by Takis Würger
“Rich twats.”
He reached for another glass.
“And the rest of the uni are on the outside dying to belong. There are only two sorts of people at Cambridge. Half of them are absurdly rich; the other half are trying to seem richer than they are. Sometimes I think I’m the only normal person here,” he said.
I recognized one of the men in the blue blazers from training. He was tall and thin with blond hair and looked a bit like a surfer.
“Who’s the surfer?” I asked.
“The tall guy? Never in a million years would he go surfing.”
I nodded.
“The worst snob I’ve ever met. His name’s Josh.”
“Josh what?”
“Josh fucking Hartley.”
“Not a friend of yours?”
Billy laughed and took a large swig of his drink.
“There’s a story everyone here knows about that retard. One time he was out in London with a couple of friends, from Harrow, I think, having afternoon tea at the Goring.”
“Where?”
“The Goring. Mega-expensive hotel. For fifty-five pounds you get as many scones and cucumber sandwiches as you like. For two hundred pounds you get as much Pol as you like to go with them.”
“Pol?”
“Champagne, Hans. Pol Roger.”
I felt my ears burn. I was the wrong man for this job. Billy bumped my forehead gently with his fist and carried on.
“It’s good business for the Goring, actually, because the Asian tourists can only take half a glass of champagne and the Saudis don’t drink alcohol but order the champagne anyway. Then along comes Hartley. He orders several bottles straight off the bat. The waiter hesitates, so Hartley takes a wad of twenty-pound notes and stuffs them in the breast pocket of his jacket. By the end of the evening the lads have secretly poured a couple of bottles of Pol into a vase of sunflowers. When the waiter brings the bill, Josh walks over to the dessert trolley. There’s this couple sitting there, celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary. Hartley undoes his fly, plonks his dick onto an opera cake with white chocolate icing and says, ‘I’d like to pay now.’”
“Oh,” I said.
Billy didn’t laugh. He shook his head slowly.
“He has a massive dick, apparently.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“No idea. Everyone knows that story.”
“Huh.”
“There’s another one. His father has a Wikipedia entry where it says that he owns a castle and allegedly supports a successor organization of the fucking Blackshirts.”
“Have you Googled him?”
Billy looked as if he were embarrassed by the question. I didn’t know who the Blackshirts were.
The DJ turned the music up, and the bass thumped through the building with such force that dust trickled from the cracks in the paneled ceiling. The door opened and the first women entered the Club. The theme on the invitation had been “God.” Three blonde girls had rolled themselves in gold dust and fastened angel wings to their backs. Another woman was wearing a robe of white, semi-transparent silk and had flowers in her hair. She walked up to me.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello.”
“Do we know each other?” asked Billy.
She ignored him. “How do you like my costume?” said the woman, moving closer.
“Er, it’s nice.”
She tapped her chin with a finger.
“I’m a nymph.” Her pupils were the size of gobstoppers. “Who’s that?” she asked, pointing her thumb at Billy.
“That’s—”
“I’m the opposite of a nymph,” said Billy.
“Are you a member?” she asked me, paying Billy no further attention.
I shook my head.
“What’s that necklace?” she asked.
Her fingers reached for the red gold chain around my neck; it had pushed up from underneath my collar.
“A present,” I said. I regretted not having taken the chain off long ago.
An hour later the Club was so full I had to push people aside if I wanted to move. There were three times as many women as men. An angel and an Indian elephant god grabbed my hands and pulled me onto the dance floor.
The angel said, “The pre-party is usually better than the party, anyway.”
I have never understood dancing. I didn’t know what I was meant to do with my arms, but the dance floor was so full I could simply move with the crowd. A young woman accidentally elbowed me in the temple; another yelled something in my ear. One of them greeted me with a Nazi salute. Someone smelled of fried fish.
At boarding school I’d never gone along at weekends when the other boys took the bus to the disco two villages away. They would say they were going to a club, too, but they’d meant something different from this.
“Great party,” one of the women yelled.
“Yes,” I yelled back.
“The remix. Sick!” the woman shouted.
“Sick!” I shouted.
She took a little bag of pink pills out of her pocket and waved it before my eyes. The pills were stamped with the symbol for infinity.
“Already taken one,” I yelled.
“Don’t I know you from my Feuerbach lecture?” she yelled.
Two men carried a dwarf into the room on their shoulders. I looked into his eyes and saw nothing there. At some point the men started carrying the dwarf across the dance floor on their outstretched arms. Every now and then they dropped him. I saw condensed sweat dripping from the ceiling. One man held a bottle of Absolut to several girls’ lips; they all drank, looking him in the eyes as they did so. The music was too loud. Someone tugged at my sleeve, and I jumped.
“Billy’s getting beaten up,” a young woman yelled.
I followed her into the inner courtyard. A group of men were standing in a circle. In the middle I saw Billy, so drunk he could hardly stand, and a tall, powerfully built man in a light blue blazer. I thought of my father and pushed my way into the circle.
“Get out of the ring, mate,” said the man.
“Hans,” said Billy. His nose was bleeding; the skin above his eye was split.
I raised my fists. The vodka was throbbing in my head. I was glad to be off the dance floor. The man threw a left hook without warning.
Long before that evening, in my first boxing lessons, I’d learned that it’s not the punch that hurts, because skulls are hard; it’s the humiliation. And because I was a small man who no one would expect to beat a hundred-kilo hulk in a light blue blazer, I could only win. You can’t box well if you’re afraid.
All evening I’d been playing a part. I’d behaved as if I thought it was normal for young men to wear light blue blazers and for women to roll themselves in gold dust. Ever since I’d arrived in Cambridge I’d thought every day about this club, and now I was standing in its backyard. I’d thought about what Alex could have meant when she said I had to solve a crime here. She’d cast me in a role to which I wasn’t suited: I was supposed to play some kind of spy and to act brave, but I wasn’t good at pretending to be someone I wasn’t, nor had I had much opportunity so far to test my courage. In fact, I was sure I was a coward. And because this all made me nervous, I was glad when I finally found myself standing in front of a man who wanted to hit me. This was my moment: all the members of the Club were there.
Weeks later someone told me I’d looked as if I was dancing.
I didn’t hit back. I slipped under the man’s arm and put him in a lock. His breath turned my stomach. The man flung me away and dropped his fists.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Hans.”
“If I see your faggot friend here one more time, I’m going to smash his face in. Do you understand?”
Two minutes later the backyard was empty. Billy sank down on one knee and watched the blood from his nose pooling at his feet.
“Please … hospital,” he said.
The nurse
asked for the name of a relative who could be contacted if Billy’s condition got any worse. Without looking up, Billy pointed at me. I gave the nurse my German ID card so she could write down my details. It had my real surname on it. I was probably the worst undercover investigator ever to attempt to solve a crime. I hoped Billy hadn’t seen the name on the card, and promised myself I’d be more careful in future.
A doctor sewed up the cut on Billy’s face. He said his nose wasn’t broken, and that he had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.21.
The dwarf from the Pitt Club limped past the room where Billy was being treated. He glanced at me. His right arm was in a sling.
“They were playing bowls with me by the end,” he said.
He reached into his jacket pocket, took out a crumpled business card and handed it to me.
“In case you ever have another party. There are a lot of fucking dwarves out there.”
He raised his undamaged arm in farewell. I felt ashamed.
I helped Billy to the taxi, rode with him to his college, and sat beside his bed. The doctor had said he was so drunk there was a danger he might suffocate on his own blood. “Thanks,” Billy said, before he fell asleep. He squinted at me through his swollen eyelids and added something I didn’t quite understand. I thought I heard him say the word “truth.”
The sun rose over the crenellated roofs of the college, and I stared into the light. I took my student ID out of my jacket pocket. It had my photo on it, University of Cambridge written across the top, and beside the photo: Hans Stichler, my new name.
Josh
It doesn’t matter what you do if the stories they tell about you are good enough. The Goring story was strong. I suppose I should have felt a bit sorry for the waiter, because we’re supposed to be polite to strangers, too. But you know what—fuck it.
Of course, there are some stories only a few people know, so only a few people can tell them. Often they’re the best.
Another good story is that I would always get someone to give me an infusion to cancel out my hangovers. And of course I would always drink half a liter of coconut water the morning after a party, for the minerals and trace elements, though actually everyone did that at uni unless they were a total retard.
At midday I was staring at the needle in my arm and the tube attached to it. I watched the electrolyte solution entering me drop by drop, imagined it mingling with my blood and absorbing the alcohol. Whenever I was attached to a needle like this, I always felt the urge to jerk my arm really quickly and see if the needle would come out the other side below the elbow.
The previous night, after Paul fucked up the faggot— mate! All that blood!—he suggested we each drink at least one bottle of gin. Boom. Safe idea.
The medical student holding the electrolyte solution over my arm was in love with me and knew she could lose her university place for this. She was all right. She didn’t have to do it; and whenever she asked me something, she really seemed to want to know what I had to say. I was still debating whether or not to shag her. When she looked down on me like that from above she always looked a bit like Sasha Grey.
“When are you going to take me to your castle?” she asked.
“Weather’s not good right now.”
These birds always want to go to the castle.
We haven’t lived at Pengannon Castle for two generations. I grew up in a house on a cliff in Cornwall. It’s painted Farrow & Ball Wimborne White. Sea view, long flight of steps up to the entrance. I’d trained there like a psycho all summer. By the end the veins were standing out on my forearms, pulsing against the skin. I’d come back from vacation weighing seventy-six kilos. Other boxers had got fat; after half an hour’s warm-up some of them were jumping up and down in a puddle of their own sweat.
That summer I went running for an hour along the cliffs every morning. Afterwards I would drink a glass of coconut water and swallow six tablets of wild-harvested AFA algae, the original from Lake Klamath, to maintain an optimum balance of vitamin B12. I would breakfast on a bowl of chia seeds I’d left to soak the previous evening—very healthy because of the Omega-3 fatty acids. Then I would sit by my grandmother’s bed and read her “The Devil’s Sooty Brother.” My grandmother is eighty-eight years old and has dementia, poor thing. Dementia is a bastard disease. I felt sorry for Grandma, I felt sorry for my mother, I even felt sorry for my father; it was so bad that all of us were thinking, Hopefully Grandma will die soon. Well, almost all of us. I don’t think Grandma was thinking that; her brain was too far gone.
Sometimes, when I paused, Grandma would seize my hand and say, “Please, Daddy, just one more story, I’d like to hear ‘The Devil’s Sooty Brother,’ too.” She actually called me Daddy. She just wanted me to read her this one fairy tale over and over again.
I would often cry a bit before lunch (usually steamed salmon with broccoli—something low carb, anyway), but of course I knew it was my duty to read to my Grandma, because interpersonal relationships are the most important thing in life.
After lunch I would go to the gym in the nearest town and punch the sandbag. That summer I mainly worked on my left hook. I wasn’t talented, but I knew that even without talent you could still be a boxer.
I kissed the student who was in love with me on the forehead and gave the warm fabric between her legs a quick stroke, but I still had too much alcohol in my system to get properly horny, so I gave her forty pounds to buy more electrolytes and left it at that. People always get this weird look in their eyes when you give them money; it’s like throwing corn to chickens. Not that I’ve ever done that, of course—the chicken thing—but, you know, theoretically.
Then I went to the gym to flush the gin from my pores. Thought about friendship en route. A few days earlier I’d had to fill out an employee questionnaire for a bank where I was going to do an internship. The questionnaire had a field where you were supposed to write the name of someone to be contacted in case of emergency. I spent a long time thinking about who to put down. I didn’t want to put my father, because I hardly knew him and didn’t feel he deserved it. To put it bluntly, my father was an arsehole. I thought about all the lads I partied and trained with, but I didn’t know whether any of them would describe me as his best friend. Isn’t that what life is all about? Being able to call someone your best friend? A mate. Basically, I was living proof that money, a place at Cambridge, and a big dick don’t make you happy. Fuck.
I’d seen the new German guy jumping rope at the other end of the boxing hall. He’d moved well yesterday evening, and now he was skipping quickly and easily, like a man who knows what he’s doing—not exactly the norm at this retarded university. He was either very hard or very stupid.
I sensed that twinge in my scalp, a slight, pleasant pain spreading upward from the nape of my neck. I often felt it when something good was about to happen. This was one of the stories nobody knew; perhaps that was why it was strong. I’d felt it at the Goring. I’d felt it as a child when my father used to come home and bring me Turkish delight, but he didn’t do that anymore.
Once, when I was a child, I’d found a cat in a dustbin on the street and brought it home. It was a tabby, and it was missing an ear. I know, it sounds wet, but she was lovely and soft. I hid her from my parents, asked our chauffeur if I could hide her in the garage and keep her; I gave her cream to drink, poured milk into my palm; I liked the roughness of her tongue. Once, just for a second, I held that little tongue between my index finger and thumb.
Three weeks later the cat was writhing on her blanket and I thought she was done for, rat poison or something, so I was very surprised when she squeezed out a litter. I watched this very closely. The chauffeur pointed at the kittens and told me I had to get rid of them.
I felt the same twinge that evening in the gym when I saw the German with the skipping rope, and silently hoped: Perhaps I’ve finally found somebody else like me.
Hans
The woman who was supposed to be helping me was sitting on the
stairs outside my room when I came back from training on Saturday, the morning after the party. My vest was saturated with blood.
“What the hell happened to you, laddie?” she asked.
I couldn’t help smiling. Blood always looked worse than it was. She’d even gone a bit pale.
“Your chin,” she said.
“My chin?”
“It’s covered in blood.”
I wiped my face with the palms of my hands and felt the crustiness of dried blood.
“It’s fine. Nothing broken. The other guy was just a bit better than me.”
“I’d like to go to London with you. We need to go shopping,” she said.
“Now?”
“Yes. And you should meet my father. He boxed for the university, too.”
“OK.”
“Do you have a dinner jacket?”
I sat beside her on the train with my dinner jacket in a suit bag on my lap. She took me to an antiques shop she said she used to go to with her father.
“One of these old suitcases was Hemingway’s when he was out hunting lions in Africa,” she said.
“Wow,” I said, and hoped I sounded convincing.
The salesman greeted her with a kiss on the cheek and nodded at me. I noticed him looking at my jeans. On the train the young woman had said it was important I didn’t look like new money.
She chatted to the salesman and walked around the shop as if it belonged to her. I stood in front of a root wood wardrobe, stared at the inlay and hoped this would soon be over. She bought a hard bag of untreated cowhide with a gleaming brown handle.
“For your boxing gear.”
The bag was too small to hold my gloves, boxing shoes, protective cup and headguard, but I could see how pleased she was with the purchase.
“Thanks.”
Afterwards we went to Camden Market and walked round the secondhand stalls. She bought me three pairs of shoes: one dark brown, one cognac-colored with little holes on the toe, and some black evening shoes. I didn’t say much; I wondered when she would finally tell me her name. She took me to a sandwich shop where the sandwiches were like works of art. I ordered a cheese sandwich and the tattooed man behind the counter asked if I wanted Cabrales or Coulommiers. I was embarrassed; yet again I didn’t understand. The strange young woman from Cambridge was standing beside me with the leather bag in her hand.