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  “But it ain’t like I don’t pay my own way, though,” said Leon in response to Monica, one night when she was high enough to imply that he was taking advantage of her lover’s sweet nature. “I do my fucking bit, don’t I?”

  No one could say he didn’t. He supplied the whole college with weed, Es and mushrooms when they were available, and what he liked to call “the cheapest coke this side of the M4.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Leon wore Kappa tracksuits on rotation. On especially cold days, a neon yellow Puffa and a furry Kangol cap were added. On hot days, he kept the bottom half of the tracksuit and paired it with a tight wifebeater that revealed a taut, wiry, ghost-white frame. He wore his vintage British Knights no matter the weather: he bought them from Japan, before the Internet, when this was not an easy thing to do. He did not look like anyone else, yet at the same time did not stand out: his was a conventional face, not unpleasant to look at, neither handsome nor ugly. Short blond hair, rigid with gel, blue eyes, a diamond stud in his left ear. He was the embodiment of the phrase “white youth” when used in a police report. He could steal your car in front of you and you still wouldn’t be able to identify him in a lineup. And yet, by the end of that first Michaelmas term, he was known by all, well loved. Some people can “talk to anyone.” In a context where everybody was trying to be somebody—hoping to impress, developing a persona—his consistency was admired. He spoke the same way to the posh girls, the choral scholars, the nat-sci Northerners, the working-class maths geniuses, the two African princes, the ex–Territorial Army college porters, the Jewish North London intellectuals, the South American Marxist graduates, the lady chaplain, and—when the shit finally hit the fan—to the Provost himself. Part of his appeal was that he offered a vision of college life free from the burden of study. All those fantasies from the prospectus, on which the students had been sold—images of young people floating downstream or talking philosophically in high grass—that life had come true only for Leon. From the stained-glass panopticon of the library, Monica would spot him down there, at his liberty: lying on the Backs blowing smoke into the face of a cow, or in a punt with a crowd of freshers and bottle of cava. Meanwhile, she wrote and rewrote her thesis on eighteenth-century garden poetry. All Monica’s life was work.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the evenings, she was hard at work again, trying to establish if the G-spot was a real thing or an ideological chimera of seventies feminism. With her index finger she could feel, deep inside, a sort of penny-sized raised area, facing outward toward the stomach wall, and the idea was if she sat on Darryl and wrapped her legs around him very tightly and he did the same and they both stayed upright, moved rhythmically and listened to Foxy Brown, then the question might be finally resolved. But Leon was on her mind.

  “Inside these gardens—these formal gardens—they’d have a hermit figure. In a grove, or at the center of a maze. He was real, like a real homeless man, and he just sort of sat there being at liberty, while the house and gardens were all about hard work, about labor and capital. He was the light relief. And I think Leon’s basically like that hermit.”

  “I really don’t want to talk about Leon right now.”

  “And when these posh girls are shagging him, it’s like Lady Whoever coming out of the great house to patronize the hermit.”

  “I think Leon’s more like the Lord of Misrule. Or the college duppy. Him pale like duppy!”

  “Ugh—I’m suddenly too hot.”

  “Gal, you nah know mi like dem fih sweat? You sweat like big woman!”

  “Big Womanist. Seriously, I need to get off—I’m too hot.”

  “I thought we were looking for your secret garden? I was going to write it up for Nancy Friday. You’re letting the side down.”

  A joke, but she still remembered it.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was very important to Monica that Leon get caught. She never said this aloud, or admitted it to Darryl, but she felt it. Despite her youth, she was secretly on the side of law and order. At first, she put her hope in the cleaning ladies—the “Bedders”—but they discovered the subterfuge within weeks and never reported it. Monica walked into the communal kitchen one morning and found Leon sat up on the counter, having a cup of tea with a couple of them, gossiping away, sharing a breakfast fag. Very convivial. All Monica ever got from the Bedders was silence and contempt. They tended to be Irish ladies of a certain age who hated their work, and the lazy, entitled, usually filthy students for whom they cleaned. They did not see why passing a few poxy exams meant anyone deserved to sit around for three years doing what appeared to be fuck all at the taxpayer’s expense. But Monica was very committed to the idea of a meritocracy—it was the fundamental principle undergirding her life. Some part of her always expected any nearby adults to be spontaneously applauding her efforts in all areas. She urgently wanted the Bedders to love her, and to express class allegiance with her, for her own grandmother was a kind of Bedder: she emptied the bedpans at St. Mary’s Hospital. Monica tried very hard not to give these put-upon ladies any extra work or make unnecessary requests. But sometimes it was unavoidable. In the summer term, when the sweet, rotten smell in her room had become impossible to ignore, she timidly asked her Bedder whether she could help solve the mystery of The Smell. Did she perhaps think, as Darryl did, that there might be a dead mouse somewhere in the fabric of the wall?

  “Excuse me, do I look like bloody Columbo?”

  It was different with Leon. The Bedders knew for certain he was absolutely undeserving and for this very reason they loved him. He’d no better marks than their own kids, after all, and yet he was here, and simply by continuing to live in the black fella’s room—and getting away with it—he demonstrated there was nothing special about these stuck-up little twats who thought they ruled the world. They baked him homely treats and advised him on his love life:

  “See, Marlene, the thing is, she keeps turning up at my door. I mean, Darryl’s door.”

  “Well, I heard she’s the second cousin of Princess Diana, if you can believe that.”

  “Posh birds are always the randiest.”

  “They’re certainly the worst behaved. I’ll tell you this: we all think you could do better, Leon, no messing.”

  “Marlene, are you chatting me up?”

  “Oh, go on with you!”

  “You’re old enough to be my mum, Marlene, you do know that?”

  * * *

  • • •

  They were trying a new thing where he came in little white spirals on her chest and then he had to lick it off. More work. But the only thing she gleaned from it was that she liked the idea more than the feeling of cold cum on her chest. And Leon was still on her mind.

  “What are you going to do about him?”

  “About him how?”

  “Sooner or later, he’s going to get caught and you’ll both be sent down.”

  “You’re allowed friends to visit.”

  “He’s been ‘visiting’ for nine months.”

  “Don’t you like Leon?”

  “I don’t like the idea of a young white man dragging a young black man down into the mud. It’s utterly grotesque.”

  “Utterly grotesque” was one of the new phrases she’d picked up in college.

  “‘A young black man’? ‘Hello, I’m Darryl, nice to meet you. I’ll be licking the cum off your tits today.’”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Monica, I wouldn’t be here without Leon.”

  “Oh my God what are you talking about!”

  Then he said something she couldn’t understand.

  “He has faith in me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  She often heard parents comparing their small children to Nazis and fascist dictators but in
her experience the correct analogy was the Stasi, or really any secret police. Their greatest pleasure was informing on each other. Sometimes she would walk into the house after work and a child would fly at her with a passion far beyond affection, lit up with the desire to tell her that the other one had done something terrible. What followed never made sense: automatically she said, “Don’t tell tales,” but then in the next beat requested more information; then, over hysterical protests, had to condemn the act and the reporting of it simultaneously, while all the time pretending that she was an almighty judge who had never in her life either committed a crime or informed on a criminal. But whenever her daughter’s lovely mouth quivered with the almost erotic delight of exposure she was sent back to a memory of herself, with much the same expression on her face, slipping an anonymous note under the Provost’s door.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two days after she did it, Leon was gone. No one knew it was her, and no one suspected, least of all Darryl. He clung to her like she was the life ring, never knowing she’d sunk the ship. She’d imagined of course that he’d be sad about Leon, but it turned out she had not imagined sufficiently. The effect was shocking. He stopped going to lectures, stopped doing much of anything, and refused to accompany her to any social thing, even to the bar downstairs. She began to feel like that government doctor separating Elliott from E.T. He seemed to be withering—his whole world shrank. Now it consisted only of her. Fuck, eat, smoke, repeat. The mouse fumes and the weed fumes and the sex fumes. A day would come when she would wish she had a bottle of that scent, could take a big, fortifying sniff: ah, 1995 . . . But when it was happening it was hideous. He just wanted to be with her, all the time. It was unnatural. If she mentioned a party, he’d lose his temper:

  “Why d’you want to hang out with those people?”

  “Those people are our friends.”

  “We don’t have friends here. These people are from a different world.”

  “It’s the world we live in.”

  “We live in love.”

  But it was ridiculous that they were in love! They were nineteen! What were they going to do: just stay in love all through college and perhaps even beyond, two people who had grown up practically right next door to each other? Just stick it out all the way to the end, à la some pre-Freudian Victorian novel? Thus missing a myriad of sexual and psychological experiences along the way? That was literally crazy!

  “It’s not literally crazy. Mum’s been with Dad since they were fifteen. She had me when she was seventeen!”

  “Darryl, your mum stacks shelves at Iceland.”

  But how had she let that come out of her mouth!

  * * *

  • • •

  In the months that followed their breakup she went to work, collecting sexual and psychological experiences. She spent some time treating a posh girl from Mumbai called Bunny like a muse, but this was less benign: a thick strain of unconscious misogyny ran through it, a cultural residue maybe, but passing specifically through Monica. She shocked herself one night, looking down at her own naked body to get a better view of Bunny, who was presently taking out Monica’s tampon, by the string, with her teeth, while, unbeknownst to Bunny, Monica was thinking: Yeah you take it out. Take it out, you little bitch. Disgusted with herself, she broke it off, in the high-minded, youthful hope that sex and morality might one day perfectly align. Not long after that, she started spending a lot of time in the college bar, holding court, trying to start complicated drunken conversations about cultural theory with willing victims and then “winning,” by immediately disagreeing with anyone who aligned with her, like a knight in chess moving out of a rook’s columnar range.

  * * *

  • • •

  One night, five months later, she saw Leon. It was the night before the college ball, which was to be a sad sort of posh rave, featuring expensive Jungle DJs from London, mostly sourced by Leon and paid for by every Bedder’s favorite sucker: The Great British Taxpayer. In a way, she was happy to see an old friend: she’d had a long, strange day, up to that point. That very morning, she’d risen from Bunny’s bed with a whacking hangover—after an unfortunate bout of drunken, last-people-in-the-bar sex; then, after lectures, she knocked on Darryl’s door, to see if they could “find a way to be friends,” although she knew, even as she was saying it, that this was not the reason she had come. He was stoned: resistance was futile. He giggled in the old way as she played with his nipples, but when it was over he turned icy cold. He went to his desk, sat down totally naked and opened a textbook. She thought it was a gag at first—but no. When she asked if she could hang around, he said: “You do what you like.” She got dressed and let herself out, offering no good-byes and hearing none. That was at five. Since then, she’d been in the bar, drinking vodka and lime, each one taxpayer subsidized and so only one pound twenty. So far, she’d downed six. A little unsteadily she got to her feet and peered through the mullioned windows. It was Leon for sure. Standing next to the rising edifice of the pyramid stage presently being constructed by a small army of builders, right in the middle of the quad. She watched a huge speaker being hauled upright like a statue of Stalin. This must be the expensive sound system Leon himself had convinced the ball committee to secure, back in January, when Leon was still able to attend ball committee meetings. Now the prodigal son had returned. To witness the monument he had built. Also to sell Es.

  * * *

  • • •

  When he walked in and sat down in her booth he had a very serious face. She felt judged, which was her least favorite thing in the world to feel. Did he know? Had he found out somehow? Oh God was it the Iceland thing?

  “Mate, he was in love with you. And you just left him like it was nothing. You know you really hurt him? He was fucking destroyed! And that’s my brother right there!”

  She was astonished. In all the many stories she’d told herself about herself since childhood, the narrative that had never appeared, not in any form, was the one where she had the power to hurt anybody in any way. It was such an alarming sensation and so intolerable to her sensibility that she immediately bought some coke off Leon, did the coke, drank a lot more than she could handle, and flirted like a lunatic. Soon enough she was walking out of the bar with Leon, hand in hand, into the warm air.

  “What are we doing?”

  “Taking back the night. You’re always banging on about it. Feminism. Now we’re doing it.”

  “That’s not what that means.”

  “Follow me.”

  “What about Darryl?”

  He raised his eyebrows, surprised. He had a new piercing in one of them, a little black bar, set slantwise, like the lines Monica drew in the margins of novels, next to the word SUBTEXT.

  “No girl never broke us up, don’t you worry.”

  He held her hand and walked onto the grass. Normally neither student nor nonstudent were allowed to do this, but this evening they passed unnoticed among all the hard hats and orange safety vests. They crawled through a hole in the huge tarpaulin to the side of the stage. Sank down into the mud. She found herself utterly frantic for him.

  “Calm down, calm down. Monica, you ain’t gonner try and put something up me, are you? Cos I’m not about that.”

  “What?”

  And then she remembered. But it was unfair: there had once been a hypothetical conversation about strap-ons in the context of a theoretical conversation about Hélène Cixous. But she didn’t want to penetrate any man, she wanted to subsume them. She felt wounded and annoyingly misidentified. Also, it proved what she’d long suspected: Darryl told Leon absolutely everything.

  “No, I’m bloody not. Come here.”

  From above came the noise of the workers laboring, hammering and nailing, creating surplus value for bloated plutocrats, while down below two anarchists, naked from the waist down, tried to fuck in the middle
of the quad, protected from sight by their tarpaulin mausoleum. Monica could feel a cold trickle of coke going from her nose cavity down her throat, and the sense that this would all work better as anecdote than reality. Nothing fit right, every touch was wrongly placed or timed—she longed for Darryl. She longed for all the people in the world and also for the one person who would rescue her from all this longing. She tried to analyze it. What was the problem? It wasn’t his face or his body or his gender or his class or his race. It was the flow of energy. Incredible. She had only just turned twenty, and yet she had alighted upon the answer everybody had been seeking since the very beginnings of cultural theory—yes, it had fallen to Monica to uncover it. Sometimes the flow is just . . . wrong. There were people to whom you wanted to abase yourself, and people you wanted to abase; there were people you wanted to meet on a flat playing field—which was called “love,” for capitalism’s and convenience’s sake—and people you really didn’t know what to do with. Leon turned out to be in the latter category. She couldn’t work with him. He was surplus value. He represented wealth for somebody, but not her.

  Leon stopped what he was trying to do, rolled off her, pointed to the Kappa trademark on his sleeve and sighed.