Life (9 page)

Privately Anna wondered, could making love to a woman be so different? When she held Spence, wild with pleasure, gasping and trembling in her arms, as he begged her to suck more fiercely on his nipples, as she rubbed at his perineum, slid her fingers into his slippery rectum and kneaded the soft concavity where his testes, when he was in this mood, so easily slipped back behind the pubic bone, what was different then? She had heard that women are better partners because men are not multiorgasmic. Spence often seemed to reach peak after peak, in a cascade as extended as her own, before the final climax… Must be because he was so young. Of course there was his prick, which she would not want to be without. When they were in his room at Regis Passage she loved to lie naked, spine arched, heels under her and knees spread, and masturbate while Spence did the same. She kept her eyes closed so she would not know when, overcome by the sight of her cunt, he would fall, clutching her shoulders, and plunge his prick inside. She loved the moment when her whole body went into spasm, locking and seizing, madly pumping. It was like a merging of human and machine, without the paranoia of that idea; it was the pleasure of tennis and yoga glorified, pure movement in power, the delight of becoming completely physical. To be a machine is lovely. And everything else—the way the dance floors grew empty and uncertain in the early hours, the hot grubby sands, the smell of suntan oil, the wine they drank, the street sounds, the glittering sea that rocked at the end of every street and caught her body in its cool invigorating embrace in the late afternoons—all these were the adjuncts of this summer, which she would have possessed anyway, if she had settled for the pain and deceit of the kind of boyfriend-girlfriend affairs a nice girl was supposed to have, without ever knowing what was missing from the center: this rapture of a young animal, pure appetite without shame, without anxiety. She thanked the light of reason in her prayers.
They said it couldn’t be done.
But Anna had made up her mind to tackle sex in a fair and straightforward way, and things had turned out just fine.

She understood how Spence felt about Rob and Daz. Daz Avritivendam was fabulously beautiful and intelligent and lovely in many ways, but nothing unconventional could survive in her vicinity. Daz and Rob were
a couple,
a transformation as obvious as a physical metamorphosis, and it grated. Anna had kept her distance from this coupledom, not because of Spence, but for her own reasons. She tried not to know it when the lovebirds started to fall out. But one day, after a London weekend that had obviously been a disaster, Daz asked Anna to come back to the house after the lunch session at work, instead of joining the others. As soon as she’d shut the door of their room behind them, she collapsed in tears.

“Daz! What’s the matter?”

“It’s Rob.”

“You’ve had a fight?”

“I have to get away from him. Anna, you have to help me, please.”

She wept on Anna’s shoulder. She had to get away from Rob because she couldn’t marry him. She’d seen this happen to Muslim girls from home, stumbling blindly into relationships that couldn’t survive. Daz was a Hindu, and her family so detached from all that religious-ethnic power stuff she’d thought she was safe. She’d been wrong.

“I can’t marry him, it would be impossible. I must get away, right away, right now.”

Anna did her best to comfort the World’s Most Gorgeous Malaysian. She asked no questions; she didn’t need to. She suspected she’d soon know more than she wanted to be told, anyway. She agreed that they would put their savings together, and instead of staying in Bournemouth making money all summer, she would go away with Daz.

Needs must.

Daz calmed down and revealed, ingenuously, plans already devised. They would go to Greece, there were some very cheap flights. They would bum around the islands. There remained something so tragic in her hollow cheeks and compressed lips that Anna knew she had no choice. It was probably better this way. Quit while you’re ahead.

“But what about you and Spence?” asked Daz, when she knew she was safe.

“It’s okay,” said Anna. “It was a temporary thing.”

They left on the last day in July, driven to Gatwick by Daz’s mother. Anna and Spence had said goodbye the night before, in the pub on the corner of the Passage. It served them right, that they had to part in public, after the stuff they’d got up to.

In the kitchen at Regis Passage late that night, under a pokerwork wall plaque that read DON’T GET MAD GET SORTED, Frank N Furter shook his head over the folly of the young. “Should’er told her how you feel, Spence. Should’er taken a chance. The key is always frank. Remember that. As you go through life, you will find I’m right.”

“Yeah, well. It’s too late now.”

He would go back to school, bury himself in his studies, use his new expertise to find another girl who would never lead him such a dance. He would try to forget.

“Fancy a line?”

“Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.”

Anna Anaconda

i

When Anna was a little girl, she and her sister possessed a picture book about a snake called Anna Anaconda, who swallowed things: notably other animals. It was a reign of terror. The anaconda lured and flattered every animal in the forest to its doom, except for the peacock, whose beauty was impervious to flattery and immune to greed. (The book was indifferent to conventional zoology: this was a female, Amazonian peacock.) Finally the peacock tricked the monster into trying to swallow her reflection in the river. She went on swallowing until she burst, and all her victims escaped. Anna had gained immense, sensual satisfaction from the picture of the snake trying to engulf the whole of the great Amazon: flanks swollen and transparent, so you could see the huge variety of things and creatures she’d already consumed. But she had equally admired the cool-headed bird. There’s a growing grace and glory in remaining by myself, sang the peacock, to the annoyance of her neighbors. But solitary content turned out to be the right choice—a rare conclusion for a children’s story. The book had frayed, disintegrated, and vanished. In Anna’s memory the two characters had survived, the distinction between them fading. The snake who swallowed everything was not a monster. She desired, like the peacock, to be self-contained. She tried to gulp her own reflection not because she was tricked, or greedy, but because she longed for closure.

Anna remembered
Anna Anaconda
in her second year at university, as she drifted into social isolation. She shared a house with Daz and Rob Fowler (their relationship had recovered after the abortion and the summer break, though the old suburban certainty never returned); Simon Gough; a sociology student called Ray Driscoll, who had been another male member of first year’s
they all;
and a girl called Marnie Choy, live wire and fun fanatic, who had answered an advertisement they put up. One night in October, when Daz was in London for the weekend, Rob Fowler came and tapped on Anna’s bedroom door. She turned him down. Sexual attraction never dies, but it was no struggle.

She worked. She was the Biols student who attended every lecture, studied every textbook, and possessed complete, immaculate notes that she freely shared. She was the one who enjoyed the hated, obligatory statistics course. She went out dancing, she stayed up late commiserating with other people’s troubles, she had a few nights of sex with Ray when he was between serious girlfriends. A transparent envelope stood around her. It was Anna’s extended self, her containment: the great river. When Marnie and Daz, arm in arm, screeched drunken girl-power challenges in the Union Bar:
We want a man! Not one of you dickless lot, a real man, we want a man!,
she laughed and cheered, but she was a million miles away. There’s a growing grace and glory in remaining by myself.

In early June, on a bright cool summer’s day, she walked out of the campus valley to visit Spence’s sun terrace. There had been more rain this year. The turf was richer, the flowers more advanced. Some of the plants were hardly recognizable in habit as the above-ground processes from the same rootstocks as last June. She spent a long while on her knees, looking, examining, making sketches in her notebook.

She thought of Spence. In that room in Regis Passage, with the ridiculous wiring and the terrible crack in one corner, which he monitored in felt-tip, he lay beside her on the mattress that smelled of flea-powder and cum. They were both dressed; they were not being sexual. He showed her a picture of his cat, a blue-eyed, black half-Siamese called Cesf, standing up on gangling back legs to bat a catnip mouse on a string. “It’s an old password I don’t use anymore.” He missed Cesf, and worried about him. The cat was monogamous, didn’t get on with Spence’s Mom, and was reportedly pining. He missed his mother too, but didn’t carry her picture. He said, with a droll self-mocking reserve, “I can remember what she looks like.” Anna sensed something very different from the affection and mutual respect she shared with her own parents: Spence’s mother was a power over his whole life, future and past, his goddess not his government.

She had realized, soon after the start of their idyll, that she could never, ever tell him about being “in love” with Rob Fowler. It would have been rude, like telling someone they’d been invited to dinner because your first choice of guest had canceled. Especially since it turned out he didn’t like Rob. Given the typical first-year’s emotional situation, Spence’d probably had an unrequited crush of his own, and
he
hadn’t said anything; but she’d felt compromised. Maybe it was because of that unease—something she needed to say, but must not—that she’d made no effort to get back in touch. He hadn’t contacted her either, which he easily could have done. Simon still heard from him.

They had each made the same choice. It was the right ending.

She set her sketches aside and opened a sheaf of printed lecture notes, minutely annotated.
Eukaryotic Genetics: Genetic Constraints of Selection.

At school, Anna had been thrilled by the
certainty
of the DNA process. It was such a trick, so satisfying and neat, the two complementary strands of bases, unzipping, acting as templates for replication: safe as the ticking of a watch. At school they let you think perfect replication was the norm—with the occasional dramatic derailment, so that new species could be born. When you got closer, you realized what happened was totally different. The process was weak, not strong. The strings of bases were continually being repaired, continually evading repair, the patterns snagging and dropping stitches, so it was amazing you woke up every morning and found that a rabbit stayed a rabbit and a rose a rose. Coherent change emerged, mysteriously, like new music, out of the constant noise of miscopying: sections stuffed in backwards, upside down, in totally the wrong place… How could this flux of meaningless chemical glitches drive the engine of something so powerful as evolution?

This was still not fully explained, even by the experts.

She looked up. Feathery white cloud skimmed the blue dome of the sky. She was held suspended, in a silent cool concavity of earth and air. Dr Russell, Anna’s favorite lecturer, was big on
context.
She derided the very concept of isolation. No allele is an island! To Anna this was like a moral reproach. She had not set out to be alone. But if you didn’t want to play the sexual-panic games, there wasn’t much left of undergraduate social life. It was like sitting there being tee-total while everybody got drunk: and so she was retreating, day by day, week by week.

Arranged marriage would have suited Anna: no impossible ideals, just a matter-of-fact agreement. It would be no problem if you met for the first time on your wedding day. As long as the person was a decent human being and the sex worked, you’d be happy. And why wouldn’t it work, if the two people were young, fancy free, and entered the pact with goodwill? It worked for me, she thought, remembering how very excellent it had been, cleaving only to Spence. Whose body did not fascinate her, who had no allure that could drag her from room to room: with whom she had shared a common, human sweetness that any two people might have. But that had been a controlled experiment.
In vivo,
as far as she knew anything about it, arranged marriage had a success rate no better than love affairs. Worse, in the big numbers: especially for women.

It would have gone sour. This way, their few weeks were safe forever.

…yet still I think of him with kindness,

and shall do ’til our last goodnight.

She couldn’t remember the name of the poem or the poet, but the couplet spoke to her feelings: enduring tenderness. If I never get another turn at it in my whole life, she thought, I bet I’ve had more than my share of really good sex, compared with lots of people. Thank you Spence. I won’t forget. She made a note to herself, as she headed back, that she must not let this trip develop into a yearly pilgrimage. She knew she had a tendency to get obsessive about things.

ii

Charles Craft was a tall young man with sleepy eyes, a puffy pink and white complexion, and a permanent stipple of black around his lips and jaw. His hair was a fine dark thatch that stood up in tufts on the crown of his head, like the hair of some newborn babies; he had large, soft hands and large, soft thighs that strained the fabric of his habitual, very clean and pale blue jeans. He had a girlfriend called Ilse, who was one of the Biology masses, but Anna didn’t know her except by sight. She did not socialize with Charles, though they were
de facto
associates at the top of the class. She was not surprised when she discovered, in the Autumn term of final year, that they were to be project partners: but she was disheartened. Charles spoiled things. He was a pain in seminars, sniping at her with pointless little challenges.

Guy Doone, the redheaded post-doc who would be their supervisor, showed Anna and Charles around the big warm room that had the atmosphere of a catering kitchen, but less coherence. Benches and counters were divided into separate untidy territories, where domestic-looking machinery jigged and stirred, and trays of cells lay about, like leftover food in the back of the fridge. Mess, thought Anna. Noise. I must be getting closer to the reality. She was intensely excited at the prospect of committing real science.

“And this is our pride and joy,” said Guy, standing before what appeared to be a top-loading washer-dryer. “The new PCR machine. Not the cutting edge, but it’s the nearest we’ve got—and one of the few pieces of big equipment we own that you couldn’t buy from a consumer durables discount store. Fridges, microwaves, mixers: as you’ll soon find out, we’re just glorified housewives in here…er no offence, Anna.”

“We had that model at my Dad’s lab, years ago,” Charles examined the machine disdainfully. “I’ll take the back off it if you like, see if I can give it a reboot. I can’t boil an egg. But if you do the housewife thing, Guy, I can take care of the science.”

Guy blushed, a red-head’s violent crimson. “As you should know,” he said stiffly, “the crucial factor in polymerase chain reaction, the development that turned genetic engineering from a handicraft into an industry, is precise temperature control. The machines are bloody expensive because they can shift the temperature inside practically instantly. They’re very delicate, as your Dad may have told you, Charles. Please don’t take the back off anything in here, ever.”

Charles sighed and stared blatantly out of the window.

Anna would have liked to kick him. The chances that Guy the post-doc
wanted
to be lumbered with two third-years were remote. If Anna and Charles gave him grief, his interest in them was going to be less than zero. Charles caught her eye. “I wasn’t going to let him get away with that,” he whispered. “We’re not here to wash dishes.”

There was nothing she could say. The problem was too trivial.

As they left the lab at the end of the morning they met Seraphina Russell. The big woman, white coat crisp in spite of the heat, beamed on them with spaniel-brown eyes, startlingly warm and emotional in her large, stern face. “Well, Anna,” she said. “Welcome home, my dear.” She said this because Anna had pestered incessantly for
real work
since the first term of first year. “Charles too,” she added kindly. “Enjoy yourselves, and don’t expect too much.”

Ilse was waiting downstairs by the porter’s cubbyhole, hugging an armful of books and folders to her pink-sweatered front. Girls like Ilse made Anna uneasy. Had she not met Daz at the Freshers’ Fair, had she not met Rosy and Wol and Spence and Simon, had she never met Ramone Holyrod, Anna might have herded with the Biols masses. She might have looked like
that:
the crop-hair and pastel ensemble that was like a uniform.

“Coming with us for lunch?” offered Charles, with a magnanimous air.

Ilse smiled.

“Er…no thanks.” She wished she had an excuse to dress the refusal.

Charles looked like he thought as much. As he turned away he muttered distinctly,
“teacher’s pet!”
He was right, damn it. Dr Russell made no secret of the special feeling she had for Anna. Oh, God. She didn’t want to be teacher’s pet. Nor did she want to be involved in Charles’s status-contests with their supervisor. But she couldn’t see how to avoid either. Oh, how infuriating.