The Lessons

by Naomi Alderman

  As term drove on, my weekly telephone calls to my parents became ever more brief. Yes, I told them, the knee was healing well. It wasn’t. The thing the doctors had feared had come to pass. I could walk on it reasonably much of the time, but any attempt to run brought back the glacial, nauseating pain. And they had shaken their heads further, to tell me that although I might expect a little more improvement I would not, no, I would not run again. Yes, I told my parents, I had mostly caught up with the work I had missed; I might just have to stay up a little longer than planned at Christmas to finish things off. I hadn’t caught up; each week that went past, I slipped lower in the class rankings. And yes, I said again, I was making friends. I wasn’t. My injury had isolated me. Or, it would be more accurate to say, my injury hastened the isolation I myself had encouraged.

  For this is the heart of the matter: disasters occur where accidents meet character.

  Here’s the truth: two inexplicable things occurred, one outside me and the other within. My knee was shattered, my work disrupted, my understanding fractured. No action of mine could have prevented this. But then. Well. Let me be very clear. I could have worked, as I’d told my parents I would. I could have buckled down, pulled up my socks, rolled up my sleeves and made all the other sartorial adjustments that indicate determination of mind. I could have regained my place somewhere in the middle of the physics pack. I say I ‘could’ in the certain knowledge that this action wasn’t beyond me. And yet … it was beyond me.

  Term came to an end and I remained in Oxford. I told myself every morning, ‘Today I must work,’ and sat at my desk or took my books to the library. And did not work, but stared at the page with a mist in front of my eyes, unable to concentrate for fear of not being able to concentrate, hating myself so intensely that I was forced to twist my right leg out violently, to be erased by the all-engulfing, stereoscopic, clean white pain. Sometimes I sat in the stale JCR, staring at the television. At other times, I told myself I needed a quick nap, and woke hours later, groggy and confused, a headache pulsing in my eyeballs. I did not understand why I behaved as I did.

  Things would have been different, I told myself, if Guntersen had gone home along with the other students. In fact, I was waiting only for him to leave and then I would begin work. But he sat day after day in the almost-empty library, remorselessly working. I became paranoid. Guntersen had clearly only stayed in Oxford because he knew I was waiting for him to leave, to stop me working. Emmanuella began to accompany him to the library. They sat in the central well, clearly visible from the gallery, where I took my position. They were side by side, heads bent over their books, breaking off occasionally for a variety of kisses, which I began to categorize. The quick affectionate peck as if to say ‘here I am’, the triumphant hug-and-kiss at the end of a section of work, the long voluptuous embrace which was often followed by an hour’s absence from the library and a shower-damp, flushed return.

  At times, they were joined by friends. Guntersen’s friends: other members of the college rowing team. Or Emmanuella’s friends: the woman in the red sweater, her long straight hair brushing her music notation paper as she hunched over it; another woman, short and large-bosomed with corkscrewing spirals of curly hair and a pair of serious black glasses.

  Emmanuella’s friends passed notes to one another on slips of paper torn from their notebooks, read them, smiled and returned to work. Once, they left one of these tiny notes on the table. After I was sure they would not return, I walked stiffly down to the lower level and picked up the scrap of squared paper. On it were written two sentences. The first, in Emmanuella’s flowing hand, said, ‘Mark doesn’t think he is.’ The second, in staccato, spiky handwriting, said, ‘Well then, it must be true.’ I kept it, between the pages of my own unused notebook.

  So there was no escape. Either Guntersen and Emmanuella were with friends, or they were alone. If alone, either they were kissing, or they were working. Either I was in the library, watching them, or in my room, drowsily coming to rest over my work, head swimming. I tried walking but could not go for any distance before the pain returned, at first soggy – a filmy mist of discomfort – and then, if I went on, whip-sharp, teeth and claws. I tried sitting in other locations around the library, but then I simply imagined what they were doing, picking up on tiny sounds and suggestions to weave a writhing erotic tableau.

  It was three weeks to Christmas and then two weeks, and soon it would be absolutely time to leave and my work was vile to me. I found more and more that I could not even think of it, that my mind glanced off as I tried to approach it. I would, I knew, have to go home soon. My parents would insist on my ‘resting’. And no work would be done as no work had been done and then, and then … But I could see no further than this, the terror was too immense.

  It was Sunday, two weeks before Christmas. At 4 p.m. the sky was already darkening over Gloucester College, dark-painted clouds on an ink-wash sky. The lamps had been lit around Chapel Quad, pools of weak yellow against the ancient stones. My knee was hurting again, a gnawing pain that faded in and out of my conscious mind, grasping the joint in its strong jaws, relaxing the pressure and then applying it again. I had thought I would use the telephone in Chapel Quad to call my parents, to tell them I was ready to come home. Instead, I sat on one of the benches and wrapped my fleece around me. White-cold wind set the pain in my knee thrumming like a metal cord. If I didn’t call now, then what? And then what? I couldn’t see. The future had shrunk away from me, days contracting to hours, hours to minutes. The fingers of my hands were very white, the nail beds pale blue-purple.

  I wanted … I wanted … But I did not know what to want. I wanted to be a child again, for my own desires to be unimportant, to be taken up into greater arms than mine and not need to think. Was it then that the music struck up? Can it really have been just then? Or was it that I only noticed it then? Notes splashed on my inner ear, bursting in fat droplets. And I noticed that the chapel lights were on. A service was in progress, some part of Advent. Notes rising and falling and a choir singing and all the memory of Christmas carol services leapt upon my heart. I stood up and limped into the chapel.

  The choir sang ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’. I took an empty seat at the end of one of the rows and listened with the kind of intensity I had never before known for music. The two simple lines of melody conversed with each other, a simplicity of constant joy beneath the rising and falling of speech. Each note, each leaping phrase, was addressed to me only – a message of hope, an acknowledgement of despair. It was a pulse, soft and sustained; it was a word of consolation for the echoes of existence. It was the beauty that might contain truth.

  And then it was over, and there was silence and a shuffling of prayer books and a muttering as a new reader walked to the lectern, ready to deliver one of the Advent lessons. I found I could not bear this. The music might have contained truth, but these lessons never would, for me, and so it was all revealed a lie. And my knee hurt and my fear rose, and nothing had been resolved.

  ‘Hello,’ whispered a woman’s voice next to me.

  I looked, and saw that I had sat down next to that girl, the friend of Emmanuella’s, the girl who seemed always to be wearing a red sweater. Her eyes were clear blue-grey, and she looked at me directly.

  This, this was the chance I’d waited for. Here, if I said the right things, I could enfold her into my life, and wrap myself in hers, in the Oxford life I had somehow missed. Fear and panic engulfed me again, that I would not find those right words. Before I could reply, she spoke again.

  ‘I’ve seen you. In the library. You’re one of Ivar’s friends, aren’t you? Aren’t you James? I’m Jess.’

  And, to my own surprise and horror, I began to cry.

  3

  First year, December, tenth week of term

  The service was soon over, with a collective mutter and closing of prayer books. The tears that rolled silently down my cheeks had ceased, for the moment, and I scrubbed at my face with my swe
ater sleeve. Jess, looking at me kindly, said, ‘Hey, do you want to come back to my room? For a cup of tea?’ and I knew it was pity, though the Kendall in me winked and nudged me in the ribs. I felt raw from the bone-heart to the skin. I had not known I was lonely; it had been so all-engulfing as to be invisible.

  Jess’s room was smaller than mine but warmer. The quality of the light was different, yellow not blue. A half-full suitcase was on her floor, her wardrobe open for the packing. She busied herself boiling the kettle, finding tea bags, running to the communal fridge in the hall for milk. I sat on her desk chair, sniffed and wept some more and hated myself and apologized and she said, ‘Don’t apologize,’ and I apologized again.

  I said, ‘I don’t usually do this, I never, never, I …’

  She placed a warm mug into my hands and said, ‘It’s fine. Tell me what’s up.’

  And, in gulps and gasps, I told her.

  There was a relief in it, pouring out everything, from the shame of the tutorial to the humiliation of Anne’s instructions, from Kendall’s tea-breath to the girl I had seen but could not possess. I did not tell Jess who that unpossessable girl was, this was my one privacy, a tinfoil shield over the centre of my heart. But Jess smiled when I mentioned her and I knew that she had guessed.

  I did not know I had so much to say, so many words stored up. As I spoke, she folded her clothes and slowly filled her suitcase. Nothing I said seemed to shock her. There was a pleasing precision to her movements. When she sat, she crossed one ankle over the other, or tucked one leg under her. When she walked, it was concise and purposeful. I liked this. I liked watching her move.

  At one point she said, ‘I have a friend who says that Oxford is hell. Perfect hell without redemption. But the people make it heaven.’ She tipped her head to one side as if easing stiff muscles in her neck.

  I looked around her room. It did not seem to me the room of a person whose experience of Oxford was hell. She had a teapot decorated with multicoloured polka dots, pictures of her friends and postcards were stuck in the frame of the mirror, Christmas cards were arrayed on her bookshelves, a violin case sat on a chair by her music stand, there were neatly labelled lever-arch files stacked by her desk and various fliers for concerts and theatre productions pinned to the board. It looked to me to be a full life, and an ordered one, a purposeful one. An Oxford life, as I had imagined it.

  She began to take the books from the shelves.

  ‘I think I’ll leave the stuff on the walls till last. It’s horrible seeing naked walls, isn’t it?’

  I thought of my own bare room, the tangle of unwashed laundry, the half-pint of soured milk by the bedside, the work which chattered and muttered at me from the desk.

  She said, ‘We all have blue days. I have them too.’

  I imagined her blue days. Days when she might need to talk to a friend, or read a novel, or treat herself to a chocolate. Blue, I wanted to say, is a different colour to black. But already I was a little afraid of frightening her off.

  She knelt on the ground and leaned forward, rolling a poster into a tight tube. Her jumper rode up, exposing a slice of freckled back. I could not help staring. They were real, those freckles. This girl seemed more real to me than anything in the world. More real than my terror, more real than my ambition, more real than my fantasies of Emmanuella. I remembered how it felt to want something real. Something that might be within my grasp.

  At 1 a.m. her packing was done. Files were tidily stacked in plastic bags, the wardrobe was empty, the bookcases cleared. Only her bedclothes and toothbrush remained.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for keeping me company. I’m really grateful, you know! I only stayed up for the Christmas concert; everyone else went home yesterday.’

  I looked at her, aware I should say something, unable to find anything more to say.

  ‘Still, time for bed now.’

  I nodded and went to scurry away, and she smiled and said, ‘Come back here a moment.’

  And I thought, this is fast, too fast, but my heart was thumping and I thought, yes, just take me with you wherever you are going, I don’t need my life any more, I will take yours. I bent towards her, expecting an embrace, uncertain what might happen next, waiting for her lead. She kissed me chastely on the cheek.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘are you busy over the break? After Christmas, I mean?’

  ‘No.’ One or two friends from school had written to me, hoping to meet up. I hoped fervently never to see any of them again.

  ‘Only a few of us … well, one or two of us, well. It’s nothing exciting, we’re just getting together in someone’s house, in Oxford. And I thought you might like to. Well.’

  Some look must have passed over my face. A shadow of something uncontrollable.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s nothing strenuous, not with your –’ She motioned to my knee but then grimaced. ‘Now I’ve said the wrong thing.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not. Not at all. I’m free, I’d love to.’

  ‘Oh good.’ She grinned again. ‘Emmanuella said she thought you were nice and look how …’

  ‘Oh.’ I gulped and swallowed and said, ‘Is Emmanuella coming too?’

  ‘Sadly not.’ Jess smiled. ‘She’s in Spain for the break.’

  ‘And … Guntersen?’

  Jess laughed.

  ‘God, no. Mark can’t stand him. To be honest –’ Jess lowered her voice – ‘I think Emmanuella’s starting to be of the same opinion. Sorry, I know he’s your friend, but –’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly, ‘he’s not my friend.’

  ‘Oh.’ A pause, and then, ‘So there’s nothing to worry about.’

  We exchanged home addresses and phone numbers before we parted, written in blue ballpoint on torn-off corners of paper from her notebook. I held hers in my hand and stared at it, admiring the curl of her rounded letters: the fat s, the jaunty j. She smiled and yawned and stretched.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk next week.’

  I stood dazed at the top of her staircase. The stairs swam before my vision, my eyes defocusing uncontrollably. I prepared to wince my way down the staircase, sighed and gasped and waited for redemption and realized it had already come to pass.

  In the morning, my pain came in dull twinges, like a blurred telegraph signal nagging and then falling silent and nagging again. I woke early and sat in bed, with the blankets tented over my one good knee, the other a thickened mound by its side, as the dawn slowly revealed the room. At 8 a.m., without thinking too hard or for too long, I limped down the staircase and into Chapel Quad. The quad was deserted, the flagstones mossed up with frost. I placed the foot of my crutch with care, glad I had brought it, and thought again, with an echoing flutter in the centre of my being, that I would always be afraid of falling now.

  It was early to call but my parents are early risers.

  ‘It’s time to come home,’ I said. ‘Can you pick me up tomorrow? Or Wednesday?’

  ‘Oh!’ said my mother, a half-mocking half-laugh behind her words, ‘you’re not staying there for Christmas after all?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Have you finished your work?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I’m finished.’

  I wondered and worried over when might be the right moment to call her. Not too soon, for fear of being too demanding. But not too late, for fear of seeming uninterested. But she telephoned me first. It was Boxing Day and there had been dinner the day before with Anne and Paul and talk of Major and Heseltine and the threat from the Liberal Democrats. Anne had asked searchingly about my work, the societies I had joined, and seemed only partially mollified by my mother’s explanation about my knee.

  ‘Next term,’ she said. ‘Hilary term is when it all kicks off. You have to be ready.’

  Later that evening, the telephone rang.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘it’s Jess. Do you remember me?’

  ‘Yes, of course I …’

  There was laughter i
n the background, a man’s voice.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’m driving to Oxford the day after tomorrow, almost past you. It’d be no trouble. Do you want to be rescued?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered into the telephone. ‘Yes, I do.’

  She picked me up in an elderly estate car. My parents, grateful to see me with a friend, a girl, had been over-enthusiastic, winking and smiling. We bundled my bag into the car and left as soon as we could.

  ‘I’m sorry about them,’ I said.

  ‘If we’re going to get on,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to stop apologizing.’

  ‘Oh, I –’

  ‘Don’t do it.’ She was smiling, still looking at the road. Her lips were pressed together hard and I could see a dimple in her left cheek.

  ‘I … what?’

  ‘Don’t apologize for apologizing.’

  ‘I … um …’

  ‘What?’

  I furrowed my brow. The conversation seemed to have escaped from me rather more quickly than I’d hoped.

  ‘I’m just, well. I don’t know what to say now.’

  She grinned. We were nearing a red traffic light. As the car came to a halt she leaned towards me and kissed my right cheek, then turned back to her driving.

  ‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you tell me how your Christmas was? How were the dreaded Anne and the leech-like Paul? Did you get any good presents? Any good arguments?’

  And so I did.

  I noticed something on that drive that continued to be true for as long as I knew Jess. Her presence calmed me, like a soothing hand in the centre of my chest bringing quiet to every muscle fibre and threaded sinew. Infatuation cannot last, and even love may be less certain than I’d once hoped, but this essential quiet, the stillness she brought to me, that lasted. Mark said to me once, ‘She’s like God to you: she inexplicably calms inexplicable fears.’ And in this, as in so much, he is irritatingly right.