Noughties (18 page)

Maybe it would’ve been better to have never seen the evidence. Sure, that would’ve been the healthier option. At least that way I could have had a decent night’s sleep and my road-kill ego would still be intact. But I
had
seen it. And I had wanted to see it. I had sought it out. Let’s face it, every time I click on her Mugshot “face” I am slightly disappointed not to find something scandalous or upsetting. I long to be fucked up. How dare you not fuck me up sooner.
Fucking slag
.

No, still too much.

“He’s outside of experience,” I said, breaking my conspicuous silence for the first time. Ella looked up at me, surprised. I was surprised myself, slipping into autopilot: “Libertinism is ostensibly about the direct gratification of the senses and lust, right? Yet language only forms a barrier for Rochester. It doesn’t bring him any closer to his subject. It merely distances and self-mortifies, like he’s on the
outside looking in.” I shifted in my seat, getting more upright. Terrence nearly dropped his notebook. “His vicious tirade on the promiscuous lover is ultimately futile: it may be brutal and damning, but it’s only words. He is helpless to affect what he sees. He’s merely left with his own fear and loathing, hidden behind a stylistic screen and mask.”

“Absolutely,” said Dylan, smiling and putting his book down. I noticed that the others were all scribbling away, and found a garbled version of my thoughts flicking and curling across Ella’s stunned page.

At the end of the tute Dylan asked Ella to stay behind for a quick chat. I think he had noticed her unusual lack of gusto, and apparently her essay that week had bombed. I was too busy angsting over Lucy to really care. I wondered what she was doing and weighed up the chances of seeing her soon.

Jack’s determined to enjoy this final night. Aren’t we all? Yes. We’re all agreed on this one.

“Let’s just have a good night, yeah?” he says again, with hammed-up seriousness, shrugging his shoulders in fake appeal like it’s a decision that needs to be made.

“Let’s just have a good night, yeah?” I say, the agreed response to the call.

“Let’s just have a good night,” chips in Scott.

“Lads on tour, lads on tour, lads on tour,” sings Jack to the tune of a footy chant, wielding a beer in each hand, as we settle into a booth inside the bar.

“Fuck me, this is going to cane in the morning,” says Sanjay. The warning isn’t necessary.

Jack and I pair off in the conversational arena. “Is it time to have a man chat yet?”

“You mean like a final ‘I love you, bro’?”

“Yeah. It won’t be the final one though. You ain’t ever gettin’ rid of me, baby.”

“As I feared.”

“Oh, how we laugh!” exclaims Jack in his best private-school imitation. He’s had long enough to perfect it these past three years.

“Oi, me old mucka, leave it out,” jeers Scott in horrifically rendered cockney. Ever an old Etonian, despite his best efforts to cut those ties, he sets off a round of giggles.

“Haha! Do you remember the first time we met Scott?” begins Jack.

“Oh come on, guys,” pleads Scott, instantly ruing his pained attempt at joviality. “We’ve heard it a million times before.”

Jack doubles over, choking on mute laughs, eyes scrunched shut, all teeth and gum.

“Please?” tries Scott, a last-ditch plea, delving into his pockets for the touchy-feelies.

“Oh god!” I’m fighting back the hysterics. This is more like it. “It was in your room as well, Jack, in Freshers Week.”

“Oh haha how we haha laugh hahaha!” He’s red, shaking and bubbling, a volcano of mirth.

Scott is now gulping his beer in individual stabs, blushing horrendously—like he always does—bracing himself for the story he knows will come.

“Fuck me, I can’t breathe,” pants Jack.

“Unfortunately not true,” mutters Scott, momentarily lifting his lips away from his security pint.

“… when Abi necked that whole bottle of Lambrini,” continues Jack, “and then Scott …” he breaks off, tugged under by our wave of roars “… he says … he says …”

“Hahahahahaha,” we cry in unison.

“… he says, ‘Gosh! I’ve read about girls like you in the tabloids … but, well, you know, gosh … I never knew you actually existed!’ ” Jack tilts back on his chair, throwing his face up to the skies, convulsing rapidly, tears streaming down his tensed, muscular cheeks. Scott buries his face in his hands, shaking his head, surreptitiously enjoying his claim to posterity.

“Bless him,” comes Sanjay, “he’d never seen an actual living girl before!” (the routine conclusion to the skit).

The girls arrive at the booth, ogled by a troop of lads just over from us.

“What’s so funny?” inquires Megan, her tipsy voice slipping off her tongue.

“The Lambrini story,” explains Scott with dejected airs. Ella rolls her eyes and Abi shows subtle signs of pride.

“Ah, I’m gonna miss the posh sod,” I say to Jack, returning to our private dialogue.

“Me too.… What am I talking about? I’m going halfway round the world with the tosser!”

“Hah, yeah. Good luck.”

“Fuck. Nah, it’ll be hot. He can pull them in with the Hugh Grant and then I’ll give ’em the bit of rough they’re really after.”

“Teamwork.”

“Exactly,” says Jack before darting at his glass for another swig. “It’s a shame you’re not coming with us.”

I would’ve been up for it as well, but things weren’t too easy between me and Jack when they organized their gap year a few months ago …

Ella cautiously watches us from across the table, full of care, chewing on her straw and pretending to listen to Abi’s conversation.

A roving bar-lady infiltrates our booth, showing off her utility belt loaded with strawberry-and-cream vodka shots. Her looping earrings glitter under the neon lights and her waddling bum shakes from side to side like drink in an unsteady glass.

“Anyone for shots? Only two quid each,” she says.

“Are they as sexy as you?” asks Jack, always quick to stir cheeky vibes.

“Of course. They’re scrummy.”

“Scrummy you say? Will you do one with me?” She is remotely fit, I suppose, but this is irrelevant.

“Shots all around and one for yourself,” I interrupt to end the cringe. The waitress smiles and begins administering our tooth rot.

“Trust you to jump in there before me,” mutters Jack.

I shoot a quick look at Ella, whose face, though motionless, seems to be telling me something. My heart whimpers. What does he mean? Nothing, nothing. Stop being so sensitive. He doesn’t know, does he? How could he … I’ve kept it from him all this time. My stomach flutters and my skin prickles with heat. I’m being overly paranoid … reading too much into things. He could’ve meant anything …

I’m remembering a certain night (of course I am, what other night could it be?). It begins at an English Literature drinks party halfway through a royally shit Michaelmas term. English Drinks: the once-termly gathering of Hollywell’s literary students and tutors (about twenty in all) for minor nibbles and major inebriation. There we stood in a snugly fitted room, named after one of the college’s illustrious benefactors, guzzling wine gratis. (Some tables and chairs pushed to the mahogany sides. Shimmering book cabinets with leather-bound guts. Rippled carpet hugging old cambering floorboards. Lighting sleepy, temperature soft and warm. Window seats with deep, crimson cushions looking out and down onto pitch-black quadrangle scene. Armchairs and sofas, portraits and chandelier. The door rattles shut with each coming and going: private.)

I pause to note that Rob had been in touch earlier that
evening to let me know that he was there for me after the breakup with Lucy:

“Rooted anyone yet?”

“Huh?”

“You know,
porked
anyone? Have you moved on?”

“Too soon, mate. I’m not even thinking about that.” That was a lie—the possibility of being sexually promiscuous all of a sudden was scaring the shit out of me.

“Okay. Well, if you ever need to talk … Why not come and visit me in …” I had switched off. I knew he was only going to suggest I went up to his uni, wherever it was, and laid some of his mates or a selection of the eager freshers he had primed.

“Yeah mate, maybe. Busy term … so I doubt it.”

“Whatever.”

“I’ve gotta go.”

“Working again?”

“I’m going to a drinks party actually.”

This combination of words was a self-evident redundancy to Rob; a silly tautology: one drinks at all parties, right? Otherwise what’s the point?

“That’s what I’m talking about! Big club night?”

“Actually, no. It’s a little get-together put on by my tutors for—”

“Your what?”

“My tutors.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Well, it’s for—”

“You’re such a fag, mate. I worry about you sometimes. Nah, what you need is a couple of pints of snakebite, a sweaty club, and lots of hot girls to rub yourself on.”

“Bye then.”

“Peace.”

And so I went to the party. We began in circles. Nervous clusters crystallized around their respective oracles: a pair of postgrads, bedraggled by advanced knowledge of Joyce and Woolf, bookending Dr. Polly Snow; a brace of first-year girls plus awkward lad, tirelessly topped up by Dylan’s trigger-happy claret and Sauvignon Blanc; Cassandra, the young new medieval tutor, blending with third-year finalists and their thoughts of apocalypse; and me, Megan, and Ella, scavenging the egg and cress, the tuna and cucumber, the cheese and tomato, staining our teeth against the bitter grape of the red, a nervous cluster in want of its oracle. (Terrence was absent, thankfully, being too exclusive for such an event.) The air was charged with excited expectancy: the prospect of hobnobbing with our tutors and absorbing grand, vaulting thought.

“I’m gonna get absolutely fucked tonight,” I said on the down-low to our orphan group. “I think I’m halfway there already.”

“Lightweight,” ribbed Ella.

“As if,” I remonstrated. “I’ve only had a sandwich all day” (the standard line).

“We need to corner one of the tutors,” said Megan ambitiously, staring in the direction of Polly. “Bloody postgrads kissing her arse and getting in the way … Let’s head over and make ourselves apparent,” she suggested, unable to relax.

“I guess,” said Ella as she refilled her lipstick-signatured glass.

Setting off on our seven-meter expedition over to Polly, a bumbling old man blocked us in our tracks.

“Mmmmmmmm hullo th-th-there.”

Simultaneously alarmed and amused we took stock of this most unexpected creature. He had old Fellow bespattered all over him: the tweed jacket and velvety cords; the
tufty nostrils and mischievous twinkle; the incoherent babble of drink and arcane knowledge. The port glass in his right hand suggested a lifetime devotion to the hard stuff.

“Hello?” said Megan, jaggedly.

“Hello,” said Ella with more humor.

“W-w-w-well, aren’t you a p-p-pretty wibble thing,” he said to Ella, swaying and nodding somnolently. This guy must’ve been fucked off his tits for the last fifty years. That’s what hanging out in libraries does for you.

“Excuse me?” she said abruptly. I was surprised: I had expected her to forgive his sleazy aspect for the quirky, grandfatherly character he clearly played.

“Are you Polly and Dylan’s b-b-b-b-bright wobble young things, hmmmm?” he asked, leaning so far forward on his toes that I was primed for a catch.

“Yes,” jabbed Megan with a hint of finality in her tone, desperate to dispense with this inconvenience in order to get to Polly.

“We’re second-years,” added Ella as an apologetic modification. Megan glared at her.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhh,” sang the old man, wavering between wonderment and death throe. “T-t-t-tttto b’young,” he dreamed out loud, his bulbous eyes momentarily hidden by wrinkled accordion lids, as though rolling the idea back and around in his once lucid head.

“I w-w-w-w-w-w-was Fellow here, a long wobbly t-t-t-ttime ago. Wrote on James and Hardy, hmmmmm?”

Groping after a bottle from the side he topped the girls’ glasses liberally, holding the vessel limply round its head and leaning into them, splashing puddles of red all over his shoes and the light-gold carpet. Bored by his gendered focus and my own empty glass, I slipped away to the drinks table. Glugging from the wings I watched Ella throwing back her
hair and laughing generously. I marked her sophisticated squints of consideration and her full-bodied enthusiasms: those tilts and flutters and sways. I could smell her careful fruitiness from across the room, coming in traces and then waves. A stylish, miniature blazer pinched her about the sides, contrastingly fanning her chest and hips into distracting outlines above and below. In the course of making these observations we slozzled another glass each. It looked like Ella was going to drink me under the table.

Then a familiar rumble in my trouser leg. First Jack:

Then Rob:

“Alright?” came Dylan’s voice as I tucked my phone back into my pocket. He was scouting through the mass of opened bottles on the table, testing them for dregs.

“Oh, hi Dylan.”

“Enjoying the evening?”

“Yeah I am, thanks,” I said, hurriedly swallowing back a stodgy sandwich of mysterious content.

“I need heavy booze, and quick,” he confided, nodding toward a group of master’s students who had fallen to bickering amongst themselves about some inane literary point.

“All they want to do is talk about bloody English. Factory-line academic sycophants! It’s such a bore. Why talk shop?” he asked rhetorically, filling his glass to the brim. “Can’t they talk about music, or the last film they saw, or who they’re shagging?” He took an eager gulp. “Tossers.”

“Completely,” I said, squirming at the thought of all those pre-planned questions I had lined up about his latest research, his book on Wordsworth, and the English course. I couldn’t take my eyes off Ella.

“How do you think she’s doing this term?” he asked.