by Jo Baker
I strode past the bar, through the blurt of voices and music; I glanced in, saw them among the glinting glass and red upholstery. Karen said something funny. I watched her smile spread in satisfaction at the laugh she’d got, and the way she raised her glass to hide it. Tim made some comment, glancing sidelong at Nicholas; Meryl touched Nicholas’s arm, tweaking his attention to her. And then I was past the window and off into the darkness.
* * *
—
I barely slept that night. No sooner was one worry—trigger warnings, Nicholas, Steven, lectures, Mark—put aside than another popped up in its place like a duck in a pond. The final and most distracting of these ducks was my desperate need for sleep; it swam around and around in circles till well after two. Then they all bobbed up together at five a.m., crashing through the surface and shattering all possibility of further rest.
I was up with the lark and in with the secretaries, Sam already dropped off at nursery at opening time, while most of the university was still in darkness. At nine I bumped into Lisa in the corridor: Hello there, Lisa, that’s a lovely jumper, and filthy weather isn’t it. (She always had a lovely jumper and it was always filthy weather.)
When I went to make coffee, Mina’s light was on. Patrick’s wasn’t. It struck me as odd that they’d come in separately, but then people had such wildly different timetables. Through the cross-wires of the glass-panelled door I could see her hunched at her computer, peering at the screen; she had a tired-already look about her that I recognised from my bathroom mirror. So I made her a coffee and on the way back tapped her office door with my toe. She jumped, looked round, smiled, and opened the door for me.
“Milk or no milk?”
“Ooh, no milk, thank you.”
“Good cos I don’t have any.”
“You want those crib notes? I’ll find them for you.” She set the coffee down, turned towards the filing cabinet.
“It’s not that, actually.”
We sat down. She was wearing a loose black blouse over a vest patterned with brightly coloured Mexican death’s heads. Her fingers were tightly interlaced, and squeezed between her knees, and her collarbones stood proud and tight. Pushed for time and chasing deadlines but, well, being nice. Being lovely.
“Maybe I should go to my mentor about it.”
“Who’s your mentor then?”
“Christian Scaife.”
A flicker of an exquisite eyebrow. “Oh-kay.”
“But the thing is with him as Head of Department. As my boss. I don’t want to, well. Flag up this kind of thing. Because I can cope, of course. It’s just I need a little guidance.”
“Who suggested Chris as your mentor?”
“Well…he did.”
She seemed to be on the point of saying something, and then didn’t. I told her about the conflict in the last class. Nicholas’s taking down of another writer for his depiction of a female murder victim. How he’d said that that kind of material needed a trigger warning, and that whilst I realised this was valid, I also knew the content was no worse or better than the kind of thing you’d see on Sunday-night teatime telly. That it had occurred to me that he, Nicholas, could well have experienced some kind of trauma, since he was asking for a trigger warning, but I didn’t know and didn’t want to go prodding around where it might hurt. In short, I didn’t know how to handle it without making it worse, seeming to take sides, or censoring content you could find in any bookshop in the country.
Mina properly listened. She said, “First things first. Okay? This needn’t be such a big deal. Send a round robin email to the whole group, attach the class protocol document, make it as neutral as you can. Just a bit of admin, nothing personal. Tell them they all have to reread before next week.”
“Good. Yes.”
“So that’s your arse covered about trigger warnings. If the older guy chooses to ignore protocol then it’s not your fault: you told him. He gets a final warning, and if he’s a dick about it, you pass him on to the Head of Department, and if that doesn’t solve the issue, Chris can refer him to the Disciplinary Committee.”
“So I can just pass the buck?”
“Totally. That’s what all that bureaucracy is there for. So you can pass that buck and get on with your job.”
“I don’t know, wouldn’t that seem a bit…nuclear?”
“But it might do this guy good. Some students are tender little plants and they need sunshine and careful watering and even a touch of frost’ll do for them. Others are more like walnut trees and what they need to make them bear fruit is actually a damn good thrashing. Could be he’s one of them.”
“Is that true?”
“You can always tell him that: say you’re challenging him because you see something in him. He’ll love it.”
“No, I mean, is it true about walnut trees?”
“It’s what my granddad always used to say. He used to go out in the garden of an evening and hit it with a stick.”
“Did you get many walnuts off it?”
“Come to think of it, I don’t remember there ever being any.”
Trigger warning: Contains violence against people and animals.
Chemistry
Like a rock lobbed into a stream, there’s the smash and split and then the water rejoining and smoothing itself again so that the surface is barely troubled but underneath there’s the remaining solid lump of stone that must be slammed into always after. It will take more than a life to wear it down to smoothness.
Around him the college bar is thick with drinkers and he drinks sitting at the counter and when someone talks to him he finds that he is blinking at their face and wondering not so much what they are saying but why they are bothering to speak. He turns away from the moving mouth and he looks down at his hand there on the wooden countertop and it is dirty he is filmed with dirt he will always be she was the only clean thing in his life and he can’t write clean with his dirty hand.
His head sinks over his glass and he closes his eyes. And when he closes his eyes he is with her, it is more than memory he is there and the day is arid, blazing, and they find each other by the river, and they swim and the water beads on her skin; and it drips from her hair stretching out the curls and he kisses her, and their bodies are cold against each other, and their mouths are warm.
Come with me?
And she takes his hand and they are climbing up the bank, dry earth attaching itself in sprays up their shins, past dusty nettles and fat balsam stems, up into the sunpatched beech woods.
This is where I come, she says, when I want to be alone.
She toes off her squelching tennis shoes and upends them and the river water pours out and she laughs and the cold wet clothes are peeled off like skin leaving them more than naked for each other. There in the darkness of the college bar he touches his fingers to his lips in echo of a kiss. There is frost on the grass outside there is a snap in the air like it could shatter into bits like it could cut you up.
Someone leans in against him at the bar. He opens his eyes and sees some guy.
You look proper wasted there, mate, the guy says, and he nods slowly because this seems like the first sense he has heard since the phone call and the news, since that carefully casual Maybe you’ve heard, as if the girl were just someone he might have seen around, as if her death were just a scrap of gossip that had drifted upwards from the locals, and was nothing much at all. But she had chosen death, had taken it to her, body and soul, as she had once taken him.
A girl leans round the guy and he just stares at her treacle-coloured curls and her freckles and she smiles at him and he blinks a slow sick blink and he knows it is not her because she is two hundred and more miles away and cold as stone. He knows he is to blame. Without him there would have been no darkness in her. He touches something and it can’t stay clean.
&nbs
p; Later and he is in someone’s room. A rumpled bed, identikit posters and books. A bong passed from hand to hand murky bubbling. All this edgy conformity.
Some girl the girl with the treacle curls crosslegged on the floor beside him is talking and he nods but he doesn’t like it and he doesn’t care what she is saying it’s all empty words weightless and they drift like ash
He draws in the smoke again, and he holds the smoke deep inside him, and it snakes through his lungs and into blood and it creeps and slithers into his bones and for a moment nothing happens, and he thinks, Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this, and goes to get up. The world goes white.
He comes round to circled faces, pushes up and away. Outside the night is ice and the ground seesaws beneath his feet and the air is hissing and whispering and there is a hand on the back of his neck pushing him forward pushing him on. He has to get out, get away. He steps out of college through the little door in the big door, and along the pavement comes a man and a dog, the dog solid muscle and jowls and straining on its harness and the man shaved head puffed jacket. The man gives him a look he doesn’t like and so fuck him he aims a kick at the dog and the dog crunches in the ribs and it flings to the end of its lead and the man is jolted with it and the dog yelps, hits the ground on its side, scrabbles and whines and the man is close up face broken veins and blackheads and creases narrowed pinky eyes. The man spits You little shit what did she ever do to you, and this is the best idea he’s had in ages. He smiles. A fist smacks into his face and the pavement swings up to meet him and
The night porter leans over him. There’s blood in his eyes. He hauls himself over onto all fours pavement beneath hands belly heaving vomit onto the stones and blue lights and huddled in a blanket and A&E and softening of pain and a woman leaning over him breathing dabbing sticking and her breasts close in blue scrubs and no sign of concussion the smell of her of disinfectant and sweat and washing powder and deodorant and he closes his eyes and feels her breath on him
She leans away and says Well you are going to have a scar there young man.
He shrugs
You have been a silly boy haven’t you. Getting tanked up, getting into fights; you’ve got off lightly, you know. Could have been much worse.
But this is all that was ever wanted, to feel something and be in the moment feeling it, to be right now in the present moment, here. The smell of her and the warmth of her and the pillow of her breasts and the pain of the cut and of its stitching. But the moment is gone as moments always are and she is saying something about what to expect what to do if pain painkillers and if infection and then there is a phone in reception where he can call for free
Call what
Call a taxi. Taxi home.
Home?
A shuffle of images the big house with the gravel drive two hundred and more miles north of here and the cold kitchen with the fizzing light and the Margie’s steak pies, and the attic rooms of childhood Gabriel and nanny down the hall, and the common room at school with its sagging armchairs and its chessboard and the day-old Times and Telegraph, or the polish and dope smell of his college rooms and clutter of books and mugs and clothes and the books. Home is in none of these places it slips through his fingers like water and is as ungraspable as Now. Home was her and she is lost.
Are we done, he asks the nurse and she says I should say we’re done, and he says Can I go, and she says Of course you can but call a taxi and he says I’ll walk as he swings his legs off the table, and she says You won’t walk you need a cab and straight to bed and a good night’s sleep sleep it off because that head my god that head is going to hurt you in the morning
He says, Okay okay mum, I’ll get a cab and he leaves her there backstage in A&E and he walks out through the waiting-room hopefuls and front of house and past the receptionists behind their security screens and he goes through the swooshing doors and across the yellow grid where the ambulances swim in and out again and he crosses the carpark and he is out into the city. Headlights stream and flare and there are halos round the streetlamps. Not back to his rooms no not with his things in them no, all the evidence that adds up to him. A hotel. He could sleep in a hotel where he can be absent from himself as well as everybody else. He thinks of the girl with the treacle-coloured hair and he could go to her he could go to her and be let in and be taken to bed, if he remembered who she was and where she lived but he doesn’t remember not even a name. There is pain in his head and his eyebrow stings and he walks through the night city past the kebab vans and the closed shops and the tourist junk and the sugar-crumbling medieval walls and the bikes piled against railings and the terrace houses and the gates are locked but he scrambles over them, cuts his hand on the rust. Beyond there is dew on the grass, and he switches on the torch on his phone and the headstones slope and rabbits freeze spotlit and their burrows dig right through the graves and out again ivy trails and a car’s turning headlights make Caravaggio shadows, he sucks blood and dirt from his hand. He turns the light and swings it yes this is the right one it is his. The man buried here with his wife Anne you can barely make it out but the man buried here lived to be fifty-two and have two of his children buried before him and he died in 1843 and he had married and had children and the children died and his name was Nicholas Palmer. He alive there lays his head down on the cold earth on the pastness of this other man, the over and doneness of him, eternally over. Arm crooked behind his head he looks up into the filthy city sky filmed with streetlamps and car fumes and he finds his cigarettes and he smokes a cigarette and he thinks of the beech wood green and alive and the leaves stirring and dripping water glowing moss and birds in the trees and sometimes a deer and here and the patch of light, always moving, always changing, never still: her in that place, her being and belonging there. And that is the choice, between all that life and growth and pain, and this stillness, this failure, this darkness.
* * *
—
“Is this chronological?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is this set before or after the first piece you showed us?”
“Oh, yeah, it happens before, but comes after…You see I’m thinking in circles now.” This with a half-smile for me. But I was preoccupied not so much with the work itself, or the structures of his novel, but with fitting it into a pattern with his gut-punch reactivity to Steven’s work, what he’d said about death and telling lies and trigger warnings. Then Steven a lifted a finger for attention, like he was summoning a waitress.
“Yes, Steven?”
“Dead girl klaxon,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“Didn’t you notice?”
“What?”
“She’s dead, his girlfriend or whatever, that girl in the story. You not going to pick him up on it?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“He was going on like I was some psycho, so how come he gets away with it?”
“I don’t think anyone meant to imply…”
Nicholas tilted his head.
Steven leaned in to glare at him: “You don’t have a leg to stand on, pal.”
“Okay. I see. So Steven’s reminding us about Nicholas’s questions about using a young woman’s death as an initiating incident for his story. Which, it seems, this story also does. Any thoughts?”
Karen leaned in. “It’s not leering over a naked dead body”— Steven visibly baulked at that—“it’s about grief for a lost loved one.”
“Is that a genre difference?”
“Could be.”
“Is it murder here though? I don’t think so.” This was Meryl; she traced through the piece with a fingertip. “ ‘She had chosen death, had taken it to her, body and soul’—that sounds more like suicide to me.”
I looked to Nicholas; his dark head was bent now, his face obscured, but he slightly nodded.
“So I guess she
has a degree of agency that Steven’s victim didn’t have…” Karen twisted a lock of hair around her finger, let it go; it bounced back like a spring. “The boy blames himself, but at the same time the narrative implies that he is not to blame. She made the decision; she chose.”
Steven, scowling, tipped his chair back, his suit jacket swinging open. Richard leaned back too, the buttons of his plaid shirt straining to reveal patches of hairy belly. Their eyes met behind Karen’s back. That’s all there was to the interaction, but observing it, I got the distinct impression that a moment of this sort had been foreseen, discussed between them, and a strategy agreed. Because as Steven landed the front chair legs back on the floor, Richard cleared his throat, picked up the baton and ran with it.
“It doesn’t seem right,” Richard said, “that some of us are criticised and others get praised for the same thing. You’re not even writing crime fiction. You don’t need someone to be dead. You could just choose to do something else.”
“No, Nicholas said. “I couldn’t.”
Steven scowled round at him. “Couldn’t what?”
“Couldn’t do something else.”
I leaned in: “Why’s that, Nicholas?”
“That’s the rule,” Nicholas said.
“Rule?” Steven asked, folding his arms. “What rule? What are you on about now?”
“My rule.”
“Your rule?”
“The rule I’ve set. The rule of the work.”
“What is it?” I asked.
Nicholas looked at me. His strong dark face seemed congested, full, as though something was about to spill, as though he was only just managing to keep a lid on things.
“I’ll only write what happened,” he said. “I’ll only write the truth.”
I flicked back through what he’d written, the drugs and drink and darkness, the scar on his eyebrow, the lost girl.