Life (12 page)

“I had orgasmic fantasies about food,” announced Ramone. “Sausages and chocolate bars, alive and running up for me to eat them.”

Lavinia and Anna glanced at each other: of course Ramone was lying.

“But there was a friend of my Mum and Dad’s. They used to say: he doesn’t mean any harm, keep out of his way. I had fantasies about
him
all right. I used to imagine he’d made me pregnant. He only groped me. I knew that wasn’t enough to do the damage but it didn’t help. It was like I had a big maggot in my belly, wriggling. Yecch. That’s why I’m never going to have children.”

“What if you accidentally got pregnant? Would you have an abortion?”

“No, I wouldn’t do that.” snapped Ramone.

“Huh? But if you hate the idea of—”

“Abortion is a slave’s option.” Ramone scowled. “It’s not an issue because I’m never going to get pregnant. I’m not going to get myself sterilized, I just know it’s never going to happen. But if by any chance it did, I’d stick it out, because I’m important. My potential is important. If women are to be the people, then what they produce—their blood, their babies—has to be
over
-valued. We have to stop apologizing, oh please excuse me, I made a mess, I’ll clear it up. If I were a man I would say my seed is important, and how different that would sound. Bastards.”

“What about you, Anna?” wondered Lavinia. “Would you abort?”

“If I had to,” said Anna—and heard her mother’s voice from those hard early years: clipped, contained, enduring. Anna’s mother: always tired, never exhausted, bearing everything. “But Ramone, what if you had a scan and the baby was hideously deformed?”

“Oh yeah, the be-cruel-to-be-kind argument. I don’t believe it. I don’t even like kids, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t have its little nine months in womb-world. Have the baby, let it be born, and let it die. That’s the answer.”

“Great. Radical feminist aligns with the Christian Right Fundamentalists. Ramone you’d say anything to make yourself sound off-the-wall.”

“I am childless and virginal,” said Lavinia. “Except for the disease. My confessors invite me to confide my sexual fantasies, I have none. Like Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen: I refer my voices and visions to the doctors of my church, the church of mental disease. When they imply that my visions cannot be true visions, since they are not sexual, I don’t argue with them, though they are calling me a charlatan. I never let them tell me that I am crazy when they can’t cope with what I say, sane when they can. That way madness lies.”

So they would sit together, passing the eye of speech from hand to hand like the three Norns in a winter cave; sipping thick cool vegetable juice. Ramone and Lavinia shared Anna’s conversational style—lengthy, perseverant, more like a successive presentation of gifts than the normal undergraduate horse-trading: and Anna had found a niche. If she could have got on better with Charles, she would have been perfectly happy.

In finals term, their lab project (a footnote in the investigation of onion anti-fungal defenses) was still incomplete. As luck would have it, Anna’s share of the work had turned out well. Charles couldn’t get his sequencing right. Anna kept after him—partly because of her insensate, disinterested drive and partly because no matter what anybody said about the minor importance of this thing to their results, she wanted a perfect score. It was like a computer game. Getting through level one without missing a target is not the challenge. It’s the starting point. Her father’s experience went deep in her: telling her that the world is harsh and there are no second chances. Charles sulked. To coax him into compliance she was forced to spend time in his company: go to the bar with him, have coffee with him. She did not like doing this. Charles would try to flirt, by “casual” touches, and by tacking compliments onto the end of his strut-my-stuff: which was ridiculous. You’re a brainless teacher’s pet, I’m the one who’s in charge around here, great tits by the way… A couple of times she politely reminded him that he had a girlfriend. Didn’t work. She grew inured and ignored his advances. Finally, she had the brilliant idea that she would do his sequencing herself. They would write everything up together and present the work jointly. That would be okay. Dr Russell and Guy had already suggested full collaboration as a solution to the problem.

The plan went swimmingly. Everyone in the lab was very busy and used to seeing her around, so she managed to escape specific attention. After a couple of attempts she produced a gel that separated out into recognizable bands, which appeared where they were supposed to be on their mug shot photo. She was so pleased that she actively invited Charles to her flat, gave him copies of all her material, and sent him off to check it over. And that, thank God, should be that.

The world was lost, buried, extinguished under revision. Simon Gough held a Damn the Torpedoes party in his battered roof-top studio: hardly anybody turned up. Daz had been offered a modeling contract, after finals, and was wondering whether to accept. “Shall I do it?” she asked, as they sat on Marnie’s bed one night, allegedly working. “God! Why not! Take the money and run. You’ve all your life to be a software baron.”

“A lawyer,” said Daz, gathering up the pictures of herself. “That’s where I’m heading. Computer science is for background, you need more than one expertise. I want to be in Human Rights law.” It would be a performance, like being the kind of sassy, flirty waitress who attracts big tips. The idea of tumultuous success at something feminine allured her. “I’ll do it. But when
this
is over you have to come to Paris with me first. One last student rave.” She glanced towards a wall of the room. Her ex-boyfriend was on the other side, if he hadn’t gone out. It was over, the flame so dead they could calmly live together (in separate rooms) in the flat they shared with Marnie. The exams were not a problem.
This
meant Rob: a course she had already failed, but she still had to sit the paper.

Ramone was engrossed in a scheme that had nothing to do with her finals. She was devising cultural equations. Anna was right: the numbers were everything. You could regard what went on in the battle of the sexes as a chemical reaction, a fractional distillation, positive feedback, a sixteen-dimensional surface, a normal distribution curve… You could draw it in one of those strange horned crowns invented by the lady with the lamp. You could show why feminism in the classic model was doomed, explain how it came about that the vast majority of women were so stupid and venal, how every wave of “feminism” was doomed to self-destruct, and yet the tide would keep on rising. You could show how a neutral imbalance (e.g., men must compete physically, females need to minimize energy consumption, both for reproductive success: females end up smaller) could get into everything, could lie at the root of a huge pervasive complex structure.
Alas how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much or a kiss too long…
She scribbled fast, dividing her attention between Levi-Strauss’s
Mythologies,
Wentworth D’Arcy Thompson’s
On Growth and Form
(a book Anna had recommended), a primer called
Basic Statistics,
and her trusty Bugs Bunny calculator that she had owned since she was six. She would set up camp on the border, on the actual fault-line of the Great Divide, and wrest her insights from the religion of her times: the feared, denied, adored, all-pervasive bogey—Science.

It was May-time. The beech tree outside her dark window was in leaf, pattering dryad whispers against the glass. Met Anna two years ago—how time flies. Her door was open, allowing her a glimpse down the lighted hallway into the big living room. Seraphina Russell had come to visit. Dr Russell’s son had married a young woman who did not love her mother-in-law and had spent the last years ruthlessly excising the mother from her only child’s life. Seraphina was suffering atrociously. People who hovered on the edge at the soirees often came to Dr Kent like this: late at night, almost in disguise. Lavvy lapped it up. Like Teresa of Avila, called upon by great ladies.

Lavinia was fascinated by female saints. She claimed them all as schizophrenics, the way gays and dykes will try to persuade you any famous person you mention is secretly bent. As far as Ramone could see, what these women had in common was the same as any women struggling to have power in a man’s world. The eating disorders, the mysterious illnesses, the hysteria. If you were Albert Einstein and born female in the fifteenth century, you’d end up in some convent fasting yourself crazy, writing liturgical music, or reforming the Carmelites. Anyone could see that. Who could tell, at this distance, if they were technically bonkers.

It made you wonder about Lavinia herself: did she fall or was she pushed?

Lavvy hated that kind of talk.

She peeked into her periscope view of the consulting room. Lavinia was holding Dr Russell’s hand. (Not good, Lavvy does not touch, that’s Lavvy trying too hard to act normal.) “I believe that the world is a person,” she was saying. “I believe that person cares intimately for me. This is not an act of faith, it is an act of reason: the universe is a complexity, unfinished and pattern-haunted, the mirror of the human mind. Accept that vast complex, problematic selfhood, see it looking back at you, sharing your nature, and you have a refuge that cannot be taken from you… And knowing what we know of ourselves, how can anyone doubt that the God/universe is in pain? I believe that the only possible God,
Who Is What Is,
is dying in agony now, as we speak. In the state of eternity, being is sacrifice. As long as you can escape from the pain-fest of God, escape by any means available. If you cannot, then understand that pain is bliss—”

Ramone recognized cadences from
The Wounded Void,
or maybe
Autotheology.
Lavvy was quoting herself: she did that when she was “tired.” As they called it. The paramedic had better stay awake, on call, tonight. Because of me, she thought, with a flutter of pride in her young blood, Lavvy can live. She can be their showgirl, get the audience reaction she needs, and she can work. She put her equations away, hugged Pele closer, and turned to a different stack of papers. It was four in the morning, a good time for the thin, fine concentration of revision work.

Anna had decided not to hassle Charles. If he didn’t get back to her she would wait until the deadline and submit her own write-up, under both their names, as they’d agreed. A few days before her first exam she walked into Dr Russell’s office to deliver an extended essay and noticed Charles’s name looking up at her from the in-tray. It was the onion embryo project. Good, now she could hand in hers. Something about the first page, picked up in that casual glance, made her take a second look.