Aubrey always wanted to do the thing she wasn’t doing. “What’s the use of sociology, really? It’s fucking people skills, isn’t it?” she’d moan. She’d want to go back to the beginning and try English literature, or run her fingers over her face and say it should’ve been biology, or even music. She played acoustic guitar every day, singing hoarse and husky country songs about love and firemen and French toast. She’d sometimes say they were her own songs and then laugh at me for believing her. But she’d often leave notebooks open on the coffee table scrawled with black-inked lyrics, covering everything from her ex-boyfriend’s sexual habits to the texture of her favourite cheese (always brie). I’d sometimes sing along, mumbling old mantras to her new tunes.
Renting a two-bedroom flat wiped out our student loans almost straightaway, so we engaged with the world through TV. In choosing between diluting our dynamic with more students or poverty, we chose poverty. Together, we guffawed at the ridiculousness of made-for-TV movies, pointed and gasped at old nature documentaries, and watched the news the day the National Health Service publicly signed with a private institute to make up for lost funding. I can still remember bits of the NHS Chief Executive’s speech, spoken with sad eyes and quivering chins. “Today, we mark our professional honesty by opening our doors to innovation,” followed with something like, “We are in a needs-must scenario. Life has been handed an eviction notice. This contract,” here he gestured at the paper he’d signed, “will save lives. Design. Inventiveness. Entrepreneurialism. This is what will save the NHS. We all deserve to be saved.” And then the head of an unnamed private institute, a clean-shaven man in tweed who looked too young to be there, stepped up to the microphone.
Aubrey looked at me then, a lock of yellow hair between her teeth. “Isn’t he the one who makes the squirrels?”
The man in tweed smiled down at the press. “Not only are we committed to restoring the National Health Service to its former glory, but we’re committed to sharing our resources to a better end. So each man, woman and child born today enters a world where they can win.”
It all seemed like the sort of stuff that happened to other people. I’d never even had a broken bone. Though I would never have admitted it to Aubrey, I was still a child, soft and sticky. There was nothing in me that wanted to win any race. Happiness was on the sofa, raising an eyebrow at satirical soap operas and eating cheap pizza. The future could wait.
Aubrey was more outward-looking; she’d already planned out several lives for herself. In typical me-style, I hadn’t fixed my mind on anything, but it didn’t worry me. Loads of my other friends were in a similar position, and even though they never said it aloud, I could tell they half-willed their parents to absorb them into their businesses. An easy life with instant monetary payback.
I played with the idea of moving back home after finishing, doing a bit of painting with Mum, helping her with her equipment on trips to far-flung landscapes. When I told Aubrey about it she started to imagine herself enacting them too.
Even before she met Mum, she loved the idea of her and her big red hair and ability to swear in French, German, and Chinese. The first time Aubrey came home with me, she was so quiet and red-faced that Mum asked what I even saw in her – so sure was she that I’d latched on to the first person who was nice to me. But like a sunflower Aubrey soon followed the light, even playing her guitar one night in the garden. Mum sang along with made-up words in an order that didn’t make sense and slapped her bare knees to an irregular beat, always with a smouldering cigarette clipped between her fingertips. It was hard to be embarrassed for her when she was having a far better time than anyone else. Mum always did have this uncanny ability to make you embarrassed about your own normality.
That was the night we stayed out in the dark and thought we saw a vole, burrowing through Mum’s back fence towards the bog which used to be a river. We stood around it like three mountains, not breathing, holding on to each other to be still. It had wedged itself between two stones, flicking its tail up and out of the crack like a tentacle.
“Is it still alive?” I asked. “It doesn’t look right.”
Mum leaned in, hacked up a ball of phlegm, and pointed a stubby finger at the tail. “It’s not natural. Look, the line up the tail.” She stood up straight and coughed into her palm. “I know they’re doing it to repopulate, but any idiot can tell they’re not the same.”
Between second and third year I earned a few extra pounds working in a café in York, mostly spilling drinks and charging the wrong prices, so I didn’t go home all that much. I spoke to Mum on the phone, of course, but my attention was elsewhere and frankly so was hers. Our calls ended quickly, and our conversations often dried up before they began. It had always just been the two of us, but now I was enjoying my freedom. As the phone
