Various Pets Alive and Dead by Marina Lewycka Read Free Book Online

beliefs of the oppressor.’
    Bras and false consciousness had been a subject of intense discussion in her women’s consciousness-raising group in 1968, when she and six women from university, including Moira Lafferty (then still Moira McLeod), had met every Wednesday evening to pour out their feelings about their bodies, their boyfriends, their families and their hopes for themselves. That was when she’d dumped Dorothy, along with her bra, and started calling herself Doro, which sounded interesting and powerful. Moira, who was both Doro’s oldest friend and her most long-standing rival, was a bit flaky on the ideological front and prone to false consciousness, even then. Moira was the one who argued that since men screw around, women would become liberated by doing the same, and the others nodded, lacking the confidence to dispute something about which they knew so little. Moira was the one who clung on to her bra when the rest of them binned theirs in solidarity with their sisters in the USA, chortling about the myth of bra-burning.
    Now Oolie hates to have her overgenerous bouncy breasts restrained, and Doro’s the one who insists.
    ‘Which oppressor?’ her mother had scoffed.
    ‘Well, Daddy, I suppose.’
    Which made them both laugh, for it was hard to imagine anyone less suited to the role of oppressor than her gentle, diffident historian father.
    ‘Don’t be silly, darling. It’s not about men, it’s about gravity.’
    Doro shared a flat in Islington with two other girls from her course, Moira McLeod and Julia Chance. Julia, a thin Celtic beauty from Wallasey, was engaged to Pete Lafferty, her childhood sweetheart, who spent most weekends at their flat. Within six months, Julia and Pete had split up and Julia had gone back to Merseyside with a broken heart and a fistful of Moira’s auburn hair.
    Observing this, Doro was reluctant at first to bring Marcus Lerner back to the flat. She’d met him only a few months ago, when he’d pulled her out of a hedge in Grosvenor Square where she was cowering, terrified by a rearing police horse, on an anti-Vietnam War demo in March 1968. Out of the turmoil of flailing batons and horses’ hooves, he reached out his hand and gripped hers.
    ‘You all right, sister?’ He had blazing blue eyes and wild curly brown hair; he wore a black leather jacket and a red bandana around his forehead like a real revolutionary.
    ‘Fine, thanks, comrade,’ she said, dreading the moment he would realise she was just a third-year sociology student, and not a revolutionary at all.
    ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
    He sat her on the back of his scooter, and she thought he was going to take her home, but instead he whisked her off to his room in a house near Hampstead Heath. It was a small attic room with a mattress on the floor, bookshelves made out of old floorboards supported by bricks, and a wooden door balanced on four columns of bricks for a desk, on which were spread the handwritten notes of Marcus’s PhD. The curtain was an unwashed pink sheet with a lung-shaped stain in the centre. Doro found it all deliciously romantic. When he told her in a deep serious voice about the revolutionary movement in Paris, from whence he’d just returned, and the struggle of the masses for freedom and dignity, she eagerly offered up her virginity to the cause.
    Afterwards, they lay watching the candlelight flickering across the damp-stained eaves, and listening to the scurrying of mice and the thud-thud-thud from the room below, which Doro thought was an insomniac DIY enthusiast but turned out to be another PhD student called Fred Baxendale, who was writing his dissertation – something obscure about Karl Marx’s
Critique of the Gotha Programme
– on an ancient manual typewriter.
    She bumped into him the next day coming out of the mouldy bathroom on the first floor, wrapped in a small towel. To her surprise, he was a pale, skinny man wearing a knitted cap pulled down over his ears, under