A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy

by Charlotte Greig

  On the way up to Cassie's room, I stopped at the European Common Room to look in my pigeonhole. Thankfully, there was no one there I knew. I picked up some reading lists for the holidays, and a few Christmas cards that other students had sent me, the straight ones on the course who still hadn't realized that you didn't do things like that at Sussex. Most of the mail was internal, but there was also a letter addressed to me care of the university. With a shock, I recognized Jason's writing on it. I wanted to tear it open and read it right then and there, but instead I picked it up with my other papers and walked quickly down the corridor to the loo. Then I locked myself in, sat down on the seat, and opened it.

  Dear Susanna, it began.

  Not darling, or Susie. And he'd spelt my name wrong, as he always did.

  I hope you are well.

  I knew Jason wasn't much of a writer, but this was pathetic.

  I'm sorry about what happened. Can we meet up and talk? I miss you.

  So he really was sorry. He wanted me back.

  XXX Love Jason.

  P.S. I still want to marry you if the baby is mine.

  When I read the postscript, I couldn't help bursting out laughing. As I did, tears began to prick my eyes, but I didn't cry. What a bloody idiot Jason was. Why had I ever taken him seriously? He might have been ten years older than me, but he had the mentality of a child. It would be useless trying to explain to him that if you loved someone, you didn't carry on like this: you took on their problems, their life, their mistakes, lock, stock and barrel. Fair enough, I'd been unfaithful, I'd hurt him. But if it was really me he wanted, he'd meet me on my own terms, and we'd talk the whole thing through. As it was, all he could do was to make another of his dramatic, childish gestures that ignored everything and everybody except his own needs.

  I heard someone come into the toilets, so I put the letter in the bin for sanitary towels next to the loo, pulled the chain, unlocked the door, and walked out to wash my hands. As I did, I looked at my face in the mirror. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed to have got rounder. My cheeks seemed to have puffed out, and the flesh around my chin and on my neck was plumper than usual. I looked younger somehow.

  Six weeks pregnant, and already it was showing, even on my face. I had to get this abortion over and done with as soon as possible.

  That afternoon, I rang one of the numbers on the information booklet Doctor Morgan had given me. I gave the receptionist my details and told her that I wanted to book an appointment for an abortion as soon as possible after Christmas. I had to speak quietly because I was ringing from a phone box on campus. The receptionist told me that there was nothing available in the week between Christmas and New Year because that was a very busy time at the clinic. She sounded disapproving every time I said “abortion” and corrected it to “termination,” so in the end I followed suit, even though the word sounded euphemistic and petty bourgeois to me. She said she couldn't fit me in until two weeks after, so in the end I rang another clinic, and another, but they were all full. Apparently, I'd picked a bad time, as most of the clinics were booked out over the Christmas holiday with Catholics coming in from Ireland. Finally, I found a clinic that could take me, so I put my name down and agreed to post them the fee in advance, which was seventy pounds, payable by check. The money had to be cleared by the time I came in for my examination, and after that I'd have the operation under general anesthetic and stay overnight in the clinic.

  I hadn't realized I'd have to get hold of the money so quickly, or that it would be so much. But I knew immediately what to do. I had a savings account at the bank with a hundred pounds in it, which my father had set up for me when I'd first gone to university. I'd managed to keep it all this time. Even when I'd been completely broke, I hadn't touched it, but now I needed it. It wasn't exactly what he'd envisaged the money would be spent on, I knew, but this was an emergency. I didn't feel guilty, just relieved that I wouldn't have to phone my mother and lie about why I needed seventy pounds all of a sudden.

  Once I'd made the calls, I went straight down to my bank on campus and moved the money over into my current account. Then I wrote a check and posted it off to the clinic, which was called “The Arbours” and was in a part of town up by Preston Park full of neat, low-rise blocks of flats and retirement homes. After that, I phoned Cassie to tell her what I'd done, and asked her to pass the message on to Fiona. Cassie sounded bewildered and upset, and asked me if I wanted to come over, but I said I was leaving the next day and had to pack. Then she said that Fiona was with her and wanted to talk to me, so she put her on the line.

  “When's the date fixed for?” said Fiona, who had obviously been listening to the conversation.

  “Hi,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” she carried on, ignoring my attempt at a normal conversation.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but it'll be in the holidays before you come back. Anyway, I don't know if you're allowed.”

  “Of course I'm allowed. Remember, Susannah, you're calling the shots here. You're paying. You can do whatever you want. I'll come back early and take you in if you like.”

  “There's no need.” I really didn't want Fiona breathing down my neck and bossing me around while I was having an abortion. “But thanks anyway.”

  Once I'd declined her offer, I wondered if I'd made a mistake. Fiona could be a pain in the arse, but I knew she'd stand up for me if anything went wrong. And I had to admit that, if I thought about it too closely, the prospect of the operation frightened me quite a bit.

  “Is this a reputable clinic that you've booked yourself into?” asked Fiona.

  “Well, it was on the list that the health center doctor gave me,” I said.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I suppose that's all right. You'd better let the doctor there know where you're going, though.”

  I hadn't thought of that. “OK.”

  “And if you change your mind, phone me at my parents',” she said, giving me the number. “I'll come straight down.”

  “Thanks, Fiona.” I was touched by her kindness.

  “And don't worry, you're doing the right thing. You know that, don't you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You're taking control of your life.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Then I asked to be put back on to Cassie to say good-bye before the conversation went any further.

  On my way back through campus, I passed by the health center and gave the receptionist a note for Doctor Morgan, with the name and address of the clinic on it, and the date of my operation. Then I headed up to my room to pack. I didn't have much to take, as I was only going to be at home for a week. I'd have to think up an excuse for my mother as to why I had to come back so soon, but that wouldn't be difficult. I could say that I had some studying to do. She'd be happy with that.

  While I was packing, Clare stopped by to see me. I asked her what she was doing for Christmas, and she told me she was going to stay with her aunt, who lived in a flat in Bournemouth, and that she'd be coming back to campus before term started as it was always so boring there. I had a sudden urge to ask her to come home and spend Christmas with me, but then I pictured my mother trying to make polite conversation through a fog of tranquilizers, and I thought better of it. I told Clare that I'd be coming back before term started as well. She seemed surprised, but pleased that I'd be around. I was pleased she'd be around too, but I didn't tell her why.

  By the time I went to bed, the room was neat and tidy, and my suitcase was packed. Before I turned off the light, I looked around, wondering if there was anything else I still had to do. I knew you were supposed to clear all your stuff away in the holidays, so that the cleaners could come in, so I'd put all my books and files away in the cupboard, and left some clothes in there too, carefully folded beside the sheets and towels. I'd done a good job. Apart from the suitcase on the floor and my toothbrush and toothpaste in a mug by the sink, there was nothing in the room to show that I'd ever been
there.

  I turned off the light and listened for the owl I'd heard outside the window the first night I'd been here. For a long time there was nothing, and then, in the distance, came its cry. First a short wail, and then a long hoot, like an eerie laugh. It was too far away this time for me to hear its prey squeak. I was glad of that. I was about to run my hands over my belly to see if it was any more swollen, but something stopped me. I closed my eyes and began to fall asleep, wishing I could hear the sea and feel the sting of salt in my nose, as I had just a few nights before in Brunswick Square. It seemed a lifetime ago now.

  philosophy 103

  SØREN KIERKEGAARD:

  Fear and Trembling

  chapter 21

  When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, grasshopper, then it will be time for you to leave …

  It was Saturday afternoon and I was watching TV in the student common room at Sussex. David Carradine snatched the pebble and then began his eternal walk into the sunset while an oriental flute played the Kung Fu theme tune. I smiled to myself. Rob had once mentioned to me that he loved this program. I could see why. Corny eastern philosophy and kung fu, spaghetti western style. I wondered if he was watching it now.

  The episode started well, with the pebble and the sunset and the theme tune, but after that there was just a lot of fighting with a fatuous story line hung on. The only saving grace was Carradine, whose expression of sorrowful boredom never altered throughout, even when he was delivering his killer kung fu chop to the many enemies that crossed his path. Carradine was pretty cool, I thought. He was definitely a Knight of Infinite Resignation. He had made the first movement from the world of the finite. But I doubted whether he was a Knight of Faith. If he had been, he wouldn't have come over as so distant and superior.

  Over the Christmas break, I'd started reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and it had blown my mind, even more than Heidegger. In some ways, I wished I hadn't. It was too close to the bone. It was all about the biblical story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac to God; about what it means to kill your own child; about how you can justify that to yourself or anyone else. I kept thinking, this guy's a Christian, and I'm not: this doesn't apply to me. But I knew it did, because Kierkegaard's God wasn't a father who told you what to do; his God was a conscience that tormented you day and night until you were forced to choose your fate for yourself.

  While I'd been at home, I'd tried not to think too much about the abortion. It was all fixed up, and there was no point in dwelling on it. It hadn't been all that hard to put it out of my mind, because going back to Swansea was like going back in time, to when I was a child in my parents' house. My room was much the same as when I'd left it, even though now it had the feel of a spare room, like a lot of the rooms in the house did since my father's death. In the runup to Christmas, I'd gone shopping and seen some of my old schoolfriends, who were mostly working by now. Only one of them, Eleri, was at college like me, training to be a librarian. We'd gone out for coffee as we usually did in the holidays, to catch up on each other's news. We'd been close when we were at school, and I'd thought I might tell her about the abortion, but when she sat down and announced that she'd got engaged to someone she'd met on her course, I couldn't face raising the subject, so I'd just made small talk instead, trying to ignore the fact that she looked hurt by my polite answers to her questions about what was going on in my life.

  On Christmas Day I'd gone to chapel with my mother in the morning, and then to Auntie Luned and Uncle Ifan's for lunch. They were my father's brother and sister who lived together, both strict teetotalers and chapelgoers. Meals at their house took about twenty minutes maximum. In the old days, when my father was around, we'd have had lunch at home and invited them over, and there would have been wine with the meal, because Dad had been interested in wine and had a collection of French wines in the cellar. We'd have taken our time over eating, and Luned and Ifan would have pretended not to notice the booze but stayed anyway and enjoyed themselves. Nowadays, with my father gone, my mother never entertained anymore. There was still wine in the cellar, but nobody drank it. After lunch, we'd watched the Queen's speech on TV and then gone home and watched Morecambe and Wise. Mam had laughed a bit then, and so had I. I'd wondered if she was getting better. On Boxing Day we'd visited more relations, and the next day I'd gone back to Sussex. I'd told her that I had to work on my dissertation. She hadn't seemed too upset. She was still in her own world, after all this time.

  As the Kung Fu credits went up on the screen and the flute played the program out, I got up to go. Nobody else moved. There were a lot of chairs in the room, but only a few students, slumped about in corners, each one far away from the others. They looked as though they were there for the duration, and would watch whatever came on next, until the little dot showed and the bleep sounded. Before the Christmas break, I'd never have come in here, even if I'd been bored out of my mind. I'd have stayed in my room and read. But now, Kierkegaard had driven me down here. By coming in here this afternoon, I'd finally surrendered and joined the ranks of institutionalized student inmates, but I wasn't planning to stay long.

  As I climbed the stairs back up to my room on the second floor, I noticed that my body felt sluggish and I was panting a little. The thought crossed my mind that there were only a few days to go until my operation. As I reached the top step, I stopped to catch my breath, feeling slightly dizzy. At that moment, I realized that there was nothing else for it now: I was going to have to put my mind to the question of whether to have an abortion or not. Granted, it was all fixed up, and I wasn't about to cancel my appointment. But it wasn't a foregone conclusion, much as I wanted to make it so. It was something I had to think about carefully. Something I had to agonize about, probably. A torment. A test of faith. Kierkegaard had won, the bastard.

  There wasn't much time. I had three days, not counting the rest of today, to make up my mind. Three days, like Abraham's journey to the mountains of Moriah.

  On the way to my room, I knocked on Clare's door to see if she was back from her aunt's yet. She was, and she seemed pleased to see me, inviting me in. She'd been listening to Emperor Rosko on Radio Luxembourg and working at her desk, but now she went over and sat on the bed, offering me the chair. The bed was covered in a brightly colored African textile, and there were matching cushions on it. Above it, on the plain white wall, she'd fixed a couple of carved wooden masks that looked slightly menacing. They kept catching my eye as she talked to me, and I wished I was sitting on the bed instead of her so that I couldn't see them.

  We talked about the Christmas break. Hers seemed to have been as boring as mine. I asked her what she'd been doing since she got back and she came over to the desk and showed me the application she'd been making. It was to help out at a project for orphan elephants in Kenya over the summer. Their mothers had been killed by ivory hunters, she said.

  Orphan elephant babies, I thought. First Fear and Trembling, and now this. It seemed that everything was conspiring to remind me of my pregnancy, of the fact that I was planning to have an abortion in a few days' time without really having thought about what I was doing. I hoped Clare would change the subject, but she was in full flow now. She started talking about how hard it was for humans to imitate the elephant mothers, and how labor-intensive it was to replicate the herd's way of raising the babies, showing me pictures of Africans playing with them and trying to feed them with bottles. Few of the orphans survived, she said, but the more research that was done on elephant behavior, the better the prospects of saving their lives.

  “If I'm lucky I'll be assigned an orphan to look after,” she said. “I'll have to sleep next to it at night to feed it and keep it warm, and stay close to it all day, sheltering it from the sun the way its mother would have done.”

  I said nothing.

  “… It's pretty hard work,” she went on. “I'll have to play with the other babies as well. The research shows that it's not healthy for a baby elephant to get too attached to its mo
ther. In the wild, other adult elephants would play with it and help to bring it up. It would be cherished by the entire herd.”

  A lump came to my throat. “Oh really?” I said.

  “Yes. Elephant society is matriarchal, you know. There's a female elephant in charge of a close-knit family herd. She knows where to find food and water, and how to protect the herd from danger. When the mothers in the herd give birth, she or one of the other older female elephants acts as a midwife. It's amazing, isn't it?”

  Clare looked up at me, smiling.

  “Yeah, great.” I swallowed, trying to get rid of the lump.

  Clare turned away, embarrassed. “Sorry, I tend to get carried away about umm …”

  I waited.

  “Umm …”

  I knew what she wanted to say, but I didn't want to supply the word for her.

  “Umm e …”

  She'd have to get it out on her own.

  “Elephants.”

  Now that she'd started stuttering again, I realized that she hadn't done it once up until now. It was obviously being made to feel that no one was listening that set her off.

  “No, it's really interesting,” I said. It was. In fact, I envied her. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted to do in life, and was setting about doing it, unlike me. “It's just that I'm a bit freaked out at the moment …”

  Emperor Rosko was babbling away in the background so I went over and turned him off. Then I told Clare I was pregnant, and that I'd fixed up an abortion in three days' time, but that I was now having second thoughts about it. I wondered how someone who was going to devote her life to orphaned animals would take the idea of a woman purposely aborting a baby, but Clare was pretty matter-of-fact about it. I suppose it came from being a zoologist.