Читать книгу Click - L. Smyth - Страница 11

The following week I turned up five minutes early to the professor’s lecture. I hovered at the end of the corridor – the one leading to the theatre – and scanned the crowd waiting outside. I couldn’t see her at first, it was so busy and loud – all the faces blurred into one another – and so I edged forward, past the bent knees and bulging rucksacks and forearms crossed over folders. I avoided eye contact with those I vaguely knew, pulling my hair over my face.

Soon there was a commotion behind me: the professor.

He bustled through the group of students, papers waving theatrically in his hand, a murmuring of ‘excuse me’ as he pushed his way forward. Then, at the door, he wavered. I watched him intently. There was a strained look on his face, a kind of suppressed smirk. He looked as though he might have been rehearsing a line in his head. But he said nothing, only glanced sideways briefly, then straightened his shoulders and walked into the lecture hall.

My eyes tracked across in the direction of his glance. She was sat against the wall, reading a book. I noticed she was wearing the same style of dress as the week before, but a deeper shade of blue. Her hair was in a low, neat bun at the nape of her neck and her face was knotted into a little frown. She flipped over a page in the novel and raised an ironic eyebrow.

At that moment the crowd began to trickle into the lecture hall, and she stood up. I watched the dark blue fabric lift and drop as her legs unfolded and straightened. She began to move towards the theatre with them, and I followed where she was going, keeping a good distance behind. There was a spare seat next to her. Avoiding eye contact, I shuffled in and sat down.

Around us I heard the familiar hum of student voices – those awkward few minutes before the start of a lecture which are never quite long enough to make conversation. I stared at my hands. I wondered how to introduce myself. I wondered what I could say that would sound natural. I had never been good at introductory conversations: the ‘hello’ itself was fine, but the segue into small talk always felt stilted. I was terrified of the inevitable silences that would follow and so would pre-emptively fill them with vacuous babble – babble that I found impossible to sustain, so my sentences trailed out, and I would end up awkwardly cutting myself off … Anyway, I kept my mouth shut.

The lecture began. I paid attention this time, partly because the title irritated me: ‘Female novelists in the nineteenth century.’ That categorization was annoying. I had never been a fan of what-was-called women’s fiction, in the same way that I’d never been a fan of what-were-called women’s magazines. I liked the idea instead that literature transcended the boundaries of gender, and thought that to lump together the work of (in this instance) Gaskell and Eliot into a ‘women’s literature’ category was to strip them of a creative freedom that male novelists were automatically afforded. That said, I mostly read men.

There was also a particular reason – a particular detail – which jolted me to pay attention that day. It was a sound bite I happened to pick up on in the first five minutes. After introducing the topic of the lecture, the professor said: ‘Now, who exactly, made up the readership of lady novelists during this period?’

Not female novelists, as the lecture title indicated, or even women novelists, as I might have found acceptable – but lady novelists. Nice ladies. Polite genteel women who behaved themselves. Every time he casually dropped it in, I felt my face flush and my throat constrict in anger.

Now he peered over at the students in the front row, and tapped the pen against the lectern. I resisted the urge to charge to the front of the lecture hall, grab the pen and shove it up his nose.

‘A particularly interesting detail,’ he continued, ‘in fact I should say, a particularly controversial detail featured in the writings of both lady novelists is the—’

Someone cut in: ‘Women.’

The interruption jolted me alert. I felt a prickle of panic at the nape of my neck. The professor stopped speaking.

‘Pardon?’

I looked around. A hundred eyes were now staring towards my row, wide circles of panic and irritation. I thought for a moment that Marina had spoken, but when I turned towards her, I saw that she was looking back at me.

I realized, with horror, that the voice had been mine.

The room spun. To steady myself I turned my eyes away from Marina and looked forwards. The professor had stopped talking. He was squinting in my direction through his glasses. His eyes flicked from me to Marina, seemingly attempting to establish who, exactly, had interrupted him.

He cleared his throat.

‘Pardon?’ he said.

In my periphery I saw Marina fix her gaze upon me. My lower lip felt numb. What the hell was I going to say now? Why had I put myself in this situation? I brought my hands together under the table, laced my fingers so tightly that my knuckles ached.

Suddenly another voice piped up. I recognized a cool, affirmative tone.

‘They’re not lady novelists,’ Marina corrected confidently. ‘They’re women.’

The professor rolled his eyes.

‘Marina, if you have an issue, please send an email and copy in—’

‘If you’ve bothered to make us sit through a lecture specifically about quote unquote gender and the novel then surely it’s worth explaining some of these terms. Otherwise just stick to the one you’ve used in the title.’

My toes scrunched in my shoes. I felt excruciatingly hot. The backs of my knees were slick with sweat, my face unstable. Under the damp of my fringe I looked in Marina’s direction. She was looking straight ahead, not registering my presence. Her mouth was curled in the very corner: in what almost looked like a smile. She seemed … pleased.

The professor, on the other hand, was uncomfortable. His forehead was a blotchy red. His cheeks were pink and seemed to expand with the silence, pushing the collar of his shirt tight against porcine jowls. Now he scratched them, laughed breathily and said: ‘For your information there is an entire section on this in the reading material provided.’

‘Then—’

‘Marina, for the moment I would like to just get on with it …’

‘Well to be honest—’

‘Marina.’

Another, shorter, silence as the professor jigged from one foot to the other. I glanced around. Other students looked either bored or riveted. They chewed their nails. The professor rustled his papers and continued on a different tack: ‘If you’d like to discuss it having read the secondary material then there may be an opportunity at a later date. In the meantime’ – here he leaned a large, flat hand into the lectern – ‘I would like to just get on with it. And if anyone else has a similar issue, please wait until the end to raise it with me.’

***

That’s when it started, I think. That was the first time that I became aware of it happening: my body folding in on itself, the hardened core at the centre of my identity dissolving and becoming replaced by something else … something corruptible and soft; unfamiliar. Until that lecture I hadn’t been aware of it, but I’d always had a fear of being found out. To some extent I still have it. It is not just that I am worried that someone will discover an unpleasant secret of mine and reveal it to the world. It’s more specific than that. It is, I suppose, a fear which stems from me. It’s a sense that I’m not completely in control of my own actions; that, by accident or otherwise, I will be the principal agent in my own downfall. When I’m not paying attention, drawing a tight restrictive circle around myself, I’ll say something tactless or do something stupid, which will reveal my true nature as incompetent. Or evil.

I think again about the headlines in recent days – the torrid accusations, the glimpses of my face, the glimpses of my name. All of it makes me question myself. I am worried about what they are saying. I am worried about how they are depicting me. I am worried about whether that representation will cause me to lose sight of who I am again, that it will make me do something that I don’t understand.

***

It was that moment in the lecture when my self-doubt began to set in, I’m sure of it. Before then I had always thought of myself as someone reserved and watchful. I was a person with control over their inner thoughts and emotions. Though my silence unnerved people around me, I had always felt bolstered by it.

But because of that lecture slippage, I felt that my sense of self-preservation was gone. I had acted so out of character, and with such potentially humiliating consequences, that I couldn’t understand what sort of person I was anymore.

I scared myself.