by Ben Masters
“You been up to much?” he asks, confidentially.
“Just a long phone call with Mike.”
Sanjay takes a sorrowful, longing pull from his pint. It goes down like shards of glass.
“You?”
“Thought about going gym but realized I couldn’t be fucked sort of thing.”
I notice that this mention of the gym prompts Jack to look down at his arms and, as subtly as possible, tense them. Nope—the protein shake still isn’t doing anything.
Megan nods. She probably hasn’t even listened.
“You’ve gone well red, Eliot,” broadcasts Abi.
Great. Thanks for pointing that out to everyone, mouthy bitch.
“Great. Thanks for pointing that out to everyone.”
Ella gives a little giggle, knowing how much this annoys me. She’s seen me red plenty of times.
The poetry of the pub envelops us. We love it. Just look at our little faces—we bloody love it. Take, for instance, the malignant antagonism propping up the bar with his opinion on everything. See how this Voluminous Maximus wrenches his way into any conversation going, jabbering in caps lock:
“YOU FINK THEY CAN WIN A CHAMPIONSHIP WIV A BACK LINE LIKE THAT? YOU’RE ’AVIN A LARFF, ENTCHYA?” he says to his left; “FACKIN STUDENTS, THEY’RE BLOODY EVERYWHERE, SPENDIN ALL MY TAXIS,” he says to his right; “OI OI BILLY, POUR US ANUVVER, MATE—I COULD CANE A BEER, TO BE FAIR,” he says to his front; “YOU ORDERIN A DIET COKE? YOU A GIRL OR SUMFINK?” he says down the bar to the right; “DON’T GET ME WRONG, BOSS, I AIN’T NO HOMOPHOBIC OR NUFFINK. I’M A LIBERAL KINDA FELLA AT THE END OF THE DAY” (snorts and nods self-approvingly, almost tearful) “BUT I FACKIN ’ATE THE GAYS. THEY CAN DO WHAT THEY WANT S’LONG AS THEY DON’T COME NEAR ME,” he says behind him; “TOMATO JUICE? FACKIN TOMATO JUICE? YOU A GIRL OR SUMFINK? HAHAHA, EH BILLY, D’YA ’EAR WHAT I JUST SAYS? I SAYS …” he repeats to the left and to the front. It’s like cider off an alky’s back to us. He’s part of the décor.
We drink with tireless rapidity. It’s a functional thing this early in the night: groundwork. Sipping and gurgling defers communication and thought, until a few rounds down the road when, fingers crossed, it’ll have the opposite effect. Oh, how the tables will turn. Despite the intention of bonding, we are all slightly closed to each other, won’t let each other in, won’t give anything away … for now.
“Ah mate.”
“Yeah, right.”
Have another sip, maybe swill it too.
Ella settles next to me. This makes me feel slightly on edge, the expectations being so high tonight. It’s as though we are sitting on different benches: I hump and slump, almost unfolding off the furniture and onto the floor, while Ella practically levitates, all poise and serenity. Earlier on in our friendship I would have put this down to our different backgrounds, but I’m not such a twat anymore. Ella seemed to arrive at Oxford fully formed—cultured and widely read, crystallized and polished. Her sophistication and grace were like foreign goods I couldn’t get my hands on. (If I could just nick some of what she had. The knowledge this girl is carrying on her … her brain is well fit.) I spent the first few weeks of our relationship trying to measure her degree of poshness: she must have gone to a cushty school, but where were the buckteeth and frizzy hair? Where the downward gaze and raised snotter? Was she defying my expectations? She didn’t appear to recoil when I said things like “mate” or “d’ya know what I mean?,” or if I allowed my clunky Wellingborough accent to ring through. She represented the world that I wanted to move into: the refined world, the intellectual world, the world of high culture. She was everything that home didn’t represent: Wellingborough, my schoolmates, and possibly even Lucy.
In fact, she was so different from Lucy … is so different from Lucy. There’s all the common ground with Ella, which seems so uncommon with everybody else: the books we’ve read, the films and music we like. The daunting intensity that she brings to everything, her vitality, is contagious. Plus, there is potential … potential for the unknown and for enrichment. With Lucy, though, there is the past, which is hard to shift: the vast photo album of the mind which holds all our memories and first times. And her endless kindnesses, her undying optimism, her easygoing attitude. It’s just that we don’t have anything in common.
But we have each other in common.
“It’s coming to an end, Eliot,” Ella says with that melodious voice that you’d have to call well-spoken but not plummy. I notice that Jack is keeping a careful eye on us from across the table.
“I know. It sucks. Do you think we’ll all keep in touch?” I ask. I hope so, though I know it’s going to be tough. After all that’s happened, I can’t tell if finishing uni is a relief or a tragedy … all the drama; all the heartbreak and confusion. I think we share too much history to lose one another though; we’ve held our thorny secret for so long. But trying to keep it buried has done us no good. I need to talk to her … explain my feelings. I just need to be open.
“Well—”
My phone is vibrating demonically. Lucy again—I’m sure of it. This time it’s a long-drawn-out frenzy. Must be a call. I would answer if it wasn’t for Ella. I ignore it and look at her, each burr and buzz a rampant betrayal. It feels like the bench is moving … tremoring under the pressure of my secrets. She must be able to tell: she’s practically rattling along with it. I smile. I can’t say what I really feel.
“Probably not all of us, eh?” I say, answering my own question.
Lying in the hairdressers. The back of my neck is being ground into the china rim of a basin, arched and tense.
“Is that temperature okay for you?”
It’s unbearably hot. I can feel my scalp blistering and swelling. Is she emptying a kettle on my head?
“Yeah, that’s fine thanks.”
It’s a semi-chic salon: black tiles and marble surfaces, extra-large mirrors, bowls of wrapped humbugs, piles of male grooming mags.
“Is that pressure okay?”
Do it harder. Harder. Go on, harder.
“Yeah, that’s fine thanks.”
I can almost feel the sheen of the trainee’s peroxide hair as she lurches over me, giving my head a rub and a tug. Flecks of shampoo make darts for my eyes and slipstreams do mischievous runners down my forehead.
“Got the afternoon off work then?”
“Nah, I’m a student.”
“Oh right, cool.”
She starts kneading my head like she’s fashioning a man out of plasticine.
“What do you study?”
“English?”
“Oh right, cool.”
We are reaching nirvana on the head rub. I close my eyes and strain after relaxation.
“Where do you go to uni?”
“Oxford?” I say, apologetically.
“Oh wow. Are you like well clever then?”
“I don’t know about that,” I say modestly.
“How did you get into Oxford then?”
“Well, I guess I was clever enough.”
“No need to be arrogant about it.” She continues to rummage through my mop. I wonder if she can tell from that angle that I’m blushing. “So what do you want to do with that?”
“With what?” I ask.
“An English degree.”
“Oh, I see. No idea really.”
“Typical.”
“The suburbs are dreaming,” sings the stereo. “Typical,” echoes the babe. He’s next to me with one of those shower-cap contraptions on his massive head, waiting for some color to set, flicking through a magazine larger than his body. “Hey gal,” he says to my head-fiddler, “ask him about his thesis.”
“What did you do your thesis on?” she says obediently.
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s so boring.”
“Why did you do it then?”
“Okay. Well, I uh, oh you know, I looked at doubles in Shakespeare through
the, uh, lens of dialecticism,” I stutter in embarrassment.
“Oh, okay.”
“Yeah, see, it’s pretty dull stuff … I guess.”
“So are we talking like the Master/Slave dialectic from The Phenomenology of Spirit?” she says as she squeezes some conditioner into her palm and lathers it up.
“Urrr, yeah, kind of,” I say, rather stunned. “Exactly, really.”
She thinks about this for a second while she begins to rub the conditioner into my hair. “That’s a bit anachronistic, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Applying nineteenth-century philosophy to the early modern period?”
“Told you,” says the babe. “I hated that thesis … he lost so much sleep over it; it really tired me out. I’m the one who has to bear the brunt of all the stress and hard work, you see. I am anti theses, that’s for sure.”
I look up and my eyes meet the babe’s in the mirror. We share a reflection and I watch in astonishment as large, bulbous bags begin developing beneath his eyes. His hair thins and recedes slightly, like something in a time-lapse movie. I urgently need to go for a slash … I feel like I’m gonna split if I don’t get out of here soon.
“Here, how does the color look, fella?
I’ve had bare blonde put in it
innit.”
says the babe,
his speech turning colloquial,
the accent all chavved up.
“Gonna look proper phat.”
“Huh?”
“Gosh, Eliot, don’t irk me with your
ghastly false ignorance, okay?”
he says,
posh as a swan.
“It proper fucks me off. This one
finks everyfink’s so
polarized. He can be a
frightful old bore.”
“Which plays did you look at?” asks the trainee.
“Sorry?” I mumble, not knowing where to look or what to think.
“Which plays did you write on … for your Shakespeare thesis?”
“Oh. Henry IV mainly.”
“One or two?”
“One.”
“Hotspur as Hal’s double?”
“Yeah.”
“Makes sense. Hotspur being the dutiful son that Hal should be … And then I guess you have Falstaff representing the opposite possibility available to him. Two poles of being: the ambitious and the waster; the worldly and the simplistic; the aristocrat and the lowly fool.”
“Well yeah.”
“Things aren’t that transparent though,
are they, Eliot?”
says the babe.
“It
just ain’t as fucking easy-peasy-
lemon-squeazy as you’re tryina tell
yourself. It ain’t so black and
white, boss.”
“What are you
talking about?”
I ask.
“Pardon the equivocality
for a second—”
“Stop punning!”
I scream.
“It’s
linguistic onanism!”
“—but ain’t you being a bit
of a wanker?”
Do you ever feel like your life is in a constant state of rehearsal? Like you’re always wondering when the clinch is going to come? I feel like an eternal sub. “Late?” exclaims a customer to my left. “What do you mean, late?”
“I’m sorry,” says the stylist hovering above him—the stylist who has broken the rules. “We should have washed that off five minutes ago. The timer didn’t sound, I’m afraid. I apologize … it’s entirely my fault.”
“I do believe that’s your alarum,
Eliot.
Wake the fuck up.”
It’s a most twenty-first-century scene, here in the King’s Arms, here in our twenty-first-century scene.
The start of a century, it’s a nothing phase; those first two decades a lacuna in the hundred-year sweep. It’s a nominal dilemma born of numerical obstinacy: the ’40s are the forties and the ’80s the eighties, sure, of course, but this here decade is nothing but the slops of numerous misfits. Some settle for the noughties, smacking as it does of nihilism and reprobates. But that’s rather dismissive, is it not? The next decade doesn’t get much better: the teens? Sounds like some crappy American high-school flick. And what about 2011 and 2012, those big uncooperators? Shall we reformulate and go for a duodecade and octennial followed by eight decades? Shoot me for being pedantic, but I have had a few pints.
What we are facing here is a problem of—
“Would,” says Jack, watching a tall brunette walk past with her friends. She notices his attention and looks at the ground, smiling. All the girls spin to grab a peek, but I continue doing what I’m doing, drink in hand, dreaming. My bladder is starting to fidget.
“You’d do anything?” says Abi, always resistant to the notion of another girl being considered attractive.
“Yeah, but he’s mad for it,” Scott says, harping on Jack’s Mancunian roots.
“Lad!” remarks Jack, qualifying himself. Ella doesn’t appear to be enjoying the tone of the conversation, picking a crusty old coaster to pieces. Scott, greatly excited, is fiddling about in his trouser pockets. He’s playing with his touchy-feelies: softened washing labels cut from jumpers which he rubs in moments of nervous energy—is this kid private school or what?
“You fiddling with your touchy-feelies, Scott?” I ask.
“No,” he says, hastily placing both hands on top of the table and blushing profusely.
“Bless him?” says Abi. I flinch as my bladder ups the ante.
As I was saying, what we are facing here is a problem of conceptualization. We just don’t know where to place ourselves, and neither will history. The Roaring Twenties and the Swinging Sixties we ain’t. Can’t be. We resist totalizing models and interpretations; we don’t provide the chronological shorthand. We’re a loose bunch: a confused series of tenuously associated, random events. How will we be referred to? How will they homogenize us? Or will we be overlooked as an untimely mass of singularities? We have no foreseeable narrative, untaggable as we are. Ours is a lost period, shopping around for identity, spiraling off in referential chaos.
“Back in a sec,” I say, rising from the table. Need the toilet—time to break the seal—will be pissing like a racehorse from now on—the three rooms leading there are rammed—playing dodgems on a full bladder—reached capacity—at least five people give me the glare as I buoyantly pass—collisions and spillages—lube me up—fetid smell—slide me through—suspiciously wet door handle: the Gents.
What we do have, down here in the fledgling twenty-first century, is performance. Our entire tangible lives are performance; we are consummate professionals. The performance of self is nothing new of course; but it’s never been so rampant, so vital, so fundamental.
“Where’s Eliot?” Sanjay will be saying at our table, just returned from the bar.
“Toilet,” someone will reply (“Toilet?” if that someone is Abi), and Sanjay will say “typical” because it’s typical for me to be in the toilet.
Performance: rampant, vital, fundamental. Our lot follow celebrities, red circles flashing round their defects—their unforgivable cellulite and unthinkable lack of abs—and adjust ourselves accordingly. We turn on MTV, where the M stands for Materialism, and make our demands, warp our expectations, perform performance. Even our language is performed: the twenty-first-century phrasebook all cliché and slang, empty razzmatazz and Neanderthal droning.
Undo fly—keep head up—stare straight ahead—do not look down—do not eye the steaming stainless steel—dripping bubbling reflection—I am not inspecting your tackle—I repeat, I am not inspecting your—I am strictly focused on the job in hand—ten seconds of dry delay—seriously, I am not looking at … and we’re away.
Performance is foremost a qualitative notion, here in the twenty-first century. It has a competitive edge. For i
nstance, one of the girls I knocked into on the way to the toilet was a strong 7 and her friend a close 6 (10 being absolutely hypothetical, of course); the cocky barman, with his irresistibly punchable five-year-old face, is a Grade A bell-end. Moreover, the condom machine in the toilet boasts that it can make me “last longer” and “raise my sexual game,” just as the junk mail on my BlackBerry promises “prosperous lovemaking” and offers to “boost” my “manhood” for only a few dollars a month. He that farthest cometh behind, fainting follows, in this, our most twenty-first of centuries.
Shiver and repackage—quick check of the mirror—rower type next to me delicately tweaking each strand of hair—someone vomming in the cubicle—another, the next along, having his beeriod—rower type now surreptitiously testing his guns—anonymous character still chucking up. Ready to reload, I set off for the bar.
A blip in time then, this, the awkward, tentative first decade. Sure, we remember the ’90s well enough to associate with the twentieth century still, but why would we want to do that? Let’s run away from that. We’re the veterans of the twentieth and the rookies of the twenty-first; old and young, corrupt and innocent, all at once. Innocence didn’t last long, mind. It only took a year, one worldwide NY day, for the last century’s hangover to rekindle into more drunken abuse. Hair of the dog: reckless advice. And so now we’ll spend the entirety of this century—our one stab at a clean slate—running away, Atlassing burden on our backs. But as we well know, there’s no such thing as a clean slate: dates and numbers don’t change a thing, don’t help us forget or remedy. They couldn’t even bring the Internet crashing to its knees like they threatened to.
7—2—1—8. I enter my PIN at the bar. A line of Jägerbombs for all: my treat. The shots plunge into the long trail of energy drinks—those festering pits of liquid marzipan—a chain of splashing dominoes. We’re going nuclear.
Another toilet. Not a toilet in a pub. A toilet in a club.
A toilet in a club, three years ago, on my very first night at Oxford.
“Freshen up.”
It was Freshers Week, and I was in a club called Filth. I was a fresher in a toilet in a club called Filth. Not a toilet in a pub, but a toilet in a club, a club called Filth … and I was a fresher.