Twin Truths by Shelan Rodger

Author:Shelan Rodger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 111-1-11-111111-1
Publisher: The Dome Press
Published: 2017-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 42

The university calendar turned life into a sequence of chapters in a way that the repetitiveness of the school year had never achieved. Perhaps it was our age, perhaps it was the amount I was reading, perhaps it was the insularity of undergraduate life at Oxford, but the four years sit in my memory like a book neatly parcelled into chapters.

Chapter one: Weekends spent mostly in London with Jenny. Easier to spend time with her there than for her to come here. Only friends here are books.

Chapter two: Prolonged affair between Jenny and Daniel. First time she has ever used word ‘boyfriend’. Discovered Borges. Started wearing glasses.

Chapter six . . . Jenny always used to say that there are fewer surprises in life than you think; that the causal links are there in our lifestyles and our choices. If you have a habit of clubbing and no fear of sex on the first night, you are more likely to meet a fucked-up paramedic turning to drink to help him bring back the dead. If you wear red power suits and matching lipstick to work, you are more likely to break up someone else’s marriage than if you rely on Dateline to meet the man of your dreams.

If you are a twenty-year-old virgin bookworm at Oxford University, you are more likely to meet someone in a library than outside it. And if you meet someone in a library at the age of twenty, he is more likely to have a bespectacled, rather nervous, laconic, slightly clumsy sort of presence than that of a broad-shouldered, handsome stud whose main interests are surfing and skiing.

So it’s no surprise that the fucked-up paramedic ends up giving you a sexually transmitted disease and a black eye. Or that the man whose marriage you have broken up later has an affair with your best friend. Or that the self-conscious bookworm, whose sex life has been confined to the four walls of his imagination, turns out to be tremendously gentle and patient in bed.

It was on the night of my twenty-first birthday that I finally lost my virginity. By then Eddie and I had spent endless hours together, feeling our way towards some kind of space that was comfortable for both of us. He was shy in public, but quirky in private, and I warmed to his gentle wit and his cautious interest in me. I began, oh-so slowly, to talk about myself. I told him about Jenny. I told him that she was prettier than me and vivacious and wacky and incapable of sitting still.

‘No, she isn’t,’ he said to me after he met her for the first time.

‘Isn’t what?’

‘Prettier than you.’

I looked up at him. My eyes met his through the safety of two layers of glass and didn’t flinch.

Jenny was brittle at first and Eddie was careful not to say what he thought; that she was jealous, that this was probably the first time that anyone else had challenged her dominance in my life.

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