She thought. ‘The computer house.’
The computer house was a glass building attached to the library and, in the last year, it had become a symbol to Natasha of the college regime. The structure was a mystery to her. Most days, out of curiosity, she ventured up and peered inside at the productive people busying themselves around the printing station. Often she imagined herself walking into the computer house, opening a document, putting words on that document, deliberate, incisive words about the subject she was studying. Then, standing at the printing station, with complete attentiveness, waiting for her document. With the best of intentions, she stood outside and thought about going inside. Usually, she was running away before she even noticed she was running away. Her fear wasn’t fully irrational. The last time she had been inside, in late November, she had received an email from an account she didn’t recognise, describing scenes from her life. They were written like the darkest play – her uninspiring daily routine, her arguments with her boyfriend, one scene delivered in unfathomable poetic language – all ripped directly from her life. She hadn’t checked her emails since.
‘I don’t think the computer house has done anything to you, Natasha.’
‘I think I’m being watched.’
Professor Carr leaned forward on the desk, as if preparing to deliver a sermon. ‘Every woman in this country is being watched.’
‘But I specifically feel like I’m being watched.’
They sat in silence.
‘I hear the unemployment building is a lot like hell,’ Natasha said, after a while.
‘You should be grateful that you’re young.’
‘I want youth to be over. I don’t like it.’ She thought of the hours she spent on the stone bench waiting for youth to pass. She often sat for so long, morning to evening, that she heard the six o’clock bell signalling religion. She knew time moved strangely inside the gated community. She was largely indifferent to her fellow students with their loud typing on computers, and the ideas they communicated to each other in trembling voices. They all seemed to follow a strict code and, in the college coffee shop, they outlined their secret philosophies passionately, huddled beneath heavy cardigans. ‘What are you all talking about?’ Natasha wanted to scream. Ideas, ideas, ideas. She had no time for ideas. She wasn’t raised with ideas.
‘I don’t like it,’ Natasha repeated.
‘Natasha, we only have a few months. Let me help you.’
‘But my disorder,’ she said, weakly.
When Professor Carr discovered what a philistine Natasha actually was, he dedicated himself to her general cultural education. He instructed her to come up to his office three times a week. As he listed out books to her, Natasha counted the hairs on the backs of his hands. There were six longer hairs and three shorter ones. Had she read the Americans – Bellow, Roth, Auster? How was her philosophy – Toussaint, Nietzsche, Baudrillard? Had she seen That Obscure Object of Desire? Had she seen Vertigo?
He screened films for her as she lay on the carpeted floor of his office. She positioned her body so he could see down her top. She felt as if she were slowly seducing a priest through a confessional grille. She watched the lint from the carpet rise and fall. Soft carpet was still new to her.
‘Do you understand it’s about the danger of possession and the futility of desire?’ he asked.
She looked at him sadly. ‘All the money he spent on that suit. What a waste.’
Natasha felt altruistic during these trips, like she was throwing pieces of bread to a starving duck. The professor acted innocent, like nothing had happened with a student before, but Natasha wasn’t sure. She felt like he might have gotten away with a lot in his office simply because of the size and shape of it. Despite her doubts, when she first touched him, on her sixth appearance, she giggled – playing the virgin – and he blushed right down to the back of his hands.
*
When Natasha first entered college, at eighteen, a boy called Patrick, stick-thin, raised Catholic, had attached himself to her. He was her first boyfriend. They were a good pairing because she was a strange person pretending to be a normal person, and he was a normal, well-raised person desperately pretending to be strange. She knew when they left college he would get a job in a bank, develop financial ideas. He was the sole link to a life Natasha felt she could never fully be part of. Already she suspected love was over for her. How could you make another person happy? How could they make you happy?
During the day, she wandered the campus with Patrick – avoiding her classes, the buildings looming over them, the city, outside the walls, doing whatever it did in its daylight hours – and he filled her in on the comings and goings of the place. She worried, despite all preventative measures being taken, self-control barriers being rightfully installed, her daily exercise regime producing slick, metallic sweat, that she had inherited her mother’s weak and crazy personality. Her mind felt like a long trailer carrying a number of cars; if one car went they would all go, scatter across the motorway, cause carnage. She would miss her sanity when it went.
She wanted to spend her weekends like the other students, underground, undernourished, blacking out, being infinitely surprised by her own youth and beauty, but she didn’t allow herself. In her entire college career, she hadn’t had one bit of fun and was immensely proud of this fact. Fun was forbidden to her. She might enjoy it too much and slip into the endless pursuit of it. At least she was charming, she assured herself. But charm was thin compensation for a life of constant, lurking terror.
Her relationship with Patrick had become queasier and queasier. In September she had fallen pregnant and she’d asked him to steal money from his parents to pay for the abortion.
‘Steal money from your father,’ he said. ‘I’m not a thief.’
‘Why are you this way, Patrick?’ she asked, in genuine bafflement.
The night before she travelled, Patrick, counting out the cash, looked like he might cry. ‘It’s okay if you want to cry,’ he said to Natasha.
‘I don’t,’ she replied. ‘I’m not sure if you know this but I had a very tough childhood and have had to overcome obstacles far greater than this to seal my place in the elite college.’
‘You don’t go to any of your classes.’
‘I have a disorder,’ she said. ‘Anyway you’re only upset because you think you’re supposed to be. You don’t care about me.’
He didn’t correct her. It was as if he couldn’t procure an abortion and lie in the same week. It would have to be one or the other. In the clinic she sat in the waiting room, trying to figure out how she was supposed to feel, wondering who to blame, nurturing her anger. It all happened in a flash. Although she was alone, she didn’t feel alone, she felt like a part of a large pantomime dragon made up of other women, a long line of them, moving and swaying invisibly through the city. When she returned, she and Patrick stayed together. It was around then she stopped attending college full-time and starting using the cotton wool more liberally.
At the weekends, when Patrick went out to clubs, she stayed in his family home and cooked him hearty lasagnes. She bought a special apron. She wanted to look proper, like a girl who would never steal, never have an abortion. The apron was a plastic material; every stain wiped right off. She bought it in the luxury department store. On Saturday nights she watched television in the good living room with his parents, who loved her like an orphan.
Patrick arrived home on the edge of Sunday evenings, looking strange, dirty, with that shame he carried in his shoulders whenever he had been cheating on her. Whoever he had been sleeping with, Natasha still got an almighty thrill watching him eat those lasagnes. As she layered the ingredients the red of the mince reminded her of her father’s bloody mouth, huge and open, at their kitchen table. To calm herself, she often locked herself in the bathroom and counted the perfumes, emerging extremely fragrant. She didn’t eat any of the lasagnes and if Patrick started telling her about the fun he had at the clubs – what a glo
rious good time it all was – she just stood up and left the room. Afterwards, they had sex tentatively, lightly, as if neither of them wanted to be involved any more. On one of their last weekends together, Patrick, a psychology student, said that God had appeared to him in a dream and told him the only real addiction Natasha had inherited from her mother was her addiction to pain.
‘Maybe God should have diagnosed me before you got me pregnant,’ she said.
Finally, in the college coffee shop, their relationship was coming to a close. She slid a cold lasagne across the table as a symbol of their time together.
‘I don’t like you anymore,’ she announced.
‘You don’t like anything, Natasha.’
It was true. One day, as a challenge, she set herself the task of writing down everything she didn’t like. She filled an entire copybook with her tiny, hateful handwriting. She included the elite college at least forty-five times. She included the concept of fun ten times. She included Patrick eighteen times.
She shrugged. ‘Goodbye, Patrick.’
Patrick tapped his fingers meditatively across his nose, subsuming this rejection into his grand, personal narrative within a few short seconds, and stood up. He didn’t say goodbye. When he was safely out of sight, Natasha took out the ornate cigarette case in which she kept her cotton wool. She had to be careful she didn’t hear any opinions in the coffee shop. She crammed some in her ears and began to cry. Normally, she didn’t understand her fellow students’ need for melancholy, their high emotional register, shrieking music and complete lack of composure like they were auditioning daily for some drama she wanted nothing to do with. She had to keep her emotions quiet and fixed in place or her whole face would break apart. But this was the end of her first romance and she was determined to enjoy it. She wept loudly, not knowing herself if they were fake or real tears; she attracted a lot of attention from nearby tables. Her father’s false teeth appeared to her that night, their cold porcelain chattering in the silver of her dreams. For once she could hear what they said: ‘Natasha, don’t lose your mind.’
*
Natasha’s days passed as a series of empty diary dates, no classes attended and no closer to discovering what she was studying. Inside the campus, the students stripped themselves of their wool jumpers and cardigans, and lay awake at night worrying about their results. Natasha didn’t lie awake at night. She slept heavily and had wild dreams where she was watched by a thousand eyes, chased down corridors. It felt absurd to continue her service in the college.
She was now involved with the professor after a protracted and fraught seduction he had feebly protested. Overall, they didn’t have much to say to each other; they didn’t speak the same language on account of the significant age gap, but it didn’t matter. As they hid in hallways, lay secretly on the carpet in his office, Natasha felt like she was involved in a transaction that was professional and centuries old. It was a history lesson. While Professor Carr tried to educate her she adopted an expression of complete neutrality.
‘Of course, you’ve heard of Ionesco.’
‘You should have seen where I grew up. I was like the roadrunner in that awful cartoon, constantly evading a terrible fate.’
‘It can’t have been that bad, Natasha.’
‘You have no idea.’
When they ventured out together, into the city’s understanding night, to its high-priced bars and restaurants, she couldn’t help but think of the city’s own romantic past – all the liaisons it had hosted without its consent. Going out in the city was exciting for Natasha; she had to be stern with herself, and be extra careful not to have any fun.
‘Do you think other people are having liaisons in the city right now?’ she asked.
They were in a taxi, sitting far apart.
‘I suppose.’
‘Do you think two people having a liaison ever sat in this exact same taxi?’
‘Probably.’
‘The circle of life,’ Natasha said, dreamily.
He agreed but Natasha could see tears forming in the corners of his eyes. Since he met Natasha he was prone to excessive weeping. He wept whenever she mentioned anything contemporary. He wept when she told him she hadn’t accumulated any significant life regrets. He wept when she admitted to some laziness in her academic work. The real issue was Natasha made him feel like a young man and he hadn’t liked being a young man. She enraged him and brought him back to a time when all women were inscrutable. One night he confronted her with her blank academic diary. She watched him waving it in front of her, like evidence of an indiscretion.
‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Why do you have so few time commitments?’
The next day, to appease him, and with a hope of finding out what she was studying, she visited the computer house. It was as bad as she remembered, full of irritating, flickering computers.
There were several emails from her father. He sent her articles about the importance of the college, what it had achieved, dead facts and figures. He also sent her clips from TV sketch shows they had watched together. After her mother left, they had watched comedies, takeaways resting on their laps. Splayed over couches in that sitting-room – their eyes glued on the television set, laughing over the same stupid scenes, sticky food dropping onto the stiff carpet – they had buried her mother, although, somewhere, she was still alive.
If she and her father wanted to express anything, they did it in the ugly, hideous, hilarious language of the shows. He attached a clip of a man screaming down a telephone about a hotel reservation, with the sentence: ‘Natasha, this is funny!’ Natasha wrote back: ‘They don’t like that stuff here,’ because she wanted to tell the truth and also she wanted to hurt him which was, occasionally, the same thing.
As she scrolled through the emails, on the whirring machine next to hers, a small, first year girl moved through photos of another young girl. Through the fast succession of images, Natasha watched as the onscreen girl stood and knelt in different poses. Close-up. Her make-up was slick and robotic, adhering to regulations. Larger view. Full-length shot. Two thumbs hooked under the strings of her vest. Nipples flared towards the camera.
‘Who’s that person?’ Natasha asked, tapping the monitor.
The first year girl focused on her screen as if willing Natasha to disappear. She ran her tongue over her parched lips. ‘Nobody,’ she said, after some consideration. She carefully angled her whole body away.
The last email Natasha opened was a single stage direction: The girl sits alone, waiting, in the clinic.
After much aggravated typing, she located an academic email. She searched for evidence of what she was studying as the hazy sunlight shone on the computer house. She couldn’t organise the words into sentences, she couldn’t read the words, she felt hatred towards the words. All of this transpired within a few short seconds. The hazy light shone on.
*
One night, two months into their rather tedious liaison, while seated in a mid-priced restaurant, the professor told Natasha she reminded him of the music of his era – which he had loved at the time, which he had needed to feel alive at the time – but now whenever he listened back, with intelligence and reason, it was baffling. It was just a lot of empty noise. When he heard that music now, jagged and alienating, he felt one foul swoop of nostalgia before he realised it was all rather silly. He had no idea how he had ever danced to it.
‘You probably just did this,’ she raised her hands in the air and swayed gently.
‘Please put your hands down.’
This was their love. Sadly unrhythmic. Silly.
‘You’re not like the others,’ the professor said, doubtfully.
‘What others?’
Afterwards when they went back to his bachelor apartment, Natasha wanted to watch trash TV. The professor owned a large plasma screen that was perfectly suited to trash viewing. Her incredible self-control didn’t naturally extend to her taste in television. She tried to frame it critically, but it was straight
-up, stick-in-your-teeth trash. Natasha had romance visions like anyone her age. She wasn’t a girl who doodled in her notebook and never had been, but she entertained scenarios. In her fantasies, they watched Breast Implants Gone Wrong with feeling and sincerity. Firstly, they would marvel at how fine and normal the breasts were before they underwent any surgical procedures. As they watched the horror unfold, Natasha would cry knowledgeably over what women do to their bodies. Then she would swan around the room, naked, her unremarkable breasts framed in a newly appreciated light.
She didn’t get this opportunity. Instead they watched a film where time was the enemy and ageing was a singular tragedy: a film about a middle-aged man. Natasha lay face down, her head buried in the bedsheets, her hands locked over her ears, while the film was happening. She had an instinct for self-preservation and she knew if she caught sight of a single scene, even for a second, it would reduce her life span by several years. She understood the professor was watching the film, thinking wistfully of his lost youth, and Natasha’s failings as a student, of which there were several hundred, and her failings as a human being, of which there were also several hundred. As the film neared its climax, he placed the thinner of the two bedsheets over his head and cried, taking in huge gulps of air like an inconsolable ghost.
‘I know you’re crying under there,’ she said.
The sheet sniffled.
‘Did I ever tell you that when my mother left my father he pulled out his front two teeth with a pliers? I didn’t understand it then but I’m starting to now. Love is very hard.’
‘What was your mother like?’
‘She was like me.’
The sheet nodded.
*
As they reached the three-month mark, that milestone creeping up on them both, draining them of all life and hope, the professor’s expression became more resigned, his great height reduced to a stoop, his suits creased and untidy as if he were choosing to get dressed in the dark to avoid his reflection. In the evenings, when he walked towards Natasha, down the more secretive ramps, it wasn’t the walk of a man who has won the sexual jackpot. It was the frozen gait of someone who wanted to ask: ‘Is this still happening to me? Is it?’
Show Them a Good Time Page 6