by Ben Masters
Jack has wandered off, probably rucking his way toward the bar, and the girls are ranting about some bitch in the year below, which I really can’t be bothered with. My pint is almost nonexistent so I may as well follow.
“I think I’m gonna get another. Anyone?”
“I’m good, ta.”
“No, cheers.”
I’m up and off.
I need to stop delaying. Either confront Ella or ring Lucy and find out what the matter is …
And how about these dreams I’ve been having? I’m not even sure if they are dreams … hallucinations or visions might be nearer the mark. They’ve been with me for a while now. For example: I’m sitting in a café. A jet-black Americano, dark as the day I was born, steams its little heart out beneath my nose. An odd bustle, mindful of being hush, murmurs and meanders. I’m surrounded by academics with their squints and their dandruff, their Biros and ring binders.
I’m sitting in a café on Broad Street, opposite the Sheldonian Theater and its comic grotesqueries; those gurning statues of Monty Python stock. A chap to my left, like a monk in a suit, talks of the South African constitution; a ruddy old Irishman in the middle of the room raves at his seen-it-all-before interlocutor about terrorism and the Church; a bohemian tutor conducts a tutorial with two undergraduates on economics in the eighteenth-century sentimental novel. I take my place in this brain boggle with my Essays of Elia and thirteen-part Prelude.
I’m in a café, in a bookshop, the university’s unofficial library and staff room. It smells of aspiration and intrigue. It sounds of niche interest and internal gossip. I’ve got my laptop out in front of me, whinnying and whirring, drafting yet another job application, trying to sound like I possess direction, trying not to sound like an arrogant prick. The flakes of a pain au raisin get about the keys and granules of brown sugar are embedded into my forearm. My stomach begins to hurt and I find myself doubling up.
“Alright mate.” I look around but can’t locate the voice. “Down here,” it says. A pram has appeared to my left. “That’s right … in here.” I peer inside to find a baby grinning up at me. I try to scream but I’ve got nothing. Its body is the size of an eighteen-month-old perhaps, but its head is preposterously adult-sized. I look harder, almost falling off the edge of my chair: it has my face on it.
SMASH.
I jump at the unexpected sound of a slamming door: “Ian, stop being so gray,” says the lady over from me to the ranting Irishman. “You could win an Oscar for such a wild performance!”
I stare incredulously at the mini portrait of myself, wrapped up in its abandoned pram. I can’t see his body, hidden behind a soft white blanket, but I can make out the hump of his exaggerated baby’s paunch.
“Do you mind? I’m a bit embarrassed about the old beer belly. That’s what three years of your hard drinking has done to me, I tell myself, but I still don’t like it.” The baby reaches behind his head and pulls out a can of lager, whacks it open, and takes a thirsty glug. “What can I say?” Its voice is a perfect imitation of mine. “Helps us sleep though, doesn’t it?” His large head, transposed onto that toddler body, impractically fills the pram. Facially he’s identical, though his hair seems a little thinner than mine and I can make out some specks of premature gray. “What now? Is it the hair? Well, you have put us through a lot. The question is: do you think you’ve been provident in peril?”
“I guess we’re going to find out, aren’t we?”
The babe lets out a small burp. From the mouths of. “Excuse us. Well, let’s just hope for some success, eh?”
I don’t know what to say.
“Are you thinking about Lucy again?”
Startled surprised by the noise of the sound of her name coming from the tiny little thing, I hit and knock the scalding hot Americano all over me, myself, and I, but feel no hurt pain. Curiouser and curiouser.
“Careful!” shouts the babe, steam effervescing from his ears and nostrils in cartoon frenzy. “That hurts like hell!”
“Shit, I’m so sorry. I didn’t get any on you, did I?”
The babe ignores my question, too busy writhing about. And then he takes another swig.
“You make me feel like a sinner,” I find myself crying. “Is all of this justified?”
The babe simply stares.
“Why are you hogging my attention so?”
The babe looks at me, deadpan, knowing eyes. “Dreams, innit.”
I start to panic; the entire café has gone silent and is watching. Nervously I begin packing my things away and without acknowledging the babe I wander off into the shop, searching for escape. The customers switch back on and continue with their routines. I avoid looking behind as I flank the enormous rows of bookshelves, narrowing and leaning down on me like a bizarre Fritz Lang set. I can hear a squeaking noise creeping up.
I turn to find the pram wheeling itself in pursuit. No one accompanies it: it’s chasing me like some crazed M/F, driven by invisible forces. My heart is thumping and I long to wake up.
“It’s a strange case, I know, but you can’t hide from me, Mr.,” says the babe, panting from all the exertion. “Anyway, why do you pun so much in your sleep? It’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?”
“I’m not punning—you are!”
“Exactly. I think you’ve read far too much, mate. It’s hurting my eyes.” The babe is squinting, struggling to keep me in focus. “I suppose you think this is all a bit of a riddle though, don’t you?”
I find myself amassing the bibliography of my subconscious, frantically rushing between shelves and floors, not thinking about the selections: Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Martin Amis, Lewis Carroll, James Hogg, Anthony Burgess, Robert Louis Stevenson. Obvious when you think about it.
“Do you think they’re going to help?”
“I don’t know. I need answers from somewhere though.”
“Good luck with that.”
There’s Jack—queuing, as I thought. He’s seen me and is making room amongst the crowd.
“Ah mate.”
We’ve already been served. Jack knows when to make the call. Wise. Experienced. It never takes long to refuel, what with Jack’s pub/club know-how: he’s from Manchester.
“Ella looks well fit tonight,” he says. It must hurt him to acknowledge this, given the history, and it hurts me too, though he wouldn’t know anything about that—yet. Hearing him come out with stuff like this makes my night’s task even more difficult. Can it end in any way other than disaster for the two of us? I’m struggling to draft an alternative in this hurriedly planned script.
“Huh?”
“I’m messing! But seriously though …” We exchange rueful grins.
When I first met Jack, at the very beginning of our Freshers Week, I thought I had found myself. Not in a spiritual or metaphysical sense. Nah. As in I had found someone exactly like me. My principal criterion when electing new friends was music taste, and Jack caught my attention in the JCR at a welcome talk, that first afternoon, when he muttered “tune” to an old Smiths song that came on the radio (was it “This Charming Man”? No, let’s go for “The Boy with a Thorn in His Side”). I immediately checked him over (vintage denim jacket, black skinny jeans, self-consciously cool hair) and made my move. “You a fan?”
“Fookin love um. From Manchester innit.”
“Oh right, cool.”
“Whereabouts you from?”
“Wellingborough?”
“State school?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Of course. Could tell from your accent.”
“Cheers.”
“No worries.” We shared a look of mutual attraction. “What are you studying?” Jack asked.
“English?”
“Nice. You any good?”
“Urrrr … well, I like got an A I guess.”
“I can’t even write, me. Nah, we didn’t have any pens at my school.”
“Oh yeah? That’s nothing. My school didn’t have a roof.”
“Really? At my school we played football with a first-year’s bladder … used a different one every break.”
“We played catch with bricks.”
“Hence no buildings?”
“Exactly.”
We paused for a second, each searching for extra material but finding none.
“Eliot,” I said, extending my hand to him.
“Jack,” he said, giving it a solid shake. “Nice one.”
Perhaps it’s a shame that I have so readily sought out characters similar to myself. But there are two clear options available to the sniveling statie at an institution like Oxford: locate your compatriots and stick together with a resentful, snotty leer, or do that cringing dance we like to call “The Upward Mobility.” I should know by now that things are far more complicated and nuanced than I allow—go for the particular over the general. But it’s difficult. I’m still uncertain about how I even ended up in a place like this.
Maybe it’s time for some of that Copperfield bullshit: It was my primary-school teacher, via my proud, puffed parents, who first put the grand idea of Oxford into my head. They returned home from the annual parents’ evening at my school, up the lane, all suited-and-tied and whatever it is mums wear to these occasions. I was waiting with the eager need-to-know of a boy accustomed to doing well.
“So, what did she say?”
Dad smiled as he filled the flaky kettle, Mum looking on all goopy and warm.
“Mrs. Parker thinks you’re the kind of kid who could end up at Oxford or Cambridge,” he relayed, with a quick glance to gauge my reaction. This extraordinarily premature news registered with little-to-no referential meaning, yet I could tell it was a fucking good thing.
“Ah,” I proffered in schoolboy wonder. The seed was planted.
We took a fidgety Saturday trip to Oxford not long after, with all the conventional stuffiness and aches of a family day out. You remember the ones: stately homes and landscape gardens; museums and galleries … all those hellholes that were anathema to your sucked thumb and anti-attention span; to your childhood mess and E-number erraticism.
I remember seeing the Radcliffe Camera for the first time, the photogenic library that is the city’s centerpiece, poised in middle of cobbled square like bulbous tit and nipple, suckling the dreamy sky. Beleaguered, I had followed Dad around Christ Church College and its capacious dining hall, tripping up over my shoelaces and tonguing the River Thames that oozed from my nostrils. Five centuries of roast dinner blended with fumes of polish and Dettol.
“One day, one day,” Dad kept muttering, with a knowing nod of his head.
Gloomy blokes with comic beards and wooden titles stared down from the oak-paneled walls. I was bored out of my tree. While Dad divulged titbits of some illustrious history from the tourist pamphlet, I staged an imaginary war-to-end-all-wars between my G.I. Joe and a coalition of Boglins, WCW wrestlers, and Transformers, raging amidst the silverware and beneath the long tables, the anthem of my charmed youth. Soldiers fought for their lives in mires of English mustard while associative baddies abseiled down John Locke’s portrait, making mayhem all over high table, splashing sherry and bleeding port in front of his wizened mug.
“One day.”
My primary-school teacher’s prophecy infused my plastic noggin. We used to write stories in her class and she seemed to really dig mine, mainly because they didn’t end “And then I woke up. It was all a dream.” She suggested books—Cider with Rosie, My Family and Other Animals—getting me hooked and dependent, frothing angrily at the mouth for my next fix. She told me to read To Kill a Mockingbird, but should wait a few years first, cautioning me that its adult themes might be a bit much. Naturally I went straight to the library and ragged it in two days, searching for glorious gang bangs and female things I couldn’t get my mitts on just yet. It was hardly Naked Lunch.
Then Mum and Dad began to worry about the big “what next?” They couldn’t afford to send me to private school but gave me the option all the same. Fat chance of that: all my mates were going to the local comprehensive and that was where I was going too. They needn’t have worried. I wasn’t going to get lost along the way. My destiny had been decreed.
I spent my seven years of secondary school hanging out by vending machines, rustling Monster Munch, gobbling Tootie Fruities, scouting for girls, and playing concrete football. While the kids at the pricey boys’ school in town were building jet planes and learning first aid on top of Mount Snowdon, I was contorting myself into impossible positions to cop a feel of Emily Morris’s boobs in Media Studies as she leaned forward, obligingly, so that I could learn the alien dimensions of her bra beneath the graffiti-scarred desk. Walking across the classroom, I’d shove my hands into the dry-tissue recesses of my pockets to disguise the throbbing bulge of my curiosity. At that age you never know when it might rear its grubby head. You have to be on constant red alert: marching into assembly in front of the entire year; in the sick room desperately pleading with the nurse (“No, I can’t possibly go on”); in the swimming-pool changing rooms … oh god, please not in the changing rooms. Cocked, loaded, and ready to spit; but out of your hands … until you get home (a Ginsters pasty and strawberry milk shake from the garage along the way), approximately 4 p.m.
I enjoyed school. As my personal statement would have it: got stuck in with sports and a bit of music; got high grades; popular with my peers; liked by the teachers. “What a tosser,” many might say. But then my school comprised perennial non-achievers: cigarette-butt-gobbing-unbuttoned-earring-jokesters. My best mate from home, Rob, could be said to belong squarely (or roundly, but what’s the difference?) in this category. We were opposites: I could barely muster three kick-ups; he was the captain of the football team … that kind of thing. I liked Charles Dickens; he liked Pro Evo. I was a virgin; he shagged Janice Nutsford in Year 9. I got A grades; he failed General Studies. Yet we were inseparable, doing laps of the schoolyard at lunch, an established tag-team, talking about girls and planning legendary nights out. During the occasional break times when he’d go off to do mysterious things in the Design and Technology block, working on a project or some extracurricular (I never asked and didn’t listen when he talked about it), I was utterly lost. I missed him. Sure he ribbed me relentlessly about my academic interests (though I did a pretty good job of hiding those, my mates being genuinely shocked when I bagged all the A*s) but I didn’t care. I was off, secretly chasing bigger and better things.
And here I am just a few years on. I take a couple of swills from my pint and wonder how many times all the drink I’ve consumed at uni would fill the King’s Arms.
“Mate, it’s gonna be an emotional one, innit?” I say to Jack. We’re hovering in the middle ground between the bar and our table.
“Less of that! I want to get appalling tonight!” says Jack—his usual boast—carefully stroking his quiff with the butt of his hand.
Sanjay fights his way over. His bushy black monobrow looks like a large caterpillar undulating across his forehead, his expression wavering between a frown and a smile. “Ah man, Megan looks well fit.”
“Oi, less of that,” we cry in unison.
“What? Ah, I guess.”
The atmosphere is both somber and celebratory. The ignorant bliss of university life is coming to an end, but we still have a big one lined up. It’s been a blow-by experience and I can’t quite grasp what (if anything) has changed about me just yet.
“What time is it?” asks Scott, also strolling over, pint in hand.
“Eight thirty,” I say, checking the watch that Lucy gave me for our one-year anniversary. I’d say “eight firty” and elongate the vowels to death if I was with my old schoolmates back in Wellingborough. But I’m not. I’m in Oxford. So I say “eight thirty,” crisp and clean. You should see me at home though. Woooooo, I’m an entirely different proposition: more of a lad; better to know; more fun to be aro
und. I sparkle with earthy witticisms and fizz with mock put-downs and ball-breakers. I share carnal truths with the boys. I walk with a strut (a rhythmic loping sideways bowl). I’m garlicky and rambunctious. I call a spade a fucking spade and don’t take no shit from no one. Ah, the double life of the boy done good; the double life of mind and mouth.
But like I said, besides Ella and Scott (a renegade Etonian who’s crossed over to the dark side), I have tried to surround myself with mirror-image mates. We are Judes who would not be consigned to obscurity. We don’t stand on these benches drunkenly railing the Latin creed at bloated dons and upper-class undergraduates. Nah. We are more likely to chant yob tunes and smack empty pint glasses upside down on our gelled heads. Maybe our attitude to it all is different: everyone goes to university now; you just kind of end up there. (So I guess I should feel extra pride about making it all the way up the ladder to Oxford rather than anywhere else, but I would never shout about it.) It’s one of the defining features of our peculiar epoch, this further-study craze. We expect to go to university, and we’re not even sure why. Generally speaking, intellectual curiosity and aptitude are irrelevant (not at Oxford, mind, but I don’t resent people for going to Oxford, obviously. Why would I? I go there! No, here we just resent all the sex and booze that we assume every other student in the country is enjoying, and strain to replicate them on those rare nights when we don’t have work to do). I know people who practically failed school but still wound up student clones. This is the age of entitlement: it’s our prerogative and ain’t no one gonna take it away from us.
Jack drops a penny in my drink, so I down it, because since time immemorial that’s what you do when someone drops a penny in your drink. I drop the penny in Sanjay’s drink and he downs his. Rules be rules.