by Ian McGuire
He repeated something that Dirck’s extraordinarily tall girlfriend had told him about Thailand. Zoe continued to make small talk.
‘When did you hear about it anyway?’ she asked.
Morris gulped.
‘I was in my office late,’ he said. ‘I saw the police and so on.’
Zoe nodded.
Morris began anxiously mapping the logical cul de sac into which he had just wandered. If I was in my office late, he thought, then why haven’t I told anyone else? Why didn’t I talk to the police? And where, most awkwardly, did I park my bloody car? It was no good. He was snookered.
‘What is the worst thing you have ever done?’ He asked suddenly, ‘and how did you get over it? I favour confession.’
Zoe’s eyes widened. Her forehead was corrugated with concern.
‘Morris,’ she replied, ‘could you be a little more specific?’
‘This is all my fault.’
‘God no,’ she said. ‘It’s bonkers to blame yourself. I mean really what could you have done?’
‘I should have looked in the mirror.’
Zoe seemed non-plussed. Her mouth moved but for a moment no words came out.
‘Riiight,’ she said eventually. ‘And what do you think you would have seen in the mirror Morris?’
Was she an idiot, he wondered, or was this some special interrogation technique?
‘Dirck of course.’
At that Zoe actually took a step backwards. The dividing curtain behind her wafted slightly. If she had suspected something, Morris realised, she had certainly not suspected that. He felt momentarily proud to have taken Zoe Cable so clearly by surprise.
‘What are you going to do next?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to confess,’ he said. ‘I’m going to the police.’
‘The police?’ Zoe squealed.
There was a brief commotion, heads turned. Morris reddened.
‘This is the twenty-first century Morris,’ she hissed. ‘You were consenting adults.’
Now Morris took a step backwards. Consenting? He was aware that Zoe’s research encouraged a certain ethical murkiness, but hit-and-run? And what did consent have to do with it? Was she really suggesting that on some unconscious, non-verbal level, Dirck, because he was there, because he was dressed entirely in black, because he was directly behind the car, wanted to be run over?
‘You think he consented?’
‘Are you saying you forced yourself on him Morris?’
‘God no! It wasn’t deliberate. It just happened. It was beyond my control.’
‘Of course it was. So what is there to confess?’
‘You don’t think I’m culpable at all?’
‘Absolutely not. You can’t legislate desire.’
This, Morris thought, is getting weirder all the time. He could see the appeal, if not the logical basis, of the idea that Dirck van Camper had really wanted to be run down, but was she now suggesting that he, Morris, may really have wanted to do it, that it hadn’t been accidental at all?
‘You think I really wanted …’ He couldn’t finish. The thought was too strange and too illegal.
‘I understand how you feel, Morris,’ she said. ‘But these lines are there to be crossed. I’ve done similar things myself.’
‘You have?’ he said. ‘You’ve done similar things?’
‘Of course. Did you really think you were breaking new ground?’
‘Well I suppose not.’ Morris hesitated. ‘But still.’
‘You’d be amazed what people get up to in their free time.’
Morris was amazed. Was it possible that, rather than confirming his personal and professional isolation, his assault on Dirck might become a way of making new friends? Was there really, as Zoe Cable seemed to be suggesting (was that a wink?) a community of like-minded people who enjoyed that kind of thing?
‘I’ve got a child,’ he blurted nonsensically.
‘Oscar Wilde had two.’
Did he? Oscar Wilde? What on earth was she talking about?
‘Let’s just say,’ Zoe continued, ‘that I’m good with secrets, Morris.’
She was smiling at him now. Between the wide white lapels of her Italian mac her breastbone glimmered hard and knobby, like the ridgepole of a tiny suntanned tent. She took a step forward and placed an arm round his shoulder. She was inviting him in, he realised, into the guiltless zone. She was assuring him that it was safe there, that he was welcome. He smelled the plasticine. He smelled the grapefruit. A tear came to Morris’s eye. Hitherto he had never considered Zoe Cable to be remotely motherly, but at that moment he had the urge to lay his care-bruised head on the taut yellow zigzags of her Eley Kishimoto skirt and bawl like a child.
Chapter 11
E had arranged to have lunch with her friend Stella. They were sitting in a booth in Totally Tarquin, one of the new restaurants on Grundy Street.
‘Morris flounced out again this morning,’ she said.
‘Flounced?’
‘Flounced, stormed, whatever.’
‘Is he still obsessed with that job?’
‘It’s an addiction – which in itself is OK with me, but it brings him no pleasure at all.’
‘I believe there is a name for that.’
The starters arrived: garlic mushrooms, deep-fried Brie. E attacked hers with gusto.
‘I am hungry and angry at the same time,’ she said. ‘Those two emotions are vying for control.’
‘Is hunger an emotion?’
‘Yes, it bloody well is.’ She squeegeed the empty mushroom plate with her forefinger then sucked. ‘I worry that Morris is becoming bipolar,’ she continued. ‘It’s hard to find grounds for optimism.’
‘Is there a family history at all?’
E paused and frowned as though trying to recall an unusual name.
‘His mother sends us monthly food parcels – canned goods, crab paste, macaroons.’
‘So there are boundary issues.’
E nodded.
‘If it weren’t for the macaroons I’d say something myself, but Morris won’t go there at all. He still feels guilty that they have nothing in common. You should hear them on the phone – weather, cat food, it’s truly painful. Then there’s the death.’
‘His dad’s?’
‘Right. His father owned a hot-dog van. Football matches, greyhound races, he would park up near the town hall on Saturday nights to catch them after closing time. Twenty years of boiled onions and brown sauce.’
‘That would take its toll I imagine.’
‘Of course. Of course it would. Morris had to help. His Dad would cook and Morris would serve. They wore long white coats, the van was spotless, but you can never quite erase that smell of onion. His mother still mentions it.
‘Morris went to Rotherham Grammar School. He was a scholarship boy. There were encounters involving the hot-dog van. Boys would stop (often with their fathers), there would be a cheerful exchange, smiles, introductions, but the repercussions still haunt him. Mockery, looks – it’s the little things. His father had no idea; he was proud of the hot-dog van. When people asked for his occupation, he said businessman. There was a certain amount of anger. Morris felt abandoned. And then the guilt of course.’
‘What happened to the van?’
‘Crushed after the funeral. Recycled I imagine. But part of him is still in it.’
They were eating heated ciabattas: ham and gruyère, roasted pepper salad. The smells were orchestral: layered, swelling counterpoints of mellowness and tang.
‘Sometimes I fear we married in haste.’
‘North Devon,’ Stella remembered. ‘It was a lovely weekend.’
‘Yes, but did we really need to attach a wedding to it? It was rather literal.’
‘How does Molly fit in?’
‘Molly never fits in. That’s her charm. She’s the original refusenik.’
‘I think she is gorgeous. That little pudding face.’ Stella made a squeezing motion as thou
gh testing an invisible grapefruit.
‘That’s her image. Cute kid, on the quiet side. She cultivates it. She practises in the mirror. The truth is more horrible.’
‘But now you’re having another.’
‘That’s a strategic move. We’ll play them off against each other. They’ll cancel themselves out. It was Morris’s idea.’
‘Really?’
‘No. Not at all. I’m joking. I fear I bullied him into it. I’m not loud, but I am constant – I have a drip-drip quality at times.’
‘So how does Morris feel about kids?’
‘Deep down I think he fears them. They make him nervous. He looks at Molly sometimes as though he thinks she might suddenly go off like a bomb.’
‘I thought they were close.’
‘That’s his image: cheerful father, chuckle-headed academic. It’s served him well but now …’
‘Thirty-seven’s a tricky one.’
They looked at each other, then down at the empty plates. E sniffed.
‘Someone’s eating key lime pie. Do they serve that here?’
They called for a dessert menu.
‘How’s work?’ E asked. Stella was assistant producer for Camcorder Calamity, a Friday evening blooper show hosted by ex-footballer Dave Piston and made on a budget by Ringroad Productions of Coketown.
Stella rolled her eyes.
‘You know, calamity’s like porn,’ she said. ‘There are only so many variations.’
‘But people watch it.’
‘Our share is up. We’ll run forever so long as people keep toppling into swimming pools and sitting on birthday cakes. Misfortune is a cash cow.’
‘It’s a strange business.’
‘It’s a twisted world we live in. You should see some of the things they send in: bloodshed, sex. We’ve had to involve the police more than once. I’ve seen an actual amputation – chain-saw up a stepladder. Bestiality is commonplace. These people are exhibitionists. The posting is part of the pleasure.’
‘Is this how you imagined your career path?’
‘Now you’re mocking me. It’s steady money. I’m writing links.
“This next lot are animal crackers”, that sort of thing. I still dream of radio drama, but we’d have to move back south. Did I tell you we’re looking at flats in Tintagel Forest?’
‘Tintagel Forest?’ E puffed at her herbal tea. ‘Didn’t that used to be Bogdean?’
‘That’s right. The estate agents changed the name. They chopped down some woods, put up a John Lewis and a stack of yuppie prefabs. Environmentally it’s not so great, but you can’t argue with the commute.’
On their way out E waved and flashed a smile to a dark-jowled man in the corner who seemed to be speed-reading the Times Higher Education Supplement.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Stella.
‘They call him the Crocodile,’ she said. ‘I could strangle the bastard with my bare hands.’
Chapter 12
The tragedy of Arthur Alderley is, therefore, the tragedy of western modernity itself. For Rufus Clerkenwell, protagonist of A Scent of Horseradish, as for the honourable but finally unhinged Maddy Puberly of The House at Hough End, the drive for personal liberty cannot ultimately be unentangled from the centrifugal experience of subjective decentring. The ironic finale of A Scent of Horseradish, in which the manic Clerkenwell is asphyxiated in a hopper-load of the very root vegetables which have brought him his fortune, only serves to italicise this overdetermined yet critically underprivileged linkage. For Alderley himself (if I may risk a concluding deviation into the theoretically prickly forest of the biographical), the compulsive ritornello of his late novels may be back-allegorised to the adolescent Alderley’s own ‘primal scene’, in which the Promethean and the Oedipal remarkably cross-refer. The scorching of Causley is the symbolic origin, the always absent cause, of Alderley’s subsequent literary expulsions. His work is, for all its extraordinary lubricity, a Janus-faced pushme-pullyou, pointing both forwards and backwards, up and down, towards the very meaning he would like to expunge; away, in a liberating gesture, from the very murky material trauma which gives him his identity.
Back allegorise? It stank of desperation. Morris was sitting in the death car going over his presentation one more time before the interview. The windows were fogged up; hail was beating on the roof and gathering in the moss-grown gutters. It was April. Morris could smell his own aftershave, feel the cold sweat dripping from his armpits on to his love handles. He must have gone over the presentation thirty times since Wednesday – Zoe Cable had lent him Jocelyn and Darren so he had done no teaching – and once or twice it had actually seemed quite good. Now it read like a suicide note, a farewell to his career.
His nascent friendship with Zoe Cable, which at one point he had thought might save him in the interview, had actually only added (if that was possible) more pressure. She had unexpectedly come into his office half an hour before. She was wearing dark glasses and stylised camouflage gear; she smelt of airports and olive oil.
‘Morris, one word of advice,’ she hissed.
Morris nodded eagerly. Zoe lifted up her sunglasses. She was wearing camouflaged contacts.
‘Attack!’
‘Attack?’
‘I think the military metaphor is appropriate in these circumstances. No blood will be shed, but there is booty. We have it, you want it. You must wrest it from us.’
‘I’ve never thought of an interview in those terms before.’
Zoe nodded and glanced over the sparse office he shared with three other temporary lecturers, as if that proved her point.
‘There are elemental forces at work here, Morris. I know what you’re capable of.’ Morris blushed a little. ‘But do the others? I doubt it. They look at you, they look at your CV and, forgive my harshness, they smell your fear. And fear is annoying, no one hires fear. Remember that, Morris. You need to show us something.’
Morris winced. ‘I was going to photocopy my teaching evaluations.’
Zoe rolled her eyes.
‘Let me put it this way, Morris. We have a shortlist of five. There is an order of preference and you’re at the bottom. Student evaluations won’t do it, you need to go nuclear. We’ve just seen someone with large tits from Wolverhampton who’s already pulled in 15k from the ESRC. Declan’s mind is all but made up. Listen, I’m on a bathroom break, this conversation is completely off the record. See you at two.’
It was one forty-five. The hail was easing slightly. From Recreation Road there was a roar of deregulated buses, and from the student union steps the sound of someone with a megaphone shouting about Third World debt. What had Morris expected? That on the basis of his shared hit-and-run secret Zoe Cable would get him the job? Probably. Their conversation on Tuesday afternoon had so affected his thinking that it had been hard ever since for Morris to know what was real or possible. If reversing into Dirck van Camper was a) OK and b) what he had really wanted to happen, what was the new status of his other fears and desires? If he wanted a permanent job intensely enough wouldn’t he get it? He had hoped, a trifle desperately perhaps, that it might work like that. But now Zoe Cable was saying he had to act, he had to ‘wrest it from them’. Hopeless. Of course they could smell his fear; fear was all he consisted of. He was the insubstantial sum of all his errors and anxieties, all his failures to act or speak. He was a large jelly in a bad suit.
He was so tired of this: this job search, this whole process emptying him out like a vast, brutal enema again and again. How many interviews had he had over the last five years? He added them up – Eccles, Peterborough, Gwent … twenty-two. Twenty-two interviews. He needed to bring it to an end one way or another. It had to stop.
Morris opened the glove compartment and removed a clear plastic folder that had been in there since Tuesday. He walked carefully across the hail-slickened car park towards the Arts Faculty. As he walked, the sun blinked brightly on then off as though its bulb had just blown. Morris puffed out his chest;
he got ready to attack.
The seat they offered him was warm and smelt of CK One. It was at the head of a rectangular conference table. The panel had arranged themselves around the remaining edges in, as far as Morris could tell, no particular order: the Crocodile, Declan Monk, Darian Cavendish, Mohammed Ganguly, Zoe Cable. Mohammed Ganguly was the only one smiling. The others, including Zoe, were either staring grumpily into space or, more disturbingly, reviewing his CV. The residue of their coffee break – broken biscuits, unused crockery – formed an untidy centrepiece. As he looked out at them, Morris felt a moment of intense loneliness, a mixture of terror and exhilaration which reminded him most vividly of the dizzying confusions he had experienced as a child on trying to imagine the death of his parents.
‘We’d like to begin with the presentation,’ the Crocodile said. ‘Whenever you’re ready.’
Morris retrieved the plastic folder from his bag and placed it in front of him. He took from it a sheaf of typewritten sheets. He cleared his throat and made direct, unyielding eye contact with each of the interviewers in turn. Then he began.
‘The title of my paper today is “Total Mindfuck: A Study in Ethics and Embodiment.”’
He read Dirck van Camper’s words slowly and carefully, partly to increase their impact and partly because he had never read them before and wasn’t exactly sure what some of them meant. The argument, as far as he could understand it, was that the Body was a terribly good thing, especially in comparison to the Mind, and that most philosophers, novelists and literary critics, in fact almost everyone prior to Dirck van Camper himself, had neglected this fact. It struck him as overblown and self-evident, but he could tell that the panel were eating it up. Several were actually nodding, making notes. Twenty-two interviews and he had never known anyone nod before.
‘This tendency in Western ethics towards decorporalisation, which I have been tentatively mapping,’ Morris read, ‘must be met not with a reactionary return to the body as logos, but rather with an expansion of the category body to include, to incorporate as it were, the non-physical and non-human – the animal, the machine, the network. We must seek a body not only sans organs, as Delueze argues, but also sans frontières.’