by Stephen May
‘Bloody tourists,’ she said. I pointed out that complaining about tourists in Cambridge in the summer was like complaining about penguins in the Antarctic, sand in the desert. It was like moaning about the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Plus those bloody tourists she was so dismissive of were also bloody brilliant for the local economy. They probably spent way more than the bloody students for a start.
‘Yes, yes, I know. You’re right,’ she said. ‘But let’s go somewhere else, get away from the colleges. Let’s see the real Cambridge. Let’s go where the tourists don’t.’
So we walked along Chesterton Road towards Newmarket Road where the charmingly lop-sided houses gave way to fast food outlets and places to get your tyres changed. We walked past the football ground all the way out towards the park and ride. By the time we had got near the perimeter of the town’s dinky airport, rain had come on, skittering down the gutters like spiders, and so we sat in a pub called The Fox and had pints of dark beer.
It was a barn of a place, unlike the Blue Pig in every respect except for the sense of a defiantly cheery struggle to make ends meet. We had steak and chips and I told Anne about Bim’s first shift in my parents’ pub.
‘Isn’t he a marvel?’ she said. ‘Bim the warrior. Bim the avenging angel. I would’ve liked to have seen that.’
The pub had a collection of board games in one corner, one of which was backgammon and for the next couple of hours we drank slowly, while Anne taught me the game. She was a good teacher: patient, good-humoured, tolerant. I was, as ever, a good student. A quick study. I didn’t fall in love with backgammon there and then, but I began to see how it could become addictive, how I might one day, with practise, fall in love with it.
I was already in love with the idea of being taught things by Anne of course. Anne knew it. She even tested its limits.
‘How’s that lovely girl? The delectable Katy,’ she said at one point.
I shrugged. ‘She’s all right I think. She’s teaching English to kids in Italy.’
Anne nodded. ‘Of course she is. She’s one of those young women who are never knowingly under-employed. She’s the future, Mark.’
I thought she was probably right. The 1990s would be the decade of women after all. That was what the UN had decided. An unlikely coalition of allies had been agreeing with them all year. The Secretary of State for Employment, the guy who ran the Confederation of British Industry, the Trade Union Congress. The EEC, the Army. All of them saying women were where it was at. By the new millennium they’d be running everything.
It was another thing Eve would miss. The girl who was a singer, a writer, an artist. A girl who could have been anything – now just a box of ashes, unbelievably small. You wouldn’t believe what a small heap of dust a person becomes in the end.
‘I was very surprised when you said Katy wasn’t your girlfriend. Very surprised indeed. You missed a trick there I think, Mark.’
I was confused by this. I hadn’t ever wanted to be with Katy. I had wanted to be with Anne, but now she seemed to want to pretend that nothing much had happened between us.
‘Who’s LM?’ she said.
She had noticed the tattoo. I told her how I’d had it done on a day when I was more than usually oppressed by memories of Eve. She was everywhere in the Blue Pig after all. She’d made up dances with her friends in the cellar at thirteen, The Good Terrorists had rehearsed in the function room, had played their first three gigs there too. There was a wonky watercolour of a blue pig on the wall, a painting she’d done at ten.
Of course I thought of her every time I spotted a Daddy long legs, a ladybird, a wasp, a butterfly. Every time I went to the Eazyzap. I’ll be the annoying insect that won’t leave you alone.
So one slow afternoon, in search of pain I think now, I went out and had a big scarlet love heart tattooed on my arm, the initials LM written in the centre, a bit wonky because it was the first real tattoo inked by a seventeen-year-old apprentice who was shaky with performance anxiety.
It was okay though, the pain was distracting enough but bearable, and the owner of the tattoo parlour, embarrassed by the shoddy workmanship, let me off paying.
There was a short silence after I told this story, and for something to say I asked something that had been nagging at me.
‘What is parflutretoline?’
Anne told me it was Dr Sheldon’s project. The active ingredient in something sold as Fluxin. He led the team on it. A real breakthrough worth literally billions.
‘Of course it’s not actually the money he wants. He thinks he deserves a Nobel prize. You know he is genuinely enraged when another year goes past and he’s not in the running.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘What kind of planet are you on when you actually start thinking like that – thinking it outrageous that those Nobel bastards are ignoring you again – are you all right?’
I nodded, though I wasn’t all right. I could feel something beginning to boil inside me. A sickness rising. But I checked myself. It would turn out to be nothing.
I changed the subject and we talked of other things, unimportant things. Later, Anne said, ‘You know what I’d like to do now?’
I had no idea.
‘I’d like to watch a film. Before I met Philip I used to go to the pictures all the time, but he hates films. He can’t sit in silence for two hours. He doesn’t have the concentration for films. He has a very TV mind you know. He loves those game shows. Things like The Generation Game and Play Your Cards Right. He is a fan of all that. Funny, isn’t it?’
It sounded like carefully cultivated eccentricity to me, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I went and fetched a paper from the bar. It was now 7 p.m. The ABC was showing Pretty Woman at seven forty-five. If we got our skates on we could make it.
‘Well, let’s get those jolly old skates on then,’ Anne said. ‘A romantic comedy about a tart with a heart. Perfect. It’ll be like a date and we’ve never actually had one of those, have we?’
We hurried back into town and had time to buy tubs of Häagen-Dazs and a bag of wine gums, and in the dark of the ABC we sat with arms resting against each other.
By the time Richard Gere had got himself lost on Hollywood Boulevard our legs were pressed against each other too. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. The air seemed to be growing more solid. I was finding it hard to concentrate on the back and forth of the dialogue.
By the time Richard Gere and Julia Roberts were making love on the grand piano our hands were linked. By the time the Jason Alexander character, the villain, was attacking Julia in her hotel room, Anne’s hand was on my thigh, stroking gently. My hand moved so that it was doing the same to her. I moved my fingers up towards the hot centre of her and she grabbed my wrist to stop me. It was like being fourteen again, like being on one of my first dates, unbearably exciting. I moved my hand back to her knee.
There in the dark, chewing wine gums, Anne’s hand on my thigh, Richard Gere renouncing the cold ways of business in order to have a better work-life balance, I wondered how the evening would end. Who would start things when we were back in the house? Anne, I decided. Obviously it would be up to Anne to start things. Unless it wasn’t. Unless it was up to me. Whatever, I knew that within minutes of getting in we would be sprawling across her bed, or maybe we wouldn’t even get that far. Maybe we would do it in the hallway, the kitchen, on the stairs. We were back. We were an item again. A thing.
When we reached Selwyn Gardens, when Anne had the key in the front door, she stopped a moment and said. ‘It was a good idea. The walk. My mood is definitely enhanced. Well done.’
She kissed me lightly on the lips and I followed her down the hall. A drink, then bed. It looked like we would restrain ourselves until we reached the bedroom. At the entrance to the living room she stopped, abruptly. Behind her I could see her shoulders tense.
‘Hello, dear. Had a nice time?’
A cool, deep, sarcastic voice from the darkness beyond. Sheldon. Anne put her shoulders back an
d took a determined step into the room. I followed her as a lamp clicked on and Philip Sheldon was revealed, sitting in one of their over-stuffed armchairs as if entirely at ease. Long legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. He was in shirtsleeves, hands steepled together, a pose that suggested a serious man quietly contemplating the events of a busy but rewarding day. He had a large glass of wine on the table next to him. He was every inch the relaxed pater familias at home. A man enjoying some much-deserved downtime. He was even wearing slippers for fuck’s sake.
34
‘Philip.’ Anne’s voice was stony.
‘Anne. Anne. Anne.’ He seemed to be tasting her name, chewing it, savouring it, turning it over in his mouth as though it was new and exotic and lovely to say. As if each syllable kept surprising him with sweetness. There was a chill silence afterwards. Sheldon broke it, his head turned towards me.
‘And you, you young scamp, a surprise to see you here I must say.’
I couldn’t think of anything to say and Sheldon smirked.
Anne spoke, her voice tired. ‘I’m sorry, Philip.’
I was taken aback. Anne sounded utterly abject.
‘You don’t have to say sorry to him.’
‘Oh, but she does. You do, don’t you Anne?’
‘I’m going to have a bath.’ Anne turned and walked back past me and towards the stairs. I took a step after her. Caught her by the shoulder. She stopped.
From the room behind us Sheldon called out, ‘Offering to scrub her back? Nice. Good for you. She’s not bad in the sack, is she? I’ll give her that. A decent screw when she feels like it. When she can be bothered to put the effort in.’
‘Get rid of him, please. Just get rid of him.’
One clear task to focus on. One straightforward job to do. Anne ran up the stairs, her head down and I watched her. She looked shrunken somehow.
I took a second to think and headed off into the living room. If he’d got any sense Sheldon would take one look at me and he’d take off of his own accord, but if not, well, he’d be gone in ten minutes anyway. Or less even.
I rubbed my knuckles. Decided to treat the professor as just another unruly Saturday night customer, just another drunken fuckwit punter needing bouncing.
‘Come in then, boy. Don’t skulk out there. Come in, take a pew, have a drink. Let’s have a wee chat you and I.’
‘Anne wants you out.’
Sheldon ignored me. ‘Just sit down,’ he said. For some reason – a lifetime of obedience to teachers probably – I found myself doing it.
Sheldon said, ‘You’re in over your head you know.’
I said nothing. Five minutes, that’s all I was giving him. Five minutes, and then Sheldon was out. The professor put his hands behind his head, regarded me with studied cool. Flexed his slippered feet. Then he told me where he’d been, what he had been doing while Anne and I were walking the streets of Cambridge, while we were watching Richard Gere and Julia Roberts do their thing.
While we’d been doing all that, Sheldon had been in a windowless room in the basement of a Cambridge nick answering the viciously invasive questions of hostile detectives.
‘Because you know what she did, don’t you?’
I stayed silent. I wasn’t getting into a discussion with him. Couple more minutes and then Sheldon really was out on his ear. ‘She accused me of interfering with our daughter.’
So I heard how Dr Sheldon was arrested at home and questioned for hour upon humiliating hour by grim-faced policemen who had no time for academics anyway and hot-shot scientist is kiddie-fiddler, well, that’s a story they understood – that played right into their prejudices. The rage with which he denied it also seemed to them to be a kind of supporting evidence of course. Why are you getting so het up, Sir? Touched a nerve have we, Sir?
After questioning, he was left to sit for several hours while a team was despatched to Hampshire to talk to Dorcas where, in a child-friendly lilac room with pictures of bunnies on the wall, a baffled and distressed kid frustrated a sympathetic lady from social services by plainly having no idea what the hell she was talking about. In my head I could picture that poor girl, anxious even on a normal day, struggling to get her head round the implications of what was being said to her. Wondering how to pass this latest test she’d been set by the incomprehensible adult world.
‘Eventually it was clear even to the goons from her majesty’s constabulary that the dates and times didn’t add up. For several of them Dorcas was at school, for others I’d been a thousand miles away on a bloody lecture tour. I will be suing of course; I’ll be having their guts for bloody garters. Anne’s too, if I can.’
Through all this, he didn’t actually seem angry or outraged. He didn’t look like a man out to turn guts into bloody garters. He didn’t look like a man who’d been through a gruelling ordeal at the hands of the police. He looked like a man replete. A man with a glutted look, full of smug self-satisfaction. Bloated with triumph.
‘Just thought I should let you know what you’re dealing with.’
‘I think you should go now, Dr Sheldon.’
‘Leave my own house?’ He stared at me, challenge giving a glowing heat to his eyes. Then he relaxed. ‘Yes, don’t worry. I’m going to go. I’m going to go back to my very beautiful, very passionate, very sane partner. Tomorrow Mish and I will spend a happy day discussing names for babies. While you try and deal with the fallout here.’
‘What fallout?’
‘Well, I imagine that even our dozy constabulary won’t leave matters where they are. I think that tomorrow Anne can expect a knock from one or more disgruntled boys in blue. I don’t know what the penalties are for wasting police time in the way that she has, but they are probably reasonably punitive wouldn’t you say?’
With that he finished his drink, heaved himself from the armchair and crossed the room with the confident strides of the righteous drunk. He stopped right in front of me, ran a hand through his unruly grey mop.
There was something I needed to ask him.
‘Parflutretoline – Fluxin – is it as dangerous as they say?’ By they, I meant my dad and Mr Harold Thorne-Lungs but Sheldon reacted as if I were talking about the propaganda of an organised conspiracy. A terror cell. He stiffened, his fists clenched, his lip curled.
‘That is a vile, disgusting libel.’ He made a very visible effort to get himself under control. He exhaled noisily. ‘In a very few individuals, in the first weeks of taking it, there is some slight risk that our product might exacerbate symptoms before it relieves them. We are talking about very, very few people – mostly adolescents – and nearly all of those few affected in this way are successfully moved on to alternative and more suitable forms of medication. Our drug is a major contribution to curing one of the greatest epidemics of the modern age, that of anxiety and psychological distress. Who have you been talking to?’
It was true then. Harold Thorne-Lungs and my dad, they’d got him bang to rights.
There was a long silence. Dr Sheldon looking at me with a pitying contempt, while I thought about the psychological distress my sister’s death caused to quite a lot of people.
‘And you, sunny Jim,’ the professor was talking again, his voice granite hard, ‘you may not have the glorious Cambridge career you were hoping for. No starred firsts for you. No, you may well find your academic studies become a great deal tougher from now on. You might find your final degree is undistinguished I’m afraid. No BBC afterwards, no becoming a QC or an MP or forensic accountant or whatever you were hoping for. A shame but there it is.’
‘You’re pissed.’
‘Yes, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill, in the morning I will be sober while you will still be a tragic tale of potential that somehow failed to flower. Expectations that never quite blossomed into successes. A mind that turned out to be third rate after all.’
I stood up. Sheldon moved back a step, wobbled. Just about kept himself upright. ‘You going to hit me then, boy? Good because th
en you really will be finished.’
I eyeballed him hard. Sheldon held my gaze. Even in the thin light cast by the lamp I could see how sallow and liverish the skin of the professor’s face might become in the not too distant future. How even now rumours of thread veins were making themselves known on those chiselled cheekbones. His new love seemed to be taking its toll. Again I could think of nothing to say. Sheldon grinned in triumph, I could see inflammation of his gums in the gaps between his large square teeth. Yes, love seemed to be doing him in. Someone needed to take him in hand or the medical science career would be down the toilet; there would be a new, younger, less blemished scientist to take his place. A woman probably, in this decade of women.
‘Good night, old bean,’ Sheldon said. ‘Enjoy the wine.’
After he’d gone I sat for a while in the growing chill of the house, just thinking. I headed off up the stairs with two glasses of that dark wine. I knocked gently on the bathroom door and then went in without waiting for her to reply.
‘He’s gone.’
‘Did he tell you what I did? Am I a terrible person? Do you hate me now?’
Her eyes were shadowed and deep, skin marble white. For a second I saw someone else there instead. A girl much younger, lying in water cooled and coloured by her own blood. I shut my eyes. Eve, you fucking idiot.
‘I don’t hate you.’
She smiled, and she looked suddenly shy, suddenly young. ‘Why don’t you have a bath?’ she said. ‘Use my water, it’s quite clean.’
I didn’t spend long in the bath, just long enough to wash myself thoroughly. The water was tepid and since Eve’s death I found I didn’t really enjoy baths anyway. Lying still, with nothing to do except think and remember and speculate about how we could have stopped her – that was too much. These days I just had a quick shower in the morning and another in the evening. You don’t think much under hot showers.