The Gone-Away World (12 page)

We look around. Wood. Linoleum. Cheap chairs. Gonzo writes his initials in the dust on the bar, grins a
veni vidi vici
and turns to go—and stops as a deep growl vibrates in the dark. It is not a human noise. It is a predator noise of another variety, a feral, challenging, no-messing rumble which hits your brainstem and says
fight or flight.
We all look towards it.

There is a monster in the doorway: a big, fat, ugly canine with a head like a basketball and too many teeth. It is ludicrous to imagine that this might be an actual cannibal dog. Even a descendant of cannibal dogs. Clearly, it is a pit-fighting dog or a bear-hunting dog or the kind of dog an idiot thinks would be really cool, which then eats his hand and runs away to live in the forest or hunt wild horses on the moors. The kind of dog which gets very territorial and would choose to live in an abandoned bar. I push Theresa behind me, and at the movement the dog swings its heavy head in my direction and I have time to think “Oh, bugger” and it leaps.

I have some idea about dodging but I can't dodge with Theresa behind me and the thing is like a huge black torpedo. My right hand rises anyway, palm up, and I hope to God this is something Master Wu has taught me coming to the fore and not just a lousy bite-my-head-off-I'm-prey reflex. And then there is Gonzo's broad back and his leg is braced on the floor and he catches the dog as it falls on me. It scrabbles at his chest with its hind paws and snaps at him, but Gonzo holds it by both front legs and wrenches them apart. I see his trapezius muscles labour, and release, and I hear the crack of the dog's ribs and I hear it scream and then hit the ground, broken.

Gonzo's face, when he turns, is filled with revulsion which only I am allowed to see. And then he grins lightly, like he does this every day. It would be callous except that if he did anything else it's possible Belinda would actually pass out from horror.

“Reckon it's time to go,” he says. He ambles out. Belinda follows. So does Theresa. I look down at the monster, and I wonder whether my hand was coming up to slap it over me, or whether I was just going to get savaged. And then I realise the dog is not dead. It's not going anywhere; it's not about to rear up and assail me. It will die soon. It just hasn't yet. Gonzo's dog-destruction technique, culled from survival manuals and rumours of burglary, is unpractised and imperfect. Wrenching open the forelimbs should burst the heart, but it hasn't. The job is unfinished.

Black, reproachful eyes accuse me as I walk to the door. And then it whimpers. The sound is small and desperate and it ought to come from a dog you'd trust with your kids and which would bring you your slippers and carry cats around in its mouth without ever even contemplating a feline snack. It has no business coming from this thing which just now tried to rip a new orifice in my chest. From which Gonzo saved me. I turn and look at the dog again. There is pain obvious in its posture, and helplessness. It jerks, sniffles and hauls itself over to expose a patch of white fur at the neck. If there is a language shared by mammals, it is the language of pain. Dominance is clear. Only the question of relief is open to discussion. I am asked to finish what Gonzo has begun.

I step closer, half-expecting vengeful snapping. There is none. The dog just waits. I give the only help I can. It does not take long. And then I emerge into the dark, and try to smile and be relieved.

Gonzo does not, in fact, sleep with Belinda Appleby that night. She is too distraught, and he is gashed in a way which exceeds manly and becomes messy. She tends his wounds, but insists on a suspension of familiarities. I take Theresa to my room and make up a bed for myself on the floor with some extra cushions while she is in the bathroom. She emerges, and I take her place, washing for longer than is strictly necessary because I cannot quite get the smell of dying dog from my nose. When I return, she has folded my makeshift bed into a neat pile, and the single sheet which covers her in no way conceals the fact that she is naked. We give Ms. Poynter's lessons a thorough testing. It is not, technically, a first for either of us, but it is the first time the results have been so utterly, back-archingly, desperately enjoyable. Fear and danger, perhaps, but also maybe just a kinship of sorts; I am Gonzo's shadow as she is Belinda's. There is no suggestion of consequence to our encounter. We go our separate ways in the morning.

Gonzo picks me up the following morning, and we do not talk about cannibal dogs until breakfast is nearly over, and then all my nervousness pours out and I confess I have no idea what I would have done had he not been there. Gonzo shrugs. Without me, he says, he never would have gone in. I stare at him.

“You were stopping,” I point out.

“I was turning the bloody car around,” he answers, and then stares at me right back. “No way,” he begins, but I am already howling with laughter because neither one of us wanted to go into that bloody place and both of us went because the other one was determined. The death rattle of the monster is fading in my memory. I tell Gonzo he saved my life, and he grins and says maybe yes, maybe no. And so we dawdle our way home.

After lunch, I receive a call—the
gong fu
of the Evangelist is strong—from Dr. Fortismeer at Jarndice University, who is delighted to tell me (he sounds genuinely delighted, and before I can stop myself I have arrived at the theory that he and the Evangelist are lovers, and that my entry to the place has been bought on a promise of physical delights untold, a prospect which appalls me because it entails a brief and hastily suppressed vision of their coupling) that I have been selected for a new programme called the Quadrille Bursary, which seeks to ameliorate the relationship between the arts and the sciences by creating a Generalism Degree. Dr. Fortismeer sounds like one of those bluff, turbulently fat individuals who take the virtues of manhood to be found in hunting and fishing and a collection of activities falling under the general heading of “roistering,” and his explanation of the programme is punctuated with guffaws and snortings to indicate that he too was young once, and that indeed his heart and other parts still are. The Quadrille will comprise four segments (hence the name), these being I. Art and Literature; II. History, Anthropology and History of Science; III. Mathematics and Physics; and IV. Chemistry, Basic Medicine and Biology, in the style of a Renaissance autodidact, save that there will be no “auto” about it. I will be expected to show up for four years of my life and I would do better to avoid (
snort snuffle
) too much in the way of partying, entertainment and, above all (
ho ho, my boy, I think we all know how much notice you'll take of this
), girlish distractions, which are (
fatal to the mind, delectable to the juices
) apparently a frequent cause of lower grades and personal heartbreak. Dr. Fortismeer pauses at this point and apparently expects me to say something, so I say thank you, and he laughs so loudly that the phone cannot convey the signal and distorts it, then tells me to remember to pack warm clothes as Jarndice can be damned chilly at night if you haven't got company (
hufflehufflesnort!
). I assure him that I will, reflecting that I am delivered by one bizarre character into the hands of another and that this should not surprise me.

I'm a-goin' to college.

Chapter Three

A university education;
sex, politics, and consequences.

T
HE MAN
whose head occupies my attention is called Phillip Idlewild, although I know him (as of an hour ago) as
Lay Chancellor
Idlewild, PhD, professor of Greek and nominal top dog at Jarndice University. It is a blusterous October evening; the sky is a deep blue-grey made popular by an artist named Payne. We do have those days, and this is one of them, but for the most part the place where I grew up—bounded by Cricklewood Fens on one side and Jarndice on the other—basks in a gentle climate which favours delicate flowers and happy short-haired dogs. Tonight, though, the wind is whipping in across the ocean and bringing a tang of salt, spume and tar, and there's a bass note of corruption: a huge dead sea creature floating on the forty-foot swell, picked apart by gulls. It is the perfect night to be a young man; it is a night to tear off your shirt and howl at the sky and run, to feel the moisture on your skin and not care about the cold. It is a night when wine and whisky will flow and a roaring fire and a wild dance will find you in the arms of that girl or this one or making friendships which will last for ever.

Unfortunately, I am at a function. I arrived at my set (not digs, please, or rooms, or even accommodation) and opened my suitcase and set up my music, which is pretty much all the unpacking I needed to do, and went directly from there to Matriculation Dinner, which is the first in what is an almost inexhaustible list of traditional Jarndice occasions which are best discreetly ignored. Almost no one ever knows that about the Mat Dinner and so they end up, like me, staring at the bald patch on the top of Phillip Idlewild's head and wondering whether the pale, scabrous material which is fluttering from it as he rubs his hand through the two or three remaining hairs is in fact a contagious disease, a harmless consequence of advanced age or the residue of something he accidentally dipped himself in at lunch.

Professor Idlewild cannot speak unless he is horizontal, or at least unless his head is horizontal. When he wishes to emphasise a point, he twists his face up towards you like a passionate piebald owl and nods, and the tendons in his neck stand out amid the wrinkles, but for the most part he addresses his eloquence to the patina of the dining table. A vertical cross-section of Lay Chancellor Idlewild, taking its plane from the line of bilateral symmetry between the eyes of the normative human figure, would likely reveal a distorted set of interior organs and bones in the shape of a question mark, which seems mysteriously inappropriate in a man whose entire conversational armament consists of exclamations. As the butler (who is a postgraduate student in Industrial Conflict Resolution Theory) brings the fish course, Idlewild looses another flurry of dermis or necrotic fungal spores into the butter dish and, by means of a series of puppet-like twitches, turns to me.

“Mr. Lubitsch! Welcome to Jarndice. I'm told we should expect great things.” He smiles. “Do try to make a gesture in the direction of LMAE, won't you, it makes them happy!”

I realise that I will have to tell him I am not Gonzo. I do so. To my surprise, he hoists a horizontal smile at me.

“My dear fellow,” he says, “I'm most terribly sorry.” He thinks about it for a moment. “Oh, you're the other one!”

Yes. I am. Of all the students here, only I am the other one. Idlewild grins and turns back to his prior interlocutor. I look for Gonzo in order to hate him, and find him for a moment silent and bereft, two chairs away and across. On his right is a glowingly beautiful girl who appears to be genuinely interested in the conversation she is having with her opposite neighbour and his companion about crystal structures, and on his left is a hard-eyed dame of the Evangelist's type who announced herself to him audibly as they sat down as “Doctor Isabel Lamb, and I loathe attractive young men.” Whether this is in fact true (I suspect it is not, and that Gonzo was supposed to take it as a challenge) it wrong-footed him and he simply edited her out of his world. Dr. Lamb is now holding forth to the man beside her on the subject of catastrophic failure in suspension bridges, and Gonzo is almost switched off. Without an audience to verify his magnificence, Gonzo has to look deep inside to find himself. He is looking now, but amid the clutter and the obvious sociableness of everyone around him he's having a hard time. I can do nothing for him from here, not directly, but if I can find the right moment to butt into the conversation on my left and drag it into more promising fields, Gonzo will be able to unleash his charm on the situation and will stop looking so horribly empty and insufficient. Ma Lubitsch did not say to me, as we left Cricklewood Cove, that I was to take care of Gonzo. Old Man Lubitsch did not, as he dropped us at the train station, lay upon me a burden of fraternal care and support. They did not do these things because there was absolutely no need. I understand my obligations. After a moment, I beg my neighbour for the salt, and in passing ask why powdered salt is so different from crystal salt and why no one cooks with it, and the conversation roars off at a tangent and Professor Idlewild wants my attention again and Gonzo is debating spices with the numinous girl. Idlewild's conversation takes the form of a lecture, and I consider this new world and take care to avoid eating any small pieces of him which make their way onto my plate.

Jarndice University is not large, but nor is it new. Its proper name is the Jarndice-Hoffman Metanational Wissenschaft-u. Kulturschule, from which it is possible to deduce that although Mr. Jarndice was what is usually for the sake of brevity known as English (i.e., possessed of a genetic heritage including the DNA of warring Angles, Normans, Saxons, Jutes, Picts, Celts, Kerns, shipwrecked Catholic Spaniards, fleeing Sephardi Spaniards and curious Moorish Spaniards, and also mercantilist Burgundians, Viking Scandawegians, rampaging Goths, sullen Vlams and the occasional dislocated Magyar) his fellow rationalist and educator was a pure German (specifically a Teuton-Tartar-Turkic-Russ-Ashkenazi-Franco-Prussian). These two individuals determined not only to found an institution of higher learning and scholarly debate free of the wranglings of academic strife, but also in doing so to create a place apart from the petulant squabblings of national entities. They therefore required in the
Ordinanses of ye Univarsitie
(which also decree that all students shall live within a
myle radiusse
of Jarndice Library, a regulation which became impractical in 1972 when the faculties, sports fields and lecture halls came to occupy most of that space, but which could not be repealed and was instead reinterpreted as referring to a league, which in turn is three English nautical miles, which is 5.55954 km, rather than 5.556 km, which would be three international nautical miles, a distinction chosen to honour Palgrave Jarndice's nationality in spite of his dislike for all forms of patriotism, but which also serves the useful purpose of obfuscating the precise terminator line of that great circle and allowing everyone to live where they damn well please) that anyone who comes to Jarndice in whatever capacity make oath to the effect that they will
looke upon ye world with an eye to ye proper managemente thereofe, ye goode conducte of ye businesse of livynge and ye keeping of ye pease, and that all magisters will give heede to ye thoughts one of another, and not take untoe themselves an excessive pryde.
As a consequence, Jarndice University is a hotbed of cordial scholarly loathing, departmental vituperation and ecstatic political extremism. It is also infamous as the “U of Ye,” short for “University of Ye Ordinanses,” in reference to the eponymous document, and pronounced by detractors and Matriculats (first year students) as “yee,” whereas the letter
y
in this context is in fact the Anglo-Saxon symbol for
th,
a point the lay chancellor does not tire of explaining in exhausting detail to whoever sits upon his left at Matriculation Dinner.

And here I sit, longing to be up and roaringly drunk, instead clad in a rented blue velvet gown with silver trim which scratches at the back of the neck and smells strongly of elderly cat. Dressed thus like a bargain basement Polonius, but with the manners I learned at Ma Lubitsch's table too firmly ingrained to do anything so uncouth as interrupt the flow of nested histories regarding the Great Vowel Shift and the decline of classical scholarship since Hadrian, I endure the stewed beef and smile at the fine-featured woman opposite me and wait for Professor Idlewild to run out of breath. This he does, as dessert arrives, not slowly, but all at once. He stops, and shivers. He compresses himself against the dining table as if looking for a particular fragment of his head which he has decided he will want later. His nose grazes the polish, and two ragged cones of mist appear beneath it—uneven, because his head is turned somewhat towards me. His hands grip the edges of the table. I look across at the fine-featured woman on Idlewild's other side, but her face shows only chiselled bewilderment and the beginnings of the same concern which must be showing in my own. It strikes me as entirely conceivable that Professor Idlewild is having some form of heart attack, or is about to have one, and I realise that I know nothing at all about what to do if this should prove to be the case, nor even how to determine if it is. Part of me also is unthrilled at the notion that he has elected to expire right here in front of me, of all people, at this time, which will inevitably scar me in ways I cannot envisage.

Professor Idlewild throws himself back from the table in a cloud of dandruff, and sits bolt upright, staring and shock-headed. He gurgles a bit, then curls himself around his chest, hands and arms contorting, and gives vent to a kind of bark or yawp. He is either dying or being possessed by the divine animus; the former would be tragic, but also frankly a bit weird, and the latter leads one to contemplate the nature of a deity who might select as his messenger, even his vehicle in this world, an academic bore with a minor but revolting skin complaint and mushroom breath. I glance around a bit frantically for someone who has a clue about what to do next, but no one is paying any attention at all. This complete absence of anyone paying attention—anyone from Jarndice, that is, as the new arrivals are all sharing a moment of unease up and down the table—is a big hint. I find the butler at my elbow wearing an expression of absolute blandness. Since his master is, at this moment, grabbing both his ears and pulling hard, so as to produce an effect not unlike the wings of a fruit bat held up to a bright light, and since this appears to discomfit him not at all, I deduce that Lay Chancellor Professor Idlewild of Jarndice is subject to some form of seizure disorder and it is polite to ignore it. It is in fact polite to the extent that no one would ever consider mentioning it in advance, or commenting on it to anyone who might leap up and do something about it. I am deeply thankful that I am sitting here and not Gonzo, who, having just cottoned to the situation, is preparing a savage lunge down the table to perform a tracheotomy, but has the native intelligence to note that I, who am closest to the emergency, have taken a serious decision to do nothing and that there must be a reason for this. I am therefore spared the spectacle of my best friend sprinting pell-mell along an oak banqueter, spraying nineteenth-century china in all directions, and plunging a silver port funnel from the Arts and Crafts period (probably late 1890s, well made, although not a very attractive example owing to a series of nicks and dents resulting from careless use) into the throat of Professor Idlewild in order to facilitate his continued access to oxygen.

In all of this confusion—like Harry Callaghan—I forget myself sufficiently that I accidentally chat up and make friends with the fine-featured woman sitting opposite me, and it emerges that her name is Beth, and that she is from Herringbone and that she has just left her boyfriend because he was seeing a dancer named Boots on the side. By the time Professor Idlewild has sufficiently recovered himself to break into the conversation, I have even managed to make some forays into the knotty problem of what we will talk about when we go for a drink later in the week. The answer, of course, is politics.

P
OLITICS IS
very much in fashion at Jarndice, because—aside from being a topic specifically frowned upon in Ye Ordinanses—it is also one which provokes lively debate, passionate shouting matches and wildly inconsistent positions, and is therefore ideal for student posturing and social one-upmanship. The flashpoint of the day is the Addeh Katir Problem.

Addeh Katir is a small nation rubbing shoulders with a variety of big ones. It is temperate and tropical both, richly colourful, lush and splendid. A great chain of lakes runs along its spine (the largest of these being Lake Addeh, quietly famous because its water was for many years reckoned to be the last word in tea-making) and this fertile interior is wrapped in sheltering peaks, the eponymous Katirs, which jut eastwards from the Himalayas and have embraced Lake Addeh and its smaller companions as if determined to keep them.

Politically, the best description of Addeh Katir might be that it is broken. There are many failed states, but this one has rather been vandalised. The place has no inherent ethnic tensions owing to the somewhat unique circumstances of its creation: the people of today's Addeh Katir are descended from assorted thoughtful souls who grew bored with the endless pendulum of massacres and treaties in their own countries, and also with a curious ban on fermented beverages being then imposed by party-poopers of the Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and Hindu faiths, and also by various other sects and cults with a me-too approach to religious prohibition. They therefore hoofed it from what are now China, Tibet, Pakistan and India, and headed to the Katir mountains to hide out and (to be honest) get drunk. Arriving on the shores of Lake Addeh, they found that the entire indigenous population had been wiped out by a variation of rubella to which they were by and large immune.