Suddenly, propelled by a kind of fury, he was out of bed and down the stairs. Barefoot, in his boxers, he switched the radio on loud and tackled the mess in the kitchen: he ran bowls of scalding water, created mountains of detergent foam, scrubbed, sloshed and dried until an orderly heap of clean crockery and cutlery lay on the kitchen counter. A couple of saucepans, victims of his errant attempts at cooking, he put to soak, though he knew this was only a preliminary to throwing them away. Then he hauled out the wet washing from the machine and stuffed it into the tumble drier.
He surveyed the kitchen: better, certainly, but the floor was dirty and the cooker top stained. The sitting room, when he went into it, was tidyish (he didn’t spend enough time there to make it untidy) but dusty and unwelcoming. He could tackle this too. Or he could not. He picked up the Yellow Pages and checked ‘Domestic Cleaning Services’, found ‘We Clean 4 U’ (fully insured – references guaranteed), phoned the number and left a message. He made coffee and toast and ate and drank on the move as he threw yesterday’s tracksuit into the washing machine, shaved and showered and dressed in sweater and jeans. It was now ten thirty and the day loomed ahead.
Half an hour later he was driving into Dungate, the small, grey seaside town where his parents had spent their retirement. When he’d got in the car, he’d had unspecified thoughts of a walk by the sea, and he’d somehow ended up here, cruising past his parents’ bungalow, now rendered unrecognizable by the addition of a huge conservatory bolted onto the front, obliterating his father’s symmetrical flowerbeds. He drove down to the sea wall and parked.
The wind was furious here, fighting with him as he opened the car door. The wall offered a wide walkway, stretching for miles along the coast. On his right was a continuous line of beach huts, three or four deep, lovingly painted and slightly fantastical in their decoration; on the left was a steep drop to the pebbled beach with steps down at intervals. He set off at a brisk walk. At times like these, he wished he had a dog with him. Perhaps he should get a dog. It might be good for him, make him take more exercise. And it might be good to have something there to greet him when he got home. With the hours he worked? Who was he kidding? Anything or anyone who waited for him to get home would be so pissed off by the time he arrived it wouldn’t be worth it.
He broke into a jog. The wind came almost directly off the sea and it was hard to steer a straight course. One or two of the beach huts had been opened up and their owners were sitting outside them, swathed in coats and rugs, drinking from thermoses. They were elderly couples and family groups mainly. No-one sat alone. He saw himself through their eyes, a lone figure in their landscape, just passing through. After a while, he slowed to a walk again and allowed his mind to slow too, to roam where it would until it settled, uncomfortably, on Gina Gray.
Was it just because she had been his teacher? Did teachers always seem like that: so settled, so secure, so permanent? She had made him feel so impermanent somehow, yesterday in the supermarket, with her granddaughter and her trolley full of real food, smiling acknowledgements at people as she went round. He imagined her today, cooking Sunday lunch for the family: husband, children, grandchildren. There were probably dogs and cats too. He wouldn’t be surprised if lonely foreign students found their way to her table. She was certainly pally enough with the girls; he could see her laughing and chatting with those two yesterday, while they totally ignored him.
He really could do with her help in this case. It was difficult interviewing those students. They seemed to understand English pretty well but they expressed themselves oddly and he couldn’t tell if that was just a problem with the language or if they were hiding things. Usually he prided himself on being pretty acute about the way people answered his questions: he could spot evasion and unwillingness as well as fabrication and guilt. With these students it was different. He’d had a sense with nearly all of them that they could have told him more, that he was being offered polite stonewalling. If he felt certain he could trust her, he’d ask Gina Gray to sit in on the interviews second time round, but he wasn’t sure that he could trust her. There was something about her manner: a kind of – skittishness was the word that came to his mind, as though you couldn’t be sure what direction she might suddenly go off in. And she found everything so bloody funny, him included.
He sat down on a bollard and ate the cheese sandwich he’d brought with him. He could have had lunch in a pub, but he didn’t want to, didn’t want to be a sad man eating and drinking alone among the cheerful family groups out for Sunday lunch. He ate his apple as he walked back, thinking about those mobile phone records. How connected they all were, those students: Yilmaz and his Turkish and Russian friends; the Iranians and their calls home; the girls all phoning each other on Wednesday evening; Desirée phoning Denis from the girls’ night out; half the class, including Yilmaz, calling the Turkish girl when she was off sick. Such interdependence: how was he to cut through it? What did he understand about it? He felt for his mobile in his pocket. Tomorrow, it would be ringing again. Tomorrow he’d get back to real life.
9
MONDAY: Present Indicative
I don’t hate Mondays as a rule; I like my job and find it more restful, generally, than being at home. Today though, I am resentful because I lost my weekend. Don’t misjudge me, please. I’m not a monster: I love my granddaughter and would murder with my bare hands anyone who tried to harm her. I do need time to myself, though. When my own children were small, I used to shut myself in the loo for a bit of solitude, but they would come battering at the door, demanding to be let in, threatening to poo here on the floor if I didn’t admit them. So this morning I’m a touch frazzled.
I meet the 2-year Masters class at ten o’clock. We are in Seminar Room 2 on Mondays and instead of the conference table arrangement there are rows of chairs with little flip-over writing boards attached to one arm. They’re fairly impossible to write much on, so we work together on the board. Laurent is missing. No-one has seen him since Friday. Denis and Desirée, who share a flat with him, knocked on his door this morning but got no reply. He didn’t say he was going away for the weekend. I wouldn’t normally be worried: Laurent is never very good at Mondays. Today, though, a niggle of anxiety is at work. I shall ring David Scott as soon as this class is over.
We do the disappearing sentence exercise. This is syntax practice. It’s about putting together and pulling apart complex sentences. It’s also a game. What happens is that we build up a complex sentence on the board. Each person takes a turn at adding one, two, or three words to a sentence (they may also add a comma instead of a word). The aim is to make the sentence as long as possible: everyone tries not to be the person to add the last word. We also try to be a little fantastic. Nothing trite, I urge them, nothing banal. When we’ve got our sentence, then we dismantle it: we take turns at removing one, two or three words, but we have to do it so that the sentence still makes sense at every stage. We go on until we have the irreducible minimum, the shortest sentence possible. Jesus wept is our model. So this is how it goes today (you may think this won’t be interesting, but trust me, it will – what’s about to happen I can only compare, sceptic though I am, to an unnerving Ouija board experience).
In this seminar room, with its rows of chairs, the students arrange themselves differently, the genders slightly more mixed up. Picture the scene with me. From left to right in the first row in front of me are Ceren, Christiane, Yukiko and Irina, and next to Irina is Valery, who has trouble with grammar and hopes Irina will help him. In the row behind, left to right, sit Desirée and Denis, the Turks, Asil and Ahmet, then the Iranians, Atash and Farid. To give you the whole picture, the door is to my right and there is a window looking out to the corridor in the right-hand wall. The whiteboard is, of course, behind me. Having given you the stage directions, for ease and for drama I shall recount to you what follows playscript style. The script goes thus:
CEREN: My father
CHRISTIANE: My dear father
; (She has done this before and knows the ropes).
YUKIKO: Add comma, then ‘who worked’
IRINA: In circus
(Laughter)
GINA GRAY: In what, Irina?
IRINA: In the circus
VALERY: As the man
(Applause. Valery says something to Irina in Russian)
FARID: On the – swing?
GINA GRAY: Not swing. Does anyone know what it’s called?
DESIREE: Trapèze
GINA GRAY: Well, trapeze, yes. What was that, Irina?
IRINA: It is same word in Russian. I am explaining Valery.
GINA GRAY: Well, please speak English, you two. Atash, what next?
ATASH: I can add, daring man?
GINA GRAY: Excellent, yes. So, we’ve got My dear father, who worked in the circus as the daring man on the trapeze. Ahmet, what next?
AHMET: Comma
GINA GRAY: Comma. Asil?
ASIL: Enjoyed
DENIS: Watching
DESIREE: The happy faces
CEREN: Of the children
CHRISTIANE: In the audience
YUKIKO: So
IRINA: Much that
VALERY: One day
FARID: He looked down
ATASH: For too long
AHMET: And slipped
(cries of mock horror)
ASIL: Off
(laughter)
DENIS: And
DESIREE: Fell
CEREN: Missed the net
GINA GRAY: We’d need ‘and missed’, but we’ve got a lot of ands. How else can we do it, Christiane?
CHRISTIANE: Comma, then missing the net
GINA GRAY: Good. What sort of net. Does anyone know what it’s called?
DENIS: Security net
GINA GRAY: Not security, but safety. So, we’ve got, My dear father, who worked in the circus as the daring man on the trapeze, enjoyed watching the happy faces of the children in the audience so much that one day he looked down for too long and slipped off and fell, missing the safety net. Yukiko, can you add any more?
YUKIKO: Comma, and sadly
IRINA: Was crushed
VALERY: To death
FARID: On the ground
So there we have it and for brevity’s sake I shall summarise for you how we dismantle it. All the adjectives and adverbs go first so, on the board, we have:
My father, who worked in the circus as the man on the trapeze, enjoyed watching the faces of the children in the audience so much that one day he looked down for too long and slipped off and fell, missing the net, and was crushed to death on the ground.
Then Desirée takes out in the circus, Ceren the faces of, Christiane one day, Yukiko for too long, Irina and slipped off and Valery missing the net. We pause to look at our sentence now:
My father, who worked as the man on the trapeze, enjoyed watching the children in the audience so much that he looked down and fell and was crushed to death on the ground.
Now Farid takes out on the ground, Atash who worked as, Ahmet the children in, Asil down, Denis looked and, Desirée to death.
My father, the man on the trapeze, enjoyed watching the audience so much that he fell and was crushed.
So we’re back to the front row again and Ceren takes out my father and the comma, Christiane on the trapeze, Yukiko watching, and Irina fell and. As I’m rubbing this off, I hear her say something to Valery in Russian and I turn with my rhetorical What’s the first rule in an English language classroom, Irina? on my lips - and I only just restrain myself from screaming, though even so I know my hand goes to my mouth in an absurdly dramatic gesture.
What I see, as I turn round, are Irina and Valery with their heads together, sharing a joke, and beyond them, through the window out into the corridor, a man’s face looking in – Ekrem’s face. He is watching Irina and Valery, and I’m aware that my legs feel very odd. I wonder, in an abstract sort of way, whether I may be going to faint, but then his eyes meet mine and I realise that he’s not Ekrem – he’s not even very like Ekrem. He is a Turk though, I think, and there’s something about his face, so that for a moment there I really thought I’d seen a ghost.
He disappears from view, not hastily or guiltily, but quite casually, and I turn back to my class who are looking at me and my (presumably) stricken face in some alarm. I know how Macbeth felt when the ghost of Banquo turned up at his party and no-one else seemed to notice. (Macbeth had ordered Banquo to be murdered, of course; I wouldn’t want you to think that this is a clue that I am the murderer. This isn’t The Murder of Roger Ackroyd with a killer-narrator. I tell you the story as it happened. I play no tricks on you).
I admonish Irina and Valery, who must wonder why their peccadillo has caused me so much distress, especially as my voice, I find, is by no means steady. Then I turn back to the sentence on the board.
The man enjoyed the audience so much that he was crushed
I’ve no idea whose turn it is so I call at random on Desirée, who takes out the audience.
Denis protests, ‘Surely enjoyed must have an object. It’s a transitive verb.’
I overrule, ‘But it’s got an object now, Denis, hasn’t it? The man enjoyed so much. Before, so much was adverbial – he enjoyed to such an extent. Now so much means so many things, so it becomes the object.’
This is complicated and I’ve probably lost several of them, but they are happy to believe me. Trust me, I’m an English teacher. And then, in quick succession, it is done. Ceren (who hasn’t quite got the point about so much) takes out much and I allow it, then Christiane takes out that and Yukiko enjoyed so. And there it is. Why the hell didn’t I see this coming? Our sentence sits there on the board and we all gaze at it:
The man was crushed.
There is a silence. I look at them and they don’t look at me. Atash and Farid exchange a look; Desirée twists a lock of shiny brown hair round a finger; Denis inspects his shirt cuffs. In the front row, only Ceren stares at the board. Christiane writes something in a notebook; Yukiko has withdrawn into some private, interior space and is focusing on a point on the floor; Irina is putting away her pen and notebook; Valery has a hand over his mouth, but I think he is smiling. Then Asil – bless him - asks,
‘We can’t say just, The man crushed?’
So now I can go back into teacher mode and explain how crushed would need an object. I ask, for good measure, what the sentence would mean if we removed the initial The to leave Man was crushed, and Farid tells me that it would mean mankind in general. I, because I can’t resist it, ask if that would include womankind. He says it would, and I even see the glimmer of a smile deep in the forest of his beard. I find that I can, quite casually now, wipe the sentence off the board, and the waters close once again over Ekrem’s head.
At coffee time, standing outside the SCR with my cigarette, I fish out the card David Scott gave me on Friday and use my mobile to ring his. He is, it turns out, on the campus. I tell him about Laurent and he says he’ll meet me in the SCR. A second assignation: people will start talking. I hope.
He looks a lot better than he did on Saturday evening - he’s clean and wearing another good suit – but he looks stressed. I get him a coffee, black with sugar, we retire to our corner nook and he says, ‘Bloody keys!’
It turns out that he has a brilliant theory about Ekrem’s murder (he doesn’t specify what it is) but it depends on someone having got hold of a key to the library. He has spent the best part of the morning talking to the Social Science librarian, the security staff and anyone else he can think of but he’s been assured that 1) no key to the library has gone missing in the past three years and 2) the library keys can’t be copied: because they are external keys (the library office key also opens the front door to the Social Science block) they are made so they can’t be copied. No key-cutter would be able to produce a copy. So Yukiko was the only holder of a key that night and at five feet and seven stone she can’t be the murderer.
‘Unless the porter dunnit,�
� I suggest.
‘I have thought of that, obviously,’ he says, and I detect a bit of sarcasm there, ‘but Clive Davies has worked for the college for over thirty years, has never been in trouble and has no criminal record of any kind.’
‘There’s always a first time. Perhaps it was a crime passionnel – especially given what you were telling me in Sainsbury’s on Saturday.’
‘This has to have been planned, and there have to have been two of them.’
Though I try to look casual, he sees my ears prick up and I think he’s going to clam up on me but he says,
‘We’ve got Yilmaz’s mobile records: there’s no sign of Davies there but Amiel and Longueville are all over them.’
‘Really?’ I am genuinely surprised. ‘I didn’t think they were friends. I never saw them speak to each other.’
‘He was definitely supplying Amiel with drugs – the lad finally admitted it – and I’m prepared to bet he was supplying Longueville with some recreational stuff as well.’
‘That’s why you talked to them again on Friday’
‘Yes. Amiel was quite helpful once I put the pressure on. Longueville played the little lawyer and wanted to know what evidence we’d got against him.’
‘The fact that Laurent was helpful makes me worried now that he’s disappeared.’
‘I’ve got a couple of men on their way to his flat now. I’m just heading over there myself. It’s in somewhere called Beechwood, if you can tell me where that is.’
‘I’ll come with you and show you if you like. I’m not busy.’ I see him hesitate so I add, ‘I can stay in the car.’
We get into his blue Peugeot. It’s clean and tidy without appearing to be the love of his life, of which I approve. Beechwood Village, as it’s officially known, is on the edge of the campus. It’s designed to look villagey so the flats are disguised as houses, each with a front path and a little porch. There are no gardens, though. They’d soon run rampant left to students’ care. The police car is already there when we arrive and Scott seems not to notice when I follow him into the building. The flat, which Laurent shares with Denis, Desirée and a quiet Danish mathematician, is on the ground floor. There is a central living-room-cum-kitchen with doors leading off it and the door of what must be Laurent’s room stands open. As a man emerges from it, I sit down on a sofa and try to blend myself into the background.
This Is a Dreadful Sentence Page 6