‘So am I.’
And with that, Adam comes down off the stepladder at last.
WHAT IS THE meaning of a life so short?
What is the meaning of a life that has left nothing behind, that barely had time to touch the world before disappearing again?
You think of the plans left unfinished, the projects begun that will never be completed, the paths opened up only to be met by a dead end.
And you wonder was it worth it, the being born and all the learning and growing, all that effort laid to waste by so early a death? Was it worth loving someone just to be left with such a painful, profound absence? You might live another span of Adam’s life, another two even, perhaps, though of course perhaps not, and would that give your existence more weight, would that give it more meaning?
Or are we all just as insignificant as each other, whether we die in childhood or youth or old age, brief interludes of life in the long eternity of our inexistence, and if that is the case, really, what is the point of it all?
EVERYONE IS LEAVING to move on to the next pub, but Eva still has an almost-full pint, and also can’t find her scarf, so she gets down underneath the table, and after some rummaging finds it trampled underneath Jimmy or whatever his name was’s chair. It is dusty and one end of it is covered in something sticky. Fucking hell.
A guy appears at the table with a full pint of lager in his hand.
‘Hey, where is everyone?’
‘They’ve moved on to the Mitre.’
‘Fucking hell. I’ve only just managed to get myself a fucking pint.’
‘I know, it’s ridiculous. I’d only just started mine as well.’
‘…’
‘…’
The guy plonks himself down in the seat next to hers.
‘Oh well. I was kind of hating it anyway, weren’t you? Shall we just have our drinks in peace?’
‘Um. Yeah. Cool.’
‘So how come you didn’t go to the Mitre with the others, then?’
‘I couldn’t find my scarf. I’ve got it now though. But it’s got this weird shit on it …’
‘Eurgh. Gross. What is that stuff?’
‘I think it might be a sort of concentrate formed through centuries of spilled beer.’
‘Probably contains molecules from a pint once drunk by Byron. You should frame it.’
‘Hm. I suppose that’s some consolation.’
‘What’s your name, by the way? I’m Adam.’
‘Eva.’
A pause.
‘It really is Eva.’
‘Ha! That’s funny.’
The pub, after heaving with students and their loud, nervous chatter, has reverted to a certain degree of calm, although it is still quite packed. Its clientele consists mainly of middle-aged men. There are angry sounds emanating from a back room; a darts contest seems to have got out of hand.
‘This isn’t quite how I imagined the Garden of Eden.’
‘No, me neither. I don’t feel particularly prelapsarian, either.’
A hefty man in a pink waistcoat walks past their table, lets out a low belch.
‘Join the club. I think you might have already eaten the apple, or whatever it is you’re meant to do.’
‘I don’t think it actually is specified that it’s an apple. Technically, it’s the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.’
‘How’s your knowledge of good and evil feeling?’
‘Fairly tuned. I spotted a lot of twats this evening.’
The door to the pub opens and a hubbub of freshers swarms in, drowning out the older men and their darts-based bickering. Suddenly every seat, every inch of floor is filled again, and a deafening racket of barking voices and nervous laughter enfolds them.
‘Fuck.’
‘I think we’ve just fallen from grace.’
‘Yep.’
‘Shall we go on somewhere else?’
‘Isn’t everywhere going to be like this tonight?’
‘I know a cool little café just round the corner, I think they’re open late. Unless you’d rather go to the Mitre?’
‘I am definitely not going to the Mitre. Come on then, let’s see your cool little café.’
Adam stands up to put his coat on. To the left of him, a guy with floppy hair and a weak chin is hollering at another in a cut-glass accent.
‘Chap! Chap! What you having?’
The guy who is being addressed as ‘Chap’ – tall, dark, well-dressed – turns to the girl next to him and shrugs his shoulders in what is presumably meant to be a disarming manner.
‘Everyone at school called me “Chap”.’
Who are these people, and what has given them this astonishing self-confidence? To the right of Adam, a gawky boy – this one really is a boy – is trying to wrestle his way to the bar. He lacks the assertiveness to get very far. He has a kind face, and would seem quite sweet if it weren’t for the fact that he is laughing so sycophantically at the inane comments of the two posh boys.
‘Shall we go then?’
Well. This Adam guy, at least, seems normal. A little try-hard with his ‘I know a cool café’ stuff, but not in a desperate way – and he’s someone, well – you feel you can talk to. This was how she had imagined university: full of people you could talk to.
‘Yes, let’s get out of this hell-hole.’
They prise their way through nervous boys and overdressed girls, trying not to get doused in beer spill, and then they are out of there. Eva takes a deep breath of cool, crisp air – a welcome change from the smoky fug inside.
‘It’s this way.’
‘How come you know your way around here so well already?’
‘Oh, my brother studied here, I’ve been up a couple of times.’
The screeching sounds of drunken students still reaches them from the other end of the street. They set off in the opposite direction, and soon turn into a small, quiet alley. Cambridge is blue at night; the cold light makes the stone walls and cobblestones glisten, as though they have just been rained upon. Adam walks briskly and in silence, as if she’s not there. He has lost the affable air he was sporting in the pub, and now looks serious, determined. Eva likes it, this lack of conversation – it’s a relief after the constant effort of the past two days.
Adam turns to her.
‘God, it’s nice not to talk for a bit, isn’t it?’
‘I was just thinking that.’
They let each other toy with their private thoughts, listening to the beat of their footsteps in this quiet darkness, taking in the venerable façades that contemplate them from the height of their centuries. On one street, there is a Sainsbury’s sitting opposite the gate of one of the colleges, sort of tastefully camouflaged within an old-looking structure, but a Sainsbury’s nonetheless, which feels disappointing, gives the whole place a Disneyland feel, as though the colleges have been built by Americans to make the supermarkets more attractive, rather than the other way round.
Still, good to know that there is a Sainsbury’s here.
Then down a street that is all back ends of shops and featureless expanses of cement, past a couple of pubs hiding away from the hordes of freshers, and here they are in the café, which mainly reminds Eva of the inside of a Little Chef.
‘Hm. Nice.’
‘It’s all right, isn’t it? What do you want?’
‘Um – I’ll have some wine, I think. Hang on, I’ll give you some cash.’
‘It’s OK, I’ll get it.’
She watches Adam walk over to the counter. It occurs to her that the others will all think they’re getting off with each other, but then she remembers the others probably won’t have noticed she’s gone, apart from Carmen who definitely will, but won’t go spreading rumours anyway. Not that she cares. The point is, she can feel the strictures of how this will be perceived from the outside, and it is a drag, a boring, predictable drag. She likes this guy, why shouldn’t they hang out together?
Adam looks over fr
om the queue and smiles at her. It is a kind smile, which makes him seem older than he is. Underneath his adolescent body – slim, nervy, too eager to please – he has this quiet self-assuredness. It is as though, Eva realizes, Adam actually knows who he is. With him looking at her now, she wonders if he is planning on pulling her. She hopes not. It would be a shame to ruin a delicate affinity by jumping into a predictable fumble. How Eva longs for the world, her life, not to be what you might expect! How handsome Adam is, with his aquiline features and shock of blond hair, and a certain fineness in his limbs which makes him look as though he might disappear. Actually, handsome isn’t the word. Nor is cute, nor good-looking. He is beautiful, like a painting or a statue. A beautiful boy. She hopes he doesn’t stick his tongue down her throat.
The other people in the café all look relaxed; they chat without trying to impress each other or establish a position in the pecking order. There can’t be any freshers among them. Eva has a sudden, vertiginous sensation that she will never be like them; but she doesn’t want Adam, who is walking back over to her, to think she is crazy, so she bites back the angst and smiles at him.
He sets two steaming mugs down on the table.
‘Sorry – they don’t serve alcohol. I assumed a hot chocolate was OK …’
‘Wow, no – now you’ve given me that, I realize it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting all along.’
‘Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. Thank Christ we’re not in the Mitre.’
‘I’ll drink to that.’
They both set to their hot chocolates, hands wrapped around them like bunnies’ paws.
‘Nice café. I like the, er, atmosphere. Restful.’
‘Yeah, sorry, I was just thinking it’s not as nice as I thought it would be. It’s a bit tacky, isn’t it?’
‘No, I mean, it’s fine. I mean, I probably wouldn’t want to come and spend every evening here, but, you know, it’s a nice break from fresher’s week.’
‘I guess it seemed cooler to me when I was, like, fifteen and visiting my big brother.’
Is he a tiny bit disappointed? She’s been sort of assuming that he’s just this effortlessly confident guy, but there’s a flicker of discomfort in him all of a sudden, a loss of bravado now that his great little find has turned out to be not quite so great after all. She feels bad – she didn’t mean to put him down. She hasn’t put him down. She wonders if he thinks she’s full of astonishing self-confidence.
‘So, have you met anyone interesting this evening? Present company excluded, obviously. I’m sure no one can beat my knowledge of quite nice cafés that seem really cool when you’re fifteen.’
‘Not really. I got stranded at a table with that Alex guy from the year above and a bunch of people whose sole topic of conversation was Britpop.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘I mean – I like Britpop, you know, but I never realized people could find so much to say about it.’
‘Sounds pretty similar to the guys I ended up talking to.’
‘It’s kind of a bit of a let-down, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘I mean – I thought we were meant to be the finest young minds in the country – I was kind of expecting to be meeting people here you could talk to about other things than Top of the Pops.’
‘Such as?’
‘I don’t know – surely we should all be having impassioned debates about philosophy or politics or something? Not just getting wasted.’
‘Well – it’s only our first week here – I’m sure the philosophical debates will start at some stage.’
‘It’s just – I was so looking forward to going to university at last, I was expecting it to be so exciting …’
‘And reality isn’t living up to your expectations?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m judging this place too fast. And I have met one really cool girl – Carmen. We’re on the same staircase. She’s kind of … Just really easy to talk to, you know?’
‘Isn’t that just a way of saying that you get on well?’
‘I suppose so. But she seems to be like that with everyone, whereas …’
Hm. Maybe she shouldn’t be telling this guy how intimidating she finds it all. Don’t want to sound like a loser.
‘I know, it’s kind of exhausting, all this having to be really chirpy with every new person you come across. But, you know – we’ll all get to know each other soon enough.’
‘That’s very level-headed of you.’
‘I don’t know – I just look at the guys in the year above us, and they’re all so comfortable here, it’s as though they’ve been here for ever. It was certainly like that for my brother. Why wouldn’t it be the same for us?’
‘I was thinking the exact opposite: I was looking at the guys in the year above us and thinking I can’t see how I’ll ever be like them.’
Adam smiles.
‘I’m pretty sure you’re going to end up being proven wrong.’
‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. Or I hope so, anyway. Though I hope I don’t end up like that Alex character.’
‘God, me too. What a creep.’
‘…’
‘I do know what you mean, though. I had a kind of weird moment when my mum dropped me off here – this kind of sudden panic, like I was a kid being dropped off for his first day at kindergarten or something. Ridiculous.’
‘Maybe it’s knowing that we’re embarking on a new chapter of our lives – and a really important one. I mean, university, that’s meant to really define you, isn’t it? To be the best years of your life or whatever. But right now we’re on the threshold of that, and it’s kind of daunting.’
‘Yeah, maybe. I think in my case it wasn’t helped by the fact that my mum insisted on driving me up here. I’d have been fine if I’d just come up on the train, I reckon. And I mean, she’s really busy at the moment, and I was like, “Mum, I can just take the train, it’s really fine,” but she was like, “No, no, no, I have to take you, I’m not going to let my boy head off to university all alone,” and I mean, she’s really not like that usually, I mean I’ve been going away on holiday with friends and stuff like that for years and she never stresses about it. But, yeah – somehow the fact that she dropped me off here, and looking at my stuff sitting in this empty college room … It felt like, Oh shit, oh shit, this is actually real. And to make things worse, she actually took this guy who’s in the room next to me to one side – this guy called Henry, he’s really hilarious actually, you’ll have to meet him – and gave him this speech about how he had to look out for me and she could tell he was a reliable young man who wouldn’t let her down, and I mean, luckily Henry isn’t a dick, basically, so he just laughed it off when he told me about it and was like, “Yeah, my mum’s really crazy sometimes too,” but imagine if she’d said all that to someone who wasn’t so cool? I’d be the laughing stock of the college by now.’
‘I’m sure there’s quite a few people with similar tales – I mean, you’ve got to see it from their point of view as well, it can’t be that easy for our parents to watch us all fly the nest.’
‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. How about you – how’s your mum reacting to losing her little girl?’
‘Oh. Kind of – normally, I think. No outbreaks to any fellow students, at least. Though I mean – my mum left home in pretty crazy circumstances, so it would be weird if she were freaked out by me just going to university.’
‘Why – what happened when your mum left home?’
‘OK, “left home” isn’t quite the right way of putting it. She’s from East Germany originally, and she fled to the West when she was, like, nineteen.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yep.’
‘How – I mean – what happened?’
‘She, like, went up to the Baltic Sea and this friend from West Berlin came to get her with a kind of dinghy thing and then took her to a boat.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah, I know, It’s kind of a cr
azy story.’
‘And – I mean – why did she want to leave East Germany, was there a particular reason or was she just, like, I don’t know, I need to get out of here?’
‘No, there was a reason – or at least, it was kind of a precaution, I guess. Her parents had just been put in prison, and I think she felt it would be safer for her to leave – or at least, that her life would be easier if she left.’
‘Wow. Jesus. And what had your grandparents done?’
‘I don’t know exactly, to be honest. I mean, they were involved in groups opposing the regime. They were quite religious – well, I mean, my grandfather was a pastor, in fact – and, you know, that wasn’t very popular with the East German government. As far as I know, all they did was take part in discussion groups at their church, that sort of thing – but it seems that was enough for the Stasi to take an interest in them. They’d been making their lives difficult for a while – by doing stuff like stopping my mum from going to uni, for example – but then, yeah, suddenly they got thrown in prison and she doesn’t really know why. Or I guess she knows part of it, maybe, but not everything.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And – what happened to your grandparents, then? How long were they in jail for? I guess you weren’t able to see them until the Wall came down?’
‘They died long before I was born, unfortunately. In prison, in fact.’
‘Oh Jesus. I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s fine, I mean – I never knew them.’
‘Oh my God. That’s awful.’
‘Yeah, sorry, bit of a conversation-stopper …’
‘No! I mean, as long as you’re comfortable talking about it …’
‘Oh, sure, don’t worry – there’s not much more to say, really. My mum made a life for herself in England, I guess. Though she’s never managed to lose her German accent …’
‘Did she not talk to you in German, then?’
‘Oh sure, yes. She spoke German to me when I was a kid.’
‘Na das ist aber toll!’
‘Ha! You speak German?’
‘Ja! Wir können miteinander Deutsch reden, wenn du willst.’
‘Um. I don’t really speak it any more, to be honest.’
How I Lose You Page 18