Matriculation: (The Oxford Trilogy #1)

by Riley Meyer

  The building almost took my breath away. We walked in from the bright light of the morning into the dark, grand expanse of the Sheldonian and, like everyone around us, we immediately looked up. Far above us was the expanse of the ceiling, emblazoned with a huge painted fresco—rows of cherubs and angels surrounding dark clouds that in their centre were red with some hidden fire. I didn’t know what it stood for but I knew there wasn’t a ceiling in all of New Zealand that could compete with this.

  This was, after all, a theatre and that day we were the ones on stage. Circles of seating surrounded us and lifted into the gods, like the angels gathered in concentric circles in the fresco above us. All the seats were taken up by the severe figures of the academics and fellows, dressed in their full regalia, the multicoloured cloaks, gowns, shrouds and caps of the different disciplines and of different levels of rank and prestige. It would have felt like a pantomime if it hadn’t been so grand and so solemn. The crowd immediately hushed and even Maura was quiet, after letting out an initial wow.

  The Vice Chancellor stood up and said a few words in English before switching into Latin.

  “What the hell's she on about?” Maura asked.

  Just then I saw him: Mark.

  He was standing two rows of gowned figures away from us, off on a diagonal. From this angle I could make out the dark, stubbled line of his jaw, his thick eyebrows. In his gown he looked older, dignified in a way that you wouldn’t—or I didn’t—associate with an eighteen year old rugby player.

  My heart skipped a beat; hell, it skipped two or three. He looked beautiful, serious, manly. There were those dark lips that I’d kissed, that neck I’d buried my head into as we’d gone to sleep that night. I could remember the smell of his skin, the callouses on his hands from working out at the gym.

  “Rafe?” Maura asked and, when I didn’t answer, followed the direction of my gaze until she reached Mark, “Oh.”

  The rest of the ceremony was a blur for me. There was more Latin, something about the hats, something about our responsibility and the legacy left for us by our centuries of forerunners, but I couldn’t tell you any more than that.

  The whole time, my eyes were fixed on Mark, willing him to turn around, willing him to shoot me a smile and make things normal again.

  “We’re going, Rafe,” Maura said, tugging at one of the strips of my gown.

  "Huh?"

  "It's finished. We're done being blessed, or whatever."

  “Wait, I—”

  “You what?”

  I pulled my eyes off Mark, who was turning to leave the theatre, and looked at Maura. Her expression was sceptical.

  “I need to try and talk to Mark. I’ve been trying to all week. Now’s my chance.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, defensively.

  “Well, if he wanted to talk to you, wouldn’t he have done it already?”

  “Maybe he’s been really busy. Maybe he hasn’t been able to get hold of me.”

  Maura raised her eyebrows.

  “Look,” I said and I noticed a hint of desperation in my voice that made me wince, “I need to know what’s going on. I need to get some clarity. And maybe you’re right, maybe it doesn’t look good for me, maybe I’m just accelerating my own demise. But if that’s the way it’s going, then I want to know. I need to know. And if that’s not the way it’s going, well I want to know that too. I don’t want to act like a kid that’s too scared to talk to the person he likes. I need to face the music, whatever song it turns out to be.”

  She smiled, gently, sadly.

  “I get it, Rafe.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Tell me how it goes later on, OK? And, Rafe,” she hesitated, “good luck.”

  Then she turned and walked away. I looked through the crowds.

  Fuck. Mark wasn’t where my eyes had left him.

  I started to leave the theatre, standing on tippie-toes to scan again through the crowd. Why was everyone wearing the same damn thing!

  Returning, blinking, into the daylight, I hopped on to the bottom of a column of the Bodleian to get the perspective of higher ground. My eyes darted from one trencher to another.

  Everyone was taking photos, smiling into cameras with their arms around each other. Groups of students were posing under the Bridge of Sighs and their friends were taking photos. A group of Chinese tourists were taking photos of every student they could turn their cameras on.

  But no Mark anywhere.

  Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’d missed my chance.

  “Rafe,” came a low voice below me.

  At first I thought it was someone coming to tell me to get down from the column I was on, but then my name registered.

  I looked down and right below me stood Mark. He was holding his trencher against his chest, as though he’d just been shot. His face was pale.

  Oh shit, I thought.

  I dropped down, a bit awkwardly, from the column and pulled up next to him.

  “Hey,” I said and then gestured to the column, “I was, uh, looking for you actually.”

  “For me?”

  He looked unsure. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his muscled neck.

  “I’ve been hoping to talk to you for a while,” I said.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Everything about his expression, about the flat tone of his voice, gave me a sinking feeling. He looked like an army officer might have looked, knocking on your door sometime in 1942 to tell you that your husband was Missing in Action.

  I tried to smile, in the hopes the he might smile back. All we could manage were grimaces.

  “Do you want to go somewhere?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure. Course.”

  He nodded with his head away from the crowds.

  In silence, we walked back past the Sheldonian and out of the close-knit buildings of the ancient university and into the bustling activity of Broad Street on a weekend. There were people everywhere and nowhere obvious for what seemed to have the makings of a serious conversation.

  “We could go into Blackwell’s?” I suggested, indicating the bookshop across the street.

  “OK.”

  We walked in together and I led us through the busy ground floor up one storey and then another, into the Classics and Second Hand sections which were almost always empty. It was sunny, but not hot, the golden glow of the early sun lighting the factions of Mark’s face like a precious stone.

  We walked past the shelves of academic books with titles like The Hearth and the Civitas in Sparta, past images of naked men on pots, past imposing grammar text books, and at long last found ourselves alone.

  I pretended to browse, waiting for him to say something. When he did, it was:

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For leaving you in the dark all this time,” he said, “I should have messaged.”

  I shrugged.

  “I didn’t really message you either. Or not really.”

  I turned away from the books to face him and leant back against the shelf, hands parting my gown and deep in the pockets of my suit trousers.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  My heart was in my throat again.

  “So do you. Really nice.”

  And he did. He looked perfect. Did he ever look anything else?

  Mark smiled a little and then dropped his gaze. He ran a finger over the spines of some books, thoughtfully.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” he said.

  “What are we doing?”

  “Having a hard conversation.”

  “Does it have to be a hard conversation?”

  He nodded slowly, surely. His face said: Yes, I’m sorry, but it does.

  I swallowed.

  “I had an amazing time with you," he said.

  “Uh huh,” I said. You can be sure as hell that the past tense wasn’t lost on me.

  “Really,” he said emphatically, “I
have no regrets.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “And I’m so pleased it happened with someone like you.”

  “But...?” I asked, waiting for the blade to fall. This is probably what Henry VIII said to Anne Boelyn before the chop: I had an amazing time with you, but...

  “No buts. I’m glad we did what we did,” Mark said.

  “But...?”

  He looked irritated that I was making him spell it out. Well, tough.

  “But,” he said, looking at me, “it can’t happen again.”

  There it was. I was expecting it but it still hurt. How could something that I knew was coming still have so much power over me? Even though I’d seen it coming so clearly that I’d already lived and re-lived it, still the sight and sound of the words leaving his lips was a blow to the gut.

  I didn’t know what to reply. I didn’t want to be petulant and ask the question on my lips: Why not? In the end, he answered it anyway.

  “It’s because,” he got closer, looked apologetic, “the reason is: I like you, Rafe. I like you too much.”

  I let out a dry laugh.

  “Too much?”

  He nodded.

  “Too much.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know, I’ve never even considered being with a guy before. I’ve never even looked at a guy before you. And now—well, it’s like you flicked a switch in my brain.”

  His eyes were shimmering.

  “It’s like,” he went on, “when you kissed me, you broke me.”

  A note of frustration entered his voice.

  “I’d been going along one track, minding my own business, and I’d been doing that all my life. And I was happy. I was fine doing that. Nothing was bothering me. I didn’t even think about it. And then you came along and you did something to the signals in my brain. You switched me over to another track and now I feel like I’m going in this totally different direction.”

  “So?” I asked.

  He was close now, maybe a foot away from me. His cheeks were flushed, he was angry, only just holding himself together.

  “So? So??” he said, eyes widening, “you’ve fucked me up!You’ve screwed with my head, Rafe.”

  Mark repeated my name, quieter, like a hated thing, like a curse word, but then he leant in to me—his expression suddenly turning hopeless, forlorn—and his lips brushed clumsily against mine, pressing his lips into mine, his eyes shut as if trying to block out the world permanently.

  His hands clasped my head, pulling me desperately into him. His lips were tight shut, like his tongue had a mind of its own and had to be kept under lock and key, but he kept kissing me, hard and dry, parched kisses. My back was hard against the bookshelves but Mark didn’t stop. His heavy, muscled body pressed me against the wall, his hands gripped my head, his fingers pulled through my hair, like he was trying to remember every bit of me, every feeling.

  He pulled back from the kiss and, with our heads still close, the bridges of our noses together, as they had been on the punt, he took in a long, ragged breath.

  Then he let his hands drop from my cheeks and stood back. His eyes were red when he looked at me again.

  “That’s why we have to stop,” he said, as if he’d proven his point.

  “Mark—” I started gently.

  “Don’t try to convince me. Don’t try whatever you’re about to do. You’ve already done enough.”

  “This isn’t my fault, Mark. It isn’t anyone’s fault.”

  He was staring at the floor. He said nothing.

  “I know what you’re feeling.”

  Mark shook his head: no, you don’t.

  “Trust me, I know. I get it. I know because I’ve felt those feelings, too. You’re feeling overwhelmed with it all. You feel—,” I hesitated, “like all the plans you had won’t work the way you wanted, that they were made for someone that you aren’t anymore.”

  He looked up, something I’d said had meant something to him.

  “Mark,” my eyes appealed to him, “as a kid I always used to think I’d have kids, a wife, a family. Maybe a dog. That’s what I’d always assumed would happen to me. And when I realised... what I realised—well, I kind of grieved because I didn’t think that future was open to me anymore. But that wasn’t true. I was wrong. I didn’t need to throw out every vision I’d had for my life just because it turned out I liked men.”

  His eyes flashed. I could tell that he wanted to deny it.

  “Maybe I just like you. Not men, just one man.”

  I smiled, but my heart was breaking.

  “If you like me, why are you pushing me away?”

  He shook his head and took another step away from me.

  “Because if I just like you, and I’m not—you know, gay—then everything will be normal again.”

  “That is, once you get rid of me,” I finished for him.

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t think it’ll be that easy,” I said.

  “You don’t know me, Rafe. You might think you do but you don’t know shit. What school did I go to? What’s my Mum’s name? Where did I grow up? We don’t know anything about each other so don’t presume to think you have some sort of insight into me or my life.”

  He’d said these words loudly, cuttingly. They felt like shards of glass, partly because they were true. But he wasn’t finished.

  “All we did was spend a few nights together. Nothing. Basically a one night stand. Why would that change my life? That’s a blip. That’s not anything.”

  “If it was nothing,” I said carefully, justifying my own feelings as much as I was responding to his words, “then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  There was a beat where Mark's nostrils flared. Then he said:

  “This conversation is over.”

  I stood still. I stared into his deep brown eyes, where the colours seemed to darken and brighten moment to moment, like clouds passing over the sun.

  He took a deep breath and repeated, more quietly:

  “This conversation is over.”

  “So that’s it?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t want to see you, Rafe. I don’t want you to try and talk me round. Leave me to do my thing and I’ll leave you to do yours. OK?”

  “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  “I don’t think I am.”

  He said this confidently, arrogantly.

  I smiled, bitterly. I saw that he wouldn’t be convinced even though, to me, it was so clear that his decision only locked in more pain and more frustration for him, that it kicked the can down the road and left him without any support.

  Well, not without any support. I’d be there, if he ever needed me. If he ever realised he needed me. I just hoped he would still come to me after this.

  He looked at me again.

  “I’m going to go now. See you around, Rafe.”

  “Mark, wait,” I said and slowly he turned back to me, his face hard and soft all at the same time.

  I wanted so badly to scoop him up in my arms, to kiss his forehead, to tell him it was alright. But I knew what his response would be to that. And I knew he needed to figure it out for himself; I knew that he wasn’t ready.

  I hesitated and finally said:

  “If you need me—for anything, anything at all—I’m around, OK?”

  He made no response for a second, just stood there, swaying slightly on the spot. Then he muttered as though against his will: “Thanks.”

  He turned and left.

  I watched his head descend the stairs, his cloak billowing behind him, and then turned towards the yellow light of the morning which was brightening and rising in the sky; as it was finding new heat and new strength, I felt mine dying clean away.

  14

  Maura ran her long fake fingernails through my hair, making a parting right down the middle of my fringe and then letting the swathes of hair drop back into place. My head was resting in her lap and I was lookin
g at the ceiling of my room, or what I could see of it between my red, puffy eyes.

  Yeah, so I’d shed a few tears; I’m man enough to admit it.

  “Honestly, my fine thing, my favourite chiseler, it’s for the best.”

  “Is it?”

  “The boy’s repressed. Where’s the fun in that?"

  “Aren’t we all repressed, in one way or another?” I asked.

  "Steady on Freud, speak for yerself because aunty Maura is in no way repressed.”

  I smiled. This was true.

  Maura massaged my temples, my scalp. It felt pretty good.

  “I can lend you Tom or Jason if you want?”

  “I think I’ve fucked up enough straight boys for a while, don’t you?”

  I felt her shrug.

  “Honestly, these boys need a little clatter from time to time. They can get too sure of themselves. Too precious. Having a fumble with a guy gives them a little jolt.”

  “Or a big jolt.”

  “Well look, if it’s all so life-changing for young Mark to be fucked in the arse, that tells you something, doesn’t it?”

  “What does it tell you?”

  “It tells you,” Maura declared, “that he doesn’t know who he is, what he’s about, or what he likes. A real man can get fucked in the arse without having an identity crisis. Like you.”

  “I’m more of a top, actually,” I said.

  “Oh don’t yer get started, I can’t be dealing with this. What are these roles about? What is this identity rubbish? We’re all just atoms bumping each other in the void and if sometimes someone bumps you in the void and if sometimes you’re the one bumping someone, well what’s the difference at the end of the day?”

  I laughed, barely following her analogy.

  “What’s the void?”

  “Life, the universe. Look, no follow up questions. What I’m saying is: we’d all be a lot better off if we didn’t run around thinking we were x, y or z because it means that when something unpredictable happens—and the one predictable thing in this world is unpredictable things happen—we end up freaking out and having to reassess everything. Much better just to let things come as they come, to go in without all these assumptions about yourself and about other people, and just not think about it too much.”