Noughties

by Ben Masters

  We’re trained to stand stationary, there on the purgatorial platform, observing the delays and dues on the most depressing TV screen you’ll ever see. The episode is bollocks—all numbers and middle-of-nowhere place-names; no pictures, no music, no action. Everyone watches with slight grimaces of perplexity, newspaper rapiers tucked under armpits; briefcases, suitcases, rucksacks piled about feet. The thistles and nettles prising their scraped heads and necks through the concrete tiles spark unspoken questions about hope and fear, security and abandon.

  I caught the 16.15 to Wellingborough.

  Hey. I’ll b there in

  two hours. That ok?

  x x

  The question on the end was entirely unnecessary. We had already arranged to meet up earlier that morning, so I knew it was “ok”—or at least green-lighted. All I was doing with that question was wishfully stretching my tentacles out for further connection, straining and longing for—

  K x

  I retreated with severed limb … a throbbing stump of sadness. That solitary kiss; the response reduced to one harsh letter, one destructive plosive; that cutting K.

  Cool. Lookin 4ward

  2 it x x

  I wasn’t sure what I was traveling toward or even what I wanted. I just had to go. It was me who had unconsciously engineered our breakup for so long, yet there I was, yearning for return, dragged under by nostalgia’s fierce undertow. I watched the countryside straddling the dual carriageway’s yawning asphalt as it rushed through the window frames of the coach. I gripped my phone in case of reply.

  My destination was a coffee shop round the corner from the bus station in town. Destination, of course, shares its etymological root with destiny. But something told me that destiny had bugger all to do with this. Destiny could get up out of it. Destiny could fuck right off.

  I arrived before Lucy, opening the door with its nosy-parker bell on top. It was a standard café of the type you find in every town or city. There were the aggressive thwacks of coffee strainers on the counter and the fizzing of rampant milk-steamers; the busy chatterings of hobnobbers and casual meeter-uppers. I expected a few student characters, each to their own, buried in textbooks and night-out reverie, but of course there were none: it was Wellingborough. I took my place.

  Might she know everyone in the café? Had she become acquainted with every punter in our hometown … now more her hometown than mine? Of course not. But in my head … in my head … All these new people she had let into her life, traveling up her motorway in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the other side of the road from me. Me, in the outbound lane. Me, alone. Everyone in there was rooting for her, as far as I was concerned. A tricky away game when even my home form was far from stellar.

  “Hey,” I said, scrambling from the table when she glided in.

  “Hi.” Her tone was obscure. We did that nervous dance of greeting, unsure whether to peck, kiss, hug—a pat on the back?—or just smile, until we practically head-butted each other instead. She seemed fuller, galvanized, adjusted by new experiences and knowledge. Not cerebral knowledge, mind. Carnal. But that was probably the brushwork of my imagination; my restless distorting eye.

  “It’s good to see you” (that’s me).

  We sat down opposite each other in interview formation. There hung an invisible barrier between us, blocking my soft signals, fortifying her guardedness.

  “How’s things?” I asked.

  “Fine. I’m hungover.”

  “Oh right. Heavy night?”

  “Yeah. I drank far too much.”

  “Was it a late one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who were you out with?”

  “Friends.”

  “Do they have names?”

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t know them.”

  “So? Why won’t you tell me who you were out with?”

  “Eliot, stop it.”

  “Whatever.”

  With each jealous thud of my jackhammer heart Lucy recoiled a little further into herself. She chewed the inside of her bottom lip, not sultrily like she used to, but anxiously.

  “What do you want to drink?”

  “Just an orange juice.”

  “Don’t you want a hot drink?”

  “No. You know I hate caffeine.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She stopped me as I got up. “Eliot …”

  “Yeah?” I said, spinning round like tortured lover in romantic movie … heavy … giddy … longing for revelation … say it, please, just say it … give me anything and I’ll take it.

  “Can you get me a chocolate twist as well?”

  “Sure.”

  After surviving a barrage of options from the bloke behind the counter, I returned to Lucy and settled down for the long haul. “Oh, I have a gift for you,” I said, pulling a paperback from my jacket pocket. “See what you think.” I placed it on the corner of the table: Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net. I’m not entirely sure why I did this—to impress her? To continue molding her into my idea of the perfect girl? To remind her of our differences?

  “What do you want, Eliot?”

  “I don’t know,” I stuttered, surprised by her directness. “I just wanted to see you.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I miss you, and—”

  “You can’t do this,” she said. I sat back, stunned: but thy more serious eye a mild reproof darts, O beloved woman! “You can’t push me away and then try and pull me back in. You know?” (Yeah, but I thought—) “You can’t put me down whenever you feel like it and just expect to pick me back up again,” she said, talking about me like I was a demented forklift truck. “I’ve been settling into my new life,” she continued. “You knew I was going to need some space for a while. But that’s all.” (But I didn’t need you to need space, did I? I mean just think about—) “You’re the one who goes quiet and distant, for no reason, until jealousy or curiosity brings you back round. I love you, but you can’t keep doing this to me.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t realize I—”

  “You made it seem like you’d lost interest. You were lovely all summer and then you changed again as soon as we went back to uni.” (Dramatic pause.) “You went quiet.”

  “You’re the one who changed though,” I countered, unadvisedly, knowing that she was spot-on. “You’re too obsessed with your new life … your new friends.”

  “No! That’s what you wanted to happen,” she said, growing more animated. “That’s how you’d pre-planned it in your head. You chase tension, Eliot.” (Well, I hadn’t bargained for this.) “It’s like you expect bad things to happen—you don’t trust anyone, and I don’t understand why. No one’s ever even done anything horrible to you! Your life is constant plain sailing.”

  “That’s not true!” I retorted, stung by the venomous truth of her dart.

  “Look, I can’t do this,” she said, welling up. “I’m not right for you—you know it and I know it … and it makes me so unhappy … makes me feel awful. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to want me as much as I want you and just accept me as I am … like I do you. But I don’t think you can. You used to, but that’s all changed now you’re comfortable at Oxford.”

  “Please Lucy, just let me—”

  “Eliot, stop it. You don’t even know what you really want, and it’s messing with my head. It’s not fair.”

  “Sorry.”

  She shriveled when I reached out to touch her—a reaction so alien that reality seemed to be betraying me.

  “I’m gonna go,” she said. “I promised I’d meet some friends.”

  “Oh.”

  “We can’t keep doing this.”

  “So why do you stay in touch with me?” I said in last-ditch desperation. “Why do you reply to my texts and agree to meet up?”

  “Because. I can’t help it. I can’t imagine cutting you off. But this isn’t good.”

  We sat for a while, saturated in silence.

  “I have to go. Text me later or something �
�� when I’m less tired.”

  “Okay then.”

  She rose and disappeared into her new landscape (that once familiar landscape), absorbed by its canvas and colors, all hostile to me, the non-integrated object. She didn’t say bye and neither of us drank our drinks.

  The bus jibed and cajoled me all the way back to Oxford, mercilessly grinding away at my fresh wounds. Stopping at every place conceivable, and many inconceivable, it took my misery on tour: Northampton, Towcester, Silverstone, Brackley, Bicester … The show garnered an underwhelming reception, what with virtually no tickets sold. At each stop we rolled up to, no one got on, no one got off. I was alone in my unhappiness, performing to an empty house. Even the stocky bus driver seemed to resent having to chauffeur such a sorry excuse for a man.

  My second year was off to a disastrous start. Not only was there the loss of Lucy, but I also found out that I had fucked up my first-year exams, or “underachieved” as the two-sentence report that landed in my pigeonhole put it. Dr. Dylan Fletcher, who was fast establishing himself as an absolute legend, took me under his wing (a blokey pint at the Turf), and convinced me not to feel disheartened by my results. He said that I showed a lot of promise and that some people just develop more slowly than others. Apparently he had absolute faith that I was going to have a breakthrough at some point in the next two years and I took his word for it. Why not? I liked his approach. He’d even hosted a debauched house-party for his students at the start of the term, welcoming us all into the new academic year. I tried to enjoy myself as best I could but it was fucking hard, what with Lucy cramping my emotional and psychological style. Most of the others crashed at Dylan’s after, drinking and dancing into the early hours, but I snuck off at the height of the shindig to wallow pitifully in front of Lucy’s Mugshot page.

  And that is precisely what I did when I made it back from Wellingborough to my room, which had donned a decidedly bleak aura in my absence. I fired up the slumbering laptop to renew contact with the world and recharge myself at the mains. Then I did the habitual rounds: uni email, personal email, some sport sites and, yes, mugshot.com. Like everyone else I slaughter whole swaths of time on the latter. Pathetic. My Mugshot inbox blinked two new messages and an update notified me that I had been “prodded” by two “friends.” How thoughtful. Jack had scribbled all over my “face”: “Mmmmmmmate! When are you back from home? Large one down Scrot Lounge tonight … keen? Peas x.” Then, as I do every single day, still, I clicked on Lucy’s “face” to torture myself with the latest. Always at this moment my stomach plummets and my ticker accelerates in dreaded anticipation; the anticipation of something that’ll make me curious … paranoid … jealous … livid … sad. Signs of a life in which I don’t exist. Never gets easier. It throws me.

  “Lucy has been ‘caught’ in 7 photos,” advertised her status update.

  Fucking great, I thought, prepping myself for the stalker’s gloom of compulsive investigation. These would be shots from her night out with her new friends: the root of her hangover. What am I expecting to find when I search through her photos, and her friends’ photos, and her friends’ friends’ photos, getting lost down inadvisable back roads of dubious connection?

  Exhibit 1: This one was fine. This one I could handle. It was pretty much inoffensive. Just Lucy in group pose, in some club, yes, with three gf’s. I noted that one of them looked like a tangerine … sure to be a bad influence.

  Exhibit 2: Lucy and man. Probably a rocket scientist or future Nobel Laureate from her Travel and Tourism course. My palms clammed up like soggy bread, but it was okay … they were just standing next to each other. Fine. Besides, although I couldn’t make out his face, which was distorted by the snapper’s clumsy thumb covering half the lens, he looked like a chav.

  Exhibit 3: What? Hugging? I leaned closer into the screen and administered deep breaths.

  Exhibit 4: This was more like it. Strength in numbers. A motley assortment of boob tubes and quiffs. People that I just don’t know. A harmless gang of drunken counterfeits, their faces melting into horror-show shapes. Grim as, but better than that last one.

  Exhibit 5: Now we had a problem. Now we had a big fucking problem. She was on a sparse dance floor, grinding on that bell from Exhibits 2 and 3. She was facing me, obliviously taunting me, excluding me. He was behind her, leering over her, mortar-and-pestling her, his face blocked by Lucy’s. His hand-that-was-not-my-hand gripped her hip and her arse was slipping and sliding all over his parasitic cock.

  Exhibit 6: This was the stomach-churning masterpiece. A Caravaggian scene of epic betrayal. That “lad” was eating her face. Or was she eating his? It’s hard to find precision in these matters. But they were kissing. They were kissing, okay? There was something recognizable about the guy’s pose … maybe it was just because I had been in his position so many times myself. It was obvious that neither was aware of being caught by their “friend’s” scandal-cam, which somehow made it worse: I was seeing something that I was never meant to see.

  I didn’t dare confront the finale … the money shot. The dry metallic taste in my mouth and the trembling of my body let me know it was time to turn away. No Exhibit 7 for me.

  I know that I am probably misrepresenting Lucy and I regret it immensely. I wish I could truly convey her … the poetics of her geometry: the longing arcs of her shoulders; those slender, inquiring fingers and pouty knuckles; her smooth, tight neck; those infant ears like time signatures on a piece of music … but it’s never enough. And then there’s Ella, who hangs over these memories like a gauze, forcing me to squint as I struggle to make sense of everything. In old age such recollections might seem like a gift, purified of any poison … pleasant reminders of flesh, limbs, and sexual possibility … harmless messages from the subjective historian cloistered in the head. But for now they are raw. They disorientate, carrying so much consequence and import.

  I feel as though I am forever haunted by thoughts of Lucy. I’m haunted by—

  A murky vagina, ghoulish in its sinister ferocity, loomed down on me, stared across the room at me, winked its rheumy eye at me, as Ella pressed tight against my thigh. (I’m sorry … the memories are starting to come thick and fast, and I must allow them … it’s the only way … I am straining for intelligibility.) We were intimately packed on the sofa in Dr. Fletcher’s room. Dylan stood by the window fondling his crotch.

  “Anyone want a cuppa tea?”

  “Ooooh, yes please. Three sugars,” piped Megan, who was perching on the edge of a sofa perpendicular to ours.

  “How very artisan,” said Terrence, sunk back next to her, one leg crossed over the other in the feminine form, twirling a pen and balancing a leather-bound notebook on his lap.

  I hadn’t slept much the night before, what with seeing Lucy’s “moving-on” pics on Mugshot and having my insides hung up to dry. The whole scene took on a giddy, almost hallucinatory quality.

  “I bet you’ve had cunt on your mind all week,” the vagina seemed to be saying to me. It was Dylan, in the corner, to the left of the meticulously placed sketch of a naked female torso and crotch (directly above his teaching chair, directly in front of my sofa, directly yet silently testing me), as he fiddled with kettle and teabags on a rickety side table.

  Megan immediately took the bait (Dylan’s chief aim and pleasure being to get a rise from his female students). “To be honest, I don’t see why he has to be so profane. He uses the c-word so much and I can’t see any artistic or philosophical justification for it.”

  Handing a steaming cup to Megan before lurching into his throne with a cup for himself (this roughly signaling the beginning of the tutorial proper), Dylan smiled a smug note of satisfaction.

  “Need there be a justification for it? What’s wrong with some gratuitous cuntery?”

  The tute was on John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester; that libertine poet, all sex, guts, and booze. I had borrowed an Oxford University Press edition of the complete works from the Hollywell library, an orange
train ticket poking out from the top. I always use train or bus tickets for bookmarks (unlike Terrence, with his gold clip or peacock feather). I like the sense of a journey, as if the book is going to take me somewhere. As for Dylan’s language, he had worked hard (in a manner that suggested not working hard) to reach a stage where he could be as open and irreverent with us as he liked; to be a mate; a young one. We were so impressed to hear a tutor swear and act like one of us that we didn’t think to ever take issue or question the content. He enjoyed playing the windup merchant and therefore it was difficult to be offended. Megan felt differently about old Rochester though, who, unlike Dylan, hadn’t earned our respect by throwing parties and organizing trips to the pub:

  “Well, quite frankly, the endless, ahem, c-words seem a bit misogynistic to me,” replied Megan, heating up, her voice wobbling with all the righteousness that was simmering inside.

  Was I a mug? Had Lucy been playing me for a fool? I knew we weren’t together anymore, but wasn’t it a bit soon to be doing all that? And god knows how many others there had been. I could hardly call her a slut, or a slag, or a whore. But I wanted to. Fucking slut. No, too strong. I looked to the charcoal vagina for answers, but none were forthcoming.

  “ ‘And may no woman better thrive, that dares prophane the cunt I swive!’ ” performed Terrence with extra thespian attack on the obscenity. “It’s fabulous, Megan, what are you talking about? It’s so full of bite and wit, actually …” All dandies fancy themselves libertines, so of course Terrence would embrace the aristocratic hedonism.

  “Alright, Terrence,” said Dylan dismissively, displeased by the prospect of anyone else relishing the word, but mostly not wanting Terrence on his side. (I think he dislikes him as much as the rest of us.)

  It’s not like I hadn’t ever thought about it myself. Of course I had wondered what other girls would be like—those rogue phantasms that pop into the head when they shouldn’t; my dream team raring for the call-up from my wanking bench. Put me in, coach, put me in! But I’d never made it reality … I mean, Jesus Christ, I didn’t actually want to move on, did I? And I certainly didn’t want Lucy to.