by Jonathan Coe
They don’t know. They think the worst thing that happened was having spiders all over you, having to shove an insect down your throat. That wasn’t the worst. Hope you get VD. Alison was right. You deserve to be raped. You shouldn’t have looked. Can’t get rid of words like that. Twenty grand, for having shit like that poured all over you. Not worth it. Ten, anyway, after the Australian tax people took their bit. And by the time you paid off Visa, and the overdraft …
– Bearwood – Harborne – Selly Oak –
Still, you’re out of debt now. Look on the bright side. Out of debt, for the time being.
– Selly Oak – Cotteridge – Kings Heath –
Twenty grand. Not so bad. Not till you heard what Danielle was getting. Three hundred and fifty. Them and us. ‘We’re all in this together.’ I don’t think so. ‘You know so much, Val.’ ‘When we get out of here, I want to spend a lot more time with you.’ Yeah, right, you little bitch. Got my number, haven’t you? So how come you never returned a single call? Nor any of the others.
Truth is, you don’t belong with people like that. Stupid to think you ever did. This is where you belong. On the Number 11 bus. Look around you. Get real. These are your people. Ordinary people. Decent people.
– Kings Heath – Hall Green – Acocks Green –
Look at that old dear. Saw her yesterday, didn’t you? Somewhere or other. Did she come into the library? A lot of them do, to keep warm.
No, the food bank, that was it. She was on her way out when you went in. Held the door for her. Gave you a funny look, like you weren’t supposed to be there. Why not? You were only looking around. Bit of natural curiosity, that’s all. Wanted to see what kind of stuff they had there. Not going to start using it. Hasn’t come to that yet.
Look on the bright side.
Now why’s she staring at you?
Needs someone to help with the trolley.
– Acocks Green – Yardley –
‘Excuse me, shall I give you a hand with that?’
The woman’s gaze met hers. Her eyes were pale blue, veiny, watery. Her hands were shaking as they grasped the handle of her shopping trolley.
‘You’re a nasty piece of work,’ she said at last, as the bus came to a halt, the doors hissed open, and she eased herself down the step on to the pavement. ‘Why don’t you piss off back to the jungle where you belong?’
H. G. Wells, ‘The Door in the Wall’ (1911):
‘The fact is – it isn’t a case of ghosts or apparitions – but – it’s an odd thing to tell of, Redmond – I am haunted. I am haunted by something – that rather takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings …’
* * *
THE CRYSTAL GARDEN
At first, after he had left the room, Laura was too angry even to think. She stood at the sash window, watching him walk back across the quad in the direction of the Porter’s Lodge, and fumed silently. Projecting her own resentment on to his receding figure, she felt that she could discern arrogance in the very cut of his clothes and the angle of his body as he walked. She watched him disappear through the archway and then returned to her desk, where the first thing she saw was the cup of jasmine tea she had poured for him. It hadn’t been touched. She took it out into the little bathroom halfway up the staircase and emptied it down the sink.
She had already been having a difficult day. The journal’s editors had emailed her yet again asking when they could expect her submission, pointing out that she had missed the second deadline by more than a month. And once again she had spent three or four fruitless hours at her desk, going through her own chaotic notes, and her late husband’s even more chaotic notes, trying to find the single overriding theme, the unifying insight that would draw all of these seemingly disparate ideas together. But nothing emerged.
Tim had arrived promptly at two o’clock. He was a second-year student who had come straight to Oxford from a boarding school which boasted notoriously high fees and an undistinguished academic record. He had come to see Laura to make a complaint.
When did this become a thing, she wondered? As a student, she could remember deferring to her own tutor’s every word, listening in awe as little nuggets of wisdom dropped from his lips. Of course, it was healthy that students nowadays had a more spirited attitude; but still, some of them – Tim being a case in point – had gone to another extreme, regarding her as little more than a service provider, to be vigorously challenged when the service in question turned out not to meet their expectations.
‘Whoever wrote that poem,’ he had said to her, ‘is not a serious poet.’
‘His name was Edwin Morgan,’ said Laura, ‘and he was a very serious poet indeed. I just chose to make you study one of his lighter pieces.’
‘But it was complete gibberish,’ said Tim.
‘I thought we’d established that it wasn’t. That was the whole point of the discussion.’
Laura had got her twentieth-century group to read Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’, and thought she had managed to persuade them, by the end of the class, that there were fragments of sense to be plucked out of its apparently random assemblage of vowels and consonants.
‘Well, I mentioned it to my mum. She said she’s never heard of Edwin Morgan and she wanted to know why we hadn’t read any T. S. Eliot yet this year.’
Laura remembered, now, that Tim’s mother was an English graduate herself. These days she wrote historical romances, and presumably made a good living at it, as they were often to be seen at airport bookshops.
‘I’m not teaching your mum,’ she said. ‘Your parents may be paying the fees, but they don’t get to choose the syllabus.’
It was this reference to the tuition fees, she realized afterwards, that had really made Tim bridle. She had suspected, all along, that this was at the heart of his complaint. Increasingly, channelled through the students, she was aware of the vigilant, distantly controlling presence of concerned parents, looking at the money draining out of their bank accounts and wanting to make sure that they saw a good return on their investment. What had always, to Laura and her colleagues, been a solid but intangible thing – education, the elevation of the young mind to a higher level of knowledge and understanding – had now been redefined as a commodity, something to be bought in the expectation that it would one day yield a financial return.
She was still mulling over this annoying encounter in the pub later that afternoon, as she sat sipping a large Sauvignon Blanc and waiting for Danny to arrive. On the table in front of her was a sheet of A4, upon which she had been trying, once and for all, to list the main strands of this much-delayed paper and find a way of weaving them together. So far she had scribbled:
Paranoia
The numinous/supernatural
The Loch Ness Monster, in films/books/poetry
The Monster is nearly always a fake – often at the centre of some conspiracy to make money out of tourists/locals
What is being sold? What is being commodified?
Some sense of awe – wonder – the UNKNOWABLE –
And only now did it occur to Laura that there might be some oblique, tenuous connection between the ruthlessly pragmatic way of thinking Tim’s generation had inherited and the ideas she was trying to synthesize for this essay. Had this been the argument her husband had been trying to frame – did it explain the phrase he had kept returning to, in his analysis of all those forgotten books and films: the process he had called ‘monetizing wonder’?
In the midst of these thoughts, Laura looked up
and found that Danny was standing over her.
‘All work and no play …’ he said, glancing down at the writing.
She half covered the words with her hand, modestly, as if he had caught a glimpse of her in nothing but her underwear.
‘Can I get you another?’ he asked, kissing her on the cheek. The kiss lasted slightly too long, she thought, and was slightly too close to her lips.
‘I shouldn’t really. I’m driving.’
‘Very wise. Sauvignon, was it?’
‘Well, just a small one then …’
While he was at the bar, she wondered if it had been a good idea to meet him for this drink, when maternal duty dictated that she should really have gone home forty minutes ago, to make Harry his tea and allow Keisha, the Malaysian nanny, to finish work at the agreed time. She was too pliable, Keisha, too cooperative. She had no family of her own in this country and was always only too willing to earn extra money by staying on for an hour or two, to cover the frequent occasions when Laura decided to work late, or pop into The Jericho on her way home for a glass of white wine. Usually having a quick drink by herself was just an easy way to unwind – and there was nothing wrong with that, surely? – but it was a different matter when Danny joined her. She liked him, but something about these occasions always made her uneasy. Danny was married, but he never mentioned his wife: seemed to behave, more or less, as though she didn’t exist. This had never bothered Laura much when her own husband was alive; she and Danny would meet for a drink and talk about work, about research proposals, conference papers, the students, the horrors of admin and paperwork. Harmless stuff; two colleagues letting off steam about the things that bugged them. She had never really been able to have this sort of conversation with Roger; by then, his thoughts were already too fixed on the past ever to be shifted. But after his death, in any case, there had been a change in her relationship with Danny. His wife’s absence from his field of reference was even more noticeable. He sat closer to her, spoke to her more tremulously, looked at her more intently, than he had used to. But why? She was still in mourning. If he wanted to have an affair, and somehow thought that she was more available than she had been a year ago, he was mistaken. And Laura believed that she had made that pretty clear, one way or another.
When he returned with their drinks he said: ‘What are you looking at?’
Laura’s attention had by now been drawn towards a bunch of undergraduates squeezed around a corner table. There were six of them, and they all had their phones out: they were putting their arms around each other and leaning in and taking selfies while joking and swapping empty-headed banter at the tops of their voices. There were pints of beer on the table as well as vodka shots. Incongruously, a copy of the student magazine Isis was lying there as well. It seemed to belong to a blonde-haired student who was sitting slightly apart from the others, not quite able to enter wholeheartedly into their spirit of raucous, alcohol-fuelled hilarity.
‘Just thinking what it would be like to be young again,’ said Laura, nodding in their direction. ‘Couple of my lot in there. The spotty boy, and the blonde-haired girl.’
‘She looks like she’d rather be in her room with a knitting pattern and a cup of hot cocoa.’
‘No, she’s not like that. She’s a bright girl. Just a bit more … independent than most.’
‘Teacher’s pet, by any chance?’ Danny asked, smiling.
Not rising to the bait, Laura continued (almost as if to herself): ‘I did that thing at the beginning of the first term. Asking each of them to bring in a favourite text. It could have been anything. Prose, poetry, drama, film. She brought in a song lyric. “Harrowdown Hill”, by Thom Yorke. Do you know it?’
Danny shook his head.
‘It’s about the death of David Kelly.’
He glanced across at the student now. ‘Interesting choice,’ he said. ‘Who is she?’
‘Her name’s Rachel. Rachel Wells.’
‘State or private?’
‘State. She’s a Yorkshire girl. Mother lives in Leeds, I think.’
‘And did she say why she chose it?’
Laura was looking at the group of students more closely. It was more obvious than ever that Rachel stood out from the others, did not feel at ease with them.
Abstractedly, she answered: ‘Not really. She said it brought back memories.’
*
Laura did not much like eating lunch on High Table, but she knew that it was a good idea to do so occasionally: otherwise word would get around that you were ‘chippy’ or ‘bolshie’. So the next day she took the plunge, and even found herself sitting next to the Master of the college, Lord Lucrum. They were not natural dining companions: Lord Lucrum was an influential figure in public life, with close ties to the present government; but like so many powerful figures in the British establishment he had the talent of pretending to be a good listener, and of keeping his own views to himself when in company. He was a relatively young peer – a robust and well-preserved fifty-nine – and he nodded with every appearance of alertness as Laura attempted a halting explanation of her current paper on the Loch Ness Monster, and its role as a generator of income in books and films.
‘Commodifying fear,’ he said, mopping up gravy with a slice of bread. ‘What a fascinating notion. Do you think that’s possible, with any degree of precision? Do you think that human emotions can be … priced?’
‘Well, that’s rather outside the scope of my piece, I’m afraid,’ said Laura.
‘Pity,’ he replied. ‘I thought you might be on to something interesting there.’
Their conversation dried up soon after that, and Laura’s attention was distracted, in any case, when she noticed Rachel Wells eating by herself in a far corner of Hall, the February sunshine throwing a shaft of late-winter light through the high stained-glass window on to her plate of shepherd’s pie and overcooked vegetables. On a whim, Laura excused herself to his Lordship, went to fetch herself a cup of coffee and then stopped by Rachel’s table. She was touched to see that she still had a copy of Isis magazine in front of her: she seemed to be taking it everywhere.
‘Hello. A rumour reaches me that you’ve got a story published in there.’
Rachel looked up and smiled, pleased but bashful. ‘That’s right, yeah.’
‘In your second term! Well done. Mind if I join you?’
‘No, of course not.’
Laura sat down opposite her. For a moment or two they ate and drank in silence. Laura had her back to the wall, and could see that Rachel kept glancing up at something behind her. She craned around to see what it was.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Him.’
They were sitting beneath a large portrait, in oils, of a corpulent, white-haired man in his sixties or seventies, sporting a spotted bow tie and a suit that must have been several sizes too small for him. His face had the ruddy glow of an enthusiastic drinker but was otherwise far from benevolent, being contorted into a combative frown. He was sitting at a desk in an austere, sparsely furnished office. On the wall behind him a motto had been picked out in elegant calligraphy: it consisted of the three words ‘FREEDOM, COMPETITION, CHOICE’.
‘Who is it?’ Rachel asked. ‘I see this picture every day but nobody’s told me who it is.’
‘One of our more colourful fellows,’ said Laura. ‘No longer with us, sadly. His name was Henry Winshaw. He was a Labour MP, once. Then he had a Damascene conversion, like so many people, and went over to the other side. My husband, Roger, started a petition once to get his portrait taken down. He had a particular problem with that word – “Choice”. He us
ed to claim that it put him off his food.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Rachel said. ‘But for me it’s his eyes. They give me the creeps.’
‘Mm … The way they follow you around the room. That’s the sign of a good portrait, apparently.’
‘And the petition didn’t get very far, I’m guessing.’
‘Hardly. Our distinguished Master up there –’ she nodded in the direction of Lord Lucrum – ‘was something of a disciple of his, I think. I seem to remember reading they spent time on some influential committee together.’
Rachel did not seem to be listening any more. She put her fork down and pushed her plate of food aside, half finished.
‘You feeling OK?’
She grimaced. ‘I’ve got the mother of all hangovers.’
‘Ah. Yes, I saw you in the pub with your friends. Late night, was it?’
‘Very. Plus, I ended up having to take someone to A & E. A girl called Rebecca. She lives on my staircase. She tripped on the pavement when we were coming back. I think she’d had one too many. About ten too many, in fact.’
‘Oh dear. Is she all right?’
‘Yes, it was just a cut. We didn’t have to wait long, and the doctors were great.’ Rachel seemed embarrassed by all this, perhaps worried that it was not putting her in a good light. ‘Sorry. Typical student behaviour, I know. And it won’t help me get the Milton essay written on time …’
‘Don’t worry about that. My suggestion would be that you go and get some sleep. Paradise Lost will still be there when you wake up.’
Rachel smiled. ‘OK. Thanks.’
*
That night, sitting at home alone in the blue glow of her laptop, with Harry already deep into his second hour of untroubled sleep, Laura downloaded the online edition of Isis and read Rachel’s story. It wasn’t bad at all: a vividly imagined dialogue between a young, idealistic barrister and her client, a jaded prison officer on trial for whistleblowing. It had the ring of truth and felt experience behind it. Afterwards, Laura went on to Facebook and did a search for Rachel’s name. She found her home page quickly enough, but it didn’t tell her anything: the privacy settings blocked access to everything except her cover and profile pictures. Laura tried to click on the profile picture, at least, but nothing happened, and it remained the size of a postage stamp. But there was another, perhaps more promising avenue to explore: the other student she had recognized at the pub table last night, ‘the spotty one’, as she had rather unkindly designated him. She typed his name into the search box and after a couple of false starts found herself swiftly directed to his home page, on which – as she had guessed – no privacy settings had been put in place at all. She looked at the latest messages and found – also as she had been expecting – that Rachel had been tagged in a number of recent photos. Following the link took her straight into an album called ‘Larking About, Monday Night’.