Over from the steps that I’m sitting on, there’s a couple lying on the grass, legs entwined, and I really want to throw my coffee over them. Don’t worry, it’s not hot coffee, it’s iced, and I’m slightly fuming they messed up my order because I asked for vanilla not hazelnut, but iced coffee will do the trick here. It would stain and it might wake up these two numpties from whatever love-misted-googly-eye shite they’re invested in.
I think it’s the way she’s talking to him, the way she’s testing him. Do you think I should cut my hair? she says, hands cupped around her face. No, you look better with long hair, he says sweetly. Are you saying I’d look bad with short hair? No, you’d look beautiful with whatever hair. I can’t believe you said that. I was just being honest. Over-honest. Come here. Give me a hug. She leans away from him. He tries to smooth it over by initiating a kiss. She smiles.
For god’s sake, if you want to cut your hair, cut your hair. Do it for you and no one else and yes, he’s right it wouldn’t suit your round face, you’d look like Angela Merkel, but hair grows so, essentially, it wouldn’t be a biggie. And mate, why did you let her do that? Why did you let her make you feel bad for being honest? Don’t let her manipulate you like that. There is no such thing as over-honest. It’s not even a word. You both deserve my iced coffee in your laps. They both notice me gazing over in their general direction and glare at me. I pretend to drink my coffee and throw a bit of my croissant at a pigeon. The pigeon gives me a look. Come on, mate, back me up. He doesn’t care.
It’s been two whole months since I woke up and I want to say things are better but it’d be a lie. My hair is growing so I now look like a hard-ass Charlize Theron in an action movie, and physically my strength is returning with some reluctant thanks to the torture merchant who is Igor. Hey, Igor. I know a club in Mayfair where you could be paid big bucks for the sort of masochism you dole out. However, my memory is still in nowhere land. Mum continues to panic every time I leave the house in case I wander into a field and forget why I’m there but I venture out nonetheless. I mean, I binge-watch (new lingo) the hell out of this new Netflix thing and I spend a lot of time in pyjamas, don’t get me wrong, but I also meander through life. I get on buses and trains and explore my manor because a lot can change in London in ten years and if this is my life now then I need to imprint it into my new Lucy brain.
As it turns out, the brain needs work, the levels need refilling because, when we talk about old Lucy, it turns out she was also a clever clever bitch. I mean, this isn’t a huge surprise as I grafted at school, I was destined for university, but it turns out I liked university and the experience a lot more than the average person and once my three-year degree was finished, I just kept going back for more. The sisters would argue it was so I could be a perpetual student and drink and sleep my way into oblivion for a lifetime but Dad explained it differently. I understood the sheer unpredictability of showbusiness so everything I did was to put me at some advantage, to fill the CV. So now I have all these bits of paper to my name but, unfortunately, none of the remembered wisdom to back them up so it makes sense to come to old university campuses to see if the knowledge can be infused through my bones. Maybe just being within their walls can make me feel all them super smarts again. It can be a chance to observe all these students and imagine myself as one of them.
London was always my city of choice for university. The city is my lifeblood and if I wanted drama, theatre and the arts then that flows through the veins of this place. I went on an open day to Birkbeck with Grace and the grand, historic buildings were slap bang in the middle of swanky Fitzrovia but a stone’s throw from Soho. It felt like a London I wanted to get to know immediately. What would I have been like as a student? I hope I was cool and nothing like this sad case couple in front of me. Maybe I was part of a gang, like the ones sitting over the way. I reckon they are all besties (also new lingo, look how quickly I learn). Or maybe I was the berk lying in the middle of this grassed area, already smoking and reading Proust on his own. Would I have been attracted to the arrogance? I think I’d have liked to have brought him down a peg or two and made fun of his cravat. I sit here with my crap iced coffee, large sunglasses and trainers thinking how I’ve missed all of this and now I’m here like some drunk after the event, trying to recall a time when I lay on this grassy quadrant. Hungover, no doubt.
‘Excuse me, is this the year one philosophy module?’ I ask. A girl turns around to look at me. She seems to have been beamed in from the nineties in wide-leg denim and a tie-dye cropped T-shirt.
‘Yeah,’ she replies, giving me the once-over from tattoos down to trainers. I should have left my iced coffee for her. I know what she’s thinking: How nice! A mature student! They’ve let you in to combat some sort of thirty-something crisis. I’m younger than you. I’m better than you. But yes, with more debt ahead of you and I have the better tits. I don’t say that out loud. Groups of students stand around the lecture theatre waiting to go in and pangs of both pity and sadness dart through me. This feels like it should be me, starting this journey into university and the rest of my life. I bet I was a precocious sod, wasn’t I? I would have strolled in here like I owned the place and put my feet up at the back.
I follow them all into the room and watch as they take their seats, turning off phones and scrambling around with laptops and bits of paper, that whiff of anticipation in the air. I will take notes and then I’ll take on the world with my new biros. The girl I approached before catches my eye to see me not taking anything out of my bag. Yes, us mature bitches just take all that knowledge in without needing to write it down.
‘Morning all. My name is Dr Jill Rigby… welcome to Identity, Mind and Free Will, and a new semester.’
Jill is dressed in wide-leg checked trousers and a black polo neck jumper, with glasses on the top of her head that she reaches up for occasionally to check that they’re still there. She looks up and scans the room as the screen changes above her. When she sees me, she stops and smiles, shaking her head.
‘So, first rules of my lectures, you listen, you write as much as you want, but no technology, no computers, no recording, no mobile phones. If you can’t listen and absorb what I am trying to say then you shouldn’t be here.’
I don’t even have a pen out.
‘What if you’ve done this course before and you’re here for a second round?’ I ask. Everyone looks at each other. Someone asked a question. She didn’t put her hand up first. Don’t ask permission to ask questions. That should be a life rule for you all.
‘Then welcome back,’ she says, looking at me. ‘Just no heckling if you know the answers.’
She studies my eyes. There’s a warmth and familiarity there but her face does not ring any bells bar the fact she looks a little like Rachel Weisz. Are you Rachel Weisz? The thing is, you’re not. You’re Jill and all I know is that I think you helped me realise that I am bisexual.
‘Lucy bloody Callaghan,’ Jill says after the last student has left the room. She comes over and embraces me tightly, a hand tenderly going to the top of my head.
‘Everyone is obsessed by the loss of my hair,’ I say.
‘I was going to say it suited you. Not many people can carry that off.’
‘Why, thank you. The low-maintenance thing is a winner.’
The hum of people behind the lecture theatre door makes her tidy all her sheets and books away from her desk, stuffing them into her bag. It was a successful lecture from what I could tell – the way the students were engrossed and no one seemed to fall asleep. I stayed to listen to how she spoke, how she moved across the room, the tiny ways she’d add inflections at the end of sentences to try and get a low murmur laugh out of the room, the way in which she obviously knew and cared about what she was saying. We were a couple, apparently, for a year when I was at university, and all of it was new, so very new to me at least, so she felt like an important person to meet in the flesh.
‘We can chat outside, it’s sunny. How does that sound?’ she asks. I nod and follow her as we make our way outside the lecture theatre and through the winding corridors of the building, outside into the courtyard I was in before. As we queue for drinks from the outdoor coffee vendor who tainted my last order with hazelnut, she’s quiet with me, I think a little awkward, but not in an Imogen the Fridge way. More that she’s sad, that she doesn’t know what to say.
‘So you’re a doctor now?’ I ask her, trying to break the silence.
She nods.
‘You weren’t a doctor when we met?’
She shakes her head, smiling. ‘When we met you were second year and I was doing my master’s.’ She bites her lip to relive the memory. ‘You were kinda dating Tony.’
‘You knew Tony?’
She laughs and gets her phone out of her bag to show me a photo. ‘Tony was my best man at my wedding, you were there too? We got married round the corner from here and then had a reception on a boat. You and Tony did a Kate and Leo at the bow and had to be restrained for your own safety.’
I inspect a few photos on her phone where I have my mouth open in absolutely every one. We’ll blame the excitement, the alcohol, but also the fact I am a fan of open water. I’m not wearing a bra either, which seemed to be a rule I lived by.
‘I was at your wedding, even though we…?’
‘Lucy, I love you dearly but we were never meant to be a couple. You never wanted that but it didn’t mean we didn’t stay friends. I think Tony helped in that respect. He became a common link between the two of us.’
‘Your wife… she looks nice?’
‘Amelia… she lectures in law. And…’ She scrolls through her phone. ‘These are our boys, Rafe and Xander.’
The family picture in front of me is drenched in happiness and I smile. I don’t even know anyone on that phone but you can tell these people are exactly where they need to be.
‘That’s a beautiful family…’
‘I’m so lucky,’ she says, staring back at her phone.
‘So, just to be frank and open… You were my first lesbian experience? Am I right?’
Jill blushes, looking around her before she answers.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to just come out with it like that…’ I say, trying to backtrack.
‘Well, you wouldn’t be Lucy without the frank and open. Yes… I was your first. And in the interests of frank and open, I was the first person who ever gave you an orgasm through your G-spot…’
‘Really?’ I say. I don’t look round, I don’t care who hears that.
‘That’s what you said at the time. Unless you were lying, you cow bag, but you were always one to speak the truth…’
‘I…I…’ Jill seems surprised by my hesitancy. ‘I’m confused with how and when this developed. You know my situation. Currently, I don’t remember these feelings of being bisexual. I’m trying to get to grips of how and when…’
She roots in her handbag and offers me a sweet. ‘Lucy, there is no handbook on this stuff, of how someone discovers their sexuality and who they are. It’s a pretty private and ongoing process. When I met you, there was just a spark and you wanted to act on it in other ways than just being friends. I’ve been out since my late teens so I guess I held your hand and walked you through it…’
‘And did it end badly?’ I ask, worried I may have hurt someone who obviously cares for me in some way.
‘No, not really. We were at different stages of where we were. I wanted a partner, a family, commitment and you wanted…’
‘Something else?’
‘You’d just discovered your G-spot so you were quite up for finding other people who’d explore that in greater depth too…’
She doesn’t look hurt or disappointed that we never were but I feel an embrace from her, a feeling that we hold each other in some esteem, in some emotion.
‘Can I say something?’ She gestures.
I nod.
‘You look so lost, Lucy. I don’t know why but it’s making me a little sad for some reason.’
‘How so?’ I enquire.
‘The Lucy I knew was so sure of herself and where she was going in life. No one was going to tell you different. Your confidence was like this elixir, it was certainly what attracted me to you.’
I pause as she manages to analyse that so accurately within half an hour of just being in my presence.
‘I’m still me. I’m just… you covered a lot of it in your lecture. I feel I’ve lost a sense of who I ever was: my identity, my mind… I can’t seem to find it. I can’t seem to work out how I got to being that person.’
She takes a large sip of her coffee and puts a hand into mine.
‘It was all through the process of living the last ten years. You don’t just grow as a person overnight. Maybe you need to give it time. You spent the last ten years learning, becoming. It’s why you did so many degrees. You always just wanted to be better. A better actress, a better dancer, you were so driven.’
‘Maybe that’s what’s missing… my drive. I remember having it at seventeen. I just can’t seem to locate it at the moment…’
‘Well, can I do anything? Is there anything you need?’
‘I need my damn memory back, that’s what I want. I want to be me: that Lucy who is supremely confident, who walks up to a man or woman, flirts mercilessly with them and has random liberating sexual encounters.’
‘Have you not slept with anyone since…?’
‘The accident… no. I saw Tony’s penis in a pub though, don’t judge.’
She laughs. ‘I knew that already. The Lucy I knew wouldn’t care for people’s judgement though, she would never have said that at the end of a sentence.’
‘I guess I’m just scared,’ I say, my voice trailing off to admit that emotion out loud.
Jill looks over at me in disbelief at this person before her and I feel sheepish. Lucy Callaghan was never scared, of no person, thing or thought. People describe her to me and I picture her out and about dressed like some sort of female gladiator taking on the world. She was a force of nature. I don’t feel like that very much at the moment. I feel like a low-level earthquake that flips over a few garden chairs, capable of a few tremors but little else.
‘Tony’s back in town next month. You should give him a call.’
‘So we can have sex?’ I say, horrified.
‘So you can have sex with someone who’ll look after you. Have you felt the need/desire since the accident?’
‘I think I have. Tony helped. I’ve buttered my own bagel if you know what I mean?’
She chortles. That feels like a Lucy thing to say.
‘You were always very sexually liberated. You were one of those people not tainted by fear or shame. You did and tried it all.’
‘She sounds awesome.’
‘She is awesome.’
And therein lies the problem. For the past few months I’ve kept looking to this other Lucy as another person, comparing myself to her constantly, thinking I need to live up to her, to become her. Maybe she’s always been there.
‘But maybe going out, having some fun, it won’t help you remember but at least it’ll help you to live in the present rather than reminiscing about a past you can’t remember and you can’t relive…’
When she says those words, my face blanches a bit with an emotion I can’t quite describe. I think everything I’ve done up to this point has been an attempt to turn on the lights again, to find that girl I used to be. But maybe this is it. Maybe I need to accept I’ll never find that house again, I need to build a new one, brick by bloody brick.
‘So you’re saying I need to get shagging?’ I ask.
‘You need to stop walking around this university thinking it’ll bring it all back. Let me help?’
‘With the shagging?’
‘No, silly. But I’d love to help enrol you in a course here maybe. If you need to start from scratch.’
Start from scratch. Would that start here, again? Do I need to find another lesbian to help me rediscover my bisexual side? How does one find that? Tinder? Her eyes shift to the side to the young man I spotted before, reading Proust.
‘He would have been your type, back at uni?’ she tells me.
‘Really, he looks a bit earnest.’
‘You would have shagged that right out of him.’
I laugh and her face relaxes to see someone she remembers. The man in question may be older than his teens, some master’s literature buff. The leather satchel is the redeeming feature, the badly fitting denim is dubious. If we were to hook up then I’d be mercilessly cruel about the cravat.
‘How would I have approached him?’
‘No nonsense. This is me, if you don’t like this shit then you’re missing out,’ she says. I think she may be mimicking my accent. It’s not terrible and, for a moment, I understand why I would have been attracted to her. She’s pretty but it’s cerebral, it’s kind. I reach over and kiss her on the cheek.
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m not sleeping with you, Lucy.’
‘No, for coffee, for explaining that time in my life to me.’
‘We had a lot of fun. There’s a saying that describes you to a tee. You lived your best life.’
‘My sister said the same thing to me.’
‘The sisters. God, you loved those girls, all those nieces. I’d never known anyone who loved their family so much, it made me slightly jealous.’
‘I have nephews now too,’ I reply, getting out photos from our jaunt to Kew Gardens.
‘It was your best feature, how hard and ardently you loved those you cared for. I never felt anything less from you, even as a friend.’
She stops for a moment and finishes the last dregs of her coffee, then turns to her left.
‘Hi, my name is Jill and this is my friend, Lucy, and I was just wondering if you were single?’
What the actual hell? I smile and wave as he gives me the once-over.
‘I’m Pedro and yes, I am single.’
‘Like Pedro the Pony,’ I say.
‘Who?’ he asks.
‘Peppa Pig. I have nieces. Peppa has a mate called Pedro.’
From Jill and Pedro’s quizzical looks, it would seem this is not the angle I should have chosen to prove to this semi-good-looking man that I am cool and sophisticated.
‘Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees,’ I suddenly reel off.
Jill looks at me like my mind is having a small malfunction.
‘Proust,’ I say, pointing to his book. He looks impressed but it’s most likely I can quote that as I once saw it in a hypnotherapist’s office.
‘I watch Peppa and I also read philosophy, it’s a very dangerous combination,’ I say with my most winning smile. He smiles back. ‘Now tell me, Pedro. What brings you to Birkbeck? And let’s talk about that cravat…’