Meggy

III

My whirlwind translator Meggy is knocking on my door. This morning I am to meet my Dean.

‘Hello Will,’ she smiles.

Meggy is best imbibed rather than simply looked at. Each time I clock her she’s wearing a new outfit. Today she looks like she’s off to Ascot; an ostentatious yellow puffy dress, orange near Napoleonic hat, pink lip-stick, mounds of blusher - though thankfully, this time, she’s stopped short of the cheek glitter. Her wardrobe must be the size of an aircraft hanger, I muse, locking my door. Mine wouldn’t even fill a pilot’s locker.

We walk towards the English department building in light rain. Meggy offers me a spare umbrella and an appraisal of her life which sounds like something Stalin would have devised back in the day.

‘I want to finish my studies then move to a better city.’ Her soft upper lip protruding like Pug of the Bash Street Kids. ‘I want to approach the metropolis on two flanks, buy a house, acquire lots of friends, money and generate connections. Have double happiness. Later, I will marry: maybe at 26 years three months and…..’

‘I see,’ I say: but I don’t. I’m thinking of my own life and how I’d returned home last year with no plan like a Bush in Iraq and done little worthy of a verb for weeks, languishing in my noun lounge. Three whole months had trundled by; nothing to tell, so little to report: eerily reminiscent of how school teachers had summed me up many years ago. They’d hidden it all in crafty phrases such as:- ‘Good with a hammer, mediocre with a nail, should never be let near a lathe.’ (woodwork). ‘Will serves as a good goal post (after they were stolen by local Christians for another cross symbolising Jesus’s endlessly lived death). He is tall and unflinching when the ball h...

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...y to be reared in a spick and span apartment. Last week he sent me a photo,’ she says, taking out a crumpled Polaroid, ‘but it looks stolen from a grotty passport photo booth under some concrete stairs. The curtain is really grimy. Here.’

I stare at a woman who looks like a hostage; neither beautiful nor plain, scared nor relaxed.

‘Well, bye Will,’ Meggy smiles closing my door behind her.

Chinese women are brought up in the toughest conditions, I reflect, yet are socialised to act as frail as possible by and for their men. The ‘best’ ones act like heroines in a Victorian novel: pale, delicate flowers, weakened by years of indulgence and pampering, who faint and die of consumption if they so much as stub a toe, shake hands with a beggar, or if one of the footmen accidently blows off in another wing of the mansion.

That thought, I can’t really place Meggy.