Life (18 page)

“Ha.”

He had determined to march her right round the island (he had no idea how long this would take), in revenge for his lost chance. Ramone had other plans. As soon as they were out of sight of the house she sat down with a thump on the shingle, among the blue prickly weeds, the shards of bleached wood, the lumps of tar that looked like ancient shit. A flock of handsome black and white birds with orange bills rose from the foreshore and belted off across the sky.

“I’ve seen you looking at her,” she said. “Oh yes. And her looking back. While the rest of those fuckers are yakking over the swanky food, you two have something much hotter going on. Don’t think no one notices. It’s touching. Like Alan Bates and whatsername in
Far From The Madding Crowd.
Whenever you look up, I will be there, and whenever I look up, you will be there.”

Spence stretched himself out, after checking for oil turds. “Julie Christie. I didn’t think she made a great Bathsheba. Too blah-pretty. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen or spoken to Anna since my Exchange year. There’s nothing going on.”

“Yeah. Sure. How do you find her, anyway. Think she’s changed?”

He thought about it. “Older,” he reported, prosaically. “Poised. Lot more of what she had, which is the kind of confidence that doesn’t have to push or yell or stick itself in anyone’s face. I think she’s been doing things that have proved to her that she’s the person she hoped to be.”

“Hnnph.” Ramone poked Spence in the ribs with a piece of driftwood. “You think Anna is self-confident? You are so wrong. I’ll tell you what Anna is like. She’s an over-intelligent, literal-minded
good girl.
She believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Ten Commandments. She tries to be legal, decent, honest…and when she runs foul of the real world that expects her to turn her girly trick and take the money, she blames herself and tries harder. I’ll tell you something, Spence.” Another jab in the ribs. “You think I’m a pathetic raving in-your-face maniac, but
I’m
okay. It’s women like Anna who suffer for being born female.”

“Is that a fact?”

Ramone picked shreds of tar from the grain of her weapon. “It’s a fact. You know, much as I despise my parents, I owe them. I’ve come to see they gave me something money can’t buy. No one ever gave my Dad any shit and got thanked for it. When anyone insults me, I don’t wonder where I went wrong. I smack them in the mouth.”

He had never heard Ramone speak about her family. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Several, my mum’s favorite occupation was natural childbirth. They’re all pigs.”

He studied one of the glaucous blue-leaved shore plants, a thing so thorny and hostile you could read the cruelty of its environment written there, as if in mirror writing. “Did your Mom used to give your Dad shit?” he asked, casually. “Did you and the other kids?”

Ramone laughed. “Fuck off, Spence.”

She continued her tar picking. Spence pictured Anna as a Dorothea Brooke, a highbrow young goddess hellbent on abnegation, taken in by some Victorian ideal of a woman’s noble destiny. It fit ominously well. Had she found her Mr Casuabon, her worthless idol? Maybe she had. Maybe she was at this party on a handmaiden’s weekend off. More birds passed over: big geese flying in formation, their wings making an exhilarating noise. They both looked up, faces briefly transfigured.

“Why’d you come back from Morocco for, anyway?”

“I got a job offer, working on the net: decided to take it up.”

“Groveling to the bosses after all, eh? So now you’re going to make your fortune.”

“Nah. The only things on the net that make money are gossip, genealogy, and porn: the good old meat and potatoes.”

Ramone smiled bitterly. “I noticed that. The mediation is coded female. I
prophesied
that. D’you remember an essay I wrote, in first year?”

“Um, no.” He decided, since he was trapped like this, to make use of her. “Is it true about Anna and Charles Craft? Wol tells me they were an item, in final year.”

Ramone gave him a strange look, dull and deep.

“Something happened to Anna,” she said at last. “No one knows what. She was her favorite lecturer’s pet. She was supposed to get a first, she had a prime postgrad place with her name on it. Straight after finals she headed off to Manchester. None of us heard from her for months, and she didn’t get that great a degree. Then she reappears working for a baby-farming outfit (and I
know
she would never do that of her own free will) and doesn’t want to have anything to do with anyone she ever knew. Daz kept trying to get her to come to London, but she wouldn’t. I used to write to her from Paris. The only answers I got were fucking little good girl thank-you notes so I gave up. It was me who put Wol and Rosey up to asking her here. We didn’t think she’d accept. Didn’t you know about any of this, Spence?”

He shook his head. “Me, I know nothing.”

“Thought you didn’t. Knowing won’t help though. You’re not going to score. She’s off sex. I
know.
I knew the moment I saw her.”

Spence sighed in exasperation. “Knock it off. I don’t have a relationship with Anna, except that she’s an old friend I like and admire. But if I did I don’t see how it’s your business. What’s Anna to you? You have a love-life… You and Daz and that revolting cowboy comic-artist. A hot threesome, I hear. Isn’t that enough?”

Ramone grinned slowly. “Oh,
more
than enough: believe it. But you want Anna, so do I: and I’m going to win. Forget Charles Craft, Spence. I’m your rival, and the prize is Anna’s soul.” Glaring at him, she flung her piece of driftwood—obviously meant to represent Spence’s chances in this imaginary contest. It should have plunged hopelessly into the sea: but Ramone could not throw, and the breeze was against her. It landed by Spence’s feet.

“I’m going back. I’m fucking freezing, and Tex has had time to roger your girlfriend up, down, and sideways. He’s a quick worker.”

Spence watched her marching off in the wrong direction, into the cruel wind and gathering rain, until his soft heart got the better of him, and he got up and ran after. “Hey, Ramone, you’re heading the wrong way!”

Anna allowed Tex to draw her, if that was what he was doing, for about ten minutes. When he suggested they should go upstairs, so she could undress and he could “get her tits,” she made her excuses and left. Outside the Common Room she met Yesha.

“Don’t go in there, Yesh. The cowboy is looking for life models. I just escaped.”

“Oh God! I know. He did that number on me. Did he want you to go upstairs? That’s where he keeps the baby oil, he sez.”

“Is he really from the States?”

“Nah. He’s from Sheffield. His real name is Arnold, Arnold Yutt. Daz told me.”

The two young women burst into angry, defensive laughter.

“He was Daz’s boyfriend first,” went on Yesha in an undertone. “Ramone met him at the comics convention in Anglouême, when she was living in Paris working as a film extra or something. They started collaborating on this horrible French comic called
Mère Noire,
have you seen it, it’s
disgusting,
so anti-women. I thought she used to be a feminist. Anyway, Wol says Ramone’s now trying to cut Tex out—”

The day passed easily. People drifted in and out of the kitchen, where Wol started opening bottle after bottle of very drinkable Beaujolais Villages. White powder was cut on the massive tabletop, white pills passed from hand to hand. Spence and Anna did not partake of any Class A, Spence because he was trying to live a purer life, Anna because she couldn’t buy her round. But they were as convivial as the rest. Gossip was gossiped, reminiscence flowed. Marnie Choy and her very young boyfriend Kieran, a children’s television presenter, told tales from behind the tv scenes. Shane Clancy, once the star of the Drama Club, told jokes against himself, about the joys of impersonating a noted brand of toilet cleaner, in a giant plastic squeezy suit. Shane’s rich boyfriend and Lucy Freeman’s fiancé, Duncan-the-suit, recounted hideous stories of the trading floor… Ramone had vanished again after her walk with Spence; Tex too. Daz had not been seen at all. Late in the afternoon there were sounds of a violent row upstairs, with monkey screams and parrot shrieks. It subsided, and no one commented except by exchanging glances. At dusk Ramone came down, alone with the animals. And so they came to the last banquet, only slightly more modest than the other two:
crudités
with home made mayonnaise and Rosey’s famous ciabatta, the braised quail en canapé but
sans
foie gras, a great dish of imam biyaldi, little new potatoes in rosemary and olive oil—

Ramone, trapped between jolly Marnie Choy and Lucy Freeman, who hadn’t even changed her hairstyle since she was a darling little first-year, was asked by Lucy, “Are you still a feminist?”

She couldn’t stand to look into Lucy’s soft, taunting face. She looked away—and there was Spence at the end of the table. Tugging roguishly at the beads strung in his fibrous locks, thin and brown and laid back, he was busy regaling Rosey and Shane with tales of his Moroccan amours. She glimpsed what Anna saw: ambiguous sexuality, sweet nature,
and
a dick, the best of both worlds. Fuck, it was so unfair.

“Nah,” she mumbled. “It’s a load of fuck.”

“I’ve seen
Mère Noire,
” put in Marnie. “And if that’s feminism, frankly I don’t get it.”

“I
said
it’s a load of fuck. Feminists are clit-sucking, cunt-fisting shite. ‘Women are powerful!’ Are they, fuck. I don’t want to be a woman. I hate women, I wish they didn’t exist. Feminism is like Satanism. I mean, what the fuck difference does it make. Say your prayers forwards or backwards, you’re still licking God’s same fat arse.”

“Oh,” said Lucy, pushing back her long blonde hair, “I
see.
”

“Why’n’t you ask me about living with Lavinia Kent? I could be interesting about her. She used to shave my head for me. With a cut throat razor.”

She saw that these people would go on inviting her to their house-parties, their cocktail parties, their
weddings.
Especially when she was famous. None of them would remember what being an undergraduate had been like for Ramone: the humiliation, the despair. She smiled in ineffable contempt, reached for another quail, and served it to Sambo the marmoset, who was curled on her lap under the tablecloth, scared by all the row. Bill the parrot rolled up and down between the dishes with his swinging sailor’s gait, squirting dollops of quick-drying concrete shit and pecking at the food: Ramone’s familiar spirits, her fear and her contempt…

The meal ended, they cleared the table. Ramone, ignoring the domestic chores, went off back upstairs with her pets. The rest of
they all
settled around the fire. The mood was quiet this evening. Hangovers, deadened by further alcohol, had begun to fight back. Wol kept on opening bottles, joints were rolled, but everyone was sleepy. Nobody wanted to play charades or murder in the dark. One by one the couples slipped away, until Anna and Spence were left alone—to keep the appointment that their eyes had made, meeting with rueful amusement over the white powder on the kitchen table, with tenderness across the banqueting board. Spence thought of Anna the night before, drunk as a skunk: settling down with a dictionary from the shabby collection of books in the Carstairs games cupboard, to locate the last, recalcitrant, word in that
Telegraph
puzzle by searching the tome line by line. Only Anna!
In vino veritas,
he thought. It was so touching to see her trying to pass for an ordinary human, when she was sober.

She was sitting by the fire; he was curled in his armchair again. “Why did you come back?” she asked. “Ran out of money?”

“No, I got a job,” he repeated patiently. People kept asking him this. Where did they get the idea he’d intended to spend his life in North Africa?

“You mean in the States?”

“Notionally. It’s something I was doing with some guys, when I was in college: now they can afford to pay. It’s a firm called Emerald City, kind of a net service. Search engineering.”