‘It’s art,’ he shrugs whenever people mutter about having a large custom-painted racing bike dangling from the wall.
There are twenty people at the meeting, and Dan has tuned out.
He’s looking down at the hardback notebook he uses for all his non-research notes, and is thinking of a lecture he has to give on optogenetics, when his phone starts to vibrate.
It’s on silent but he absentmindedly placed it on the desk in front of him and when Julia’s picture flashes up, it feels as if the vibrations are somehow louder.
She picked the picture herself – one of her at a party looking spectacular in a silvery sequinned dress that appears to be a very small, slightly elongated vest to Dan. He never understands women’s clothes. Julia’s are all ridiculously flimsy, barely covering her long limbs and the appropriate bits in a way that makes many men long to see what’s underneath.
Dan is used to men lusting over Julia. Has been since they were first going out, when they were both seventeen anddifferent.
He can still recall the wonder he felt that someone as beautiful as Julia would want to talk to him, never mind kiss him. He was tall, awkward, knew he was clever but worried that his cleverness made him stand out in the wrong way. He hadn’t worked out then that cleverness sometimes needed to be hidden because nobody liked a know-it-all.
Julia was someone who seemed to shimmer like a star. That she should say she didn’t fit in either, that she liked himandhis cleverness, still astonishes him on many levels.
In her currently pulsating phone picture, Julia’s beautiful face is thrown back as if she’s laughing at something and her deliciously sexy mouth is open, displaying perfect teeth and that soft pink tongue.
The phone continues pulsing.
With anyone else, Dan could click on the ‘can I call you later’ option. But not his on-off girlfriend of twenty years. Julia will keep phoning and phoning until he gives up and answers.
‘Sorry, sorry, got to take this,’ he murmurs at the faculty, bowing his head in apology as he unwinds his long legs out of the steel chair.
Outside the meeting room, Dan leans against the only wall without college notices taped on it and answers.
‘Bunny Wabbit!’ shrieks Julia. ‘I thought you were avoiding me?’
‘Never,’ says Dan in comforting tones but he feels a certain wariness.
He is only Bunny Wabbit at certain times. Times when Julia has done something she feels guilty about.
Guilt means confession which, it turns out, has never been helpful to Dan’s soul.
‘Where are you?’ he asks.
‘That’s a very loaded question, babes,’ says Julia, the bunny wabbitiness suddenly all gone. Her accent is harsher now, more London than the neutral accent she adopts most of the time.
‘Just asking,’ he says brightly, feeling a tremor of anxiety.
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.
