Page 24 of Babel

Chapter Four

So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11:8–9, Revised Standard Version

Sleep felt impossible. Robin kept seeing the face of his doppelgänger floating in the dark. Had he, fatigued and rattled, imagined the whole thing? But the streetlamps had shone so brightly, and his twin’s features – his fear, his panic – were so sharply etched into his memory. He knew it was not a projection. It had not quite felt like looking into a mirror, where all his features were reflected backwards, a false representation of what the world saw, but a gut recognition of sameness. Whatever was in that man’s face was in his as well.

Was that why he had helped him? Some instinctive sympathy?

He was only beginning to fathom the weight of his actions. He’d stolen from the university. Was it a test? Stranger rituals were practised at Oxford. Had he passed or failed? Or would constables come banging on his door the next morning and ask him to leave?

But I can’t be sent down, he thought. I’ve only just got here. Suddenly the delights of Oxford – the warmth of his bed, the smell of new books and new clothes – made him squirm in discomfort, for now all he could think about was how soon he might lose it all. He tossed and turned in sweaty sheets, conjuring up more and more detailed visions of how the morning might go – how the constables would pull him from his bed, how they’d shackle his wrists and drag him to the gaol, how Professor Lovell would sternly ask Robin never to contact him or Mrs Piper again.

At last he fell asleep from exhaustion. He woke to a persistent tapping at his door.

‘What are you doing?’ Ramy demanded. ‘You haven’t even washed?’

Robin blinked at him. ‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s Monday morning, you dolt.’ Ramy was already dressed in his black gown, cap in hand. ‘We’re due at the tower in twenty minutes.’

They made it in time, but barely; they were half running down the greens of the quadrangle to the Institute, gowns flapping in the wind, when the bells rang for nine.

Two slim youths awaited them on the green – the other half of their cohort, Robin assumed. One was white; the other was Black.

‘Hello,’ said the white one as they approached. ‘You’re late.’

Robin gaped at her, trying to catch his breath. ‘You’re a girl.’

This was a shock. Robin and Ramy had both grown up in sterile, isolated environments, kept far away from girls their own age. The feminine was an idea that existed in theory, the stuff of novels or a rare phenomenon to be glimpsed from across the street. The best description Robin knew of women came from a treatise he’d once flipped through by a Mrs Sarah Ellis,* which labelled girls ‘gentle, inoffensive, delicate, and passively amiable’. As far as Robin was concerned, girls were mysterious subjects imbued not with a rich inner life but with qualities that made them otherworldly, inscrutable, and possibly not human at all.

‘Sorry – I mean, hello,’ he managed. ‘I didn’t mean to – anyhow.’

Ramy was less subtle. ‘Why are you girls?’

The white girl gave him a look of such withering scorn that Robin wilted on Ramy’s behalf.

‘Well,’ she drawled, ‘I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.’

‘The university has asked us to dress like this so as to not upset or distract the young gentlemen,’ the Black girl explained. Her English carried a faint accent, which Robin thought resembled French, though he wasn’t sure. She shook her left leg at him, displaying trousers so crisp and stiff they looked like they’d been purchased yesterday. ‘Not every faculty is as liberal as the Translation Institute, you see.’

‘Is it uncomfortable?’ Robin asked, trying valiantly to prove his own lack of prejudice. ‘Wearing trousers, I mean?’

‘It’s not, in fact, since we have two legs and not fish tails.’ She extended her hand to him. ‘Victoire Desgraves.’

He shook it. ‘Robin Swift.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Swift? But surely—’

‘Letitia Price,’ the white girl interjected. ‘Letty, if you like. And you?’

‘Ramiz.’ Ramy halfway extended his hand, as if unsure whether he wanted to touch the girls or not. Letty decided for him and shook it; Ramy winced in discomfort. ‘Ramiz Mirza. Ramy to friends.’

‘Hello, Ramiz.’ Letty glanced around. ‘So we’re the whole cohort, then.’

Victoire gave a little sigh. ‘Ce sont des idiots,’ she said to Letty.

‘Je suis tout à fait d’accord,’ Letty murmured back.