by Tom Sharpe
There was a man in a polo-neck with a black blazer and white socks and dark blue sunglasses standing gazing up at the Bull Tower. That was fine in its way, though the Senior Tutor disliked tourists intensely. What really appalled him was that there was another man similarly dressed over by the Screens and yet another apparition – or was it two more? – gazing at the fountain. In fact, they were all over the place. The Senior Tutor clutched the sill in front of him and tried to count the swine. He’d got to about eight, though he wasn’t sure there weren’t sixteen, when he raised his eyes to heaven and caught sight of some more on the Chapel roof.
With a dreadful moan the Senior Tutor fell back against his desk and cursed himself, God, and that fucking ’47 crusted port, not to mention the two Benedictines which until that moment he had forgotten. There was no doubt about it. He was in the last stages of delirium tremens. He had to be. Pink elephants were one thing. He’d heard about people with alcoholic poisoning seeing them. And spiders. And frankly he’d have given anything for some decent pink elephants or spiders. But that he should be afflicted by symptoms that produced seemingly dozens of men wearing dark sunglasses and white socks and polo-neck sweaters clearly indicated a degree of insanity he hadn’t supposed existed. For a second or two he considered going back to the bathroom and putting an end to the horror once and for all and for ever and ever.
He was saved by a new and extraordinarily vivid illusion. Or delusion. There was another ghastly figure at the Chapel door and as he gazed in utter horror there was a sudden eruption of people from the Chapel who fought their way out and over the ghastly figure. The Senior Tutor shut his eyes and crawled back to his bed. At least in there he couldn’t see anything very much. He lay with his head under the covers and prayed for death.
He was in this condition when the Praelector arrived in a state of alarm himself. ‘Senior Tutor, Senior Tutor, are you there?’ he called out from the passage. The Senior Tutor whimpered and pretended not to be anywhere, but the Praelector was not to be misled. What was happening in the College was so dreadful he had to consult someone and none of the Junior Fellows was about and the Dean was absent and Professor Pawley, who had been doing something astronomical during the night, had sported his oak and refused to be woken. Only the Senior Tutor was available to help cope with the crisis. ‘Senior Tutor, for Heaven’s sake do get up. The most dreadful things are happening.’
The Senior Tutor knew that but he didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Go away, please go away,’ he called weakly from the bedroom. ‘I am very unwell.’
‘Unwell? Oh dear, I am sorry. Do you want to have the doctor or Matron? I’ll go and …’
But the thought that first the Matron and then Dr MacKendly should see him before he died roused the Senior Tutor. ‘No, for God’s sake, no,’ he pleaded, emerging from under the bedclothes. ‘And on no account turn on the light.’
Framed in the doorway, the Praelector hesitated. He had heard rumours about the Senior Tutor’s sex life and he was afraid he might be intruding upon it in some way. ‘When you say you are unwell …’ he began.
‘I am … I am …’ the Senior Tutor struggled to find words for his state without mentioning the DTs and men in dark glasses and white socks. ‘I am not quite myself.’
For a moment the Praelector, a man who was not easily affected by events and took things as they came, was distracted from his own recent experiences. ‘So few of us are,’ he said. ‘I know that at times I am not entirely sure of my own real nature. It is a question of philosophical interest that –’
‘It isn’t,’ the Senior Tutor protested. ‘It has nothing to do with philosophy. I am beside myself.’
‘Ah,’ said the Praelector, reverting to his previous sexual theory that the Senior Tutor might actually be beside someone else. ‘Now do you mean that literally or metaphorically?’
It was not a question the Senior Tutor felt in the least like answering. ‘What the hell does it matter whether I mean … Oh God, the agony … Can’t you tell I am out of my mind,’ he almost shouted.
‘Well, I can certainly tell you are not entirely in it,’ said the Praelector. ‘But then so few Cambridge dons are entirely in their minds all the time. In fact I’d go so far as to say some of them appear to have no minds to be in. That is surely where the expression “to be in two minds” comes from.’
‘Does it fuck!’ screamed the Senior Tutor, driven even further towards dementia by the abstract nature of the argument. ‘I am out of the only mind I’ve got. Or had. I am mad. I am insane. Don’t you understand simple language?’
‘If you put it like that, I can’t say I am entirely surprised,’ said the Praelector, whose goodwill had reached its limit. ‘To tell the truth I never believed you to be entirely normal. All that rowing and riding up and down the towpath shouting obscenities …’
The Senior Tutor shouted some more and provoked the Praelector to switch the light on. He had almost entirely forgotten why he had come to see the Senior Tutor. What he saw now served to convince him that his original premise had been the right one. Clearly the Senior Tutor had done something very nasty to himself sexually. The face that glowered at him from the bed was that of a man in extremis. The Praelector’s concern came back. ‘My dear fellow, what have you been doing to yourself? At your age masturbation can be very dangerous. Have you been using some –’
‘Masturbation,’ screamed the Senior Tutor. ‘Bugger masturbation.’ Again it was an unfortunate expression to use.
‘Well, there is that,’ said the Praelector, glancing round the bedroom to see if there was some young man there, but he could only see the Senior Tutor’s clothes all over the floor and what looked like a very full bottle of Californian Chardonnay beside the bed. Something about the aroma in the room suggested he was mistaken about its contents. ‘All the same …’
But the Senior Tutor had been driven beyond the bounds of endurance by the suggestion that he had been masturbating. He didn’t exactly leap from the bed – he was incapable of leaping anywhere – but he certainly staggered from it.
The Praelector looked at his naked body with disgust. And fear. The Senior Tutor hadn’t been exaggerating. He was extremely mad and extremely dangerous. ‘All right, I’ll go,’ the Praelector said, backing through the doorway and now remembering why he had come in the first place. ‘But before I do I think you ought to know that the College is filled with dreadful young men in dark glasses and polo-neck sweaters and white socks and …’ To his amazement a change came over the Senior Tutor. From being very obviously a homicidal maniac he had suddenly switched to being something else.
It would have been going too far to say that he was looking happy. The ’47 crusted port and the Benedictine were still having their effects on just about every part of his body and his eyes didn’t look at all healthy but his relief had turned him back into something almost human. ‘What did you say?’ he whimpered. ‘What was that you said?’
‘I said the College is filled with dreadful young men in dark glasses and polo-neck sweaters –’
In front of him the Senior Tutor sank to his knees and raised his bloodshot eyes to the ceiling. ‘Alleluia, praise be to God,’ he moaned, and expressed his feelings by throwing up.
The Praelector left him there and went down into the Court to find that Walter, three other porters, Arthur, the Chef and the entire kitchen staff plus the gardeners supported by dozens of undergraduates, had rounded up the Transworld team and had hustled them out into the street. ‘You come back in here like that and you’ll get more than a bloody nose,’ Walter told one of the team whose glasses had been broken and who was minus a moccasin. ‘Next time you won’t know what’s fucking hit you.’
*
In the Chaplain’s rooms Kudzuvine still didn’t. The Matron, a heavy woman with large hands, had had a look at him and had advised calling Dr MacKendly. ‘You never know, do you?’ she told the Chaplain who was rather partial to her. ‘Not with blows to the head, you don’t. I
daresay he’ll be all right but it’s best to be on the safe side.’
‘I’m not sure that I want to be,’ said the Praelector, who had joined the little group at the bedside. ‘Anyone who can do what those men did to the Chapel doesn’t come into any category I want to preserve alive.’ He thought for a moment and then added, ‘Oh, and by the way, Matron, I think it might be advisable for you to pay the Senior Tutor a visit. He’s been acting very peculiarly and I think he could do with some assistance.’
Muttering to herself that he always did act peculiar, she left on the Praelector’s mission of revenge. He still hadn’t got over the Senior Tutor’s disgusting behaviour or his language. The Matron would do him good. In any case he wanted to ask this awful gangster with the swollen nose what he and his mob had been doing in the College. ‘It’s not as though there is anything worth stealing, or we’d have sold it,’ he told the Chaplain, who was trying to treat Kudzuvine’s suspected concussion or fractured skull with brandy. Kudzuvine wasn’t having any. He lay there staring up at the Chaplain in a glazed way.
‘Now open your mouth, my dear chap,’ said the Chaplain. ‘A little of what you fancy does you good, as dear Marie Lloyd used to say.’
‘I don’t think he fancies Rémy Martin somehow,’ said the Praelector, who felt like a drink himself.
‘Ray Me who?’ muttered Kudzuvine. ‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’
‘Nothing is going on. It’s just that you’ve had a little accident and fallen …’
Kudzuvine concentrated hard and remembered. ‘You call that a little accident? Being trampled to death by a herd of fucking monks and things? You call that little?’
‘It’s merely a term of … it’s a slight euphemism, an understatement. Nothing to get excited about.’
Kudzuvine glowered. ‘Nothing to get excited about? You got to be kidding. And understatement it wasn’t. I was the fucking understatement. You ever been trampled to death by a herd of fucking –’
‘Yes,’ said the Chaplain with surprising authority. ‘As a matter of fact I was lock forward in the scrum, if you know what that means, and I have frequently been trampled on. There’s no need to make such a fuss about it. You are obviously an American.’
‘I am a citizen of the greatest super-power in the world,’ said Kudzuvine. ‘That’s me. A born and bred natural citizen of the greatest super-power in the whole goddam world and proud of it you better believe me. We can take on the whole fucking rest of you and whip the hell out of you all no sweat.’
‘I seem to remember you did particularly well in Vietnam,’ said the Praelector, who had landed in Normandy and hadn’t forgotten the platoon being bombed by Flying Fortresses near Falaise. ‘A most impressive performance. Brilliant strategy and such excellently disciplined fighting men and generals, but then again you were only up against small men who didn’t have any aircraft. I daresay if they’d bombed you as heavily as you bombed them …’ He left the comparison for Kudzuvine to work out.
‘What the fuck are you talking about? Vietnam? Hell, we didn’t stand a chance. Those bastards are so small you can’t find them to kill and they breed like flies.’
The Chaplain intervened with a different brandy, this time Hine. ‘I’m sure you’ll find this to your taste,’ he said, only to be told to take the fucking stuff away because he was an American non-alcoholic and teetotaller from Bibliopolis, Alabama, and they’d better believe it.
‘Oh, but we do,’ said the Praelector. ‘Now, if you’ll just tell us your name?’
‘What for?’ Kudzuvine demanded belligerently.
For a moment the Praelector was tempted to say they needed it for his next of kin, but he decided on tact. ‘It’s just that we want to be friends and –’
‘Shit!’ said Kudzuvine. ‘Trample me to death like I’m a fucking Iraqi or something and you want to be friends? Go fuck yourself.’
‘I can see this is going to be difficult,’ said the Praelector, who had had a trying day and was sick to death of being insulted.
‘What I don’t see,’ said the Chaplain who had drunk the Hine brandy himself, ‘is what Iraqis have to do with being trampled to death.’
‘One must suppose it refers to the world’s greatest super-power using bulldozers to bury the poor devils alive in their trenches,’ the Praelector said, and poured himself a glass of the Rémy Martin.
‘Goddam right we did. Those bastards didn’t know what hit them,’ said Kudzuvine.
The look in the eyes of both the Chaplain and the Praelector suggested that something of the same sort might be about to happen to Kudzuvine but, being the man he was, he had no idea it was coming. ‘I don’t know if you have a good lawyer,’ the Praelector said very quietly and very distinctly, ‘but I think I should tell you that when the police arrive and you have been charged with aggravated assault, criminal trespass with damage, and that damage deliberately done to a Listed Building of National Importance –’
‘Listed Building of National Importance? What the fuck you talking about? Like what?’ Kudzuvine shouted and tried to sit up.
‘If you want a comparison with something in your own country, might I suggest deliberately causing the destruction of the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Emerson preached. But then perhaps you don’t know who Emerson was?’
‘Sure I know who Emerson was. Invented the fucking electric light. Emerson!’ Kudzuvine practically spat at them.
The Praelector smiled grimly. ‘What I’m trying to get you to understand is that, following in the great tradition set by the lawyers and judiciary in your wonderful country, we are going to sue you for the damage you have caused to one of the oldest and most valued college chapels in Cambridge. Now I don’t know what damages and costs we will be awarded but the courts in England are increasingly following the American custom of …’
There was no need to go on. The physical injuries Kudzuvine had suffered had paled into total insignificance. He knew about damages. ‘Get me Hartang,’ he whimpered. ‘I’ve got to have Hartang.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t got any,’ said the Chaplain. ‘Lapsang Souchong, yes, and Earl Grey, but Hartang no. I can’t honestly say I’ve ever heard of it.’
The Praelector was less sympathetic. ‘He’s playing the oldest legal trick in the world. Playing dumb and being of unsound mind. Not that it is going to help in the least. He brought whoever those dreadful men were into the College where they did the most monstrous damage and committed criminal trespass. Now what did you say your name was?’
‘Kudzuvine,’ said Kudzuvine.
‘Really? How very interesting. And I suppose your mother’s name was Ivy,’ said the Praelector. ‘Something botanical at any rate, and I daresay you have Swedish ancestry.’
‘What the fuck you talking about my mother’s name? Botanical? They called her Lily May. And what’s with the Swedish shit? Nothing Swede about us. Free-born citizen of the greatest super –’
‘Quite so. We’ve been through the virtues of America before ad nauseam and we don’t need them again. What is your real name? And don’t come up with Alfalfa or Kentucky Bluegrass or anything Linnaean.’
Kudzuvine tried to get off the bed on the other side. He was clearly terrified. But the Praelector had already left the room.
‘What’s with the other guy, monk?’ he asked the Chaplain. ‘He always like this?’
The Chaplain seemed to consider the question seriously. ‘I suppose he must be,’ he said, ‘though now you come to mention it … oh well, never mind. It’s probably that time of the month.’
‘Time of the month? What’s the time of the month got to do with it? Guy thinks he menstruates or something?’
‘I think it’s mainly something,’ the Chaplain answered. ‘I’m most sorry about that tea. I do have some China. Are you sure?’
Kudzuvine didn’t want tea and having some part of China wasn’t doing him any good either. But his main worry was the ‘something’. ‘What’s he do th
is time of month?’ he asked as he tried to move towards the door. ‘Turn into a werewolf like Frankenstein? We did a movie once on fucking wolves. They got a real tight social order, you know that?’
‘How very interesting,’ said the Chaplain, and tripped Kudzuvine up with a walking stick. He was still on the floor when the Praelector returned with the Head Porter and two assistants. He stared at their shoes and dark grey trousers and moaned.
‘I think it is about time he had a strong drink,’ the Praelector said, ‘though I don’t think we should waste good brandy on the swine. Something cheap and nasty. I’ll get some from the kitchen.’ He wandered off and presently returned with a large bottle. ‘Turn him over,’ he ordered and Kudzuvine was turned over and looked up frantically at five horrible faces and at the bottle.
‘What are you going to do?’ he whimpered. ‘What’s with the bottle?’
‘What’s with the bottle is a rather nasty cooking brandy which you are going to taste rather a lot of unless you tell us your name.’
‘Kudzuvine, for fucksake. What you think it is? Clinton or Schwarzkopf or something?’