“Oh! So sorry,” she purrs.
He barely glances her way. “No worries.”
She puts out her hand and rubs his upper arm. “No, I mean it. Let me get you a coffee to make it up to you?”
Jasmine watches as Ben’s eyes flick from his arm, to her face, to her designer clothes and back to his arm. “I’m not hurt,” he says with the lightest tinge of a northern accent, his voice deep and inviting even as his words are not, “and I’ve got things to do after this.” He shows not the slightest hint of urgency as he turns back to talk to his friends.
“Rain check?” the girl suggests, as if trying to salvage some credibility.
“Okay.”
Jasmine slides into the flow of students, trying to subdue the bubble of schadenfreude brightening her morning. “Did you hear that?” she whispers in Sean’s ear.
“He blew her off. Bet little blondie’s not used to being turned down. Might be hope for me yet.”
“Forget it. Didn’t you see the way his eyes flicked over her? If he were gay, he would have stopped at her face.”
“Whatever. He wasn’t taking what she was giving. Who knows, maybe he has someone.”
“Maybe.” But Jasmine has her own opinion. Hehadlooked – not the act of a man faithful to another; he’d looked and not liked what he had seen. Yet the girl conforms to the contemporary ideals of pretty: blonde, blue-eyed, symmetrical face, slender but with enough up top to satisfy the current obsession with boobs. He wasn’t put off by her voice either, posh but slightly high-pitched and nasal. It must have been what she was wearing, but what is off-putting about designer jeans and a tight black top? Jasmine gives herself a mental shake. She is spending too much time thinking about this, giving Ben Khan too much head space. She needs to get a move on if she is going to grab some lunch before her tutorial.
Ben Khan doesn’t appear in her other lectures, but Wednesday evening is the first Labour Society meeting of the new academic year. In sixth form, Jasmine would have described herself as a Green Party supporter, but the more she studies, the more she realises the whole system is interlinked and that you need policies which address the breadth of society. You cannot remove sewage from rivers and beaches unless you tackle companies being incentivised to give bonuses and dividends instead of re-investing profits in improving the infrastructure. Jasmine has countless other examples of where her concern for the environment intersects with her increasing sense of social responsibility. Growing up, many of her acquaintances would have regarded the word “socialist” as an insult, but, Jasmine now wonders, is it wrong to want the social, political, and economic systems everyone lives under to benefit the majority of the community? She finds it dovetails neatly with her vegan convictions. In her second year, she joined the Labour Party and started to attend student activist meetings regularly. The meetings invariably take place in a pub, which is happy to lend them a side room in return for steady takings at the bar on an otherwise slow Wednesday night. And her fellow party members often seem more interested in getting pissed than solving the world’s ills.
As usual, Jasmine tries to persuade Sean to go with her, but her attempt meets stiff resistance.
“Why on earth would I want to spend an entire evening with people who are just going to argue all night?” Sean says with his head in their empty fridge.
“What’s wrong with a bit of political debate?”
“What’s great about it?”
“Sean, I can’t believe you sometimes. Your father’s an MP!” she protests, watching her friend as he turns his attention to their equally empty cupboards.
“And yours is a Lord! Do you like sitting around discussing the shenanigans of aristocrats?”
“That’s different. You chose to study politics.”
“Only because I’m good at essays and didn’t know what else to do. I thought it would be easy.” Sean closes the cupboard door and faces Jasmine. “But like all sane humans, give me a choice between streaming the latest boxset and listening to a load of whingers getting slowly pissed for three hours, then the TV has it. And before you say it, there isn’t enough alcohol in the Dog and Duck to make it even moderately bearable.”
“I’ll cook dinner for you before we go,” she offers.
“You mean you’ll microwave a ready meal? No thanks. I can do that myself.” Sean is well-aware of Jasmine’s inability to cook. Having grown up with home-made shepherd’s pies topped with melted grated cheese, mouth-watering lamb hotpot with crispy slivers of potato, and golden toad-in-the-holes swimming in luscious gravy, he was shocked to realise few others had his good fortune. So Sean learnt to cook. He tried to instil this passion in Jasmine, but she’s always made excuses – too busy or too tired. But the reality is, she just isn’t interested, even when he has adapted his beloved recipes to veganism.
“Now you see,” he continues, “if you’d actually make me a proper meal, then I might come with you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” replies Jasmine, not convinced in the least by this blatant but insincere attempt at manipulation.
“Of course, then you would come across the little problem that there is no food in the house,” Sean sighs. “How can you be so organised in everything but housework? Seeing as our cupboards are bare, I’ll make you a new deal. You go to your Labour Society meeting without me and I’ll go to the supermarket.”
When Jasmine walks into the pub for the student Labour Society meeting, she is alone and the first person she sees is Ben Khan, long legs crossed, leaning back in his chair, seeming to dominate the others in the room.
Jasmine is ambivalent about her fellow activists. For the most part, they are a drab contingent, and she prefers to spend her time with Sean and his LGBTQ+ friends. But Ben seems to bring an energy with him that transfers to those around him and animates them. It is amazing to watch. She sets her ginger ale on the table at the far end and pulls out a chair. Ben looks up and nods a greeting, as if he is personally welcoming her, although there is no sign of recognition in his eyes.
She pulls out her phone and takes a picture of the group, making sure Ben is at the centre. If people are shallow enough to join them because of one handsome man, she is happy to exploit it. Jonah, the current chair, leans over to Ben. “Jasmine does our social media,” he explains.
“It’s good,” Ben says. “I liked your recent posts,The Ills of our Days.” His eyes find her again, this time considering.
“Thank you,” she replies, trying hard not to blush. Strong, independent women do not require praise from handsome men to understand their worth. And she only interleaved pictures from her recent stay in Hayburn with those from her past life. It was hardly cutting-edge.
