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We had been inseperable all that year, but it was now the very last night we ever spent together. We had argued, as lovers sometimes do, stayed awake all evening and long into the following morning. Like all such arguments, it was a long time brewing, and maybe I had been ignoring the underlying tension between us, but tonight Doonira seemed determined to bring it to a head. I wanted her to marry me, set up house together, perhaps even have babies. I had this naive idyllic vision of a pretty little place where we lived together, with fungi around the door, where I would return home after a long day at the University distilling the wisdom of ages for delivery in lecture theatres to a legion of undergraduate students who would hang on my every word. She, of course, had very different ideas. She wanted a career of her own - like me, an academic existence in the hallowed halls of an ancient university - to make her own mark on the world. She was smart and savvy, and very, very ambitious. She wanted people to respect her for herself, her own qualities and abilities, and not as the appendage of another. I couldn't see it, at the time. I was blinded by convention, the mode of living that my parents and grandparents had long adopted. I could see no other way. I was adamant, she tried to negotiate; I got angry, she got angry back; I shouted, she cried. The argument was going nowhere. We were both increasingly tired and stubborn, having metaphorically painted ourselves into two separate corners with no path or passage left between them. Finally, Doonira sat up and took me by the shoulders, forcing me to turn and look into her eyes. "Findo," she said sadly, "I once had high hopes for you. But you don't own me, control me. I don't think you really understand me. Or even yourself. You need to work out what you really want from your life. And it doesn't include me." She slid off the bed and stood up, looking down on my naked form languishing on the rumpled bedclothes. "You should go now," she said, firmly, even kindly, but quite definitely implacably, "I don't want to see you again." With hindsight, I wonder whether I would ever have been a success as a professional academic. Oh, I am capable of the occasional brilliant insight, and I can study hard if I have to - that's how I had made it through all of the exams it had been necessary to pass to get even that far. But Doonira was probably intrinsically cleverer than me, and certainly more driven to succeed than I have even been. It would never have worked out for me. Within the week, I had left the old university and enrolled in the police academy on a fast-track course. I would later qualify as a copper - although that career didn't last very long either. And, until this very day, I never had any further contact with Doonira Quaig.
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Part 10