young man. She thought of a bird glimpsed from the train on the way to this party, rising from a river, the unexpected breadth of its wings. The grey heron, Spence’s grey eyes. When they were finished, returned dizzy and floating to the bed, the single world, Spence reached up to trace the contour of her blissed out lips.

  “Was that okay for you?”

  “False modesty will get you nowhere. Nah. I was putting it on to make you feel good.”

  They lay for a while, coupled. When he withdrew she stayed, deliciously flattened.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “Condom came adrift.”

  Anna had to retrieve it, carefully. “It seems to be okay, still intact.”

  “I hope no wiggle-efficient sperms escaped.”