The Twisted Heart (16 page)

‘—don't you?'

Kit jolted to attention. ‘Say again?'

‘
Don't
you?' said Michaela peevishly, opening her eyes.

‘You just don't get what it feels like,' replied Kit, hoping this answer would do.

‘What it
feels
like is all in your head,' said Michaela. ‘I'm telling you, you're too free and easy. Just think about it for
a minute, please? You've made mistakes before. You don't tell me stuff, but I'm on your case and I see. I don't care whether you like me or not—'

‘Michaela!'

‘—it doesn't mean my advice is wrong.'

Kit couldn't come up with any sort of reply to this. Advice? She sat there, dumb.

‘Well, I'm all done in. I've had a shocking day, thanks for asking. I am
so
looking forward to the end of term, already.' Michaela swung herself up into a sitting position, then got back up onto her feet. ‘I'm going to hit the hay. Won't be a minute in the bathroom.'

Kit nodded to acknowledge what she considered the one practical remark.

Not so much later, in a tepid and functional bath of her own, worrying about her worthless existence, Kit was assailed from nowhere by the thought that it was odd, wasn't it?—was it not odd?—that Dickens had opted to kill Nancy by having her pimp, Bill Sikes, savagely bludgeon her to death in their sparse bedroom in Spitalfields, only for Eliza Grimwood, a few months later, to be no less savagely butchered for real, also a prostitute, also in her sparse bedroom, not so far away in Waterloo, very possibly also done in by her pimp, both women struck down to the floor from a kneeling position, both omitting to cry out for help, blood absolutely everywhere: were the two cases not curiously similar? It was a crazy idea, as well as a terrible one, but for a flickering instant, Kit wondered whether Eliza's killer hadn't been inspired by reading Dickens—hadn't been
unhinged even, by Sikes killing Nancy the revolting way he did in
Oliver Twist
.

Kit stood poised and freezing in the middle of her room in her pyjamas. She had started to shiver violently in the bath, had got out in a panic and had done a kind of war dance, while drying herself, to try to warm up.

Now she assumed ghost position, as it was apparently called, her arms in jointed arcs, one foot part way through a slide, whap,
whap
, whap,
whap
. Not that Kit did dance. She just stood there, thinking nothing.

Then she went to bed.

So who was Evalina, the girl who could dance on a brick? And who was the quality-goods blonde? Kit replayed, in her mind, the incident in the pub with the bar mirror—fuck Michaela. Her mind returned to Dean Purcell's encouraging question. What had happened to the blonde?
Quality goods,
mate
.

Kit, on her uncomfortable mattress, lay uselessly discomposed; in
bed
ghost position: lonely.

The following Thursday, Orson was ill; a hangover, Kit decided. He emailed at the last minute asking whether it would be possible to move his tutorial back twenty-four hours. As Kit had set Friday aside for the Bodleian, she arranged to meet him at 8:30 in a café on the High Street—absurdly early, to punish him for messing her around. But he took it on the chin. Perhaps it hadn't been a hangover after all.

She set out at 8:10 in a light mist, which lingered, so that she and Orson, tucked in at the counter along the café's front window, seemed the more enclosed in their retreat, and also warmer. He looked depressed, despite caffeine and two chocolate croissants. What about a sugar rush? Kit took a rapid decision not to push him, or even tease him, much. Why should it matter to her whether he was paying attention or not? Everyone had warned her—first teaching job—not to put too much work in. Typical beginner's error was to attempt to do so much of a student's work for them that they would find it more of an effort to fail than to succeed; but besides this being a waste of your own time, she'd been told kindly, if you did their thinking for them, they didn't learn how to learn—a line Kit had come to think of as the teacher's sink-or-swim get-out clause.

After a meagre discussion of Orson's essay, forty minutes
maximum, Kit opened her eyes wide at him, as a sort of exclamation mark, and said, ‘Okay, well, I took the liberty of bringing a new reading list for you—' Orson plainly relieved it was all over, ‘—since we were meeting today anyway.' He slumped down an inch or two on the counter top. ‘I've pointed you towards as much material as you could possibly need to get cracking on next week's essay. We can discuss it if you like, but I thought you'd probably be happy just to plunge in. You look to be getting on well with this stuff. You can always email me any queries if you have them.' Kit searched through her bag for the piece of paper.

‘Can I get you another coffee?' said Orson.

Kit bit back a response along the lines of, ‘no'. She was desperate to get out of there, couldn't find the list, not tucked into her notebook; where was it? She had a heap of reading on order, and precious hours set aside for hunting needles.

But this, here, this is
real life
, she told herself sternly, perceiving that Orson was propelled by a strong desire to detain her. Why, she had no idea. Shape up, she said to herself, and to him, ‘Very kind, thank you.'

‘Same again?'

‘I'll take the small, “minimo” thingy.'

Orson bent into his backpack, extracted an appallingly vast print-out manuscript, and, with what struck Kit as inauthentic confidence, thumped it down on the counter beside her. She was tempted to say, then and there, ‘Can we just agree that whatever this is, I think you're brilliant and fantastic?', and she would have been quite happy to say it, too.

Orson turned away without a word.

The title was
Score
. Kit peered at it at an angle, unwilling to turn her head. Discreetly, she started in the middle of the second paragraph:

Let alone some opener, Kit thought in reply. She stopped reading, or even really thinking, until Orson came back with their coffees.

‘Oh, great,' she said. ‘Thanks. Thank you. Okay. Well, so I should have a look at this?' She put her hand on the monument beside her. ‘Not that my opinion is—I mean, I'm not exactly a, what's-it-called, a
now-literature
person, you know?'

‘It's
now
, but it's also deliberately retro, right?' said Orson, getting back on his stool. ‘But that's okay.' He was in command of himself. Kit felt a twinge of irritation. ‘What I was wondering,' he said, ‘was, like, if this could, like, count towards my grade? Like, informally? My mom and
dad—' He was staring out of the window. ‘I need the grades, you know? Like, it cost a lot to send me here? And—'

Kit tried to wave this effort away, as though it was understood between them that he didn't really mean it. She hadn't ever considered what the value might be to Orson of his grades. On reflection, though, sitting there, it came to her that his particular ration of intelligence and luck was surely ample to win him a life of material comfort, if that was what he wanted, or to reject it with splendid arguments if it wasn't. Yes, she thought, that was the grade she would like to give him: congratulations, you win, there's no good reason why your time on earth shouldn't pan out just fine compared with the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. And by the way, before you say anything, this qualifies as an ‘A'.

Kit looked down again at the top page of his novel. ‘It seems very—American, punchy. I'll look forward—' she glanced round at Orson, ‘to reading it. Of course, I can't say till I've had a go at it properly.'

‘I want to get an agent? When I get home?' said Orson.

‘Great,' replied Kit, foreseeing several years' worth of rejection letters, with a sideline in Internet self-justification. She wedged the manuscript into her bag. ‘What's the basic subject, may I ask?'

‘Street gambling,' he said, ‘is the primary axis. I mean, it's about so much more, chicken trials, you know? But kind of street things, mostly, dog fights. But, like, retro?' Only now did he appear suddenly anxious. ‘I don't really know what I'm
doing
in Oxford?' he said. ‘Like, this isn't where I want to be, in my existence, like,
at all
. Like, you're great
and everything? But—I don't know, you know, Oxford's just one big fucking lunch-out and I want to be wired into something that's
happening
. I want things to
mean
something. I didn't ask to come here. They never even thought I might not
want
to. Like, it's supposed to be this great
opportunity
and everything; but, like, Classical Civilisation and shit? The History of Philosophy—?'

Whatever exactly it was that was bugging Orson, Kit felt neither qualified nor inclined to help. Was it really her job to give succour to a person hardly much younger than herself as he struggled through thickets he couldn't be bothered to describe?

‘Listen, Orson,' she said, ‘you're bright. I shouldn't tell you this, but your essays are considerably better than I was expecting. I don't think you need to give me other stuff to help you out, even if it is allowed, which I'm pretty sure it isn't. I'm no more clued up about things than you are—'

He interrupted her to agree, ‘I know.'

Kit, who had been planning to continue with the word ‘except', now smiled, and instead threw out cheerfully, ‘Thanks.'

She put a hand in her coat pocket. And there was the reading list. Who was she to counsel Orson? She hoped it would be enough just to cart away his daunting manuscript. What did she know about the meaning of life? Nothing, nothing, she thought glibly. ‘Let's finish off our business,' she said. ‘Here's this. I take it you're still going to do some work for me?'

‘Oh sure. You don't understand, I
have
to get the grades, they'll kill me.'

‘Because there's lots of interesting stuff on here,' she said. She took the mashed piece of paper and smoothed it out on the counter top, then, holding it down with her index finger, used her thumb to rotate the sheet until the writing faced her student.

‘I mean, I like that you're so enthused?' said Orson, ignoring the list. ‘I totally get it. Fully. I was just—I've had my mind in a different place this week, you know? I've been, like, knees down in this really fucked-up brain space. But,' he struggled with himself, ‘I want to complete your course, for sure. It's quite good. And, hey,' he said, ‘who knows? I might write a detective novel one day.'

‘What does “knees down” mean—kneeling?' Kit asked. Half of what he said she couldn't understand.

He was tickled by the question and shook his head, before bending his whole body to one side as he gripped the handlebars of a notionally impressive motorbike. ‘Knees down,' he said, and demonstrated a bend the other way. ‘I'll take you for a ride if you ever come visit—like you will, huh?' His tone now tilted also, towards the ironical, before he righted himself again. ‘Where I come from,' he said, ‘we have, like, these great roads? That just favoom way to the horizon, brrrr, forever?' He made a sound in his throat to suggest massive forward propulsion.

How wonderful, Kit thought, as she slid off her stool, to ride with Orson, of all people, through vast American nowhere-land, for a thousand thousand miles, at a million miles an hour, with nothing to look at and the—before she, too, corrected herself. ‘Orson,' she said, doing up her coat buttons, and remembering the genial Midwestern course
director who had interviewed her, the pleasantries, the euphemisms, ‘Orson, please tell me it's not the case that I'm being, as it were, paid to give you a good grade?' She realised her little coffee cup still had dregs in it, and finished the rest standing.

Orson seized his head histrionically. ‘That is seriously the most fucked-up thing I ever got asked by a professor,' he said. He held this posture, then smiled at her.

‘Fine,' she said. She placed her cup back down in its saucer. ‘Fine. No problem. Bye, Orson,' she said. But he hadn't quite finished with her, even now.

Once, finally, the tutorial was done and dusted, or was partially done and not really dusted, but was at least over, Kit slipped back out of the café—the mist gone, burnt off by pale sunshine—and crossed the High Street and hurried to the Bodleian, temporarily losing a century or two, or three, as she hit cobble stones, and slowed to admire the gleaming light on the ancient walls around her. She had noticed this before: that the pleasure she took in Orson became painful whenever she held it in mind that her pupil would soon be lost to her, out in the wide, wide world.

Kit laboured in the library for many hours, possessed by her subject, and didn't leave again until the early evening, punch-drunk, unpleasantly unfed, her right eye splitting the images it received so that everything was a touch blurry—an unusual exit for her in that she walked down the stairs.

As she hit the outside air, though, she felt a wash of pleasure. It was windless, cooling and exceptionally clear.
If only she could call Joe, she thought, the sole person who knew something of what she was up to—whose number she, however, didn't have, though he was supposed to be coming round anyway, God, what time was it? She stumbled along, bought a flapjack from a sandwich joint and consumed it as fuel, wondering whether she should catch a bus for two stops to get herself home the faster. A yogurt-topped flapjack, what did that mean? Bleached corn fat beaten up with sugar?

Many witnesses, Kit noticed, had testified to Eliza being beautiful. She had been known around Waterloo as ‘The Countess', twenty-eight when she was killed, a grown-up in Kit's way of looking at things. Perhaps Eliza, too, had been a quality-goods blonde; one of those—Kit flung the flapjack wrapper into a bin—
quality-goods-blonde
style blondes. The yogurt stuff left a chemical taste in the mouth. Kit's insides hurt.

When, a couple of times that week, she had passed by the end of Joe's street, she had been unable to resist casting a look at the bend in the road beyond which his house lay, fearful that she might see some glamorous, platinum-haired girl shimmying forth; not that that would have told Kit anything. All she had really learned from doing this was that Joe had infiltrated disorder into her already unruly mind. He had provoked tedious thoughts, like, who was this blonde Dean Purcell had spoken about, and when was she; not to mention,
was
she, somehow, still?

Kit hurried along, willing herself to stop it. Think about your work, she said to herself, think about that. But, released from bondage in the Bodleian, her research seemed to have
left her bursting with a sense of her own insignificance. There were herons on the wing these days, late butterflies, still-ripe blackberries in domestic parcels of wasteland. The goodly folk of North Oxford were beginning to leave buckets of spare apples out on the pavements, with damp help-yourself notes sticking to the fruit. What mattered so much to Kit was of no importance to the world. Who cared? Nobody cared. Why should they?

She turned through the gateposts of her house, hoping against hope that Michaela wouldn't be in. The one morning Kit had got up before 8:00, in fact at 7:15—the only morning in weeks that she'd got up at 7:15—Michaela had got up then too. And once again Kit had succeeded in pissing her off, by failing to recycle a yogurt-pot lid correctly.

‘If everyone did their bit—' Michaela had said angrily. ‘It's the same principle as taxation, without which, n.b., you wouldn't even have a university place to pursue your crappy little studies.'

‘Please,' Kit had said, ‘isn't it a bit early for you to do this to me?'

‘It's a bit late in the history of human civilisation for me not to,' was the wilting reply. ‘You know,' said Michaela, ‘I reckon one of the things about what's happening now is that people are getting a more peasanty mindset about manufactured goods, you know? In the past, people who were close to the land, which was most of them, would know how to butcher and use every last morsel of a pig, for example, entrails, bladder, liver—'