Girl, Woman, Other. Bernardine Evaristo

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СКАЧАТЬ who wear increasingly injured expressions because they don’t understand why no one will sit next to them in lectures and no one wants to tell them, yo, you stink, bro

      Yazz thought she’d find romance at uni, a nice guy on her level who doesn’t look like the back of a bus and is taller than her (prerequisite)

      someone to snuggle up to on Saturday evenings and to laze away Sunday mornings in bed listening to music while she catches up with the New Yorker, Observer, gal-dem, The Root, Atlantic and thegrio

      because one day she will write for them

      sadly, Mum has more pulling power than her and is actually considered hot in the lesbian world

      her girlfriends du jour, as Dad puts it (hey, why speak English when you can speak French?), are two white women, Dolores and Jackie, although Mum has been with every ethnicity known to humankind (it’s called multiracial whoredom)

      they’re all very cosy together which is quite heart-warming seeing as Mum’s women have gone to war over her

      it’s strange, and suspicious, because with Dolores and Jackie there are no screaming matches, no ranting answerphone messages, no one trying to kick in the front door in the middle of the night, and no one skulking in a corner looking daggers at her rival at Mum’s parties

      it’s like they actually like each other, Yazz suspects they have gruesome threesomes, and can’t bring herself to ask

      besides, she’s lost count of the women who’ve come and gone to the point that the new ones barely register on her Richter scale of annoyance

      there’ll inevitably be a new face around the breakfast table trying to befriend the daughter of their new lover, running around making her toast, omelette with cheese and tomatoes, pouring her juice, washing up the dishes after her

      the daughter who’ll drop numerous unsubtle hints when her birthday/Christmas/Easter are approaching (and why isn’t the marmalade on the table?)

      when Yazz talks about her unusual upbringing to people, the unworldly ones expect her to be emotionally damaged from it, like how can you not be when your mum’s a polyamorous lesbian and your father’s a gay narcissist (as she describes him), and you were shunted between both their homes and dumped with various godparents while your parents pursued their careers?

      this annoys Yazz who can’t stand people saying anything negative about her parents

      that’s her prerogative

      anyway, she’s resigned herself to hanging out with the squad at uni rather than going out manhunting

      it’s unfortunate that she’s coming of age as one of the Swipe-Like-Chat-Invite-Fuck Generation where men expect you to give it up on the first (and only) date, have no pubic hair at all, and do the disgusting things they’ve seen women do in porn movies on the internet

      which she suspects the boys in her halls watch all day and all night, boys who are rarely seen outside their rooms (lectures? what lectures?)

      she’s only been on one date at uni, which involved sitting at a bar with a male specimen she’d thought was an interesting person, who was obviously swiping his phone to see if someone more fanciable was in the vicinity before making his pathetic excuses about having to do revision

      she left shortly after he did, saw him chatting up a woman in a bar a few doors down when she passed on her way home

      Yazz reckons that by the time guys her age want to settle down, her ovaries will be busted and they’ll be on to women half their age who can still drop babies at the drop of a hat

      so

      even though she’s considered reasonably attractive (as in not 100% ugly), with her own unique style (part 90s Goth, part post-hip hop, part slutty ho, part alien), she’s having to compete with images of girls on fucksites with collagen pouts and their bloated silicone tits out

      Yazz has considered dating older guys in their thirties (who are always up for banging teenagers), until she visualizes the nose hair, wrinkly cock and pot belly scenario

      so until such time as someone suitable comes along (if he ever will) who can offer proper commitment with a view to a monogamous relationship in the long term (her mother she is not), she’s got herself a booty call in Steve, an American who’s studying for a PhD on ‘the interrelationship and aesthetics of hip hop and racial politics in the eighties’

      unfortunately, he’s also got a girlfriend in Chicago, which provokes something of a moral conundrum when they’re in bed together, and she calls and he lies about what he’s doing

      Yazz sometimes has sleepless nights worrying she’ll be alone for the whole of her life

      if she can’t get a proper boyfriend at nineteen what hope is there for when she’s older?

      a couple of Mum’s female friends have been single for decades, not the lesbians who have little problem getting off with each other, but the straight ones who’ve got good jobs and houses and no partner to share it with, who say they’re not prepared to settle at this stage in their lives

      Mum accuses them of ‘Looking for Obama Syndrome’

      behind their backs

      Nenet, the third member of the squad, is engaged to Kadim who’s studying in America, her parents chose him for her

      she resisted at first until they threatened to cast her out, and the thought of having to actually find a job after uni and earn her own money, like the rest of them, brought her round

      luckily, she hit it off with him once she actually met and got to know him, and is often off for long weekends (like Wednesday to Monday) in Connecticut where he’s studying

      even so she gets As for her coursework, she’s that clever

      she’s also super-confident and the last person anyone should mess with

      when a boy on campus started sending her explicit texts, she reported him to the university and he narrowly avoided being thrown out

      when a classmate was raped and broke down in front of her, Nenet paid for a lawyer who got the rapist imprisoned for six years

      after which, they all agree, he’ll be back on the streets raping more women

      Waris is dating Einar, a Somali-Norwegian boy she’s been with since they sat in History together at school

      they’re both big anime fans and go to London Comic Con every year

      Waris draws cartoons as a hobby and is developing a female Somali superhero

      who hunts down men who hurt women

      and castrates them, slowly

      without anaesthetics

      while they lounge around, Yazz makes everyone hot chocolate from sachets and offers the shortbread biscuits Mum makes for her as she’s weirdly taken up baking since Yazz went to uni, almost like she realizes she’s not been the perfect picket-fence СКАЧАТЬ