Meeting the English by Kate Clanchy Page B

chummy smile, as if she were just his own age, and Struan wondered how shorts could be exciting, and he remembered that film, Bond, with the blonde girl on the island. Shirin wasn’t like that, like Ursula Andress, she was more like one of the perky clever dark girls Bond usually runs through in the first half of the film: the ones who wear white coats and are doctors, sometimes; the ones who are often spies.
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    One of the main effects of Celia’s pills, Juliet discovered as she bounced off the little train at Finchley Road, was springiness. The platform sagged beneath her feet as she disembarked, then threw her back against the already burning sky. The pills sent her tripping and grinning past the ticket inspector, and goofily trotting through the barrier. It was like wearing rubber high heels. Also, there was an airy gap where her knees usually were, and a googly effect round the eyes: a sort of rainbow edge to the world.
    Other than that, they made you feel terrific. Or maybe they just let you get in touch with how terrific you’d usually feel all the time if it weren’t for your mother who’d blighted your life by bringing you up completely wrong and with a whole mess of body issues. The pills lifted you above all that. They made it easy to plan. For instance, this morning, Juliet planned to: give Myfanwy Celia’s copy of Fat is a Feminist Issue; tell her all the things she’d done wrong; walk out with a suitcase of all her possessions; and go back permanently to Yewtree Row. She’d also have a real go at Myfanwy for being so pointlessly mean to Struan.
    Struan didn’t have much money, she’d suddenly realized last night when Myfanwy was shouting. He was the first person she’d ever met who really was poor. That’s why he had nasty trousers. Even if he bought 501s, though, Juliet would not be kissing him. She’d be kissing someone else, maybe several people. The new Juliet, the springy, wobbly, clear-headed Juliet, was going to jump out of her fat like a jack from his box, and kiss simply loads of boys in 501s.
    But Myfanwy’s flat was empty: just a whiff of ‘L’Air du Temps’ and a gap where the shopping basket should be. Juliet had a quick prowl round: a Slimfast box on the kitchen table; a Narda Artwear bag in the bedroom, some new documents on the desk, mostly about the Cricklewood cottages, and, on the kitchen worktop, a letter from Jake’s Oxford college, which Juliet read in case it was something useful, hurrah, like Jake overspending.
    It was better than that. The letter was personally from the Rector, signed personally in pen. It said: Jake was expelled. (It said ‘rusticated’, but it meant expelled, you could tell from the rest of it.) Jake had failed his Collections (exams). He hadn’t resat them when he ought to have. His conduct to his tutor was unacceptable. His arrest for possession of drugs was in the hands of the police. He couldn’t go back to college for a year. He couldn’t go within a mile of Carfax, whatever that was.
    Juliet stood with the stiff crackling paper in her hands in the narrow shiny kitchen of the Finchley Road flat and felt the meaning of the letter pulse up her body in waves, surging like the bubbling sounds of the still-boiling kettle. The long, trumpeting parade of Jake’s successes, the bells and whistles and trombones of it: Jake’s stage parts, Jake’s essays, Jake’s common entrances, Jake’s O-Levels and A-Levels and what the tutors had said at his Oxford interview, all danced before in her in their shiny triumph and fell straight off a cliff into a boiling sea of ‘rustication’. She thought of the glory of telling Celia about this, of rubbing it into her mother till she squealed. So what if she failed Maths now! What was a resit at the comp compared to rustication! Juliet looked at the light smashed on the window and held the letter