Chapter Twenty-Eight #7
Dan has learned to be careful when he talks to Julia. She’s very sensitive and feels things that other people don’t.
‘Oh, good. Thought you were getting grizzly with me,’ she says in happier tones. ‘Whatcha doing?’
‘At work,’ says Dan, which is where he always is, actually. He tried one of those work/life-balance questionnaires in the science block staffroom one day and it turned out he has the private life of someone who thinks introverts take too many social risks.
Except when he’s with Julia.
‘Work!’ says Julia crossly. ‘It’s so boring. Can’t you come out?’ she wheedles. ‘Me and some of the gang had this fabulous idea. Xavier’s aged parents are away, he went to agricultural college, remember? Has to run the family farm. Pigs. How impossibly boring!’
She sounds like one of the posh girlfriends she pals around with. Livia, Dan thinks. Livia comes from money and says things like ‘Gosh’ and ‘Impossibly boring’.
Julia’s still talking.
‘He’s got the run of the house. Outside Cirencester – remember it from his sister’s wedding?
Acres of land, horses, that huge house with mossy portraits on the wall, and it’s perfect for Billy’s band to play.
We’re having a mini-festival indoors this afternoon in the ballroom, but we need to bring our own duvets.
Or at least a hot water bottle! It’ll be a right laugh. ’
Dan can remember the wedding in the vast manor house outside Cirencester quite well. Somebody had overdosed by accident at the after party, an ambulance had whisked them off after Narcanning them.
People who got Narcanned to save their lives were surprisingly aggressive when they came to, all the fun of the drug sucked out of them by their life-saving treatment, it turned out.
Dan had watched it all anxiously. He’d been the one who’d called the ambulance because he was the only
one who wasn’t out of his mind on drugs or a lethal absinthe cocktail called Spiced Green Devils.
Astonishingly, after the ambulance had departed, everyone – well, Julia’s pals – had continued drinking, partying and taking Class As.
Dan had gone to bed alone and yes, it had been Baltic. The overdosed person had survived, but Dan hadn’t heard mention of them lately. Maybe they’d left the scene.
‘I can’t,’ he says gently. ‘I’ve got tutorials this afternoon. I still haven’t finished that paper I’m writing, either.’
‘Please,’ begs Julia.
He’s tempted. But he can’t. He has to work.
Julia does not have a career.
‘Careers are for boring people,’ she likes to say.
‘Except for you, darling,’ she’ll add if they are out with friends.
Dan has two sets of friends, actually. The ones he has himself, which is a very small bunch, mainly college friends who all have careers, ordinary homes, small children if they’re lucky, and who can happily spend an evening discussing a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience or Trends in Biochemical Sciences over a couple of bottles of red in their favourite restaurant.
Julia’s friends are a wilder bunch, many with precarious ways of earning money, some with trust funds and great-aunts with a Lowry or a Dante Gabriel Rossetti just waiting to be inherited. Others with jobs they barely cling on to who live in shared houses and spend every penny on fun.
‘Darling girl,’ he says now.
Julia loves being called a girl. She’s nearly forty now too but doesn’t like to be reminded of it.
‘Darling girl, I can’t come. I wish I could but I’ve got to work now. I could come over tonight,’ he adds, thinking that if he got up early the next morning, he could get a head start on the papers he needs to read for his team of second years.
‘When?’ she asks.
Dan feels his heart lift: it’s going to be OK.
‘Perhaps seven,’ he says, mentally calculating finishing up here, working on his paper for a few hours and then prepping for the lecture.
‘Seven! We’re going now,’ she says in her special voice, the one that sounds as if she’s so disappointed in him. ‘It’s an afternoon thing. You can’t have a festival at night.’
‘I know but I have to work,’ says Dan.
‘You always choose your work over me,’ says Julia faintly. It’s as if she’s so sad, she can barely speak. ‘I don’t know why I stay with you at all.’
She hangs up abruptly and Dan is left in the corridor outside the faculty meeting, from where he can still hear the gentle droning of conversation.
He leans against the wall, catching his breath and feeling the ache in his heart that he so often feels after arguments with Julia.
He loves her so much. They have this shared history that he can’t escape, doesn’t want to escape.
Julia is the light in his life, a dizzying star in a dull firmament. Her mind is not like other people’s minds, full of mortgages and grocery shopping, work tasks and duty visits to aged grandparents. She’s different.
As if a galaxy of suns, planets and stars was contained in that beautiful head, a head crammed full of joy, love, art, ideas, visions that nobody else dared to have.
Julia can recite poetry, declaim whole scenes of Shakespeare, dance to any sort of music, literally anything.
It’s as if there is so much energy and brilliance in her that she can’t live in the ordinary world.
A long time ago, she chose him.
She loves him, too, he knows that. It’s just that she wants a different version of him: the one who is the smartest guy in every room, but who can party at the drop of a hat, who can magic up bottles of vodka or cases of wine whenever she wants it, who has a Lowry in his attic.
But he’s not those things. Never will be.
When she’s mad at him, like now, he gets scared she’ll leave his life – or try to leave life completely. He is never sure which is more terrifying. Life without Julia is unimaginable and yet life—
Dan finds that he’s instinctively breathing deeply to calm himself.
Life with Julia is very, very hard.
A hike will burn this energy off.