Caedmon’s Song (2 page)

She could picture the old Sunday school illustrations of the Bible story: inside the whale had looked as vast and gloomy as a cathedral, with the ribs mimicking its vaulting. And there sat poor
Jonah, all alone. She imagined how his cries must have echoed in all that space. But could there really be so much emptiness inside a whale? Wasn’t it all a twisted congestion of tubing and
swollen, throbbing organs like it was inside people?

She tried to remember the story. Hadn’t Jonah attempted to escape his destiny by running off to Tarshish when he was supposed to go and cry against the wickedness in Nineveh? Then a great
tempest had raged and the sailors threw him overboard. He spent three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, until he prayed for deliverance and the beast spewed him forth onto dry land.
After that, he accepted his destiny and went to Nineveh. She couldn’t remember what happened next. There was something about the people there repenting and being spared, which didn’t
please Jonah much after all he’d been through, but Martha couldn’t recall the ending. Still, it seemed remarkably apt. She had struggled against her fate, too, at first, but now she had
accepted her destiny, the holiness of her task. She was headed for Nineveh, where evil thrived, and no matter what, there would be no mercy this time.

Captain Cook’s statue looked confidently out to sea just beyond the jawbone, rolled-up charts under his arm. Cook had learned his seamanship on the Whitby coal ships, Martha had read, and
the vessels he had commanded on epic voyages to the South Seas had been built here, where that rusted hulk lay at anchor in the lower harbour. The
Endeavour
and the
Resolution.
Good
names, she thought.

Royal Crescent, curved in an elegant semicircle facing the sea, offered a number of private hotels with vacancies, but the prices were too high. She might have to stay a week or two, and over
ten pounds a night would be too much. It was a shame, because these hotels were probably a lot more comfortable than what she was likely to get. Still, a room with a bath and a colour television
was too much to ask for. And you always had to pay more if you wanted to see the sea. How often did people on holiday actually sit in their rooms and admire the view? Martha wondered. Hardly at
all. But it was the reassurance that counted, the knowledge that it was there if you wanted to look. And that privilege cost money.

The promenade along West Cliff was lined with huge Victorian hotels of the kind that were built in most seaside towns when holidays at the coast came into vogue. Martha knew none of these were
for her, either, so she turned down Crescent Avenue to find a cheap bed and breakfast place on a nondescript street.

As it happened, Abbey Terrace wasn’t entirely without charm. It sloped steeply down to the estuary, though it stopped at East Terrace before it actually reached the front, and boasted a
row of tall guesthouses, all bearing recommendations from the RAC or AA. Many of them even had their rates posted in the window, and Martha chose one that cost nine pounds fifty per night.

Wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, she opened the wrought-iron gate and walked up the path.

KIRSTEN

‘Come on now, let’s be ’aving yer! Ain’t yer got no ’omes to go to?’ The landlord of the Ring O’Bells voiced his nightly complaint as
he came over to Kirsten’s table to collect the glasses. ‘It’s half past eleven. They’ll have my licence, they will.’

‘Pray cease and desist,’ said Damon, holding up his hand like a stop sign. ‘Dost thou not ken ’tis the end of term? Know’st thou not ’tis the end of our final
year in this fair city?’

‘I don’t bloody care,’ the landlord growled. ‘It’s time you all pissed off home to bed.’ He snatched a half-empty glass from the table.

‘Hey, that was my drink!’ Sarah said. ‘I haven’t finished it.’

‘Yes you have, love.’ He stood his ground, not a big man, but quick and strong enough to outmanoeuvre a bunch of drunken students. ‘Out, the lot of you. Now! Come
on!’

Hugo stood up. ‘Wait a minute. She paid for that drink and she’s got every bloody right to finish it.’ With his curly blond hair and broad shoulders, he looked more like a
rugby player than a student of English.

Kirsten sighed. There was going to be trouble, she could sense it. Damon was drunk and Hugo was proud and foolish enough, even sober, to start a fight. Just what she needed on her last night at
university.

The landlord tapped his watch. ‘Not at this time, she hasn’t. Not according to the licensing laws.’

‘Are you going to give her it back?’

‘No.’

Behind him, the cellarman, Les, an ex-fighter with a misshapen nose and cauliflower ears, stood poised for trouble.

‘Well, fuck you, then,’ Hugo said. ‘You can have this one too.’ And he threw the rest of his pint of Guinness in the landlord’s face.

Les moved forward but the landlord put out an arm to stop him. ‘We don’t want any trouble, lads and lasses,’ he said in an icily calm voice. ‘You’ve had your fun.
Now why don’t you go and have your party somewhere else?’

‘Might as well, Hugo,’ said Kirsten, tugging at his sleeve. ‘The man’s right. We’ll get nothing more to drink here and there’s no sense starting a fight, not
tonight. Let’s go to Russell’s party.’

Hugo sat down sulkily and frowned at his pint glass as if he regretted wasting the stout. ‘All right,’ he said, then glared at the landlord again. ‘But it’s not fair. You
pay for your drinks and that bastard just snatches them off you. We ought to get our money back, at least. How long have we been coming here? Two years. And this is how we get treated.’

‘Come on, Hugo.’ Damon clapped him on the shoulder and they all got up to leave. ‘ ’Twould indeed be a great pleasure to drown yon varlet in a tun of malmsey, but. .
.’ He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and shrugged.
‘
Tempus fugit,
old mate.’ With his short haircut and raddled, boyish complexion, he looked like
an old-fashioned grammar-school kid. He whipped his scarf dramatically around his neck and the end tipped over a glass on the table. It rolled towards the edge, wobbled back and forth there,
undecided, then stopped for a moment before dropping to the floor. The landlord stood by patiently, arms folded, and Les looked ready for a fight.

‘Fascist bastards,’ Sarah said, picking up her handbag.

They beat a hasty and noisy retreat out of the pub, singing ‘Johnny B. Goode’, the song that had been playing on the jukebox when the landlord unplugged it.

‘Russell’s is it, then?’ Hugo asked.

Everyone agreed. No one had any booze to take along, but good old Russell always put on a good spread. He had plenty of money, what with his father being such a whiz on the stock market.
Probably a bit of insider-trading, Kirsten suspected, but who was she to complain?

And so the four of them walked out into a balmy June evening – only Damon wearing a scarf because he affected eccentricity – and made their way through the deserted campus to the
residence buildings. There were Hugo, Sarah, Kirsten and Damon, all of them final-year English students. The only person missing from the close-knit group was Galen, Kirsten’s boyfriend. Just
after exams, his grandmother had died and he’d had to rush down to Kent to console his mother and help out with arrangements.

Kirsten was feeling a little tipsy as they hurried to Oastler Hall and up the worn stone steps to Russell’s rooms. She missed Galen and wished he could be here to celebrate, too –
especially as she had got a First. Still, she’d had enough congratulations to make her thoroughly bored with the whole business already. Now it was time to get maudlin and say her farewells,
for tomorrow she was heading home. If only she could keep Hugo’s wandering hands away . . .

The party seemed to have spilled over into the corridor and adjoining rooms. Even if they wanted to, which was unlikely, Russell’s neighbours would hardly have been able to get to sleep.
The newcomers pushed their way through the crowd into the smoky flat, calling greetings as they went. Most of the lights were off in the living room, where The Velvet Underground were singing
‘Sweet Jane’ and couples danced with drinks in their hands. Russell himself leaned by the window talking to Guy Naburn, a trendy tutor who hung around with students rather than with his
colleagues, and welcomed them all when they tumbled in.

‘Hope you’ve got some booze,’ Hugo shouted over the music. ‘We just got chucked out of the Ring O’Bells.’

Russell laughed. ‘For that, you deserve the best. Try the kitchen.’

Sure enough, half-finished bottles of red wine and a couple of large casks of ale rested on the kitchen table. The fridge was full of Newcastle Brown and Carlsberg Special Brew, except for the
space taken up by litre bottles of screw-top Riesling. The four latecomers busied themselves pouring drinks, then wandered off to mingle. It was hot, dim and smoky. Kirsten went to stand by an open
window to get some air. She drank cold lager from the can and watched the shadows prance and flail on the dance floor. Smoke curled up and drifted past her out of the window into the night.

She thought about the three years they had spent together and felt sad now they were all going their separate ways in the big, bad world beyond university – the
real
world, as
everyone called it. What an odd bunch they’d made at the start. That first term, they had circled one another warily and shyly, away from home for the first time, all lost and alone, and none
of them willing to admit it: Damon, the witty eighteenth-century scholar; Sarah, feminist criticism and women’s fiction; Hugo, drama and poetry; herself, linguistics, specializing in
phonology and dialects; and Galen, modernism with a touch of Marxism thrown in for good measure. Through tutorials, department social evenings and informal parties, they had made their tentative
approaches and discovered kindred spirits. By the end of the first year, they had become inseparable.

Together, they had suffered the vicissitudes, the joys and the disappointments of youth: Kirsten consoled Sarah after her nasty affair with Felix Stapeley, her second-year tutor; Sarah fell out
with Damon briefly over a disagreement on the validity of a feminist approach to literature; Galen stood up for Hugo, who failed his Anglo-Saxon exam and almost got sent down; and Hugo pretended to
be miffed for a while when Kirsten took up with Galen instead of him.

After being close for so long, their lives were so intertwined that Kirsten found it hard to imagine a future without the others. But, she realized sadly, that was surely what she had to face.
Even though she and Galen had planned to go and do postgraduate work in Toronto, things might not work out that way. One of them might not be accepted – and then what?

One of the dancers stumbled backwards and bumped into Kirsten. The lager foamed in the can and spilled over her hand. The drunken dancer just shrugged and got back to business. Kirsten laughed
and put her can on the window sill. Having got the feel of the party at last, she launched herself into the shadowy crowd and chatted and danced till she was hot and tired. Then, finding that her
half-full can had been used as an ashtray in her absence, she got some more lager and returned to her spot by the window. The Rolling Stones were singing ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’.
Russell sure knew how to choose party music.

‘How you doing?’ It was Hugo, shouting in her ear.

‘I’m all right,’ she yelled back. ‘A bit tired, that’s all. I’ll have to go soon.’

‘How about a dance?’

Kirsten nodded and joined him on the floor. She didn’t know if she was a good dancer or not, but she enjoyed herself. She liked moving her body to the beat of fast music, and the Stones
were the best of all. With the Stones she felt a certain earthy, pagan power deep in her body, and when she danced to their music she shed all her inhibitions: her hips swung wildly and her arms
drew abstract patterns in the air. Hugo danced less gracefully. His movements were heavier, more deliberate and limited than Kirsten’s. He tended to lumber around a bit. It didn’t
matter to her, though; she hardly ever paid attention to the person she was dancing with, so bound up in her own world was she. The problem was, some men took her wild gyrations on the dance floor
as an invitation to bed, which they most certainly were not.

The song ended and ‘Time Is on My Side’ came on, a slower number. Hugo moved closer and put his arms around her. She let him. It was only dancing, after all, and they were close
friends. She rested her head on his shoulder and swayed to the music.

‘I’ll miss you, you know, Hugo,’ she said as they danced. ‘I do hope we can all still keep in touch.’

‘We will,’ Hugo said, turning his head so that she could hear him. ‘None of us know what the hell we’re going to be doing yet. On the dole, most likely. Or maybe
we’ll all come out and join you and Galen in Canada.’

‘If we get there.’

He held her more closely and they stopped talking. The music carried them along. She could feel Hugo’s warm breath in her hair, and his hand had slipped down her back to the base of her
spine. The floor was getting more crowded. Everywhere they moved, they seemed to bump into another huddled couple. Finally, the song ended and Hugo guided her back towards the window as
‘Street Fighting Man’ came on.

When they’d both cooled down and had something to drink, he leaned forward and kissed her. It was so quick that she didn’t have time to stop him. Then his arms were around her,
running over her shoulders and buttocks, pulling her hips towards him. She struggled and broke away, instinctively wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘Hugo!’

‘Oh, come on, Kirsten. It’s our last chance, while we’re still young. Who knows what might happen tomorrow?’

Kirsten laughed and punched him on the shoulder. She couldn’t stay angry with him. ‘Don’t pull that “gather ye rosebuds” stuff with me, Hugo Lassiter. I’ll
say this for you, you don’t give up trying, do you?’

Hugo grinned.

‘But it’s still no,’ Kirsten said. ‘I like you, you know that, but only as a friend.’