Black

My name is Carrie. It’s actually Catharine but I’ve been Carrie for as long as I can remember. Some wankers at one of the schools I attended went on and on about some old film. One in particular kept sticking his acne ridden aspect in my face, asking me if I was going to visit terrible retribution on the school. (I streamed the film. Impressive. If only.) He stopped after I punched him in the nose. Unfortunately, it did rather cement my reputation as loner psycho bitch from hell. It was a label that followed me around.

I’ve changed schools regularly since I was in Year 7 as my mother moved for work. I’ve been sniggered at in Edinburgh for my accent, dismissed in Leeds as a ‘softy Southerner’ and spent a very uncomfortable eighteen months in Belfast being a ‘Brit’.

I’m the youngest of five. There’s Adrian (nine years older), John (seven years older) and Lisa and Marie. How much older the girls are is a moot point. They were both stillbirths. Mum was determined to get a girl, so she kept trying until she got me.

And I’m clever. Very, very clever. You might have thought my mother would be pleased to have an intelligent child. Instead, she seemedto view me with mild irritation. Being exceptional meant I needed more of her attention.

When I was nine, Adrian went to university (Bristol, engineering) and then, when I was eleven, John disappeared off to the Sorbonne. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t do data science at Imperial, but apparently, he preferred the sophistication of Paree … They quickly evolved into strangers. I mean they were still family in an abstract sort of way but their lives, their manners, their conversation was so different that their occasional visits home were unsettling.

Dad was somewhat the same. He was a freelance reporter, often abroad for long periods. He’d come back with colourful stories about his experiences and appear to be hugely relieved to be home but after a few weeks he would become restless. He’d groan at a new assignment, but it couldn’t mask his eagerness to be away. I’d get a hug and a ruffle of my hair and then he’d be gone again.

So, from the age of 11 I was pretty much on my own in the house. I changed schools too often to make friends. What I learned instead was transit omnia.

We were back in Islington in the spring of 2012, six months before I was due to start university, and Mother sat me down at the breakfast bar. She was almost vibrating with excitement.

“It’s an ideal break. You’ve not started college, so it won’t be too much of a disruption to your education.”

“Where to this time?” I asked, but she’d already left the room.

Two weeks later we moved out of London so that she could take a job at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Not the dreaming spires one. The other one. The one with the iconic chapel, sometimes referred to as the ‘inverted sow’ on account of the small spires evenly spaced in rows either side of the roof between the eastern and western ends of the building. Use your imagination.

It was quite an important job. Vice something or other. All it meant to me was even more time on my own - not counting the housekeeper, Mrs Skinner, or Joe, the gardener - in a vast empty palace of a house. “Got to have a place that reflects my status,” said Mother breezily.

Dad wasn’t terribly pleased, mainly because she hadn’t told him about any of this. I then discovered that one of the virtues of a big house was that you could go to a part where the row was barely audible.

He was gone again within a few days. Beirut or Kampala, I forget which. Chauvinism, right?

I didn’t exactly have friends in Islington, acquaintances perhaps, but I didn’t know anyone at all in this little conurbation; this small city that you could walk across in a couple of hours. Walk or cycle, because the tangle of tiny streets and arcane road restrictions made use of a motor vehicle at best unwise and at worst a test of one’s sanity. Behind the wheel, Mother swore like a trooper, which I found very entertaining.

I wafted through the summer like a zephyr, barely existing at all. The library was my sanctuary. It must have come with the house because Mother never showed much interest in learning per se other than what was necessary to get ahead. If the house was a palace, the library was its treasury; its gold expressed in the embossed leather bindings. I ingested the library, countless hours adrift on a tide of words.

When I wasn’t reading, I walked, more for something to do than actual exploring. The river path was the best - if slightly hazardous due to cyclists and runners. But out of town, past the bridge for the dual carriageway and into the tranquil silence, the placid river a mirror for the vast skies of the fens, it was possible to imagine myself the last person alive.

But I digress. You’re probably not interested in all that metaphysical stuff. The most important things to know about me are not my pixie-ish looks but my brain and my attitude. I take no shit.

An incident from my sixth form days sticks in my mind. I was sitting on the low wall beside the tall beech hedge between the art block and the teachers’ car park. From the other side I could hear the nasal tones of Mrs Pritchard the Science teacher and the smooth RP of Miss Turner the Head of Humanities.

“What do you make of Carrie Fuller?”

“Terrifying.”

Behind the beech hedge I grinned.

“She’s far cleverer than she lets on, that’s for sure.”

“Too smart for the slutty ones, too savage for the bright ones.”

“Wow, that’s a bit harsh, but not one that’s out to win hearts and minds, that’s for sure.”

Unseen by either, I nodded furiously.

“Fly high or crash and burn?” asked Miss Turner

Crash and burn! What did they think I would do?

“Maybe both,” offered Mrs Pritchard

“Both? How so?”

“Go nova.”

They laughed and on the other side of the beech hedge I frowned. Go nova, eh?

University was … disappointing. When I say disappointing, it lived up to all my previous experience. When I was younger, I’d hoped that every time I went to a different school, things would be different. They weren’t. The same happened when I was placed in a higher ability group. I hoped that because they were cleverer, they would be more like me. I discovered that good and bad personality traits are distributed just the same among those with generous raw IQ as they were to everyone else. As the French say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. And university was no different.

I found most of my peers vacuous and I determined to avoid them. However, some of them were equally as determined to network. I’m still not entirely sure how, but in my first week I was making a cup of coffee in the communal kitchen when the subject of mobile phones came up. I was staring out of the window where a shower was painting the glass with raindrops. Away in the distance I could see sunshine on a tower block. Perhaps there would be a rainbow. Perhaps.

Behind me, Rachel, one of my neighbours in the residence, was proudly showing off her new Samsung Galaxy to some girl from another residence. She then asked, “What phone have you got, Carrie?”

It took me a moment to parse what she’d said because a) I wasn’t expecting to be included in the conversation and b) it wasn’t a subject I ever thought about.

“I don’t use one,” I said shortly.

There were exclamations of incredulity and some giggles.

“I don’t understand. Why don’t you have a phone?” Rachel said, her forehead wrinkled as she grappled with the impossibility of the idea.

“Oh, I’ve got phones,” I said, still staring absently out of the window. “Mother bought me a Motorola for my tenth birthday and then an iPhone when I was sixteen.” The phone was still in its box towards the back of the desk in my room at, um, home. It was out of the way but still clearly visible, the cellophane wrapping still intact.

“Right!” she said happily, the universe returning to the default state. “I’ll friend you on Facebook.”

“I’m not on Facebook.”

“Christ, don’t tell me you’re still on MySpace!”

“I’m not on anything.”

There was the gentle sound of neurons shorting in her frontal lobes. “But I thought you said you had a phone!”

I sighed and turned to face her. “You didn’t listen to what I said to begin with. I said, ‘I don’t use one’, not that I don’t have one.”

She stared at me. “Then how do you know what’s trending?”

I shook my head, skirted the table and left them in baffled silence.

I’m going to sound like a terrible elitist and that’s not an unfair observation because I am one. However, I respect individuals that punch above their weight and, recognise me for what I am. One of those was Marianna Petropoulos. In a tutorial in the second week of term, we started arguing and she fought me to a standstill that left most of the class open mouthed, mainly because they hadn’t a clue what we were talking about. The postdoc that was supervising gave an ironic slow handclap when we fell silent, breathing hard and glaring at each other.

On the way out, she fell in beside me. “I’m right you know.”

“Like fuck you are!” I retorted.

“Buy you a coffee?”

I gave her the side-eye. “Yeah. Alright.”

While she waited in line for the coffee, I looked her up and down. She wore a denim waistcoat over a faded black Nirvana tee shirt and a plaid skirt. Footwear was Doc Martens of course. On closer inspection the black leather was embossed with roses. If they were supposed to convey some kind of message, I didn’t know what it was. It was an interesting ensemble that spoke more about what was to hand when she got dressed than of any concern for fashion.

A mass of wavy brown hair was tied back from her face, although a couple of unruly strands danced like bangs beside her temples. She had fierce, intelligent, hazel eyes and lovely even white teeth. I guess ‘handsome’ was more appropriate than ‘pretty’ as a description, but who could fail to be captivated by the way she talked. Her hands were everywhere, punctuating and elaborating her conversation. I was quite mesmerised. However, our paths only crossed in the one lecture each week and she lived some distance away and … before too long, my defensive utilities pushed her into the category of occasional acquaintance.

I had no idea of Mother’s net wealth until Tiffany (one of Marianna’s hangers-on) squawked at it when I got it out to pay for a round of drinks after we’d been to see the fireworks.

“That’s a Coutts card!”

I looked at her in surprise while the barman plucked it out of my fingers to put it into the card machine.

“So?”

“I didn’t know you were rich!”

“Neither did I,” I said dryly.

She continued to splutter for a few moments then her mouth clapped shut. I noticed she kept stealing glances at me while we sat at the long table in the back room of the lounge bar.

In the weeks afterwards she made some embarrassingly awful attempts to ingratiate herself with me. Unfortunately, I considered Tiffany to be as dumb as a rock and cared not a whit that I snubbed her mercilessly. It even earned me a rebuke from Marianna.

“You don’t have to like her, Carrie, but you don’t have to crush her every time she tries to be nice.”

“She’s not trying to be nice to me, she’s trying to be nice to my money. And it’s not my money, it’s Mother’s.”

She looked at me curiously. “You’re quite linear, aren’t you, Carrie?”

I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“If something doesn’t interest you, you ignore it. You must, therefore, be rich, to be able to ignore it.”

Every once in a while, someone says or does something to alter your perspective. This was one of those times. I suddenly realised I had never once thought about money or the cost of anything. It helped that I was vehemently anti-acquisitive – and I know what you’re thinking, Mother practiced retail therapy almost daily and therefore I was the reverse, living an austere monkish existence. I made a virtue of having only those things that were absolutely necessary.

You’re probably wondering what I told my parents about the experience of my first term. I would have done if either of them had been at home. Mother was in New York for ‘something important’. Dad was in Egypt covering the turmoil as President Morsi clung on to power. The housekeeper, Mrs Skinner, awkwardly invited me to spend Christmas Day with her and her family and failed to conceal her relief when I declined. Perfunctory Christmas cards arrived from my brothers. I moved the big screen television into my room and ordered take-out supplemented by choice bottles from the wine cellar.

The second week of January rolled around, and I went back to college mainly because I had nothing else to do, London was more entertaining, and Mother would have asked awkward questions if she found me loitering around.

My relationship with the academic University went downhill. My appetite for attending courses where I already knew the subject matter at least as well as the lecturer, declined sharply. I took to wandering the campus, and after that palled, the city outside. My tutor found my attitude baffling. He organised a meeting just before the Easter break.

On the Monday morning I made my way to the Arniston Tower. In the last few days the temperature had lifted to a balmy 8°C after a pretty chilly start to the year where it had been at or near freezing for weeks. I invested in some warmer clothes. It’s amazing what you can pick up from charity shops when they’re located near groups of people with more money than sense.

Taking the lift to the third floor I wandered down the corridor looking for Doctor Fisher’s name on a door. When I finally located it, I noticed to my amusement there was a little icon of a frog on the corner of the card.

Once inside, he offered me a seat at a small table and a cup of tea or coffee. I declined both but accepted a glass of water. Once he was installed in his own chair he launched into it without preamble. There were a lot more words than this but essentially it condensed down into this:

“This is a social as well as a learning experience. It’s often the first time people have been away from the home and they’re free to experiment, find out more about themselves. But it’s still a seat of learning and you’re supposed to put in the legwork.”

He smiled in what he must have intended to be a reassuring manner.

I eyed him sceptically. “Can I not just skip to the final year exams?”

His eyebrows rose. “You haven’t demonstrated any ability with the coursework.”

“Why would I bother with that when I already know it?”

“As I’ve just said, you haven’t demonstrated that.”

“Organise a meeting with the course tutors. I’ll answer any question they put to me.”

He gave me a sharp look. “The academic staff of this faculty are far too busy to set aside time in their schedule to accommodate the whims of one student.”

I bristled slightly at the use of the word ‘whims’. “Alright. Set me a written exam.”

The temperature dropped a few degrees. Doctor Fisher decided he’d provided enough pastoral care and exhaled noisily. “Either you comply with the regulations for attending this institution or you must make way for someone that will. This conversation is at an end.”

I shrugged and his eyes narrowed in puzzlement. “Your mother is-“

“Yeah.”

The day after the clocks went forward it was April Fool’s Day which seemed quite appropriate. It was another chilly, breezy day when the sun kept coming and going behind the clouds. I didn’t know any of that at the time as I was under the duvet and quite snug, but I would find out later.

There was a brisk knock at the door, an authoritative rap, the sort that betokened trouble. I groaned inwardly and snuggled down, bringing more folds of duvet up round my ears. There was a double rap, then a sustained burst of knocking accompanied by an imperious, “Catharine Anne Fuller, you open this door this minute unless you want me to summon the custodian and her master key!”

Mother.

Resignedly I unwound myself from my nest and stumbled the couple of metres to the door. Flipping the latch, I opened it to where my mother, enveloped in a deep green cashmere shawl and a fawn-coloured Burberry coat, posed atop a pair of crimson Blahniks. I could imagine her spending ten minutes tying the belt so that it looked as if she’d just carelessly thrown the whole thing together. The ensemble was topped off by her immaculate makeup and styled blonde hair. It made me tired just looking at it.

She stood, arms folded, looking down her nose at me as if it was a rifle sight. I’m actually taller than she is but it never feels that way. One eyebrow lifted by an infinitesimal amount and then she sighed, turned ninety degrees and wafted a hand in my direction. “Make yourself decent. I’ll wait for you in the lobby. No more than ten minutes mind or I’ll be back.”

I looked past her to where Liviana was grinning at our little tableau from her door down the corridor. I scowled and gave her the middle finger. Her grin didn’t falter in the slightest. I didn’t slam the door exactly. It was more of a forceful closure. At least it didn’t immediately bounce open as it had on occasion. You know. Before.

Pawing through my wardrobe for something that was both clean and acceptable in my mother’s sight, I paused at the handful of designer labels I owned. It was something she would expect in recognition of her admittedly generous financial support. I shrugged on a ‘vintage’ 1990’s black button-up Prada jacket that I’d found in a charity shop. Rather embarrassingly and hopefully not captured on CCTV, I’d done a tiny fist bump when I realised what it was. Now for a plain white tee shirt, obligatory Raph Lauren ripped jeans and Ugg boots. Thankfully my pixie cut looked just as good when tousled so a touch of mascara and a swipe of crimson lipstick and I was ready.

Mother stood in the middle of the entrance lobby emitting her anti-personnel force field. Students going in and out passed by her, but no closer than about two metres. I came to stand beside her, and she set off for the front door without a word. I rolled my eyes and set off after her.

Once out of the residences the spring sunshine was a little brutal and I was wishing I’d grabbed my Oakleys. Mother was setting a bruising pace which meant she was seriously cross. I suddenly caught myself. What the fuck was I doing trotting after her like this? I slowed down to a more normal gait, and she slowly edged ahead of me. It must have been a good two minutes and a twenty metre gap before she realised I wasn’t dogging her heels. She went completely rigid, head turned to one side, clenched fists at the end of ramrod straight arms.

“You’re trying my patience!” she hissed as I drew level.

“You don’t have to walk so fast,” I retorted before realising it put me straight back into teenager mode.

We glared at each other. Then she did that curious thing where she unfolded each bit of herself, starting with her hands and working back towards the centre before finally shaking her head and lowering her shoulders. Then she set off again but moderated her pace until we were almost walking like normal people.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“For coffee,” she responded shortly.

Coffee was found at a single story wood and glass affair on one of the small squares of green to be found dotted about, not far from the British Museum. Behind the café loomed the ornate monstrosity of the Hotel Russell.

The interior of the café was a rectilinear set of three rows of tables between the parallel lines of the south facing windows on one side and the mirrors on the opposite wall. With so much light bouncing around, the interior was almost required to have a muted palette.

The café windows looked out on to children running & shrieking as their mothers gossiped between checking their phones. They clutched their Pret and wished for playtime to be over.

I opted for an Americano and a sfogliatelle. Mother asked for a ristretto. I’m baffled by such things. Cost per millilitre is equivalent to that of vintage champagne. I’m not that fond of champagne but I know which I’d prefer to be drinking.

We retired to a table some distance from the other patrons. Mid-morning on a Monday that wasn’t too hard. Mother settled herself in, unwinding the green cashmere from her neck and unfastening the top two buttons of the coat to reveal a silk blouse in the palest blue. It brought out her eyes to spectacular effect. She looked like she’d wandered off the set of Sex And The City in 2002 and never found her way back. A waft of Chanel No.5 drifted across the table.

She sipped her coffee while I pulled my pastry apart. She eyed the shower of flakes critically and gave a virtual sigh, which is to say that she signalled her disappointment without moving or making a sound. I gritted my teeth; I was back in bratty adolescent mode, and I needed to escape that paradigm.

To be perfectly honest, if I’d been an employee, she’d have fired me. But being her only daughter at the third attempt, she was stuck with me. She’d tried. Oh God, she’d tried. But I was made of the same adamantine material. Even at the age of three I was pushing back against her relentless attempts to mould me in her image.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Mother?” I said, meeting her gaze. She had very blue eyes and they had to be contacts. Her real eyes were much paler than these sapphire blue confections. Her forehead looked eerily smooth. Had she been having Botox? I could feel my hackles rising again. There was nothing genuine about her, not one facet that wasn’t carefully crafted for maximum effect. Not effect, I thought, affect. The Construct I called it, the chassis upon which all her weapons platforms were deployed.

“What’s this I hear about you not attending lectures or handing in coursework?”

Cradling my mug in my hands I blew the steam from the surface of the black liquid. I took a cautious sip. It was every bit as awful as I had anticipated. I could feel the enamel on my teeth crazing. Still, it gave me something to do rather than attempt to give an answer that would placate her.

She poured herself a cup from the pot and visibly decided against milk. Probably on a diet again. Her fridge would be full of those green shake things, spinach and avocado or radicchio and green lentil, mung bean and horse’s hooves …

The silence lengthened and I could feel her blood pressure rising.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said wearily. I wondered whether she would opt for the obvious question or the other one.

Her eyebrows rose. “Don’t know? What kind of an answer’s that?”

Not the philosopher’s question, then.

“You come to University to get a degree, make connections. You’ll need both to get on in life.”

“Mm,” I said non-committally, and let my gaze drift out to the passers-by. I took another gulp of coffee.

There was a subvocal noise of annoyance and frustration. “I knew you’d be a problem one day,” she muttered, rubbing her brow with the side of her forefinger.

I threw the dregs of my coffee at her. She stared at me for a second before looking down to where ugly brown patches bloomed on the duck-egg silk blouse and the pale cream Burberry coat.

She closed her eyes very slowly and let out a breath. Then she stood and left the café without a word. My eyes tracked her until I met the gaze of a waiter who was standing with his hand to his mouth.

“We don’t get on,” I said.

I vacated my room in the residences the following day. I told the custodians I was leaving and gave them a note for my tutor to let him know that I wouldn’t be back. Feeling much lighter of spirit, I set out with my few belongings in a wheeled suitcase into the fresh spring morning. When I say fresh, it may have been sunny, but the temperature was still around zero and there was a stiff breeze.

So when I say I meandered from place to place it was more like a brisk walk or even a route march. It was definitely not a day for hanging around even if I didn’t know where I was going. Eventually I took lunch in a pub down a pokey little alleyway round the corner from Charing Cross station. It was a refreshingly traditional place with wooden floors and polished brass-work, and patrons either singly or in pairs getting on with the ordinary business of refuelling. Thankfully the doors were a two-stage airlock so there wasn’t a blast of arctic air every time someone went out or came in.

The ham and eggs with chips and piccalilli paired with a pint of Tanglefoot looked the most promising combo. At the bar, the barmaid gave me an appraising look and I gave her a Wednesday stare. The corner of her mouth ticked up and she pulled the pint and handed it to me.

“Food will be ten minutes,” she said and offered me the card reader.

The food was very good. The ham was rich and smoky and the chips suitably crispy, the eggs were perfect, whites just this side of solid and the yolk fluid and golden. There was a pot of rich, sharp, vivid yellow piccalilli.

I considered getting thoroughly drunk but decided against it. I had nowhere to stay at the moment and, while I had the funds and the front, I didn’t think many hotels would be willing to let a room to a drunken teenager.

After lunch I slid like quicksilver through the hive-like scurrying of the metropolis, its streets and its buildings, and none of it touched me at all. There are words to describe this. Dissociation is one, but the psychologists have a better one and that is derealisation. That’s the problem with being clever. You can know your complaint and yet understand that there is no ready solution.

An author of hard SF posited that very high intelligence would remove individual choice because the best course of action would always be known. In a way he was describing the philosophical problem with God’s omnipotence versus his omniscience. Not that I believe in God, but the issue is clear enough. If he (which is the first of many, many problems with God) knows everything, then he can’t change his mind because, well, he knows everything, every cause and every consequence, every action and reaction, from the dawn of time to the heat death or the Big Rip. And if he can’t change his mind then he can’t be all powerful. Quod erat demonstrandom - or hoper edei deixai if you want the original Greek. Unfortunately, these arguments more reflect the inability of recently evolved plains apes to deal logically with infinities, let alone the consequences of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

I’m digressing again. I do that a lot but hey, what else are you supposed to do when the problem was that I was of the world but not in it. Or the other way round.

Eventually I found a small hotel and booked myself a room using Mother’s credit card. She’d made me a secondary holder when I went to college. Apparently, the credit limit was sufficiently astronomical as to allow me to escape almost any emergency. I repaid her favour by not abusing it, not that I had any vices beyond my books. Unfortunately, books are not very portable, so I settled for a substitute in the form of a fully jacked MacBook Air.

This then set the pattern of my days. In the morning, I would take breakfast at the hotel and then set out into the city. Sometimes I took no more than the clothes on my back. I knew it couldn’t last of course, but I hoped sheer randomness might make a decision for me. I did contemplate buying some dice.