Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  ‘Of whom, may I ask?’ she said, leaning closer in her chair. I could tell Dr Schnitz, observing me as if I were a rare specimen, was dying to speak. ‘Apposite criticism of whom?’

  ‘Erm. The Bard. I mean Bradley. On Othello! I felt like a hedgehog as the juggernaut bears down, klaxon screaming. Professor Organ scratched her slightly stubbly chin.

  Another lengthy pause. I thought these brainbos (brainbox bimbos) worked quicker than this. She glanced at her colleague, as if to sanction her contribution. Jesus, this was like good cop, bad cop.

  Dr Schnitz’s magpie eyes flashed. She spoke for the first time in a staccato treble: ‘How did you think he dealt with the question of Shakespeare’s double time-scheme?’

  ‘I thought he, er, dealt with it very comprehensively.’

  Professor Organ smiled at my non-answer. She would have to use a different instrument. A sharper scalpel. To save my embarrassment (or maybe to increase it—by this point I wasn’t sure), she said, ‘Yes, what do you think are the advantages of starting a narrative in medias res.’

  In medias res? Christ, my brain cells felt pulverised by the gladiatorial effort. That’s Latin, right? Or is it a place? Is it in St John’s Wood? No, that’s a des res. Giving up, I allowed my gaze to fall on my shoes. For a full minute. So powerful was Dr Schnitz’s stare in its effort to burrow under my brow that I thought she might have some sexual interest in me. As roasted as I looked, this didn’t surprise me that much. Universities are very sexual places; all that dry-as-dust learning must give everyone the horn. They are indeed perverse institutions. What else is there to get worked up about? All those Bard madmen and blue-stocking imbibers of Keats, too timid to drink their warm beakers of the south directly from life. They need a shot of real sex more urgently than the rest of us. And Dr Schnitz didn’t appear overly fussy. The thought of this made me feel much, much worse.

  Professor Organ put an end to my misery by changing the subject. ‘Tell me, Brian, what poetry do you like?’

  My mind went blank. I felt like the losing contestant on Mastermind, flailing in his ebon chair. But this, surely, was my subject? How could I be unable to name a single well-known poet? All I could think of were the smutty verses of Lord Rochester that I had been perusing in the common room.

  ‘Well, I’m a big fan of Rochester,’ I managed to squeak, relieved that I had located an example from, you know—the past.

  The professor shot me a patronising and disapproving look down the lines of her nose.

  ‘And when did you first come across Rochester?’ she purred, but not nicely.

  At this I almost laughed out loud. ‘Erm, perhaps that’s the wrong choice of verb!’

  Her unkissed mouth gave a kind of mirthless grimace to the thick silence of the room. She rephrased her question. ‘Okay, when did you first encounter Rochester’s verse?’

  ‘Just now, in the common room. Sorry, I’m not doing very well, am I?’ I said, and shifted in my seat.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ grinned the tall doctor. Oh God, she definitely fancies me.

  Professor Organ took the reins once more, with a sigh of vexation. ‘Okay, Brian, what fiction has stimulated you lately? Doesn’t have to be the nineteenth-century novel—old, contemporary, anything you’ve liked.’

  At last: a question I could answer! I wiped a slick of sweat from my brow and said, truthfully, ‘Blimey—everything from Norman Mailer to Henry Miller to Bret Easton Ellis.’

  Organ and Schnitz exchanged worried glances. By this I assumed that Mailer, Miller and Ellis weren’t their favourite authors. That they were somehow—what’s the phrase?—uncanonical.

  ‘And what, I’d be interested to know,’ said the professor almost inaudibly, ‘recommended you to these …’ she paused for maximum pejorative impact, ‘… writers?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Their energy mainly; their manly take on modern life. And, it has to be said,’ I announced with a glint in my eye, ‘the nooky.’

  Schnitz leaned forward. ‘Sorry, the what? Synecdoche?’

  ‘No, the sex. I mean, it’s how we all really think and feel isn’t it? Sex on the brain, most of us. Not like all that repressed Jane Austen stuff. How can you trust a forty-year-old virgin to write with authority on human relationships? I mean, when it comes to sex, Jane Austen’s just,’ I searched for the correct adjective, ‘crap.’

  Relieved that I had made a start (though somewhat worried that my thesis had been all selling and no substance), I was perturbed to see a deep frown materialise on Professor Organ’s robust face, like the first furrow cut into a wedding cake. Her colleague appeared to be suppressing a laugh.

  ‘And how,’ said the older woman with skyscraper-high disdain, ‘would you describe their treatment of women?’

  Some sort of contrarian voice—a goading yob-voice—had taken up residence in me over the past few minutes. ‘Well, it’s horses for courses, isn’t it. I’m sure men got a hard time from, what’s her name, the one that looked like a wrestler—mates with Picasso?’

  ‘Gertrude Stein?’ asked Dr Schnitz, raising an eyebrow and so elongating her nose to the length of a largeish courgette. This fiendish double act, these weird sisters, were beginning to seriously upset my equilibrium. The job of bike messenger suddenly seemed very appealing.

  ‘And how would you describe the work of Gertrude Stein?’ said Professor Organ with impatience. ‘Crap?’

  This hit me straight in the guts. The penny had dropped. Somehow, I knew in that moment, with the repetition of my somewhat generalised adjective, that I had failed the interview. For the rest, it was a season in hell. During the remaining forty-five minutes the word ‘crap’ would be fired at me again and again with the relentless accuracy of a Bosnian sniper. I counted thirty of them. At least. My lack of knowledge on every topic known to man was subjected to a strenuous investigation. The heat just never let up. I felt—to repeat one of Dr Schnitz’s classical allusions that I had to look up later—like Ixion on his wheel of fire.

  In the end, they both politely walked me to the door. With great insincerity, Professor Organ shook my hand and delivered her standard final line, as her colleague smiled libidinously in my direction.

  ‘Thank you, Brian. Feel free to look in on the library before you leave.’

  I closed the door and breathed fresh, uncontaminated, non-gender-specific air. Set alight by two feminist academics! Grilled to a cinder by gynocentric goons! My dream of a degree, of water-fights in the dorm, of a timber-floored London flat rich in reference works, of a better life … like cold ashes in the mouth. On unsteady legs, I staggered down to the library. But I didn’t have the stomach to enter. Instead I bumped into Emily and Pippa, exiting the canteen.

  ‘And don’t forget to bring me your Hobbes and Locke … Ciao!’ said Emily, her voice thunderously deep as before.

  Something turned direction in me then. Like a flank of timber breaking free from the log-jam. Something bitter and sour and encrusted took offence at their casual sense of entitlement to all this. The gravy train of privilege that they clung to until they were kicked off screaming. No—they didn’t need to cling to it and were never kicked off. The world welcomed them with warm, adoring arms. Like high-ranking credit cards, there was nowhere (and nothing) on this earth these girls were refused. Inevitably, I thought of their parents. Yes, you are to blame, I decided, for your Little Pippas and Poppets and Emilys learning nothing worth knowing in twenty years. I’ve had enough! Understand? You fucks with your two February weeks in Chamonix, your kids with Latin to A level, your million-pound houses ringing with accomplishment, cello-practice and the traditional songs of your Norwegian nannies! Your cats named Sophocles and Aristotle. Your four-wheel drives and teary compassion for those little ‘golliwogs’ starving south of the equator; your Sophies, Tabithas and Natashas with their own ponies and shelves full of Austen and Bronte by the age of ten; you muesli-eating, Guardian-reading covert yuppies (for that’s what you are in spite of your earnest altrui
sm and leftist bravado)—you have no idea, as you leave your Rembrandt exhibition for an evening of ‘magical’ Verdi at the Royal Opera House, that somewhere (in Camden, Toxteth, Middlesbrough, East Kilbride) A SINGLE MOTHER IS TAKING IT UP THE ARSE FROM HER PIMP JUST SO SHE CAN AFFORD ENOUGH CRACK TO KEEP HERSELF ALIVE IN ORDER TO KEEP HER BABY ALIVE FOR ANOTHER WEEK!

  Forgive me. I think I need a little lie down.

  ‘Your move,’ says Robin, and takes his hand from his bishop.

  Michelle smiles at his foolish blunder, her grin reproduced in the black windows of the train. She pretends to um and ah over her next move—this little piggy went to market, this little piggy went …

  ‘Uh oh,’ I say, over the muted thunder of the sleepers. I watch her bony hand reach for her queen, as spontaneously as she can make it.

  That’s the problem with women, they’re always pretending to make decisions when they’ve already made their minds up. Hours ago. Weeks ago. Why do they do this? Why do they play this transparent game, this tired ritual? Ah, the mendacious mores of the gentler sex. One of the oldest subjects known to man. Quite obviously Homer’s Penelope didn’t exist. Before the stereotype-hacks identified the sluttish toga-babe, the Elizabethan temptress, the Augustan bodice-burster, she was the first male fantasy figure. Certainly chimerical. No woman was ever so constant in real life. Wait twenty chaste years for some geezer while he gallivants round the Med with nymphs and sexy sorcerers? I think not, somehow. In real life she would’ve been twice divorced with another teenage son. And teaching those suitors a few positions, too. The only thing Penelope really did was to perform an operation every night that she wasn’t entirely honest about the following morning. That much smacks of real life, of real insight into the feminine psyche. That’s how I know Michelle is only pretending to her husband that she hadn’t decided on her next move ten minutes ago,

  ‘Check,’ Michelle announces, trying not to sound too triumphant.

  A cloud passes over Robin’s brow. Outwitted and unmanned, sir! I have been watching their game for half an hour. Or rather, I have been watching Michelle let Robin think he had a hope in hell for half an hour. They’ve been quite chatty with me, all told. Amazing how friendly people can be if you make the effort. They even told me more about their plans for their first child, down to possible names for both genders. A baby—something they can both cherish and celebrate, that will inaugurate their long future together. How a marriage should be, really. And all this I didn’t anticipate when we left King’s Cross two hours ago. Takes all sorts to make up a world, I suppose.

  To save Robin his embarrassment I clear my throat and ask a question.

  ‘Big wedding was it? Last July?’

  Michelle looks up from the board with a dreamy grin.

  ‘Two hundred guests, a country church, and a horse and carriage to the Chinese restaurant in the village afterwards.’

  Robin straightens proudly in his confined train-seat at the memory.

  ‘I tell you—my speech, mate. What a classic. I can still remember it line for line. Shame I couldn’t then!’ At this he bursts out laughing, his jellied black hair shaking on his crown. Of course, I had to make the mistake of asking them how they met. In ten minutes they’d privileged me with their entire life stories. I just had to know why they chose each other; had to know the secret of happiness and why it had proved so elusive for me. I also wondered, but didn’t ask, about their sex life. I was curious to know if they were still doing it with the same frequency and at the same rate of knots as when they first met. Were they still doing it at all? After all, once Mandy and I had co-habited for a year, the only sexual activity in our house was the dismal sight of Fidel attempting to fellate himself night after night. I glanced at the suitcases under Robin’s eyes and decided he looked tired. Very tired. Yes, they were still at it, all right. Like laboratory rabbits, if I guessed correctly I bet Michelle, with her enthusiastic, energetic hands, never allowed him a moment’s rest. And probably after he’d endured a gruelling day advising on capital gains tax, too. I really felt for him. What is it about women always wanting sex when you’re at your most exhausted? You take them away for the wicked weekend in the Cotswolds with the two dozen red roses and the Bollinger on ice and they’re not interested. Then, after the month from hell at work, when you are at mental and physical breaking point, they will—completely against expectation—choose to treat you to the basque and sheer hold-ups concealed under colourless jogging attire … They don’t want a quick one with the lights out, oh no: they want to draw a real first-night performance from you. A proper neck-ricker, with a month of foreplay and the sort of gymnastics that would kill a parallel-bars Olympic gold medallist.

  ‘Yeah, my speech wasn’t up to scratch either,’ I say. ‘Still, you only have to do it once. Hopefully.’

  ‘Well I couldn’t go through the hangover again,’ observes Michelle brightly. She was absent-mindedly twisting her wedding band on her finger as she spoke. Yes, I used to do that, I admit to myself with a simultaneous plummeting of my spirits. The ring. My Argos-bought wedding ring. That golden emblem of exclusivity. I remember how it felt on the finger itself, heavy and solid; how people looked at you and treated you differently; how inwardly altered you felt. As if one of life’s great hurdles had been finally vaulted. And now there is a pale welt where it used to be, like the ring a vase of flowers leaves when you remove it from a table to throw the dead blooms away.

  Robin’s face has darkened again on contemplating the board. You’re up Crap Creek without your mobile, Robin—just admit it. I feel I should ask his wife about the unmentionable that everyone keeps mentioning: the Millennium. Everyone seems willing to talk about the forty-eight-hour rave they’re planning to attend, but no one wants to go into the unspoken fear that this could be it. This could be the end of the world as we know it. Fuck your Cuban Missile Crisis or the eclipses of 1605 or Cassandra wailing about the fall of Troy. This is the day of judgement. The long-awaited global catastrophe. Let’s hope we’ve all settled the tab with the Big Man upstairs and packed our souls. The thought that has definitely crossed everybody’s mind is this one: what if, when they release the balloons on the twelfth stroke, the heavens are suddenly rent apart and a Pythonesque hand reaches earthward for all the ant-like sinners, like in some nightmare by Fuseli? The earth groaning under its own weight of humanity, malignant and benign alike. Molten streams of people, like a second flood. Except it won’t be Pythonesque. It will be unthinkable. We are standing, after all, on the brink of the unknown. Great and terrifying forces may be released. Twothousandzerozeropartyover, and all that. But nobody, apart from cranks, Seventh-Day Adventists and children under ten, is actually talking about it. They’re just thinking it. Extraordinary.

  ‘So, what have you got planned for the big night?’ I ask, forgetting that, if they interrogate me, I have no satisfactory answer.

  ‘New Year’s? Oh, we’re having a quiet one with Robin’s mum.’

  I nod, and allow myself a glance at the train window. I can see my own broad forehead, projected with the image of three looming pylons, the dark countryside beyond. So everything’s going to be just the same as we left it come January the first? Christ, I’d like you to be right, Michelle.

  ‘I might have a quiet night in myself,’ I tell her. ‘Anyhow, I’m just off to the smoking car.’

  I excuse myself and rise on jelly legs. Oh yes, another thing that slipped my mind—I have capitulated to smoking. Some time after we rumbled out of Peterborough I snapped. I couldn’t handle the bleakness, the sensory deprivation. With no proper booze on offer and this song sung blue on constant replay in my head there seemed little alternative. The ambrosial fire of a Rizla full of cadged Old Holborn marked my fall from grace. Abstinence was just too much like purgatory. I guess I don’t have that iron in the soul, that strength of character that holds out to the death under enemy torture. What a depressing fact to learn about oneself.

  The smoked-glass door opens obsequiousl
y before me, like a mechanical courtier. I find an empty seat among my fellow chortling chokers, those other deferrers of reality. Flattening my notebook out on the Formica, I try to recall the last evening Rudi Buckle visited the shared flat. It was only three weeks ago, but it feels like the previous century. The sunset over the gardens behind the house had been much like the jagged, apocalyptic cataract of colour that is streaking the skies outside my train window. I remember writing, it won’t last long—it never does. The pale pink of a late November afternoon as it slides into dusk. The shivering, transitory sky and its canopy of tiny clouds, its billows of birds. The leaf-graveyards of the gardens out back with their mulch of wet yellow, peaty bronze. Woodsmoke smells; plumes of white above the huddled terraces. Everywhere a sense of oncoming and increasing emptiness; the terrible firmament full of metal and last light … The big chestnut stripped down to fibres, its hardy skeleton—its leaves filling the whole garden like a deflated parachute. It stands in a kind of agony: a hand-wringing mother shaking in a winter gale, all night grieving for her dead children; like a Niobe of the urban forest.

  Five minutes later, and a startling new palette in the heavens. A glowing salmon sun behind the fixed spires of poplars; a stripe of gold dotting the high clouds. Forlorn bushes and early lights coming on in windows … steady change: minute by minute; the light sucked down from the sky to a fluorescent horizon. Elsewhere, that strange greyness unique to late November. Whatever is present in the sky will not last long. No, it won’t last long—it never does.

  Rampant Rudi sat in my kitchen in a slippery red shirt, lighting a cheroot from a candle stuck in an old whisky bottle. He had been growing his hair long, and looked like a chubby version of Salvator Rosa’s Self-Portrait. With his suede-soft voice, he said, ‘In my experience, Bry, when a woman is sure of her man, that’s when she starts behaving badly.’

  ‘They take advantage, you mean? Once you’ve fully committed?’