Starter for Ten

by David Nicholls

  He pauses, but I can't think of anything to say, so I just look out of the window, waiting for it to be over. But the silence is almost as uncomfortable, and when I finally turn back, he's giving me a look that I think I'm meant to interpret as “fatherly.”

  “Brian, this morning I had a private tutorial about W. B. Yeats with a student—a nice-enough girl, sure to get on, privately educated at one of the more exclusive girls' schools—and at one point during this tutorial, I had to go out to my car and get my RAC Road Atlas so that I could actually explain to her where Northern Ireland is.” I go to speak, but he raises his hand. “Brian. When I interviewed you in this office a year ago, you struck me as a uniquely enthusiastic and passionate young man. A little unfocused, perhaps, a little gauche—may I say gauche? Is that a fair assessment?—but at least you weren't taking your education for granted. A lot of students, particularly at a university like this, tend to treat their education as a sort of state-subsidized three-year cheese-and-wine party, with a flat and a car and a nice job at the end, but I really thought you weren't like that.”

  “I'm not.…”

  “So what's the problem, then? Is something distracting you? Are you unhappy, depressed … ?”

  God, I don't know. Am I? Is this what it feels like? Maybe I am. Maybe I should tell him about Alice. Is simply being in love a good-enough excuse for irrational behavior? It was for Othello, obviously, but for me?

  “So. Is there something you'd like to talk to me about?”

  I'm in love with a beautiful woman, more in love than I ever thought possible, so much so that I'm incapable of thinking about anything else, but she is entirely unobtainable, and finds me amusing at best, repulsive at worst, and I consequently think that I may be going a little bit mad …

  “I don't think so, no.”

  “Well, then I don't know what the problem is, because looking at your grades so far this year—seventy-four percent, sixty-four percent, fifty-eight percent, and, for this, fifty-three percent—it would seem that you're actually becoming less intelligent. Which, strangely enough, is not what an education is for.…”

  25

  QUESTION: Where might you find the pons, the arcuate fasciculus, Wernicke's area and the fissure of Rolando?

  ANSWER: The brain.

  It's true, I am becoming more stupid. Or do I mean “stupider”?

  And it's not just barely making the team for The Challenge, it's the lectures. I go in and sit down, all bright-eyed and alert, and even when it's something I'm genuinely interested in, like metaphysical poetry, or the development of the sonnet form, or the rise of the middle classes in the English novel, I find that, after about ten minutes, I'm so lost and confused that I might as well be listening to a football match on the radio. I walk into a university library that's almost audibly groaning with the huge weight and breadth of human knowledge, and the same two things always happen: (a) I start to think about sex and (b) I need to go to the toilet. I go to a lecture and I fall asleep, or I haven't read the book because I'm always falling asleep, or I don't understand the book in the first place, or I don't get the references, or I'm looking around the room at girls, and even when I do understand the lecture, I don't know what to say about it, I don't even know if I agree with it, or disagree. I've been given the opportunity, entirely at the state's expense, to study beautiful, timeless, awe-inspiring works of art, and my response to them never gets any more profound than “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down.” And meanwhile some intense bright, shiny-haired young thing in the front row will stick up their hand and say something like “Don't you think that, formally speaking, Ezra Pound's language is too hermetically sealed to be readable in structural terms?” and even though I understand all the words individually, “readable” and “formally” and “is” and even “hermetically,” I have no idea what they mean when put together in that particular order.

  And it's the same when I try to read the stuff, it just turns to mush in my head, so that an important, profound poem like Shelley's “Mont Blanc” goes something like “The Everlasting Universe of Things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid blah / Now dark—now bla-di-da—now da-di-bla-di-da” until it crumbles and disintegrates. Of course if Shelley had released “Mont Blanc” as a seven-inch single, then I'd be able to recite it word for word and tell you the highest chart positions, but because it's literature, and it's actually intellectually demanding, then I just don't have a clue. The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It's just that they don't love me back.

  When did this start happening? Why is nothing working out the way it should have? The brain is, after all, a muscle, and I thought that if you exercised it enough, really put it through its paces, it would become this lean, humming, electrically charged little white fist of protein. Instead it feels as if I have a head full of warm, moist matter; gray and lardy and useless, the kind of thing you find wrapped in plastic inside a supermarket chicken. In fact, now I think of it, I'm not even sure if the brain technically is a muscle. Is it an organ? Or tissue? Or a gland? My brain certainly feels like a gland.

  And it's at its most glandish tonight, at The Challenge practice meeting in Patrick's flat. It's the first of the new year, and only a month to go before our first televised appearance, so Patrick is particularly on edge, especially as he's about to introduce a whole new exciting element to the proceedings. Patrick has spent the Christmas vacation building buzzers— four battery-powered contraptions made from Christmas-tree lights and doorbells screwed to LP-sized squares of plywood, which he's painted with red enamel paint—and he's clearly fiercely proud of this new innovation, because I barely have time to say hello and Happy New Year to Lucy Chang, or ask Alice how the audition went, before we're sitting on the sofa, buzzers on our knees. Patrick settles on a swivel office chair with a thick pad of four-by-six index cards, adjusts the anglepoise lamp over his shoulder, and begins …

  “So, your starter question, for ten points: Which eighteenth-century

  British prime minister was nicknamed the Great Commoner?” I buzz. “Gladstone?” I say. “Nope,” says Patrick. “Anyone?”

  “Pitt the Elder?” says Alice. “Correct. That's minus five points, Brian. I did say eighteenth-century, didn't I?”

  “Yes, you did.…”

  “And Gladstone was ninet—”

  “Yes, I know.…”

  “Okay, then. Which of the following countries does not have a coast line. Niger, Mali, Chad, Sudan.” I think I know this one, so I buzz and say … “Sudan!”

  “Nope,” says Patrick. Lucy Chang says, “All of them, except Sudan?”

  “Correct. So that's minus ten points, Brian. Okay, the vestibular nerve, the tensor tympani, the ampullae, utricle and saccule are all parts of which organ?” I've no idea, but find that I've buzzed anyway. “Brian?” Patrick groans. “Sorry, I pressed by mistake.”

  “So that's minus fifteen points.…”

  “… I know, it was a mistake, my finger slipped.…”

  “… What's the answer, Lucy?”

  “The ear?”

  “Exactly, the ear. What are you studying, Lucy?”

  “Medicine.”

  “And, Brian, what are you studying?”

  “English litera—”

  “Exactly. English literature. So, Brian, you don't think maybe Lucy would be better qualified to answer … ?”

  “I'm sure she would, but like I said, my finger slipped. These buzzers are very touch-sensitive.…”

  “So it's my buzzer's fault?”

  “Well …”

  “The real buzzers on the day, you don't think they'll be touch-sensitive too?”

  “I'm sure they will, Patrick …”

  “… because I've used those buzzers, guys, and I can tell you, you have to be
very, very sure of the answer before you press them.…”

  “Look, could we get a move on, d'you think?” says Alice testily. “It's just I've got to be somewhere at nine-thirty.…”

  “Where?” I ask, suddenly anxious. “Just going to see someone—is that okay with you?” she snaps. Lucy and Patrick share a look. “Of course, but I thought we were going for a drink, that's all.…”

  “Can't now. I've got a Hedda Gabler recall if you must know,” and I bri dle slightly, and accidentally press the buzzer. “Sorry!”

  “Actually, I don't think my buzzer's working at all,” says Lucy Chang, and Patrick snatches it off her, likes it's poor Lucy's fault, and jabs at it with the huge Swiss Army knife he keeps on his big bunch of keys. Alice and I glance at each other warily and we seem a long way from being a winning team.

  After that, I don't bother answering any more questions, even the ones I actually know the answers to. I just leave them to Lucy, mainly, and Alice, occasionally, and as soon as Patrick has given his postmatch analysis— don't get trigger-happy with those buzzers, always concede to the person with greater expertise in that area, listen to the question, be wary of interruptions—Alice has got her coat on and is heading for the door. Just before she exits, though, in the spirit of appeasement, she says, “Oh, by the way, some friends of mine are having a party tomorrow night, Twelve Dorchester Street, eight o'clock? You're all invited,” and then she smiles an apology at me, I think, and goes.

  I walk home with Lucy Chang, who lives up the hill from me, and she's actually incredibly nice. I realize that Lucy is the first Chinese person I've really talked to outside of a restaurant environment, but decide not to say this out loud. Instead we talk about what it's like training as a doctor and she's very interesting on the subject, but very quiet, and I have to lean in to hear what she's saying, which makes me feel a bit Prince Philip-ish.

  “What made you want to be a doctor?”

  “My parents, really. They always said being a doctor was the highest ambition you could have. You know, actually making a difference to the quality of life.”

  “And you enjoy it?”

  “Absolutely. I love it. How about you, how about lit-er-a-ture?”

  “Oh, I like it. I just don't know if I'm improving the quality of anyone's life, that's all.”

  “Do you write?”

  “Not really. I've just sort of started writing a bit of poetry.” I'm still practicing saying this aloud, but Lucy doesn't sneer, not out loud anyway. “Sounds a bit pretentious, doesn't it?”

  “Oh, not in the least. Why?”

  “I don't know, it's just like Orwell said: the natural response of the Englishman to poetry was extreme embarrassment.”

  “Well, I don't know why. Some might argue that poetry is actually the purest form of human expression.”

  “Yeah, well, you haven't read my poems.”

  She laughs quietly, and says, “I wouldn't mind reading them. I'm sure they're very good.”

  “And I wouldn't mind you operating on me either!” I say, and then there's a pause while we both try to work out why this sounds dirty.

  “Well, let's hope it doesn't ever come to that!” and we walk on a bit farther, trying to shake off that “operate-on-me” comment, which is still hanging in the air between us like a fart in an art gallery.

  “So—dissecting anything good at the moment?” I ask eventually.

  “The cardiovascular system.”

  “Right. And do you enjoy that?” asks Prince Philip.

  “Yes, yes I do.”

  “And is that what you'd like to specialize in when you leave?”

  “Surgery, I think, though I don't know in what area yet. I'm torn be- tween heart and brain.”

  “Aren't we all!” I say, which sounds pretty witty to me. In fact I say it before I can actually work out what it means, so that it just hangs there in the air, too. And then Lucy comes up with a complete non sequitur.

  “Alice is cool, isn't she?”

  “Yes. Yes. She can be.” It was a non sequitur, wasn't it?

  After a while. “Very beautiful.”

  “Hmm.”

  After a while. “You seem pretty close.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose we are. Sometimes.” And encouraged and sur- prised by this newfound easy familiarity between Lucy and me, I say, “Patrick is a very strange man, isn't he? I think perhaps he—” But Lucy stops suddenly, and puts her hand on my forearm and squeezes slightly.

  “Brian—can I tell you something? Something personal …”

  “Of course,” I say, then realize what she's going to say.

  “This is a little embarrassing for me …” she says, frowning.

  She's going to ask me out! “Go on, say it.…”

  “Ok-aaaay …” she says, taking a deep breath.

  What should I say? Well—no. Clearly I have to say no …

  “Here goes.…”

  … But how do I let her down gently, without upsetting her … ?

  “Well … it's just that when you talk to me, you have this habit of over- enunciating everything, like I'm profoundly deaf or something?”

  “Oh. Do I?”

  “Uh-huh, you kinda lean over and nod and use very simple words, like I've got this incredibly limited vocabulary? And I don't know if it's because I'm ‘of Chinese origin’ or American or something, but I've never been to China, I don't speak Chinese, I don't even particularly care for Chinese food, so I will be able to understand if you just, you know, talk good old, regular, colloquial English.…”

  “Sorry. I didn't realize I was doing it.”

  “It's okay, it's not just you, I get it a lot. I mean, all the time …”

  “I'm so embarrassed.…”

  “Don't be, it's fine, it just sounds a little patronizing, that's all.”

  “Right, of course, sorry,” and, thankfully, we're outside Richmond House now. “So, will I see you at the party tomorrow?”

  “Maybe. I'm not so good at parties.”

  “But maybe.”

  “Maybe,” and she sets off up the hill. “By the way—can I just ask you something?” She pauses, a little nervously. “Go on.”

  “The brain—medically speaking, is it a muscle or a gland?”

  “Well, it's a concentration of various kinds of nerve tissue, all with a similar, connected purpose, so technically I suppose that would make the brain an organ. Why?”

  “Just wondered. See you tomorrow.”

  “Bye,” and I watch her panda disappear off up the hill. Then I turn and am about to trot up the steps to the front door when I notice a hunched shape in the shadows, slumped against the front door, head down, barring the way. I freeze halfway up the steps, and peer at the man, who runs both hands over his closely shaved head before looking up at me. I'm just coming to terms with discovering what it's like to be mugged when the dark shape lurches to his feet and speaks: “So—who's the Asian babe then, Bri?”

  And, stepping out of the shadows, I recognize the sharp, shrewd eyes of Spencer Lewis.

  26

  QUESTION: Frequently used in sculpture, where it is sometimes known as Florentine marble, what is the hydrous fine-grained translucent variety of gypsum formed by bedded deposits precipitated from evaporating seawater?

  ANSWER: Alabaster.

  “Spencer? What are you doing here?”

  “Just thought I'd come and visit, that's all,” and I run up the stairs and go to hug him, and he goes to punch the top of my arm, and we do that weird little dance that boys do when they greet each other. “And you did invite me …”

  “Yeah, I know I did, but … hey, what's happened to your hair … ?”

  He runs his hand over his head, which has been shaved right down to the scalp. “It's the escaped-convict look—don't you like it?” he says, and I notice the thick, slurred quality to his voice, indicating that he must have got pissed on the train.

  “Yeah! Yeah, it's very … bold. Who did it?”


  “I did.”

  “For a bet, or … ?”

  “Fuck off, Brideshead. So, can I come in or what?”

  “Of course.” I unlock the door and turn the hall light on, and we squeeze past the bikes in the hallway. He looks different in other ways too, his eyes look hooded and tired, smudged purple underneath, like bruises. Despite the bitter cold he's wearing just a crumpled, thin old jacket that I remember from school, and as luggage he's carrying a thin plastic bag, which, as far as I can tell, only contains two cans of lager.

  “I did phone this morning, spoke to some posh bloke,” he says as we climb the stairs.

  “That's my housemate, Josh. It's Josh and Marcus.”

  “What are they like then?”

  “Oh, they're all right. Not really your type.”

  “So are they your type then?”

  “I don't think they're anyone's type, actually.” And we're outside my bedroom. I open the door.

  “So—this is where all the action takes place, is it? Nice …”

  I take my coat off, and throw it casually over the dumbbells before Spencer sees them.

  “Make yourself at home. D'you want a cup of tea, or coffee or something?”

  “Got any booze?”

  “I think there might be some home brew.”

  “Home brew?”

  “It's Marcus and Josh's really.”

  “What's it like?”

  “Bit like piss.”

  “Alcoholic, though?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Go on, then.”

  And, reluctantly, I leave him alone in my room, and hurry to the kitchen to get the booze. I need a drink, too. Spencer's arrival has thrown me completely, partly because he's clearly being a bit weird and mean, and partly, I suppose, because I never expected in my life to be unhappy to see him. Also, I'm a little anxious, because I think I may have left my poetry notebook on my desk, open on a tentative new erotic sonnet that I'm working on. The first line contains the words “breasts of alabaster,” and if Spencer reads that, then I'll never hear the end of it.