by Ian McGuire
‘Really?’ said Deirdre. ‘Helga. Do you find that works?’
‘It may, it may not,’ said Morris, staring fixedly at Underseel. ‘But then really, in the end, who cares? It’s all just words isn’t it?’
‘Words?’ said Underseel.
‘Signifiers,’ said Morris. ‘Meaning is just a side-effect of power after all, don’t you think?’ He was looking now at Deirdre, but he was still concentrating entirely on Underseel.
‘Well Firenze, who I love dearly, does go a little far for me,’ said Deirdre. ‘I’m antique enough to believe in truth and falsity, emancipation and oppression.’
‘Useful fictions, I admit,’ Morris replied. ‘But it’s important not to confuse the heuristic with an absolute, don’t you think? It may be helpful to describe some things as true and others as false, so long as we don’t start believing they really are.’
‘Well of course I’m against dogmatism,’ said Deirdre. ‘Who isn’t?’ They both glanced momentarily at Underseel. ‘But it’s the baby and the bath water again isn’t it? If you insist, as Firenze does, that everything is just language, even the body, and language is just an effect of power, then what do you have left to build on, to inspire?’
‘Moments of transgression,’ said Morris. ‘Aporias, lacunae.’
‘No one ever started a revolution with an aporia, Morris, my love, you need ideals.’
‘Well,’ interrupted Underseel loudly. ‘Enough of this sophomoric chit-chat. This Tasmanian red is surprisingly palatable. Should I pour you a glass, Morris?’
‘Yes please,’ said Morris, who was already noticing the painful if familiar signs of the Wee Hamish departing his system. ‘But I would like to say, Conrad …’ Morris swallowed. Underseel reddened violently; this use of his first name by a student of whatever age or status was, they both knew, entirely unprecedented. It was for Underseel the procedural equivalent of a goosing. ‘There is nothing sophomoric about the issues Deirdre and I were discussing. These questions, Conrad, are central to contemporary literary studies.’
‘I am sad to see,’ said Underseel, ‘that, judging by your enthusiasm for the half-baked blatherings of Ms Beach, since leaving Bangor you have fallen among theorists. I must say that the tendency of such people to parade their own educational and mental limitations would be merely vulgar if it did not also, through the sheer volume of its platitudinous bellowing, threaten to distract attention from work of real value. When you studied with me I believe I made it clear that the road of scholarship is narrow, winding and, above all, long. If you have chosen, as it seems you have, to ride instead the tawdry escalator of literary fashion, then you have squandered not only your own, admittedly rather small, talents, but also, much more importantly, my own precious time and energy. I should evidently have chosen better.’
Deirdre Pluck raised her eyebrows in alarm and then attempted a diffusing wink. Morris adjusted his wig and ran his tongue slowly along the uneven line of his front teeth.
‘Yes, Professor Underseel,’ he said after a moment. ‘I remember your homilies on scholarship very well. In the years since we met, they have stuck in my mind and I’ve always used them as a sort of yardstick.’ Underseel’s face softened slightly in anticipation of a climb-down. Morris glanced over at Zoe, who was still pretending not to look at him. ‘Yes indeed, whenever in life I am confronted by a particularly tedious bore, I bring them immediately to mind and I can console myself with the fact that whatever this person is saying, whatever hellacious depth of self-serving vacuity he or she is currently sounding, it is at least not as bad, not nearly as bad, as one of Professor Underseel’s disquisitions on scholarship.’
Deirdre Pluck gasped. Underseel’s nostrils flared like loon pants. His face was pale on the surface with dark, subcutaneous streaks of fury. It looked like a well-used whiteboard.
‘When Morris first arrived at Bangor,’ Underseel had turned suddenly to Deirdre and was addressing her with intense and unswerving casualness, ‘I thought that, although rather primitive, he might be polished up. I see now that I was quite wrong about that. Such base material cannot be improved. There are certain ingrained crudities that we simply cannot reach. And perhaps, on consideration, it is really kinder not to try. The results after all,’ he nodded at Morris, ‘can really be such a horrible botch.’
Morris noted with alarm that Zoe was about to leave the room. She was chatting with Pam and heading definitely door-wards.
‘Zoe!’ he shouted out. ‘Zoe!’ Everyone in the room except Zoe looked at him.
‘Zoe,’ he said again. She turned.
‘Yes Morris.’
He reached out and pulled her over.
‘I’d like your opinion about something,’ he said. ‘You see, I was just explaining to Professor Underseel, Conrad, here, that I find his views on scholarship, well, actually on more or less everything, both idiotic and repellent. That indeed, as an academic, a Ph.D. supervisor and a human being he represents for me the very acme of contemptibility. And he was explaining to Deirdre that he regards me and people like me (I’m not quite sure what he means by that, but I imagine Rotherham comes into it somewhere), anyway, me and people like me, as both unworthy and incapable of education. And I was wondering, erm, where you stood on that?’
‘On what?’ said Zoe.
‘On the question of me and Underseel?’
Zoe looked at him. It was not the kind of look Morris had been hoping for. If he was going out on a limb, he might have described it as cool, but really, more conservatively, it was a sneer.
‘Going Critical is a programme which thrives on robust differences of opinion,’ said Zoe. ‘We’re certainly pleased to have both of you here today. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’
‘Hold on a second,’ said Morris. He wasn’t about to let her go. He wasn’t about to abandon his train-bred paradigm, he was convinced he could still make it work. He could still squeeze it into the slot marked truth.
‘Have a drink. Underseel’s been banging the gong for the Tasmanian red.’ He forced a glass into her hand. Zoe immediately leaned past him and put it back on the bar.
‘No thanks, I’m rather busy. Don’t you have a train to catch Morris?’
Morris was stunned by her disingenuous.
‘I’m at the Balmoral,’ he said with a nudge.
‘Are you really?’ Zoe said emptily. ‘I had no idea we were so generous with expenses.’
‘Have you seen my earlier interview?’ he asked.
‘No, but I’ve heard about it.’
‘Then I’m sure you’ve heard it’s a powerful brew. I recommend you show it to him,’ he nodded at Underseel, ‘as soon as possible. That is, if you really do enjoy a robust difference of opinion.’
‘No, what I heard Morris,’ said Zoe with sudden vehemence, ‘was that your answers were unintelligible, and that you looked like Klaus Kinski on a bad day.’
All around him, in octophonic surround sound, Morris heard the sudden, shattering clink of a breaking paradigm. Klaus Kinski?
Underseel stepped forward with a forbearing grin.
‘Ms Cable,’ he said. ‘Since Mr Gutman is obviously incapable of apologising for himself, I will apologise for him. I might charitably assign the extraordinary lack of discretion and judgement that he is displaying to the effects of alcohol on a personality which is at best wobbly.’
‘Wobbly? What the fuck are you talking about?’ said Morris.
‘Yeah whatever,’ said Zoe.
‘I would, however, very much wish to emphasise,’ Underseel continued without pause, ‘that his views and behaviour are by no means representative of mainstream Alderley scholarship. Indeed the majority of Alderley scholars would find them quite atrocious.’
‘I thought you were the majority of Alderley scholars,’ said Zoe.
‘I am yes, so I know whereof I speak.’
Zoe Cable rolled her eyes.
She rolled her eyes, Morris thought, the way a teenager might roll her eyes at a hop
eless but well-meaning parent. But Underseel was not a hopeless but well-meaning parent – he was a source of evil, a spring of darkness. Six years ago he had shattered Morris’s life, poleaxed his career, and now, right now, he was doing it again. He was humiliating him in front of Zoe Cable. Zoe Cable who was herself, he now realised, a bastard too, but at least a thrillingly humpable bastard, a bastard who he yearned for with every fibre of his painfully sobering body.
Zoe was turning away; Underseel was lolloping over to Toby Royale; Deirdre Pluck was investigating the sushi. It was over for them, he realised. He was over. All they would remember of him, if they remembered anything, was the slight embarrassment, a small, hardly noticeable hillock in the gorgeous flatness of their lives. Morris felt himself receding rapidly. He would spend the night alone; he would return to Coketown; he would never appear on television again; he would eke out a living giving paltry lectures for Trident Education; he would drink himself first into chronic illness, then into an early and under-resourced retirement, then eventually, after years of miserable coping, he would die. Alone. That was it. That was all of it. And there was nothing he could do.
A sudden thought occurred to Underseel. He turned round slowly and walked back over to Morris.
‘I just remembered where I recently read your name,’ he said. ‘The Times Higher Education Supplement had a very interesting piece on plagiarism. I think, in the light of your conviction, it would be only proper for the university to carefully review your Ph.D. for evidence of malfeasance. If there are any irregularities, you would of course be stripped of your doctorate.’ He grinned.
Morris leaned back on his heels and stared for a second at the grey polystyrene ceiling panels. He then, ignoring the scream of pain from his wounded left foot, swayed forward on to his toes, bent his knees, and with a sudden upwards and outwards motion, broke Conrad Underseel’s nose with one well-aimed thump of his wig-cushioned forehead.
Underseel went down like a leaky dirigible. There was a hubbub. Deirdre Pluck shrieked and dropped her sushi. Toby called for ice. Bathsheba gathered towels. There was much toing and froing. The stricken Underseel moaned like a child with toothache. Blood was oozing from his sausage fingers, quite a lot of blood. It was dripping on to the purple cravat and beige safari suit, it was spotting the pale grey carpet.
Morris was panting, the room was bobbing up and down in time with his gasps. The skin has a memory, he thought. He could still feel on his forehead the precise and gentle give of Underseel’s nose. Zoe was looking at him now. She seemed frightened; he reached out to reassure her.
‘Don’t touch me, you fucking animal,’ she said.
Pam phoned for security.
‘It was a moment of madness,’ Morris explained. He was lying. It wasn’t. It was a moment of rare coherence, a moment when for once everything had pointed in the same direction: heart, body, mind. Hatred could do that, he supposed. Hatred was a superb organiser.
Zoe was still standing there. Her head was not so much shaking as shuddering. Was she angry?
‘I know what you are trying to do to me, Morris,’ she said, ‘but you’ll fail. You’re not big enough. You’re not even half big enough.’
‘I was trying to bring something into being,’ Morris explained. ‘To go beyond the binaries.’
‘Which binaries would those be exactly? Sane and lunatic? Because I’ll tell you, if that’s the case you’ve gone straight to lunatic. You know there’s an important difference between deconstruction and just fucking things up.’
‘I thought you liked lunatic,’ Morris said. ‘I thought lunatic was what you went for.’
‘No Morris, I go for transgressive, I go for alarming, I don’t go for demented. Demented is where I draw the line.’
‘But lines are made to be broken, Zoe.’
Morris was wondering whether there was still a chance for him and Zoe, the two of them, whether if they could get beyond these immediate difficulties – the head-butt, the anger, the imminent arrival of security – they might rediscover something truer and deeper between them.
‘Fuck off, Morris.’
Perhaps not. This was really it then. It. Although it didn’t sound quite right. It was too substantial. If it was a thing, a weight, a presence, what had occurred, was still occurring, was really its long, slow withdrawal, the accelerating failure of it. He was entering – he could sense it in the throbbing of his sutures – an itless phase, a phase of pure and ferocious absence. He wondered how long he had before the scorching adrenalin rush of the head-butt wore off and the dull brutal pain of fucking things up entirely with Zoe kicked in. An hour? Less? However long or short, it was important, vitally important, he knew, to fill every minute of it with Wee Hamish.
Chapter 32
E and Kidney were watching television. They were slouched on his snaky purple sofa. He was rubbing her feet. E liked Kidney to rub her feet; indeed E liked Kidney to rub almost any part of her: neck, shoulders, back, calves, knees – you name it, it was pleasant. No, it was more than pleasant, it was exciting. Initially, when the rubbing first commenced, she had been surprised to find herself still capable of excitement. She had thought it had been washed out of her by the rigmarole of adultery and separation, but no, there it was, that energising inner tickle.
‘Mmm,’ she sighed and shifted her position. ‘When are you going out?’ she asked. Kidney always went out.
He looked at his watch. It was as big as a hamburger and digital.
‘Midnight. I’ll have a couple of beers at the Pantagruel.’
‘Is that fun? Beers at the Pantagruel?’
‘Not really, but it’s what I do. Other men have allotments.’
‘Other men have girlfriends.’
He continued rubbing.
‘I wouldn’t want the howls of pleasure to disturb your sleep.’
‘Are there always howls?’ she asked.
‘Oh, always.’
‘It sounds rather violent.’
‘Hey lady, I pickle penises for a living, what do you expect?’
‘I thought your penis-pickling days were behind you.’
‘They are but I can’t entirely shake them off. In the eyes of the public it’s definitive. I’ll always be the pickled-penis guy.’
‘I imagine that has some disadvantages. With the ladies I mean.’
Kidney shrugged.
‘This is London. There are pros and cons.’
‘Can you do something with my knee? I’ve been experiencing shooting pains.’
E hitched up her cheesecloth smock; Kidney shuffled closer and started rubbing.
‘What about Ghee?’ she said. ‘Ghee is stunning.’
‘Ghee is a former Miss Calcutta. She’s so physically beautiful it’s not even funny.’
‘You make it sound like a problem.’
‘It’s a distraction. I mean it’s not normal, really, it’s freakish. She has no bad angle, I’ve looked for one. It isn’t there. It’s like fucking an alien.’
‘So you’ve tried?’
Kidney coughed. The light was poor, but E thought she saw the rather endearing signs of reddening.
‘Ghee has a thing for artists.’
‘She’s a collector.’
‘You could say that.’
‘I don’t blame her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Artists. I’ve met your friends. They’re exciting.’
‘It’s a job.’
‘No it’s not. You know it isn’t.’
‘No, you’re right, it isn’t.’
Kidney’s fingers were short and spatulate. They gripped and squeezed her knees like twin anemomes trying to attach themselves to a slippery rock. His thumbs described soft, soothing semicircles on her lower thighs.
‘Artists are sexy,’ she continued. ‘I know it’s a generalisation.’
‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘I like generalisations. In fact, I like everything about them.’
‘I know you do,’ she sai
d. ‘I know …’
Something was happening to E’s lungs. Already shunted up by her ever-expanding uterus, they seemed now to have shrunk even further. Her breaths were coming shallow and sharp like the puffing of a small locomotive. A certain weight within her, a dark mass she had assumed was unshiftable was, she realised, beginning to shift. She thought strangely of men pulling lorries along with their teeth; you just had to get them going, break the force of gravity. After that, after that – she felt a spasm of relaxation – things became easier.
‘What about the ugly artists?’ said Kidney.
‘There are no ugly artists,’ said E, trying to recompose herself. ‘I’ve never met an ugly artist.’
‘Christ, I’ll have to introduce you to some. There’s a whole colony out in Clerkenwell. They’re hideous.’
‘What about their work?’
‘Exquisite. It’s a Dorian Grey sort of thing. Is that OK for you?’
E blinked. His fingers, she felt certain, were now roaming more widely, more freely than she had ever expected … Imagined … Hoped for … ?
‘That’s fine,’ she said. She heard herself swallow – it sounded frail and a little pathetic. She hoped Kidney hadn’t heard.
The pretence of the knees was over now. If pretence was the right word. If that’s what it had been. Had it? Hadn’t it? She pulled the smock up further. She couldn’t see what was going on. Kidney had disappeared like a moon behind the stretch-marked planet of her bulge. All she could do was feel. Feel the removal of, oh God, her vast Mothercare maternity briefs. (‘Brief,’ as her mother had put it, ‘they are not’.) If Kidney’s ardour could survive the tortuous trek past her swollen ankles, varicose veins, painful knees and now vast flapping granny pants, he richly deserved, she felt, whatever he could get.
Oh. It was happening already. It was happening right now. She further opened her knees, adjusted herself. She wanted to be helpful, wanted this to work.
After a number of quite blissful minutes, Kidney’s head popped up.
‘Is this going to work?’ he said.
‘Emotionally or logistically?’
He shrugged.