The next morning Evelyn wakes to a string of texts on a group chat Nethra has started.

Nethra: Good morning everyone! Spencer when do you leave?

Spencer: Hey, tomorrow after lunch. We’re playing at a bar in the city tonight.

Nethra: I was going to suggest coffee, but a bar sounds way more fun. We can come see your show and then get a drink. Which bar?

Spencer: Sounds good, if everyone is free. Bar Noir, near where we were last night.

Will: love that place so expensive though

Will: we’ll deal for you buddy

Will: can we pregame

Nethra: We’re not pregaming to go to a nice bar which also happens to be Spencer’s place of work

Will: i hate it here

Will: fine

Spencer: Haha, see you guys tonight then? We’re on at 8.

Nethra: Amazing see you there!

Will: keen

Nethra: I know for a fact Evelyn isn’t doing anything tonight so you can count her in too

Evelyn replies with a thumbs up and makes herself a coffee. 

She spends the day finishing the romance manuscript, which does not improve with time and with which she is very glad to be done. The writer is friends with a girl Evelyn sat next to in a class on Renaissance literature this semester, and Evelyn readily agreed to look over it. Now, she thinks that things could be much worse, and it is much better to be editing a light—if vaguely reminiscent of internalised misogyny—novel over sitting through another economics class.

Until her small breakdown, Evelyn studied business but spent her electives on arts to make university more bearable. English literature courses, mostly. She has found that everything is a jigsaw puzzle which seems to expand in the same way the universe does: slowly, into infinity, an unfathomable vastness. Each time she puts down a piece, she finds that the puzzle stretches a little farther than she first thought. It has become incomprehensible to her. Books feel like the corner- and edge-pieces. Easy bits of time and space which can start to hem in all the rest of it. Start to show the shape. If she reads the books, all of them, and understands them for what they are—here is where English is important—she will have a clearer view of the scope of things.

It’s a shame about the Library of Alexandria, and the loss of her English classes.

There are a dozen unread emails in her inbox. She responds to them and is conscious of the invitation on her desk. It has grown increasingly loud in her periphery, which is unsettling. Now she takes it up and studies the gold cursive lettering. But it is studying her, she thinks. She puts it down again. Checks the time on her phone. Decides to make pasta for dinner. Flips over the card so she and the gold cursive can’t see each other. 

At eight, she is sitting in a booth at the bar with Nethra, Will, and a couple of friends of Nethra’s. Evelyn knows them a little from nights out and study groups. She has previously suspected Nethra of trying to set her up with the blonde boy across from her. His name is Christian, and for all his general loudness she has only been able to gather that he studies PPE and plays competitive sports. He once mentioned the podcast he was listening to on the contemporary persecution of masculinity, and after that Nethra stopped trying to sit them together.

The bar is busy but not crowded and Evelyn thinks that she would paint it, if she knew how. It is dimly lit by electric table lamps and metal fixtures along the walls, made to look like old-fashioned gas lamps. There are framed pictures of suffragettes and civil rights protesters and canvases of women whose bodies are violins. The cocktails are named after activists and musicians and writers. It is popular with the postgraduate students and the public servants in their thirties and forties who prefer to feel modern and subversive.

The other friend of Nethra’s is called Angela. There is something musical in her way of speaking so that Evelyn wonders if she is a singer, and is suddenly conscious of the length of her own vowels.

Angela is describing an altercation at work (she is in the public service, Evelyn surmises) with sardonicism, referring to various senators and the leader of a significant party on the crossbench by their given names with indifferent familiarity. It is slightly obnoxious, but produces the desired effect.

“Is his head that shiny in real life?” Will asks.

“Shinier. They powder it for the TV.”

A waiter brings a bottle of wine to the table. Nethra stands and divides it out between five glasses, places the bottle back in the centre.

“Christian, you’re graduating this year, aren’t you?” says Nethra. “Any plans?”

Christian says he’s working in finance at the moment, and is going to apply for a bigger position opening up next year.

Angela snorts. “And how do you know it’s opening up next year? The same reason you’re going to get it, I’ll wager. Go on, tell them where you work.”

Christian looks irritated. “I work at my dad’s accounting firm. It’s only temporary. I’ll move on in a couple years.”

Evelyn is startled to discover that she is independent of her body—has been for a long time, possibly forever—and all this time she has been learning to keep up with it so as not to expose herself. Committing to memory the way her arms move when she walks, the rhythm of her breaths, the precise length of a blink. She has been diligently ensuring that she is not caught out in a moment of complaisance in which she perhaps turns her head a fraction too slowly so that she and her body blur in the artificial style of a poor-quality audio with a tinny echo. To expose herself, she understands, would be to reveal the conscious practice of her movements, and the pains she is at to pretend otherwise, and the way that she is barely keeping up with her self while everyone around her is concerned with the real world because they are all connective tissue and habitable flesh, easy in the motion of their bodies.

But she is good at this, performs convincingly. And yet occasionally her body takes her by surprise, seizes her in a fit of momentary rebellion. Exhibit A: The words are on her tongue before she has thought to say them, and she must scramble to fit her mouth around them before she has approved them.

“You’re a purebred asshole, then?”

Christian gives a dry little smile. “No, actually. My mum worked in retail until she met Dad.”

“And now she doesn’t need to work at all?” says Angela.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mum.”

“I didn’t say there was.” 

“Some people enjoy traditional marital roles. Not everyone is a crazy raving feminist.”

There is a general outcry against this. Angela says that women can do what they like, and as a crazy raving feminist she believes in women’s autonomy, and if a woman is in a position to choose to be a housewife, she has every right to do so. “She’s fortunate, is all.”

“I never said she wasn’t. I just don’t like the judgement in your tone. You’re so judgemental.”

“I’m not judgemental. I’m critical.”

They continue to argue, Nethra jumping in every once in a while with a comment or an observation, Will with something witty and occasionally mocking. Evelyn sips her wine and watches the band absently. They play well—better than yesterday, she thinks, or maybe she is just paying more attention now. Spencer catches her eye and smiles. Half the time he is not looking at the keys or the sheet music in front of him; half the time he is watching the singer or grinning across at the bassist conspiratorially, as though they are sharing a private joke. There is nothing in the careless indolence of his shoulders to suggest the energy in the movements of his hands. It’s a disconnect which she finds alarming.

They finish playing at ten, and Spencer brings a jug of beer to the table, followed by the other members of the band. They all press together to make room.

“Bravo,” says Nethra.

“Drink up,” says Will, and raises his glass.

Introductions are made, and although Evelyn finds she quickly cannot remember the name of a single bandmate, there is the feeling of camaraderie which comes with wine and flushed cheeks and laughter.

There is a little thumping nightclub nearby, which they are drawn to just after eleven. The strobe lighting makes her feel distinctly apart from things, removed from reality somehow. But they dance in a group, which is unifying. Once, Spencer puts a hand on her back and says something incomprehensible into her ear. She says, I don’t know what you’re saying. What? he asks. She smiles and shakes her head vaguely. He is standing halfway behind her, closer than he needs to, and she understands that he wants her to kiss him. She entertains this for a moment, then turns away to dance with Angela.  

She Ubers home and as she is brushing her teeth takes up the wedding invitation. She looks at the RSVP number and wonders if she is supposed to call or text. As it is two in the morning and she deeply dislikes the idea of calling, she types out a message, which she leaves open and sends the next day.

*

“I want to come home for a while, I think,” says Evelyn, phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear. She is slicing a tomato for the sandwich she is making. Telling your mother you have dropped out of the university she sent you to, for which she has helped you pay rent and move all your things and been understanding when you haven’t answered her calls during exams, feels easier when you are also making a sandwich.

Okay, honey. Is everything alright? I thought you had assignments.

“Yeah, I do. I did, I mean. I don’t anymore.”

Well, that’s good. When will you be here?

“I was thinking next month, before Dad’s birthday.”

You’re sure nothing is wrong?

Evelyn lays the tomato slices on a piece of bread and starts on the cheese. She bought a knife sharpener last week, and now sees that she has been using blunt knives for a long time.

“I don’t think university is for me, Mum.”

What makes you say that?

“I’ve unenrolled, I guess.”

It is quiet on the other end of the phone. Evelyn notices that the static sometimes sounds like wind, if wind had little bits of metal in it.

“Mum?”

It’s done, already?

“Yeah.”

You can’t just enrol again?

“I don’t think so. I don’t want to. It’s not for me, Mum.”

You said that. I just don’t think it’s true. Why didn’t you talk to me?

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

There is a sigh. Her mother says, You couldn’t think of anything else? Couldn’t try studying something different?

“I didn’t like business, but it wasn’t just that. Everything is the same there. I can’t explain it. It’s not what I want.”

And what do you want?

“I don’t know.” Another sigh. “I’m sorry, Mum.”

You don’t need to apologise to me, Evelyn. It’s your decision.

“Can you tell Dad?”

You’re sure you don’t want to?

“Mm.”

Okay. I’m glad you’re coming home. I love you.

“Love you, too.”

The static is gone, and Evelyn puts her sandwich in a press.

*

On the train home, she is intermittently writing a social media advertisement for a local psychic medium and falling prey to bouts of travel-sickness. The advertisement doesn’t pay well, but she has been taking every commission she receives and applying for more to cast the time off her hands—and to pay rent, which was eating into her savings during the semester.

It was strange, this morning, handing the keys to the unusually tidy apartment to a person she hardly knows. It’s only for a month, but there is something sickening about sparkling floors and an almost-empty bedroom. It’s a threat, Evelyn thinks. It is the apartment saying, You can live here as long as you like, and decorate these shelves with a hundred thrifted trinkets, and cover these walls in rows and rows of Blu-Tack, but fundamentally and unalterably, you are impermanent. 

Every few minutes she has to tip her head back against the headrest and close her eyes so that things in her vision don’t start swimming. She is in a toxic relationship with travel-sickness which she cannot escape no matter how many pharmacy pills and treatments she tries. The back of her skull only reaches the slope where the headrest starts, and now her neck is at an uncomfortable incline, which is deeply unproductive for resting and combatting spells of nausea. She read a study last year which said women are overmedicated because drug trials are mostly conducted on men. Now she is thinking that the seats on trains must have been designed with similar information, because she cannot imagine a person less than six feet tall finding these headrests useful. This is supremely irritating.

She settles for looking at far points out the window. The sun is high, and the edge of the vast blue sky is held up by dark sleeping mountains. Even in Spring, the ground under the trainline is rocky and coarse. Grass grows with the determined spirit of water, finding every unguarded pore and spot of weakness and escaping to the warmth above. The trees aren’t many, but they are resolute and unabashed. There isn’t much softness here, Evelyn thinks. But it’s beautiful; its beauty is in jagged lines and endurance and an inexplicable togetherness. 

At the next stop someone sits down beside her. She now has a sense of enclosure, and gives up on the advertisement and puts her laptop away. She will be home in an hour, anyhow.

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