Life Read Free

adventures for the wild girl or to invent imaginary conversations. She would simply look up from time to time from her reading, to meet the bright eyes of the other. They would smile at each other. The wild girl vanished at last when Anna was fourteen, which was when her parents had the loft converted and the two girls were able to have a bedroom each. She was not entirely forgotten. It was because of her that Anna, usually so levelheaded, had the curious impression—which she confessed to nobody — that she had invented Ramone Holyrod the night when they first met: called up this mischievous, erratic guardian spirit from nothing and darkness, with a past and circumstances all complete.
    It happened like this. Anna was wandering the campus alone in the middle of the night. This was supposed to be dangerous for a female undergraduate. Anna, accustomed to street life on an inner-Manchester estate where the Rottweilers went around in pairs, saw no reason for alarm. Her sister had been staying for the weekend, sleeping on Anna’s floor; it had been a strain. Her mind was buzzed and bruised from lack of sleep, but either her room or her head was still full of Maggie (still Margaret in Anna’s interior monologue, for old time’s sake), so she had been forced to come out for a midnight stroll. She was trespassing at the Arts end of the campus. Owing to savage prejudice on the part of the planners, the grass was literally greener up here, because there was more of it. The library was here (do they think we can’t read?); and the great beech trees that Anna loved. Light from uncurtained windows and security lights along the paths and roads filled the dark valley, but when she looked away from them the sky above her was cobalt clear and bitten by more stars than you ever saw in inner Manchester.
    She had been stupid enough to confide that she was in love.
    “Do you sleep with him?” demanded Margaret.
    “It’s not like that. We’re friends, we’re in the same…social group, I suppose. He…he isn’t interested.”
    She must learn that you didn’t have to answer those kinds of questions. You could ignore them, or change the subject, or lie. Everybody did it.
    Margaret laughed. “You don’t have to wait for him to be ‘interested.’ Make him an offer. Men will fuck anything, the pigs. Didn’t you see that thing on the news last week, a ninety-three-year-old great grandmother gang-raped by a bunch of thirteen-year-olds? Or something like that. It’s always happening. I don’t mean to be crude, but if she can get some, what is your problem? Offer sex, you don’t have to worry about anything else. He’ll fuck you once, he’ll fuck you twice, he’ll get used to the idea, you become a habit, and bingo!” Margaret waved her white hand in the gloom of Anna’s sleeping cell, spreading the fingers daintily. “The engagement ring!”
    “You’re nuts,” muttered Anna from her bed, wishing to God being drunk made Margaret fall asleep like a normal person.
    “What d’you say?”
    “I’m going to sleep.”
    If Margaret was right about the way things had to be between men and women, then Anna wanted no part of the business. The idea that you could carry on in such bad faith to the point of marrying someone was disgusting. Margaret said they expected nothing else, wouldn’t understand if you were honest. Anna couldn’t believe that the boys, the men, she knew were really like that. Straightforwardness and fair-dealing must be better. It only needed somebody to make the first move. If it was true that human beings were the helpless puppets of their sex hormones, then why didn’t Anna herself have six children by this time? Surely men must be human as well as sexual, same as women? Surely they must be. Suppose Margaret was right? Anna shuddered. Then too bad; she would stay celibate her life long. Can’t play; won’t play!
    Getting married young was crap anyway. When she married—if she married, it wasn’t