Life (5 page)

“Jars of marmalade would make more sense. Whoever invented the screw-top lid made more positive difference to women’s lives than political feminism, if you ask me—”

“Okay, if sex doesn’t come into it, why did you say
women’s
lives—?”

“Children, children…Telephones. The subject was telephones. Ramone’s essay. Could we return to our
moutons?
”

At the end of the session Ramone, bright color in her pasty cheeks, bundled up her belongings into her shoulder bag. She tried to take the essay with them; she was now ashamed of it and miserable. The tutor made her leave it on his desk. His resigned glance at the butter-stained first page cut her to the heart. She stomped out. Lucy and Andrea had departed to some girly lunch-date, but the appalling Martin was lying in wait pretending to talk to Spence. She had to walk down the corridor between the two of them, feeling hatefully small and untidy, a heaving maggoty mess.

“Look, Ramone,” began Martin. “I’m sorry I upset you. It’s just that I don’t think our Technology and Society tutorials are the place for sexual politics. It’s not the subject of the course, and it’s not fair on the rest of us. I’d honestly love to sit down with you some other time and have a proper discussion about the whole sex and gender thing.”

The term
shit-eating grin,
she thought, was coined for occasions like this. She stared, fascinated, analyzing the precise content of that exposure, male teeth with a fat juicy turd locked behind them. It means,
I’m stealing something from you.
I’m being obnoxious and we both know it, but you can’t prove it and you can’t stop me. I’m getting something for nothing from a female. I’m copping a feel here.

“I know what’s wrong with you, Martin. You’re afraid for your life. You don’t want me to mention sex because by mentioning sex I insist that I’m here at the university as a woman, whereas you still think women ought to accept that they’re here as second-rate men. Your privileges aren’t protected any longer. I’m not going to keep the rules of the little boys’ club, I’m not going to pretend to be inadequate. I’m going to claim to be a complete human being. And if that’s what I am, where does that leave you, you titless freak!”

Spence wondered what ’a God’s name would happen next. Martin opened his mouth and closed it. Knots of muscle on either side of his jaws worked visibly.

“Well, see you around, Spence.” He strode away.

Spence cleared his throat. “I don’t think you can claim William Gibson for a marginal male, Ramone. In the US it’s okay for a guy to be a writer, was in the eighties anyway, as long as he makes good money. And science fiction is some kind of heartland. Maybe it’s different over here, but to me bracketing Gibson with Proust sounds weird. I mean, not in a good way—”

She shook her head. She could not talk about her work. Her essays were creations; they stood or fell. It was over: another stillborn, another fortress leveled. They dawdled, to avoid the awkwardness of bumping into Martin again. Ramone seemed surprised that Spence was still by her side as they passed out into the May sunshine.

“Are you two going to go on like this for the whole degree course?” he asked.

“Maybe not. He didn’t say ‘until our next encounter, dear lady’ this time. Arsehole. I got to him. Maybe someday he’ll learn to
leave me the fuck alone.
”

This reading of the situation was enough to make a basilisk blink, but Spence let it stand. “I thought he was going to do a Dr Johnson on you that time.”

“Say what?”

Spence took a violent swing at the air. “I refute you
thus!”

Ramone glowered, her hands bunching into two ready little fists. She bared her teeth: plain fury behind them, no shit. “If he did, he would get a surprise.”

He’d been trying to think where he’d seen a likeness of Ramone Holyrod. Now he knew. It was an Aubery Beardsley drawing of Messalina.
Messalina, Going To The Bath:
snakelocks, glowering cheeks—a dumpy Queen Victoria bundle of garments full of pugnacious forward movement… He’d have to tell someone this: it was too good to waste. Not Ramone. Much as she’d bite your head off if you dared to suggest it, he knew she longed to be better-looking. She was a pig to live with, but his heart went out to the kid. Her absurd, bantam hen bravado:
he’d
get a surprise! Martin Lodge was six two and built like a linebacker. You could only hope that crazy Ramone would never meet the man callous enough to hit her. Because
she was asking for it.

He had caught himself wondering if she knew about that in herself.

“I’m moving out,” he announced.

“Huh?”

“I’m moving out of the Woods. I met some guys—”

“But it’s the end of term next month. I mean, why bother?”

“Yeah, well.”

“You won’t get your rent back.”

“That’s okay. I’m moving into a squat. The fact is—” Spence was wondering why the HELL he had told Ramone, the LAST PERSON IN THE WORLD he wanted informed of his escape plans—“I’m thinking of staying in town for the summer. I have an open ticket. I can temp with a software house, make some easy dosh, and head home in September.”

She beamed, round eyes glowing. “Cool! When are you moving? Can I help?”

He didn’t have the balls to refuse. “Sure. Sure, why not?”

The day that Spence moved into his squat
they all
went along to help, in Rob Fowler’s battered but capacious old Volvo and Daz Avritivendam’s glossy Renault: a version of
they all
that meant Rob and Daz and Ramone, Anna and Spence and a computing friend of Spence’s called Simon Gough. Everybody stared, lost for words, at the three tiny old cottages, their picturesque flint walls gruesomely painted-over in coarse bright colors. A junk metal man with a frilled yellow head, possibly representing the sun, stood where roses should have clustered over the middle one of the three front doors. The other two doors were roughly boarded-up.

Spence was moved to apologize. “That’s the way it goes for us tourists these days. There’s no romance left in the Old World. You schlep into the interior to rubberneck the savages in their traditional murdered-bird hairdos and find them sporting war-bonnets made of flattened Coke cans and Radio Shack parts—” He blushed. Daz, the lissome, elegant black girl with the confusing English accent, was an ethnic-origin Tamil from Borneo. “Er, meaning no offence—”

The World’s Most Gorgeous Malaysian patted him kindly on the shoulder. “We do our best to stay ahead of your games, Americano. We do our best.”

In the kitchen the head of the household, a skinny smoke-dried individual going by the name of Mr Frank N Furter, was transacting business with three oldish men in work clothes. It was a surprisingly clean kitchen, although doing double service as a menagerie. A black and white rat sat in a cage by the cooker, next to an iguana the size of a rabbit in a glass vivarium. A grey parrot peered down from an old-fashioned drying rack slung from the ceiling; there was a cat with kittens in a basket under the table. Frank seemed distant. Spence was nervous and hustled them away before Ramone—who had shed ten angry years the moment she saw the animals—could ask to play with the rat or get her busy paws into the vivarium.

Everyone cheerfully hauled everything up to his room: cardboard boxes, a secondhand mattress, a murderously heavy suitcase full of books, an old dining table from the Salvation Army, orange crates for chairs. When Spence became absorbed in wiring his computer rig,
they all
faded away. The squat was too interesting; it produced strange noises: bongo drumming, wild laughter, rapid furtive footsteps. Spence’s neighbor, a friendly brown-skinned Aussie blonde in a bikini, who introduced herself as Alice Flynn, popped in and explained that there was sunbathing on the roof… Before long, the only removal assistant left was Anna Senoz.

“Sorry about this,” said Spence, blushing. Someone had recently rewired the cottages, which were linked by casual breaches in the interior walls. Socket plates dangled everywhere, over heaps of fresh dust: but the only power point in this room was not conveniently sited for Spence’s plans. “I need to get back online, my Mom worries. If she sends me one email that bounces, she’ll be on the next plane—”

Anna nodded, more impressed than she liked to admit by an emailing mother.

She didn’t mind being left alone with the American Exchange. She didn’t know what to say to him, but it was restful to sit quietly. So many hours she’d spent like this when she was a little child, watching while Daddy did things…

“Do you know what his real name is, downstairs?”

“You mean Frank? No, I don’t. What business is it of mine?”

Where Anna came from, horny-handed sons of toil who spent their afternoons cutting up lines of white powder were not good news. She was concerned. He was a tourist, as he had admitted: seeking thrills, taking risks he didn’t recognize because they didn’t look the same as at home.

“It might be your business if the police come calling—”

Spence finished connecting his printer, set it on its base, and stepped back. “They won’t. The Bournemouth police are cool, Frank told me. They don’t bother recreational users. What’s wrong with the guy providing a service? You use drugs, I’ve seen you do it.”

“I think my parents have smoked dope most of their lives, and they know I do it. If taking alcohol is okay, there’s nothing much wrong with cannabis. But there are limits.”

“And different people have different ideas about where the limits are.” He gave her a look, assessing new information: and added, not really changing the subject, “Where d’you think Ramone comes from? She’s a phenomenon, that kid. Having the room next door to her on campus, I got to know her habits. She never sleeps. Likes to scream, too. It was a wild party for one, all night and every night.”

Anna frowned.

She was right, it was a shame to tell tales. “I
suspect
she may be the smartest person I’ve ever met. I couldn’t prove it; most of her work is a disaster. I just have a weird feeling she may be brilliant. And doesn’t have an idea how to deal with it, because no one ever told her or showed her how—”

“I think her parents are sort of hippies.”

“That would figure. Brought up in a cave, by dog-food-eating drop outs—”

He’d heard that Anna and Daz were planning to stay on and work through the summer. He wanted to ask her about that. But what could he say? Secret lust made it impossible to form the most innocent remark—

“I’m gonna have to use the light socket as an interim auxiliary power source. Damned wiring in here is totally inadequate—”

“Who did it, anyway?”

“Ah, hm. Me, actually.” He dragged one of his orange crates into the center of the room, tucking a connecting block and an electrical screwdriver in his pocket. “Make sure it’s switched off at the wall, will you?”

“Er, don’t you think you should disconnect at the mains?”

It was Spence’s mother, the original Ms Fixit, who had taught him to be a handyman, infecting him at the same time with her own cavalier impatience. He knew it but he couldn’t help it. “Not yet, I’ll just see if this is going to work—” He unscrewed the lightbulb, handed it to Anna, hauled up the naked end of the cable that led from the board—“I want to get the rig running today, send my Mom a—” He needed a third hand, just for a moment—

THWUMP!!

“My God! SPENCE!”

The American Exchange lay flat on his back on the dusty boards, bluish around the mouth. Anna yanked the live lead from between his clenched teeth:
now what?

He opened his eyes.

“Oh, thank God. Are you okay? What were you
doing?”

“I got confused,” explained Spence weakly. He was wearing a shapeless tee-shirt and a pair of vivid cotton shorts. Her breath was on his face, he could smell her body, and something too big to be hid was happening in the crotch area. He prayed she wouldn’t notice, but of course she did; he saw the flick of her glance. Absolute truth, he was too dizzy to care.

“Quick thinking, Batgirl. You saved my life.”