“Do you fancy meeting up? Next weekend? Saturday maybe? I could bring Tom into town. We could go to the Heath? I haven’t come in since we’ve been out here. He’s growing so fast . . .”

Cate braces herself for the no, but then, “Hang on,” says Hannah, “let me check . . . Saturday? Yeah. Why not?”

She ends the call, goes over to the window. It has been six weeks since she moved to Kent. Gulls sleep on the pointed roofs of the flats opposite. A man is out there, climbing out of his car. Perhaps he is the one who lives on the other side of the wall, whose sleep is broken nightly by Tom.

The man looks up. Cate lifts her hand. He stares at her—a dark shape in the window—with a baffled look of incomprehension on his face, then looks away.

Abjections

1995

THE SEMINAR IS CALLED FEMINISMS. IT IS NOT FULL. THERE IS a general feeling, in the popular culture, that feminism has done its work. It is the era of the Spice Girls. Of the ladette. Lissa, the daughter of a feminist, has taken it for granted that she is a feminist too. A wholly unexamined position. She chooses Feminisms because the other option is Science Fiction.

The reading list is daunting and mostly foreign. Lissa reads none of it in preparation for the course. No one really does the assigned reading for courses in the English department. You just skim the books in the week you have to write about them. This, to Lissa, seems to be the main thing that university teaches you—how to bullshit convincingly. The better the university, the better the bullshit. She has expounded this theory regularly in the bed of her new boyfriend, a Mancunian drug dealer with a terraced house in Rusholme who walks like Liam Gallagher and has a way with a parka. He is dark and funny and clever and the sexiest thing she has ever seen.

The girl is sitting close to the front of the room, long hair almost hiding her face, small frame drowned by a baggy sweater, the cuffs pulled down over her thumbs. One of those long patchwork skirts, Doc Martens boots, a heavy hand with the eyeliner. She is of a type—suburban rebels, indie kids, packs of them roaming Manchester on a Saturday night. Flailing around the dance floor of the student union. Sitting Down to James. Lissa and the girl (who is called Hannah) are assigned to present together—Kristeva and the abject. Having not done the reading, Lissa has no idea what any of this means. Why don’t you come to my room? Lissa asks Hannah. Tomorrow? Three o’clock?