got halfway across the road before I felt a hand on my arm. The light was about to turn green.
“I saw you,” snarled the dog woman. Her face was expensive. Her coat was vintage tweed, like mine. I wanted to ask her if she got it from Beyond Retro.
“I’m not a corporation.” The ponytail man was shaking his head. His lone dangly earring swung from side to side. It was a Native American dream catcher.
“Have you spent a lot of time in the States?” I asked him.
Dog Woman had perched on the edge of the desk. “Will you take this seriously?” she barked. “It’s a serious offense. We could call the police.”
“Please do,” I said. “Be my guest. I’ve got nothing to live for anyway. The man I love doesn’t love me. I thought it was Sebastian who was the love of my life but now it transpires it’s Vic.”
“What about Freddie?” said the man.
“Actually my great-great-great-grandmother was a thief too,” I told him. “She was a prostitute in Whitechapel. And she got deported for beating the shit out of this gentleman. My mother’s got the prison records on the wall.”
His face reddened; he flapped his arms.
“What have you got to say for yourself that’s serious?” said the woman.
“I don’t want to be free,” I said, with passion. “Sometimes I feel free but most of the time I feel trapped anyway, in all this freedom.” I gestured to Stephanie’s book on the desk. “That’s why I’m interested in her. She seems to know what she’s talking about.”
“That’s not the point,” said the man.
“Call the police,” said Dog Woman. “She’s not even sorry.”
“I thought you were against the system?” I said to the man.
“Not when I am the system,” he said. “It’s my shop.” He trod around the office.
Piles of unsellable books were stacked everywhere.
“I don’t have any money,” I said. “It’s Freddie with all the money. We live in his uncle’s apartment, rent-free. That’s the only way we can afford to live in such a yuppie area.” I looked at Dog Woman.
She bared her teeth; they were perfect.
“We don’t belong here,” I said. “I don’t belong anywhere near here.”
The man didn’t look convinced.
“I’m crazy, remember?” I said. “Cambridge made me crazy.”
I could see him begin to waiver, but then Dog Woman shouted at him: “Can I talk to you in the shop?”
Alone, I turned to the first chapter of Stephanie’s book. It was called “Falling.”
To fall is a woman’s destiny; it is the culmination of her destiny.
Eve fell because she ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Since that first biblical Fall, any woman with a sexual appetite, any woman who fucks outside of marriage, has been deemed “fallen.” The woman who fucked for love, lust, or money “fell” pregnant and was shamed by the community.
Bridget Jones—that blueprint for a free generation—fell all over the place. Her slapstick naïveté meant that she could rarely stand up without falling flat on her face and demonstrating her incompetence and the incompetence of women in general for the sake of a few laughs.
While the fallen woman was once a figure of damnation and moral outrage, now we are all fallen. We are encouraged to fall. Because falling endears us. It ameliorates our strength.
We fall in love.
Following the sexual revolution and the second wave women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s, in which I played a key role, the values that kept women in her place—albeit in a second, inferior place—seem to have dissolved. In fact, they have merely changed form.
Power metamorphoses.
Culture is an atmosphere.
It is not simply men who do not want to give up their position of dominance over women. The whole cultural atmosphere is tuned to keep women falling.
This atmosphere is what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the Symbolic.
The Symbolic is everywhere, it is everything.
The Symbolic is what the authorities tell you to do, but, more generally, it is what the world tells you to do. And here’s the twist: the world doesn’t have to tell you to do it.
Women obey without knowing they are obeying. The choice is always already made.
“We’re going to let you go,” said the man. He looked devastated. “Because I was young once.”
“I was young once too,” I said. “I can’t quite remember. I think I was happy.”
THREE
Dear Vic,
Last night was truly extraordinary. Thank you.
Plato said that we were all born with two heads and four arms and four legs. I didn’t have a Hellenistic education because I went to a comprehensive school. I’m the only one of all my friends who went to a comprehensive school—apart from Sebastian, who isn’t my friend or my boyfriend anymore. He comes from a decadent, progressive family in Islington. He is one of six siblings who all look intersex, but they are all excellent at a musical instrument. I never did that either. Nietzsche would say I suffer from ressentiment.
Sebastian looks a bit like a Nietzschean blond beast. He started off at an exclusive left-wing boarding school, but then he got expelled at the age of twelve for fighting. He had to fight at my school too. The rude boys hated him because he was upper-middle class. I remember this one time when we were thirteen. We were in the hall between lessons. It was packed with people screaming and fighting and the teachers couldn’t control it. Sebastian pretended that he was pushed too close to me and held my hand by accident but I knew he did it on purpose. So I bent his hand backward. He was in a lot of pain but he wouldn’t scream for mercy. Instead he grabbed my hair and got me in a headlock. I bit his stomach. He wouldn’t let go and I wouldn’t let go. Neither one of us would ever let go.
We walked to the next lesson like that—a two-headed monster. It took the teacher at least half an hour to separate us. There was a circle of red marks on his white shirt—it was his blood, but it was my teeth.
Soon after that we fell in love.
Plato said that Zeus got angry and ripped all the hermaphrodites in half and made them into normal humans with only one head, two arms, and two legs. But they were doomed by an overwhelming sense of what they had lost. They were doomed to spend the rest of their lives searching for the half that they lost.
