Читать книгу What it Means to be Human - Robert Rowland Smith - Страница 24

I had met Simone at a summer job in July 1986, the year before Anna’s birth. We were both working at a call centre for British tourists who run into difficulties abroad. We the staff, most of us language students, would liaise with the local services overseas. We would speak French, Spanish or Italian on the tourists’ behalf whenever their rental car had a prang or someone broke a leg. Simone had finished her degree and was about to take up a one-year teaching position at the University of Perpignan, in the south of France. I had completed two of the three years of my English degree at Oxford, and was disaffected. I couldn’t engage. My plan – my non-plan – was to throw in the towel.

There was another reason for my lowness. Some months earlier, I had broken up with my girlfriend of three years, Astrid. Actually, she had broken up with me, and I was still smarting. In an old Mini, Astrid drove down from Birmingham to Oxford with her identical twin sister to deliver the news. We faced off like actors on set in my high-ceilinged ground-floor room, with me trying to persuade her to stay. While the sister waited in the car, we had the best sex that we had ever had. The sex didn’t change her mind. It was a closing ceremony.

I wanted a girlfriend to fill the gap. To redeem myself, in fact. When Astrid left me it felt like I had failed. By finding somebody else, I would prove that I wasn’t a failure. I would show Astrid that I was a worthy boyfriend and that she had made a terrible mistake. And so I dated a physiotherapist who had done an ultrasound on my knee after I’d dislocated it, not for the first time, playing cricket. It was the reactivation of a longstanding injury – no pun intended – which, later in life, would make it impossible for me to walk down stairs without pain. I sat in my underwear at the John Radcliffe Infirmary as she smeared the paste around my patella. She pressed the cold metal head against my skin. We caught each other’s eye. But when I cooked her dinner, she claimed to have had a big lunch and left most of it. That seemed to stand for something. We didn’t see each other again.

Earlier that term there had been a party in the house, in my friend Simon’s room next door to mine. I had been dancing with Elizabeth, Simon’s supposed girlfriend. After the party had wound down and I had gone back to my room, she knocked on my door and got into my bed. I told her that I couldn’t betray Simon. Once I had denied her three times, she walked out and wouldn’t speak to me again. She left her sweater in my room, an oversized magenta V-neck by Oscar de la Renta that I kept for years.

That bed was a red futon given to me by Uncle Rowley, my father’s half-brother and my godfather. Though he was now living on a farm in remotest Suffolk, we were still close. The futon was a twenty-first birthday present. But it must have been jinxed because every time a girl got in, the prospect of sex got out. There was a chaste American, Sylvia, with whom I’d been flirting. Though she was keen to lose her virginity, I didn’t want the responsibility of taking it. There was Poppy, the girl from the library, who spent much of term away from Oxford mucking out horses on her parents’ farm. She just wanted to cuddle. There was Bronwen, the dark Welsh beauty, who lived in the house itself, on the top floor, and came downstairs to spend an entire evening on my accursed futon, smiling and twisting her hair, before going back up to bed. And there was Kate, one of my best friends. After going drinking one night, we ended up sleeping in my room, she on the futon, me on the floor. In the dark we started talking about sex. I let my hand brush against her thigh. Our heartbeats quickened briefly before we agreed to remain just friends. Aided by the alcohol, we fell asleep. Once again, the red of the futon had said stop.

So the girl situation was getting me down. But mainly it was Oxford University itself that was sapping me. The freedom it offered opened up like an abyss. Apart from checking in for a one-hour tutorial once a week, we were left to our own devices. Today it would be called ‘self-guided learning’ but I lacked the maturity to guide myself. I skidded off like a dud missile.

This second year was especially hollow. It was the first time I had experienced anything close to depression. My thoughts became bleak, my mood saturnine. I lived out of college in a huge and forbidding Victorian mansion on the Woodstock Road, the house where Astrid and I had our valediction. It always seemed empty, even when all twelve study bedrooms were occupied. That house still appears in my dreams, with extra passageways leading into derelict rooms and a basement like a crypt divided into cells, damp and cold.

I spent my days wandering the waterways of Oxford. The evenings found me alone in my room with a treasured Aiwa tape deck, dancing to Marvin Gaye and Talking Heads. I went to bed later and later. I did less and less work. Occasionally I would give in to my weakness for buying clothes, but I was on a student grant which always ran dry before the end of term. For everything else, there was MasterCard.

The lack of money was a background drone and a drain. The previous summer, at the end of my first year in 1985, I had decided to stay on in Oxford for the long vacation or ‘vac’. In that era, it was still possible for students to sign on out of term time. The phrase was ‘going on the dole’. But my application was refused. I remonstrated with a benefits officer behind a glass screen in the prefab Department of Social Security building on the outskirts of town. To no avail. This was where the government employees received us privileged ‘gownies’ – as opposed to ‘townies’ – with the contempt that we probably deserved. It matched perfectly what Kafka describes in his fiction, The Trial: faceless administration, baffling paperwork, impenetrable processes. I felt like the Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth.

So for the ten weeks of that long summer, in the year before I met Simone, while I was still with Astrid, I lived on a food budget of a pound a day. I made a few extra quid offering guided tours of Oxford, but not enough to make a difference. One pound equated to a single portion of boiled rice from a Chinese takeaway called Dear Friends – known to us student wits as ‘Dead Friends’ – and a couple of Snickers bars. That was it. I lost weight. Meanwhile, the credit card bills came through with inexorable regularity, and with interest charged on top like some monstrous dehiscence.

Why didn’t I just go home that first Oxford summer and live off my parents, like a normal student, getting my laundry done and having my meals cooked? This was the period after my father had lost his job, when his father, my grandfather, had scraped him like a barnacle off the hull of the ship of the family business, leaving him to bob hopelessly in the waves. To shore up their losses, my parents had moved from the rambling detached house where I had done most of my growing up, into a semi-detached cottage back in south Croydon. The flash cars were sold. My bedroom was a box partitioned out of the master bedroom where my parents slept, with a wall so thin that I could hear them breathe at night. It wasn’t home for any of us. On the day we moved in, my mother sat down on the stairs and wept.