Noughties (17 page)

“Oh.”

“We can’t keep doing this.”

“So why do you stay in touch with me?” I said in last-ditch
desperation. “Why do you reply to my texts and agree to meet up?”

“Because. I can’t help it. I can’t imagine cutting you off. But this isn’t good.”

We sat for a while, saturated in silence.

“I have to go. Text me later or something … when I’m less tired.”

“Okay then.”

She rose and disappeared into her new landscape (that once familiar landscape), absorbed by its canvas and colors, all hostile to me, the non-integrated object. She didn’t say bye and neither of us drank our drinks.

The bus jibed and cajoled me all the way back to Oxford, mercilessly grinding away at my fresh wounds. Stopping at every place conceivable, and many inconceivable, it took my misery on tour: Northampton, Towcester, Silverstone, Brackley, Bicester … The show garnered an underwhelming reception, what with virtually no tickets sold. At each stop we rolled up to, no one got on, no one got off. I was alone in my unhappiness, performing to an empty house. Even the stocky bus driver seemed to resent having to chauffeur such a sorry excuse for a man.

My second year was off to a disastrous start. Not only was there the loss of Lucy, but I also found out that I had fucked up my first-year exams, or “underachieved” as the two-sentence report that landed in my pigeonhole put it. Dr. Dylan Fletcher, who was fast establishing himself as an absolute legend, took me under his wing (a blokey pint at the Turf), and convinced me not to feel disheartened by my results. He said that I showed a lot of promise and that some people just develop more slowly than others. Apparently he had absolute faith that I was going to have a breakthrough at some point in the next two years and I took his
word for it. Why not? I liked his approach. He’d even hosted a debauched house-party for his students at the start of the term, welcoming us all into the new academic year. I tried to enjoy myself as best I could but it was fucking hard, what with Lucy cramping my emotional and psychological style. Most of the others crashed at Dylan’s after, drinking and dancing into the early hours, but I snuck off at the height of the shindig to wallow pitifully in front of Lucy’s Mugshot page.

And that is precisely what I did when I made it back from Wellingborough to my room, which had donned a decidedly bleak aura in my absence. I fired up the slumbering laptop to renew contact with the world and recharge myself at the mains. Then I did the habitual rounds: uni email, personal email, some sport sites and, yes, mugshot.com. Like everyone else I slaughter whole swaths of time on the latter. Pathetic. My Mugshot inbox blinked two new messages and an update notified me that I had been “prodded” by two “friends.” How thoughtful. Jack had scribbled all over my “face”: “Mmmmmmmate! When are you back from home? Large one down Scrot Lounge tonight … keen? Peas x.” Then, as I do every single day, still, I clicked on Lucy’s “face” to torture myself with the latest. Always at this moment my stomach plummets and my ticker accelerates in dreaded anticipation; the anticipation of something that’ll make me curious … paranoid … jealous … livid … sad. Signs of a life in which I don’t exist. Never gets easier. It throws me.

“Lucy has been ‘caught’ in 7 photos,” advertised her status update.

Fucking great, I thought, prepping myself for the stalker’s gloom of compulsive investigation. These would be shots from her night out with her new friends: the root of
her hangover. What am I expecting to find when I search through her photos, and her friends’ photos, and her friends’ friends’ photos, getting lost down inadvisable back roads of dubious connection?

Exhibit 1: This one was fine. This one I could handle. It was pretty much inoffensive. Just Lucy in group pose, in some club, yes, with three gf’s. I noted that one of them looked like a tangerine … sure to be a bad influence.

Exhibit 2: Lucy and man. Probably a rocket scientist or future Nobel Laureate from her Travel and Tourism course. My palms clammed up like soggy bread, but it was okay … they were just standing next to each other. Fine. Besides, although I couldn’t make out his face, which was distorted by the snapper’s clumsy thumb covering half the lens, he looked like a chav.

Exhibit 3: What?
Hugging?
I leaned closer into the screen and administered deep breaths.

Exhibit 4: This was more like it. Strength in numbers. A motley assortment of boob tubes and quiffs. People that I just don’t know. A harmless gang of drunken counterfeits, their faces melting into horror-show shapes. Grim as, but better than that last one.

Exhibit 5: Now we had a problem. Now we had a big fucking problem. She was on a sparse dance floor, grinding on that bell from Exhibits 2 and 3. She was facing me, obliviously taunting me, excluding me. He was behind her, leering over her, mortar-and-pestling her, his face blocked by Lucy’s. His hand-that-was-not-my-hand gripped her hip and her arse was slipping and sliding all over his parasitic cock.

Exhibit 6: This was the stomach-churning masterpiece. A Caravaggian scene of epic betrayal. That “lad” was eating her face. Or was she eating his? It’s hard to find precision in
these matters. But they were kissing. They were kissing, okay? There was something recognizable about the guy’s pose … maybe it was just because I had been in his position so many times myself. It was obvious that neither was aware of being caught by their “friend’s” scandal-cam, which somehow made it worse: I was seeing something that I was never meant to see.

I didn’t dare confront the finale … the money shot. The dry metallic taste in my mouth and the trembling of my body let me know it was time to turn away. No Exhibit 7 for me.

I know that I am probably misrepresenting Lucy and I regret it immensely. I wish I could truly convey her … the poetics of her geometry: the longing arcs of her shoulders; those slender, inquiring fingers and pouty knuckles; her smooth, tight neck; those infant ears like time signatures on a piece of music … but it’s never enough. And then there’s Ella, who hangs over these memories like a gauze, forcing me to squint as I struggle to make sense of everything. In old age such recollections might seem like a gift, purified of any poison … pleasant reminders of flesh, limbs, and sexual possibility … harmless messages from the subjective historian cloistered in the head. But for now they are raw. They disorientate, carrying so much consequence and import.

I feel as though I am forever haunted by thoughts of Lucy. I’m haunted by—

A murky vagina, ghoulish in its sinister ferocity, loomed down on me, stared across the room at me, winked its rheumy eye at me, as Ella pressed tight against my thigh. (I’m sorry … the memories are starting to come thick and
fast, and I must allow them … it’s the only way … I am straining for intelligibility.) We were intimately packed on the sofa in Dr. Fletcher’s room. Dylan stood by the window fondling his crotch.

“Anyone want a cuppa tea?”

“Ooooh, yes please. Three sugars,” piped Megan, who was perching on the edge of a sofa perpendicular to ours.

“How very artisan,” said Terrence, sunk back next to her, one leg crossed over the other in the feminine form, twirling a pen and balancing a leather-bound notebook on his lap.

I hadn’t slept much the night before, what with seeing Lucy’s “moving-on” pics on Mugshot and having my insides hung up to dry. The whole scene took on a giddy, almost hallucinatory quality.

“I bet you’ve had cunt on your mind all week,” the vagina seemed to be saying to me. It was Dylan, in the corner, to the left of the meticulously placed sketch of a naked female torso and crotch (directly above his teaching chair, directly in front of my sofa, directly yet silently testing me), as he fiddled with kettle and teabags on a rickety side table.

Megan immediately took the bait (Dylan’s chief aim and pleasure being to get a rise from his female students). “To be honest, I don’t see why he has to be so profane. He uses the c-word so much and I can’t see any artistic or philosophical justification for it.”

Handing a steaming cup to Megan before lurching into his throne with a cup for himself (this roughly signaling the beginning of the tutorial proper), Dylan smiled a smug note of satisfaction.

“Need there be a justification for it? What’s wrong with some gratuitous cuntery?”

The tute was on John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester; that libertine poet, all sex, guts, and booze. I had borrowed
an Oxford University Press edition of the complete works from the Hollywell library, an orange train ticket poking out from the top. I always use train or bus tickets for bookmarks (unlike Terrence, with his gold clip or peacock feather). I like the sense of a journey, as if the book is going to take me somewhere. As for Dylan’s language, he had worked hard (in a manner that suggested not working hard) to reach a stage where he could be as open and irreverent with us as he liked; to be a mate; a
young one
. We were so impressed to hear a tutor swear and act like one of us that we didn’t think to ever take issue or question the content. He enjoyed playing the windup merchant and therefore it was difficult to be offended. Megan felt differently about old Rochester though, who, unlike Dylan, hadn’t earned our respect by throwing parties and organizing trips to the pub:

“Well, quite frankly, the endless, ahem,
c
-words seem a bit misogynistic to me,” replied Megan, heating up, her voice wobbling with all the righteousness that was simmering inside.

Was I a mug? Had Lucy been playing me for a fool? I knew we weren’t together anymore, but wasn’t it a bit soon to be doing all that? And god knows how many others there had been. I could hardly call her a slut, or a slag, or a whore. But I wanted to.
Fucking slut
. No, too strong. I looked to the charcoal vagina for answers, but none were forthcoming.

“ ‘And may no woman better thrive, that dares prophane the cunt I swive!’ ” performed Terrence with extra thespian attack on the obscenity. “It’s fabulous, Megan, what are you talking about? It’s so full of bite and wit, actually …” All dandies fancy themselves libertines, so of course Terrence would embrace the aristocratic hedonism.

“Alright, Terrence,” said Dylan dismissively, displeased by the prospect of anyone else relishing the word, but mostly not wanting Terrence on his side. (I think he dislikes him as much as the rest of us.)

It’s not like I hadn’t ever thought about it myself. Of course I had wondered what other girls would be like—those rogue phantasms that pop into the head when they shouldn’t; my dream team raring for the call-up from my wanking bench. Put me in, coach, put me in! But I’d never made it reality … I mean, Jesus Christ, I didn’t actually want to move on, did I? And I certainly didn’t want Lucy to.

“Come off it, Terrence,” said Megan. (Dylan smiled: an interstudent face-off really gets the juices flowing.) “That bit when the poet follows the lady around the park, spying on her sexual escapades … it’s nothing more than pure woman-bashing. Listen to this …” She picked up a threadbare edition of Rochester’s poems which had apparently been hurled across a room and smashed against a wall or two, the victim of some heinous domestic violence. The page was most carefully marked though by a bright pink tab, her disgust lovingly organized and considerate. Megan rolled her eyes at Terrence and glanced across to Dylan for a permissive signal. Dylan was spread-eagled, caressing the back of his head. She coughed and swallowed.

Yeah, Terrence, great fun!”

Terrence tossed a nod of superiority Dylan’s way, hoping for a laddy laugh or some sign of mutual appreciation.
Dylan was having none of it, lifting his tea to snarling lips. Ella was unusually quiet, sensing my exhausted condition perhaps: my shifts and my fidgets; my yawns gaping after sunset. Ordinarily you could expect Ella to jump in at this point and teasingly chastise Dylan for his flippant misogyny before explaining to us all exactly why Rochester was so filthy, and whether we were meant to find it profound or simply vacant. On this particular occasion she wasn’t giving any tips, however, keeping her head down and picking at her pen.

“Forget the morality, or amorality, of it all for a moment,” suggested Dylan, cocking his right leg over the arm of the chair. Hand on forehead he gazed into the upper reaches of the bookshelf behind Terrence and Megan, searching for ideas as though they might be stored beneath the Longman
Milton
, behind Coleridge’s
Table Talk
, grinding on Montaigne’s
Essays
, snogging Spenser’s
Fairie Qveene
. “What are the
words
doing? Where is the poet in all this? Whereabouts is he in relation to his style?”

Ella had stolen my tactic and was pretending to write, industriously running her pen over the only two words on the page: “Rochester tute.” What’s with her?

Terrence did some improv—a bloated answer that ended up getting lost down a dead end of empty terms and crude generalizations, salted-and-peppered with “like”s, “actually”s, and “so”s.

“But why be so explicit?” asked Dylan, completely ignoring all of Terrence’s points. “What are these ‘spermatic sluices’ and ‘cunts filled with unwholesome juices’
doing
?”

I had a gnawing desire to text Lucy and interrogate her. But how could I? Did I have any right? Well yeah, actually; I did. Her dirt was all over the Web; it was in the public domain … so now she had to face the shit-storm. You
heard: now you have to face the shit-storm. That comes with the territory. And besides, I wanted her to know how badly she had fucked me up.

Dylan geared himself up for soliloquy, the mechanisms of his brain creaking into action. Megan cowed her head. The vagina maintained a poker face.

“For all of its seeming explicitness, isn’t experience just being held at bay?” Why, of course; quite. “Cunt stands for everything and anything here. It becomes the transcendental signifier.” You took the words right out of my mouth. “So does it mean anything at all? Is it actually graphic or is it simply a way of deferring meaning and evading experience?” We twitch with faux-scholarly reflexes: mmm, well yes, one might … one could … most curious … “And is the self taking refuge in this empty space or is the self being placed under constant erasure?”