Free Death on Demand by Paul Thomas

flatmate’s rent for a fortnight in return for her notes and essays from the year before. She worked even harder, played social netball, and went to church every second or third Sunday. She gave up keeping a diary. There just didn’t seem much point in depriving herself of fifteen minutes’ sleep to record the fact that today had been pretty much the same as yesterday and the day before.
    She went out with Stuart, an arts student she met in the university library. Stuart wrote hectoring poems about the downtrodden masses and having to get by on a B bursary, and studied her minutely as she read them. She developed a routine of ambiguous sighs and shakes of the head which
seemed to satisfy him. They went to gloomy films with subtitles and had long pashing sessions back in his room at the hostel that left her with bruised lips and an aching jaw. The pashing escalated to fondling through clothes, then to hand-jobs for him and less than reciprocal ferreting between the legs for her. Even though Stuart was the one getting his rocks off, he pressed her to go all the way and dumped her when she said not yet. A fortnight later she drank too much sparkling wine at a party at her place, and gifted her cherry to a gatecrasher who made her laugh.
    She awoke with the worst hangover ever and upset with herself, not so much for losing her virginity but for giving it away to someone who wouldn’t appreciate it. She went to church, which made her hangover worse. Maybe her other flatmate, who’d quit teaching and got a sales job with Air New Zealand which enabled her to lead parallel sex lives in Auckland and Sydney, was right: there was going out with a guy, up to and including having sex with him, which actually wasn’t that big a deal; and there was falling in love and getting married, which was. That was the bit you only wanted to do once.
    She got back on with Stuart, who pretended not to notice that something had happened to her virginity. She’d thought that sleeping with her boyfriend, as opposed to an amusing gatecrasher, would feel better in both senses, but it didn’t seem to work like that. It was good having a boyfriend, though. One-night stands were like Chinese takeaways: quick and convenient. One moment you were laughing at a corny joke, next thing you were on your back. When you woke up, the guy was gone and you could get on with things, as if it was a day like any other. She knew people who pretty much lived on Chinese takeaways. She didn’t want to do that. She’d heard guys talk about girls who did.

    By the time Joyce was into the third and final year of her degree, her expectations had changed. Back in Dargaville for Christmas and New Year, she understood why being in prison was called doing time. Nothing much happened, the hours crawled by, then you turned on the TV. She got her flatmate’s boyfriend to ring up pretending to be the principal, and told her parents she had to go back to work early to help him sort out some unspecified problems. They were quietly proud – not surprised, mind you, but proud – that he’d called on their Joyce in his hour of need. She drove south in her Morris 1100 with the certain knowledge that she would not go back to teach at her old primary school, and would not marry a local boy, whatever his prospects.
    One Friday night Joyce and Stuart met Penny, the flatmate who worked for Air New Zealand, at a cheap and cheerful Italian in Parnell. She arrived with a guy she’d picked up at the pub. Christopher worked for a company that exported kiwi fruit; he travelled overseas on business and drove a company car. He was different from the guys she knew: Stuart, the bleeding poet, and her friends’ sporty, self-satisfied boyfriends, and the various goofs who took pride in aspiring to being nothing more than a bit of a lad.
    By upbringing and instinct Joyce was a National Party supporter, but she kept her views to herself, partly because