by Ben Masters
“It’s okay, Eliot,” she said, snuggling against me. I kissed her. “I wish you would just relax.”
“I’ve missed you really bad this week and I want you to like it here is all.”
“It’s okay, don’t worry.”
I bit her on the nose, gave it a little lick, and she screwed her face up, playfully … adorably.
“You’re so cute,” I whispered.
“And you’re silly,” she whispered back, smiling.
“Are you having a nice time anyway?”
“Yeah, it’s cool.” I was pleased to hear it. “Scott and Jack seem really sweet. Jack’s great. He’s so funny.”
Oh fuck off! Why don’t you just marry him if he’s so perfect?
“How about that for a first tute last week,” I said to Ella, turning my back on Lucy and cultivating a conversation I knew she’d feel alienated by.
“I know,” said Ella, surprised by the seeming spontaneity of the question. “I’m so relieved to get it out of the way. I didn’t know what to expect.”
“I wasn’t banking on Dylan knowing so much about Hardy. He must’ve read everything … I don’t get how he remembers it all.”
“Totally. I felt so dumb.”
“Yeah, right! You said so many interesting things … like all that stuff about the poeticity of Hardy’s prose … and, errrr, the influence of like evolutionary thought, you know?” Ella modestly shrugged this off and turned to Lucy.
“Have you read any Hardy?” she asked, wanting to include her in the conversation.
“No. Can’t say that I have.”
“What kind of stuff do you read?” asked Ella.
“She’s not interested in reading,” I answered for her. I could feel her hand relinquishing mine under the table.
“No … I guess I’m not.”
She was unhappy now, I could tell. She looked demoralized; disheartened and challenged. I had done it. But why was I trying to show her up? I was purposely making things difficult and I didn’t even know why. I simmered in guilt.
“I don’t blame you,” said Ella. “You’d just wind up making boring conversation like us.” She gave Lucy a supportive smile. All the encoded comments and body language weighed down on me like a universal betrayal.
“Right, let’s head off. I can’t be fucked to go out any more,” I announced, getting to my feet. “I’ve been partying too hard this week … I need a quiet one for once.” (Did you get that, Lucy? I’ve been having fun without you.) “Come on, we’re going.”
“Fair enough,” muttered Lucy, rising to the racket of screeching stools.
I wondered if she was actually relieved to bring the evening—her trial—to a premature close. She said it was a shame, that she had been having a good time. But I felt otherwise.
Later that night, back in my room, we got undressed and made up. There in the depths of our inexperienced bed we learned about greed and jealousy, about give and take. I held her in my arms to let her know I was a fool. I kissed the back of her neck to show her I had been unfair and tickled the inside of her legs to undo my wrongs. She had made all that effort for the both of us, and we had gone to bed early. Awake, I spooned her through the night while she slept peacefully, to show her how much I needed her. I spooned her throughout the night to show myself—
Ella has taken the empty seat on my left. Swollen tears form around the outside of her wineglass and drip down the stem to its cloudy base. She fiddles with it absentmindedly, turning and tilting its curvaceous body, drawing attention to its transparency.
“Let’s make this a bloody good one, yeah?” says Jack as he ferries another round to the table. There’s nostalgia in the timbre of his voice: this one’s for all the other great nights, yeah?; out of respect for everything gone by, yeah?; let’s just have one last fucking good night—yeah? “This night is real,” he adds, nodding in approval at his new pint.
The windows in the King’s Arms have steamed up, the nighttime streets looking like they’ve been soaped over, obscured by the forces and emissions of the pub. Pockets of energy throb throughout the place.
“So, have you got much planned at home for the next few weeks?” asks Ella.
This is my chance. We’ve got some privacy and she seems to be really focusing on me. I should just tell her how I feel and deal with the fallout afterward.
“Yeah, I’ve got quite a lot of, uh, you know, stuff on, I guess,” I struggle to say, bottling it, thinking about Jack and Lucy and a whole range of other potential obstacles. I’m a humdrum conundrum, my mind and mouth no longer bedfellows, no longer on speaking terms.
“Oh, okay.”
The night is young. Plenty more opportunities will present themselves, I’m sure. No need to start panicking just yet.
So here we are, gaping zeros of insufficiency, trying to mouth genuine feeling but coming up short. The feeling’s there alright; the momentousness isn’t lost on us. It’s hard. That’s all.
“Let’s just have one final fucking good night, yeah?”
“Time to move on?” asks Sanjay, testing the mood.
“Defo. A round of tequila for the road?” suggests Scott.
“Doubles, pussies!” challenges Abi.
Everyone laughs and chatters, shifting around in ready assent.
Without arrangement or silent signal, Ella and I hang back.
“You seem sad,” she says.
“Err … it’s just the weight of the occasion,” I say, somewhat misleadingly.
“Yeah. For three years, a night out like this seemed so trivial … so habitual, right? But now all of a sudden it’s …”
“Meaningful.”
“Yeah.”
I finish the watery dregs of my pint and look up at her. I look up at her because I don’t know what else to do. I go to say something but change my mind.
“Ready?” she says, probably to avoid whatever I might’ve been boiling up.
“Yeah.”
It’s time to check my phone. I can’t ignore it any longer. The others are slightly ahead, having downed the tequilas, weaving their way through the door and onto the pavement. I pull it from my pocket, shuffling around to ease the tightness of the jeans.
Got it. Unlock …
There are three missed calls, and my inbox contains a couple of text alerts from my voice mail, and then there’s … aha, here’s the one we need …
Open it, open it.
Bar
I’ve turned my phone off.
I wasn’t expecting that. I just don’t know what to say … what to think … what to do. I mean, how the hell has this happened? I’m going to need time … time to figure all this out.
We’ve left the King’s Arms. We shoved those tequilas where the sun don’t shine and split. Time for progress; momentum; the logical next step.
So we’ve moved on to a bar. Not a pub or a club, but a bar. A bar: it comes somewhere between a pub and a club. But it isn’t a pub or a club, coz it’s a bar. It’s basically a step up from the pub on the going-out scale: the drinks are unjustifiably more expensive, the lighting is darker (with bursts of neon), and there is a mini dance floor of sorts toward the back there. The girls in these joints make considerably more effort: shorter skirts, tighter shorts, higher heels (I clock Scott rubbing his touchy-feelies as he checks out our new environment). And it’s more metropolitan than a pub, which is quaint: all moldering “ye olde” pretension and fix. On the other hand, it’s less ferocious than a club (where we leave all dignity in the car park, outside Argos, sodden in the rainy queue). But like I said, it’s halfway between the two. See: our world does have form and order, an internal logic … kind of thing.
There’s a hierarchy of conversational possibility in the pub-bar-club equation (although the twat chugging a yard of ale over by the fag machine might not agree). The pub is the most sociable: there we kotch about, rhapsodizing on our specialist subjects of not-a-lot. We can actually be heard. In a bar the music has to dominate—there’s a dan
ce floor to be taken care of. Bar noises have a greater tenacity. Conversation fragments and simplifies, tending toward gossip and vulgarity. A vast improvement, one might think. As for the club … well … that’s where language utterly degenerates into blubbering white noise: monosyllabic phrases, polysyllabic belches, aggressive consonants. It’s unadulterated shit-chat: “Drink?,” “Piss?,” “Dance?,” “Number?,” “Shag?” But we’ll get there in good time.
The tequilas have really done the trick. Jack’s transforming into hyper mode: Turbo-Jack. He’s skipping around to the music, sidling up to random girls, doing the epileptic string-puppet. He’s been saying “fucking A” ever since the bouncers granted us entry. He is starting to unwind.
“You need to watch your mate,” warns a stern dude, arms folded, face like a Meat Supreme (Stuffed Crust), as he polices his harem of grinders, Jack rubbing against its fringes.
“Whatever, mate.”
Jack is oblivious. I have always admired, maybe even envied, his insouciance. How he can turn his surroundings into a Jackocentric universe without being egotistical or selfish; the gravitational force around which we orbit, drawn and maintained. Like all of my university friendships, we only exist to each other within Oxford, never crossing boundaries of home and origin, but I think I’ve got a pretty good sense of him. Within Oxford we are an effective fit, sharing perceptions about the state-school/private-school distinction, and cultivating them to our own comedy ends. But the chip on his shoulder is smaller; there’s no inverted snobbery or lurking resentment. He has gone at things more vigorously than I, game to mix and establish himself. Less fettered in many ways.
I’m going to have to level with him at some point tonight, though I can’t see how it can possibly go well.
We are making our way toward the flash bar (the bar inside the Bar), flanked by rude-boys and stumbling-somethings.
“Whose round is it?” I shout, broadcasting that it sure as fuck ain’t mine.
“I’m on it,” replies Sanjay, withdrawing a fat wallet and positioning himself so as best to attack.
It’s heaving in here. A real cock fest. I’m surrounded by blokes in tight shirts. They ripple and bulge like steroid blancmanges, their clothes bought at least one size too small to give the lie of muscularity. Most are simply plump. All the men around me are obsessed with size: puffing their chests and holding their bevies in ways that deliberately accentuate their guns. They call the bar-ladies “darlin” and “sweet’art” and frown at fitties like me. Performative cunts the lot of ’em. Girls wriggle about in the byways and swellings while these men stand sturdy, inspecting, like farmers at a cattle market. They watch stiffly, effortlessly emitting their rigor-mortis charisma, occasionally saying “would” when a particularly fine specimen flits past (because they would, of course). They are meant to appear intimidating (obviously the best way to attract the opposite sex is to look like you’re going to punch them); but actually, it seems to me, they’re just bricking it. They’re uncertain about what to do with their oafish bodies and bubble-wrap heads. Mark their sweaty brows and disconcerting sways. Shit, these guys are nervous wrecks, even if they could kick my head in.
“Wahey, check it out,” says Sanjay, gesturing toward our right. We all follow his motion. Jack and I don’t look best pleased. A random is trying to get in there with Ella. Fuck me he’s good-looking. Don’t you just hate that? When you know someone is a better deal than you? When your ego has no choice but to admit tail-between-legs defeat? This guy is tall and tanned, with long golden locks scraped back off his face. His white shirt is stylishly cut—fitted is the term, I believe—and his sleek black jeans encase legs longer and rounder than my own. Ella is politely smiling and nodding. If I was a girl I would. Jack makes an unannounced dash for the bathroom.
Watching the blunt servitude of barroom show-and-display, with its speculative pulling bids and trade deadlines, makes me think of Lucy’s message more and more. I thought tonight was all about Ella, but now I’m not so sure. I’m all over the place.
I start reaching for my phone but put the urge in check.
Oxford is filled with memories of Lucy. She’s everywhere—every restaurant the scene of a date, every path the route of a stroll, every establishment with an alcohol license the setting of a ridiculous lovers’ tiff. It’s the dates that really stick, what with all visits being a date of sorts … containing a date … an occasion. I languished in perpetual heat and stickiness during that early period, all underlined by a dull ache in the balls, getting hard-ons walking down the street, buying some groceries, returning library books. She always left her mark: the fervid smell of her perfume in my room, puffing from the sheets and pillow at the slightest tap; last night’s wineglasses on the desk with tiny puddles of white left at the bottom; the room a bomb site of sexual warfare and going-out costume changes—the strewn clothes, the balled-up Kleenex, the rash-inducing massage oil capsized at the foot of the bed.
I tried so hard. Punting across the gnat-gauzed river, I would misquote Tennyson and exhaustively point out anything of remote historical insignificance—“That’s where [insert poet] studied,” and “That’s where C. S. Lewis got his inspiration for x, y and z”—until Lucy pulled out a pair of sunnies and a creased issue of Heat. Or the picnic in University Parks when I sat on duck shit and got stung by a bee. And how about the time she returned the copy of Lucky Jim I had lent her in an attempt to make her a bit more literary.
“What did you think?”
“He irritated me so much!”
“Who? Kingsley Amis or Jim?”
“Yeah. Why can’t he ever say what he thinks? He has all these humps about everything but never actually comes out with them. Just seemed so weaselly and weak.”
I was incredibly surprised by the concision and perspicacity of her critique. I really hadn’t expected it. And it was a strong argument: one I didn’t like, feeling as it did like a covert attack on me.
“Errr, okay,” I said condescendingly. “I think you’ve missed the point a bit. Maybe I should’ve given you something easier to start with.”
And who could forget the Valentine’s Day when I booked a bicycle-rickshaw to transport us to our restaurant on the corner of Little Clarendon Street? I sat fuming while she enjoyed the cyclist’s gratuitously bulbous buttocks and chunky calves as he rode standing up, a mechanical specimen of some masculine ideal. The meal was equally unforgettable. When the waiter asked if I would like to try the wine, Lucy watched expectantly, like she thought I’d be good in such situations. I choked violently and tapped some instant access sweat from my forehead; “Yes, that’s fine thank you,” I concluded. And then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, Lucy’s chicken turned out to be undercooked: “Does this look pink to you?”
“I don’t know … is it meant to be like that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you’ve already eaten half of it.”
“Do you reckon I could get salmonella?”
“Are you sure chicken isn’t always like that?”
“I don’t know … can’t be.”
“Should I complain?”
“I don’t know. What do you reckon?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I guess.”
“Excuse me … waiter … oh hi, thanks. This, err, chicken appears to be, err … is this chicken, like, raw … do you possibly think?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I could check with the chef … but she has eaten over half of it.”
“I know, but she only just realized you see.” (Lucy waiting.) “Can we have this deducted from the bill possibly, at all?”
“But, as I say, sir, she has eaten over half of it.” (Lucy thinking about how the rickshaw-cyclist would deal with the situation.)
“I won’t pay for it.”
“Yes you will, sir.” (Lucy measuring my worth.)
“Okay … I guess that’s fine,” I said to the waiter. “I mean, you have eaten over half of it, honey. Can we ju
st get the bill then, please?”
But her visits were the absolute highlights of my time at Oxford, especially early on. They were all I wanted and looked forward to. She was all I wanted. What I’d give to return to the innocence of those days, rather than the nightmare pageantry of now …
What am I talking about? How could I overlook the college summer ball at the end of first year? I remember Lucy in my room, making diligent use of the mirror, again. Her syrupy smells and preternatural sheen; those lithe bends and generous smiles. I lay on the bed, hands behind head, legs outstretched.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready too?” she said, turning away from the mirror for a rare second (I was going to say a fleeting second, but I’m not sure that they occur in real life, do they?). She had been in preparation for half an hour already, but I knew that her handicap was at least forty-five minutes (allowing up to one hour for special occasions, which I suppose this was).
“Yeah yeah, I’m on it.”
I had never worn white tie before and was delaying the ordeal of attiring myself. Before Lucy arrived I had trawled the Internet for instructions on how to put the outfit together, a sobbing mess of inadequacy and defeat: they’re not buttons, they’re cuff links; that’s not a scarf, knobhead, it’s a waistcoat. For all that I could tell, the sole purpose of this preposterous costume was to crush my lower-middle-class spirit, as well as making me look like an impractical tit. So I ended up ringing Scott for some private-schoolboy advice, this shit being like pajamas to him.
I spotted my opportunity when Lucy momentarily turned her back to search through some bags, and leapt into manic action: firstly trip-wiring and sack-racing with the trousers, I then locked the waistcoat in a sleeper hold, body-slammed the shirt to the ground, and administered a clothesline/elbow-drop combo to the bow tie. I was roughly dressed in fifteen seconds flat. In sharp contrast (having taken care of the surfaces and the icing: immaculate makeup, complex hair), Lucy slipped into her dark green silk dress with supreme ease. Her supple figure undulated in—those soft curves and pliant grooves making their bends adornings—to find its most perfect rhyme in the elegant lines of the garment. She’d pitched the makeup just right—ceramic lids, fruit crush lips, gentle shimmer—avoiding some of the arts-and-crafts horror shows that would be on display at the ball (clown colors, pizza faces, embalmed corpse lacquer, freshly squeezed tans). Makeup terrifies boys: young girls wear it to look older, old ladies wear it to look younger … either way we’re just confused. But Swift had got it wrong in Celia’s scummy dressing room: Lucy was beautiful beneath it all, and upon her transformation I was speechless—partly because I was out of breath from sumo-wrestling my outfit onto my body, and partly because the bow tie was slicing my throat, but also (to fulfill the queasy line) because she was stunning. I already knew this, of course, but the eventful glamour of the evening and the lack of oxygen going to my head emphasized the fact.