by Glen Duncan
But here’s the Tube pulling into Liverpool Street, where ranks of worried-faced total strangers wait to get on. Everyone looks funereal and sweaty. The world is full of people, billions, all connected if we only knew which threads to follow. Connected not by the gods and goddesses of romance but by meaningless matters of fact. I put my hand out to the top of Raj Rogue’s flaking spine and with index finger alone tilted it and a terrible joke meaningfulness into my life. I see it now as in one of those films where, trapped in the library, someone (the clown of the group, to show ironic resignation) pulls a book from the shelf only to discover it’s the one that opens a secret panel, and there, suddenly (what were the odds!), is a torchlit passage and a whole new possibility of escape…
The Arbuthnot College (prior to shut-down and sell-off, the Fine Art unit of the South London College of Art and Design) is a dwarfish neo-Gothic redbrick building just west of Wimbledon Common. The corridors’ disinfectant evokes, queasily if I’m hung over or close to the reality of my own death, St Thomas’s, my Bolton primary school. At all other times being able to experience this smell without nausea or fear fills me with quiet triumph; something formerly alien and dictatorial has let me in, revealed its mystery, made me a part of it. They’re all fee-payers here, to the tune of ten thousand a year. The staff divides: lefties skulking under a cloud of guilt and right-wingers with shoulders back and faces lifted to the sunshine of private enterprise. Former state teachers with socialist sympathies are the most pitiful. They used to do the right thing, but doing the right thing nearly killed them. Now they sit in the staff room like shell-shocked soldiers brought home from the front, not quite daring to believe they don’t have to go back. There are flapjacks, there is cafetière coffee; their eyes are wet with tears. It’s all one to me, Mr Apolitical I’m the only non-white teacher here (but obviously not non-white enough not to have been taken on) but the snitty looks I get are mainly from the cleaning staff, all of whom are sufficiently non-white to guarantee only being taken on as cleaners. Aside from these I get irritated interrogation from the Indian and Pakistani students, of whom there are a handful. Two cheeky pretty Indian girls, Krishna (the daughter of a gynaecological consultant) and Sujartha (of corporate-law mother, divorced, single) regularly grill me, vacuously flirting.
‘So your dad’s English, then.’
‘No, Anglo-Indian.’
‘But your name’s Monroe.’
‘Actually, Monroe’s Scottish. There’s Scottish blood on my father’s side, mixed with English, a little French, a lot of Indian.’
‘Indian from your mum?’
‘Well, my mum’s Anglo-Indian, too, although her granddad was born and bred in Lancashire.’
They look at each other. They don’t actually rotate their index fingers at their temples to indicate screw loose, but they might as well. ‘Where were your parents born?’ Sujartha says, as if addressing a simpleton with the last gram of her patience.
‘India. Well my mother was born in Sukkur–that used to be India but now it’s Pakistan. The fact is both my parents are Anglo-Indian. Both of them–and my paternal grandparents, and my great-and great-great-grandparents and possibly all the ancestors as far back as the seventeenth century–have mixed Indian and European blood. The Anglo-Indians are a race, albeit a relatively young one.’
They look at each other again. Krishna raises her lovely eyebrows at her friend. Clearly, I don’t know what on earth I’m talking about.
‘Yeah, okay, Mr Monroe,’ lip-glossed Sujartha says, taking Krishna’s arm and backing away, hamming gentle retreat from potentially dangerous crazy person. ‘Whatever you say, Mr Monroe.’
Off they go, tittering, looking back over their shoulders.
Sujartha has a perfect glossy shoulder-length bob, hips packed in user-friendly flesh, large, firm, proudly carried breasts. She’s aware of the money behind her, knows she’s never going to have to take shit from anyone. It’s freed her to swank with her impressive boobs. Krishna is high-cheekboned, willowy, gold-earringed and-bangled, with the Indian girl’s impossibly long, thick plait tied with a wispy bit of purple ribbon. When I imagine her naked this wisp of ribbon rests halfway down the dark crack of her flawless young bottom.
(This is a new thing for me, fantasizing about Indian girls. Presumably some last gauzy vestige of Eurasian snobbery is wearing away. It only occurred to me in my university days that black and Asian women were exempt from my imagination’s attention. I confessed it to Scarlet. Oh come on, she said, wearily. Black and Asian women aren’t your enemies. We were in bed one Sunday morning. For men, she said, yawn, fucking is an act of aggression. Fucking a white woman directs aggression at the enemy. What you really want is to fuck white men, but that’s unacceptable to your heterosexual male ego, so you fuck white women instead. Where in God’s name do you get all this shite? It’s not shite. Or rather it is, but it’s the sort of shite we’ve plumped for. Do you actually read anything? Every time you fuck a white woman you’re engaged in an act of counter-colonization. For really black men there must be nothing like it. Okay, I said, why do I fuck you? You’re not a white woman. You’re the same colour as me. You’re a beige woman. She shrugged. That’s no mystery, either. Firstly, I’m a woman, and to men all women, whatever their colour, are the enemy eventually–have no illusions: you’d jolly soon get around to brown girls if the white ones vanished; and second, it’s a sublimated incestuous desire for your sisters, with whom you’ve clearly been in love since infancy. Or alternatively, I said, maybe I love and fancy you. Either way, she said, I need you to do it to me again right now. When I got hold of her and we kissed she said, Lust is so nice, so horrible, so nice…Now it seems I’ve got round to the brown girls even without the disappearance of the white ones. I know what she’d say to that, too: Because after all these years you finally feel white enough, Mr Monroe. English Literature? No wonder you’re ashamed of yourself.)
Janet Marsh’s letter has had a strange effect on me, its tug towards intrigue like the first twitch of arousal in the phallic blood. I feel emboldened by it, that I’ve impinged on her consciousness (and who knows, perhaps on the consciousness of Skinner himself!). This, plus the vacuousness of my breakfast blind date, has called forth in me a new erotic determination: I will ask Tara the art teacher out. Today. This very afternoon. The minute I get her alone.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘Winston works in Records in the Ministry of Information. What does the Ministry do? What’s its role in the Oceania set-up?’
Before I can get to Tara, however, there’s my Friday three o’clock lot, sadly not including Krishna and Sujartha. There are others. There are always others. (I must be the only male academic who’s never slept with nor had the opportunity of sleeping with one of his female students. [Not that you’d know it from Millicent Nash’s An Adult Education.] Male students, Vince says, just give them a chance, you homophobe.) You’d think Orwell was a safe bet. Wrong. Orwell gets on their nerves. Literature gets on their nerves. I’ve tried ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. I’ve tried Wendy Cope. In desperation I’ve tried Roger McGough. They just go Yeah yeah yeah, whatever. ‘Why are you studying English Literature?’ I keep asking them, mystified. So far not one of them has answered with anything other than a shrug, or a tut, or an exasperated eye-roll. Language gets on their nerves, apparently. This is my experience of twenty-first-century teenagers: they don’t want to talk about anything unless it’s not worth talking about. Then they’ll go on for hours. Who can blame them, if life is meaningless, ironic, finite, material and bent?
‘Er, could it be…?’ Daniel Flynn says, with laboured sarcasm. ‘I’m not sure about this but could it be…to do the opposite of providing information?’
We’ve got a little thing going, me and Daniel. He knows he’s the flower in my desert. He’s not sure what to do with his intelligence, keeps his cynic on more or less perpetual guard duty.
‘Well, thank you very much, Daniel,’ I say. ‘Yes, I believe you’re right.
Let’s think about this in relation, as I keep saying, to the present. Any novel–or film–that looks into the future is always really looking at the present and extending logically or quasi-logically from there. Yes?’
Daniel looks at me and smiles, shaking his head. Quasi-logically? Give up. No one cares. I look back at him, jaws clamped. You care, mister, and we both know it. I can still get him to look away first (out of the window in this instance) but the time is coming when he’ll butch me out: no, I don’t care, or at least I’m not going to. I’m going to get money and fuck women and do drugs and die without having fallen for the mug’s game of thinking there’s anything more to it than that.
‘What do we think about what Winston’s saying about the Oceanian media? How do today’s media hold up in comparison?’
Heads go down, there are sighs. Time passes.
‘I hate this shite,’ Isobel Rolly says. A long time ago, years, decades, it seems, I told them I didn’t care if they swore occasionally as long as it was because they were worked up–and willing to make a critical case for why they were worked up–about the text in question. I know why I did that. It was because more than anything else I wanted them to like me. It’s what I always want, from anyone, anywhere, more than anything else. Only highly attractive women are exempt. What I want more than anything from them is that they let me fuck them. There was a time when it helped, libidinally, if they didn’t like me, but that, like many other misogynistic kinks, has been relaxed. Moot, in any case, since I never get anywhere near the sort of highly attractive women to whom the exemption would apply.
‘You hate this shite why, Isobel?’
‘I don’t see what all the fuss is about. The world we live in’s nothing like 1984. This book’s supposed to be so prophetic. I don’t get it.’
‘Is it like he’s saying…’ This is Dawn Edge, who’ll sometimes have a tentative go, get me excited; then someone’ll crack a joke and I’ll lose her. ‘Like he’s saying, you know, if you can change the facts of the past, then…’ Because of something Kate Stubbs has just said to her Jessica Aldridge snorts, then clamps her hand over her mouth, then giggles in silence. Which is Dawn’s precious thread lost. ‘Actually, no. I don’t…I mean, what is he saying?’
I glance over at Daniel, who’s sitting with his arms folded and his eyes closed and a nirvanic smile on his lips. His hair’s dark and thick and artfully hacked. He’s not good-looking, but he has cold, dark eyes and a face of interesting hollows and knobs. I pray there’s a smart, not-too-good-looking girl out there for him somewhere who’ll stop him turning into the poisonous capitalist misogynist his tender, terrified soul might otherwise force him to become.
‘I think what Orwell’s getting at here,’ I say, with a glare at Jessica, who looks at me as if to say, No, this was really funny, ‘is that our sanity, our ability to think, largely depends on our ability to remember. We need a repository, we need a history we can trust, so that when someone comes along on Friday and says x is the case and has always been the case, we can check the record to see what he was saying on Monday. It might turn out that the record shows he was saying y was the case on Monday.’
‘What?’ Isobel says.
‘That’s the worst explanation of anything I’ve ever heard,’ Daniel says.
This happens to me increasingly of late. My mind slips out of gear. ‘You’re absolutely right, Daniel,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you supply us with a better one?’
‘Nah, you’re all right.’
‘Come on.’
‘Nah, cheers.’
‘Come on.’
Daniel closes his eyes again and makes a hurried, tension-relieving gesture with his head and neck. ‘This is such a Jesus Christing yawn,’ he says. Then, with sarcastic mellifluousness, ‘Monday: Weapons of mass destruction in forty-five minutes. Tuesday: no weapons of mass destruction and simply hours if they had them. The difference is we can call Tony Blair a liar because we’ve still got him saying it in the Guardian or wherever, whereas the poor sods in Oceania have had their Guardians reprinted so there’s no way of proving he ever said anything in the first place.’
‘That was Daniel Paxman,’ Louise Bell says, ‘reporting from the dark side of his brain.’
Two or three of the girls are attracted to Daniel’s intelligence. Pretty, slim and pert-boobed Louise is one of them, but her superficial self won’t stand for it; there’s a quota of cool, good-looking brainless types to be got through before she’s allowed any of that nonsense. My optimistic bet is that Daniel pricks the gorgeous with occasional reminders of their mortality. The certainty of ending.
‘Which is all fine and jim-dandy,’ Daniel says, still with children’s TV presenter melodiousness, ‘but the fact is it wouldn’t matter to us if we had all our newspapers rewritten and all our archives re-shot. It wouldn’t matter to us–that is, us–because we’re all too busy watching who wants to be patronized by a fucking millionaire or I’m a fucking nobody get me an ad contract out of here. In case anyone’s too retarded to have noticed, Big Brother doesn’t need to watch us because we’re all watching Big Brother.’
‘Have another shandy, Daniel,’ Kate says.
‘Nobody cares if Tony Blair’s a liar,’ Daniel says. ‘It’s not news that any politician’s a liar. I don’t know why they don’t just put that as the definition in the dictionary. Politician: liar. We all know that’s what it means and we’re all okay with it.’
‘So you’re okay with liars running the world?’ I ask him.
‘As long as it means I don’t have to, yeah.’
When the bell rings I try to get a quiet word with Daniel–Listen I think you should keep these ideas in mind when you come to the exam, disinformation versus apathy–but he just says, ‘Sorry, got to dash,’ and hurries away down the polished and disinfected corridor, rolling a fag as he goes. It hurts. Not Daniel specifically, just the tingling electric aura all their young lives have that my life doesn’t. They have a Friday night to go to, parties, drugs, sex. There is for each of them the absolute certainty of his or her centrality in the universe. They don’t even need love yet. The adult realization of your own radical non-centrality is bearable if love arrives. Love is being the centre of someone else’s universe and having them as the centre of your own, in which case the universe, whether it’s owned by God or physics or Ronald fucking McDonald, can take a hike. But as I watch them go–the boys with a rubbery testosteronal lope, the girls in two groups, Louise’s sashay, Kate’s hunched shoulders, fat Rachel’s laboured swivel (she’s at her universe’s centre, its miserable centre)–I see that they’re still running on childhood’s myth, that their lives matter, superlatively, objectively, that if not God at least their eager, significant Future is watching, waiting for them to reach it and fully blossom, even if it be the terrible glamorous blossom of suicide. What couldn’t they be, in the future? What adventures in ecstasy and despair aren’t they destined to have? The idea that their lives will be more or less bearable like more or less everyone else’s is to them intuitively absurd. I remember what that was like and it’s not like that any more.
This, I concede for the umpteenth time, dispensing myself a hot chocolate from the corridor’s vending machine (something comfortingly pathetic about vending machines, as if they’ve secretly got so much more to offer, personality, if we’d just give them a chance; this unpatronized one at the end of the corridor and I are in mutual sympathy), is the platitudinous core of my condition. I’m leadenly soaked in its ordinariness, by the weight of my unexceptional heartaches, by, yes, the commonness of the disease of remembering the way things once were. (We’re doing the Romantics. ‘It is not now as it hath been of yore;—/Turn where-soe’er I may, /By night or day, /The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’ ‘What do we make of this?’ I asked them. Daniel said, wearily, ‘When you’re a kid everything’s great, then you grow up and it sucks.’ ‘Unless you were abused,’ Isobel said, ‘in which case it sucked from the start.’ ‘In which
case you sucked from the start,’ Kate Stubbs said. ‘In which case big deal,’ Jessica said. ‘Welcome to the world.’) The joke on me is the joke on everyone: youth makes life mythic; then leaves. If you’re lucky, first love comes along and makes it mythic again. Then leaves. For a few God, the fit having inexplicably taken Him, steps in and makes life mythic again. Then most likely leaves. For the rest only death–the mother’s funeral, the aftershaved doctor and the test results–retains the heft to make life mythic again, and that’s an awfully high price to pay.
I’ve finished for the day but I go to the staff room in the hope that Tara might be there. She’s twenty-seven, tall, milky white, wears green dresses and knee-boots, has a tiny grapelike pot belly and a lovely pearly throat which comes out of her green V and unmans you with its softness and faint blue veins. Lacklustre blonde shoulder-length bob and narrow, lively eyes which might be hazel or green or blue for all I can recall but which in my fantasies are always looking collusively up (or down) at me while her long white and no doubt faintly blue-veined legs part and wave around in gentle ellipses like the antennae of a disorientated insect.