by JR Carroll
It came as no surprise when, upon graduation following outstanding results, Robert was offered a tutorship in his old faculty. He was made: now he would never have to leave university at all, ever. He would simply work his way up through the system and one day become Emeritus Professor, or even Dean of Arts. So he moved into his study and carried on where he had left off, reading and discussing the great works – and the lesser but more contemporary ones that had found their way into the curriculum – and set about immersing himself wholly in the academic and social domain. Of late there had been in-fighting regarding the content of courses, with members of staff lobbying for this or that faction – what Robert described as the war between the Big Endians and the Little Endians – but he took no interest in politics, correct or otherwise. He was there for the life, and preferably one that never changed.
While still a student he had been befriended by a senior lecturer of hedonistic bent who also had the reputation of a ruthless powerbroker in faculty matters. His name was Nick Barthelmess. Barthelmess was a tall, gaunt-faced man with a rakish sweep of greying hair across his forehead and a vicious, cutting tongue that sliced through cant and bullshit like a rapier whipping the heads off flowers. He was a brilliant but cruel person who had taken a shine to Robert, obviously seeing him as something of a protege, and Robert was flattered to have been so chosen. So when he joined the faculty they naturally became even firmer friends and Robert found himself more and more in the thrall of Nick Barthelmess, who had been at the university for so many years he was now in a position where he could insult whoever he liked and be as corrupt as he wished without compunction.
As Robert was to learn, a large part of Nick’s problem was his bitterly frustrated wish to be a novelist. Although he had a fine critical and analytical mind, he was completely devoid of creative flair – a shortcoming that was apparent to everyone else but which he could not bring himself to accept. More than anything he wanted to write the definitive campus novel, brimming with black humour and droll, bitingly satirical musings about the literary scene, feminism, academic standards, political correctness and all the usual suspects. He even claimed that he was on the verge of finalising a deal with a major international publisher and, although Robert knew he was lying through his teeth, he said nothing. During the heights of their drinking binges he would frequently compel Robert to listen to his scribblings, demanding to know his opinion and when Robert’s response was less than effusive he would simmer and sulk for days. When he eventually thawed out he’d remark apropos of nothing, with undisguised rancour: ‘So. You think my work is boring, derivative shit. Maybe you’re right, damn your vacuous eyes. But I don’t see you doing any better, you prancing fucking showpony.’ Robert copped it all in good spirit. Everything Nick wrote was like a poor parody of his literary models – Kingsley Amis, David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury – and if he tried to be original it came across with all the verve and dash of a scholarly paper, full of many-jointed words and dense, often impenetrable meanings. Robert felt sorry for him.
For his own part Robert secretly wanted to be a writer too. He had written numerous short stories, all of which were self-conscious imitations of his own literary heroes, but he believed he had enough natural talent to write a publishable and possibly superior novel one day. The idea he carried around in the back of his mind was a big, sprawling, atmospheric book about post-war Melbourne, borrowing a theme from George Johnston, but the inspiration for the story was his father, who would be the principal character. Through his father’s eyes the reader would observe all the changes occurring on the political and social landscape, from Menzies through to Whitlam, as he made his way to the top. It was to be the definitive novel of that formative era, when the country came of age.
Robert and Nick had a lot in common, despite the age difference. Like Robert, only more so, Barthelmess was a shameless skirt chaser without scruples or any kind of moral sense at all. He made it his business to seduce the most attractive female students and if his considerable charm didn’t work he would give them the choice, as he put it, between fucking and failing. A wise old head in the department warned Robert from the start: ‘Stay away from that chap, or he will be your undoing.’ It was a red rag to a bull. Soon Robert was screwing students too, although without having to resort to blackmail or threats. He didn’t need to. He was quite a prize in his flash three-piece suits, complete with gold fob watch and chain, not to mention the glossy red Alfa Romeo his parents had given him for his twenty-first birthday. Robert’s usual gambit was to ask the object of his desire to stay behind after class to discuss something or other, then issue a thinly veiled invitation and take it from there. As often as not she would save him the trouble by dropping hints of her own or even coming right out and asking for it.
Nick Barthelmess was also fond of long drinking sessions at a local pub, a university hangout in which he was a permanent fixture during and after lunch, which was always purely liquid. A connoisseur of fine red wines, he would normally consume two or three bottles and then return for a late afternoon lecture in which he would floor them with his wit, flourish and showmanship, often terminating the lecture early so he could go back ‘across the river and into the trees’, as he was fond of expressing it, to finish himself off. Sometimes he wouldn’t bother going back at all, just get stinking drunk with Robert and then drive himself home to the beachside suburb of Black Rock, where he had lived forever with his invisible, long-suffering wife. Robert began to follow the example of his Lord Protector, skipping tutorials whenever he pleased, having it off with girls in his study at night after a session at the pub and marking them according to how far they were prepared to go. He was particularly fond of having them on their knees busily ministering to his needs with their mouths while he sat in his swivel chair with his fly open, reciting Robbie Burns, Dylan Thomas or some suitably bawdy poet, or fucking them on his desk amid the piles of uncorrected papers, more than the odd few of which would have been returned to their owners generously laced with one bodily fluid or another.
The friendship between Robert and Nick became a notorious one in campus circles. By the time he was twenty-seven or so, Robert had effectively abandoned any higher academic aspirations and become a professional boozer and pants man. His MA thesis, a study of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – an epic, mystical poem about the redemptive journeyings of a wastrel and pariah, which was rapidly becoming a prefigurement of his own sad destiny – had run out of steam. Nick maintained he didn’t need further qualifications anyhow, since he already had a PhD in cockmanship. In fact Robert was growing infatuated with the notion that he was a dissipated genius, swanning around in his gorgeous but rapidly fading plumage. His famed threads were becoming rumpled and baggy from being slept in, his imported shoes were dulled and muddied from stumblings in the dark and he was beginning to wear the same slightly frayed shirt on consecutive days. He was still handsome in a way if you overlooked the dark puffiness under his eyes, the thickening of his jowls and his overlong, unkempt hair, which was already streaked with grey, but plainly he was on his way down. It was his custom now to arrive in the mornings late, reeking of stale booze and in need of a shave, then vanish across the river and into the trees for a Bloody Mary as soon as possible – with or without Barthelmess. His Alfa, which was scraped, battered and otherwise knocked about from his many drunken skirmishes, looked as if it had spent its life in a war zone.
At about this time Robert became involved with a new young typist in the department named Patti Filjar, a Swede, who came from a well-known motor racing family and who was ravishingly beautiful and sexy. Patti was a livewire and an outrageous – though innocent – flirt who had a large, delectable mouth, masses of red, curly hair that reached down to her backside, prodigious breasts that she emphasised with low-cut tops and push-up bras, and which she had a way of accidentally brushing against Robert’s back in a crowded – or not-so-crowded – room. She was also the proud possessor of exquisitely carved legs that
she was fond of showing off by wearing short skirts and stilettos, which caused her calf muscles and sinews to stand out sharply when she walked. In warm weather she did not wear pantyhose, which gave the men pause. If she happened to be standing next to Robert while they were both reading the noticeboard she always stood so close he could smell her perfume and feel the sexual impulses radiating from every part of her body. Not overly intelligent, she was thrilled to find herself being pursued by the fabulously rich and decadent Robert Curlewis, about whom she had heard so much around the place. Patti had a penchant for clove cigarettes, was fond of drinking Southern Comfort on the rocks and Kahlua, neat, and fucked like a madwoman flying on benzedrine.
The first time he got her into his bed – one hot December night after they’d had a few bevies – they were in the Alfa heading for his place and she asked him what he mostly thought about. Puzzled, Robert gave an off-hand answer, and Patti said, ‘I mostly think about sex.’ Taking his cue Robert said, ‘Are you thinking about sex now?’ and she replied, ‘I’m thinking about it so much I’d have to change my pants – if I had any on.’
Inside his flat they left a trail of discarded garments behind them, all the way to the bed. When he was poised to enter her, he took a minute to run his eyes over the sumptuous terrain of flesh spread before him. The lush tresses fanned over the pillow; her thick, swollen nipples, which were the same pale pink as the rest of her skin, were themselves the size of small breasts; the hips were wide, the flat stomach fluttered with keen anticipation, the russet beaver gleamed with beads of moisture. And could she come. Patti didn’t care who heard her screams when she went off. In the end – at her request – he gave her a pearly spray job right up her body that impressed Patti so much it became a trademark of their love-making, like an artist’s signature on a canvas.
Robert started taking her down to the family beach house at Portsea for weekends, where they would fuck each other to a standstill through a continuous alcoholic haze. They did not so much make love as invade and ransack each other’s bodies with total abandon and often minor violence of the playful, drunken variety. She would resist him fiercely and he would pretend to throttle her, force her legs open and ‘rape’ her while she hit and scratched him and screamed for help. No matter how often Robert put it to her, Patti was utterly insatiable, even … unbalanced, he sometimes thought, in her endless craving for sexual gratification. It was the ultimate physical union, a wild and manic quest to see how far they could push the boundaries of sexual adventurism. Robert believed that, temperamentally, he had found his female counterpart.
In the midst of one of their steamy weekend assignations, lying naked among empty bottles of Krug and Moet, Patti told him he could do anything he liked to her, even with an empty champagne bottle. No fetish was barred. They saw more and more of each other, sometimes having a quickie in Robert’s study during the day with a chair wedged under the doorknob. Their antics became a common spectacle in and around the university. They could be seen walking hand in hand, arm in arm and kissing while locked in a full-body embrace, holding onto each other as if their very lives depended on it, oblivious to passing students and as still as stone carvings. Patti was also partial to giving him dazzling, all-the-way blowjobs in his car while he concealed her head with his straw hat or a newspaper. She consumed his jism as if it were a rare and precious elixir. Robert seemed to have a rampant erection all the time, even – embarrassingly – while thinking about her during his classes, and the more he fucked her the more he needed to fuck her. It was insane and out of control, but utterly fantastic. Naturally, his relationship with Nick Barthelmess fell by the wayside, which occasioned much vicious – and jealous – sniping on Nick’s part. ‘And to think,’ he became fond of declaring in the common room, ‘that I got her the job just to brighten up the scenery, the poor silly cow.’
Robert took a year’s sabbatical in the heat of their affair and he and Patti spent much of it touring Europe, drinking and fucking their way through all the main tourist haunts and ultimately holing up in a palatial, whitewashed villa outside Florence for six weeks. Life there consisted of snoozing and sunbaking nude on the roof between unbridled sex romps in the cavernous bedrooms, booze marathons and leisurely, recuperative strolls through the gauzy blue countryside, pausing whenever the need struck to hastily disrobe and take their brief pleasure al fresco. In this way Robert planted his seed in many an Italian field.
They got married after their passion had peaked and before a year was up Patti had become a different kind of person. She still liked sex, within reason and at the proper place and time, and booze to a point, but her interests seemed to be turning towards homemaking and having babies. She wanted them to buy a big old ramshackle place with an established garden and angora goats out in the fucking bush. Robert thought, What the fuck is going on here? He was perfectly happy in his old bachelor’s pad in Kew with a floor-to-ceiling view of the city lights, thank you very much. This was not part of the game plan. His idea was that they would just party on and stay young forever, not succumb to all this … bourgeois bullshit and finish up just the same as everyone else, raising kids, planning for their future and becoming solid, responsible citizens. He wanted romance. Babies? Christ. There was no way Robert was cut out to be a parent. That he knew.
Their life together became one of blazing rows followed by long, cold silences. Sex slipped from the agenda by degrees and then altogether. Patti repeatedly attacked him for drinking too much and openly flirting with other women, even in her presence. Dinner parties became a forum for their public brawls. Robert began spending time with Nick again; they patched up their old differences and resumed getting shitfaced together. And then Robert went back to fucking Judys and Janes on the side to compensate for what wasn’t happening at home. Things were returning to normal. Then, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, he and a few friends went down to the Portsea house for a few days, and while they were sitting around drinking heavily one night someone produced a special birthday treat for Robert: a small quantity of white powder, which he said was pure grade heroin. Robert wasn’t interested. As he explained, his two drugs were booze and cooze, and his demanding schedule didn’t allow him to fit anything else in. Anyway all this hard shit was for fools and desperates. But as the evening wore on his resistance was gradually eroded, and in the end he shot up mainly to get some peace from his very insistent friend.
The trip was sensationally, incomparably divine. So mind-blowing was it Robert promised himself immediately afterwards he would never touch the stuff again. Having an addictive personality he knew he could not partake of dangerous pleasures of that magnitude in moderation. He had never done anything in moderation in his life. But a couple of weeks later when he was mildly drunk and feeling a bit blue he thought it would be nice to relive the experience just once more, so he called his friend. The friend very considerately gave him enough for three shots, all of which Robert used in a week, by which time he was hooked.
Before long he was either high or strung out in need of a fix every day on campus, even during his lectures and tutorials. His mind began to blank out in midstream. His appearance became more and more dishevelled, so that he looked more like a tramp than an academic with an acceptably dissipated lifestyle. Robert was living proof of that classic law of life which states that the heirs of first-generation wealth are only good for blowing it. He began to have recurring horrific nightmares about coming seriously unstitched and the nightmares merged more and more with his waking reality. Early one morning he found himself on the banks of a river somewhere, fully dressed – minus his shoes and socks – and drenched with rain. He was going down the toilet fast, but somehow managed to hang onto his job. His partner in crime, Nick Barthelmess, became frankly concerned. He told Robert he was losing the plot completely, that he was a fucking embarrassment and an unmitigated mess, and that before it was too late he should at least shore up his marriage. As Nick expressed it, when everything else turns to shit, you can
always fall back on that. If you are cast out on your own, he told him, you will be universally despised. His own marriage was really just a sort of mutual support base and, even though there was no feeling there any more, he would never dream of separating from his wife Beatrice, who suffered from multiple sclerosis. Without bitterness or rancour she was prepared to turn a blind eye to his infidelities in exchange for his lifelong companionship and, as a result, their relationship had evolved into something much more durable and necessary than anything love could provide – and he used the word with a curl of the lip. Your wife will remain loyal and look after you when all is lost, he said. Women are stayers, while men, who are really boys at heart, favour the short course.
Robert took Nick’s advice and made an effort to clean himself up, but concealed the smack habit. Very few people knew about that, and certainly no-one at university. Patti took him on again with a list of strict conditions, to which Robert unhesitatingly agreed. He badly needed his wife to prop him up. He began crying a lot in her presence, both drunk and sober. When she wasn’t home he would shoot up. Most of his income and savings went on his habit. Then he wrapped the battered Alfa around a pole late one night with a blood alcohol reading that was four times the legal limit, seriously injuring his passenger in the process. He lost his licence for three years and was lucky not to do time – a fate he escaped only because of the highly respected character witnesses rounded up by his father. That result came at a cost, however: the incident made the papers and the TV news. His tenure was looking shaky. He began raiding funds from his and Patti’s joint account to spend on heroin, and whenever she challenged him about it he would simply play dumb. He’d never had to think about money before, so why should he start now? Robert became a master at living a secret life, maintaining a brittle sort of respectability with Patti while intensifying his vices on the sly. Then one fine autumn day he was sprung shooting up in the men’s room at university, and was dismissed out of hand. He packed up his books and his briefcase and walked out of the staff room without a word or a sideways glance. All eyes were on him, but not one person, not even Nick Barthelmess, expressed sympathy, wished him luck or even said goodbye. Word had got around fast: Robert Curlewis was on the nose, and anyone seen consorting with him might find their own reputations tarnished. Gone was the golden boy. He was utterly, irretrievably beyond the pale. When he had left, leaving a solemn hush in his wake, Nick just shook his head and said to no-one in particular, ‘What A Fucking Waste’, and carried on with his cryptic crossword as if the distraction of Robert’s departure had been a minor irritant. He never saw or spoke to Robert again. Robert just left and shut the door on the only life he had known. Now he had nothing. Emerging into daylight he was suddenly engulfed in panic and went straight across the river and into the trees to wipe himself out.