My room was on the second floor, and very plainly appointed. It was just big enough for a single bed, a small armchair, a wooden desk, and a three-shelf bookcase. The armchair was red, but there was no other colour. The entrance was from a long corridor of similarly plain-looking doors, though behind most of them, I eventually discovered, were rooms much larger than mine with nice views over the street. My window looked straight into a wall but I didn’t care. I loved that room. It was mine, at least for the academic year.
A few feet away was a shared bathroom with three cramped shower cubicles and a well-worn plastic tub. Each of these ablution stations offered only a clammy, clinging white curtain for privacy, and because the entire room was lit by a single fluorescent light, pulling one’s curtain across meant shutting out most of the light. Besides this, the corridor offered two tiny toilets at each end, and one “gyp room,” a basic mini-kitchen of the kind suitable for people who either can’t be bothered to cook or shouldn’t be allowed to. I tried to stay out of all these common areas as much as possible.
The piano rooms were a short walk away, near the chapel. They were in a bright open space which felt all wrong, so I never used them. Instead, when the weather was good, I took my tiny harp and busked opposite the Great Gate. I had always wanted a beautiful concert harp, but they cost thousands of pounds. For my eighteenth birthday, my aunt had saved up a couple of hundred to buy me a tiny clarsach that sat on my knees. I fell in love with it even before it became a way to feed myself. When a day of busking went very well, I could even afford a bottle of cheap wine from the Sidney Street Sainsbury’s. And it went well pretty often. Tourists come to Cambridge looking for magic, so they loved me and my pretty instrument nestled into the cobblestones, filling the little streets with plaintive folk songs and slow slip jigs. Wistful ghosts of a sonic past that might or might not have been real. It didn’t matter, it was worth a couple of quid either way.
Occasionally, passing men stopped to sketch me as I played, leaving their sketches in my case in lieu of money. I mostly found this annoying. I did quite like one of the pictures, a soft and fuzzy pencil sketch with the stone wall of the College behind me. I kept it on the top shelf of my bookcase in Hermes Court. In another I was depicted naked, with bushy pubic hair and one misshapen breast almost as large as the harp on my lap. I threw that horrible picture away at once, and yet I can still see it to this day. I have no choice. One man’s shitty image of me, grimly installed in my mind forever. Like it’s his own personal gallery space.
Once, as I walked back to my room with my case full of coins, a rich kid stopped me. I recognized him as someone who lived on the corridor above mine in Hermes Court. But we’d never spoken.
“Hey! Why are you jangling?”
I showed him.
“Oh, you were the busker! Thought I could hear something. Very…pretty.”
He meant the music. I think.
“Must have been a good day, for you to be jangling like that.”
I said yes, it was, and we started walking together towards the door that led up to our rooms.
“So, after you collect it, do you donate all that money to charity?”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just walked away from him. That was the end of our one brief attempt to get to know each other.
The rich kids didn’t understand I wasn’t from their world. Or perhaps they just didn’t care. Cambridge had its own infinite spaces that contained such things for them. They call it “the bubble”—a pocket of airlessness, timelessness, unreality. Without oxygen, nobody can really breathe, but nothing can decay either. There’s a lamppost halfway across Parker’s Piece known as “Reality Checkpoint.” The name is scratched into the iron—whitish-grey letters scored out through bottle green paint. If you walk by this in the mist, it can be unnerving. By legend, it’s supposed to mean you are now leaving the Cambridge bubble—the “normal” world lies beyond. Town not gown.
The real joke is that nobody ever checked anything, there or anywhere else.
—
Deb was a rich kid. Not that we were kids anymore, I suppose. I met Deb in the second week of term, looking lost in the street behind the side entrance to the College, and I recognized her from our first lecture with Dr. Humberton. She’d annoyed me—and, I assume, everyone else—by asking questions that seemed to have nothing to do with the lecture. I’d hated her voice, and how slowly she talked, as if all the time belonged to her by default.
But for some reason I felt like I ought to help. This feeling was unfamiliar.
“Uhm, hi,” I said, approaching awkwardly. “Heading to lecture?”
“Oh…” she said, looking around her. “Yeah…no. Sure.”
Ugh.
“Yeah you are or yeah you aren’t?” I tried.
“Sure,” she said, as if deciding only at this second effort, and even that was provisional.
So we went together, across the river that never seemed to move, towards the red-brick library—at this stage we were still too polite to talk about why it was shaped like a big red phallus—and round behind it to the raised building where most of our lectures took place.
Deb wore pink. Always. She liked to
