Читать книгу The Trouble with Rose - Amita Murray - Страница 11

The next day, a Monday, I resolve to go back to my normal life. I’ve found that in times of stress over the years, having a regular and predictable routine is the one thing that I’ve been able to depend on. In the last six months with Simon, I let my routine slide a little, let it get scruffy around the edges, but now it’s time to put my life back on track.

As I walk out of my house, I take a deep breath to brace myself for the day. But I needn’t have worried, because the city looks like it is determined to help me in my resolve. On the train to New Cross Gate, to get to campus, I easily get a seat. On my walk to Goldsmiths, a little girl with a cheerful pigtail on top of her head waves shyly at me. As I make my way across campus to get to my department, the March sun plays peek-a-boo on the common, and candyfloss pollen floats on the breeze. I turn my face up to the warmth.

Maybe, just maybe, I can go back to who I was before I met Simon. If I can do that, if I can let go of the image Simon created of me – a tempting picture of someone who knows who they are, for whom something vital didn’t get left behind a long time ago – then maybe things will be okay.

I walk into my department building, humming along to someone who is listening to ‘Cake by the Ocean’ on their phone, determined to make this the first day of the rest of my life.

My optimism is severely tested as I walk through the double-doors.

‘Ohhhhh,’ says an undergrad who I tutor, making a sad face when she sees me. ‘What happened?’

‘Oh,’ I say, staring at her. She is wearing dark red lipstick and thick black eyeliner, a pair of harem trousers and a sports bra. ‘Yes. It’s all fine.’ I smile brightly and give her a thumbs-up.

I keep my eyes focused ahead of me as I walk quickly past the student towards the stairs that lead up to my office. I can do this. This still makes sense. Of course people are going to want to know what happened, and why I’m not on my honeymoon. But as news stories go, I’m sure I’m not the most important of the day. And, in any case, I am not going to let an eighteen-year-old who thinks underwear is suitable to wear around campus ruin my day.

‘Rilla!’ another voice says, as I place one foot on the stairs. I slowly turn around. It is one of my professors. Professor Maxine is French, she teaches phenomenology, and she tells her students: Talk with your body, yes? Your heart, she is the same as your crotch, yes? ‘What happened? Why are you here?’ she says to me now, her face a picture of deep distress. ‘Come here!’ She embraces me. ‘Cry, ma petite! Cry!’

I shake myself like a dog when she lets go of me. ‘Professor Maxine,’ I say, though there is a breathlessness to my voice now, ‘really, it’s all fine.’

I run up the stairs before she can say anything else. I look left and right, and pass by a meeting room in which a few of the admin staff are having a meeting. It is glass-fronted, and I resist the urge to hide my face behind a book as I pass by. The department administrator pauses in the act of giving a PowerPoint presentation whose title reads, What does your work allocation say about you? and does a double-take. No way! she mouths, her face aghast.

Now I’m running. I can’t get to my office fast enough. Why on earth did I think it was a good idea to come to university today? Of course I’m the scandal of the week, and I should have known I would be! I run inside my office, slam the door shut and press my back against it. I look frantically around at the broom cupboard that is my office: the grey cabinet, the posters of philosophy conferences that other grad students have left on the walls, my work desk and chair, my old department-issue desktop, the thick leaves of the aloe plant that a student gave to me as a present.

And then I realize it. I’m alone here, I’m alone in my office. No flatmate, no GIF, no students or professors. Yes, I am alone here and that’s a good thing. I am still feeling the weight of the onslaught, but perspective slowly starts to return. I can stay in here and I can work. I put my bag down, take off my jacket and scan my workspace. I move things around. I place my water bottle and a chocolate-and-orange cereal bar next to my computer, fiddle with the height of my chair, place my spring jacket on the back of it. There, the room looks familiar now. I feel safer, I can breathe.

I automatically reach out to the desk calendar to change the date. And there it is. Monday, March 13th.

I have neatly crossed out the words ‘Office Hours’ and instead written ‘First Day of Honeymoon’. My hand snaps back like I’ve been stung. I stand staring at the words, feeling trickles of something crawling up my spine.

Why, why not even one exclamation point, I think irrelevantly. Why not more excitement at the thought of spending ten days with Simon in Hawaii? Tears prick my eyes and I turn blindly around.

Why am I here? I had woken up with the idea that if I could just carry on as normal, then maybe all this would go away. But what is normal now? What is normal for me? In the time I’ve been with Simon, my ‘normal’ seems to have morphed into something I no longer recognize. I stand with my back to my desk, a hand on my mouth, eyes tightly shut. I’m unable to move, unable even to think clearly.

After many minutes, I slowly open my eyes. And there is a thought in my head, a clear one. Focus, I need to focus. I turn slowly around, refusing to look at my calendar. I turn on the computer, I slowly sit on my chair, tentatively now, not daring to move too fast. I open a file I’ve been ignoring for too long – the file in which I have made notes for my MA thesis.

Just as I click on the file, there is a knock at my door that nearly makes me jump out of my skin. I creep to the door, open it a notch and sneak a peek. What looks like the entire undergraduate population of the philosophy department is standing outside my office. I slam my door shut. Another invasion. First the GIF, now this.

I have something of a reputation for saying it like it is, for not being nice, but getting straight to the heart of the problem. And not just about undergraduate papers, but also undergraduate lives, so my office hours (held twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays) are usually full with back-to-back tutorials. I’m employed as my supervisor Professor Grundy’s teaching assistant, so I assist in classes, mark essays and give feedback to students on their coursework. But today, two days after my non-wedding, there is already a line snaking its way out of my office and down the corridor to the common room. Popular or not, my office hours have never been this well attended.

There is a knock behind me again. I close my eyes, willing the student to go away, but the knock is repeated. I open the door an inch, heave a shuddering sigh, then reluctantly gesture in the first student.

‘Oh no, what happened?’ It is Sara, a redhead with Britney Spears pigtails.

I purse my lips. ‘I thought I’d cancelled my office hours.’

Her green eyes are wide. ‘Yes, but then we saw you were in. You look so sad!’ She reaches out a hand.

I stop myself from springing back. ‘I’m fine,’ I mutter. ‘Now, what did you want to talk about?’

I gesture her to the ‘student chair’. Sara settles into it like she’s here for a picnic. She seems to have no questions about her essay or about my feedback, but it still takes me fifteen minutes to get rid of her.

The next student comes in. ‘Oh no, what happened?’ Mimi gasps, as soon as she walks in. ‘I am so sorry for you! Did you literally leave him at the altar? In front of all the guests? At the very last minute?’

My heart is pounding, and I can hear a busy hum from outside the door, the swarm of locusts is expanding further. I decide that my best strategy is to attack.

‘You need to think about whether this is what you want to do with your life, Mimi,’ I tell her, finding her paper on my desktop and clicking on the file. ‘Look at this paper – it’s so awful I don’t even want to use it as a coaster!’

She peers closely at the computer. ‘Well, you can’t,’ she points out. ‘It isn’t printed out.’

‘Totally not my point,’ I say sternly. ‘How much time did you spend writing it? Half an hour?’

This strategy works. I use this form of address with each student as they filter in.

‘Tell your girlfriend how you really feel,’ I say to Jacob. ‘Don’t be a douche-bag.’ He looks mildly hurt at my words, but his natural laziness kicks in and the hurt vanishes. He lounges back in the chair, the front legs of the chair come off the ground and now he is almost horizontal. ‘She’s, like, you don’t talk, and I’m like, whaaaa?’

Several more students come in. Each one asks me what happened, and why I look so awful (one actually uses the word decaying) but I am like an Olympic ping-pong champion, I thrust the ball right back at them.

I have been at it for almost two hours, and am starting to feel more like myself, when Wu Li comes in. She gives me the standard sad face and question. I prepare myself for attack. It is harder to do with Wu Li, though, because she is one of the top undergraduates in the department, and her personal life seems spotless as well, not riddled with broken relationships, binge-drinking, flatmate crises or chlamydia scares like everyone else’s. I search her paper frantically for any of my comments that don’t read, Excellent! Great point! Wow, never thought of it that way! Have you thought of doing a PhD (talk to me about this!).

She’s looking at me seriously for what feels like minutes on end, her eyes unblinking beneath curly eyelashes. ‘Maybe you’re like Nietzsche,’ she says at last. ‘You can only talk about love, but not practise it.’

My stomach clenches. I stare at my computer.

‘But it’s okay,’ she adds sympathetically. ‘Some people are just not cut out for love.’

I stumble blindly up from my chair. ‘I need to make a phone call,’ I say to her, holding the door open, my voice sounding strangled and choked. She gives me a sympathetic, knowing glance on her way out. I slam the door shut for the third time this morning. I need to get out of here!

But my options are limited. I can either leave through the door and face the fifteen or so shiny young faces that are still waiting on the other side of it, or I can climb down through the tiny twelve-inch-square window in my office, adopt my father’s way of dealing with confrontation – i.e., avoiding it like the plague.

My friend Tyra walks in as I stand there, hands tangled in my hair. She stares at me aghast. Tyra was invited to my wedding, so she doesn’t need to ask, Oh no, what happened? She quickly closes the door shut behind her.

‘Rilla—’ she says. ‘You look terrible. Your hair, your skin, your shirt is buttoned all wrong and’ – she looks down at my feet – ‘you’re wearing mismatched socks!’

I look at her, panic clear on my face. ‘I shouldn’t have come today—’

She walks over to me and places her hands on my shoulders. ‘Rilla. For crying out loud, get yourself together! Who cares what anyone thinks?’ She quickly buttons my shirt right, pats my hair, and squeezes my cheeks to get some colour back into them.

I collapse on my chair and lift my head to stare up at the ceiling. ‘I never want to see anyone again.’

Tyra perches herself on my desk and swings her legs, stylish in her orange jumpsuit and platform sandals. She is watching me, her caramel skin beautifully offset by an emerald scarf and enormous silver hoops.

‘Rilla, what’s going on?’

‘With what?’

‘You know what. All of it!’

I shrug defensively. ‘I couldn’t go through with it, okay? Why is everyone staring at me like I’ve lost a limb? I made a mistake getting engaged in the first place.’

She nods slowly. ‘Well, I could have told you that.’

I look at her sharply. This is the first time since I left Simon at the altar that anyone has expressed this opinion. Everyone else in my life is convinced that I’m a terrible person, that I hurt Simon and I ruined my life. I narrow my eyes at her. I want to ask her what the hell she’s talking about but, characteristically, her rapid-fire brain is already moving on to the next thing. She’s looking at my computer screen where she can see the notes I’ve made for my MA thesis.

‘Any progress?’ she asks, trying to read what I’ve written.

Federico was wrong about what he said to my family. I have not been thrown out of my MA, I’ve only been given a warning. I need to produce more work, have more to show for the last three years. I’m doing an MA in philosophy, writing a thesis on multicultural perspectives on love. I want to know, I genuinely want to understand how some people are so good at love and others aren’t. Yet the more I study it, the less I seem to know.

I shake my head. ‘Nope, no progress.’

She inclines her head to study me. ‘You’re good at this stuff. I don’t get it. What’s stopping you from writing something, anything? You can do it in your sleep.’

I cluck impatiently. ‘And act like I know about love?’

She raises a stylish shoulder. It was Tyra, my best friend during the three years of my undergraduate degree, who convinced me to apply for a scholarship to do an MA at Goldsmiths. She’s writing an MA thesis on sex in black feminist literature. Soon she’ll be moving on to a PhD. She’s nearly done and I don’t even have a clue where I’m headed.

‘Do it, finish it. What’s stopping you?’ she asks.

This is a really good question. I have pages and pages of notes, hundreds of pages. Yet, I am no closer to finding a thesis topic.

The years of my degree, a BA in English Literature, weren’t easy. I was haunted by a recurrent unease with my life, maybe even with being in my own skin. I felt restless and unsure with just about everything. But I was able to focus on one thing – the degree itself. On the books we read and the papers we wrote. Once I completed my degree, though, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I felt like I had no anchor, that even the relative grounding that my degree had given me had been stripped away from me. What were my skills? What was I good at? What did I want to do? I’d never been in love with any job I’d had over the years – teaching chocolate-making workshops, selling vintage clothes, working in a pub. So when the scholarship was offered to me, I had said yes. It felt like a lifeline.

‘I can’t write anything at all. I feel like I’m pretending I know things that … I’ve never known.’

‘Why does everything need to be perfect? This is the problem with you. Either something is perfect, or it’s total shit.’ Tyra raises an eyebrow.

I shake my head. ‘That’s not true.’

‘It so is. Take your MA, for instance. It could be about, say, Jane Austen’s perspective on love. That would do. But no, the woman has to find out everything on love that’s ever been written anywhere in the world. Compartmentalize, Rilla. Write the thesis. It doesn’t have to be perfect!’

‘Maybe.’

She’s looking at me now, not saying anything.

I frown, determined to give her the silent treatment, but then I give up. ‘Fine, just tell me. What did I do wrong with Simon?’

She widens her eyes, looks about the room, seemingly looking for an answer to my question. ‘You got engaged three months after you met. You were getting married three months after that. I mean, duh, you don’t need to look far for what went wrong! Anyway, look, what’s the big deal? We all make mistakes. Love and marriage and all that, it’s not for everyone. I mean, look at me!’

‘Love and marriage and all that,’ I repeat stupidly.

‘Come out with me Friday. We’ll pick up some blokes, go on, say yes!’

This is Tyra’s answer to any problem. I don’t say anything. She jumps off the desk, gives me a kiss and knocks on my forehead with a bony knuckle. She waves her fingers, mouths Friday and disappears out of the door, leaving me staring blankly at my computer screen.

I should appreciate everything she just said. Tyra is the one person who doesn’t believe I’m the worst person in the world after what I did to Simon. Yet, the voice in my head is saying: It’s Tyra, she’s supportive, she cares, but she also tends to wash her hands of sticky situations, to fix things and move on quickly. She likes to think she knows what people should be doing with their lives. Come to think of it, not so unlike my GIF. A minute after she leaves, she sends me a text message and I expect it will reiterate what she has already said to me. But it doesn’t. It says, Prof on prowl. She means Professor Grundy, my supervisor. If Professor Grundy finds me in university today, she will not let me go without an interrogation, an interrogation that will make my undergraduates’ sad questions seem like a birthday party. In fact, it would be safe to say that her cross-examination wouldn’t be out of place in a prison camp.

I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, then stand up, picking up my bag and my coat. I feel exhausted, weary to the bone. Some people are just not cut out for love. This seems to be the consensus today. And I’m really not sure they’re wrong.