by Jonathan Coe
Finally, there was the most peculiar thing of all. He was holding something strange in his hand. An unidentified object. It was soft and fleshy and smooth, except at the nub where he could feel something harder and coarser, though still yielding. For the first few seconds of wakefulness he had no idea at all what it was. Then, when he had managed to free his hand and some of the sensation had started to return to his fingers, he began to explore the object further and discovered that it was attached to other objects which seemed more familiar and recognizable. A human collarbone, for instance, and a shoulder and an arm. Then he realised what the first object must be. It was a breast. A female breast!
Now a female voice let out a low groan in the dark next to him.
“Ohhh, shit . . .”
There was the sound of a hand groping along the surface of the wood, and then the creaking of a door being pushed open, and then a rectangle of faint orange light appeared. Benjamin could now see out into a bedroom, lit dimly by the glow of a streetlamp, containing a double bed on which three half-naked bodies lay entangled beneath a pile of coats. It was not yet dawn. Benjamin began to remember where he was. This was Bill and Irene Anderton’s bedroom. They had gone away to Málaga for a winter break and Doug, left in charge of their house for the first time in his life, had taken the opportunity to have a party. It had got ever so slightly out of hand. The drinks cabinet had been opened and its contents devoured. Benjamin himself had drunk at least three-quarters of a bottle of vintage port. That much he could remember. And he could remember talking to this friendly girl with short red hair and a pale, freckly face. He had been talking to her about National Health and explaining how really it was the same band as Hatfield and the North only with a different bass player. She had seemed very interested. Remarkably interested, in fact. All the same, he was surprised to find that he had been sleeping with one of her breasts in his hand for the whole night. And what were they doing in Bill and Irene’s wardrobe?
Having opened the wardrobe door, the red-haired girl struggled to her knees and crawled out. She was wearing a full-length navy blue Laura Ashley party dress which was rolled down to her waist. Once she was standing up in the bedroom she realized that she had lost her bra and began to look around for it. Benjamin found it on the floor of the wardrobe—it was white and lacy—and handed it out to her, feeling gallant and embarrassed at the same time. She took it from him matter-offactly and slipped it on. Then she pulled her dress over her shoulders, and Benjamin crawled out of the wardrobe and helped her to zip it up.
“Thanks,” she said, her voice husky with tobacco and alcohol. She pointed down at Benjamin’s flies, which were undone. He did them up. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
He followed her downstairs to the kitchen, stepping over more bodies in the landing and the hallway. When she switched the kitchen light on, it revealed a predictable scene of devastation. Broken glasses, empty bottles and spilled food were everywhere. Irene’s fondue bowl had been used as an ashtray and was overflowing with cigarette ends and the butts of several dozen joints.
The girl examined her reflection in the kitchen window and grimaced.
“I’ve got to get home,” she said. Then she looked down at the front of her dress and said: “Ugh.”
“Oh,” said Benjamin, noticing the patchwork of very obvious white stains. “What’s that?”
“Well, I don’t think it’s Horlicks.”
Benjamin was shocked.
“Did I do that?”
The girl smiled for the first time. “With a little bit of help from me.” She stood close to Benjamin and touched his chest lightly, sliding a finger between the buttons of his cheesecloth shirt. “Don’t you remember?”
The memory was fuzzy at the moment, but getting clearer all the time.
“Yes,” he said, and he kissed the girl on the mouth, feeling her tongue slide between his lips and entwine itself gently around his own.
“So what’s your verdict?” she said, detaching herself and smoothing down her hair. “Not bad—for a comatose mullet?”
Benjamin stared at her blankly. This seemed a very odd thing to say, even though the phrase was, now that he came to think of it, distantly familiar.
“Pardon?”
“Do you have a comb?” she asked, examining her reflection again.
“What did you just say?”
She turned and faced him, with a look of quiet triumph on her face. “This time last year,” she explained, “when I was in Othello, you said that I radiated ‘all the erotic allure and raw sexual energy of a comatose mullet.’ Now—where did I leave my coat?”
She went to look for it in the living room. Benjamin followed her, in a sudden panic.
“You mean—you’re Jennifer? Jennifer Hawkins?”
“Didn’t you recognize me?”
“I’ve only ever seen you on the stage before.”
She had found her coat, a knee-length fake fur affair which at least concealed the worst of the stains.
“I’ve really got to go,” she said. “My folks’ll be going crazy. What about yours?”
Benjamin hadn’t given this the slightest thought. “I . . . told them I’d be staying over,” he said, dimly remembering telling his mother some such story. A far more serious problem had occurred to him. Tomorrow was the first day of the term, and tonight he was supposed to be having dinner at the Chief Master’s house with the other prefects. At the moment all he felt capable of doing was having a long and much-needed vomit and then crawling into bed to die.
“My car’s outside,” said Jennifer. “D’you want a lift?”
“Erm, no. No thanks. I can walk from here.”
“Suit yourself.” She kissed him on the cheek, briskly but not without a certain sharp fondness. “Oh well, so long, Tiger. I never did it in a wardrobe before.”
“Did we actually . . . do it?” said Benjamin, aghast.
“Don’t worry, you didn’t get to know me, in the biblical sense,” Jennifer told him, kindly. “It was just a bit of fun. You’re quite a performer, though. Thirty or forty seconds, I reckon. Fastest shot in the West.”
With this backhanded compliment she left him, easing the front door open and trotting down to the road in the blue light of the pre-dawn. A few birds were beginning to sing, tentatively, in Cofton Park. The noise of her car engine was deafening. Benjamin clutched both sides of his head and knew that he would never drink port again as long as he lived.
The Chief Master’s house stood in the school grounds, between the science labs and the new sports hall. Benjamin approached it from the Bristol Road South and saw Steve Richards arriving from the other direction. It was seven o’clock, and it felt strange to be at school at all, after dark and out of term. School uniform had always suited Steve well, and tonight he seemed smarter than ever, if a little nervous. For his own part, Benjamin knew that he looked terrible, but Steve was too well-mannered to say anything. He had spent most of the day in bed, and at four o’clock had been convinced that he wasn’t going to make it this evening, and perhaps would never even regain the use of his legs. But his mother, silent and mortified, had pumped him full of black coffee and now he reckoned that he might just about survive if he didn’t touch any alcohol for the rest of the week.
“Sherry, Trotter?” said the Chief Master, handing him a glass almost as soon as he had entered the hall.
“Oh—erm . . . Thank you.”
“Rather pale, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, sir, I know. I didn’t sleep very well last night. All the excitement, I expect.”
“I was referring to this somewhat anaemic Fino. However, now that you mention it, your pallor is a mite spectral, even by your usual standards. Would you like to go upstairs and lie down for a while?”
“No thank you, sir. I shall be fine.”
“As you wish, as you wish. Ah, Richards! No one could accuse you of looking pale, eh, what?”
With these and other such pleasantries, the Chief Master
kept his guests entertained before dinner.
At the long dining table, Benjamin sat between Richards and Mr. Nuttall, the amiable Deputy Chief Master who had also been his form master in the first year, and with whom he had always been on good terms. Besides Mr. Nuttall, there were eight prefects on one side of the table, and seven on the other. The Chief Master sat at the head of the table, and his wife, a quietly formidable woman with severely permed brown hair and an unfortunate twitch in her right eye, sat opposite him at the other end.
“Well, Trotter,” said Mr. Nuttall, breaking open a bread roll, “it’s good to have you on the team, I must say.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“Sinclair and I were just discussing the firemen’s strike. What’s your view on the matter?”
“Well . . .” Benjamin had no views, needless to say. He was aware that there had been a national firemen’s strike for the last two months, but that was about it. “I think it’s a terrible shame if people’s houses are on fire, and there’s nobody there to put them out.”
“That’s true, Trotter. But you must also remember that the only way that some people can make their voices heard, under the existing political system, is by withholding their labour. This may come as some surprise to you, I know, but I’m a Labour man. Always have been. This country has a tradition of standing up for the little fellow, and the Labour Party best embodies that tradition, in my view. We who teach and study at King William’s are the privileged few, Trotter. We have to stand up and do our bit for those less fortunate than ourselves.”
Benjamin nodded earnestly, although even standing up to say grace, which was the next task required of him, proved a debilitating effort. He sank down into his chair afterwards and groaned softly as he contemplated the prawn cocktail which a uniformed maid had placed in front of him. The Chief Master’s wife heard the groan and looked at him with some interest. Benjamin noticed that she was staring at him. Her eye twitched three times. He was the only person not to have realized that the Chief Master’s wife had an unfortunate twitch. He thought that she was winking at him. Not knowing what you were supposed to do, etiquette-wise, when your host’s wife started winking at you across the dinner table, he winked back. The Chief Master’s wife jolted up in her chair as if she had been bitten. Benjamin looked across at the Chief Master, who was staring at him in amazement. He returned to his prawn cocktail, feeling the waves of nausea rise in him more violently than ever.
During the main course he spoke mainly to Steve Richards. They had never had much to say to each other before, but Benjamin now found himself warming to this polite, modest and witty young man. He began to realize what Cicely might have seen in him.
“Cicely and I—we never did any of that stuff, you know,” Steve said. “All that stuff that was mentioned in the magazine. We just got a little too friendly at the party, that’s all. It happens all the time.”
“Of course it does,” said Benjamin, feelingly.
“I lost my girlfriend because of that letter they published. That’s what really hurts. We were only together six months but I thought we might have had . . . you know, some kind of future.”
“What about your parents? Did they see it?”
“Yeah, they were pretty upset for a while. Thought I’d let them down. We got over it. This—” (he pointed at the prefect’s badge) “—has cheered them up a lot.”
“Mine too. Funny, isn’t it, what makes your parents proud?” They had been given glasses of French red wine with their silverside of beef and roast potatoes. Steve took a long sip. Benjamin left his well alone.
“What are you going to do after A-levels, Ben? Stay on for Oxbridge?”
“I think so.”
“Me too. I want to do physics at Trinity. That’s where Isaac Newton went, you know. Mr. Nagle thinks that I can make it. I’ll need to get straight As, basically, but he reckons if I really push myself over the next few months . . .”
“I hope all this prefect stuff isn’t going to be too much of a distraction.”
“No. We’ll be fine. Don’t worry. A kid could do it.”
Their conversation grew more fitful. Benjamin started to enthuse about the Morecambe and Wise sketch, but he could tell that Steve didn’t really understand. His family didn’t watch television on Christmas night, he said, and besides, “I’ve never quite seen it, with those two.”
After dessert (fruit cocktail, of which Benjamin managed to eat about half) the school captain, Roger Stewart, got up to make a speech.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “you have been chosen for the highest honour that King William’s has to offer to its senior pupils. You have been chosen for one reason only: because, in the eyes of the Chief Master, Mr. Nuttall, and other members of the Senior Common Room, you have all achieved excellence in your chosen field, whether in your schoolwork, athletics, sport, the Combined Cadet Force or even—” (looking at Benjamin) “—even literature. Remember this: you have been chosen on your merits. King William’s is a meritocracy, not a bastion of privilege. At the same time, the school has its traditions, and these must be protected. There has been talk in some quarters of abolishing the position of prefect altogether. This talk is being put about by failures, raddled with envy, and it must be discouraged. The office of prefect is not a perk. It creates a solemn bond of duty between you and the school. You must reflect on that. Tonight is an occasion for celebration but it is also a time for us all to ponder our new responsibilities.
“Now, Mr. Nuttall is going to pass around a bottle of the Founder’s Port. In keeping with a tradition going back to the eighteenth century, we shall all declare our loyalty to King William’s, and drink our glasses down in one draught.”
By the time Benjamin returned from the bathroom, he was feeling slightly better. The others had left the dining table by now, and were grouped informally in the Chief Master’s sitting room, drinking coffee and laughing among themselves. He did his rather desperate best to join in. On the coffee table in front of him he found what looked like a life-size plastic model of a hand, which for some reason he took to be a prop from the Drama Society’s store room. He entertained the others for a while by picking it up, shaking hands with it, scratching his head with it and using it to relieve an itch under his armpit. Only when he pretended to pick his nose with it did the Chief Master’s wife lean across, take it from him without a word, and strap it with skilful, practised movements on to the smooth and rounded stump at the end of her arm. He was the last person to have noticed that she only had one hand.
Alone at the number 62 bus stop thirty minutes later, Benjamin was already trying to block this incident from his mind. Whichever way you looked at it, the beginning of his career as a prefect had not been a striking success, but right now he had something else to think about, something far more important, in its way. Upstairs in the Chief Master’s bathroom, after throwing up for the third time, he had been struck by a momentous revelation. He had realized that he was in love with Jennifer Hawkins.
At 10:30 that evening, Benjamin telephoned Doug, who sounded even worse than he did. (He did not come to school the next day, or even for the rest of the week.) He asked for Jennifer’s number and Doug told him without raising any awkward questions, which was a relief. Benjamin called her there and then.
“Hello?” said her frail and throaty voice, after he had exchanged a few words with her father.
“Hi, Jennifer? It’s me.”
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “I’m sorry—who is this?”
“It’s me. Benjamin.”
“Oh.” It took another few seconds for it to sink in. She sounded very, very surprised, although not entirely displeased. “Hello, Tiger. To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“Well . . . I don’t know . . .” Once again, this master of the written word seemed to be having trouble with its spoken counterpart. He wished he had thought a little harder before making the call. “It just occurred to me that maybe—maybe we started so
mething last night, and it would be good to . . . see where it went?”
There was a long silence. “What does that mean, exactly?”
Benjamin didn’t know.
“Are you asking me out, Benjamin?”
“Well—yes.”
“Do you think that’s such a good idea?”
Here was a question he had never anticipated. “Well, yes. Of course. Isn’t it?”
“Look, all that happened last night is we both got blind drunk and had a bit of a grope. You don’t have to take me for candlelit dinners.”
“No, Jennifer.” He couldn’t bear this offhand way of describing it. She mightn’t realize it yet, but something bigger had happened. Something more meaningful. “I really think . . . I really think it’s important that we see each other again.”
Jennifer sighed. “Well, OK. If you say so. What did you have in mind?”
At least he was prepared for this one. “There’s a season of early French surrealist shorts at the cinema in Cannon Hill Park at the moment. They’re showing some rarely seen works by René Clair and Man Ray.”
“How about a drink down at The Grapevine?”
So a drink down at The Grapevine it was.
21
THE BILL BOARD
Thursday, 19 January, 1978
LETTERS NOT TO THE EDITOR
The following missive—intended, apparently, only for the eyes of R. J. Culpepper—has made its way by circuitous means to the offices of The Bill Board. We publish it unedited and without comment, as a fascinating insight into the thought processes of some of KW’s better-known pupils. Many thanks to the anonymous mole who passed it on.
10 January, 1978
Dear Ronald,
I hope you have recovered by now from the shock of learning that you have not been made a prefect. It is indeed an appalling condemnation of the buffoons who make these decisions, and to tell the truth it confirms my worst suspicions about them. To promote a mediocrity like Richards, simply as a liberal gesture because of the colour of his skin, is little short of pathetic. You could even argue that to be snubbed by such cretins is really a compliment, but I know it must be hard for you to see it that way. Your overwhelming feeling must be that you have suffered a terrible insult.