Fortunately Deb and I were not particularly concerned with dignity at breakfast.
“All you do is laugh at your own jokes,” said a man sitting opposite us one morning. “It’s the least funny thing in the world.”
We both nearly peed ourselves at the realization that he was completely right.
—
There weren’t many others in College I talked to. There was Pandemos, the College cat, a huge tabby with intermittently friendly tendencies. Students used to feed her scraps of cheese, and put out saucers of milk for her to drink. Pandemos was lactose intolerant. You could usually tell if the vomit in the stairways was hers or a student’s by the quantity. Her presence was calming, though. I’ve heard it said that the reason cats smush their faces up against things is that they are “tagging” them as safe. I don’t know if that’s true but I liked letting Pandemos smush her face against me as she threaded round my ankles in the mailroom, or deigned to let me stroke her fur while she basked on warm stone windowsills in the sunshine. She seemed to care about very little except finding food and the occasional cuddle. She didn’t even seem to mind that about half of what she ate came back out the wrong end of her. Because she was so round and large, it was often speculated that she might be pregnant, but I knew her for years and I never saw any kittens nor any change of shape. I could tell Pandemos anything. She couldn’t have cared less about any of it.
Apart from Deb and Pandemos, I only talked to Gin, really. Or rather, she did most of the talking. Gin was a grad student, an American, working on her philosophy Ph.D., and she spent a lot of hours in the College library. Whenever I had an essay on the go, I did the same. Gin was what Americans call “put together,” in a quiet way, with long light-brown hair and a soft smile. Her outfits and the leather satchel she took everywhere conveyed a scholarly look, in keeping with her bookish tendencies. We sat together round the pine tables in the College’s working library, and we worked.
This library was an entirely different space from the College’s show library, although the one sat right beside the other. The show library was designed by Christopher Wren, and I loved it in a worshipful way. So quiet and cold, a little space out of the world. Its black and white diamond-tiled floor ticked and tocked under my heels, and the sound would bounce up around the book stacks, the shelves adorned with swirled wood carvings and packed with dark ancient spines. Sometimes when the sun was low, the light through the stained glass lit up the books in red and gold, like costume jewellery to the floor’s harlequin outfit. Marble busts of dead white men guarded each aisle, but A. A. Milne’s manuscript for Winnie-the-Pooh sat open in one of the glass cases, and somehow it made me feel a little safer to know that Pooh could make a home in here. Next to Isaac Newton’s notebooks.
You couldn’t talk in the Wren, though, that would have been all wrong. And there was nowhere to work unless you booked a space in advance. It was just a place you could be, like a temple, to stop time from coming at you for a moment. It was mainly used for ceremonies, but was also good for redirecting nosey tourists away from the student bedrooms.
In the working library, Gin and I could talk. When there was no one else around it felt fine to talk in there because we weren’t disturbing anyone except the books, and these books were meant to be disturbed. They weren’t like the beautiful manuscripts in the Wren: they were the working class of books. Cheap, scuffed, replaceable.
“Do you think that Mary who’s lived in a black and white room all her life knows what it’s like to see a red tomato?” She spoke softly and pronounced it tuh-may-doe. Gin liked to run thought experiments past me to see if they made sense, or check if I shared her intuitions about a hypothetical scenario, or ask how she might strengthen a premise in an argument.
“If it turned out that the stuff in our rivers and seas was not really H2O but some other chemical substance, and had been all along, would that stuff still be water?” Wah-durr.
“Suppose one day you promise someone that you’re going to kill your grandma. Is it now wrong for you to refrain from killing grandma, because you’ve promised, and breaking your promise would be wrong? Or is it still wrong to kill grandma because killing is wrong?”
All my grandparents were dead before I was born, but I didn’t say that because Gin wouldn’t have been interested. Gin never seemed to care about what was true, only what might be true, or what would follow from what, or what would happen under what circumstances. I didn’t mind her casual intellectual company-keeping, but I never told her what I was thinking about, and to her credit she never asked.
Gin wasn’t a friend, but she was the kind of person you can say is “a friend” if someone asks. Talking to her I’d sometimes feel that jolt of chemical release in my brain, the one that I think is meant to be a social reward, a signal that I have done something right (or at least well enough) so that my body wants me to remember and do it again. I don’t think the mechanism works properly in me. I don’t like the feeling very much. I can see how it’s supposed to feel nice but it’s also enervating, like a sudden intake of breath. It puts me on edge. I worry that I’ve set an expectation of social competence I cannot live up to.
Also, I don’t think you’re supposed to notice this sort
