It felt like some place from the GDR, some place with garish wallpaper and large square rooms, a small stage and hellish white lights. Under them everything looked plastic and poor, everyone spoke rough and everyone, you thought, looked like a smoker. You thought of old cheap films and bad music, you thought of nothing happening but boredom and apathetic, fruitless complaining. A man walked past, and from behind he seemed something, like he might belong to the real world. You saw yourself sitting there flowering in some flowery dress, lips outlined and a glass of wine between your fingers. He was tall and slim and he walked, from behind, in a way which you found interesting. He didn’t drag himself across the room like everyone else, nor did he swagger; you couldn’t stand that masculine pushing forward. The ego that spilled out from some of those walks. Jesus. You thought maybe he would sit down at the next table and pick up his drink, he would catch your flowers from the very corners of his eyes and he would pause, maybe, for a second before he drank. You thought, watching that grey t-shirt moving through the crowd of small skirts and too much skin, that you would be quite happy for him never to have a face or a voice or interests or friends, or a small brick terraced in a small grey street, if only he would pause before he drank. But then he turned round and you saw his face, his very solid face, and a nose not at all generic and anonymously male, and you heard his brash nothern words, and thought, oh well, life is not a film and nobody really pauses before they drink like that.
Back home. Have been surprisingly productive, editing the novel manuscript and my father’s Nietzche commentary. The first is awful beyond words, and painstakingly slow, every highlighted terrible phrase and accompanying suggestion a frustrating drop of tiny tiny improvement in a sea of bad words badly put together. And the second is mostly over my head, but pleasantly mechanical, the act of reading but not absorbing. Read Heart of Darkness for the dissertation, underlining things so exuberantly that Len, his giant headphones swamping his small head made all the smaller by his tiny haircut, looked over in a concerned sort of way.
He asked suddenly whether it was bad that he’d told his French teacher to ‘visite ma tante’. Because, he said proudly, he sent me out. He did the washing up standing with his legs comically splayed, his tiptoes avoiding the little flood he swept over the stainless steal edge of the sink every time he dropped in a new plate. He closed his eyes with distaste as he scrubbed at the pasta burnt to the bottom of the pan. ‘I can’t believe,’ he said, ‘I once said I wanted to be a girl so I could do the washing up.’ And have long hair, he said when he was five, to keep his ears warm. I’m sure he has forgotten too that his favourite colours were once pink and purple, that he cried at a labrador with a stick, that he made a habit out of falling out of bed, that he wore mine and Chrissie’s hand-me-down cardigans to school.
The boy is floating miserably about London, at a loose end with no money and the prospect of next term already looming threateningly. No-one likes this dispersal of people to various corners of the country, and being home the walls press in, especially if the lodger’s round, forbidding wife materialises demanding pernot and lemonade and speaking down her nose. And sleeping in till 2pm is the worst feeling, knowing in an hour it will be dark and the day over again.
But here things are surprisingly peaceful and the walls not too close, especially with everyone but me and my father going away to Germany next week. We will put up the Christmas tree and go to Wales for a few days, and I will visit J in Liverpool, not a nightime visit this time, and no sleeping under kitchen tables, but a day trip, with coffee and catch-up and maybe the Tate and shopping. I haven’t seen her since summer, before I went to India, and she stood on my doorstep with the deceiving angel-faced A, who made an unexpected return. She will talk just as much as ever, and she will be a little thinner, her hair a little crazier.
O sits next to me for a while in the cold. I can hear his teeth chattering. He asks about unreciprocated love, unrequited, he says, slurring. Tell me about it. I think about it. As I’m thinking he describes his own unrequited love. Fuck, he says. Fuck, I say, and we stare into the black hedge together. Have you told her? I ask. He has explained things so cryptically, so carefully, that for the life of me I can’t figure out who he means. Who is O in love with? I rack my brains for a while, and then realise I have spoken to him all of six times, and never for longer than three minutes. Last time he said, ‘kill me now’ on the way to the library, and I grimaced, and we formulated a plan for if everything that day went terribly wrong. Yes, he says. Then no. And finally, kind of. What do you think? he asks. I really can’t say, so we stare into the hedge some more, and smoke into the dark. I want to tell him everything I haven’t told anyone, because he is there and drunk and not looking at me. I tell him that when he is ninety it will seem exciting, and being happy a desert of boring. Fuck, he says again, and smiles. He asks about me. You’re lucky, he says, and, but of course you have doubts. Fuck, he says, it’s cold, let’s go back. Fuck me. Which is not an invitation.
Later a kiss on the forehead, a race for the door, two cigarettes staring at the stars with S. We establish Chris Martin lied; they are not yellow.
I must pretend to be surprised, I must store my breath up all day and let it out in one big swoosh of shock. I should practise the arrangement of my face before I leave, I should practise it in bed and in the shower and whilst brushing my teeth. I will say ohygodohmygodhowwonderfuliamsosurprised, squeal and bounce on the balls of my toes.
two magpies
Today I stood on the very tip of my toes and waited for the Queen, waited and waited, not entirely voluntarily. ‘Come on,’ said H as we peered fruitlessly between and over and around the shoulders of taller people, little children grabbing at our coats. ‘We’re here now, right?’ Flourescent yellow policemen stood avoiding eye-contact on the barricaded road. ‘She’s having lunch at King’s now,’ said a waiting teenager to his friends. ‘Quail,’ H nodded gravely as we sat in the Copper Kettle with our panninis and one eye on the gates of King’s College. ‘Seven courses.’ The Queen’s flag flattered from a gleaming black car. It reminded me of Mrs Dalloway. Its blinds drawn and its air of inscrutable reserve. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Only no horses and no omnibuses and no parasols.
We waited some more. At the gate of the registry building stood officious men and women, a pink shirt, a clipboard, a medal, a strange squashed hat. The woman in the hat glanced at her watch. The Queen was five minutes late. My calves burnt and my toes went numb. ‘Oooooooohhhhhh’, said the crowd with one breath. H and I craned our necks to no avail. People held up camera phones and shuffled closer and closer, crammed their heads together and filled every little space with shoulders and hair. And then everyone shoved and elbowed and snapped photos. ‘It’s okay,’ said the tall woman blocking our view, ‘she is wearing very bright colours.’
‘She’s there!’ I assume the woman in the strange squashed hat is shaking her hand or courtseying. Perhaps the Queen is waving. Did she wave? ’She’s walking down the carpet!’ I can no longer feel my legs. ‘She’s having her photo taken!’ And then for three seconds she appears, just before vanishing again into a marquis. She wore orange, she was stooped and small and clinging from the arm of Prince Phillip.
‘Right,’ said the crowd, and turned its back as one. The boys jumped back on their bikes and that was it.
on having NO LIFE
R’s lover-man failed to materialise. ‘I am not,’ he said apparently, enigmatically, ‘unattached.’
‘Emma is better than sex, anyway,’ she says. We watch about ten times the part where the farmer’s crotch advances from across the fields towards the camera very slowly. Tonight she is cycling to a house party two miles away wearing pink and blue and yellow shoes two sizes too big for her. ‘I am keeping them on,’ she emphasises, ‘it’s hard to be irresponsible wearing massively colourful shoes.’ She eats black-pudding and lends me her tweezers and a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album.
Tonight I will, between reading Morte d’Arthur and Oscar Wilde, be plucking my eyebrows. Tragically by Monday afternoon I will not have left college for three days, only having performed sporadic expeditions between room and bar to buy milk. I envisage an eyebrowless hysterical future-me. Possibly hairless also. The dissertation plan and the writing the unconscious essay – which supplanted the five hours of quasi-obligatory college-wide drinking and make-up and drinking and dancing and drinking and drinking and crying and puking - mysteriously were no longer on the laptop this morning. Much hair-tearing out and gnashing of teeth ensued. (They lurked undetected for a good half hour amongst the fletsam and jetsam of my computer memory.)
An Education never really did answer Lyn Barber’s (very relevant) ‘what is the point?’ question. It is definitely not to equip us with the frankly unenviable non-ability to supress the 3rd person middle english commentary I have going on - he[o] rente oute hir lokkes, fore sytthen thre dayes hence, the faire damesel hath toke hireself beyaunde hire chambre bot ones to purchasith oon pinte of milke.
Joshy comes round for a while and we watch The Thick Of It and contemplate buying tiny tiny £700 pigs. Which is lovely. I can tell that he too is suffering, when he sticks his forefinger into a little alpacca finger puppet with very red thread lips and has a five minute conversation with it about the stasis of his dissertation. He at least has the excuse of being a third year.
oh no
The winter blues have kicked in early this year. I need to sort my life out. Spent Halloween evening drunkenly sobbing on other drunk people. S says, I thought you wouldn’t stop, it was terrifying. We paced the marshy freezing field an sat on the Bench of Post-Pav Pain and Sorrow. I don’t remember exactly what I said to J, but I know that he would never ever bare his soul in such a manner. And this is the nth time I have sobbed into his shoulder. What did you cry about? asked H, who wasn’t there. I rack my brains and remember only things I would never in a million sober years tell anyone. H says it is probably like dreams, things that my subconscious wants rid of. (We have all been reading too much Freud.)
Saturday morning I woke up and wished I hadn’t. I still would quite like to find a hole to sink into for a while. My mother says it is most definitely genetic and that she did this frequently. ‘But life is on the whole magnificent!’ she chirps.
After we’ve sat for ten minutes pointedly not looking at each other, the boy tells me I must decide whether or not I make him happy. Oh no 
Again yellow trees, a tangle of autumnal branches and leaves netting the window. At the pit of my stomach there is something scrabbling and squirming which does not go away when I close my eyes. I close them anyway and wonder what if what if what if, and breathe slowly and sleepily pretending superbly and not fooling myself, cocooned and wonderful and going nowhere, like sitting on the train. Later I’m in a cafe waiting for a supervision on a mediocre essay, and still the scrabbling crazy butterflies. Did I ever make your heart race? I remember a kiss and shaking legs. (Under three duvets day-dreaming with my sleepy in-and-out breathing roaring like the sea in my ears, I shiver uncontrollably.) As they scrabble and I think of this racing I come across the cat woman, now catlesss. I express my commiseration and her face crumples for the briefest of seconds. She points wordlessly at the cat tag on a silver chain around her neck. It happened in the basket, she says, and, in June, it was hard. I remember the dreams I had when Fritz ran away with Olive and never came back, waking up with my face pressed into a wet pillow over a cat with tattered ears, one snaggle tooth and almond eyes, a thing for cheese and a penchant for falling off furniture. In the supervision I don’t find the right words, but it doesn’t matter much because I mention desperately author anonimity and my lovely supervisor talks about Foucault until my time is up. Tonight is a play about robots and a tumbledry-warm laundry smell.
Do you remember the time we dragged our drunk friend back to her room together, a dead weight on my shoulder when she fell asleep standing up? And how you began to tell me something meaningful as I sat on the edge of the bathtub and scraped back her hair as you leant against the doorframe, brought to a stop for once by your slow and wrong words, and a knock on the door? Probably not, but last night I remembered again and wondered what you might have said.
