Read Online Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire - Free Book Online Page B

was standard seventies red brick, four floors, reflective glass and iron bars on the windows. But it was Sarah’s true home, her spiritual home. If she could afford to not work, she would spend every moment here. She loved the student lounge with its threadbare orange and green sofas, its chipped formica tables and wobbly chairs. She loved the ancient silver urn which only the second and third year students knew how tooperate without scalding themselves. She loved the squeak of her sneakers on the linoleum floors, the persistent knocking of the front door against its frame on windy days, the nook under the stairs between the third and fourth floor where you could always find Joe D, buy some pot, pinch a smoke. She loved the old stoners who took a decade to complete their Bachelors’, and she loved the shiny new first years who could be overheard earnestly discussing the theories of Barthes and Lacan as though they too were shiny and new. Most of all, she loved the classes, where she vacillated between being sure of her wisdom and insight and being convinced of her impossible ignorance.
    The other students adored Sarah, because she gladly shared her always precise and coherent notes and was generous with praise and encouragement. She was humble but enthusiastic, easy to talk to but undeniably clever. Sometimes she slept with her classmates, sometimes with her lecturers and tutors, but this made her neither more nor less popular. Here at least, fucking for stress release, for celebration, or to relieve boredom was commonplace. That was another reason Sarah loved it.
    She wished she could stay at university forever. Learning, teaching, thinking, talking, fucking. Sleeping under the gum tree behind the science block in summer, and on the squishy green Arts lounge sofa in winter. Drinking bad coffee and half-price beer, eating peanuts and Joe D’s chocolate-chip hash cookies. She had another six months of her undergrad degree, and then her honours year, and after that, she did not know. Although almost everybody she knew said she was bound to do great things, nobody, including Sarah, seemed to know what this meant.
    Whatever she did, she was determined to not live up to anyone else’s expectations. These expectations were, depending who you asked, that she would fall pregnant and live off welfare; that shewould become the pampered mistress of some old but rich businessman; that her heavy drinking would tip into full blown alcoholism and she would die in a gutter clutching an empty metho bottle; that her occasional dabbling with illegal substances would become less occasional until she reached the point where she was turning tricks to pay for her next hit; or, that she would get tired of fending for herself all the time and return to her parents, happily copping their shit as long as they cleared her university debt and gifted her with the traditional Antipodean post-uni tour of Europe. The first and last of these were laughable; the others she had flirted with throughout the years. She had to remain on guard to ensure these flirtations did not become love affairs. She had to work hard at being something more than a living cliché.
    Jamie was waiting for Sarah at their usual table in the uni pub. They met here at lunch each day, because Sarah would only go to the Economics building if she was in the mood to pick up a virgin, and Jamie refused to go to the Arts lounge because he believed that everyone there thought that Commerce majors were soulless subliterates.
    She bought a beer and a packet of cigarettes and headed over to Jamie who was sipping a coke and picking at a basket of fries.
    ‘I called you when I got home last night,’ he said. ‘It was after two. Where were you?
    ‘I was running amok with Andy the alcho.’ Sarah kissed his cheek and sat down. ‘Say what you want about middle-aged unemployed drunks, but
shit
do they know how to party. I don’t think there’s a pub in all of Sydney I didn’t drink in or a