Noughties (11 page)

But what have we got to complain about? What on earth could constitute crises for us, so young and brimming with
potential? Well, I can’t account for everyone, but maybe Sanj is burned from the intensity of Law Finals and having doubts about his future at a Magic Circle firm where the pressures will only rise exponentially, a slave to corporate boredom; maybe Abi is heartaching over the lack of love in her life, all her promiscuity and pulling initiatives no substitute for genuine bonds; perhaps Megan is realizing that if she’s still with Mike now, after all this, she’s gonna have to start getting used to the idea of being with him forever … (
Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and Faustus hood?
); Scott is almost certainly despairing over his future: the expensive education—illustrious prep schools, Eton, Oxford—and now not a clue; as for Jack, Ella, and me, that’s going to take much longer to convey. That’s what tonight is for.

A load of first-years from our college enter the pub. We all look up, slightly put out. They’re so fresh, virtually ejaculating with hope and ambition.

“To be young, eh?” I say.

“To youth!” exclaims Jack, raising his pint aloft.

“Hear, hear,” we cry.

“Bitches,” mutters Abi. It’s tough for the older lady in student society.

The last three years have retarded us all. Apparently you’re meant to “find yourself” at uni, but all we managed to do was get even more lost. It’s like a game of hide-and-seek where the seeker can’t be bothered to finish the job … can’t be arsed to look in the drawers or under the bed. I came of age and age came of me. It was all rather becoming. At least I think it was. Maybe it passed me by. We’re twenty-one, which is to say we are slightly more specialized eighteen-year-olds. Twenty-one used to be the
age when you got the keys to the home, but we can’t open anything except our gullets.

We chug.

“You should be paying for tonight,
solicitor
Sanjay,” jokes Abi with a sarky sound effect on her voice. “You’re the one with the hench salary coming your way—lucky shit.” Sanjay looks consummately depressed, burdened by the toxic City connotations of his future: perceived enemy of art, literature, and soul.

“Second that. Me and Scott are just poor gap-year vagabonds now,” says Jack, reminding me of their plans to travel the world for several months. Scott seems embarrassed by their anti-prospects, all too willing to trade the idealism of his wind-in-the-hair route for some of the soulless City bread—all those loaves and fancy rolls—that Sanjay’s going to be getting his hands on.

“If anyone should be minesweeping for free drinks it’s Eliot—he’s the one who hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing next!” quips Megan. I don’t think it was meant to sound so cruel, but she’s right: I really haven’t got a clue.

What’s it going to be then, eh?

I look around the table: some of the slightly-above-average minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the—

“Hi, I’m so sorry. I haven’t had a chance—”

“Eliot! I’ve been trying to get hold of you all—” The signal in the King’s Arms is terrible. I jump from the table and head to a corner, left index finger plugged into left ear, pressing the phone harder against the right like it might absorb her voice better.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear that. It’s my last night, you know, I can’t spend it checking my phone all the time …” Slightly quieter, I say, “This might be the last time I see some of them.”

“There’s something I need to talk to you about.” She pauses. “Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”

“Sorry. What’s wrong?”

“I need to tell you something … but I’m not sure how …” Her voice trails off into silence. “Where are you?”

“The King’s Arms. I told you that, hun. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know if that’s a good place to hear something like this.”

Cautious eyes glance over from the table, trying to gauge the seriousness of my call: Ella, Jack. They talk amongst
themselves, hypothesizing and screenplay plotting. I turn my back.

“What’s going on, Lucy?”

“Eliot, I—”

The phone is beeping, like it’s censoring a long illustrious obscenity. I look at the screen and see the usual mountain of signal incrementally dropping to a mere doorstop. She’s gone. Was she crying at the end or was that the dwindling connection? I try calling back, but there’s still no signal. I try again.
Sorry, it has not been possible to
— “Fuck,” I mutter under my breath.

I head back over to the table. The others can tell from my vacant look that something is up.

“Everything okay, mate?” asks Jack.

“Yeah, fine.” It wouldn’t have taken them long to deduce that Lucy was on the other end. That might explain their timorousness: Lucy always did fit uncomfortably with Oxford. And somehow hearing her on the phone just now reminds me of that … a disembodied Lucy … not fully present …

“She’s quite shy,” I warned Ella and Jack, down the college bar the night before Lucy’s first visit to Oxford. It had been nearly two weeks since we had said good-bye and I’d left for university, but it felt like we’d been apart forever.

“I’m sure she’s lovely, Eliot. We’re all looking forward to meeting her,” Ella had said with a tender maturity that made me want to fall for her that little bit more—

Why am I torturing myself with memories? How am I ever going to be in any kind of moment if I can’t just let things go? But past incidents are what I’m full of and I must continue to play catch-up. It’s not a question of an A
side and a B side, of present and past, for it all feels contemporary to me; it all goes into the making of tonight. It’s the only way I am going to make sense—

Okay. Lucy’s first visit. My nerves were threatening to get the better of me, grabbing me by the balls and letting me know who was boss as I waited for her at the bus stop outside Sainsbury’s. The heavy air and sodden gritty pavements compounded my fears, the rain teasing out all those grimy smells peculiar to wet weather: dank hair, moldy cardboard, dog tongue, oil-swirl puddle. Different worlds—home and uni, love and friendship—were coming together and the atmosphere was thick with portent.

As I’ve said before, Lucy wasn’t—isn’t—the academic type. This made me anxious about bringing her to Oxford, where I had expected everyone to be so otherworldly and lofty. But maybe I wasn’t giving her enough credit. It’s hard to be rational though, or to feel secure, when the thing that really sets you apart from other lads is your brain and excellent literary knowledge. Most girls simply aren’t interested in brains and excellent literary knowledge. They are worthless commodities … valueless on the modern-day meat market. If a girl, however, was to say to me, “Hi, my name is Nicole and I am a huge fan of
fin de siècle
novels that explore the theme of degeneration,” I would bet my entire student loan that I’d have her in the sack before you could say Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
. Obviously none of this mattered to Lucy. She must’ve liked me for other reasons that I couldn’t make out.

Part of me felt a growing preference for separate spheres: keep Lucy to myself, tucked away in our private enclave, far from the baying and spitting of the public forum. I could smuggle her into my room and lock the door … disconnect the Internet cable … divert all calls. I could even—

“Hey!”

Lucy’s bus had been and gone.

“Huh? Oh … Sorry! I was a million miles away.”

“Hehe.” She didn’t say this as such, but it comes close. It’s her code for gentle humor or self-deprecation in texts and emails (as in “bless me” or “how silly is that?”).

“It’s great to see you,” I said, accompanied by a kiss and a hug. And it
was
great to see her. She looked vitalized, aglow with uncertain excitement, wrapped in her shimmering gold scarf, shaped enticingly by white skinny jeans. Still approaching eighteen, this must’ve seemed quite an adventure: away from home in an unknown city, with a boy (yours truly), and the promise of sex and alcohol (in no particular order). Most importantly, though, free from the obtrusive presence of “come and sit with us” parents.

“Have you missed me?”

“Of course I have. Terribly!”

“Good,” she said, untroubled by the irony of greeting my intimation of suffering as a positive thing, as only a lover can.

“You?”

“Of course.”

We strolled arm in arm to my quaint and pretty college. When we passed through the forbidding archways, into the main quadrangle, Lucy unlinked from me, donning an impenetrable armory of puzzlement and suspicion. She attempted to take it all in: the perfection of the grid-imprinted grass; the palpable sense of history emblazoned in stained glass and weathered stone; the Gothic points and angles, aslant from our accustomed reality; the threat of an alternative life. Already she seemed to be turning away. I boasted futile gems of college history as we made for my staircase: how many prime ministers went here,
which movies and TV shows were filmed on site, the roll call of alumni novelists and athletes. I was pompous and proud, but mainly awkward.

She spent, it seemed to me, an unusually long time in front of the mirror in my room, preparing herself for the bar: lip gloss, mascara, bracelets, perfumes, straighteners, heels, hair spray, bronzer. Who did she want to impress? I wallowed in sudden paranoia: she didn’t go to all this effort for me … she
must
be looking to impress my mates … Oxford lads … 
has
to be … maybe she’s seen my new photos from Freshers Week on Mugshot and taken a fancy to one of the guys … maybe she’s got a crush on Scott … she
must
have a crush on Scott … she wants all the guys to be attracted to her … she’s after their hard-ons and chat-up lines. The gungy cogs of my jealous mind went into overdrive. (In a cooler, more collected moment, I realized that she was doing it for herself. It was her shield. She was responding to her difference in age and a presumed deficit in sophistication. She wanted to fit in. And she was doing it for me. She wanted me to feel glad that she was around.)

“So what are your friends like?” she asked, rooting for some preparatory information as we bustled out of my pigsty.

“Oh, they’re all lovely. You’ll get along fine.”

“That’s cool.”

I thought I picked up a quiver of anxiety in her voice.

“Don’t feel any pressure though. Just be yourself. I’ve told them you’re quite shy anyway … so it’s not like they’re expecting much.”

“Well, thanks a lot, Eliot.”

“What?”

“I’m not even shy,” she added, coldly.

As we descended toward the Hollywell College bar, a dungeon buried beneath the quad, sharp voices and bellows ricocheted against the walls of the stairwell, echoing like a frenzied swimming pool. I felt tense as I imagined the nerves that must have being consuming Lucy. When the door swung open we were drowned by an instantly doubled hoorah. My crew was sitting over by the jukebox playing a game of 21s or Bunnies or whatever. The laughs and cheers were caricature, the shouts superficially aggressive: “Get it down, you Zulu warrior … Get it down, you Zulu CHIEF CHIEF CHIEF CHIEF.”

“Everyone, this is Lucy … Lucy, this is everyone,” I said, interrupting their drinking game.

They all seemed taken aback … was Jack checking her out? Motherfu—

“Hey, Lucy. Here, take a seat.” Ella pulled up a stool. “I’m Ella.”

“Hi,” said Lucy, shaking Ella’s hand and smiling her razzle-dazzle smile. Her summer countenance, with its sultry contours and soft textures, couldn’t have been more incongruous with the humdrum
mise en scène
: the drab chipped furniture, the low arching ceiling, the lumpy underground brickwork, the weak septic lighting. She’s an effervescent Eloi kidnapped by Morlocks in an alcoholic subterrain, dramatized my essay-fagged brain. They belonged to different genres: Lucy all dream vision; the scene a lowly Anglo-Saxon dirge. I had breached some code of formal decorum by bringing her there.

Lucy sat smiling.

She won’t start any conversation … I know she won’t … she’ll just sit there, smiling.

“So what do you do?” ventured Sanjay.

What do you mean, what does she
do
? Well, she sleeps and eats, shits and pisses, takes regular doses of oxygen, and stretches her limbs when she needs to get from A to B …

Me. She does
me
! Alright?

“I’m in my last year at school.” (They already knew this, of course.)

“Ah, cool.”

“Hehe.” (She didn’t actually say this.)

“Have you started applying to any universities yet?” offered Megan.

Yeah, probably none of the ones you did. Jesus!
She’s not the academic type
, okay? Leave the poor girl alone.

“I’m not quite sure if I’m going to go yet,” she said, coloring up slightly. She peered at me, as though she was bothered about how I’d respond. I had the feeling she was only considering uni because of me … like it was what I would’ve wanted … or expected. “The uni at Northampton has a pretty good Travel and Tourism course, so I might look at that … I’d have to get the grades first though!” I hung my head, waiting for the inexorable judgments of my brainy mates. I wanted to apologize to everyone. I relinquished Lucy’s hand under the table and fiddled in my pocket for my wallet.

“Oh cool,” said Jack. “My big sis works in events management … same kind of thing, right?” Lucy nodded readily. “Yeah, she loves it. Gets loads of free tickets for things.” I glanced up, surprised not to find everyone staring at me in disbelief or giving Lucy condescending looks. No, they were all listening intently, and drinking their drinks as per normal. I took Lucy’s hand back in mine.

“I think Eliot secretly wants me to apply to Oxford Brooks,” she said, giving me a cheeky sidelong look.

“Hah, keep you nearby, eh?” said Jack.

“Exactly … that’s the one thing that puts me off though!”

Very funny now … quite the sense of humor on you there. You’ve got all my friends laughing … well done … oh, funny girl. This is depressing.

“Hehe, only joking, Eliot!”

Get off my hand.