The Trouble with Rose. Amita Murray

that. You can do a critique. When pushed, you can deliver a summary, a decent one. But we ask you to develop your own writing on the subject, and, well, how much of that have we seen so far?’

      ‘Not enough?’

      ‘No, Rilla. We haven’t seen anything. Not a page, not a word. We can’t have you be a student here for life. You can’t just be here in this programme so you can take notes. You have to make a choice. Either write something or leave. You’re not a romantic, you know how things work. Which is it going to be, Rilla? Sink or swim?’

      You’re not a romantic.

      My professor says I’m not a romantic, and Tyra says I’m too much of one. So, which is it? You know, I just don’t know.

       10

       Romancing the Chickpea

      For Slavoj Žižek, the falling in love is important. He makes love an event or an encounter. It isn’t just a being in love, but the moment of falling in love that matters, it changes the rest of your life. It is such an important event that not only is it a catalyst for everything that will follow in your life, but it feels like everything in your life has been leading up to that moment.

       Rilla’s notes

      The day after we met, I really thought I would never see Simon again. Maybe that was the unromantic side of me. I had had such a good evening that first night when he took me out to dinner, but I had convinced myself that it must have been a one-off, something not real. We had talked nonsense for three hours over our shared platter of injera (Simon had wanted to know if it made him a cannibal that he liked bread that felt so much like human skin), shiro, yellow split peas, red lentils and the house speciality, lamb stew. Over the enormous platter we discussed – well, everything. Victorian pocket-watches. Fondue and Simon’s complete abhorrence for liquid cheese. Rye crackers and how they were really hyped-up cardboard. Whether or not Liv Tyler looked like a Disney princess version of Steven Tyler. Whether or not the Steps reunion would reveal that members of that band had frozen their bodies back in the nineties and they had now re-emerged from the freezer. If concept art was actually art or just something produced by people who couldn’t paint. And whether Theresa May looked like Arrietty’s mum in the Studio Ghibli version of The Borrowers