“Huh?” I said, embarrassedly.
“Ella. She doesn’t seem her usual self.”
“Oh, she’s fine. I guess things are more serious now we’re studying toward Finals. You know how she is—she’s incredibly driven. She wants that First so desperately.”
“Of course, and so should you. You’re both more than capable.”
We sipped our drinks. I felt tense.
“But she hasn’t said anything to you?” he added.
“Not at all.”
“I’m sure it’ll sort itself out, whatever it is.” We refocused on our glasses of wine, having run out of conversation, but were soon joined by Polly and Ella, plus an ebullient Megan, visibly thrilled by the tutorly company she had managed to gather at last.
“Drink up, drink up,” goaded Dylan, resuming the role of ringleader, replenishing drinks and holding court. Megan chuckled boozily at his every word while Polly poked fun at his outlandish statements. Bobbling back and forth and side to side, Megan binged her way by the gallon. Even Ella was starting to lose her balance, the drink circulating through all our bodies with destabilizing intent. I leaned into Ella to offer support, grateful for the contact.
Quickened by the greased frivolity of his primmest student, Dylan was prodding away with bawdy conversation.
“This one gets so wide-eyed on the drink. You’re a little minx, aren’t you?”
“I knnnnnow you’re after a rise, Dddddylan,” said Megan, gluing her words with sloppy slurs.
“I’ve already got one, thanks.”
Usually antagonistic to Dylan’s ribaldry and bite, Megan spewed a grotesquely fulsome laugh. The social parameters had expanded with alcohol-bloated flaccidity to incorporate all possibilities.
Amidst apologetic good-byes and excuses (long cycle ride home, essays to mark), Polly made her exit, leaving Dylan singularly in charge. The telltale rouge in Megan’s cheeks deepened as she polished off another glass.
“Here, knock this back,” coaxed Dylan, minesweeping the empties for abandoned remains. He wiggled a half-filled glass in front of Megan’s nose.
“I know what you’re doing, Dylan. I’m onto you, don’t you know. You’re tryin’a get me pissed,” she said, rising to a comic squeak on the last note.
“I’m your tutor. I only have your best interests at heart.”
Megan giggled a little more. Ella leaned against me with weightier dependence and I stole an arm around her waist. She didn’t seem to be enjoying Dylan’s performance and hardly offered a word.
“I think I’ve had enough,” voiced Megan’s rolling head, slipping free at the hinges. Lurching backward and then forward like a suddenly released spring, Megan let loose her evening’s wares all over the floor. The crimson pool of vomit mutated into an increasingly larger organism as it soaked into the carpet. Those once innocuous-looking sandwiches were now sinister and monstrous, bedeviled in
their lumpy rot. Dylan brought the evening to a sobering close, locking the door behind us and leaving the pool of sick to fester overnight for the cleaning scouts to discover the next day.
Out in the quad, once Dylan had hastily fled home with bicycle and reflector jacket, Ella and I piled Megan’s carcass onto one of the caretaker’s trolleys and dragged her to her staircase.
“Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” chanted a group of freshers sitting on one of the benches, blowing smoky swirls into the cold night air.
We lugged Megan up to her room and dug out her keys from a tan handbag. Her room was neat and orderly, with pot plants on the windowsill and picture frames carefully positioned all about. We laid her onto her purple sheets and I filled a glass of water at the beautician-like sink. She sprawled out on her back, her chest slowly rising and falling, a slight linger before each exhale. Her bare toes scrunched and wiggled, her hair scattered carelessly across face and pillow. Ella and I watched her melt into otherworldly terrain.
Once we had buried Megan we sloped off to the wine merchants on the High. Absurdly jealous of Megan’s comatose state, we needed another bottle or two to help us on our way. Returning with a plastic carrier bag now chiming against my leg, we turned into the stillness of Radcliffe Square. That late at night, the library magically appears, sudden and sheer:
I’ve been here all along
, it says.
Where have
you
been?
It rises and grows out of the black, gaining in stature as you walk around; adding extensions, levels, windows, pillars, alcoves, like some untrodden region of the mind. We were heading back to Ella’s room to continue the drinking, just the two of us, though I can’t remember at whose suggestion. It was probably unspoken; simply intuited
by the imperceptible palpitations in our pants.
Is this what you came here for?
taunted the Radcliffe Camera, snap-shotting me in its bookish glare.
Get all the way to this hallowed bed—hallowed
seat
of loving—of
learning—
just to get laid?
Who said anything about getting laid? Leave me alone.
And what about Lucy?
Oh, get out of it … keep your nose in your own books.
Ella is well fit though, mate, to be fair … she spends a lot of time in here with me, actually …
We turned out of the square and onto Catte Street.
“Would you rather have a nipple on your chin or a chin on your nipple?” asked Ella as we finally made it to her room. I pondered this while she clattered about, flicking on a couple of lamps and revealing her treasure chest of trinkets and charms. Loose clothes modeled themselves over an armchair, stacks of CDs crept up the side of a desk, a small unit of shelves went wobbly at the knees with books (all containing first-class scribbles), and a chest of drawers stood stocky, topped with necklaces, rings, bracelets, bangles, lipsticks, eye shadows, mascaras, and a privileged mirror.
“That’s a no-brainer,” I said, dropping into the armchair, the two bottles in my lap. “Nipple on chin. If I had a chin for a nipple it would poke out from my clothes like a little boob. And besides, I could just grow a beard.”
Ella placed her keys on the desk and awoke the laptop from its hibernation. She bent over the screen and keyboard so that her body almost mirrored its right angle, her dress lifting slightly, teasingly, so that I was forced to look in a different direction. She began scrolling through her music library.
“It’s got gender significance though, that one,” I continued, trying to disguise my awkwardness. “I mean, if you were a girl you’d have to go the other way.” I fidgeted with
unready thoughts while Ella double-clicked her selection and turned the dial up on the supplementary speakers. “The goatee get-out clause just wouldn’t apply. You’d look like a tit.” Lucy frowned over her shoulder to acknowledge the atrocious pun. “And on the upside, a chin for a nipple would give you a slightly bigger … well, you know.”
“Boob?” she said, walking toward me.
“Hah, well …”
“Tit?” now standing directly in front of me, the music firing up behind her with cinematic timing.
“Your words, not mine. It would be kind of lopsided, but still …”
Ella smiled, her lips dancing disarming potential. She lifted the carrier bag from my lap and took it over to the desk where a bottle opener awaited. The song was “Boy Child” by Scott Walker, with its ripe plucks of the guitar and atmospheric strings … music from another planet. As Scott’s mellifluous voice poured from the speakers, I went to the laptop.
“Tune.”
“Of course.” Ella planted a glass of white on the desk. “There you are.” She sat on the desk chair, her own glass in hand, watching me nose through her music files, down on my knees, there by her side. Her library was impeccable; almost a carbon copy of my own. Our music snobbery gave us reference points (along with our nerdy love of literature and film) and we had indulgently used them all for the past year, cross-referencing and consulting our expanding network of allusions, our growing common sense. Basically all the stuff that I had never shared with Lucy.
I continued to scroll. There was Joni. (We both favor her experimental jazz period over the earlier folk warblings—
Mingus, The Hissing of Summer Lawns
, and
Hejira
, with black-and-white
Joni, bereted and cloaked, coming out from the cover like an apparition of painful wisdom and dare-do.) There was Scott. (I’m all for the eponymous LPs, 1 through to 4, though Ella feels that he really hits his stride on
Nite Flights
and its increasingly obscure successors.) We agree on Motown, pedantically differentiating between performers and artists—The Supremes, The Temptations, and The Four Tops on the one hand; Marvin and Stevie on the other. As she said of the latter, they’re uniques, stepping outside of the Holland-Dozier-Holland hit-making machine. I concur. She understands the crucial differences between Prince and Michael Jackson, and why the US’s rejection of The Kinks was a good thing, forcing the band inward to make provincial classics like
Village Green Preservation Society
.
I switched to “The Electrician” from
Nite Flights
. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course not.”
We stayed in position—me on the floor, Ella on her chair—and sipped our wine as the song’s eerie intro coaxed us into silence. (I thought of Lucy, briefly.) Ella removed her shawl and hung it over the back of the chair behind her. Her skin seemed palpable to me in a way that it had never before. Now it was flesh; tumescent and yielding. It gave off heat and scent … vanilla, plum, apple blossom.
“It looks a bit uncomfortable down there,” she said, peering at me and then shying away from the eye contact. “You can come up here … if you like.”
Both rising, we stood face-to-face for the slightest of moments, and then I sat down on the chair. Without hesitation, though my heart was playing along with the beat, the off-beat, and any other more complexly syncopated beat on the track, I curled my arm about her waist and channeled her onto my lap. I linked my hands round her
soft, pliant midriff. She felt luxurious. The song rose and broke into its full wave of melody—the drums, the swirling strings, that voice. Again she looked over her shoulder, for a second, and smiled. We both faced the laptop but really stared out into nothingness. Up this close she smelled of rich, smoky wood … the aromas rising from those tight crevices and hidden gullies … like smells from the forest of experience where the young girl loses her innocence. Neither of us acknowledged that such a position and proximity was unusual. We allowed ourselves to exist inside the assumption that it was entirely natural. Our bodies breathed together and her weight became mine. Ella placed her hands on my own, fastening their clasp tighter against her stomach.
With an unsteady and quietened voice she asked, “Would you rather kiss someone or
be
kissed by someone?” She was looking down at her shoulder so that I could see her flushed profile. Then I slid my hand around the far side of her neck, tucking it beneath the underhang of her jaw and pulling her mouth toward mine. We took gentle bites from each other’s lips. Our tongues grazed, unintentionally, encouraging us both to take a full, swollen lick. Ella unlocked my grasp and placed my right hand on her bare leg. Still arching round to kiss me she began guiding it up the smooth strip of her inside thigh, her dress hitching upward as my hand drew farther in, nearer and nearer, her legs parting. She gave a slight jump and sigh—a high, breathless “huh”—when I hit against her crotch. I quickly removed my hand, but when she started to kiss me harder I placed it back again, this time firmer and more direct. She pressed her forehead against mine, eyes closed, mouth agape, moving her hips in harmony with the motion of my hand and rolling her head back and around.
You thrill
me and thrill me and thrill me
. My other hand dropped from her neck to her breasts. She took it and forced it inside the cup of her bra, lending me her full cushiony swell. I traced the Braille of her viscera. She read so differently from Lucy. She became warmer and slick … more fragrant.
We got up from the chair and she led me to her elfin grot, getting amongst the pillows and cool sheets. We trawled each other’s bodies for every inch of history. I dug after what I had always imagined and came up with even more. She stroked my outlines in perfect synchrony until I was febrile in her hands, willingly guided elsewhere.
We collapsed into each other and died a thousand deaths, to find ourselves breathlessly alive in wrapped arms and legs …
When I withdrew and shifted over to the edge of the bed I was confronted by a menacing ring of rubber squeezing the base of my sorry cock. The condom had ruptured, like one of those paper hoops that circus performers pounce through. I held it in dismay as it shriveled in my sticky palm, staring up at me in all its gunky matter-of-factness—
gotcha!
I looked over my shoulder to see Ella snug under the duvet, smiling.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, course.”
The music in this bar is too distracting and the image quickly fades. Ella is looking at me, as though she has seen the memory too. I can’t tell if it is the recollection or the strawberries-and-cream vodka that is making me feel nauseous, but her knowing gaze is making it exponentially
worse. I pull out my phone and pretend that I’m writing a text. It’s not even turned on.
Do you ever wake in the night? Ever wake in the night grappling with the a.m. light? Early-morning hours blink through smudged eyes to no one, and then someone.
It comes as a jolt. Irrational fears magnified to the nth degree manhandle your feeble body, doped as it is on gooey sleep and warm saliva. They pummel you in the stomach and wrench your heart up to your throat: what if she’s pregnant? What if I never get a job? What if I’ve got a disease? A bloody STI … what if I die? Oh god, what if I die?
Obscene hypotheses terrorize your fuzzy head. Shaking to the core with syncopated terrors you fling the duvet and gasp after strangled air. The water on the bedside table tastes of chlorine and your hot flush is swelling. It comes like this, entirely uninvited yet somehow willed—self-inflicted. You fall and fall into the oblivion of your sunken stomach. Sick to the pit. Perhaps it’s the absence of light. Maybe it’s the immediate panic of knowing you’re meant to be doing something else: sleeping. You’re meant to be sleeping, and you’re running out of time. You’ve been caught waking on the job, and no one can bail you out except yourself.