Even in this pretty, tree-lined area, the smells of parkland and old leaves were half-drowned, to my newly sensitized nose, by the metallic reek of car fumes. I had two main roads to cross. Both were filled with a dangerous, sluggish stream of cars. Startled by the bleep of the pelican crossing and urged on by an impatient old lady, I realized it hadn’t been a mistake to leave the Porsche in the garage.
The interlinking suburban roads were nicer, more as I remembered them. Landscaped gardens and mock-Tudor gables. There were schoolchildren piling into ugly Volvos in driveways, and joggers and students walking, and students on bikes. This was my usual route, and many of the faces were familiar, people I passed day after day without acknowledgement. Everything was so neat, so orderly, so expected.
I went through the west gate into the campus. Staff and students drifted and talked and walked in the grassy spaces between the red brick and concrete. Faces came out at me from the past. I was a fixture here, part of the crew. Norman Harris from the Chancellor’s office nodded in my direction as he walked away from his Sierra. Then I saw Stephanie Kent hurrying up the wide granite steps of the library, the same old woolen skirt tight as ever over the ample ridges of her knickers. And there was Jack Rattle, my own Head of Department, the latest Penguin in one hand and a sandwich box in the other.
We converged at the swing doors leading to the Graphic Arts Faculty. I held them open for him.
“Morning, Daniel,” he said. “Another day, eh? Another few brain cells gone.”
“Hardly any left,” I said; it didn’t sound right, but then I’d never really known how to respond to Jack. I wondered if he’d said the same thing to me on this same day all those years ago, and what my reply had been.
“You must,” he tapped my elbow with the corner of his sandwich box, “you must show me what we’re getting from that new plotter. Damn thing cost us enough.”
“Sure. Just say when.”
“I will. I will.” Jack wandered off down the admin corridor to his own office, passing in and out of frames of window sunlight. I paused for a moment beneath the frescoes at the foot of the marble stairs, watching him, wondering if it was foreknowledge or if the signs were really there that his heart would kill him in the spring.
A few students pushed past me as I dawdled, huffy and in a rush. In the sixties and seventies, any arts faculty would have been filled with campus peacocks even this deep into winter term, but now, with the odd green-haired exception, the students were heavy with overcoats, anxiety, and books, just like all the trainee lawyers and engineers in the other faculties. Like everyone else, they wanted their grades, they wanted a job, they wanted money.
I checked my watch. It was 9:35. That was just right; my tutorial should have started at half past. Although it was quite impossible that anyone could find me out, I nevertheless felt it was important to give nothing away by changing my habits.
My legs were suddenly a little weak as I took the stairs to the second level: a strong and unexpected return of the feeling that my body didn’t belong to me. In a sense, of course, it didn’t, but I pushed that thought down as I passed the Burne-Jones stained-glass and the fire hydrants at the stair turns. This was not the time to hesitate, not when I had a tutorial to get through. Just don’t think, I told myself. It worked well enough before.
Along the waxed gleam of the east corridor. Notice boards and past students’ efforts on the walls. Rooms 212, 213, 213A, 214.
214. I took a deep breath and walked in. The charter ceased reluctantly. The air smelt a little of someone’s BO, and a lot of the plastic of the computer terminals that had only been in place since the start of the term.
“Good morning.” I powered up the master screen, proud of the swift and easy way my hands moved across the switches and keys. “This week we’ll continue our exploration of the ways we can expand from the basic paintbox options…”
I paused and looked around at the faces, half-familiar now as they had been then. From the bored expressions, it was obvious that they accepted me without question. I knew that I’d passed a test; my nerves were loosening by the moment. I continued talking at a brisk pace, hardly referring to my notes.
Living in the past was easy.
I closed the tutorial at eleven, and the students drifted out, leaving the garish perspective tricks that the inexperienced or untalented generally produce shimmering on their screens. The computer was still logged for our use, and they could have continued, but, for all of them, the novelty of pressing keys to make things happen on a screen had worn off. Too lazy to walk around the room and look (and how quickly the habits of my lecturing days were coming back!), I called their efforts up, reduced to quarter windows, on my own screen, and saved them for next week’s session, unthinkingly hitting the right keys. View, Save, Name, Return. It was an oddly absorbing task, and probably the first time this morning that, with the success of the tutorial behind me, I’d felt completely at home.
The students had left the door open, and Marnie entered the room without my noticing. She’d crept up close behind me before I knew, suddenly, that she was there—and that she was real.
It was strange, to come this far and then to be almost taken by surprise. She put her arms around my neck. Her hair brushed my face. I could smell the shampoo and acacia, and the cigarette she’d just smoked, and the wool of her scarf, and the faint, bitter sweetness of her breath.
“When are you going to give this up,” she said, her voice serious but trickling down with every word towards laughter. “Why don’t you let the machines get on with it?”
“Could I be replaced that easily?”
“That’s right,” she said. Her hands pressed against my chest, then suddenly released. “… old boffin like you…” She spun the chair around so that I faced her. “… and how is the old boffin anyway?”
“Same as yesterday,” I said. “Let’s have coffee.”
Marnie’s good mood was frail, as I knew it would be. She walked with her head down as we crossed the bright, busy campus, like a child aiming to miss the cracks in the pavement. I’d have liked to have taken her hand, just to be touching her, but I knew it wasn’t the sort of thing we’d usually done.
We queued in the cafeteria. Marnie was silent and I couldn’t think of anything to say. The woman at the till shook her head and gave me a funny look when I offered my Visa card to pay for the coffee. I don’t think Marnie noticed. We took our cups over to an empty table by the window that two Arab students had just vacated. The plastic seat felt warm. I was noticing these things, the steam rising from the slowly spinning froth of the coffee, and the way someone had spooned the sugar to one side of the bowl that lay between us: with Marnie, everything was more vivid. It always had been.
“Is this a busy day?” she asked, lifting the cup with both hands, blowing with that beautiful mouth, sipping. A little of the froth stayed on the faint down along her top lip.
“We could be together, if you like.”
“That could be nice,” she said.
“Could?”
“Depends on what sort of let’s-be-together-day it is.”
“I love you, Marnie.” For thirty years, I’d been wanting to say those words to her again.
She put the cup down with a slight bang. Her eyes travelled across my face, onwards to the window, the wandering students amid the winter-bare trees, the big buildings beyond. “I don’t feel right in this place,” she said. “All this architecture. Look at the people out there. Standing, wandering around, talking. It’s all such a pose. You know, like one of those architect’s drawings you see. Prospective developments. And little sketches of people in the foreground … imaginary people doing imaginary things, just to give the whole neat concept a sense of scale. It’s not real, people standing around like that, you only ever get anything actually like it at a university.”
“It’s just a place,” I said. “We’re both here. You. Me. That’s real enough.”
“And this is going to be a y
ou-and-me day?”
“I’d like it to be,” I said.
“I’ve got a couple of lectures and a life study I could skip.”
“Then,” I said, “there’s no problem.”
She didn’t reply. There was still froth on her lip and I wanted to mention it, but knew I shouldn’t. This whole thing was doubly confusing: my searching for the right words to bridge the awkwardness that was already between us was compounded by the continued vague promptings of memory, a feeling of drifting in and out of the flow. I’d imagined that it would be easy to draw things away from the patterns of the past, but Marnie was still the same, and, now that I was here, I was surprised at how little J had changed. I decided that the best thing was to take a new tack, and say those things to her that I’d always wanted to say.
I swallowed some coffee. Another distraction. I’d forgotten the way the university coffee used to taste. Something about it always reminded me of floormops. I was like Proust, but instead of drifting away into memory I was choking and drowning in tea-soaked madeleines.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, “… about the way we’ve allowed things to … drift. I’ve been a fool to forget that I loved you. Love you … no, I never forgot that, but things got in the way. Let’s ignore the last couple of weeks. It’s just history, a little time in our lives. The arguments don’t matter if we have each other.”
She glanced back at me from the window as though she was coming back from another world. I checked my irritation. No rows, not this time.
“I’m a bit hung-over,” she said. “Honesty time. I was pissed last night.”
“With your friends.”
She shrugged. “With people. They’re not you, Dan, don’t worry. I’d like to give things a chance, I really would, if we could get it back. When I saw you this morning, sitting in front of that damn screen of yours, it was—”
Her gaze went up. Something slapped my back.
“Dan! Mind if I join you?”
A chair rasped over from the nearest table before I could answer. Ritchie Hanks—one of the specialists who took care of the university mainframe—plonked his heavy, boyish self down.
He glanced at Marnie. I wasn’t sure whether they’d ever met—my memory failing me again. There was a gratifying moment of hesitation, as the thought that maybe he’d interrupted something passed briefly in ones and zeros through Ritchie’s computer-specialist’s brain. But he wasn’t easily put off when he had a story to tell about some fascinating new glitch he’d found in the system.
We listened politely. I asked a few questions so that he could give the answers he wanted. Marnie was on her best behaviour: none of the sly asides that I’d found so amusing when I’d first known her but had since come to dread. None of that mattered, I told myself, not here in the past, not when I knew that Ritchie would have a private sector job on double the pay by the end of next year and I’d never think of him again, or whilst Marnie … but it did. Everything mattered.
“Anyway,” I said, stopping him quickly before he began a different story. “I’d better be going now. Pressure of work, you know how it is.”
“Sure, Dan. Pressure of work. Never stops, does it. I was only—”
“—that’s right.” I moved to stand. “Marnie, are you coming?”
“Well…” she hesitated and looked at me. Just her joke. Of course she’d come instead of staying with a prat like Ritchie. Wouldn’t she?
She smiled. “I have some work to do. Us students have work too.”
“Students,” Ritchie said, as though it was a new concept. “Of course.”
Marnie and I walked out into the cold air. Nothing had been decided. Nothing had changed.
Marnie shivered and pushed her hands into the pockets of her jacket. Her hair almost glittered in the sunlight. “It’s true,” she said. “I do have things to do. Tell you what, I’ll come round your place tonight.”
I nodded numbly. “What time?”
“Say … eight.”
I nodded again.
“Ciao.”
“Ciao.”
She walked away from me. Above her winter boots and red socks were the bare backs of her knees. I wanted to kiss them and taste her skin. In my newly youthful body, the thought brought the odd and unaccustomed stirrings of an erection. It grew and then faded as she diminished in the slow drift of movement, as she became another figure, an artist’s brushstroke to give these buildings a sense of scale.
Maybe I should have started earlier back. Perhaps that was part of the problem. Started back at the time when everything was fresh and new and right. But to do that, I would have had to go back to some misty and mythical place where Marnie wasn’t Marnie and I wasn’t me.
It was simply more complicated than that.
This was Marnie’s second year at University. I’d seen her in the first year, of course; she was too pretty and … different not to be noticed. I think we might even have been to a couple of the same parties, not the student sort, but the ones around the chintzy academic fringes of the university where people dress up and pretend to stay sober, and start off talking about the Booker Prize and end up bitching about who’s screwing whom. But Marnie didn’t invite approaches, at least not from me she didn’t.
She was twenty-four, a good three years older than the other undergrads. A mature student: how she hated that phrase. I suppose she was lonely in the way that older students always are, having to act as a shoulder to cry on, having to ignore or laugh along with the stupidities of her younger friends. She’d spent those extra years drifting in Europe, working as a nanny in Cannes, staying in some kibbutz, doing the sort of things that most people only talk about doing. I was seven years older, but I’d never really left school. She made me feel young, and she made me wonder just where and why and with whom she’d been doing all these things.
I only met her properly, face to face, when she took the computer graphics option in her second year. She didn’t belong in the class. She was always sitting a little apart when I came in and the others looked up from their chatter. Marnie stood out in most situations. She just didn’t belong. It was everything about her.
By the end of the second week, it was obvious that Marnie and computers weren’t going to get on. There wasn’t much to learn—the whole purpose of the course was, after all, to allow the students to put computers down on their CVs when they applied for those cherished jobs in design offices and advertising agencies—but even when she hit the right keys, things would go wrong. And after I’d cleared the screen of gibberish, and she’d punched the keys or prodded the light pen or rolled the mouse again, with a simple pessimism that was quite different from the manner of people who are genuinely computer-phobic, something else would go wrong instead. I’d never known anything like it. She nearly brought down the whole mainframe in the third week, something that was theoretically impossible from our access port and doubtless caused Ritchie and his colleagues no end of fascination.
I didn’t mind at all. It gave me a legitimate excuse to spend most of the tutorials sitting next to Marnie, to lean close to her as we pondered the latest catastrophe, and to breathe her scent. I kept my eyes on the screen, but that was because I could see her reflection so clearly in the glass.
She gave me no particular signals. Of course, someone as lovely as Marnie gives signals to every man she passes, but that is merely God’s unthinking blessing and curse. She dressed differently from the other students, usually in skirts and dresses rather than jeans. She had a striped blue-and-white cotton jacket that she wore when the weather was still mild early in the term that I fell in love with for some reason. She wore her hair long or in a bun. She smelt of acacia and cigarettes and Marnie. There was a slowness about the way she moved, a kind of resignation. She understood how she looked, but, unlike most beautiful women, she had a kind of confidence, but absolutely no pride.
I was attracted. I wanted to walk along sunset beaches with her. I wanted to talk through the night. I wanted
to go to bed with her, and stay there a long, long time. I wanted my fill of Marnie, and I wasn’t sure how much that could possibly be. The whole thing quickly got out of hand. I wanted her too badly to break the silence and risk rejection. And by the fifth week of term, I was being brusque and ignoring her in class and then replaying every word and look endlessly, even in my sleep. I was even beginning to wonder if it really was Marnie, or whether I was simply going a little mad.
Then I saw her one afternoon. I was killing time, wandering in the local botanical gardens, because the Chancellor’s department had cocked-up the room allocation for my tutorial. The big tropical house was a common enough place for students to work, and it came as a bigger surprise than it should have to find her there, sitting with an easel beside the goldfish pool, filling in blocks of colour on a squared-off grid.
I said hello and she said hi. She was wearing a loose tee shirt, and I could see the curves of her shoulders and neck far more clearly than my fantasies had permitted. She seemed quite cheerful and relaxed. Marnie was, as I soon discovered, very partial to warmth, and very averse to the cold. A real hothouse flower. I sat down on the stone rim of the pond amid the bananas and rotting oranges and orchids, and we chatted. When I stood up for us to go down to the tea room by the pagoda, the backs of my trousers were soaking wet. We laughed about that, the first time we’d ever laughed together. When she pulled on her blue-and-white cotton jacket, her bare, downy arm brushed against my chest, and the feeling hit me like a huge, taut drum.
That was how it began. Now, with an afternoon to get through without her and only those odd, unsatisfactory words in the cafeteria to cling to, Marnie seemed almost as distant from me as she had all those years ahead, before I’d returned.
I spent the time wandering. I walked down to the botanical gardens, feeling more comfortable now with the undirected flood of traffic that growled past. This was, after all, my life. I had lived it. The eighties were as idiosyncratic as any other decade, but, at root, nothing was really that different from the true present. It was just a question of emphasis and style. Women pushed prams. Tramps mumbled. All the young people seemed to be plugged into those clumsy music players … Walkmans. They stared straight through you. Visitors from another planet. It reminded me of that Bradbury novel, all the people with shells in their ears. A helicopter chittered low and loud over the rooftops. No one looked up. And some of the new buildings looked as though they belonged on a moonbase. The future was already here. Of course, there were no silver air-cars or monorails, but, by now, people had realized that there never would be. Things would carry on pretty much as they had always done, and even the tantalizing fear of a black and glassy wasteland, the last of those great mid-century fantasies, was fading. These people pushing past and looking through me as they went about their busy, empty lives knew that nothing would ever really change. The holes in the sky would grow larger, and so would their flatter, squarer, sharper, deeper, thinner TV screens. And when the news slipped in between the commercials, the faces that peered out at them from those TV screens would still be ancient and hollow-eyed with starvation. The future was a fact that had arrived and had already been forgotten. It meant as much and as little to them as it would have done to their ancestors, dragging a plough or sheltering in a cave. They knew that what lay ahead was the same as now, only more so.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 30