King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  ‘It’s really quite all right,’ Sylvie said. ‘I didn’t mean to tick you off, or anything. I could see you weren’t yourself.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ Billa said. ‘I certainly wasn’t. I am really so sorry. It really isn’t like me.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Sylvie said, ‘I’m sure anyone else would have picked you up. I just happened to be nearest.’

  ‘Even if that’s true,’ Billa said, ‘it was you who did do it. I never said thank you. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You’ve said thank you now,’ Sylvie said, smiling.

  ‘And so we must be friends,’ Billa said.

  In a moment, they had established that they had nothing else to do for the moment. Billa asked Sylvie to come back for a cup of coffee—there was still some funeral fruitcake left, and would be for some months. But when Sylvie suggested that Billa come back to her house, to have coffee with her, not promising much in the way of anything else— ‘though I could do you some toast’ —Billa was tempted, and agreed. As Sylvie said, as they went companionably through the back lanes between wisteria and magnolia trees, past terraces and almshouses and the stately white houses of the eighteenth-century gentry, Billa had done enough entertaining for the moment. Sometimes it was nice to be someone else’s guest, however inadequately entertained. And that was true. Billa thought of Kitty returning, flushed, from the greengrocer with her bag-for-life full of her week’s greenery; she would knock on Billa’s door, probably pushing at the same time, and be surprised Billa was out still, not available as the recipient of concern and sympathy. That—offering to be the recipient of concern and sympathy—was the most tiring form of entertaining, Billa had found, as tiring as making sure a small child had everything he needed. She was rather glad to be going to a strange house, even for an hour or so.

  ‘I have heard of you,’ Billa said, when they were in Sylvie’s kitchen. ‘Not by name, I mean. I’ve heard what people say about you.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘No, I mean…’ Billa said. ‘Well, they say that you’re an artist, that was what I heard.’

  ‘If that’s the worst…’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Billa said. ‘That’s the worst of it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, I teach art to the kids in Barnstaple,’ Sylvie said. ‘Nothing so very elevated.’

  ‘Do you not do art yourself?’ Billa said. ‘“Do art” —that sounded strange. Do I mean “do art”?’

  ‘“Do art” is just fine,’ Sylvie said, smiling. ‘Yes, I do art, even when no one’s looking or when they’re seizing my attention by trying to eat the pastel chalks or sniff the Copydex, which is how I spend my days, mostly, putting a stop to that sort of thing.’

  ‘May I see some time?’ Billa said. ‘Your art?’

  Sylvie put her coffee mug down, and appeared to assess Billa. The kitchen they were in was not as atrociously untidy as Billa had anticipated. There were two bowls for a cat by the sink on a sheet of newspaper, and the animal had scattered the dry food, which constituted its dinner, about a large area. There were two dinner plates, a saucepan and two wine glasses in the sink along with the breakfast things, and a finished bottle stood on the draining-board. The pine table they sat at could have done with a wipe—the crumbs from breakfast and spilt gobbets of muesli had been ignored. Billa had seen worse.

  ‘May you see some time?’ Sylvie said. ‘Well, I don’t see why not. I’m not a lady watercolourist, though.’

  ‘Too many of those around,’ Billa said. ‘My friend Kitty, she’s long ago run out of interesting subjects round here, so she’s taken to painting the same things over and over. She’s still getting through her photographs of her holiday in Tunisia two years ago—she props one up on the easel, and she just copies it, with her tongue out, you know.’

  ‘I know exactly,’ Sylvie said. ‘What happens when she gets to the end of her photographs, or the usable ones, anyway? I suppose even Kitty takes some photographs you wouldn’t want to turn into a watercolour.’

  ‘She’s nearly finished, I believe,’ Billa said. ‘Nearly got to the bottom of the pile. Not that there is a pile, it’s all digital nowadays. I presume she’ll go back to painting the view from the Wolf Walk. Or she could just go on holiday somewhere else and take some more photographs. But you’re not an artist like that.’

  ‘No,’ Sylvie said. ‘I’m not much like Kitty. I used to be—I used to put marks on paper and canvas and turn solid stuff into shapes on pedestals. I even carved a piece of elm, once.’

  ‘Lovely grain,’ Billa said. ‘I know that much—it has a lovely grain, elm.’

  ‘Yes, indeed it does,’ Sylvie said. ‘But I teach kids to do that sort of stuff all day long, and I don’t really feel like starting up again when I get home. I do different sorts of things nowadays.’

  ‘And can I see?’

  Sylvie gave her, again, that assessing look; then she apparently decided that Billa would do. She got up, and together they went into the garden—the lawn needed a trim and the beds a once-over to get rid of the weeds but, like the kitchen, no worse than that. The outhouse, or perhaps studio, was not connected to the house: you had to go out of the kitchen door and across the patio, Sylvie explained. It was good on a winter morning to feel that you had to go to work—to leave your cosy home and travel, however short a distance, to your place of work. Commuting was good, Sylvie explained; a commute that lasted twenty seconds was good enough for her.

  ‘Here we are,’ Sylvie said, throwing a switch; a brilliant fluorescent light flooded the studio.

  ‘If you cleaned all those leaves off,’ Billa said, nodding upwards at the glass roof, ‘you wouldn’t need artificial light at all.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Sylvie said. ‘I ought to do it. I have a terror of crashing through, though—getting up there on a ladder, leaning too far over, losing my balance, and—’ She shuddered. ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Get someone in,’ Billa said. She had never been in an artist’s studio before, if you didn’t count Kitty’s box room where her easel and paints and unsold works were stored. It was unexpectedly orderly. In pigeonholes to one side were pages of magazines, torn out roughly and labelled with the signs of male and female, and boxes of artists’ materials—pastels and oils, pencils and charcoal—were shelved above stores of paper, sketchbooks and two large blank canvases. The work surface was two or three metres across, in white Formica, and an efficient-looking array of glue, scissors, rulers, pencils, rubbers, sharpeners sat in an office-tidy by the side of a small guillotine and a photographer’s spyglass. Propped up was what looked like a finished work. Billa’s eyesight was not quite what it had been, and she murmured, ‘Impressionist, I suppose you could call it,’ at this pink, dappled, throbbing image. It didn’t seem to depict anything in particular, but the rippling effect of small strokes of paint in shades of pink and white and brown did remind her of impressionist paintings she had sometimes seen on an occasional trip to London and the Royal Academy. She put her spectacles on, and immediately saw that brushstrokes had not created this effect, but a thousand miniature, collaged pieces of magazine print. ‘Ingenious,’ she said politely, moving closer, and then, all at once, it was apparent what everything, every component of the image was: a man’s parts, cut out and glued on.

  ‘My word,’ she said. ‘That startled me.’

  ‘It tends to do that,’ Sylvie said. Her expression was unreadable; had she meant to shock an old woman who had insulted her? Billa thought not. Sylvie was direct, and was showing Billa her work, no more than that.

  ‘So,’ Billa said. ‘You cut these out of, what, magazines? And then what? Forgive me—I would just rather like to know what the process is.’

  ‘I put them in jars first,’ Sylvie said. ‘These jars.’ There were nine, darkening by degrees from left to right. ‘I arrange them by colour, really. The very pale ones here—the darkest ones here. I’m only really interested in colour. The other things…’

  Sylvie went on expl
aining, about the glue, the canvas, the glaze, the difficulties of sourcing the material, and Billa went on saying, ‘I see, I see,’ at first politely, but then with real interest and engagement. It seemed to her to be an interesting undertaking. She herself had never seen a man’s genitals in life, apart from Tom’s—she searched her memory, but apart from a visit to Equus twenty years ago, one or two things like that, that seemed to be the case. ‘I see,’ Billa went on saying, enjoying Sylvie’s seriousness, and placing her in context among the ceramicists and the tapestry-makers, the perpetrators of macramé and the proponents of batik. She did seem to have her careful, devoted place in the town; the maker of découpages, as Sylvie called it; the community cutter-out of willies. By the end of the morning Sylvie had handed Billa a pair of curved-blade scissors, and Billa was cutting out the crucial parts of nude men, perfectly handily.

  11.

  Miranda had been talking for only five minutes when the door to the lecture room opened behind her. She paid no attention. Students were never good at turning up on time, and she let them come and go more or less as they chose. She continued talking from her notes on Robinson Crusoe. It was a windowless room, ill-lit by theoretically adjustable lights, and this lecture was timetabled for three o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday, a graveyard slot. Miranda herself liked to take a brief nap around this time. She was used to facing a slumped and dull-eyed audience with conspicuous gaps in it. She was surprised, now, that the students grew suddenly alert, that they had started to talk among themselves, their pens and pencils abandoned above their note-taking paper.

  ‘As I was saying,’ Miranda said, to get their attention back, turning to one side to see what, if anything, had created this disturbance. To her alarm, standing inside the lecture room were two policemen, each holding his cap in his hand.

  ‘Could I have your attention, please?’ one policeman said, and the walkie-talkie at his belt crackled into electric life. ‘I’m going to have to interrupt this lecture. Is there a Faisal Ahmed in the room?’

  ‘Faisal,’ Miranda said, correcting the policeman’s pronunciation. ‘No, there isn’t. There’s no one of that name in this lecture hall.’

  Faisal Khalil had been sitting in the third row. Was it an illusion, or had the girls to either side of him drawn away somewhat? He now raised his hand, perhaps conceding that, since he was the only person in the room who was not white, it was only a matter of time before the policemen asked him directly who he was. ‘I think you might mean me,’ he said. ‘Ahmed’s my middle name.’

  The larger of the two policemen looked at him, and went outside. He could be heard talking indistinctly into his walkie-talkie. An excited murmuring broke out in the hall.

  ‘Quiet, please,’ Miranda said, and then, to the policeman, ‘Who gave you permission to come into my lecture?’

  The policeman ignored this, and in a moment his colleague came back in. ‘That’s right,’ he said to Faisal. ‘Are you Faisal Ahmed Khalil?’

  Faisal agreed that he was.

  ‘Confused your surname and your Christian name,’ the policeman said.

  ‘I don’t have a Christian name,’ Faisal said, reasonably enough.

  ‘We need you to come with us, please,’ the policeman said, brushing this irrelevant objection aside. Faisal, with resignation, as if he had been expecting something rather like this all his life, got up, taking his book, his notepaper, his pens and pencils, and followed the policemen out.

  ‘I’m going to leave it there for the day,’ Miranda said to her audience, though she had only reached halfway down the first page of her notes on the nature of capitalism and Robinson Crusoe. In any case, she had lost their attention now, and would not be able to regain it. They could just jolly well go and read a book on the subject. She left the lecture hall in time to see, through the glass double doors, Faisal Khalil being helped—not pushed, but definitely helped—into a squad car. With her documents, she hurried upstairs to Benjy’s office. She knocked, briefly, and then entered without waiting for a reply.

  Benjamin was sitting at a table with someone she vaguely recognized as some administrator or other from the university headquarters. They seemed to be going over some figures.

  ‘Did you know this was going to happen?’ she said immediately.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miranda,’ Benjamin said. ‘I’m in the middle of something here.’

  ‘This is most important,’ Miranda said. ‘Did you give the police permission to come into my lecture?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Benjamin said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Miranda Kenyon, one of our senior lecturers,’ he added, as an aside, to the administrative bod.

  ‘Two policemen just came into my lecture in Theatre Three,’ Miranda said. ‘They told me to stop what I was doing, and demanded to know if Faisal Khalil was there. Then they took him away. Did you give them permission?’

  ‘I’m sure they wouldn’t have come in without permission,’ the administrative person said. Miranda recognized him now—he was one of several deputy vice-chancellors. ‘I’m sure they had a very good reason for coming in.’

  ‘And I’m sure they didn’t,’ Miranda said. ‘Benjamin. Did you give the police permission to come into my lecture and arrest a student in front of a hundred other students?’

  ‘I don’t think I need to answer that question,’ Benjamin said.

  ‘I really don’t think we can resist the police in the legitimate conduct of their duties,’ the deputy VC said. ‘I really don’t think this is something for you to get worked up about.’

  ‘I think I should also say that the student was the only student in his year from a non-white background,’ Miranda said. ‘I have no idea what he is supposed to have done, but it doesn’t look very reasonable to me.’

  ‘I’m sure the police know exactly what they are doing,’ Benjamin said, taking his cue. ‘I very much doubt that there is anything for you to worry about here.’

  ‘So you’re happy, are you, that the police come in and arrest our students in the most public way imaginable, without bothering to inform us? Is that how we are going to start running our disciplinary procedures now?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miranda,’ the deputy VC said urbanely. ‘Miranda? Is that right? I’m sorry, but we really are in the middle of something very important here. We’ve heard what you have to say, but I think we have to ask you to let us get back to all this.’ He gestured at the table top before him, covered with papers—accounts, discussion papers, institutional proposals, every one of them written by people who believed that you said, ‘This proposal was considered by the VC and I in March 2007.’ Miranda turned and left the pair of them to pursue the work of the enemies of literature.

  ‘A little bit less concern on that one’s part for the welfare of students, a little bit less intrusion,’ Benjamin said. ‘That would be very welcome, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘I recognize the type,’ the deputy VC said, perfectly calmly.

  12.

  ‘Amy was, like, can you tell the lead singer that I, like, want to marry him, and she was, like, well, you can go on MySpace and tell him, or I’ll take your number and I’ll tell him. Anyway, how was your weekend? Oh, cool. Because one really dodgy one called that William something. You know Amy’s friend Joe who’s like blond, it’s his birthday, so they managed to get him a ticket to go, and the trombonist was incredible, he like did not stop dancing, it was incredible. We were like in the top seats, in the circle, he wouldn’t stop shaking his hips the whole time and the lead singer wouldn’t stop shaking his hips the whole time, and the trumpeter, he was all dressed in white. But the whole place smelt of wee!’

  Ahead of Mauro, a girl sat, talking into her telephone. She had been talking like this since the train had left Paddington station; talking into her headset intently, hardly making sense at all. They had stopped at the first station on the line, Reading, and the girl had gone on talking; they were pulling out now and the conversation was going on. ‘That’s
crazy,’ Mauro said, actually out loud, at the volume and nonsense and unstoppability of it. Around her people were staring and raising newspapers, and talking about her in loud voices. ‘There were some really weird types there,’ she went on at top volume. ‘Yes, just at Reading.’

  Mauro had only once taken the train in England before, and he had not very often taken one even at home, in Italy. He knew how it was done, but there had always been people around to give him a lift and, anyway, he hadn’t gone to so many places, or needed to. He had done it all wrong. He had turned up at Paddington, queued, and asked for a ticket to Hanmouth. The man behind the counter hadn’t understood, or hadn’t known where he was asking for; Mauro had spelt it out, as best he could, and the clerk had looked it up. Finally, he asked for a sum of money so outlandishly large that Mauro had said he didn’t want a first-class ticket. He was corrected; thought of walking away; thought of David’s parents, waiting for him; and resentfully, crossly, with a sense that he was doing the right thing here and it was costing him nearly a hundred pounds, he handed over his bank card, almost hoping that it would be refused. When he had caught the train before, that one time, he had not paid. It had been a Sunday, escaping from the hospital to which David had been taken, and Mauro had correctly calculated that there would be no ticket checkers at work. Then, he had not paid for his ticket; now, on a more serious obligation, he felt he ought to.

  His overdraft, in the event, bore the brunt, and he got onto the first train to Bristol, after which he would have to change. He sat down in a seat at a table, but in a moment a family of four came up—overweight, overladen, puffing and morose—and stood, examining their little orange tickets, talking to each other with theatrical bafflement. Eventually, Mauro understood that they wanted him to move; that they for some reason considered the seat he was sitting in to be their seat. The English were strange; they forced him to move and to recognize his mistake without addressing one word to him, or even looking directly at him. Mauro went on through the train. His instinct had been to sit down in the next empty seat, but now he understood what the small tickets at the back of each seat signified. He went on, from carriage to carriage, as every seat seemed to be taken; reserved, but not taken. Eventually he had come to a carriage, an inhuman, overstuffed, overheated, sweet-smelling carriage, in which no seat was reserved, where people like him who had not planned or reserved were placed. These incompetent planners jostled and shoved, and squashed up next to each other. Mauro wanted to go on; but when he eventually reached the far door, he saw another thicket of white reservations in the carriage to follow. He turned back, and sat down in a seat going backwards, thinking himself lucky. And then the girl in the seat ahead of him answered her phone, and began to talk.