HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
HAMISH HAMILTON
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First published 2012
Copyright © Ben Masters, 2012
Lines from ‘Oxford’, copyright © 1938 by W. H. Auden.
Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.
Lines from ‘Marriage’ by Gregory Corso, from The Happy Birthday of Death, copyright © 1960 by New Directions Publishing Corp.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover design: gray 318
Author photo: Angus Muir
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-14-197100-1
Pub
Bar
Club
for my parents
with thanks to
Georgia Garrett, Simon Prosser
and Zachary Wagman
And is that child happy with his box of lucky books
And all the jokes of learning? Birds cannot grieve:
Wisdom is a beautiful bird; but to the wise
Often, often is it denied
To be beautiful or good.
W. H. Auden, ‘Oxford’
‘Ah mate.’
This is how it begins. This is how it always begins. Four flat characters sitting round a table, with our pints of snakebite, our pints of diesel.
‘Ah mate.’
We contort our faces into gruesome grandeur, gurning with eloquence and verve: Scott with his question-mark nose, Jack with his inverted-comma eyebrows, Sanjay with his square-bracket ears. Nodding and grunting and twitching our legs, we clutch our carbonated weapons of mass destruction.
‘Ah mate.’
My name is Eliot Lamb. I’m the one with the fierce mane. Utterly fantastic it is: blond, wavy, thick, and full of spunk. You can tell I’ve gone to a lot of effort with the old creams and unguents, but it is a special occasion after all: it’s our last night at university. I’ve even cultivated some designer stubble, sprinkled over my rosy face like Morse code, with all its dots and dashes. And if the code was readable it would go something like this: There’s a lot on my mind tonight, pal – oh such a lot – and things could get very messy.
We are in the King’s Arms, Oxford, rainy weekend eve, unfortunate travellers fumbling our way into the sticky crotch of a night on the lash.
‘Ah mate.’
This is the end, beautiful friend, the end. Our university finale; the last time we’ll ever do this. The real world snaps viciously at our cracked-skin heels, groaning of jacket-and-tie, briefcase-headcase, hair-receding, tumble-dry mortality. I stare into the bottom of my pint glass and glimpse faint outlines of the infinite. I gaze into the abyss.
Sip, sip, chug: ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’ – four pressurized valves released and relieved, letting off steam.
‘I needed that,’ blurts Jack, right on cue.
Scott: ‘Anyone else out tonight?’
(A droopy old man falters past. He wears the heady bonfires and dissident blossoms of the cool summer air, stirring fragrances of ale and tobacco.)
‘I sent a loada texts’ (that’s me). My tripwire legs are vibrating beneath the table, compulsive and anxious. ‘Some of the girls are coming in a bit,’ I add judiciously. Rhyming nods of solemn approval. Jack traces his high-rise quiff just to make sure it’s still there.
Glug, glug, swallow.
The phone in my pocket chatters, clamping after my testicles with cancerous claw. I don’t reach for it. It’ll be Lucy.
She rang just before I came out, but I was a bit hesitant and evasive, needing to fix myself for the big night – picking the right shirt, nailing the hair, generally ogling the mirror in a you-talking-to-me-type fashion – and also being at an awkward place in my character development: I already have something pressing to face up to … something that needs to be dealt with, tonight. I do feel bad about Lucy though. She sounded, well, nervous; lost somehow. It was all the preambling that got in the way: Where are you, are you on your own, please don’t overreact to what I have to say. I was running late and that was valuable time spent already. Only now I have the feeling that it was something important … must’ve been … I mean, we don’t really talk on the phone any more, and my promise to call her later seemed desperately inadequate. I should’ve just heard her out. But she was the last person I wanted to speak to, given my plans for tonight.
Maybe I’ll send her a text in a bit.
She doesn’t go here – Oxford, that is – not being the academic type. She’ll be making a lot of appearances though, whether haunting from the margins or dancing resplendent across my imagination, and she’s playing on my mind already.
‘Ah mate.’
The King’s Arms is filled to spilling point. Students run rampant in red-cheeked naïvety. With military-front precision the place bares its insistent demographics: flowery thespians with lager for Yorick skulls; meathead rugby players (cauliflower-eared, broccoli-beard, potato-reared) floundering in homoeroticism; red-corduroyed socialites with upturned collars and likewise noses; bohemian Billies and Brionys, all scarves, hats, and paisley skirts; indie chics and glam gloss chicks; crushed-velvet Tory boys feigning agedness; pub golfers and fancy-dress bar crawlers; lads and ladettes, chavs and chavettes; and the locals, frowning at the whole motley spectacle. And then there’s us: the noughties. We are quotidian calamities; unwitting lyricisms; veritable Wordsworths out on the razz, lugging twentieth-century regret on our backs.
How to convey the gang to you … Scott, Jack, and Sanjay … Well, I like to buttonhole people; fasten them in nice and tight wherever I see fit and wait for the holes to sag. The buttons begin to shuffle and slide, impatient with the restriction. And then – the hold worn, no longer adequate – they break free. Excuse the ready exchange of metaphors, but as Augie March says, there is no accuracy or fineness of suppression; if you hold one thing down you hold the adjoining. My style is to hold everything down, as firmly as possible, and hope that only the most vigorous stuff rises.
So, there’s Jack, still my best mate (I think) and clown extraordinaire. Right now he’s clenching a pint of Stella and wearing a white-collared blue shirt (sleeves rolled, top three buttons undone), flashing a hairless chest with each flap of the loose collar, his shortish brown cut moulded to aerodynamic specifications. Next to Jack is Scott, rocking a sprawl of auburn without styling gel (he’s private school and they don’t really do hair product like us staties). Scott’s drinking Kronenbourg and chancing a pink shirt. He’s bigger than the rest of us, being a college rower and rugby player, but he has the softer disposition, his various insecurities taking the edge off his muscles. Jack and I have affected occasional gym regimes ourselves, though we never actually change shape or size, clinging to our coat-hanger frames and the self-assuring consolation that ‘girls don’t like big men’. They don’t. Muscle freaks them out. Still, we bought a barrel of protein shake at the start of our second year, hoping it might prove the key to the kind of rapid muscle development we felt we deserved. I was happy just mixing the potion in with a glass of milk after each workout, while Jack all-out binged on the stuff, sprinkling it on his cornflakes, dipping crisps and chocolate bars, pouring it into his bedside glass of water, even layering it on top of his toothpaste. Naturally our bodies stayed stubbornly put: no tightening of skin, no swell of veins, no progression in shirt size. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not runts or anything … just bothersomely average. And finally there’s Sanjay (Stella), wearing his black Fred Perry with the white trimming. It’s his ‘lucky’ shirt, though I can’t testify to the accuracy of the appellation. If it does attract the fairer sex it’s certainly not working its voodoo tonight: our table is demonstrably cock heavy. Sanjay has a little blinking tic going on. Every now and then he is able to shake it off, but as soon as you remind him (‘Hey, Sanj, I haven’t seen you do the blink in ages’) it returns (‘Oh, for fuck sake’ wink wink). You want to know what I’m wearing too? Black jeans, on the skinnier side of slim fit, and a blue and white check shirt. Stella.
We’re over at the quiz machine, slurping our student loans and tossing shrapnel into the slot. Gather round …
Q: In Brideshead Revisited, what is the name of Sebastian’s teddy bear?
A: Paddington B: Rupert
C: Aloysius D: Baloo
Drink while you think.
‘C’mon, Eliot, you do English,’ says Jack.
‘Did English. I’m finished now, ain’t I?’ I protest. ‘How the fuck should I know anyway?’ Jack, a physicist, has always wondered what exactly it is that I do know – literature as an academic pursuit being entirely mysterious to him – and is looking at me doubtfully. The only social utility of my subject that he can make out is its occasional propensity for propelling progress on quiz machines, as well as select rounds of University Challenge. ‘But yeah,’ I add. ‘It’s definitely Aloysius.’
English: I’ve served three years. Pulling all-nighters over weekly essays, arguing indefensible points with unswerving commitment, and defying all common sense with consistent ill-logic, I’ve completed my subject. English. I’m nearly fluent now, mate. But what next? Back to Wellingborough I guess. (I feel it closing in like an obscene womb, pulling me into its suffocating folds …) And then what?
‘Fuck yeah,’ shouts Jack, selecting the correct answer.
There goes my phone again. Lucy.
Why did I have to mention Lucy so early on? I promised myself that I wouldn’t. It makes things so much harder than they already are. Perhaps that’s why I was reluctant to talk to her earlier. Too late now – she’s gone and hooked herself into the night’s narrative. It’s fitting, I suppose … she was with me at the start of this Oxford story, and now she’s making her presence felt at its end.
Lucy was my secondary-school sweetheart. She’s a year younger than me and therefore, in school terminology, falls under the ominous label of ‘The Year Below’, such distinctions being vital in the zitty adolescent universe. We hooked up the summer before I went down to Oxford, three years ago now, and fast-tracked our way through the various steps of romantic training – an eight-week intensive in Sex Theory and Love Management.
I remember those early days vividly. She used to leave pieces of herself in the bed for me to commune with through the night: bittersweet surprises, proof of our love and decay. She’d douse the sheets in her secret smells, deftly scattering personal trimmings under the duvet and atop the pillow: long brown hairs like fragile question marks, arranging themselves into the broken outlines of a sketch; minute bits of skin like the baubles on a damp towel; all those mysterious stains and pools of our concentric love.
On my last night at home – my final night before the horror-movie transformation into lager-lube student – everything still felt so new. There we lay, fallen creatures. The fledgling months, ah—
‘Same again, mate?’ asks Jack tentatively. I tilt my glass and soberly evaluate the contents … nearly empty.
‘Yeah, cheers.’ I drain the leftover. Jack’s heading off to the bar.
Where was I? Yes, the fledgling months … they’re the sweetest, are they not? Explorations into the unknown and no turning back. Discovering new creases and folds, hidden moles and scars, we marked up the cartography of each other’s bodies. Our greedy hands learnt to the touch, moulding and impressing, leaving imprints for rediscovery to be fitted into again and again. We puzzled over our astonishing elasticity, pioneering to establish ourselves.
Oh Lucy …
Not that everything was so profound on my ‘farewell’ night. There was, for instance, the sexed-up playlist singing instructively in the background with all its hints and prompts: Vandross, Marvin, Prince, Boyz II Men, Bazza White, Sade … which must have had her thinking how white and unsexy I was in comparison, and how small my—no, no, no! You can’t say that kind of thing! All it had me thinking of, on the other hand, was my parents’ vinyl collection, forcing involuntary images upon me that I just didn’t need, that I just don’t ever need, believe me: I do not want to have sex with my mum. And Dad, put that away RIGHT NOW! Luckily Lucy did not take the lyrics as a direct representation of my intentions (‘You want to do what to my what?’, ‘You’re gonna spray your what all over my where?’), though there was considerable calamity when the iPod malfunctioned and switched of its own accord to Reign in Blood by American heavy-metal outfit Slayer (how’d that get on there?). I leapt from my bed to the thrashing riffs and commando-rolled across the floor, my buttocks flashing pale like two miniature moons, groping after the disobedient audio player. Eventually the soundtrack played itself out (coming in around the thirty-minute mark, which I have to admit was wildly ambitious on my part) and we snuggled down on the embarrassed bed.
Lucy peered up at me with enquiring eyes, her naked figure censored by the shelter of my side. Her dark brown hair, with its subtle sheen of ochre, fanned out over the pillow like an upended curtain tassel, and her heavy tan bolstered the already potent comedy of my fridge-white skin. I’m like a man wrapped in printer paper to look at in the buff. Weak-kneed from the cold scrutiny and paranoia that swallows you whole after orgasm, I was glad to be lying down.
‘I don’t want this summer to ever end,’ she whispered.
This was my cue. We’d begun our relationship under the promise to split come summer’s end, when I would leave for Oxford. Not my idea. Lucy, with her extra year left at school, thought it gallantly realistic and (mistakenly) what I wanted to hear. But then we were ignorant of adult complication. I begrudgingly accepted our relationship’s small print, secretly ambitious to violate this most restrictive clause. I didn’t care about rocking up to uni an available man. I really didn’t. I’d begun to revel in my not-for-sale status; in our private culture for two.
‘But I guess it’s time,’ she concluded, a lilt of martyrdom in her voice.
I would be leaving the next morning to become, as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby puts it, ‘an Oxford man’ – whatever that means. The ruffled bed was surrounded by boxes brimming with my stuff – books (battered Dickens, partially read Shakespeare, unthumbed Joyce, Eliot, Wordsworth, Keats, straight from the uni reading list), DVDs (Partridge, Sopranos, Curb), clothes (flimsy tees and skinny jeans), CDs (the Stones, Leonard Cohen, Talking Heads, some old-school hip hop, Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, D’Angelo). I stroked the top of Lucy’s inside thigh – that part of a girl’s body so exquisitely smooth and soft it feels like you’re about to slip off the earth.
‘Suppose we don’t want to break up,’ I risked.
Her eyes widened as she pulled closer, and I felt a flutter of clichés coming over me.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t really want to end this.’
‘No, neither do I.’
‘Will you come visit me next week?’
‘Of course.’
I chewed on the inside corner of my mouth, creating that subtle metallic taste of silent concentration. I tried forecasting how the turn of the conversation might impact our futures, how it would actually unfold, but the vision was limited by the soft warmth of the body next to mine.
‘Shall we just stay together then?’ I asked.
Lucy has an adorable habit of nodding along in conversation, regardless of the content – a kind of ready agreeability – but this time it seemed thrillingly conscious: ‘Yes … I think we should,’ she said.
‘Awesome,’ I said (a sublime note to end on, I thought).
‘Great.’
The wallpaper in this joint is waxy; smoke-stained from times of yore. It’s lumpy and tactile, like a golden-brown resin caked over the top of dead insects: worm circles and cockroach grids, the patterns of nausea. The furniture is despairingly ad hoc: drippy tables and diverse races of chairs rubbing up against each other; tall and thin, short and fat, sunken, bony, flappy and slappy, and all else in between. These death-row seats, those unholy pews, don’t so much nuzzle our buns as butt them away.
‘It’s proper muggy in here,’ says Jack with an air of constraint, like he’s trying to dispel an unacknowledged awkwardness.
‘Is it,’ I concur.
I’ve been dreading this night for three years now, all of which have been spent looking the other way, hoping it would never come. But it finally has, with its big hairy balls dangling in my terrified face: the end of my student ‘career’ (don’t you dare laugh!) as I pass into—no, can’t say it … mustn’t say it.
Immediately to our right stands a harem of females, pretty, but clearly underage. It’s easier to sneak in on busy nights like this. They’re getting chatted up by some smarmy postgrads who should know better. Trouble is, they know they can’t do any better, punching above their weight and below the law.
‘Been Pizza Express with the girls,’ yaps the head teenager, twirling her hair and fluttering her lids in response to some tiresome questions-by-numbers, administered by the overeducated elders. The frontman of the latter is a gangly specimen of the DPhil variety – a red-faced piece of lank – and he plies the fairer sex with Smirnoff Ices and WKDs. He’s the type of bell-end who’ll order a half pint and pay for it by card.
‘That’s so cool,’ he says, an unfashionable turtleneck irritating his shave-sore jugular. The girls look like nervous peacocks, pastried over with gunky layers of make-up, debilitated by high heels and cling-film miniskirts. We grimace at each other knowingly as these older hard-ons work their desperate black magic. We roll our eyes and make obscene gestures.
Ella, Abi, and Megan arrive and join us by the quiz machine. My skin prickles and I can feel the colour rising to my face. I can’t even look at Jack. ‘Evening ladies?’ chirps Abi with the habitual rising intonation, like she’s asking a question. We grin sheepishly (ever seen a sheep grin?). And before you can shout that B: Joe Strummer (not D: Joe Bummer) was the frontman of The Clash, they’ve been served. Fact: girls get served quicker than boys. They have a preternatural ability to make barmen bend to their every whim.
Guzzle, guzzle, chug.
Megan is pretty inconsequential as far as my narrative is concerned, but Abi and Ella deserve mentionable spots in the dramatis personae (Abi in the minor category, Ella in the major). Abi is all make-up and short skirt – the kind of girl who becomes increasingly fascinating in dark scenarios, supplemented by copious booze – while Ella is more inscrutable and weightier of soul. Ella’s got her big-night purple dress on and the matching heels to boot, which further compounds the sense of occasion. Our very last night? It’s hard to believe. Ella gives me a loaded look; just a glance, yes, but rammed with so much history and heartbreak. The minute glisten in the corner of her left eye is enough to spark a personal revolt. (A girl bearing a pitcher of Pimm’s on her head squeezes past, granting me a second’s relief.) If only I had the words and colours to paint the visionary dreariness of my feelings for Ella. But I don’t. They are unknown to me. She means everything, and sometimes everything is too much … everything overwhelms and confuses, and what I need right now is distinction. There is such a crowding of thoughts, such an excess of emotions jostling inside of me, scrambling to get out. If only I had the words …
I dart my eyes away and sip my beer. I realize that I’ve got to face up to it all, but it still messes with me. And yes, I realize that now is the time to grow a pair. Whether or not I have the skills to do this is wide open. I feel like a puppy, poised and tense, watching the leaves flutter in the breeze as he learns the physics of the mysterious universe around him.
I know what the root of all this turmoil is though. It’s the one thing I know for sure. I am unbearably aware of what I’m running from. Michaelmas term of my second year, when I was—
‘Photo!’ screams Abi, waving her flash new camera in the air, putting me off my stride. Everyone groans with fake weariness while sorting their hair and straightening their outfits. We’re conceited little buggers. These’ll be on the Internet tomorrow – mugshot.com – verifiable and incriminating.
‘One two three?’ Abi counts down, wishing she was in the huddle too. A right cheesy one, I can tell; all pouts, grins, and carefully cultivated embraces. We’re pros at this stuff: the performance of a private life. Produced for all to have a gander, we make ourselves into mini-celebrities. We want everything to be known and we want to be bitten for it. But that’s just how it feels, right now, so early in the century.
‘Let’s see, let’s see,’ we shout, inspecting our handiwork. We piss-take Sanjay’s half-shut eyes. Megan secretly rues her roundness and tastes a deep pang of dissatisfaction, suffering in silence. Minor characters, negotiating their self-loathing.
‘Gross. Take another,’ demands Ella.
Now, we all know that people judge ensemble pieces entirely on their own performance, so it seems doubly ridiculous for Ella to complain when she is obviously the stunner of the cast. Nevertheless, she strolls over to a group of lads, tossing her wavy blonde hair over a bare shoulder (the hair and neck you yearn to touch and nuzzle), and asks one of them to do the honours.
‘Sure.’
Ella is an effortless ingratiator. Any one of these fellas would’ve clambered to push her button, simplified and softened by the measured attention. I remember my own initial encounter. It was the first night of university, a cocktail event in college, when the real world was but a drowning murmur far off in the distance. Lecherous second-years sharked about, scanning the fresh talent, mixing drips of Coke and lemonade into plastic storage boxes filled with cheap vodka and Bacardi. Ella and I waded our separate ways through the frantic mob of small-talkers (Hey what’s your name where you from what you studying what’s your name again?) to scoop our cups in the toxic vats. She caught my eye.
‘This stuff tastes of arse,’ I said.
‘Mine’s not that good.’
I laughed. I was terrified.
‘Here, try some,’ she said.
Before passing the cup, she ventured an emboldened mouthful for herself, an elastic cord of saliva connecting the brim to her succulent lips as she pulled away. Stretched tight – tight as the chest-line on her panting red boob tube – the string snapped, pinging with abandon into the drink. I took the cup and pressed my mouth against the lip-glossed rim, swigging her while she smiled at me. That drink, more than any (and there’ve been many), went straight to my head. It went charging, leaving dizzying shockwaves in its wake …
We’re ready for photo take-two. The girls turn on their pouts (they’re hard-wired for this shit), Jack points at Ella like a gimp, and Abi leans her head on my shoulder. I strategically fold my arms to make my biceps look bigger. Cheese.
‘Would you rather sneeze every time you orgasm, or orgasm every time you sneeze?’ asks Jack with considerable sincerity. He’s saved this ice-breaker precisely for the moment the girls arrive, I’m sure of it. Abi loves these games more than anyone.
‘Give me a break?’ says Abi. ‘The latter? Of course? Firstly, you avoid the embarrassment of sneezing in the bloke’s face every time you come? And secondly, who’s gonna complain about bonus orgasms?’
‘I can just picture you,’ says Jack, ‘dallying in wheat fields, staring at the sun, rolling around in the grass with no clothes on … probably lodging a feather up your nose …’
‘But what if you want to protect the specialness of the orgasm?’ interjects Ella, sweet and earnest. ‘Won’t it lose all effect and … meaning?’
‘What, you’re just gonna sneeze up in the fella’s grill?’ says Sanjay, the repulsiveness of such an outcome intelligible in the scorn of his voice.
‘What if you’ve got severe allergies? You’d be buckling at the knees all day long!’ says Megan.
‘What if you’re allergic to orgasms?’ I add as a witty modification.
‘That would suck cock?’ declares Abi. The entire group nods in concurrence. We’ve all got one thing on our minds now … the one thing that’s always on our minds …
Sex. It’s astoundingly democratic and permissive here in the twenty-first century. At school you heard rumours of people at it all the time – Year 11s (always boys) banging awed Year 9s (always girls); ugly brothers and sisters making ugly sons and daughters in bushes on the council estate; sixth-formers settling into ‘serious’ relationships and boning away on a more permanent basis … ragging with regularity. I use impassioned and degrading verbs intentionally, because that’s what young sex is in the twenty-first century: a cold verb; a doing word. It’s all about performance and tally … love rarely figures … doesn’t even make a cameo. There is no meaning in the act beyond your shagging CV. And I meant ‘rumours’ too, coz that’s all sex was to me as my final school year came to an end: a rumour that had begun to preoccupy my mind with alarming tenacity. All its intrigue and unknowns, its supposed universality, had me a gibbering mess.
I was a conscientious non-fucker before I hooked up with Lucy. I could’ve got my end away multiple times (oh yeah, believe me), but I had standards. I wasn’t going to give it all up for some get-around or industrious cock-monster. No – I wanted my first time to be pumped with meaning. That’s why I was so keen to make it legit with Lucy … so ready to resolve the panicking virgin’s inner turmoil with some outer turmoil. I couldn’t possibly arrive at university branded with virgin status—
‘This is ridiculous,’ says Ella. ‘Shall we grab a table?’
‘Good call,’ I say, snapping out of my reverie. I’m never going to get anywhere tonight if Lucy continues to steal my spotlight like this.
The place is heaving, but there’s an unmanned table near the entrance. I slot myself in on the oak settle that backs up against the wall, with Ella and Sanj for accompaniment. Jack and Scott are darting around doing the old ‘Excuse me, mate, is anyone using this?’ Sip … sip …
So yeah, my virginity (why not? It’s a welcome distraction and we have got a long night ahead of us). I aimed to dispense with the big V-tag before starting at Oxford and made arrangements, accordingly, about two months prior. The whole affair was pulled off with clinical precision. Lucy and I met in the Wellingborough town centre outside a crummy chain hotel, 8 p.m., a sticky July Friday, suggestively early in our relationship.
‘Hey,’ I said, glowing red and pecking her on the cheek.
‘Hiya,’ said Lucy, not glowing red, receiving the peck on the cheek.
I took her small overnight bag. I had gentlemanly aspirations.
I hadn’t asked, but I was pretty sure she had done it before. She hadn’t asked, but she was pretty sure I hadn’t. Neither of us had asked, but we were almost certain that we were going to do it that night.
I felt like Dustin Hoffman in that film. You know, the one where he goes to the hotel to meet the older bird. Only I was meant to be the older one. I sure didn’t feel like it. ‘Just do it,’ I advertised to myself (the image of Michael Jordan soaring in for a dunk seizing my concentration).
‘Have you got a reservation?’ asked the orange receptionist, with her heaving chest that sang of experience and boasted special moves and combos that I could never imagine.
‘Yes … double room for Mr Reservation please.’
‘Mr Reservation?’
‘Errrr, no, I said Mr Lamb.’
‘Right … one second, please.’
While she did whatever it was she did on her computer and rooted for our key, a hen party tramped into the lobby, clucking and crowing. They had just pulled up outside in a pink Playboy Bunny limo – those once exclusive chariots of statesmen and celebrities. They were a flabby lot, dressed in pink, plastic tiaras riding their heads. The cumulative sexual know-how of this orgy was climactic – something to which their specially made T-shirts bore testament: Deep-Throat Debbie, Katherine the Clunge, Tit-Wank Terri, Donkey-Punch Delilah, Fist Me Full of Fun Fran, The Head Mistress. I mused over the future marriage they were so eager to celebrate: would the golden couple be able to keep the nascent romance alive; maintain their lovers’ dignity through thick and thicker; uphold the integrity of their intimacy? And on cold winter nights would they light a fire and open a book, passionately discuss their reading over a glass or two? Or would they wake up next week, in a few months, next year, on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and roll over in abject horror?
What was I getting myself into?
Lucy looked at me and laughed. I took a deep gulp and smiled back.
‘Oh dear,’ I said. The words melted in my throat. Lucy gripped my hand and we made our way to the prepared love-nest.
The room was no Cleopatra’s boudoir, let me tell you. The brown raspy duvet was smudged with the kindness of strangers and the carpet was hard as concrete. In lieu of curtains hung feeble blinds, and our luxury view on the other side was the delivery vehicles’ drop-off point. It was our very own anti-romance factory.
‘Freedom, eh?’ I said, trying to swallow the desperation in my voice. But we had come here to escape parental CCTV, and that much this shit-ole did achieve.
Sat on the breeze-block bed, we set about kissing and fumbling. Interestingly, we didn’t hold a position for longer than five seconds, rolling and reforming with hysterical energy. Don’t get the wrong impression – I was well experienced and educated in the first three bases (figure them out for yourself). It was just that elusive fourth base – the deal clincher – that was absent from my repertoire. But all experience crumbles when you know you’re going the whole hog – when you’re promoted to the main stage. This might help explain our manic manoeuvres: we wanted a bit of everything, and all at once. That’s just part of the twenty-first-century condition though … isn’t it?
I thought it best to stretch this thing out, what with the whole night before us – and paid for – so I directed our attention to the unplugged minibar instead. Two minutes later, Lucy was indulging in a lukewarm Smirnoff Ice and I was savouring a flat tin of Carlsberg.
And then we were at it again.
It pains me too much to recall every sordid detail … to retrace the event step by step. But if there was a halftime report it would’ve gone something like this:
‘Hello sports fans and welcome to the Virgin Halftime Analysis with me, Corey Shucks, and Rod “the Hitman” Nosh. Eliot’s performance in the first half was perhaps as to be expected, Rod.’
‘That sure is right, Corey. At moments he seems content to make the usual rookie mistakes: frantic with the tempo, a bit too aggressive around the box, and occasionally struggling to keep himself up for it.’
‘You’ve hit the nail on the head there, Rod, but remember: Eliot isn’t a big-game player. Let’s get serious here, okay? At the end of the day, when you look at Eliot you’ve gotta like his intensity. Here’s a young guy, not used to the big occasion – a perennial semi-finalist, to be fair. You’ve gotta give him a lot of credit, going into a hostile environment and trying to come away with the win – something which, frankly, his franchise has never managed to do before. It’s a game of two halves and the second is going to be huge. For me, if you can’t get up for a big one like this there’s something wrong with you.’
‘That’s a great point, Corey. What are the areas to look out for in the second half?’
‘Well, Rod, watch for Eliot to tone down some of his offence. For me, when he wraps around her he needs to be less grippy and grabby – he needs to stop attacking her like an indoor climbing wall. At the same time, if you’re Eliot, you’ve gotta like the fact that she hasn’t run out of there yet. She’s sticking around and he needs to feed off that. I’m not being funny, but, for me, if you can’t get up for a big one like this there’s something wrong with you.’
‘Another great point.’
‘It may not be pretty, Rod, but he’ll get the job done.’
It was hard work, I’ll tell you now … but yes, we got it done (a solid 6.5 or thereabouts). The intersubjective dynamic pricked my curiosity. Or was it more intrasubjective? Well, no, actually. No, it wasn’t. Disappointingly there was no ontological mix-up … no blurring of being as the Beat poets had led me to expect. It was far more carnal Earl of Rochester than transcendent Keats. I don’t think Lucy would’ve put it like that, but there you have it. At all points we were two very distinct people, slopping about in our individual anatomies … our individual autonomies. I was brutally aware of where I ended and she began. Zero confusion on that front. But it was a relief, like when you manage to use up all those stray five pences and coppers that have been weighing down your wallet for so long; that cosy feeling of ‘well, at least I don’t have to worry about that any more’.
The post-match bit I could handle. Snuggling and chatting I had down. I had pre-scripted some sophisticated conversation in preparation for this part of the night (‘How did that compare to your ex?’, ‘Got any sexually transmitted infections?’), but none of it seemed appropriate when the moment came. Like contented springer spaniels we rolled about in our own mess, riffing on fancy and autobiography into the early hours. Lucy was tender and, as my paranoia would have it, implicitly forgiving. She didn’t tell me about her dreams and hopes, because at that point I don’t think she really had any. But she watched me. She wrapped me in a warm woollen stare. It was the beginning of the summer and already I couldn’t see how we would ever call it off.
‘Are you looking forward to uni?’ she asked, staring past me at the wall, pretending not to be bothered. Even then I think she saw the obstacles that Oxford might present: different interests, diverging ambitions, alternative ways of seeing the world … an inflated sense of self. I was far more idealistic about it at the time, or maybe just wilfully short-sighted.
‘I guess. Why?’
‘Just wondering.’
‘Cool.’
‘What are you thinking?’
What am I thinking of? What thinking? What? Such a disarming question, this one, the answer rarely ever worth knowing. I toyed with saying ‘How beautiful you are’, but feared the cringe police would come tearing in, bent double with their contortions of squirm-armoury, clamouring to throw up all over me.
‘Nothing really. You?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Cool.’
There was comfort in our aimless words. There was true romance in our banality. It all made sense.
‘Haven’t you got something you want to tell me?’
I thought this one over carefully, rolling it about in my mushy head. At least five minutes passed in our unhurried embrace.
‘I love you?’
‘Oh, I love you too, Eliot!’
This pleased me. I don’t like getting questions wrong. (Goes right back to Year 6 SATs.)
Lucy fell asleep first, as would become our standard. Her body looked for mine in its sleep with exploratory fidgets and experimental wiggles. When it found the warm contact of my wakeful limbs, I would crumple and curl around her like a benign Venus flytrap. I happily allowed her everything: her intermittent snoring, her bed-hogging antics, her oven-like heat, her funny suckling noises, her bullying hair getting in my face. I allowed her everything, as I lay awake, collecting pins and needles in the arm lopped beneath her neck, right through till the beeps and grunts of the early morning delivery trucks made her stir.
Jack has wandered off, probably rucking his way towards the bar, and the girls are ranting about some bitch in the year below, which I really can’t be bothered with. My pint is almost non-existent so I may as well follow.
‘I think I’m gonna get another. Anyone?’
‘I’m good, ta.’
‘No, cheers.’
I’m up and off.
I need to stop delaying. Either confront Ella or ring Lucy and find out what the matter is …
And how about these dreams I’ve been having? I’m not even sure if they are dreams … hallucinations or visions might be nearer the mark. They’ve been with me for a while now. For example: I’m sitting in a café. A jet-black Americano, dark as the day I was born, steams its little heart out beneath my nose. An odd bustle, mindful of being hush, murmurs and meanders. I’m surrounded by academics with their squints and their dandruff, their Biros and ring binders.
I’m sitting in a café on Broad Street, opposite the Sheldonian Theatre and its comic grotesqueries; those gurning statues of Monty Python stock. A chap to my left, like a monk in a suit, talks of the South African constitution; a ruddy old Irishman in the middle of the room raves at his seen-it-all-before interlocutor about terrorism and the Church; a bohemian tutor conducts a tutorial with two undergraduates on economics in the eighteenth-century sentimental novel. I take my place in this brain boggle with my Essays of Elia and thirteen-part Prelude.
I’m in a café, in a bookshop, the university’s unofficial library and staffroom. It smells of aspiration and intrigue. It sounds of niche interest and internal gossip. I’ve got my laptop out in front of me, whinnying and whirring, drafting yet another job application, trying to sound like I possess direction, trying not to sound like an arrogant prick. The flakes of a pain au raisin get about the keys and granules of brown sugar are embedded into my forearm. My stomach begins to hurt and I find myself doubling up.
‘Alright mate.’ I look around but can’t locate the voice. ‘Down here,’ it says. A pram has appeared to my left. ‘That’s right … in here.’ I peer inside to find a baby grinning up at me. I try to scream but I’ve got nothing. Its body is the size of an eighteen-month-old perhaps, but its head is preposterously adult-sized. I look harder, almost falling off the edge of my chair: it has my face on it.
SMASH.
I jump at the unexpected sound of a slamming door: ‘Ian, stop being so grey,’ says the lady over from me to the ranting Irishman. ‘You could win an Oscar for such a wild performance!’
I stare incredulously at the mini portrait of myself, wrapped up in its abandoned pram. I can’t see his body, hidden behind a soft white blanket, but I can make out the hump of his exaggerated baby’s paunch.
‘Do you mind? I’m a bit embarrassed about the old beer belly. That’s what three years of your hard drinking has done to me, I tell myself, but I still don’t like it.’ The baby reaches behind his head and pulls out a can of lager, whacks it open, and takes a thirsty glug. ‘What can I say?’ Its voice is a perfect imitation of mine. ‘Helps us sleep though, doesn’t it?’ His large head, transposed on to that toddler body, impractically fills the pram. Facially he’s identical, though his hair seems a little thinner than mine and I can make out some specks of premature grey. ‘What now? Is it the hair? Well, you have put us through a lot. The question is: do you think you’ve been provident in peril?’
‘I guess we’re going to find out, aren’t we?’
The babe lets out a small burp. From the mouths of. ‘Excuse us. Well, let’s just hope for some success, eh?’
I don’t know what to say.
‘Are you thinking about Lucy again?’
Startled surprised by the noise of the sound of her name coming from the tiny little thing, I hit and knock the scalding hot Americano all over me, myself, and I, but feel no hurt pain. Curiouser and curiouser.
‘Careful!’ shouts the babe, steam effervescing from his ears and nostrils in cartoon frenzy. ‘That hurts like hell!’
‘Shit, I’m so sorry. I didn’t get any on you, did I?’
The babe ignores my question, too busy writhing about. And then he takes another swig.
‘You make me feel like a sinner,’ I find myself crying. ‘Is all of this justified?’
The babe simply stares.
‘Why are you hogging my attention so?’
The babe looks at me, deadpan, knowing eyes. ‘Dreams, innit.’
I start to panic; the entire café has gone silent and is watching. Nervously I begin packing my things away and without acknowledging the babe I wander off into the shop, searching for escape. The customers switch back on and continue with their routines. I avoid looking behind as I flank the enormous rows of bookshelves, narrowing and leaning down on me like a bizarre Fritz Lang set. I can hear a squeaking noise creeping up.
I turn to find the pram wheeling itself in pursuit. No one accompanies it: it’s chasing me like some crazed M/F, driven by invisible forces. My heart is thumping and I long to wake up.
‘It’s a strange case, I know, but you can’t hide from me, Mr,’ says the babe, panting from all the exertion. ‘Anyway, why do you pun so much in your sleep? It’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not punning – you are!’
‘Exactly. I think you’ve read far too much, mate. It’s hurting my eyes.’ The babe is squinting, struggling to keep me in focus. ‘I suppose you think this is all a bit of a riddle though, don’t you?’
I find myself amassing the bibliography of my subconscious, frantically rushing between shelves and floors, not thinking about the selections: Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Martin Amis, Lewis Carroll, James Hogg, Anthony Burgess, Robert Louis Stevenson. Obvious when you think about it.
‘Do you think they’re going to help?’
‘I don’t know. I need answers from somewhere though.’
‘Good luck with that.’
There’s Jack – queuing, as I thought. He’s seen me and is making room amongst the crowd.
‘Ah mate.’
We’ve already been served. Jack knows when to make the call. Wise. Experienced. It never takes long to refuel, what with Jack’s pub/club know-how: he’s from Manchester.
‘Ella looks well fit tonight,’ he says. It must hurt him to acknowledge this, given the history, and it hurts me too, though he wouldn’t know anything about that – yet. Hearing him come out with stuff like this makes my night’s task even more difficult. Can it end in any way other than disaster for the two of us? I’m struggling to draft an alternative in this hurriedly planned script.
‘Huh?’
‘I’m messing! But seriously though …’ We exchange rueful grins.
When I first met Jack, at the very beginning of our Freshers Week, I thought I had found myself. Not in a spiritual or metaphysical sense. Nah. As in I had found someone exactly like me. My principal criterion when electing new friends was music taste, and Jack caught my attention in the JCR at a welcome talk, that first afternoon, when he muttered ‘tune’ to an old Smiths song that came on the radio (was it ‘This Charming Man’? No, let’s go for ‘The Boy with a Thorn in His Side’). I immediately checked him over (vintage denim jacket, black skinny jeans, self-consciously cool hair) and made my move. ‘You a fan?’
‘Fookin love um. From Manchester innit.’
‘Oh right, cool.’
‘Whereabouts you from?’
‘Wellingborough?’
‘State school?’
‘Yeah. You?’
‘Of course. Could tell from your accent.’
‘Cheers.’
‘No worries.’ We shared a look of mutual attraction. ‘What are you studying?’ Jack asked.
‘English?’
‘Nice. You any good?’
‘Urrrr … well, I like got an A I guess.’
‘I can’t even write, me. Nah, we didn’t have any pens at my school.’