‘That’s a bit of a tricky one.’
‘What’s happened?’
Louise plunged in. ‘Josie and her new group have occupied the Science and Industry building. They’re all topless. They’re throwing the files out of the window. They’re holding an alternative open day.’
Miriam was silent for a moment. Then she let out a long weary sigh. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘Miriam?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is that all you’re going to say?’
‘Did you expect me to break down and weep?’
‘No, but …’
‘Look, Louise, practically every single thing in my life at the moment seems to me to be falling about my ears. We’ll cancel our open day. We’ll give up on the Fresh Start committee. Josie can do it her way. The refuge is going to have to close down within three months. Toby is in deep depression and won’t talk to me at all, and I can’t say that I care two hoots either way.’
‘Oh.’
‘Is it the party this weekend? Is it still on?’
‘Mr Miles’s party? Why on earth should you care?’
‘Shall we go to it?’
Louise, still shaken from her encounters in twenty-four hours with an improbably dressed Toby, an amorous neighbour, and twenty half-naked women, wailed, ‘Miriam, how can you think of going to a party when everything is going so badly wrong?’
There was a little silence. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ Miriam said equably. ‘I can’t think what else to do really. If everything’s as bad as I think it is, we might as well go out and have a little bop.’
‘They don’t call them bops any more,’ Louise snapped.
Miriam chuckled. ‘Well, let’s go and find out! Can I come over this weekend?’
‘Oh, all right,’ Louise said crossly. ‘But I’m not going up to the farm. You’ll have to go on your own.’ From her window she could see the back of the Science and Industry block. A long white banner was being unrolled from one window to another. It read: ‘Women Support Women! Naomi Petersen and Louise Case Represent Us! Open Science and Industry to Women! We Are Everywhere!’
‘Oh my God,’ Louise gasped.
‘See you tomorrow, about midday?’ Miriam asked.
‘I have to go,’ Louise stammered.
‘And don’t worry so much,’ Miriam counselled. ‘What’s the worse thing that could happen?’
Louise shook her head numbly, reading again her own name blazoned on the outside of the occupied building. ‘I think it just did,’ she said.
She put down the telephone.
It rang almost immediately. It was the head of the Literature department, Professor Maurice Sinclair, a man watching his prediction that a feminist specialist would bring nothing but trouble come to a triumphant vindication. ‘It’s Maurice here,’ he said quietly. ‘Glad to catch you in so early. I’ve just had a telephone call from the head of Science and Industry. He seems to be under the rather disagreeable impression that you have organised an occupation of his building.’
‘Oh,’ Louise said faintly.
There was a pause. Maurice Sinclair was the most elegant man of the university. He wore the palest of pale grey suits, his long white hair was always beautifully cut. He never raised his voice in either anger or joy. He had never been seen to manifest either anger or joy in any way at all. His greatest disapproval was signalled by the raising of an eyebrow and a quiet murmur of ‘well, well’. He hated and despised Suffix University and longed to be back at Cambridge where he had completed his MA at the feet of F.R. Leavis, all those years ago. The appointment of Louise to his department with responsibility for a feminist reading of the great texts, and a suggestion that she should teach books other than the Leavis dozen, even books written by women, even young women, even young black women, he had greeted with a raised eyebrow and three ‘well’s. Since then he had undermined her confidence and work in a million slight unobjectionable ways and had been waiting patiently for her finally to despair and leave of her own accord; or for the funding of her post to surprisingly expire.
‘Would it be improper of me to ask you to cancel this little exercise?’ he asked softly, his voice almost a whisper. ‘It seems to be rather inconvenient for them over in Science and Industry. Apparently your young ladies have destroyed the student records and are currently engaged in wrecking the computers and related equipment. While I am sure we all sympathise with enthusiasm and the – ah – revolutionary heat of the moment, I understand that these electrical goods are rather expensive and inconvenient to replace.’
‘I didn’t organise it,’ Louise said flatly. ‘I can’t stop them.’
‘Ah,’ he said with quiet pleasure. ‘That does make things a little difficult. Since, apparently, they have named you and Dr Petersen in Sociology as their spokes-er-persons. Dr Petersen is apparently out of town so she can hardly be held responsible. It looks as if you have been left to – ah – carry this particular baby, if I can – in these urgent circumstances – stoop to employ a cliché; and if the word “baby” is not offensive to you.’
‘Dr Petersen and I were on the Fresh Start committee but these women are a splinter group,’ Louise said, trying to speak firmly against Professor Sinclair’s die-away whisper. ‘I have no control over their actions and I don’t approve of them.’
‘That is a relief,’ he assured her swiftly. ‘I was so afraid that you would be getting cold.’
‘Cold?’
‘I’m told you are all naked?’
‘I am fully clothed,’ Louise said stiffly. ‘And I am not responsible for this demonstration.’
‘A schism in the broad church,’ Maurice Sinclair commented contentedly. ‘I thought all you women worked together so much more successfully than us crudely competing males?’
‘Not on this occasion,’ Louise said through her teeth.
‘This leaves us in a rather difficult position,’ Maurice Sinclair continued smoothly. ‘I have been asked by my colleague Professor Edgeley to persuade you to persuade them – I hope you are following me throughout all these clauses? – that they should leave the building in return for full support from the Science and Industry department for your open day? Or is it their open day now? Forgive a mere male’s confusion.’
‘We have cancelled,’ Louise said. ‘And I am not cognisant of their plans.’
(One of the more irritating things about Maurice Sinclair’s pomposity was that it was infectious; Louise would never normally have used a word like ‘cognisant’.)
‘Do I take it, then, that you are refusing to speak with your erstwhile colleagues while they continue to destroy university property and of course, damage the academic reputation of the institution which, after all, remunerates you for working towards its greater glory?’
‘I am not refusing …’
‘Will you negotiate with them?’
Louise paused. ‘I don’t know that I’ll do any good,’ she said feebly.
‘I shall tell Professor Edgeley that the monstrous regiment is meeting for a parley,’ Maurice said happily. ‘I am telephoning you from my home at present, but under these rather dramatic circumstances I think I had better come in to university. Perhaps you would do me the courtesy of coming to my office to report what progress you have made, Dr Case. I must confess that I cannot restrain myself from feeling slight anxiety.’
‘I’ll try,’ Louise agreed miserably. ‘I am feeling slight anxiety too.’
‘Most unfortunate,’ Professor Sinclair said contentedly.
Louise paused outside the front door of the Science and Industry building. Confused Science and Industry students were standing around in groups on the grass outside, worried that they would be late for lectures. They were a likeable lot of young men. Many of them wore round pebble glasses to compensate for eyestrain caused by staring too long at diagrams of subatomic particles instead of going out to play when they were little boys. Those destined for industry rather than applied science were bro
ader and more burly. They stood at the back of the crowd and heckled when they glimpsed the women passing before the windows. The nakedness of the women seemed to have failed to make its legitimate political point and had produced instead a bawdy bacchanalian atmosphere. It was not helped by the tendency of the younger and prettier women, whose re-education had obviously been scanty and rushed, to come to the windows with their hands spread bra-wise over their breasts and taunt the young men in the courtyard below, casting aspersions on their potency, and the allegedly inferior dimensions of their genitalia.
The porter was morosely guarding the outside door with the air of a man shutting a stable after the horse has bolted. Inside the door was a barricade of heavy metal filing cabinets.
Louise stood at the back of the crowd and looked up at the windows, hoping to see Josie. The window of Professor Edgeley’s study swung open and Josie rested her neat breasts over the windowsill.
‘Have you come to join us?’ she demanded.
‘Not quite,’ Louise called back.
At once all the young men turned to her and stared at her in open curiosity. ‘She’s no good, she’s got her shirt on,’ one said in disappointment. There was a long low whistle from somewhere.
‘This is outrageous!’ Louise cried angrily. She marched towards the building, the sea of young men parting before her, until she stood under Josie’s window.
‘I’ve had my head of department on the telephone,’ Louise said as quietly as she could. ‘If you come out now you can have your own open day and Science and Industry will co-operate.’
‘We’re having an open day now,’ Josie said. ‘The department is open to women in a way that it has never been before.’
Someone inside the building set light to a pin-up poster and dropped it flaming from the window to the ground. The young men, who had all done their Health and Safety training, conscientiously rushed forward and stamped out the flames. They looked around for the Health and Safety Accidents at Work log book to report the incident and seemed uneasy when they realised there was none.
‘What do you hope to gain?’ Louise asked. ‘You must see that you are making enemies for The Cause.’
‘Publicity,’ Josie said airily. She waved towards the back of the crowd where a photographer from the local paper was taking photographs. ‘Shock! A bit of constructive anarchy.’
‘All the technicians and secretaries who have joined you are almost certain to lose their jobs,’ Louise warned. ‘And the students will face disciplinary action, and maybe they’ll bring the police in, it’s damage and trespass.’
Josie stopped smiling for the camera and looked down at Louise instead. ‘You know your problem?’ she demanded.
Louise shook her head.
‘You’re a worrier,’ Josie announced grandly. ‘You’re all screwed up. Give a little, Louise! Relax! Smell the roses! Experience life!’
Louise looked away for a moment. She realised she was grinding her teeth and set her jaw carefully. ‘Can I come in and talk to you?’ she asked. ‘I am afraid that I may be right to worry.’
Another flaming poster dropped to the ground. At the back of the crowd a television crew was unpacking its gear.
‘You can come in only if you agree to join us fully,’ Josie stipulated. ‘And recognise the rightness of our cause and my position as Leader.’
‘Leader!’ Louise demanded, genuinely shocked.
‘We are storm troopers of sexism,’ Josie said, her breasts and earrings joggling with sincerity. A couple of women behind her nodded emphatically. ‘Storm troopers of sexism! And I am the Mother of the movement.’
Louise stepped back and collided with the television reporter. The woman’s hair was a bright unmoving blond helmet. Her face was a smooth unmarked mask of perfection. ‘Are these your students?’ she asked in a bright professional voice, hitting every word with equal emphasis. ‘Did you order this action?’
‘No!’ Louise exclaimed irritably. ‘I was vice-chairperson to a committee now disbanded from which this group split. They believe in direct action and we believe in persuasion. They believe in creative anarchy and we believe in consensus.’
‘Yeah! Louise is right!’ Josie agreed from on high. She nodded vigorously. ‘Tell her all about it, Louise. Tell her about the creative anarchy and the direct action and don’t forget I’m Leader.’
The large black eye of the camera turned balefully on Louise. She heard herself stammering, excusing, trying to explain. Showers of burning pin ups scattered around them, causing the cameraman to curse softly about light levels but making the reporter look as if she were bravely transmitting from the front line of a battle zone. She wished with all her heart that she had worn khaki this morning rather than peach.
Suddenly a roar went up from the crowd of students. A small SE 434 computer was held high from an open window by a rather beautiful bare-breasted girl. It was not a particularly valuable piece of machinery but it was the most modern and the most efficient the department possessed. Most important of all, it held on hard disc the most exquisite Mickey Mouse program that anyone had ever seen.
Every computer department staffed principally by men and attended principally by male students knows about the Mickey Mouse program. As a secret initiation rite every competent student working on computer programming learns how to programme the computer to print out – in dots, dashes, percentage symbols and colons – the large black ears, the surprised eyes, the cute button nose, and then the whole cartoon body of Mickey. Why this should hold such a peculiar fascination for otherwise grown men is a mystery which only they could explain – if they had the analytical and linguistic skills which, demonstrably, they lack.
Every student in the department had spent hours with the SE 434 adding new and more exquisite detail: a little light-sparkle in Mickey’s eyes, a flower in his gloved hand, a fluffy cloud behind his head. Thus, when they saw their colleague, their playmate, their toy, the SE 434 held aloft by some naked bimbo, a groan of deep dismay went up from the crowd.
They had watched their pin-up posters burn without regret, they had heard the sounds of breaking equipment, they had seen their files torn and scattered to the four winds, but the threat to the SE 434 and the Mickey Mouse programme was more than anyone could bear.
In a single concerted rush they dashed for the door, displacing in the first thrust Mr William Collins the porter, and then flinging themselves against the double doors which were anchored by the filing cabinets.
The women at the windows shrieked like banshees. The SE 434 was hastily put to one side and the women fled down the stairs to the front doors to defend the portals. It was obvious that the barricades would not hold. The doors were creaking and groaning, but under the battering of nearly a hundred determined men, they were slowly but surely shunting the filing cabinets to one side.
‘Regroup! Regroup!’ Josie screamed. ‘Upstairs and barricade ourselves in the office!’
She was hardly heard above the shrill shrieks. The doors burst open but already the quicker women had the back doors unlocked and were running over the smooth lawns towards the car parks. With a hulloa! like foxhunters the Science and Industry students were after them.
It was a new experience for them all. Many of the women had never in their lives been actively pursued by a single man, let alone one hundred of them, and though they screamed in terror there was a girlish delight in the way they twinkled across the grass, out of reach, but never too quick. As for the young men, they had no idea what they were chasing the girls for; most of them had never even seen a live naked woman before this morning and would certainly not have known what to do if they had been so unfortunate as to actually catch one. But it was irrelevant.
They were responding to the old call from their childhood when the shout had gone up in the playground: ‘Catch the girls!’ They were responding to the old archaic stirring when the cry had gone up on the plains ‘Urrrjhj wooooohm!’ which meant, ‘there are women and there is a farmstead wher
e they have invented agriculture, pottery, weaving, the wheel and cooking, while all we can do is rush round and kill things. Let’s go down there and bash it up.’ With primal roars of joy the Science and Industry students chased the half-naked women, just quick enough to make them run, but not quick enough to catch them, while the women ran as fast as they possibly could – without courting the danger of actual escape. They screamed as they ran, high banshee-like wails. ‘The engineers!’ they cried. ‘The scientists!’
It was like a passionate re-enactment of the arrival of technology among a group of Luddite spinsters. Impossible to say how long this mythological progress would have lasted had not a more imaginative young man suddenly shouted, ‘Duck them! Duck them in the ponds!’
Responding at once to advice as to what to do with these elusive creatures, the men suddenly speeded up. The girls shrieked as they ran but they let themselves be caught. All of them, the fat ones and the thin ones, the pretty ones and the plain ones, those of every sort of sexual orientation and the simple virgins, were caught by the enraged Science and Industry students and thrust gently into the ornamental lily ponds which punctuate the smooth lawns of Suffix University.
Many of the women clung to their captors as they went in, and the men were dunked too. Almost all the men leaped in anyway from sheer joie de vivre, and also because a surprising number of couples had turned to each other in the slimy waters and were passionately kissing. Young men who had never before been close to a woman other than their Mum suddenly found themselves entwined with warm, sweaty, duckweedy women whose faces were flushed, whose mouths were warm and soft, and whose expressions were undeniably willing. And the women of the short-lived Creative Anarchy Group for Equality, fired by the success of direct action, warmed by a brisk run, aroused by pursuing men and the sound of their own screams, put their hands out under the discreet camouflage of the green water and got a good grip on the traditional powerful symbol of patriarchy and found it was, as it should be, obedient to their slightest touch.
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