Tenure

Tenure

by LimeNina

❖ ❖ ❖

She sat in the front row of my seminar on the Victorian novel and I couldn’t look at her and I couldn’t stop looking at her.

This was September. I was newly divorced, the decree absolute still warm. I had a house I couldn’t afford alone, a cat who’d chosen Martin in the split, and a reading list for the autumn term that I’d built like a barricade: Brontë, Eliot, Hardy. Big books. Thick walls. I’d been a literature professor for nineteen years and the thing I knew best was how to hide inside a text.

Her name was Tessa. Twenty-six. New intake, PhD candidate, funded, mine—assigned to my supervision before I’d laid eyes on her, before I knew what laying eyes on her would cost. Black hair to her shoulders, dyed the flat, depthless black that announces itself as a choice. Blood-red lipstick, the kind that stains. Silver rings on most of her fingers—skulls, serpents, a crescent moon. Black lace dress over black tights, lace-up boots to mid-calf. The goth costuming should have been ridiculous on a PhD student in an English faculty but it wasn’t, because underneath it she was precise and still and her eyes—grey, light, the colour of a winter morning—watched me with an attention that had nothing to do with the Victorians.

I was wearing a silk blouse and a statement necklace and my hair was up in a chignon—the same chignon I’d worn for fifteen years, copper-brown, greying at the temples, pinned with the same tortoiseshell clip Martin had bought me in Paris. My armour. My costume. Professor Margaret Voss, specialist in sensation fiction, Fellow of the college, known in the department for her precisely assembled appearance and her precisely assembled sentences.

I had a friend called Patricia. Twelve years. Medievalist, two doors down from me, the only person in the faculty I had coffee with on a standing weekly arrangement. I had a colleague called David, senior fellow across the corridor.

❖ ❖ ❖

The supervision meetings were Thursdays at four. My office, top floor of the English faculty, autumn light through the window, the radiator ticking. She’d sit in the chair across from my desk and talk about Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the sensation novel’s relationship to shame—to the erotics of exposure, the thrill of the secret made public—and her readings were so sharp, so uncomfortably perceptive, that I’d find myself leaning forward, forgetting the desk between us, forgetting the door was open.

She watched me the way you’d watch a creature in a glass case. Patient. Calibrating. I could feel her reading me—the blouse, the necklace, the chignon, the way I reached for my glasses when I needed a moment to think. She was cataloguing.

‘You adjust your hair when you’re flustered,’ she said one Thursday. ‘You’ve done it four times this session. The chignon. You check it’s in place.’

‘I don’t—‘

‘You did it just now.’

She was right. My hand was on the clip. The unconscious gesture—confirming it was still there, confirming I was still there.

‘Your reading of Braddon is excellent,’ I said. My voice was steady. My face was hot.

‘I know,’ she said. No modesty. No deflection. She knew her reading was excellent the way she knew her lipstick was red: as a fact she’d chosen.

❖ ❖ ❖

The fantasies had been there for years. Not about women—or not only about women, though there was that too, a low frequency since my twenties that I’d catalogued as intellectual curiosity and filed away. The fantasies were about being altered. Reshaped. I’d lie in bed beside Martin and imagine someone—faceless, authoritative—changing me. My clothes. My voice. My habits. Someone peeling back the layers of Margaret Voss until what was underneath was someone I didn’t recognise. The not-recognising was the point.

I never told Martin. I never told anyone. It was the most private thing I owned—more private than my body, more shameful than any desire I’d ever had—this wanting to be unmade.

❖ ❖ ❖

She came to my office on a Friday. Out of schedule. She closed the door.

‘I know you want me,’ she said. She stood by the door, one boot propped against the frame. A black velvet dress today, long-sleeved, close-fitting. ‘I know it terrifies you. I know you’ve been managing it with professionalism and I know the professionalism is failing. So: I want you. Drink tonight. Wear your hair down.’

‘Why down?’

‘Because I want to see what I’m working with.’

Working with. The phrase was a hand at the base of my spine.

‘Seven o’clock. The Lamb on St Giles.’

She left. Eleven minutes passed before I moved. Then I pulled the clip out and let my hair fall and it came down past my shoulders, heavy and unfamiliar. I hadn’t worn it loose in years. The weight of it on my neck felt like someone else’s hands.

❖ ❖ ❖

At the pub she didn’t touch me. She drank whisky and asked questions that were instruments: precise, sterile, inserted into places I’d thought were sealed. My marriage. When had the desire stopped. Had there been desire. What was the difference between comfort and desire. When was the last time my body had surprised me.

I answered everything. She had a way of waiting that made silence feel like cowardice, and I was not going to be a coward in front of this girl in her black lace and her red mouth who looked at me with those grey eyes and saw exactly what I was.

She walked me to my car. My hair was loose in the wind and she reached out and gathered it—the whole weight of it—in her fist. She pulled. Slowly. The way you tighten a rein. My scalp flared. The tug at the roots connected to something deep in my abdomen, something coiled, and I gasped and she held me there, my head drawn back, my throat bared to the streetlight, her silver rings cold against my scalp.

‘Come to mine tomorrow,’ she said, close to my ear. ‘Afternoon. Don’t bring your phone.’

She released me. I drove home with my hands vibrating on the wheel and pulled over twice because my vision kept sliding out of focus.

❖ ❖ ❖

Her flat was on the top floor of a terraced house near the station. One room, a bathroom, a kitchen smaller than my pantry. Books everywhere—stacked on the floor, on the windowsill, on the back of the toilet. A mattress on a low frame. Black sheets. A mirror propped against the wall. No curtains. The walls were covered in postcards: Egon Schiele. Frida Kahlo. A photograph of Louise Bourgeois, old and fierce and bald.

She sat me down. She poured me a glass of water and put it in my hand and watched me drink it, and the watching was already the beginning of what was about to happen.

‘I’ve never been with a woman,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘I’m your supervisor. If anyone found out—‘

‘You’d be finished. Not me. I’d be the wronged student. You’d be the predatory professor. Your fellowship, your career, your reputation—all of it gone.’ She said this the way she said everything: precisely, without emphasis, the way you’d describe the weather. ‘You know that. I know that. And you’re sitting here anyway, which tells me everything I need to know about what you’re willing to risk.’

The calculation of it—the clarity with which she’d mapped the power structure, the ease with which she’d noted that she could end me if she chose—went through me like ice water. And under the ice water: heat. The old heat. The heat that had no name except this is what I’ve been waiting for.

‘Stand up,’ she said.

I stood. She came to me. She was shorter than I was—five-four in the boots, the top of her black head level with my chin—and she put both hands on my waist and looked up at me. It was the last moment she’d ever be below me in any sense that mattered.

She kissed me. Her mouth tasted of lipstick and something underneath it, dark and alkaline. The kiss was not tentative. It was a statement of ownership, her tongue in my mouth, her hands moving from my waist to my hips, pulling me against her, and I made a sound—a low, wrecked sound that came from somewhere behind my sternum—and she swallowed it.

I was shaking. Full-body, systemic, the kind of shaking that precedes a collapse. She pulled back and looked at me and her grey eyes were calm and appraising and the calm was terrifying because I was not calm, I was a ruin, and she was steady.

‘Undress,’ she said.

I undressed. I stood in her flat, naked, in front of a woman for the first time in my life. I was forty-four and I’d been naked in front of men without thinking about it. This was different. She walked around me once, slowly, not touching, then stopped behind me and laid one hand flat against the small of my back, the silver rings cool on my skin, and held it there long enough that I understood I was being read.

‘On the bed,’ she said. ‘On your back.’

I lay down. She didn’t undress. She stood at the foot of the mattress in her black dress and boots and looked at me lying there—pale, shaking, exposed—and took her time. Then she knelt on the bed, between my legs, still clothed, and put her mouth on the inside of my thigh. The red lipstick leaving a mark on my skin. She moved higher—inch by inch, devastatingly slow—and I could feel her breath and her lips and the faint graze of her teeth and my hips were rising off the bed and I was gripping the sheets and making sounds I’d never made.

Her mouth found me. The first touch of a woman’s tongue on my cunt was a new fact about the world—a fact that rearranged everything I’d known about sensation and reduced it to footnote. She was precise. She was patient. She read me the way she read a novel—closely, structurally—and the attention was what undid me. She sucked my clit into her mouth and I came so fast and so hard that I arched off the bed and my hand found her head—her black hair, the silk of it, her skull underneath—and I pulled her against me and the orgasm tore through me from cunt to scalp.

She kept going. I was too sensitive, everything was too much, and she held my hips down and kept going and the second orgasm built on the wreckage of the first, slower, deeper, and when it broke I was sobbing—real sobs, from the chest—and she rose from between my legs with her red mouth wet and looked at me with an expression that was not tenderness. It was satisfaction. The look of a woman who has confirmed a hypothesis.

‘That’s what you’ve been missing,’ she said.

I couldn’t speak. I lay there with tears on my face and the taste of my own obsolescence in my mouth. Every man. Every adequate, dutiful, well-meaning man. Rough drafts. Pencil sketches. This was the finished work.

She lay down beside me and put her hand between my legs—casually, possessively, the way you’d rest your hand on something you owned—and I felt my body arch into her touch and the arch was involuntary and the involuntary quality of it was the most frightening thing yet.

‘We’re going to do this my way,’ she said. ‘All of it. Not just the sex. Everything. How you dress, how you speak, how you think. I want every piece of you. You can say no at any point. But I don’t think you will.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t.’

❖ ❖ ❖

The next time was at mine, on a weekday afternoon when I should have been marking. She arrived with a bag. I didn’t ask what was in it. She pushed me against the kitchen counter and kissed me and then she turned me around, my hands flat on the granite, my back to her, and I heard the buckle and the adjustment and when she pressed against me I felt it—hard, silicone, unmistakable—and I dropped my forehead to the counter and my breath left me.

‘Say yes,’ she said. She had one hand in my hair, the other on my hip.

‘Yes. God. Yes.’

She pulled my trousers down. She entered me from behind, one slow push, and the fullness of it—the deliberate, mechanical fullness—was nothing like a man and was everything I had not known I wanted. She fucked me against my kitchen counter with her hand in my hair and her hips driving the cock into me and I came with my face pressed against the granite and her grip on my hair so tight my eyes watered and the orgasm was a detonation, absolute, and she didn’t stop, she fucked me through it and past it and into a second one that rolled over the first like a wave over wreckage.

Afterwards she fed me an anchovy. Standing in my kitchen, her fingers salt-slick, and I opened my mouth without being asked and she placed it on my tongue and I closed my lips around her fingers and sucked them clean and the gesture was so animal, so abject, that my face caught fire and she watched me burn and smiled that slow, delighted, cat-like smile.

❖ ❖ ❖

She started reshaping me from the inside out. The sex was a vehicle and the hair was going to be a symbol but the mind was the territory. The mind was what she was after.

She began with what she called focus sessions. She’d sit me in the chair in her flat—the one chair, wooden, straight-backed, in the middle of the room—and she’d say, ‘Close your eyes.’ And I’d close them. And she’d talk.

Low voice. Steady. Not monotonous but rhythmic, the rhythm of a metronome. She’d describe the woman she was making of me. The body, the posture, the breathing. The way this woman walked into a room. The way this woman did not fill space, did not make herself palatable, did not perform.

She’d talk for twenty minutes, thirty, forty. My body would go heavy. My thoughts would slow. The edges of Margaret would soften, blur, recede. I could feel the other woman rising up through me like groundwater. I’d feel her in my posture—my spine straightening, my shoulders dropping. I’d feel her in my jaw, in the muscles releasing. I’d feel her in the space behind my eyes where all my careful, constructed thoughts lived, and the thoughts would go quiet, and in the quiet there was only Tessa’s voice, describing me into existence.

Both of us knew what this was. We’d both read the literature—Tessa was writing about sensation fiction, about the Victorian fascination with mesmerism and suggestibility and the horror of an invaded will. The word brainwashing sat in the room with us like a third person.

She said it once, directly. ‘You understand what’s happening in these sessions.’

‘Yes.’

‘You understand I’m overwriting you.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you want me to continue.’

‘I’ve spent forty-four years performing Professor Margaret Voss,’ I said. My eyes were still closed. ‘I am so tired of the performance that when you offer me someone else—anyone else—my body says yes before my mind can object.’

‘Your body and your mind are both saying yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the part that frightens you. You’d like to believe one of them is being coerced. Neither is.’

The sessions escalated. She gave me days. ‘No opinions today.’ ‘No first person today—don’t say “I” from the moment you leave this chair.’ ‘Today your name is whatever anyone calls you. If someone says the wrong name, accept it.’ I’d go through entire working days rewired—saying ‘one thinks’ instead of ‘I think,’ answering to the wrong name without correction, eating lunch without choosing it—and by evening I’d be so aroused that the walk to her flat was a sustained act of not coming.

She told me to write a page about myself in the third person. Not Margaret—the new woman. Her habits, her preferences, her body. I sat at my desk and tried and couldn’t do it; whatever I produced was hedged, recognisable, mine. I gave Tessa the page. She read it once, set it aside, and said: ‘I’ll do it. You’re not ready to write her yet. You can read her.’

She wrote it that night in the chair across from me. Black ink, her unhurried handwriting. She slid it across the table when she was done.

I read it.

It wasn’t about a woman. It was about a thing. It described the body—height, weight, eye colour, distinguishing marks, the small mole on the left collarbone—in the register of an inventory. It described the things the body did when given an instruction. It described what it ate, when it slept, what it wore, what it was permitted to say, what was not permitted. The pronoun was she but the she did not refer to a person. It referred to an instrument. The page made no attempt to be aspirational. It was not improving me. It was specifying me—the way you’d specify a piece of equipment, a tool you owned and intended to use.

The last paragraph was about voice. She speaks when she is spoken to. She answers questions in fewer words than she would prefer. She does not initiate. The exception is when describing herself, in which case she uses the exact language of this document, and no other.

I looked up. Tessa was watching me over the rim of her glass with that mild, attentive expression. The cat expression.

‘This isn’t a manifesto,’ I said. My voice was unsteady. ‘This is—‘

‘A specification.’

‘Yes.’

‘I know. That’s what it is.’ She set the glass down. ‘I’m not improving you, Margaret. I’m not unlocking your authentic self. I’m telling you what I want you to be and you’re going to be it because I can do this and you let me. Read it tomorrow morning. Read it the morning after. Read it until the language is yours.’

I took the page home. I sat at the kitchen table and read it through again and the second reading was worse than the first because I could feel my mind beginning to file the sentences, to make room for them, to absorb. By the third reading my breathing had changed and I was wet through my underwear and I went up to bed and didn’t sleep, and at six in the morning I read it again, and that was the morning the rewriting began in earnest.

I read it every morning. The sentences seeped into me. My speech patterns shifted. My posture changed. I stopped reaching for my glasses when I was nervous. I stopped crossing my ankles in meetings. Small things, invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking, but I was being rewritten paragraph by paragraph and the rewriting was the most erotic experience of my life—more erotic than the sex, though the sex was extraordinary—because every altered habit was a proof of her power and every proof of her power went straight to my cunt.

❖ ❖ ❖

She had friends. I had not expected this—I’d imagined her as solitary, self-contained, a creature without a pack. But she had three: Maren, Jo, Xia. Other PhD students, sharp young women in black who drank wine and smoked on Tessa’s fire escape and looked at me with a knowingness that made my skin crawl.

Tessa brought me to meet them on a Friday evening. Six weeks in. I was dressed in clothes she’d chosen—dark trousers, a black shirt, no necklace, my hair in the low ponytail she’d instructed. I sat on the floor because Tessa had taken the only chair and hadn’t offered me another.

Maren—Norwegian, shaved sides, a nose ring—said: ‘So you’re the one.’

I looked at Tessa. She was watching me over the rim of her glass. She’d told them. She’d told them everything—the sessions, the sex, the page. My private dissolution was public knowledge in this room.

‘Tell them what you do every morning,’ Tessa said.

‘I read the page Tessa wrote about me. I get dressed in what she’s told me to wear. I don’t check my hair in the mirror. I don’t put on makeup.’

‘And?’

‘And the page describes me in the third person, as a specification, and I am learning to think about myself the way the page does. As a thing she’s making.’

The three women were watching me. Jo—freckled, septum piercing—said: ‘That is so fucked up.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And you like it.’

‘I am wetter right now, telling you this, than I have been at any point today.’ My voice was flat and the flatness was Tessa’s—the directness, the refusal to soften—and the three women stared at me and Tessa smiled into her wine.

‘She’s a professor,’ Xia said. ‘She could get you expelled.’

Tessa set down her glass. ‘She could. If the professor were still in there. But the professor is becoming unreliable. Aren’t you, Margaret?’

The question, in front of her friends, with that slight emphasis on my name—as if the name were provisional, as if it were a word she was considering replacing—went through me so violently I gripped my glass to stop my hand from shaking.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Tell them what you did on Tuesday,’ Tessa said.

On Tuesday she’d called me during office hours. She’d told me to take off my underwear, to leave it in the desk drawer, and to receive my next supervision in the low chair beside the window—not behind the desk, the low chair, the one with no skirt, the one where students sat. Knees apart. Apart, Margaret. So that if he looks, he sees.

The student was a postgraduate, a blameless boy called James, twenty-two, working on Wilkie Collins. He sat across from me in my own chair, on the right side of the desk, and I sat in the student’s chair with my skirt riding up and my knees an inch further apart than I had ever sat in my life and James talked about The Moonstone and did not look. Or looked once and registered nothing. Or looked and registered something and was too well-mannered to react. I could not tell. I could not tell which of the three would be worse. I sat for fifty minutes with the knowledge that any small adjustment of his eyes would end my career and that Tessa had positioned me precisely on that edge and was not in the room and did not need to be.

I told them. The telling, in front of three strangers, their eyes on me, Tessa’s smile—the telling was a blade dragged slowly across my skin. Not cutting. Pressing.

‘Good girl,’ Tessa said. Quiet. Almost private, except that three other women heard it and the hearing was the point.

I came that night on her hand—her whole hand, eventually, because she’d been working toward this, stretching me, opening me, and on that night in the dark of her flat with the memory of her friends’ eyes still on me she pushed inside me until her hand was gone and I was full of her, fuller than I’d ever been, and I screamed into the pillow and she said that’s what you are and the orgasm was not a peak but a levelling, a flattening of everything I’d been into the single plane of her hand inside me.

❖ ❖ ❖

She sent me to get a Brazilian wax. This was before the haircutting. Before any blade touched my head.

‘You have an appointment,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow, twelve-thirty. Bare. Everything.’

I lay on a table in a salon on the high street while a woman called Jade pulled hot wax strips off my cunt and the pain was bright and specific and with each strip something was being clarified—the territory of my body was being prepared, as if for inspection, as if for a transfer of ownership. By the time Jade was done I was smooth and bare and the bare skin between my legs felt like a statement I hadn’t agreed to make and the statement was: I belong to someone who wants me like this.

I drove to Tessa’s flat. She put me on the bed and examined me—clinically, thoroughly, her fingers parting my bare lips, looking—and the looking was so frank, so devoid of performance, that I felt myself fall into a space beneath embarrassment, a place where the body was simply a surface to be read. She pressed her mouth to the bare skin and the sensation—her lips where no lips had been, no hair between mouth and nerve—was so sharp I cried out and she held my thighs open and worked with her tongue until I came with her name in my mouth.

The next morning I looked at myself in the mirror. My body was hers—stripped bare between the legs, dressed in her clothes, the face she’d stripped of makeup and the posture she’d corrected and the speech patterns she’d reshaped—and only the hair was still mine. The last outpost of Margaret, pinned to the top of my skull.

❖ ❖ ❖

She brought scissors to my office on a Thursday. Not hairdressing scissors. Stationery scissors, orange-handled. The cheapness of them—the insult of them—made it worse.

‘Sit,’ she said. The student’s chair.

I sat. My own office. The wrong side of my own desk.

She cut my ponytail off above the elastic. The crunch of blunt scissors through thick hair. The rope of it coming away in her hand and laid across the essays, a foot of copper-brown across a second-year’s reading of The Woman in White.

‘Go home like this,’ she said. ‘Lecture tomorrow like this. Don’t touch it. Don’t fix it.’

Over the following fortnight she cut it shorter in stages. Always the stationery scissors. Always in my office, on my desk, the hair mixing with the essays. She was reducing. By the end of the fortnight it was a rough crop, two inches, the grey showing, the skull visible. I looked in the mirror and the woman looking back was mid-sentence in a story she hadn’t agreed to tell.

David, in the corridor: ‘Good God, Margaret.’

I said nothing.

❖ ❖ ❖

Patricia stopped speaking to me. The full withdrawal—no coffee, no eye contact in the SCR, a silence so pointed it had edges. The loss should have hurt more than it did. Instead it felt like another wall coming down, another room in the old house being emptied.

❖ ❖ ❖

The focus sessions intensified. Forty minutes at a time, sometimes longer. Eyes closed. Her voice.

I’d emerge unable to remember what I’d been thinking about before I sat down. Not amnesia—a reorganisation. The priorities had shifted. Tessa occupied the available room in my head, and the room that was left was the room she’d built, furnished with her words. By November she occupied most of it, and the moving through it was easy, and the ease was the drug.

She told me once: ‘I’m not fixing you. I want that to be clear. I’m not correcting some error or healing some wound. I’m doing this because I can. Because you let me. Because the act of changing another person—not for their benefit but for the proof that it’s possible—is the most interesting thing I’ve ever found. You’re a canvas, Margaret. You’re not broken. You’re available.’

‘Does that make you a monster?’ I asked. My eyes were closed. The question felt academic.

‘It makes me honest,’ she said.

❖ ❖ ❖

‘There’s more to go,’ she said one evening. Her nails against my scalp, moving through what remained of my hair.

‘I know.’

‘Tell me what you want.’

She always made me say it. The naming was the point—pulling the desire out of the body and into language, making it audible, making it mine so that afterwards I couldn’t pretend she’d forced me. The consent, spoken and specific, was what she fed on. The cat likes the mouse to run.

‘Shave my head. All of it. I want to be bald.’ Did I want that? Or did I want that because Tessa had implanted the desire inside me? There was no longer any difference.

She kissed me—soft, lipstick-staining, almost chaste. ‘Saturday. Don’t eat beforehand.’

❖ ❖ ❖

Saturday. Her flat. November light, thin and grey.

She’d bought clippers. Professional. Heavy. Black. They sat on the desk beside Braddon and Collins and the sight of them stopped me in the doorway.

‘On the bed,’ she said.

I sat. She stood behind me. Her breath on my crown. Her fingers through the short crop, mapping what was left. Then the clippers switched on and the sound was a low industrial hum that vibrated in my teeth and my sternum and my cunt and my body went rigid—not resistance but its opposite, every nerve bracing for the thing it wanted.

She pressed my head forward and ran the clippers up from my nape and the vibration entered my skull and became everything—jaw, nipples, soles, cunt—and the hair fell, a clump of copper-brown hitting my shoulder and sliding down my back and the air arrived on the bare stripe, cold and intimate, touching skin that had never been touched, and I opened my mouth and what came out was from before language. From the place where the fantasies lived.

She worked steadily. Pass after pass, shearing through the crop, reducing it to stubble, to shadow. Hair accumulated on my shoulders, in my lap, on the sheets. She did the sides—behind my ears, the vibration in that thin-skinned hollow so sharp I cried out. The temples. Then she tilted my head back and ran the clippers from hairline to crown and the last of the hair fell forward over my face and brushed my lips and I closed my eyes and it was like being kissed goodbye by everyone I’d ever been.

Silence. Clippers off.

She lathered me. Shaving brush, warm foam, the bristles on stubble individually perceptible, each one a point of contact. Then the razor. A click. The blade at my nape. The first stroke upward and behind it bare skin appearing, white, smooth, and the intimacy of it was so extreme that my vision darkened and my cunt clenched in a long contraction that was not yet orgasm but had forgotten how to be anything else.

She shaved me. Stroke by careful stroke. Nape, sides, temples. Then she pushed me flat on my back and shaved the top of my head with me looking up at her—Tessa above me, her black hair falling around her face, the red mouth, the grey eyes focused, the razor in her ringed fingers moving from forehead to crown—and each stroke was the completion of a sentence she’d been writing since September.

She wiped me clean. Warm cloth, slow. Then she straddled me. She was still dressed—black lace, boots, rings—and she reached behind her and I heard the buckle and felt her adjust the harness under her dress and then she pushed inside me, slowly, looking down at my bald head, and the filling and the bareness happened at the same time—the cock entering me as the air touched my bare scalp—and the combination, the simultaneous penetration and exposure, cracked something open in my chest that I did not know was there.

She fucked me. Slow at first, her rings catching the light as she braced against the mattress, and I could feel the razor’s path cooling on my skull and the cock inside me and Tessa’s eyes on my bare head and I came—sudden, shattering, a sound from the floor of my body—and she didn’t stop, she drove into me through the orgasm and past it and I reached up and put my hands on her face, her jaw, the curtain of her black hair, and I pulled her down and her hair fell across my bare scalp and the sensation—silk on skin that had never been touched—was an electric shock across the entire surface of my skull and I came again, harder, screaming, my bald head grinding against the pillow.

She collapsed on me. Her mouth against my bare scalp. A kiss on the skin where my hair began, once, in another life. I was weeping and she was inside me and I could feel her heartbeat through the contact of her mouth on my skull. The weeping was not sadness. It was the sound of something being completed.

❖ ❖ ❖

Monday.

I stand in front of the bathroom mirror at six in the morning and a bald woman stares back. The skull is pale—blue-white, veins faintly visible at the temples, the bone structure of my face suddenly the entire story. The jaw I’d always softened with hair is hard and angular. The cheekbones are sharp. The eyes are enormous. I look like a woman something has happened to. I look like a woman who let it.

I love what I see. The love is new and absolute, and I understand where it has come from. She put it there. The bald woman in the mirror is the most erotic object I have ever looked at, and the fact that the object is me, that I am wearing her, that I will walk around inside her all day, makes me press the heel of my hand against myself through the cotton of my pyjamas before I have thought about doing it.

I shave. Her razor. Lather, brush, blade. The first stroke of the blade—nape to crown, slow, the rasp of it audible in the bathroom—produces a contraction in my cunt that I have to brace my hand against the basin to ride out. By the end my breath has gone shallow and I am calm in the way of an instrument that has been tuned.

I dress in what she’s chosen. Black turtleneck. Dark trousers.

I walk across the quad. The air on my bare scalp is a continuous sensation. Underneath the breeze is the fact of the eyes, and the eyes begin at the porter’s lodge.

Reg has nodded me through this gate every morning for nine years. He looks up from the post pigeonholes and his face does something I have never seen on it—the professional smile starts and stops halfway, and he looks at the dome of my skull and then down at the post in his hands as if he has forgotten what post is. A surface designed to be looked at. The phrase arrives in Tessa’s voice, in Tessa’s cadence, the way the page does when I read it. It is the only language I have for what is happening on Reg’s face. I say good morning. He says nothing. The not-saying lands on my scalp like a palm and I feel it travel down through my throat.

Two undergraduates coming the other way. They see me at twenty paces and the conversation between them stops mid-sentence. As I pass I hear, from behind me, very quietly, “Jesus Christ.” Each of these is a touch. That sentence is hers as well. I do not have my own sentences for this any more. I have hers, and the heat that arrives when the sentences are confirmed.

David in the corridor outside my office. His mouth opens. Nothing comes out, and then: “Margaret.” The word is lifted out of him by something other than his will. I walk past him.

Two hundred students. The room goes quiet—held-breath quiet, the quiet of people seeing something they didn’t expect. I stand at the lectern, bald, and feel every eye on my scalp. I talk about the sensation novel. About shame and secrecy and the thrill of the private made public. My voice is steady. My scalp is alive. The lights overhead are warm on the dome of my skull and the warmth is a hand. The arousal under my clothes is constant and I am going to stand here for an hour with my body thrumming and my bald head shining under the lights and every person in this room can see what has been done to me and the seeing is feeding me, the way she said it would, the way she has built me to be fed.

❖ ❖ ❖

It has been three weeks since the shaving.

I shave every morning. I have come to need the shave the way I once needed coffee. The blade on my scalp produces a low ongoing arousal that the rest of the day will deepen and not relieve. I read the page every morning. The specification. The inventory of what the body does and does not do, what it eats and what it wears, what it is permitted to say. Each morning the language is more mine. Each morning Margaret’s language is less mine.

I spend three evenings a week in her chair. Eyes closed. Her voice. She is not finished with me. She has told me this plainly—that the shaving was a milestone, not a destination, and that the mind is a larger territory than the scalp and she intends to cover every inch.

Patricia tried, last Tuesday. She put herself in front of me in the corridor outside my office and did her best, gentle face. “Margaret. Do you have a moment? I think we should talk.” And I sat across from her in the SCR and she opened her mouth twice and closed it twice and then said, carefully, “You haven’t been yourself.” I waited. The page describes a woman who does not initiate, who answers only what is asked, and Patricia could not get the actual question out of her mouth. She tried “Are you—“ and stopped. She tried “If something has—“ and stopped. After eleven minutes she said “I have a tutorial,” though she did not, and stood up and left her coffee untouched. I sat with both cups cooling and felt the heat of having been failed by my closest friend rise into my throat and sit there. She is mourning Margaret. She doesn’t know that Margaret is being composted—broken down, nutrients extracted, the remains used to grow something else.

She has started telling me things about Margaret that I can’t verify. A holiday in Provence I have no memory of, that she describes in detail—the lavender, a yellow shutter, an argument with Martin about a hire car—and after she has described it twice I can almost see the shutter. A friendship in my twenties with a woman called Helena, who hurt me badly. There was no Helena. I have begun to notice an absence where Helena would have been, a Helena-shaped silence, and the noticing of the absence is the proof that she is becoming real.

Then larger. Helena was not a friendship. Helena was the woman I loved at twenty-three, the one who asked me to leave the closet with her and went without me when I wouldn’t, the absence I have organised my entire adult life around. I married Martin a year later. Camouflage. A respectable shape to grieve inside. The nineteen years of the marriage were the long second act of a refusal I made on a Tuesday in 1999 in a kitchen in Edinburgh while Helena cried and packed a bag and the truth was that I had always been a lesbian and had spent the rest of my life proving I could outlast the truth. I had never lost this knowledge; I had buried it; Tessa is helping me unbury it. The new history slots into me with a click I can feel in my chest. It is more coherent than the old history. It explains things the old history did not. It is the history I have, and the version in which there was no Helena and Martin was a real marriage and I was a woman who simply discovered late what she wanted is the version that feels like the lie.

Last Friday she had me on my knees in front of Maren and Jo. Her flat. The lamp on. She did not undress. She watched. Maren first, on the chair, jeans pushed down, her hand on the back of my bald head and her other hand twisting in the cotton of her own t-shirt, and Tessa across the room with her whisky saying nothing, watching me work my tongue into Maren and watching Maren’s face change. Maren came hard, with my fingers in her, both her hands clamped on my skull. Jo afterwards, on the bed, on her back, who had me eat her and then turned over and had me eat her from behind, her face in the pillow, who said into the pillow halfway through, in a voice that was not quite even, “fucking hell, Tessa.” They came. I did not. The page does not permit me to come without instruction. By the end my jaw ached and my chin was wet and my entire face smelled of them and Tessa called me over and put me between her own knees and said “good girl” and let me come on her hand in front of them, while they watched, both of them flushed and silent. She is showing me to her friends. She is demonstrating that what she has built is real, that it works, that it can be extrapolated and extended.

Jade has begun to laser the hair off my body. The pubic hair first. She told Tessa, in the consultation, that the pubic work would take a while—several sessions, the hair stubborn there—but that she could do the same to my scalp. Permanent. No more daily shaving. The idea is being held over me. It has not been decided yet. The not-deciding is its own pleasure.

David passed me on the staircase yesterday and said “I miss your hair” and I said “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve always looked like this,” and he looked at me strangely and walked on, and I did not stop walking either, because the gap between his sentence and mine was a thing I did not know how to look at.

I sit in the chair with my eyes closed and Tessa’s voice goes on. I cannot tell which of these thoughts are mine and which are hers. The not-telling does not feel like loss. It does not feel like anything. The logic is airtight and the airtightness is so arousing I have to grip the arms of the chair.

Iona Khattab came to my office hours on Thursday. She had a copy of Lady Audley’s Secret under her arm and a question she could have found the answer to in the syllabus. She sat in the student’s chair and asked it, badly, and I answered, and she did not write down the answer. Her eyes kept going to the top of my head. Not in fear—I had been wrong about the fear—or not only in fear. There was something underneath it, something she was not in command of, something that was making her flush at the throat and shift in the chair and it was obvious what she was really there for. I have seen this before. I have lived inside this. Iona did not have a name for it and may not let herself have a name for it for years.

She gathered her bag and stood up to leave and then, at the door, she stopped. She turned around. She looked at the top of my head and then at my face and she said, in a voice that was working harder than the words required, “I, ah—I really like your look. Professor Voss. I just wanted to say.” And then she was out of the door before I could answer, the door closing behind her, her footsteps going quickly down the corridor.

I sat at the desk with my hand on my scalp and the imprint of her courage was still on me, more intimate than any other reaction the bald head had drawn from anyone, and I thought she is the way I was, and the page had a sentence for what was happening in my body and that sentence was already arriving.

I sit at my desk. My hand goes to my scalp. Smooth, warm. Outside the window, the quad, the autumn sliding into winter. The radiator ticks. The essays are on the desk.

I have been a Fellow of this college for eleven years. The fellowship was meant to be the thing that held. It was the architecture of my adult life, the title under my name on the door, the position no one could take from me. Tenure. The word, when I was first granted it, made me cry in a stairwell because it meant I was finally permanent. Finally fixed. Finally beyond removal.

I take the page out. I read it again. The body is forty-four. The body is bald. The body wears what she has chosen. The body says only what is permitted. The body belongs to her. Tessa continues to revise it. To revise me.

The fellowship is still mine. The position is still mine. Nobody has taken anything. But nothing in this room belongs to me any more. The tenure is hers.