Noughties (28 page)

“Absolutely,” said Dylan, smirking, now poised on his red throne. The nude sketch still hung from the wall with its psychoanalytical bent, but it didn’t interest me anymore.

“Nice essays this week,” he said, scanning his overused eyes past them to remember what they were about (double-checking that he’d actually read them). “Especially yours, Ella, though a bit too researched. I want to hear your personal response more.”

Well, how had she found the time to do all that research? Hadn’t she been terminally occupied researching Jack’s knob-end?

“Okay,” she said despondently.

“Short and sweet, Eliot. Good. That’s what I like to see.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

The two perpendicular sofas were draped with Eastern throws (it being of particular importance in the academic game to give off a cosmopolitan vibe), each taking the tutor’s chair as their focal point. Ella and I went for a sofa
each, which, admittedly, looked odd, placing us as it did several meters apart. Dylan noticed this subtle presentation of disharmony and raised an ironic smile. Such readable dynamics must be typical in a profession that deals predominantly with neurotic, sex-obsessed young adults. For three years I reckon he’d had his eye on Ella and me as potential star-crossed lovers. I’ve often wondered if tutors take this kind of thing into consideration when interviewing and selecting each year’s intake: well, this Bolshevik from Barnsley is going to send that landed Harrovian into an absolute jizz, and this recovering heroin addict from Stowe is bound to turn out an ax murderer, which will garner great publicity for us; and that luscious Caribbean girl with the posh accent will keep
me
entertained through all the dreary morning tutes on Chaucer, as well as sending the spotty state-school chumps doolally with stiffies and wet dreams …

Dylan kicked us off: “Sticking with
The Prelude
, to start with, where do you think the poet is in all this? Because there’s an interesting interplay between absence and presence, isn’t there … both a temporal and experiential to and fro? Is he occupying multiple spaces or is there meant to be some kind of disjunction?”

I had learned by this stage of my academic struggle that there is no obligation whatsoever to answer the specific question in hand. The tutor can say anything and you would still begin with the same point that you’d lined up the night before. Apparently Ella and I were both rather keen that day, edging forward simultaneously and going to speak. This kind of eagerness can usually be interpreted in one of two ways: either you are incredibly engaged and bursting with things to say about the writer under discussion; or (more often the case) you have one point and one point
only
that you think might just about be worthy of
vocalization. Ella and I faltered, slightly embarrassed by the awkwardness that such clumsy moments create, and with comic coordination (abashedly shaking our heads) we said, “Oh sorry, you go.” But it was me who insisted on defeat, opening my palms in a permissive gesture and sitting back into the couch.

“Well, I think in my essay I used Schiller’s distinction between the naïve and the sentimental …” Looking to me, she added, “The naïve being harmony with nature and the sentimental being an estrangement from nature, or self-consciousness, if you like.” Yes, I do like that; I nodded, and began to scribble. “And I think that what we get in
The Prelude
is a series of parables about the emergence from naïve complacency into self-consciousness, of course bolstered by lots of self-pleasing myths and stories, like the boat and the willow tree, et cetera.” Wow, I thought to myself, as I continued to make notes: Ella is
well
fit. Dylan was smiling, rubbing his forehead and somehow making his tiny body spread over the entire chair.

“But of course,” Ella continued, “the sense of innocence cannot be reaccessed, as it were, because it’s all ciphered through the
mature
poet’s imagination. This might enable him to carry out deeper interpretations of the past and to understand early experience more fully—where before there was a severe deficit of understanding—but it does mean that the perceptions fundamentally aren’t the same. They are the perceptions of the poet writing the poem rather than the recalled younger self. Just think of those grotesque descriptions of the baby Wordsworth as a ‘dwarf Man,’ and what he refers to as ‘the monster birth.’ ”

This hits me like a wet slap across the cheek: my nightmares, our history … I feel giddy. I think Ella suddenly realizes too and silences herself, sinking back.

“Precisely. And doesn’t he sound like a precocious little prick … Christ, he’s a fucking shit: ‘his teachers stare, the country people pray for God’s good grace.’ What a terror!” said Dylan. Ella and I laughed uncertainly. “You should both check out Kristeva on the ‘semiotic realm.’ ” Dylan started talking about Kristeva’s notion of language that is alive to irruptions, disruptions, and discontinuities, and how these moments of rupture represent a sense memory of the prenatal; recollections of being in the womb puncturing present through erratic language. All this talk of wombs and babies had me in a hot flush, my neck burning, my stomach whirling. Ella was the same; I could tell from the loud activity of her pen. I desperately refrained from making eye contact.

“The thing I find interesting about Wordsworth,” I said with shaky voice, looking to regain control of myself, “is how often he seems to be in an anticipatory state. The world he evokes is one filled with the potential for fallen-ness, yet there is a sense that all the mistakes and trials are there for the healing, and therefore the end is always inscribed in the beginning. There’s a knowingness to his narration, though he often proves to have got things wrong. But going back to what you were saying about language, Ella, it seems to me that language is constantly failing him … he is in a perpetual struggle to find a teleology that might harness all the stops and byways of his memory.”

“That’s why guilt is so catalytic in his poetry,” she responded. “Guilt as both an experiential and an expressive thing: there’s all the guilt of past sins, and the Miltonic notion of the fall, or multiple falls, but then there is also a linguistic guilt—that he can’t do himself justice, can’t access the pure thought or true moment of the past, and most importantly the prelapsarian innocence of his past.”

“Of course the inability of language in the present to express what a feeling was in the past becomes a perfect metaphor for the child’s lack of knowledge,” I said. “I think the real tragedy in much of Wordsworth’s poetry isn’t so much his difficulty to deal with
himself
but the struggle to understand and deal with
others
; it’s the unreachability of other lives, and the loneliness of observing from the outside, that really sticks. I think that’s where the plaintive tone comes from, like when he sees the girl with the pitcher on her head.” (I skimmed through my edition of Wordsworth.)

How do you penetrate another life? Where is the language of true and accurate empathy?”

Fuck knows what Ella was thinking after I said all that. She looked at me pensively and seemed to be passing an unspoken message. I sometimes get the feeling that something from the past—something that might only exist subconsciously—is trying to tell me something; providing me with a glimpse of the truth, but I never know what to do with it.

I felt Ella’s presence painfully, so rare and refined. I watched her with full measure: how she’d carefully interject Dylan’s points with a forward shuffle and flick of the
head; how she’d turn and watch me when I struggled to make a point and then start writing things down to validate me and make me feel more interesting; how she’d chew the lid on her pen, fold her legs gracefully, and smile and nod. It seemed she had two spheres only: Finals and Jack (in that particular order). I could just about make my presence felt in relation to the former, but I was utterly excluded from the latter, my friendship with Jack just a glimmer of the past, receding with each passing day.

Ella asked if she could go to the toilet and left me to handle the tutorial alone for the last few minutes. She waited for me outside and we left together.

“Started doing any revision?” I asked.

“A little bit. We still have so much new work to do though.”

“Yeah, I’m not going to start quite yet.”

The silences were unbearable as we descended the stairs and spilled out onto the quad. I wanted to ask her if she fancied a drink down the bar later on, but time was running out. Just as we approached the staircase to the college library and were about to fork off in different directions, I asked, “So what are you up to tonight?”

“Probably do a bit of work and then hang with Jack.”

“Oh right. That’s cool.”

“You?”

“Just work.”

We stopped and faced each other.

“Well, I’m going up to the library …”

“Okay, back to my room I think.”

“Cool. Well, have fun …”

“I’ll try my best. See you.”

“Bye.”

I strolled back to my staircase in the corner of the first
quad, just off from the porter’s lodge. I chucked my lined pad and pen onto the desk and curled up on the sofa. The room was sullen, cold, and drab. After burning a few seconds in self-pitied inertia I pulled out my phone and started dialing Lucy but canceled the call.

I stand apart, watching vile bodies emerge from the toilets: bleary-eyed lads drawing up their flies and buttoning their jeans as they walk back into the club, the strobe lights slashing across their faces and shirts (phosphorescent hair, coral teeth, pearl buttons). Such a hapless male trait, the walking fasten-up. Men in pubs, bars, and clubs, vacating Gents while dressing themselves, careening and tripping over the tricky multitask, straightening backs and puffing chests to facilitate the zip. The quicker you get out of there the better. But it’s more than that: a gesture of macho nonchalance, lazily, even cockily performed; a sign of just how long it takes to shut up shop. Men have a bodily assertiveness that far outweighs women’s (I also watch the girls passing through the adjacent door, a comparative haven of sparkling surfaces and perfumed air, puckering freshly applied lip gloss and ruffling their hair), wearing our pushed-out paunches, shamelessly flaunting scratches and intricate rearrangements, broadcasting belches, hawking, and farting, even vamping up what could easily have been a tempered sneeze, all as a sign of masculinity. Maybe we like to confirm our being—our virility and potency—through such acts of carnal candor.

Or is it a challenge? A challenge to other men (look how brash and bold I am), a challenge to women (can you handle all of
this
?), and a challenge to ourselves (can I dress on
the move, amplify bodily activity,
and
itch remote valleys and coves, all at the same time?).

A lack of transparency and so many subtexts—it’s all getting too much.

I’m running out of time.

Desperate to set Jack straight, on one issue at least, I stop him as he pogos past, fresh from the toilet, and say, “Mate, can I have a word?”

“Huh?” he shouts, leaning his head into my mouth, struggling to hear me over the all-consuming din.

“Can I have a word?”

“Sure, sure.”

There are some cushioned seats in one of the corners, mainly occupied by boys getting in there with tipsy girls—lots of ear whispering and “oi, cheeky” slaps of knees and arms—and we make ourselves at club.

“What’s up?”

There’s no delicate way around it. The less fumbling and stuttering the better, what with sound being such a limited economy in here. “I slept with Ella. She
did
have an abortion and it was because of me. I’m sorry, mate.”

Jack has heard these words loud and clear, as though their significance has lifted them over the music. He stares ahead at the ground, ear still lowered to my face.

“Jack, I’m really sorry.”

He takes a few seconds, all sound seeming to disappear and motion slowing down.

“Drink?” he asks, everything suddenly speeding back up to real time and filling in. But I’m really not up for it, not game, not psyched.

“Sure.”

We jump up in tag-team mode and press on, picking
and poking our way through to the bar. SORRY, ’SCUSE, COMIN’ THROUGH, EASY FELLA, ’SCUSE ME.

Up front we stand like leaders of the thirsty rabble. “Two sambucas,” orders Jack. I feel my body recoil in anticipatory dissent:
really
? Do we
really
want this? Is this
really
what we need right now? I hate you.

We throw them back.

When I regain vision (having scrunched my eyes shut and reeled for a five-second dizzy spell), Jack is standing there looking at me, entirely composed. Straight up. Hello? He turns back to the bar.

“Same again.”

“No, I—” I begin to intercede.

“Same again,” he repeats, deadpan.

Okay then.

My gag reflexes are fuming with me now: you absolute cock; you complete wanker; you total great big fucking twat. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

These also go back, fiery and polluted. Teeth clench and seethe.

Jack’s staring at me. He’s gone. Cold. On standby.

“Another,” he says. The modality is unclear: Subjunctive? Imperative? Indicative? Certainly not optative. All options are shot.

“Jack, I’ve had enough.”

“Another.”

“Seriously, I …” He burns holes through my eyes, lighting up the back of my skull. Two more sambucas are requested.

We hold our weapons in a stare-out … his stoical stares … historical stares … hysterical stares.

“Salute.”

“Salute,” comes the weary echo.

And back.

“Hahahaha,” roars Jack, head thrown toward the ceiling. “Oh, how we laugh!”