Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  ‘First they came for the Jews,’ said Morris sombrely.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Bernard. ‘Then they came for the computer illiterates. And who will be next?’ He looked wildly round his office as though searching for another vulnerable constituency. ‘Scholars of Arthur Alderley? You never know.’

  (Bernard seemed to have forgotten that Morris’s research had taken a new and rather more successful direction lately. Morris chose not to remind him.)

  ‘So you’re with us?’ he said.

  Morris paused. There was silence. His glance quickly took in the room: Bernard’s trolley, his own cardboard box, the horsehair sofa piled with essays, the ancient kettle, the sepia-toned mugs, the pock-marked jar of Nescafé, the Remington typewriter, the endless, endless books. It was like a historical reconstruction, he thought, ‘Lecturer’s Study, Northern England, 1950–1980’. Bernard was a historical curio, and the Crocodile was preparing to stuff and mount him (or mount and stuff him, depending on your metaphorical preference). His memory flicked back to Zoe two days before, sitting on his face in the Casa Urbano. What had she said to him then? ‘Hold your nerve Morris, just hold your nerve.’ He had assumed then that she was referring to country matters, but maybe not; with Zoe the line was frequently blurred.

  ‘This foul document,’ he waved the minutes in reply, ‘appals me, Bernard. I’m with you all the way.’

  ‘Terrific.’ Bernard almost gasped with relief. Morris imagined he had already suffered one or two knockbacks. ‘To have a younger member of staff on board will really help our case. Could you help me draft a letter?’

  ‘Certainly, but perhaps we should meet off campus.’

  ‘Good idea. Could you come to my home tonight? I’ll cook supper, we’ll have a glass of claret before we dip our pens in vitriol.’

  Bernard lived alone in a rather grand Victorian semi in a side-street in Glodshaw. He had bought it for virtually nothing in 1972, a decade before the yuppies moved in. Then, the street was populated by student renters and ancient sitting tenants who cut their grass by hand and invariably owned bow-legged, yappy dogs. For a decade or more, Bernard was at the cutting edge. Now, however, Glodshaw was upmarket. All the other houses on the street had been thoroughly refurbished – brickwork was cleaned and repointed, sash windows were replaced, driveways were created, paved and filled with pricey hatchbacks, children were ubiquitous. Only Bernard’s house remained undisturbed. Ferns grew from the guttering, paint peeled from the doorway, there was a leggy crack up one wall and the flashing was blowing off the chimney. He came to the door wearing carpet slippers and an inadvisably tight polo-neck jumper. He was holding a glass of red wine.

  ‘Morris!’ He stepped aside and offered a little bow. The hallway had coconut matting and swirling purple wallpaper; from the kitchen he could smell moussaka, from the living room he could hear Mahler Nine. Morris shuddered. Bernard had lived alone in the house for almost thirty years; entering it was like walking into his subconscious, like seeing him naked. There was a certain kind of intimacy involved in merely crossing the threshold.

  ‘Your timing is impeccable. The moussaka is reaching its peak. Help yourself to Brie while I fiddle with the veg.’ There was a glass of wine waiting for him on the mantelpiece, next to what Morris guessed was a photo of Bernard with his father. Bernard’s father looked a little like Clement Atlee. Bernard was wearing his school uniform: striped blazer, dark trousers, old but relentlessly polished shoes. They were standing by the Serpentine. Morris knew all about Bernard, at least all that was commonly known; Zoe had filled him in. Childhood in Neasden, scholarship to Mill Hill, Cambridge doctorate under Marcus Grunwald, a few years on the WEA circuit then Coketown, a poorly received monograph on the Romantic Epic, a textbook on the Prelude, a senior lectureship then silence. The parameters were clear enough. Now he was on the inside, however, Morris felt overwhelmed by previously unimagined detail. The wallpaper was flock, the carpet shag, the fire gas-effect. There was a sunburst mirror, pottery spaniels, a huge and alphabetically exact record collection. The room was dustless with an undertone of pipe tobacco. There was no TV and the only picture was a large and, to Morris’s mind, rather disheartening reproduction of Titian’s The Mocking of Christ.

  The moussaka when it arrived was, like the wine, disconcertingly good – musty and delicious. It was followed by Sainsbury’s chocolate mousse and Nescafé with brandy.

  ‘Is that you with your father on the mantelpiece?’ Morris asked.

  ‘That’s right. Spring 1953, day release from Dotheboys Hall. We went to see Richardson in Othello and had a spaghetti bolognese supper in Soho. The old man was rather cultured for his day. Now of course he’s nigh on ninety and he can’t shit straight.’

  ‘He’s still alive?’

  ‘Well, so they say. Modern medicine, if you ask me, is a conspiracy against human dignity. Tubes in every orifice – have you ever seen a bedsore up close? It’s not pretty, believe me. I no longer take holy sacrament myself, but I happen to believe there is a certain sacredness to life and death. For everything there is a reason. My old man looks pickled – he has that complexion. The doctors won’t listen to me of course.’

  ‘Have you tried talking to them?’

  ‘Well what’s the point?’

  ‘The thing to notice about Bernard,’ Zoe had once said, after orgasm and before he caught the bus home, ‘is his deference. Set aside the fulmination. At heart he’s scared. It doesn’t matter how often he goes to Glyndebourne, he’ll never get over being working-class.’

  ‘I thought class was dead,’ Morris had replied drowsily.

  ‘It survives in pockets. There are always residual elements, hangers-on.’

  They returned to the living room and Bernard showed him a draft of the letter from concerned faculty.

  Dear Professor McWurter,

  As colleagues of long standing we seek your attention on the matter of the Digital Faculty Proposal (Faculty Minutes of 10/5/01 pp. 32–6). We, the undersigned, have served this faculty loyally for many years, and while we do not wish to appear as roadblocks, or even speedbumps, on the road of progress, we would respectfully suggest that the wholesale computerisation envisaged in this mad proposal would brutally sever this faculty and its constituent departments from the nourishing compost of its past. The legacy of Professor Doppet (founder of the English Department, twice Dean of the Faculty) is of a humanistic community of scholars, of wisdom and learning, handed down from generation to generation with tact and care. How, we trepidatiously ask, would such a vision survive the coming electronic onslaught? Books, words, poems, people: these are our stock in trade, not bytes and screens and fuzzy disks. Many students today already reach us brutalised by popular ‘culture’; should we compound this horror by teaching them by television, marking them by email? It is surely our task to direct them via exhortation and personal example to the higher waters of truth, not to encourage them via labour-saving gadgetry to wallow in the salty muck of the quotidian. [Perhaps also mention here the spectre of Internet Plagiarism – see Daily Telegraph Culture section 5/2/01.] For another, perhaps newer, institution (the former Dukinfield Polytechnic for example), such a proposal may be appropriate, but Coketown has its traditions – chronological seriousness, independent study, scholarly accuracy. These may not be currently popular, but they are well known, and they have always stood us in good stead. We detach ourselves from them at our peril.

  Yours with some urgency.

  As Morris read, Bernard was nervously stuffing his pipe.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said as Morris put the letter down.

  ‘What do you mean by “chronological seriousness”?’

  ‘Well, in the old days, we didn’t let them near the twentieth century until they were close to graduation. Most of the first year was The Faerie Queen.’

  ‘“Independent study”?’

  ‘That means we just let them get on with it. No mollycoddling with handouts or special revision sessions. Oh,
and Darian made me include the stuff about scholarly accuracy – she’s potty about footnotes, you should see her in examiners’ meetings. She’ll knock ‘em down a class for incorrect use of ibid. Personally, I don’t give a toss, but each to his own.’

  ‘Where is Darian anyway? I thought she might be here’

  Bernard swallowed the dregs of his brandy and ignited his pipe. Morris had not imagined him as a pipe smoker – a residue of his Cambridge days presumably. Morris found it strange and faintly touching that out of everything that should survive.

  ‘Rome, I think, or Canterbury – somewhere Catholic.’

  ‘She does that a lot, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Religiously. She loves a pilgrimage. She gets young Kapoor, her Ph.D. student, to fill in. Never pays him a farthing. She waffles on about the virtues of an apprenticeship system and he gobbles it up. Not that he needs the money of course, his uncle’s the maharaja of somewhere. But come on Morris, don’t be coy,’ he said, gesturing towards the letter with the stem of his pipe. ‘What’s the verdict?’

  ‘May I be blunt?’

  Bernard seemed in two minds as how to reply to this. He finally managed: ‘Of course, if you really must.’

  ‘This is warfare, Bernard. From what I’ve read, from what I’ve heard you say, from what I know of Donald that much is clear. And in that context this letter is the equivalent of going into battle wearing red coats and whistling “The British Grenadier”. The nourishing compost of the past. It’s laughable.’

  Bernard blushed and sucked rather more vigorously on his pipe.

  ‘All right, OK, very well,’ he said. ‘So what are you suggesting? What counterproposal,’ he repressed a belch, ‘do you have?’

  As he said this, Bernard’s hands were noticeably shaking. Morris wondered whether he had struck too hard too soon. But that had been Zoe’s advice: ‘If you bark loud enough, he’ll roll over. It’s primitive stuff.’

  ‘What weapons do you have Bernard?’

  Bernard sat down on the sofa and rubbed his beard. While he was thinking he refilled their brandy glasses and turned over the Mahler.

  ‘None,’ he said eventually. ‘I have no weapons at all – apart from Darian, who’s loopy. I’m utterly fucked.’

  ‘Yes and no. I agree you have no weapons. You are horribly weak, but sometimes weakness is a strength.’

  ‘That’s a very lovely thought, Morris, but try telling them that at the Job Centre.’

  ‘I’m talking about stress, Bernard, workplace stress. It’s reaching epidemic proportions.’

  Bernard suddenly perked up. ‘You don’t need to tell me that, Morris. Old Qwerty had six months off with it last year. Muggins here picked up his teaching: three groups of “Conrad’s Longer Novels” – it was torture. In the old days when your Mum died you had a morning off to do the death certificate, an afternoon off for the funeral and that was it. Now it’s a bloody industry – counselling, antidepressants, stress consultants. Give them an extra essay to mark and they run off to their GP. Doctor, Doctor, I feel underappreciated. Too bloody right!’

  ‘Qwerty got his six months off with full pay. Peter Finger got six months off with full pay, came back for three weeks, started sobbing in the middle of a lecture on George Herbert and got six months more. If you get the right GP you can string it out indefinitely. Do you see where I’m going with this?’

  ‘I should become a professional malingerer. It does have a certain appeal, but wouldn’t it have to involve therapy? If it had to involve therapy I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘At this point a carefully calibrated threat might be enough. If the Crocodile believes that pushing forward with the Digital Faculty proposal will result in a significant number of staff going on semi-permanent sick leave it will stop him in his tracks.’

  ‘But he wants to get rid of us anyway.’

  ‘He wants to get rid of you so he can hire a hotshot researcher and several temporary drones to do the work. If you go on sick leave, he has no money to hire, and no one to do the teaching. He’s buggered.’

  Bernard dropped back into the sofa with a frown. He closed his eyes for several seconds then opened them and fixed Morris with a cheery, slightly intoxicated squint.

  ‘I remember when you first arrived,’ he said. ‘You were too scared to use the staff toilet – daren’t piss next to a senior lecturer in case they noticed something that might be detrimental to your career prospects. Now look at you. Machiavelli with a laptop.’

  Morris paused. The tone was unexpected. As if, while cutting through what he thought was clay, his shovel had crunched suddenly into a layer of hard-packed gravel.

  ‘Are you really bonking Zoe Cable like they say?’

  Morris shuddered. His head suddenly ached as if he had swallowed something much too cold.

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Enrique Hardcastle, student of mine who works for Sushi on Wheels. What was it the other night: Futo Maki and a six-pack of Sapporo? Does your wife know?’

  ‘We’re not married,’ Morris lied.

  ‘Sorry. Partner. That always sounds so bloody odd to me. Morris and Partner sounds like a business arrangement. But then again, in my limited experience, after the first year or two, after the initial flush and swell, that’s really what it is. You wash the socks, I’ll bring home the bacon – division of labour. The family is a unit of production after all, that’s Engels. Would it be correct to assume that the stress idea was Zoe’s?’

  Morris didn’t answer immediately. His mouth had dried up. He was unconsciously chewing his lip. After a while he nodded and tried a smile.

  ‘Two things, Morris. No, three things. First, have another drink.’

  He stood up and poured them both another brandy. ‘Second, I’m sure she goes like a proverbial sewing machine. After seeing her in the red waders it took me almost a week to regain my equilibrium. Third, she’s Lady Macbeth. Her motives are entirely ulterior. I don’t know what she told you, but I’m not stupid. No, take that back. I may be stupid, but I’m not as stupid as they think I am. Sending threatening letters to the Dean? I may as well write my own P45.’

  ‘Well,’ Morris began. Bernard held up his hand like a traffic policeman. ‘… OK, perhaps it isn’t a good idea.’

  ‘I’ve already been here for twenty-seven years, Morris. When I arrived I was a young man: married, lusty, intellectually energetic. Now look at me. These things leave you, Morris, it’s what stays that matters. I’m down to the bare bones, the core: this house, that bloody job. But that’s OK, because I’m a stayer, Morris, I abide. They’ve been trying to force me out for a decade. Maybe they’ll succeed one day. Maybe the Digital Faculty is it, but I doubt it. I survive, Morris, I’m like a crustacean, I have that barnacle quality. I cling. It’s not pretty but at least I have a sense of purpose. I know who I am.’

  ‘You’re whatever’s left over.’

  ‘I’m the remainder.’

  Morris lit a cigarette. Someone knew about him and Zoe; it made him tingle. He felt simultaneously proud and exposed. He was beset by memories of Zoe’s flesh, its turns and bends, its angles of approach.

  ‘How do you do it?’ he said after a while. They were on their fifth or sixth brandy. The Mahler had been replaced by Also Spracb Zaratbustra.

  ‘Do what exactly?’ The pipe was finished and Bernard had cadged one of Morris’s cigarettes.

  ‘Well, the marking for a start. Your loads are inhuman.’

  ‘Ah yes, the marking.’ Bernard’s carpet-slippered feet were resting on an ancient Moroccan pouffe. His ankles were crossed, his trousers were slightly rucked up and Morris could see a white and veiny section of calf. ‘They tried to break me with the marking. It almost worked. The first year after I was declared research inactive I was close to resigning. That June I had six hundred exams and almost fifty dissertations. They brought the date of the exams meeting forward on purpose, Declan was badgering me every day. Failure to complete the marking in a reasonable time is a disciplinary
offence under the Crocodile’s regime. The definition of reasonable, of course, being set by the Head of Department. Yes, I was close to breaking point, but then I discovered the system.’

  ‘The system?’

  ‘Let me show you. Stay where you are.’ Bernard walked unsteadily out of the room and returned with two large black box files. He perched on the arm of Morris’s chair. ‘Look at that.’ He handed him one of the files. It contained lists of student names and marks. ‘Mabel does them for me. Every student’s name, the mark they got for courses apart from mine and then the average. That’s the mark I always give them, the average.’

  ‘So you don’t read the essays?’

  ‘I haven’t read an essay or exam in four years. I think my health has improved as a result. I certainly feel much more alert.’

  ‘But you still complain about having to do it.’

  ‘Unendingly of course. If I didn’t complain, alarms would go off – I’m known for my complaints.’

  ‘What about comments? You have to write a comment on each essay.’