The Twisted Heart

by Rebecca Gowers

  ‘Can I get you another coffee?’ said Orson.

  Kit bit back a response along the lines of, ‘no’. She was desperate to get out of there, couldn’t find the list, not tucked into her notebook; where was it? She had a heap of reading on order, and precious hours set aside for hunting needles.

  But this, here, this is real life, she told herself sternly, perceiving that Orson was propelled by a strong desire to detain her. Why, she had no idea. Shape up, she said to herself, and to him, ‘Very kind, thank you.’

  ‘Same again?’

  ‘I’ll take the small, “minimo” thingy.’

  Orson bent into his backpack, extracted an appallingly vast print-out manuscript, and, with what struck Kit as inauthentic confidence, thumped it down on the counter beside her. She was tempted to say, then and there, ‘Can we just agree that whatever this is, I think you’re brilliant and fantastic?’, and she would have been quite happy to say it, too.

  Orson turned away without a word.

  The title was Score. Kit peered at it at an angle, unwilling to turn her head. Discreetly, she started in the middle of the second paragraph:

  He grunted, eyeing the sunlight as it drizzled down dazed through the tattered afternoon. He wanted to kiss her even though it wouldn’t work out, he knew. Something snapped in him. He stepped into the light like some avenging angel. He left the guys without a word and walked over to her. She was leaning against the wall the other side of the alley. Heels. It made his eyes sting how high her heels were. She smiled at him and he flicked his cigarette casually into an oil stained puddle where it hissed and spit like a snake. The guys’ eyes bored into his back as he leaned over her. Bad move. Her smile was seriously fake. He felt an icy shiver slide down his spine. Some angel, he mused.

  Let alone some opener, Kit thought in reply. She stopped reading, or even really thinking, until Orson came back with their coffees.

  ‘Oh, great,’ she said. ‘Thanks. Thank you. Okay. Well, so I should have a look at this?’ She put her hand on the monument beside her. ‘Not that my opinion is—I mean, I’m not exactly a, what’s-it-called, a now-literature person, you know?’

  ‘It’s now, but it’s also deliberately retro, right?’ said Orson, getting back on his stool. ‘But that’s okay.’ He was in command of himself. Kit felt a twinge of irritation. ‘What I was wondering,’ he said, ‘was, like, if this could, like, count towards my grade? Like, informally? My mom and dad—’ He was staring out of the window. ‘I need the grades, you know? Like, it cost a lot to send me here? And—’

  Kit tried to wave this effort away, as though it was understood between them that he didn’t really mean it. She hadn’t ever considered what the value might be to Orson of his grades. On reflection, though, sitting there, it came to her that his particular ration of intelligence and luck was surely ample to win him a life of material comfort, if that was what he wanted, or to reject it with splendid arguments if it wasn’t. Yes, she thought, that was the grade she would like to give him: congratulations, you win, there’s no good reason why your time on earth shouldn’t pan out just fine compared with the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. And by the way, before you say anything, this qualifies as an ‘A’.

  Kit looked down again at the top page of his novel. ‘It seems very—American, punchy. I’ll look forward—’ she glanced round at Orson, ‘to reading it. Of course, I can’t say till I’ve had a go at it properly.’

  ‘I want to get an agent? When I get home?’ said Orson.

  ‘Great,’ replied Kit, foreseeing several years’ worth of rejection letters, with a sideline in Internet self-justification. She wedged the manuscript into her bag. ‘What’s the basic subject, may I ask?’

  ‘Street gambling,’ he said, ‘is the primary axis. I mean, it’s about so much more, chicken trials, you know? But kind of street things, mostly, dog fights. But, like, retro?’ Only now did he appear suddenly anxious. ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing in Oxford?’ he said. ‘Like, this isn’t where I want to be, in my existence, like, at all. Like, you’re great and everything? But—I don’t know, you know, Oxford’s just one big fucking lunch-out and I want to be wired into something that’s happening. I want things to mean something. I didn’t ask to come here. They never even thought I might not want to. Like, it’s supposed to be this great opportunity and everything; but, like, Classical Civilisation and shit? The History of Philosophy—?’

  Whatever exactly it was that was bugging Orson, Kit felt neither qualified nor inclined to help. Was it really her job to give succour to a person hardly much younger than herself as he struggled through thickets he couldn’t be bothered to describe?

  ‘Listen, Orson,’ she said, ‘you’re bright. I shouldn’t tell you this, but your essays are considerably better than I was expecting. I don’t think you need to give me other stuff to help you out, even if it is allowed, which I’m pretty sure it isn’t. I’m no more clued up about things than you are—’

  He interrupted her to agree, ‘I know.’

  Kit, who had been planning to continue with the word ‘except’, now smiled, and instead threw out cheerfully, ‘Thanks.’

  She put a hand in her coat pocket. And there was the reading list. Who was she to counsel Orson? She hoped it would be enough just to cart away his daunting manuscript. What did she know about the meaning of life? Nothing, nothing, she thought glibly. ‘Let’s finish off our business,’ she said. ‘Here’s this. I take it you’re still going to do some work for me?’

  ‘Oh sure. You don’t understand, I have to get the grades, they’ll kill me.’

  ‘Because there’s lots of interesting stuff on here,’ she said. She took the mashed piece of paper and smoothed it out on the counter top, then, holding it down with her index finger, used her thumb to rotate the sheet until the writing faced her student.

  ‘I mean, I like that you’re so enthused?’ said Orson, ignoring the list. ‘I totally get it. Fully. I was just—I’ve had my mind in a different place this week, you know? I’ve been, like, knees down in this really fucked-up brain space. But,’ he struggled with himself, ‘I want to complete your course, for sure. It’s quite good. And, hey,’ he said, ‘who knows? I might write a detective novel one day.’

  ‘What does “knees down” mean—kneeling?’ Kit asked. Half of what he said she couldn’t understand.

  He was tickled by the question and shook his head, before bending his whole body to one side as he gripped the handlebars of a notionally impressive motorbike. ‘Knees down,’ he said, and demonstrated a bend the other way. ‘I’ll take you for a ride if you ever come visit—like you will, huh?’ His tone now tilted also, towards the ironical, before he righted himself again. ‘Where I come from,’ he said, ‘we have, like, these great roads? That just favoom way to the horizon, brrrr, forever?’ He made a sound in his throat to suggest massive forward propulsion.

  How wonderful, Kit thought, as she slid off her stool, to ride with Orson, of all people, through vast American nowhere-land, for a thousand thousand miles, at a million miles an hour, with nothing to look at and the—before she, too, corrected herself. ‘Orson,’ she said, doing up her coat buttons, and remembering the genial Midwestern course director who had interviewed her, the pleasantries, the euphemisms, ‘Orson, please tell me it’s not the case that I’m being, as it were, paid to give you a good grade?’ She realised her little coffee cup still had dregs in it, and finished the rest standing.

  Orson seized his head histrionically. ‘That is seriously the most fucked-up thing I ever got asked by a professor,’ he said. He held this posture, then smiled at her.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. She placed her cup back down in its saucer. ‘Fine. No problem. Bye, Orson,’ she said. But he hadn’t quite finished with her, even now.

  Once, finally, the tutorial was done and dusted, or was partially done and not really dusted, but was at least over, Kit slipped back out of the café—the mist gone, burnt off by pale sunshine—and cros
sed the High Street and hurried to the Bodleian, temporarily losing a century or two, or three, as she hit cobble stones, and slowed to admire the gleaming light on the ancient walls around her. She had noticed this before: that the pleasure she took in Orson became painful whenever she held it in mind that her pupil would soon be lost to her, out in the wide, wide world.

  Kit laboured in the library for many hours, possessed by her subject, and didn’t leave again until the early evening, punch-drunk, unpleasantly unfed, her right eye splitting the images it received so that everything was a touch blurry—an unusual exit for her in that she walked down the stairs.

  As she hit the outside air, though, she felt a wash of pleasure. It was windless, cooling and exceptionally clear. If only she could call Joe, she thought, the sole person who knew something of what she was up to—whose number she, however, didn’t have, though he was supposed to be coming round anyway, God, what time was it? She stumbled along, bought a flapjack from a sandwich joint and consumed it as fuel, wondering whether she should catch a bus for two stops to get herself home the faster. A yogurt-topped flapjack, what did that mean? Bleached corn fat beaten up with sugar?

  Many witnesses, Kit noticed, had testified to Eliza being beautiful. She had been known around Waterloo as ‘The Countess’, twenty-eight when she was killed, a grown-up in Kit’s way of looking at things. Perhaps Eliza, too, had been a quality-goods blonde; one of those—Kit flung the flapjack wrapper into a bin—quality-goods-blonde style blondes. The yogurt stuff left a chemical taste in the mouth. Kit’s insides hurt.

  When, a couple of times that week, she had passed by the end of Joe’s street, she had been unable to resist casting a look at the bend in the road beyond which his house lay, fearful that she might see some glamorous, platinum-haired girl shimmying forth; not that that would have told Kit anything. All she had really learned from doing this was that Joe had infiltrated disorder into her already unruly mind. He had provoked tedious thoughts, like, who was this blonde Dean Purcell had spoken about, and when was she; not to mention, was she, somehow, still?

  Kit hurried along, willing herself to stop it. Think about your work, she said to herself, think about that. But, released from bondage in the Bodleian, her research seemed to have left her bursting with a sense of her own insignificance. There were herons on the wing these days, late butterflies, still-ripe blackberries in domestic parcels of wasteland. The goodly folk of North Oxford were beginning to leave buckets of spare apples out on the pavements, with damp help-yourself notes sticking to the fruit. What mattered so much to Kit was of no importance to the world. Who cared? Nobody cared. Why should they?

  She turned through the gateposts of her house, hoping against hope that Michaela wouldn’t be in. The one morning Kit had got up before 8:00, in fact at 7:15—the only morning in weeks that she’d got up at 7:15—Michaela had got up then too. And once again Kit had succeeded in pissing her off, by failing to recycle a yogurt-pot lid correctly.

  ‘If everyone did their bit—’ Michaela had said angrily. ‘It’s the same principle as taxation, without which, n.b., you wouldn’t even have a university place to pursue your crappy little studies.’

  ‘Please,’ Kit had said, ‘isn’t it a bit early for you to do this to me?’

  ‘It’s a bit late in the history of human civilisation for me not to,’ was the wilting reply. ‘You know,’ said Michaela, ‘I reckon one of the things about what’s happening now is that people are getting a more peasanty mindset about manufactured goods, you know? In the past, people who were close to the land, which was most of them, would know how to butcher and use every last morsel of a pig, for example, entrails, bladder, liver—’

  ‘Teeth?’ said Kit, looking glumly at her toast.

  ‘Plus the manure, and then crop rotation. And now, in a similar way, in a way, people are beginning to get plugged in to exactly what elements make up a product, and its packaging, where it all comes from, and what’s the consequence of disposing of the constituent parts in one way or another: plastics, batteries, polystyrene, foil. What I mean is, like peasants in the past, we’re beginning to pay heed to how we can dispose of every component of what we buy as scrupulously as possible, how we can use it for other things. And why?’ she asked triumphantly. ‘To stop the sky falling in on our heads.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kit mumbled, ‘that’s an interesting way of approaching it.’

  ‘You’re so lame,’ said Michaela.

  Once in her room, not long back home, and the whole house inspiringly quiet, the top-floor bell rang. Kit rushed back down the stairs and trembled as she opened the front door, yes!—took a deep breath, felt winded. She quite wanted to hug Joe, but also quite felt like ending it, ending it, so that he didn’t any longer cloud her mind with—what had Orson said?—didn’t fuck up her precious brain space, her quality-goods mental processes, not that—whatever.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Hi. How’s it going?’

  She shrugged, and felt inexplicably deflated as he leant against the porch wall. Even though, on the occasions when they kissed, she would impulsively observe to herself that this implied an intimacy she certainly didn’t feel, she would still have liked to be kissed.

  Joe frowned. Kit’s mind leapt ahead: Friday night. ‘How’s Humpty?’ she asked.

  He put his hands in his pockets. ‘Please don’t feel you always have to ask me that,’ he said, though he then added, with effort, ‘Actually, Humpty’s in Milan. Sorry. Not an unreasonable question.’

  Milan? Had she heard right? What, a football game or something?

  ‘No, no,’ she said, catching up with herself, ‘sorry. It’s me. I’m a bit out of it. Sorry. I had to teach Orson incredibly early this morning because he had a cold yesterday, or anyway he felt rubbish, and I’ve been working non-stop all day ever since and I’m—I haven’t had a chance to eat lunch yet, and it’s getting to be more like supper now and—oh, that’s amazing, look, it’s beginning to get misty again. That was quick. It was clear just now. Did you see the mist this morning?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. There was a withdrawn sense about Joe that bore no relation to what he was saying. ‘Yes, I cycled down the canal path this morning, and it wasn’t only that mist was hanging over the trees, but the whole canal itself was steaming. It was beautiful—trees bulking out of nowhere, and these forlorn-looking ducks coming in and out of view.’

  ‘Clocks go back next week,’ said Kit.

  ‘Yes, so they do.’

  There was a pause, during which she couldn’t think of anything further to say.

  In the end it was Joe who filled the gap. ‘How was the tutorial? All right?’

  ‘Oh, fine. Step in,’ she said, ‘it’s chilly. Yes, I love Orson. I often have no idea what he’s on about, but every time we meet, he makes me laugh.’ She shut the front door, but they then stayed in the hall. ‘Today he actually asked me to a party. I was saying, you know, “Goodbye”, when, out of the blue, he asked me to this party.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t let me stop you if you want to go,’ said Joe.

  ‘He’s, I mean, five foot four,’ she said. ‘Five foot four, Joe. To me, the world is made up of men, women and men-who-are-too-short. And, five foot four, Orson’s—I mean, let alone any other consideration in the world, of which there happen to be numerous—’

  ‘You could spit on his head,’ said Joe.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Kit, aware she had just answered a question she hadn’t really been asked. She felt silly. She was silly, foolish.

  Joe looked perhaps mildly entertained for a moment, then said, ‘Right.’

  Right?

  ‘You’re as pale as anything,’ he said. ‘If you try and dance in your present state, I should think you’ll probably faint within five minutes, so I’m going to take you out to dinner instead.’

  Now Kit did hug him. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she said
.

  Before he could get his hands adequately out of his pockets, she had let go again. ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Let’s wander into town, try and find somewhere decent, yes?’

  ‘I’ll just zip upstairs a minute and get my bag. You can come, but I’m just going to zip up and zip right down again.’

  ‘You zip,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she shouted as she ran up the stairs.

  Dinner out—could he even remotely guess what this meant to her, old-fashioned, no nonsense, take-you-out-to-dinner? As she went into her room she hopped two steps, thinking, this can’t be me.

  But it was.

  ‘Can we just agree right now that we’ll meet at the dance hall next week, so we know what we’re doing?’ said Joe, as they strode along. ‘That is, if you want to. Make it a definite plan? I mention it because I’d have to go straight there if we do, because I’ve got a department thing beforehand. Is that okay?’

  ‘Yes, fine,’ said Kit. ‘Which way round are you going to want to do it?—so I know what I’m in for.’

  ‘Don’t worry, that was a one-off,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to make you black out again. I was curious once, that’s all.’

  ‘But didn’t you like it?’

  ‘Don’t tempt me.’

  At this, she thought maybe she should; but she didn’t.

  ‘Do you want to give me your mobile number, in case?’ she said.