by Robert Webb
Kate finished knotting and reached for her coat. It was fucking unbelievable. Of all of Luke’s first-term affectations, she’d forgotten this one: the guy was still pretending to be French. She stood and announced, ‘Anyway, I’m going back to the bar.’
Luke, or apparently ‘Luc’, retracted his long legs but she stepped over the vacated space anyway. There was a volley of baffled objections but Kate was already at the door when she turned back to Luke with a look so severe it silenced the room. She spoke softly to him. ‘You shouldn’t tell someone you missed them when you don’t know who they are.’
‘I know. Sorry. Like I say, it was just—’
‘Don’t ever do it again.’
She closed the door carefully behind her. At that moment the CD track ended and Amy’s low voice was just audible: ‘That girl needs help.’
Chapter 12
The October air had turned sharp and Kate hugged her coat around her. She headed towards the centre of the campus, unwilling to return to the busy bar or her empty room, although neither could make her feel as lonely as the boy she’d just left.
It was as if her favourite movie was lost and she’d been forced to sit through its shittest imaginable prequel. As if someone had recorded over the only copy of Casablanca and replaced it with two hours of Rick Blaine standing in front of a shaving mirror, combing his eyebrows and failing to get his bow-tie straight; rehearsing his coolest lines and getting them all slightly wrong. ‘Here’s looking at you, krid’ and ‘We’ll always have Doris’ and ‘I think Ben Okri should go back to short stories to refresh his style.’
Why hadn’t it annoyed her the first time round? Luke’s weird lies and affectations? The goose crap on the path glistened and she looked up at the full moon for inspiration.
Well, the first time it was charming because she was in love. And being in love is when you truly live in the present: when every moment is a discovery, every tiny detail is pregnant with meaning. Grief though … grief is the opposite of meaning; grief is where the present can’t breathe; where the past is everywhere you look; where every new moment is dead on arrival. Grief is Groundhog Day.
Oh yes, that and the fact that she was furious with him. Furious for the dumb line about missing her. Just for that second in the bar she had imagined a glimpse of the man she knew was trapped in the body of the boy in front of her. But no. Luke really was a stranger and the man was yet to grow around him. And not just grow – the mature Luke would take work to build and Kate had a pretty good idea that it was she who had laid about half of the bricks. No, we don’t lie to people to sound cool. No, sounding cool isn’t very important in the first place. No, we don’t expect the person we live with to clean the flat because she was born with a uterus. No, we don’t go into a two-hour sulk when we’re upset and wait for someone to ask us what the matter is. No, being very serious does not make you clever. And being clever is less important than being kind.
Yes, I’m the Girl From the Future. I always was. I knew things. Why didn’t you?
And was she supposed to do it all again? For another twenty-eight years?
Kate took a left past Derwent College. The pendulum of her thoughts took the inevitable swing back to self-reproach. So how kind had she been today? How wise? What was she doing right now if not sulking? Okay, maybe these were extraordinary circumstances, but aren’t they always? Do you wait until you feel kind before you behave kindly or do you do it anyway? Does a fire fighter hang back and watch a house burn because he’s ‘not really in the mood today’? Do you love your partner only when they’re at their best?
Kate realised she’d arrived at the Still Spot: a miniature secular college chapel where students could come to find some quiet. It centred on a cute Georgian gazebo, a two-storey brick building with one room on each floor. Kate and Luke had once had sex in the top room, which was very much not in the spirit of the place. Even Kes had been shocked. She had sworn Luke to secrecy and it was a promise which he had kept by telling only one friend at a time.
Between her and the building was a sculptured garden consisting of many giant free-standing shrubs set out in an asymmetrical grid but planted close enough to give the effect of a maze. She wandered towards them, the huge bushes taking on a benign mystery in the darkness, like sleeping gods.
Passing silently between the outer trees, she stopped at the sound of weeping. Someone in the garden was crying. They would be sitting on the bench set in the centre. Kate’s opinion of her own compassion was something she would consider another time: for now she moved swiftly towards the sound of distress, her softening heart forgetting itself. As she got closer she realised the unhappy person on the bench was a man – the sobs were being furiously suppressed but the occasional bark on an in-breath was unmistakably male.
What she found when she rounded the central bushes was indeed a man sitting on the wooden bench but not the kind of man or the kind of sitting she had imagined. He was certainly a student, or of student age; but instead of sitting forward with his head in his hands, he was slumped back at an awkward angle with his arms held unnaturally behind him. That was the third most surprising thing about him. The second most surprising thing about him was that he was naked except for what appeared to be a pair of white Y-fronts. But the real winner in the Surprising Things About the Weeping Youth Contest only became apparent when the boy sensed Kate’s presence and looked across to her, squinting at her in the gloom and instantly turning his face away in shame. That head movement, that skinny pale body, that light hair, that face. Kate felt like laughing. Well, every other acquaintance from Benedict College had shown up today – this one was only a matter of time.
‘Can I help you, Charles?’
Charles Hunt turned back to her in astonishment. ‘Who are you? How do you know my name?’
Kate ignored the questions as well as the imperious tone. As she approached, she realised why Charles’s hands were behind him; indeed why they were behind the bench. Her sympathy for him flooded back and this time with an accompanying glug of anger. ‘Who the hell did this to you?’
‘Bastards tied me up, didn’t they? Bloody bastards tied me to this wretched bench and scarpered with my clothes, the shits.’
Kate moved round the back and found Charles’s wrists bound tightly to one of the horizontal bench slats with two thick plastic cable ties. She thought of running to ask a Derwent porter for a pair of scissors but these ties were industry-level and it would take wire cutters to slice through them. Charles was already violently shivering. He spoke through his chattering teeth. ‘Bonzo was the one with the plastic things. Said he pinched them from the chaps putting up the marquee for his eighteenth. Thought they might “come in handy”, the blumming bastard. Dusty and Laz were no better. Held me down and stole my trousers.’
‘Why did they pick on you?’
‘I told them it was my birthday.’
‘Right. Of course.’
‘Can you loosen them?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, bloody Christ on a scooter!’
‘It’s okay. I can get you free but you have to keep still.’
‘What? What are you going to do?’
‘Shush. I need to concentrate.’
Still behind Charles, Kate took a step back and sized up the bench, taking in its dimensions. Solidly constructed but worn with age. She couldn’t make it out in the dark but hopefully some woodworm too. Charles’s dickhead public-school fresher-victimising tormentors had tied his wrists to just one slat, the third one down. Too low for a punch and awkward for a kick. Still – nothing’s easy.
Kate said, ‘You’re stuck pretty fast to this plank so you might feel a slight jolt.’
‘Why, what are you going to—’
Charles didn’t finish his sentence. By the time he reached the word ‘you’, this strangely confident woman in the body of an eighteen-year-old world karate medallist had leapt a foot and a half into the air, her arms lifting and spreading for balance as her right le
g coiled back, and with a lightning whip of Doc Marten on ageing pine, smashed through the slat and splintered the ones above and below.
‘CHRIST! Fucking ow! You … oh, I see. Blimey.’ With Kate’s help, Charles gingerly slid the tied wrists over the matchwood end of the broken plank. The cable ties were suddenly like bangles for a giant and fell off his hands. Charles’s first words of freedom were, ‘You’re going to get into trouble for that, you know.’
‘I don’t see why. They should send the repair bill to Gonzo or whatever his fucking name is. Here.’ Kate took off her coat and handed it to the vibrating Charles.
‘It’s a girl’s coat.’
‘It’s a coat. Put it on, you idiot, before you die of hypothermia.’
‘It’s got a Nazi flag on it.’
‘It’s the flag of West Germany. We beat them in the World Cup, remember?’
‘Were they on our side?’
‘In the World Cup? No.’
‘But in the war.’
‘Shall we start moving, Charles? Which way is your room?’
The coat was three sizes too big for Kate and a surprisingly good fit for her freezing companion. Kate reflected that if there was one member of Benedict College she’d been half-expecting to see in just his underwear tonight, it really wasn’t this one.
‘Other side of the lake.’
Kate looked down at Charles’s bony legs protruding from the overcoat like a child’s drawing of a man in a skirt. It reminded her of a kids’ TV show called Bod. ‘Bastards didn’t even leave you any shoes. Right, mind your step. Let’s go.’ She led the way, with Charles gingerly following and trying to do up the coat buttons, most of which were missing. Charles was then struck by another insurmountable problem.
‘I haven’t got my room key!’
‘The porters will have a spare.’
‘Oh. Look, I can find my own way. Why are you coming too?’
‘Because I’ll want my coat back, won’t I?’
‘Oh. Yeah.’
How, how, HOW did this confirmed idiot become her boss? How was it possible that one of the stupidest men she’d ever met had the slightest influence over her twenty-first-century self?
‘How come you know my name? You didn’t say.’
‘Oh, I must have heard someone use it earlier. Think I was standing behind you in the queue for …’ She tried to do a Luke. ‘… you know, that massive bloody queue with all the …’
‘In the canteen at lunch?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh, right.’
It was a long walk to Charles’s end of Benedict. Kate reflected on this ‘Bonzo’ person. Jesus. By the end of Kate’s first year, the ringleader of Charles’s bullies had become well-known to her. Paul Bonaugh, post-grad Economics student – the kind of guy you didn’t get drunk with; the kind of guy whose room you didn’t go back to; the kind of guy who took the word ‘no’ as a coquettish incitement. Kate had made a mental list of the men like Bonaugh she’d heard about at this university. Oddly famous for her monogamy with Luke, she had avoided most of their shit. But she had heard things and believed things. Was she meant to do something about that? In the custom of someone vaguely aware that they have a drinking problem, Kate tried not to follow the thought. The trouble with drunks and wayward thoughts is that one minute you’re thinking something outrageous and the next minute you’re actually saying it or doing it. No, she decided with some reluctance: she was not here to beat up every suspected rapist on campus. She didn’t believe that justice was best served by thugs and vigilantes. It wouldn’t be right for her to do it now any more than it would be right in a few years’ time for a mob to do it when they failed to distinguish between the words ‘paedophile’ and ‘paediatrician’.
That said, if she caught ‘Bonzo’ so much as grinning at Amy in the wrong way she would obviously break his face.
These men. Charles wasn’t one of them but he didn’t mind their company. The proximity to male violence was already giving him some kind of hard-on. She tried not to think about that either. Those pants. Eurgh.
She glanced at him, trailing behind her. ‘You know, you really shouldn’t hang out with those people.’
Charles was miserably scanning the path ahead and behind in case anybody witnessed his walk of shame, even though the shame belonged to his attackers. ‘The shits,’ he muttered. ‘They’ll be bloody sorry when my father hears about this. Very bloody sorry.’
Kate pictured Charles’s father as he would be now – still in his fifties, still a government minister. ‘What does your father do?’
Charles weighed this up for a moment, caught between his wariness of this stranger and a powerful need to assert some status. ‘He’s a politician.’
‘Really?’
‘Rather an important one, actually.’
‘Sounds impressive.’
‘Well. It impresses some people, but … you know, it just comes with the territory really.’
‘I guess so. My dad’s a taxi driver.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
He was entirely sincere and Kate had to suppress a laugh. But she wanted to press on: never in twenty-eight years had she got Charles to talk truthfully about his father. ‘So he’s a powerful man, your dad?’
A beat of silence. ‘Yes.’
‘You must really look up to him.’ She took another look at Charles. His face was hard to read in the dark but there was a quality to the pause that spoke of a terrible longing.
At length, he said quietly, ‘He is a hard act to follow.’
There it was. Charles Hunt in seven words. Or at least Charles Hunt’s problem. Which he would turn into everyone else’s problem. Kate said, ‘I’m sure he’s very proud of you.’
‘Sorry, what’s your name?’
‘Kate.’
‘Right. It’s really none of your business, Kate.’
After a mortifying visit to the porter’s lodge, Charles let himself into his place and Kate followed. He turned on the overhead light to reveal a tidy room, the walls of which were decorated with only two pictures: a poster of a Harrier Jump Jet and a newspaper cut-out of Margaret Thatcher. Charles went straight to his wardrobe and pulled out a pair of chinos and a plaid shirt. Kate turned to a bookshelf as he dressed, not wishing upon herself another indelible image of Charles’s body, which she presumed was still the colour and texture of wet Blu-Tack.
‘Um, this is yours, then,’ he mumbled as he returned Kate’s coat.
‘Thanks, I’ll be off.’ Kate put the coat on, feeling rather proud of herself for rescuing this ungrateful prat. If she could be this nice to her future enemy, surely she could forgive her future husband? Disappointing teenager or not, Luke was still in danger and she still had a job to do. ‘I’m off to the bar, actually. The night’s still young. D’you want to come?’
‘Erm …’ Though now dressed, Charles was clearly experiencing a new kind of anxiety – the one where you’re alone with a woman in a bedroom for the first time ever. He drifted around frowning at the floor and randomly touching the furniture like a bad actor. ‘No, I think I’ll just … stay in for now. Catch up on some reading, maybe listen to one of my compact discs.’ He looked sick, as if there was something he knew needed saying but to say it would make him throw up. He did his best. ‘Look, um, Kate. You’ve been … that was … Why were you nice to me?’
Kate smiled at him. ‘Because everyone deserves a second chance, Charles. Everyone.’
Chapter 13
The bar was packed as Kate swerved round the pool table. She reckoned the gang would have repaired here by now: it had been an hour since she left Amy’s room and Kes’s objections to the bar would have dried up along with the wine. She spotted them at a central table with a few other freshers huddled round. Given her narky departure, it would take some nerve to just stroll up but Kate figured that in their eyes she had already reached a cruising altitude of weirdness and one more weird action would make little difference. She got hersel
f half a cider and approached the table.
Kes saw her first. ‘Marsden! She leaves, she returns, she’s in, she’s out, she does the hokey-cokey and she shakes it all about!’
‘Hello! Me again.’
Kes shuffled up along the banquette to create a space, slightly squashing Toby, who raised a glass at Kate and gave her an open smile. Amy was saying something vehement to Luke about the demerits of the Nestlé business model in developing countries. He was doing his sincere nodding routine while his eyes constantly flicked over Amy’s shoulder in case there was something more interesting going on elsewhere.
Toby was making himself a roll-up. ‘Kes and I were discussing children’s TV shows, if you can imagine anything more banal. It’s like we’re in denial.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Kate began to take off her student coat, a manoeuvre she’d forgotten was almost impossible while sitting down. She stood. ‘What are we denying?’ The movement and question caused Luke and Amy to look up at her. Kate removed her coat and sat down, randomly giving Amy an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Without moving her hand from the table, Amy slowly extended a thumb while maintaining an immovable frown. Kate nodded playfully, as if everything was normal. And decided to ignore the baffled expression of her dead husband.
Yep, playing it cool. Real cool.
‘We’re in denial of our huge academic potential,’ Kes continued. ‘It’s violently transgressive to be talking about Bagpuss in an environment such as this.’
There was a loud crash from the far corner and the sound of a dropped tray of drinks and somebody’s utter humiliation was greeted with the obligatory massive cheer.
Toby ran the tip of his tongue along the Rizla and added some final touches to his handiwork. ‘Yes, the place is clearly an intellectual powerhouse.’
‘God, I used to love Bagpuss!’ said Luke.
Amy folded her arms and looked elsewhere. Kate felt that Luke’s comment should be encouraged, since he’d finally said something honest. He really did love Bagpuss. How exactly she was going to finesse that into ‘You’ve got a brain tumour’ was a bit of admin that probably needed to be dealt with at some future point quite soon.
