#prosef28

I was never going to study French. I was going to study history, and I was going to write about it.

I was asked the other week what my favourite type of music was, and I had to answer that I liked music with a story. I like Paramore because their lyrics are about the story of themselves. I like Mika, who creates and discards characters at lightning pace. I like Murray Gold, who ties Doctor Who together through the scores that he has written for every single episode since the programme's revival.

When my sixth form French teacher asked me why I was asking her to mark an essay for my Oxford application, I told her that I felt that I couldn't give French up now, because it was a task unfinished. I didn't know if it would be possible to arrive at a point where I could say 'now I have learnt French' but something about my nature forced me not to give it up. History was a book I found much easier to close. The chapters were more clearly marked, perhaps.

After six months in France, I feel fairly justified in saying that I can now speak French. I am bilingual. I can get through long conversations without missing a single thing, without mucking up my grammar, without forgetting words, and without giving myself away as English. I don't sound Raphaëloise, perhaps, I still sound a little foreign, but not so foreign as to scream my nationality with a single misplaced vowel.

Ah, shit. There’s blood on my exam script, and no, I’m not being poetic. I’m not talking about the long history of colonialism and classism that went into my arrival at this moment in this university in this city in this country, I’m talking about the blood on the piece of paper in front of me.

I raise my hand. Someone tries to hand me another booklet, because of course that’s what any student must need, but no, “can I have a tissue please?” Of course we’re not allowed to bring in our own.

The invigilator looks at me, and scurries away.

I look a sight. There’s blood under my left nostril, always the left, but it’s not just blood, is it? It’s mucus, too, crawling slowly down over my lip. Disgusting. And there’s mucous blood on my essay, and it’ll take a minute for the tissue to arrive and I have to keep writing, and bleeding, and writing. The girl at the table next to me keeps glancing at me. You must not do anything to disturb other candidates.

Well, I’ve broken that rule before.

It was tears, that time, not blood. I was nineteen, and my friend was dying, and I was stuck in Oxford, taking exams, and I cried into the paper of my short text commentary and left the ink slightly blurry. I write in biro now, but still I write neatly around the spots of red on the page. I learn from my mistakes.

I’ve put literal blood and tears into my degree. The sweat will come in hour six of my Tuesday exams.

We’re twenty minutes in. We have to write a thousand words in our second language, and we have to do it in three hours, and it has to be bien argumenté, and there must be well-motivated knowledge,

and a fly landed in my hair. I’ve got a half-page plan taking shape and most of an introduction below that, and words that I don’t want the examiners to see are spilling across the question paper, and I flex my fingers, searching for a word I know I know, and

Bad luck.

The carnation isn’t part of the uniform, not according to the rulebook, but ask any student and they’ll tell you that you simply must have one. White for your first examination, red for the last, and pink for the rest. It’s bad luck to wear the wrong one. Oh, no, you mustn’t buy it yourself. That’s bad luck, too.

This afternoon on the quad, I was doing a translation into English and L was analysing Montaigne. We had our little patch of grass, as did every other group of people, lazy circles littered with papers and bottles and books and computers. The sunlight fell in odd, unpredictable shapes, blocked by the trees and the college roofs, the dreaming spires casting gentle shadows and the leaves breaking the light into golden flakes, drawing attention to the tiniest of details:

- G, over in the corner, gradually turning as red as her hair -

- H, distracted by whatever she was writing, always turning her head so her sunglasses caught the light and reflected it across the quad -

- a sheet of paper, blowing away, unnoticed by its owner -

- a camera, and another, and another, some owned by students, some by the tourists, struck by this stereotypical idyll and wanting to capture it -

I couldn't blame those tourists, despite the fact that my skin was shiny with suncream and I was wearing one of my less flattering tops, because I felt the same way. There was an urgent need to catch these moments, to lock them down in image or in words before they could float away like the ladybirds that landed on our books and were blown off into the grass.

As G kept saying this morning, it even smelt like summer - Pimms, and suncream, and a touch of humidity. It felt like a holiday, albeit a holiday on which everyone had to work.

And L. I wanted to speak to her, to share these odd poetic thoughts, ask if she felt it too, the way that this moment was slipping away, the way that it was only a fragment of time, like a shard of a mirror, reflecting just one aspect of our time in Oxford, one tiny splinter of an image. But I realised that my fragments and shards and splinters were far too much based around her:

- the way she clears her throat, softly and gently, but so often, so I know she's in the room before I see her -

- her brown eyes flicking from the old French to the modern, and the way her eyebrows drew together when she encountered a Latin quote -

- the way the sunlight caught on her ankles as she crossed and uncrossed them in the air -

- single locks of her hair brushing the page, the curls obscuring what she was reading until she gave her head a little shake to reveal the words again -