by Anna Hope
‘Cate?’
‘Hey.’
‘How are you? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.’
‘Sorry. I’ve been …’ What has she been? She has no idea.
‘How’s Canterbury?’
‘Funny,’ she says.
‘Funny how?’
‘I don’t know.’ She thinks of how it’s funny. Tries to frame a joke. ‘We went to see Sam’s sister. They want to take us to Dubai.’
‘That sounds nice.’
‘Seriously?’
A small sigh. ‘I’m sure you’ll get used to it. These things take time.’
Cate is silent.
‘How’s my godson?’
‘He’s good. Asleep.’
There is a pause, the sound of Hannah’s computer keys in the background, of Hannah doing two things at once – the great world swirling around her, summoning her back.
‘Han?’ says Cate.
‘Sorry, just catching up on work emails. Had to send that one.’
‘Do you fancy meeting up? Next weekend? Saturday, maybe? I could bring Tom into town. We could go to the Heath? I haven’t come in since we’ve been out here. He’s growing so fast …’
Cate braces herself for the no, but then, ‘Hang on,’ says Hannah, ‘let me check … Saturday? Yeah. Why not?’
They speak a little more, then Cate ends the call, and goes over to the window. It has been six weeks since she moved to Kent. Gulls sleep on the pointed roofs of the flats opposite. A man is out there, climbing out of his car. Perhaps he is the one who lives on the other side of the wall, whose sleep is broken nightly by Tom.
The man looks up. Cate lifts her hand. He stares at her – a dark shape in the window – with a baffled look of incomprehension on his face, then looks away.
Abjections
1995
The seminar is called Feminisms. It is not full. There is a general feeling, in the popular culture, that feminism has done its work. It is the era of the Spice Girls. Of the ladette. Lissa, the daughter of a feminist, has taken it for granted that she is a feminist too. A wholly unexamined position. She chooses Feminisms because the other option is Science Fiction.
The reading list is daunting and mostly foreign. Lissa reads none of it in preparation for the course. No one really does the preparatory reading for courses in the English department. You just skim the books in the week you have to write about them. This, to Lissa, seems to be the main thing that university teaches you – how to bullshit convincingly. The better the university, the better the bullshit. She has expounded this theory regularly in the bed of her new boyfriend, a Mancunian drug dealer with a terraced house in Rusholme who walks like Liam Gallagher and has a way with a parka. He is dark and funny and clever and the sexiest thing she has ever seen.
The girl is sitting close to the front of the room, long hair almost hiding her face, small frame drowned by a baggy jumper, the cuffs pulled down over her thumbs. One of those long patchwork skirts, DM boots, a heavy hand with the eyeliner. She is of a type – suburban rebels, indie kids, packs of them roaming Manchester on a Saturday night. Flailing around the dance floor of the student union. Sitting Down to James. Lissa and the girl (who is called Hannah) are assigned to present together – Kristeva and the abject. Having not done the reading, Lissa has no idea what any of this means. Why don’t you come to my room? Lissa asks Hannah. Tomorrow? Three o’clock?
Hannah turns up at Lissa’s room on the dot of three. She carries several weighty books in her arms. She knocks on the door and pulls her cuffs over her bitten fingernails. So far, for Hannah, university is not what she had hoped. She has only come to Manchester because she did not get into Oxford and her second choice – Edinburgh – was full. And so, after a year out – which she spent, not ‘travelling’ like the majority of students she seems to meet, but working to save the money for clothes and books and anything extra she might need – here she is at university number three, still living at home in Burnage. Cheaper this way, so she doesn’t have to pay for her accommodation in halls. And her parents are happy about it. And she pretends she is too, but really she is seething. Seething because she fudged a question about Keats in the Oxford interview. Seething because her best friend, Cate, got in. Seething because she didn’t put somewhere far from home for her third choice. And, mostly, seething with the discovery that the city she has lived in all her life is infected by privileged students. For the last few months she has had a bar job in the student union, and she, who is naturally a watcher, has learned much. Forget Feminisms – she could already write a dissertation on class. There are the boarding-school kids, who wear their shirts with the collars up and play sports and roam in unadventurous, braying packs. The state-school kids, who occupy different tables but eye the rugby boys and match them pint for pint in the bar. The misfits, who wear their misfit status like a badge, thus signalling to the other misfits and forming misfit cliques. And then those like this blonde girl whose door she stands at now. These are the ones who trouble her: they are slippery, hard to categorize. And Hannah is fond of categorization. This girl sounds posh, but does not necessarily act it. Hannah has never seen her in the student union. She is beautiful, but careless with her beauty – at the eleven o’clock seminars, for instance, she often has last night’s make-up crusted around her eyes. The tip of her index finger is stained orange from smoking. She barely seems to brush her hair. But this girl possesses something indefinable, something that, although she cannot name it, Hannah knows she wants desperately for herself.
The other girl opens the door and Hannah steps inside. The room is a mess. It smells of fags, and ashtrays overflow on every surface. There are half-full glasses of water in various places. An empty bottle of wine. The single bed is covered with an Indian throw. There is a collage on the wall – photographs of young people on a far-flung beach, Lissa sitting on a scooter, no helmet in sight, Lissa and a dark-haired young man in a nightclub, both with large pupils, faces crowded into the frame. So far, standard fare. But Hannah’s eye is caught by a different picture, this one propped carelessly against the wall – an oil painting of a fair-haired girl curled into a chair, reading a book.
Is that you? she asks, kneeling before it.
Yeah, says Lissa carelessly. My mum did it. Years ago.
It’s really good.
Lissa sits on her bed, watching, a little amused, as the dark-haired girl takes her hungry inventory of her possessions, then sits at the desk and opens the first of her books. The girl moves precisely. Her pencils are sharp.
These are the things that Lissa thinks she knows about university and Manchester and class: she is the daughter of a socialist. She went to a North London comprehensive. She would rather hang out with a drug dealer than a public schoolboy. There are far too many public schoolboys and girls in Manchester, but scratch its grimy post-industrial surface and the city waits. That Manchester is, at this point in its history – if, like Lissa, you are a fan of dance music and of ecstasy – possibly the greatest city on earth.
She is interested in this long-haired girl because she has a Mancunian accent – a rarity at the university. She likes Mancunians. And she likes her serious, slightly cross face. She enjoys hearing her spar with the other kids in the seminar group. Hannah is chippy and Lissa likes it. And she is also interested in her, this spring afternoon, because she thinks she might help her to get a good mark.
OK, says Hannah. The abject.
Hit me, says Lissa.
Hannah bends her head and reads, twisting the ends of her hair in her fingertips.
Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of preobjectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.
Immemorial violence, says Lissa. What does that mean?
Well, says Hannah, it’s birth, isn’t it? And infancy – before we enter the symbolic order. Language. All of that.
If you say so, says Lissa. Tell you what. She lean
s over and pulls a small bag of weed from a drawer in her cabinet. She has been given it this morning by her boyfriend.
But … Hannah feels a mild panic as she casts her hand over the ranged books. It’s three o’clock. I mean – we’ve got to give a presentation tomorrow, haven’t we?
I know, but this might help.
Lissa feels Hannah’s eyes on her as she rolls the joint. She takes her time, enjoying her skill, finishing with a flourish before she opens the window and leans out of it, four floors up above Owens Park. Go on then, she says, lighting up.
Hannah sighs and reads on.
On the level of our individual psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between me and other, between me and (m)other.
Lissa thinks of Sarah driving her up here last September, her mother’s old Renault 5 packed high with her stuff. She took her out to lunch at a restaurant in town. Now, darling, she said over the pudding, you are on the Pill, aren’t you? Then she gave her twenty pounds, a rather beautiful portrait of Lissa aged eight sitting in the flowered attic chair, a large packet of Drum tobacco, a brisk kiss on the cheek, and drove off back down the motorway to London. A separation which hardly seemed to bother Sarah at all.
… as in true theatre, Hannah reads on, without make-up or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands …
Wait – does it really say that?
Yeah. Hannah looks up and smiles. It is the first time Lissa has seen her smile. She has a lovely smile. Interesting. All the better for not being easily won.
This shit … this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the point of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.
Wow, says Lissa.
Yeah, says Hannah.
Lissa blows out smoke on the evening air. There is the sound of traffic on Wilmslow Road below, the hazy, blurred sounds of the tower block; Portishead, ‘Glory Box’, drifting out of someone’s nearby room.
So … says Hannah. The presentation?
Oh. Yeah. OK. How about, Lissa says, how about, for starters, we name all the sorts of abject we can come up with?
Why? says Hannah. She is not a fan of thinking around things. She has a linear mind.
Well, why not? Go on – Lissa waves the joint at Hannah – how many can you name?
Hannah scrunches her nose. Well, there’s piss, obviously – urine. Shit. There’s blood; two types of blood. Vein blood. Menstrual blood.
I’ll bet there must be more types of blood than that.
There probably are.
That’ll do for starters. Vomit. Snot. Earwax.
We need to write these down. Hannah snatches up her pencil and starts scribbling.
How many is that? says Lissa.
Seven so far.
What about eye gunk?
Definitely eye gunk. What’s the right term for eye gunk?
I don’t know. Here, don’t you want some of this?
Hannah has only smoked a joint once before. It was at the Ritz with Cate last summer, and it made her feel dizzy and ill. She is self-conscious as she makes her way over to the window. She takes the joint from Lissa – a short, exploratory drag. Lissa watches, amused, from the corner of her eye, then takes up the pad and pen.
Spit, says Hannah, taking a longer drag this time. Speaking of which, I might have made this a bit wet.
It’s fine, says Lissa, keep going.
Phlegm, says Hannah.
OK. Don’t say phlegm again.
Phlegm.
They both snort.
Dandruff?
Dandruff will do. Lissa stops scribbling and comes back to the window. They are close to each other. She catches Hannah’s smell of incense and shampoo.
What about babies? says Lissa, taking back the spliff.
What about them?
Well, aren’t they a form of abject in themselves?
Maybe. Hannah scrunches her nose. Or at least what’s around them. What’s it called? Some sort of fluid. Amniotic.
Yeah. That’s it. We should form a band, says Lissa, giggling. The Amniotics. No – wait – the Abjections.
They are laughing properly now.
Oh God. We should. The Abjections. I love it.
They print out band T-shirts: black with hot-pink writing across the chest. The hot pink is allowed, they decide, as it is ironic. They name their Abjections, giving examples of each from their own life. They discuss whether a man’s sperm leaving your body – leaving its trace on your knickers after sex – can be seen as an abjection in itself. (Having not yet had sex, Hannah lets Lissa do the talking here.) They declare there are many different types of vaginal discharge: the one that leaves a white crust, the one that leaves a yellow crust, the one that floods you when you’re turned on. They discuss whether discharge – with its pejorative connotations – is itself a patriarchal term. They decide that there are as many different types of vaginal abject as Inuits have words for snow.
They watch with satisfaction as the boys cringe. They feel a new power. They become electric. They become friends.
2010
Hannah
She waits in the queue for the fishmonger, hovering over the threshold, the sun strong in the window, the shouts and calls of the market behind her. It has been a warm day; the ice is melting and the remains of the day’s catch are blood-and scale-streaked. Two young men in waders pass between the front and a chopping block at the back, where the fish are gutted and bagged.
Eight years ago, when she moved to the area, a Jamaican guy owned this place. It was painted the colours of the Jamaican flag. He sold fresh and salt fish and vegetables, and other bits and bobs in the back; incense, reggae on bootleg cassettes. He had the most beautiful face. There was a campaign to help when his shop was sold from underneath him to a property developer: articles in the Guardian by local writers, a sit-in in the premises of a cafe on the street – a place owned by the same developer. An angry meeting was called in the church hall, to which they all went along – Hannah remembers a guy in his fifties, face livid with anger, standing and shouting, I remember when it was shit round here. It was much better then.
But now the ripples have been smoothed over, now marble tiles and line-caught fish have replaced pineapples and salt cod and plantains. This fishmonger is no longer new. And, despite an occasional, residual queasiness, Hannah likes it, with its day boats and its flirty young men and its sense that the sea is still full of abundance – that all might yet be well with the world.
It is her turn at last, and she duly flirts a little as she buys medallions of monkfish, asks advice on what else she might add to the pot, buys saffron and samphire and stows them in her bag. She is sweating as she leaves the shop – the first sign of the hormonal dip. Her scalp is laced in it. This is the hard part, the part they don’t tell you about, the down-regulation, the menopause brought about in three weeks, your hormones suppressed to ground zero: the day sweats, the night sweats, the constant urge to cry.
But she is good at not crying – has it down to a fine art. She does not cry when woman after woman at work announces her pregnancy. As day after day she takes her temperature and marks it on a graph. As month after month she bleeds. And when her oldest friend told her she was pregnant, Hannah held her very close, so Cate would not see the expression on her face.
Outside she weaves past the coffee shop with its inevitable buggies clogging the pavement, her gaze grazing the babies, the parents with their fists clutching cappuccinos and flat whites. (She is good, too, at not looking closely at the children, it is not wise to stare at a baby’s plump arms, at a toddler hand in hand with its mother, a newborn slung across a father’s chest.) But as she passes the flower stand, she stops, her eye caught by the display. The woman with the stall turns to her. ‘What do you need?’ she as
ks. She is in her late fifties or early sixties, her eyes are blue.
‘I—’ For a moment Hannah is taken aback. What does she need? ‘What are these?’ She gestures towards a tall spiked flower.
‘Teasel. They came from my own garden, we had a bumper crop this year. And here,’ – the woman bends to her buckets – ‘these are Michaelmas daisies.’
‘I’ll take some of both.’
The woman ties the flowers loosely with twine, and as she hands them over, her rough knuckles brush Hannah’s own. Hannah heads to the bottom of the market, where the crowd thins out, crosses the canal and turns right, through the estate, towards her flat, jostling her bags as she opens the unprepossessing metal street door, then climbs the external stairs to the third floor of a three-storey building, an old pub, converted and sold before it was even finished. They had to elbow their way round with twenty other couples, then send their offer in a sealed bid the following day. Before the decision to move to Canterbury, Cate would visit, stroking her bump, staring out at the view, wondering aloud at Hannah’s luck.
It’s not luck, Hannah wanted to say. It’s how life works. You work hard, you save throughout your twenties, and by the time you’re in your thirties you have enough for a deposit. It’s not magic, it’s simple maths.
And now here is Cate, living in the house that has been bought for her by her husband’s parents, for which, it seems, she has to pay no money at all, with her healthy, beautiful son, conceived with the utmost of ease – here is Cate, unhappy again. Or at least so she sounded on the phone last night.
Hannah slides her purchases from her bag, places the fish and samphire and wine in the fridge, cuts the stems from the flowers and arranges them in a vase, which she places in a long slant of afternoon light. The teasels are unexpected, their beauty severe, precise. Her laptop is open on the table, and as she goes to close it, she sees the report she was working on this morning, before the sun called her outside. She saves the document and shuts the lid.
She is sweating still, so goes to the sink to splash her face with water. It is the strangest feeling, as though her skull is being scraped out. The urge to cry is on her again. She wants Nathan here, beside her, wants to feel his arm steady on her back. But he is only at the library, only a cycle ride away, along the canal. He will be home soon. They will eat together. He will tell her about his day. She looks up, her gaze resting on the flowers, the table, the light.