Starter for Ten

by David Nicholls

  So admittedly I didn't give the people in the Accommodation Office a lot to go on, but that's still no explanation as to why they've put me in this house with Josh and Marcus.

  Richmond House itself is in a red-brick terrace on the top of a very steep hill above the city, conveniently sited several miles from the nearest bus stop so that by the time I finally get there I've sweated right through my donkey jacket. The front door's already open, and the hall is crammed with boxes and racing bikes and two oars, a cricket bat and pads, skiing equipment, oxygen tanks and a wet suit. It looks like a raid on a sports shop. I dump my luggage just inside the door and, with a growing sense of trepidation, clamber over the pile of sporting goods to find my new flatmates.

  The kitchen is strip-lit and institutional and smells of bleach and yeast. By the sink, two boys, one huge and blond, the other dark, squat, with a spotty rodent face, are filling an empty plastic dustbin with water via a rubber shower attachment. “She Sells Sanctuary” by The Cult is playing very loudly from the ghetto blaster, and I stand in the doorway for some time, saying “Hi!” and “Hello, there!,” before the blond one finally looks up and sees me with my black bin liners.

  “Hullo! It's the dustbin man!”

  He turns the music down a notch, bounds over like a friendly Labrador, and shakes my hand vigorously, and I realize it's the first time I've shaken hands with someone my own age.

  “You must be Brian,” he says. “I'm Josh and this is Marcus!”

  Marcus is small and carbuncular, with all his features bunched up in the center of his face, behind aviator frames that singularly fail to make him look capable of flying a plane. He looks me up and down with his ratty face, sniffs, and turns his attention back to the plastic dustbin. But Josh chatters on, not waiting for answers, in a voice that's straight out of a Pathé newsreel. “How did you get here? Public transport? Where are your folks? Are you feeling all right? You're absolutely sodden with sweat.”

  Josh is wearing burgundy pixie boots, a beige velvet waistcoat—that's a velvet waistcoat—a puffy purple shirt, and black jeans so tight that you can actually make out the whereabouts of each individual testicle. He has Tone's haircut, the Effeminate Viking, the badge of the confirmed metallist, but here complemented by a tentative downy mustache; a sort of foppish, cavalier look that makes it almost look as if he's mislaid his rapier.

  “What's in the bin?” I ask.

  “Home brew. We thought the sooner we get the fermentation going, the better. Obviously you can join in if you want to, we'll just split the cost three ways.…”

  “Right …”

  “It's a tenner now, for the yeast and hop concentrate and tubes and barrel and everything, but in three weeks' time you'll be enjoying traditional Yorkshire ale for six pence a pint!”

  “Bargain!”

  “Marcus and I are quite the moonshiners, ran an illicit still in the dorms, made quite a tidy profit actually. Though we did accidentally blind a couple of scholarship boys!”

  “You were at school together?”

  “Absolutely. Joined at the hip, aren't we, Marcus?” Marcus snuffles. “Where did you go to school?”

  “Oh, you wouldn't have heard of it.…”

  “Try me.”

  “Langley Street?”

  Nothing.

  “Langley Street Comprehensive?”

  Nothing.

  “Southend?” I offer. “Essex?”

  “Nope! You're absolutely right, never heard of it! Want me to show you to your quarters?”

  I follow Josh upstairs, with Marcus slouching behind, along a battleship-gray hallway decorated with instructions about what to do in case of a fire. We pass their new rooms, full of boxes and suitcases but still clearly spacious, and at the end of the corridor, Josh flings open the door to what at first glance looks like a prison cell.

  “Da-da! Hope you don't mind, but we allocated for the rooms before you got here.”

  “Oh. Right …”

  “Tossed for them. We wanted to start unpacking, get settled, you see.”

  “Of course! Right!” I sense I've been taken for a ride here, and resolve never again to trust a man in a velvet waistcoat. The trick now is to assert myself without being noticeably assertive.

  “Quite small, isn't it?” I say.

  “Well, they're all small, Brian. And we did toss, fair and square.”

  “How do you toss between three people?”

  Silence. Josh frowns, his mouth working silently.

  “We can always toss again if you don't trust us,” snuffles Marcus indignantly.

  “No, it's not that, it's just …”

  “Well, we'll leave you to get settled then. Glad to have you on board!” and they run back to their home brew, whispering.

  My digs look as if they've been dug. The room has the appeal and ambience of a murder scene; a single mattress on a metal frame, a matching plywood wardrobe and desk, and two small wood-effect Formica shelves. The carpets are mud-brown and seem to have been woven from compacted pubic hair. A dirty window above the desk looks out on to the dustbins below, whilst a framed sign warns that using Blu-Tack on the walls is punishable by death. Still, I wanted a garret, and I got a garret. Better get on with it, I suppose.

  The first thing I do is set up the stereo, and put on Never for Ever, Kate Bush's triumphant third album. The rest of the records are stacked next to the turntable, and there's a bit of an internal debate as to which album should go face-out into the room; I experiment with the Beatles' Revolver, Joni Mitchell's Blue, Diana Ross and the Supremes and Ella Fitzgerald before settling on my brand-new recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos on the Music for Pleasure label, a snip at £2.49.

  Next I unpack my books, and experiment with different ways of arranging them on the Formica shelves; alphabetically by author, alphabetically by author but subdivided by subject; genre; nationality; size; and finally, and most effectively, by color—black Penguin classics at one end, fading through to white Picadors at the other, with two inches of green Viragos, which I haven't got round to reading yet but definitely will, in the middle of the spectrum. This takes some time, obviously, and by the time I've finished it's dark, so I set up the anglepoise lamp on the desk.

  Next I decide to turn my bed into a futon. I've been wanting to do this for some time, actually, but Mum just laughed at me when I tried it at home, so I'm going to give it a go here. I manhandle the mattress, mysteriously stained and damp enough to grow cress, on to the floor without letting it come into contact with my face, then with some difficulty I upend the metal bed frame. It weighs a ton, but I eventually get it stowed safely away behind the wardrobe. Obviously this means I lose a couple of feet of valuable floor space, but the finished effect is worth it—a kind of minimal, contemplative, Oriental atmosphere that's only marginally undermined by the bold navy, red and white stripes on the British Home Stores duvet cover.

  In keeping with the Zenlike minimalism of the futon, I want to limit decoration to a montage of postcards of favorite paintings and photographs, a kind of pictorial manifesto of heroes and the things I love, on the wall above my pillow. I lie on my futon, and get out the Blu-Tack: Henry Wallis's The Death of Chatterton, Millais's Ophelia Drowning, Da Vinci's Madonna and Child, Van Gogh's Starry, Starry Night, an Edward Hopper; Marilyn Monroe in a tutu looking mournfully into the camera; James Dean in a long overcoat in New York; Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man; Woody Allen; a photograph of Mum and Dad asleep in deck chairs at Butlins, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, me as Jesus in the sixth-form production of Godspell, Jack Kerouac, Burton and Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and a photograph of Spencer, Tone and me on a school trip to Dover Castle. Spencer is posing slightly, head tilted down and to the side, looking cool and bored and clever. Tone, as usual, is sticking his middle finger up.

  Finally, just by my pillow, I put up a picture of Dad, looking whippet-thin and vaguely menacing, like
Pinky in Brighton Rock, but on Southend sea front, with a bottle of beer and a cigarette smoldering in the long fingers of one hand. He's got a black quiff, high, sharp cheekbones, a long, thin nose, and a sharp, slim-collared three-button suit, and though he's half-smiling at the camera, he still looks pretty intimidating. It was taken around 1962, four years before I was born, so he must have been the same age as I am now. I love this photograph, but I still have a nagging feeling that if my nineteen-year-old dad had met the nineteen-year-old me on Southend Pier on a Saturday night, there's a pretty good chance he'd have tried to beat me up.

  There's a knock on the door, and instinctively I hide the Blu-Tack behind my back. I assume it's Josh, but instead in walks a huge blond woman with Viking hair and a milky blond mustache.

  “How are you getting on? All right?” says Josh in drag.

  “Fine, fine.”

  “Why's your mattress on the floor?”

  “Oh, I thought I'd try it as a futon for a while.”

  “A futon? Really?” says Josh, pursing his lipsticked mouth as if it's the most exotic thing he's ever heard in his life, which is pretty rich, coming from a man in drag. “Marcus, come and have a look at Jackson's futon!” and Marcus, in a curly black nylon wig, hockey skirt and laddered stockings, sticks his nose into the room, snuffles, then disappears.

  “Anyway, we're off now—are you coming along or what?”

  “Sorry, coming … ?”

  “Tarts and Vicars Party, Kenwood Manor. Should be a laugh.”

  “Right, well, maybe. It's just I thought I might stay in and read.…”

  “Oh, don't be so wet.…”

  “But I don't have anything to wear.”

  “You've got a dark shirt, haven't you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, there you go then. Stick a bit of white cardboard under the col lar and away you go. See you in five minutes. Oh, and don't forget that tenner for the home brew, yeah? Love what you've done to the room, by the way.…”

  4

  QUESTION: The interaction energy of two protons relates to the separation between them. What are the forces between the protons when the separation between them is respectively (a) small and (b) intermediate?

  ANSWER: Repulsive and attractive.

  As a man of sophistication and experience, I know the value of “lining your stomach” before an evening out, so for supper I buy a bag of chips and a battered sausage, and eat them on the way to the party. It starts to rain quite steadily, but I eat as many chips as I can before they get too cold and wet. Marcus and Josh stride self-confidently on ahead in their high heels, seemingly indifferent to the mirthless glances of passersby. I suppose that posh-boys-in-drag must be one of the inevitable miseries of living in a university town. For soon it will be fancy-dress party season, the leaves will turn to bronze, the swallows will fly south, and the pubs will be full of male medics dressed as sexy nurses.

  On the way, Josh bombards me with questions.

  “What are you studying, Brian?”

  “English.”

  “Poems, eh? I'm politics and economics, Marcus is law. Play any sports, Brian?”

  “Only Scrabble,” I quip.

  “Scrabble's not a sport,” sniffles Marcus.

  “You haven't seen the way I play it!” I say, quick as a flash.

  But he doesn't seem to find this funny, because he just scowls and says, “Doesn't matter how you play it, it's still not a sport.”

  “No, I know, I was just …”

  “Are you soccer, cricket or rugby?” says Josh.

  “Well, none of them really …”

  “Not a sportsman, then?”

  “Not at all.” I can't help feeling that I'm being assessed for admission into some unnamed private club, and failing.

  “How's your squash? I need a partner.”

  “Not squash. Badminton occasionally.”

  “Badminton's a girls' game,” says Marcus, adjusting the straps on his sling backs.

  “Take a year out?” asks Josh.

  “No …”

  “Go anywhere nice this summer?”

  “No …”

  “What do your parents do?”

  “Well, Mum works on the tills in Woolworth's. Dad sold double-glazing, but he's dead now.” Josh squeezes me on the arm and says, “I'm so sorry,” though it's unclear whether he means Dad's death or Mum's job.

  “How about yours?”

  “Oh, Dad's Foreign Office, Mum's Department of Transport.” Oh, my God, he's a Tory. Or at least I assume Josh is Tory if his parents are Tory, it does tend to run in families. As for Marcus I wouldn't be surprised to discover that he's in the Hitler Youth.

  Finally we arrive at Kenwood Manor. I'd avoided the halls of residence as I'd been advised on the university open day that they were dull and institutional and packed full of Christians. The reality is somewhere between a lunatic asylum and a minor public school—long echoing corridors, parquet floors, the smell of damp underwear drying on a lukewarm radiator, and the sense that somewhere, something terrible is happening in a toilet.

  The distant thud of Dexys Midnight Runners beckons us along a corridor to a large, wood-paneled room, with high windows and sparsely populated with students—about seven parts tart to three parts vicar, and with a roughly fifty-fifty split between female and male tarts. It's not a pretty sight. Burly men and quite a few women, in artfully torn tights with sports socks stuffed in their bras, leaning against the walls like, well, tarts, whilst patrician Edwardian vice-chancellors peer down from their portraits in despair.

  “By the way, Bri, I don't suppose you've got that tenner … ?” says Josh, frowning, “… for the home brew?”

  I can't really afford it, of course, and it's the tenner that Mum pressed into my hand, but in the spirit of new friendship I hand over the money, and Josh and Marcus skip off like dogs on a beach, leaving me to make some more of these friendships that will last me a lifetime. I decide that, generally speaking, at this early stage of the evening it's best to go for a vicar, rather than a tart.

  On the way to the makeshift bar, a trestle table selling Red Stripe for a very reasonable 50p a can, I put on my talk-to-me-please face, a simpleminded close-mouthed grin accompanied by tentative nods and hopeful glances. Standing waiting to be served is a lanky hippie with a matching village-idiot grin to mine and, remarkably, an even worse complexion. He glances around the room, and in a lugubrious drawl says, “Absolutely looooony, isn't it!”

  “Insane!” I say, and we both roll our eyes as if to say “Tch, kids today!” His name's Chris, and it soon transpires that he's studying English too; “Synchronicity!” exclaims Chris, and then proceeds to tell me the whole of his A-level syllabus, and the precise contents of his college application form, and the plot of every book he's ever read in his whole life, before embarking on a description of his summer spent traveling round India, in real time, and I pass the days and nights that follow by nodding, and drinking three cans of Red Stripe, and wondering whether his skin really is worse than mine, when all of a sudden I realize that he's saying …

  “… and d'you know what? I never used toilet paper once in all that time.”

  “Really?”

  “Nope. And I don't think I'll ever use it again either. It's much fresher this way, and much more environmentally friendly.”

  “So what do you … ?”

  “Oh, just my hand, and a bucket of water. This hand!” and he thrusts it under my nose. “Trust me, it's loads more hygienic.”

  “But I thought you said you kept getting dysentery?”

  “Well, yes, but that's different. Everyone gets dysentery.”

  I decide not to pursue the point, and say, “Great! Well, well done you …” and we're off again, traveling on bare wooden benches by rickety bus from Hyderabad to Bangalore until, somewhere in the Erramala Hills, the Red Stripe does its work and I realize with joy that my bladder's full and that I'm really sorry but I have to go to the toilet—“Don
't go away, I'll be right back, stay right where you are”—and as I'm leaving he grabs me by the shoulder, holds his left hand up in front of my face and says, evangelically, “And don't forget! No need for toilet paper!” I smile and head off briskly.

  When I come back I realize with relief that he has gone away, so I go and sit on the edge of the wooden stage, next to a small, neat woman dressed neither as tart nor vicar, but as a member of the KGB Youth Wing—a heavy black coat, black tights, a short denim shirt, and a black Soviet-style cap, pushed back behind an oily black quiff. I give her a “Mind-if-I-sit-here?” smile and she gives me a “Yes-go-away” smile, a tight little spasm, and there's a glimpse of tiny, sharp white teeth, all the same size, behind an incongruous smear of crimson lipstick. I should probably just go, of course, but the lager's made me fearless and overfriendly, and so I sit next to her, anyway. Even over the gurgling bass line of “Two Tribes,” you can still hear the muscles in her face tightening.

  After a while, I turn and glance at her. She's smoking a rollie in nervous little puffs, and staring doggedly out at the dance floor. I have two choices, speak or leave. Maybe I'll try speaking. “The ironic thing is, I actually am a vicar!”

  No response.

  “I haven't seen this many prostitutes since my sixteenth birthday!”

  No response. Maybe she didn't hear me. I offer her a swig of my can of Red Stripe.

  “You're too kind. I'll pass, though, thanks very much,” and she picks up the can by her side, and waggles it at me. Her voice precisely fits her face, hard and sharp; Scottish, Glaswegian I think.

  “So! What did you come as?” I say brightly, nodding at her clothes.

  “I came as a normal person,” she says, unsmilingly.

  “You could at least have made an effort! Just put on a dog collar or something!”