Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

And then – we weren’t. It was over, and we were strangers.

I still get distressed over it, to be honest. Why wasn’t Helen more needy? How could she cut me out of her life so easily?

Of course, I moved on. I made new friends. Except they weren’t really friends. Not real friends. That intensity was missing.

It’s not that I was a social cripple. I was a reasonably good raconteuse. I could banter, amusingly. I was amiable, easygoing, sweetlooking. People took to me, by and large.

But I always found it hard to make best friends. Something in me resists it. Perhaps it’s because I felt let down – first by Clara, then by Helen. Or perhaps I am too independent, I find it too hard to love.

My third best friend was Tom, who was also my lover. Tom was different. He was special. He was the only friend who never, ever let me down.

Although, I suppose, when I think about it – I’m the one who let him down.

Freckles were my curse.

As a child, the freckles made me cute. People always praised them. “Look at those lovely freckles.” “Isn’t she cute?” I took it as praise. And maybe it was meant as such. But in retrospect… I cringe. “ Cute? ”

Freckles were my curse!

Does that sound extreme? Maybe. And, okay, as a teenager, admittedly, the freckles were a neutral thing. I was more embarrassed by my thick square glasses, in an age where contacts for teenagers were the norm. My eyes were particularly poor, combining astigmatism with myopia, and I was considered a bad candidate for lenses. So I had glasses, and freckles, and pale skin that never tanned but only ever burned.

One summer when I was fourteen I played on the beach with my family and that night the skin peeled off my forehead and legs and face. My mother warned me to be more careful in the sun. So I wept, and the tears burned my raw peeling cheeks.

When I was sixteen, I was so badly sunburned I had to spend two days in bed. My mother said, casually, “Well, I did warn you.”

I read an article in a magazine. And I learned: people with freckles don’t tan properly. So that was why. The freckles were to blame.

It’s not as if I was careless or stupid in my dealings with the sun. I didn’t seek out blazing sunshine with all its ensuing pain. I just found it hard to always wear a hat, sit in the shade, avoid hot days, never wear skirts in summer. I longed to be a vampire, because at least then my sun affliction would be a symptom of my dangerous and evil nature. Instead, I was merely pale. And, did I mention this? Freckled. Who ever heard of a vampire with freckles?

A fact: a freckled person can never, ever, be cool.

What’s worse, the freckles grew and multiplied in sunlight. Some summers, I was covered in blotches, like some alien in a Star Trek episode. And so as I hit twenty, the pale spectacled mutant-freckle look was becoming the bane of my life. It defined me, it limited me. And it controlled how others perceived me: I was never smart, tough-cookie, wisecracking brain-like-a-razorblade Lena. I was just poor old freckly Lena.

I came to hate suntans. I hated the vulgar display of long-legged beauties with their bronzed skins, and men with six-pack torsos who wear no T-shirts in the blazing sun.

Florence was my favourite city, I used to go there every year when I was in my twenties. But it was spoiled for me by all the bare skin on shameless display. The city was swarming with gorgeous, smiling, happy, slim, sexy, tanned young people, in their revealing shorts and skimpy T-shirts. They were everywhere, and I loathed them.

The purest joy I knew was when I went to see the Donatellos and the Giambolognas in the Bargello and Michelangelo’s David in the Accademia. I adored the look and texture and sensual joy of those naked muscular bodies which were, arguably through historical accident, but that’s not an argument which concerns me here, entirely untanned.

And even now, many years later, I am offended at the basic unfairness of this whole skin thing. It affronts me that some people can absorb sun like oxygen. They never sear or scald, they are at ease with their own bodies. Whereas I… I… I…

Move on, Lena.

And yet, I’ve always been fit. Wiry, lean – fit. At university I was a famously keen runner. During my twenties I would run ten or twenty miles a week. But for reasons I can never comprehend, I never managed to be happy in the body I wore. The moment I entered a room, my posture and poise projected the unmistakable message: It’s Only Me.

And, most monstrous of all, added to the unfairness of having freckles and pale skin in an Ambre Solaire-worshipping culture, it was also unjust that after years of keeping fit and watching my diet, of not gorging on rich foods, not drinking rich red wines, not splurging on melty fat-rich suppurating cheeses, and not oozing cream eclairs down my delirious throat, and not having pig-out midnight feasts of icecream from the carton, of shunning cooked breakfasts with greasy sausages and crispy fried bread and never eating rich meat sauces with wine or madeira or port or brandy, after all those many years of moderation and restraint and holding back, it was simply not fucking fair that at the age of forty-four I should suffer a massive and fatal heart attack.

That, and freckles. Those are the two things about my life that I most resent.

I am God.

And so are You.

After my first degree at Edinburgh, I chose to move to Oxford to pursue my DPhil. My subject was the history of science, focusing on the remarkable rivalry between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The work I did in those years proved to be the foundation of my future work on systems and psychology. I found it absorbing and exhilarating. At first, I was under the spell of Newton; that powerful personality, that radiant intelligence. Scientist, alchemist, thieftaker (now that’s a story for another day…), cheat, and bully. I loved him.

And yet later, of course, it was Newton’s nemesis Leibnitz who became the object of my fascination. Leibnitz, a German genius, a philosopher, a mathematician, and, in the view of many of the finest minds in science, the original inventor and describer of the principle of relativity. In his arcane and complex philosophy of monads, Leibnitz set out the basic principles of a relativistic universe long long before Einstein.

However, after three heady years of reading primary sources and attempting to fathom the intricacies of calculus and mathematical modelling, my priorities shifted. I had to get a job. The job I took wasn’t much different to my research work – I became a research fellow in the college where I had previously been a DPhil student. But the horizons of my world shifted. I was introduced to bureaucracy, university politics, and the entire microcosm of tedious make-work.

I had an office. I had a university email address. I bitched about the photocopier. I bitched about how many emails I had to read. I sent emails bitching about how many emails I was receiving, and received back emails bitching about… you get the idea. I attended course committee meetings, and I spent hours of my life assembling and stapling paperwork in order to be prepared for meetings in which nothing of any substance was actually said.

I gave my heart and soul to the students and had my trust betrayed. I was mocked and belittled by fellow tutors. I was stuck in lifts with men smelling of tweed and middle-aged women who spent their early mornings crazed in the company of cheap perfume. I found myself, in my late twenties and early thirties, a dowdy spinster surrounded by bare-armed tattooed young female students with lurid hair colours and pierced tongues. And I found myself unable to sexually desire the gorgeous male students who surrounded me because I felt they were old enough to be my sons – even though they weren’t old enough, and I had no son.