Black Chalk

by Yates, Christopher J.

  Jolyon pointed excitedly. ‘You mean Havisham,’ he said. ‘Chad and I always call her Havisham. Big Dave – you know the Scottish guy with all the hair – he asked her out for a drink and she turned up at the Churchill in a wedding dress. He said he’s going to need years of intensive therapy before he can even ask another woman so much as her name.’ Jolyon picked up his list and his pen.

  ‘Jack, why do you call her Dee?’ said Chad.

  Jack put down the book on which his joint-rolling assembly line was arranged. ‘She’s into writing poetry,’ he began. ‘I mean, I know half the people here think they’re poets. But Dee’s different. Dee Addison’s on a mission. She says that when she’s written five hundred poems – you’re going to love this – as soon as she inks the final line of the five hundredth verse,’ his legs bounced excitedly, ‘she’s going to kill herself.’

  Mark blew the smoke out of him as fast as he could. ‘Shit! No way,’ he said. ‘Mind you, if you ever catch me writing five hundred poems, you have my permission to shoot me.’

  Emilia sighed. ‘That’s just not true,’ she said. ‘God, you can all be so tiresome.’

  ‘It’s absolutely one hundred per cent true,’ said Jack, slapping his thighs as he spoke. ‘Rory told us and he’s her Beowulf tutorial partner. He went to her room to go over some notes and she was working on one of her poems. So he asked her what she was doing.’

  ‘Why should we believe Rory?’ said Jolyon.

  ‘Look, no one could make all this stuff up,’ said Jack. ‘There’s a whole lot more.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘She uses red ink and she has this big book with special parchment pages. Also she numbers each poem with large Roman numerals before the title. And that’s why Rory calls her Dee. You know, Roman numeral for five hundred. And maybe she chose five hundred as her suicide target precisely because it’s a D, right? D for death. I’m telling you, she’s a proper fruitcake.’

  Jolyon wrote Dee/Havisham on his piece of paper. ‘And what number do we think she’s up to now?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know for sure. But Rory said there were at least a couple of Cs at the beginning, maybe three. Who knows how fast she churns this crap out. But wouldn’t it be great to have another suicide in college?’

  Emilia struck too quickly for Jack this time. Her boot sole caught him at the same point of his shin as earlier in the night and twice as hard. ‘That’s a really horrible thing to say, Jack.’ She wound up her body to slap him but Jack scooted away with his good leg. ‘How can you even think such a thing let alone say it out loud?’

  Jack grabbed his leg, lowered his sock and pointed to his shin. The red bud of his bruise would bloom purple tomorrow. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Look what you did to me.’

  ‘What do you mean, another suicide?’ said Mark.

  ‘Five years ago?’ said Jack. Mark shrugged. ‘Christ, don’t you ever read the newspapers or turn on the television, Mark, you ignoramus?’

  Mark flinched. ‘Sorry, guess I was too busy trying to understand the hidden nature of the entire universe,’ he said.

  ‘Well, excuse me, Dilbert Einstein,’ said Jack. ‘I mean, it was only the biggest news story for a month. Oxford student kills herself after bad mark. Do elite universities push too hard? Did drugs play a role in death of attractive brainbox Christina Balfour? No? She was studying Classics, failed her Mods, couldn’t handle the pressure and jumped.’ Mark shrugged and returned to his joint. ‘I’m just saying,’ Jack continued, ‘we get friendly with some wrist-slitting type, and if we can just keep them alive until a week before Finals, I bet we’d all get granted sympathy firsts.’

  Emilia jumped to her feet.

  ‘Emilia, Emilia,’ said Jolyon, ‘come on. We all know Jack is a terrible, terrible human being. But if you use physical violence against him, you’re only giving him the attention he craves. And there’s also a very real danger that he might one day mistake attention for affection.’ Emilia sat back down. She crossed her arms and made a face as if she had tasted something sour. ‘Now then, Em,’ said Jolyon, ‘you live next door to Dee so maybe you know more about her than whether she likes to wear wedding dresses. Now this is important. Are her parents rich?’

  ‘No,’ said Emilia. ‘Or if they are, or were, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea. Her mum died when she was three or something and God only knows who her dad was. She was taken into care. And then as a teenager she went through a series of foster-parents but they could never handle her for more than a year. So you bloody well deserved that kick Jack effin Thomson.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Jack, ‘So she’s Little Orphan Annie then. I’m truly and genuinely sorry, I didn’t know.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Jolyon. ‘I think we might have our sixth player.’ He waved his piece of paper like a flag, lowered it onto his thigh and underlined Dee/Havisham. And then he underlined it again.

  XIX(i) The air feels fresh and my mind temperate today. Reading back through my words reminds me of several incidents from the past few days. Although I will admit to a few black holes, some lines I do not wholly recall writing. I discover a note to myself and immediately institute its suggestion. I place a matchstick in a coffee cup and the coffee cup on my morning plate. Yes, breakfast al fresco.

  Which also prompts me to think –

  Note to self: Remember to place your shoes on the bed. And when you come across them at night, find for them a place in the daily routine, beneath the second plate perhaps. Post-lunchtime walks every day would do you a power of good. Routine is vital.

  XIX(ii) I remember that the outside world is my medicine now and so after my lunchtime routine I pull on my shoes and stand near my front door, by my apartment’s rear window. While taking some deep breaths I look out through the glass, gazing at the rear windows of other apartments. I see a man who waves his TV remote like a magic wand, a woman forking out food for her fat ginger tom. Lower down I see dark yards, metal ducts, chain-link fences.

  But then something more interesting catches my eye, a rooftop standing directly across from my own and fringed with a white picket fence. A roof garden with large blue-glazed tubs holding sapling trees, terracotta troughs full of flowers, tables and chairs. It reminds me of Blair, our own building’s roof garden on the Upper East Side. Sipping rosé on cool evenings with neighbours, a life littered with surface pleasures. Everything I have lost.

  XIX(iii) Down on the street I turn left and soon reach the shade of the park. I sit on a bench near the entrance, across from the stone chess tables clustered at the park’s corner like mushrooms in a forest glade. There are only two chess games in progress but the seats at the other tables are full. I feel the old itch as I look at the games in progress. I get up and make my way along paths that curl and sweep around the park. I pass the dog run, lively with little dogs pedalling and scrabbling. Larger ones hooping its dusty length.

  Despite my itchiness this has been a good start. Perhaps this was all I ever should have looked for from life, the pleasure of watching the world turn.

  Leaving Pitt after less than a year, and never earning a degree, my dream of becoming a barrister was shattered. My snowballing nerves would not have made for a good courtroom orator in any case. So that was that. My life’s ambition – crusader for justice, defender of the innocent – destroyed.

  After my premature departure from university, I spent almost a year standing mournfully by a conveyor belt in a factory, returning each night to my small bedroom in my mother’s house. And then out of the blue there came a surprise, a helping hand from the warden of Pitt. I moved to London to work for a legal newspaper, my first job in the world of journalism. I could write well enough and so it seemed I had finally found something at which I might excel. The theory was good but in practice the scheme proved unsound. I was a mediocre journalist. The timid creature I had become struggled to ask the pertinent questions. I wrote fine words about nothing. In every interview I felt wary of causing offence, I became someone wh
o wished not to pry. People would tell me things when I was young, I had an interested nature, I looked out at the world with an appealing thirst. But I started to become a very different person in my twenties. Someone who looked only within and found shadows. The world clammed up.

  I lived a solitary life outside of work. But eventually the skin of my guilt and grief began to split. I nudged out tentatively into the world. I even made a few friends. And then I met Blair, beautiful Blair, who thought she could fix me, who actually wanted to fix me. There is something that has always drawn me to Americans abroad. She was a Bostonian in London studying at the LSE for a year. The time limit made rapid action a necessity and I proposed to Blair before her course ended. We married in Fulham. We were happy, we were in love. But already back then I was thinking ahead to my thirty-fourth birthday. And escaping abroad made a good deal of sense for several reasons.

  So we moved here to the States where I received my second leg-up in journalism, Blair’s father pulling some strings at a newspaper. But of course I remained twitchy and timid. I was quickly pushed into rewrites, cut-and-paste jobs or sprucing up the words of bolder journalists at the paper, those with some people skills, some get-up-and-go.

  And all the while Blair tried to fix me. Tried and failed. But in reality the failure was all mine. Next came the divorce and Papa Blair rushed back to his strings. This time he did more than pull, he tugged and tugged with all his might. The newspaper fired me within days.

  And so, you see, the Game has taken everything from me. My education, the career I craved, the career I had, my wife, my happiness . . .

  And now if I want any contentment in life, there is only one thing to do. The only way out is to win. Death aside, I can see no other way out of this trap.

  But before I return to my training, I must place in front of you a question. Because there are two opposites to consider and before my story is told you must judge me.

  What am I? Murderer? Or innocent?

  XX She wore black. Jack looked disappointed. Although the dress did at least have some lace and frills. He leaned over to light her cigarette and asked her, ‘So what happened to the wedding dress, Cassie?’

  Cassie looked at him blankly. ‘This is the wedding dress,’ she said. She drew on the turquoise cigarette that had come from a tin of cigarettes in various bright pastel shades. ‘But I had to dye it black.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Jack. ‘Why’s that?’

  Chad was sitting beside Jolyon on Jolyon’s bed. He looked at the black dress again and now he could just about see it had once been a wedding dress. Then he looked at her hair. It matched the dress, black and sleek as vinyl records. Last time he saw her, her hair had been brown.

  She blew smoke from the corner of her mouth. ‘Well, I dyed the dress black because I’m no longer a virgin, Jack.’ Cassie batted her eyelids sarcastically. ‘So white isn’t appropriate any more.’

  Jack swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple jumping in his neck.

  ‘You should see the look on your face, Jack,’ said Cassie. And then she turned to Emilia. ‘He’s much prettier when he’s embarrassed, don’t you agree?’

  Emilia shrugged, enjoying the spectacle.

  ‘I’m not embarrassed,’ said Jack. He leaned back in his chair. ‘So going back to your loss of cherry. What form did it take? Girl on top? Oral pleasure? Or a nice spot of anal perhaps?’

  Cassie looked mischievous, she had a sly beauty about her. ‘With less than half a boat crew, one can enjoy all three options simultaneously,’ she said.

  Jack laughed hard. ‘OK, OK, you win,’ he said, smiling at Cassie as if he was looking forward to many more battles to come.

  Cassie rested her hand against her stomach and gave a bow, the gesture little more than an exaggerated nod. ‘Don’t worry, Jack,’ she said. ‘I’m not really into boaties. And I haven’t been a virgin for some time. I dyed the dress black because I felt like dyeing the dress black.’ She dragged on her cigarette and blew the smoke out in a thin stream. ‘Why do you do the things you do, Jack? Like asking rude questions under the guise of being supposedly funny?’

  ‘Because essentially I’m a cunt,’ said Jack. ‘Which is, to be fair to me, partly genetic. I come from a long line of utter cunts. And I suppose I have to admit, a little sheepishly, that I really quite enjoy being a cunt. Also it’s the fault of my upbringing. Hippy bullshit parents, the sort who turn all conservative once they near forty. Whereupon they decide to dissolve the commune. All four of them.’

  ‘You were brought up by four parents in a commune?’ Cassie looked doubtful.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Jack. ‘Now bear in mind that with four parents there exist mathematically six possible coupling combinations. And I know for a fact that five of those combinations took place. It’s complicated but if you ever want me to draw you a diagram . . .’

  ‘Everyone fucked everyone,’ Mark called out from the floor. ‘He likes to make the ins and outs sound more complicated than they were, he thinks it sounds more exotic. But essentially what Jack’s saying is everyone fucked everyone in every way possible, apart from his two dads. And if you get him drunk enough, he’ll admit he even has his suspicions about that.’ Mark tilted his drink to his mouth. ‘And this is how one ends up with the emotional wrecking ball we all know and love as Jack Thomson, no P in Thomson.’

  ‘Parents are too easy to blame,’ said Cassie. ‘And four parents might be called modest by some standards.’ The room fell silent as Cassie, looking down, turned the tip of her cigarette slowly against the edge of the ashtray. Its ash now in a neat cone, she resumed smoking again.

  Chad felt bad for Cassie but also a little jealous. He had fantasised often about being an orphan, adopted as a baby. Not the pig farmer’s son but the secret child of an intellectual, a philandering writer, or a scientist who had died in an experiment gone wrong. It wasn’t unknown riches that had been concealed from him in Chad’s fantasies. He just wanted an explanation for why he was so different from his own family. At the very least he dreamed that one day his mother might tell him she had had an affair, the pig farmer wasn’t really his father, their obvious physical resemblance was nothing but wild coincidence. Anything but that man’s son.

  Everyone else in the room was the product of divorced parents and Chad felt envious even of this. The exoticism of their broken homes, their splintered pasts. They had reasons to be interesting while he had excuses to be dull.

  And then Cassie lifted her eyes, a cunning look spreading over her face. ‘They say if you blow smoke in a man’s face it means you fancy him,’ she said. She sucked on the turquoise cigarette and sent its smoke in a line of quick quivering rings toward Jack’s face. ‘Do you think that’s true, Jackie-oh?’ she said.

  Jack affected a cough and waved his hand to break up the smoke. ‘Then if you shit in his hair it must be true love,’ he said. ‘So anyway, how’s the latest grand opus of Pitt’s most bohemian poetess coming along?’

  ‘Like pistons,’ said Cassie. ‘Fast as wild rutting stallions.’

  ‘And how many little verses are you up to now?’

  ‘Who’s counting?’

  Jack now played his startled look. ‘Well, you are apparently, Cassie. Or so I’ve been reliably informed. Unless you’ve been telling lies to make yourself sound more interesting?’

  Cassie wrinkled her nose, a thin nose and freckled. ‘I’m not interested in interesting,’ she said.

  ‘So is it true,’ said Jack, ‘that when you’ve written five hundred poems, you’re going to kill yourself?’

  ‘If I said yes, would it give you a big old hard-on?’

  ‘I’m just trying to separate the truth from the student bullshit. There’s so much of it round here you have to watch where you step. But then you are studying English Lit, so it pretty much goes with the territory.’ Jack waited to be challenged on this point but no challenge was issued. ‘So about this suicide pact with the Muses . . .’

  ‘Just go right ahead
and erect yourself, Jackie-oh,’ said Cassie. She tried to sound indifferent but there was a trace of defeat in her voice.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes then. And taking the Roman numerals into consideration, we came up a special nickname for you. We’re going to call you Dee. Dee for five hundred, Dee for death.’

  Chad shrank inside. He didn’t want this girl to think he had been part of a group talking in secret about her, discussing rumours, concocting names.

  ‘I love it,’ said Dee, clapping. ‘Yes, Dee it is, you have my absolute approval. And meanwhile I’m going to call you Jackie-oh, Jackie-oh. Like Jackie Onassis. You’ve got her far-apart eyes and also that whiff of bringing tragedy to all those round you. And when I get back to my room I’m going to write a poem all about you, Jackie-oh, my first ever limerick.’

  Jack stared at the ceiling. ‘Nothing rhymes with Jackie-oh,’ he said.

  ‘Ralph Macchio,’ Mark called out from the floor. ‘The kid from Karate Kid.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Dee. She twisted her fingers creatively in front of her. ‘The first line would read something like . . . A boy who was surly and blunt.’

  Jolyon rapped his knuckles on his bedside table. ‘Well, I for one could listen to this all night long. And I know Jack could keep going possibly forever. But right now we need to talk about the Game,’ he said.

  XXI Early on in my morning routine I find a cup on my breakfast plate and a matchstick inside the cup. It takes me a few minutes but then I decipher the new mnemonic.

  Cup: tea. Matchstick: fire: fire escape!

  And so in the morning I eat breakfast perched on the giddying slats of my fire escape. I feel like a tourist enjoying a fine vacation breakfast, a rare meal eaten with a warm sigh and unhurried eagerness for the day.

  My neighbour across the street is also breakfasting on his fire escape. He has a sunlounger in which he sits, sockless, filling in the crossword and dabbing his finger to pick up the crumbs of his croissant. And then it comes back to me – this was part of my routine three years ago, before I shut my curtains and blinds. We used to acknowledge each other whenever we were outside at the same time. He notices me looking across and tilts his head as if pleasantly surprised to see me. And then he raises his cup.