The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  From the way it was written in the top right hand corner of many of the A4 sheets, the working title of Shaw’s book seemed to have been The Anticipation of Gifts. He had seen that title before in Charles’ papers; it was the title of another article by another scholar. Perhaps the whole thing was just a simple case of plagiarism or academic jealousy, he thought optimistically.

  Tommy read through a few sheets of notes. They contained little more than a series of bullet points. From their rather overwrought style, they looked like the kind of soundbites that Charles would have used for his back cover blurb, or maybe a TV or radio interview. The Professor had underlined one of them. Maybe he was saving that one for the front cover.

  What would you give up to be happy? Your principles? Your sanity? Your children?

  Spoken like a true father, Tommy thought. He looked at the words again. He had leafed through cuttings about the killing of James Bulger, extracts from articles about the pre-pubescent killer Mary Bell, transcripts from the trial of the Moors murderers when the tape of the torture of Lesley Ann Downey had been played; but of everything it was this that made him stop. This was wrong; very wrong, but Tommy had no idea why. As an atheist who took his lack of ethical principles seriously, he no more believed that it was bad, in the moral sense, to torture an innocent man than he believed it was bad to put carpet in your bathroom. So how did this feel wrong? It was wrong because something about it rang untrue; like a bum note in a symphony, something about it clanged. Something that made Tommy think he’d hit his first breakthrough.

  And it was wrong because, even though in the last week he’d seen two dead bodies, this was the first thing that really made him feel sick. As he tried to analyse just what was pumping the nausea from somewhere deep below his gut, all he could see was Becky. He pictured her as he’d left her, wandering aimlessly around Shaw’s enormous house, neither at home there nor a stranger, just ambling aimlessly; as though the house, as though Shaw, had been indifferent to her presence; as though her life meant nothing.

  Perhaps, he thought, that was all that the calm and patience he’d admired in the Professor had been: indifference. He wondered how it was possible for someone to create a whole world of ideas they could talk about as though it had a life of its own, a world to which they had no emotional connection at all. Maybe that had been Tommy’s problem, the reason he had never been able to finish his studies – his ideas meant too much to him. He had never really been able to think about them dispassionately and in the end the connection had taken its toll. Or perhaps he had exactly the same problem as Shaw. Perhaps, for all they differed in their approach to ideas, what linked them was the fact that neither was capable of making any kind of attachment to people. He heard Becky’s hollow steps in his head, and he knew that he was wrong. For some reason he did care, and maybe the fact he cared was what would help him see this through. If it didn’t give him another breakdown first.

  Pulling himself out of his thoughts, he knew he’d spent too much time thinking already. If he was going to make the course, he had to do it in very small steps, however frustrating it was, however useless it made him feel.

  He went to the bedroom and put on his sweats. He took the key and ran down the stairs, out of the door, down the snicket and up the Woodstock Road. By now he had a pain in his head that throbbed so deep it seemed impossible that anything could reach it. The rank stench of depression was beating and shrieking against the inside of his skull. Sometimes he wished he could trepan himself and watch the fetid pressure escaping like marsh gas from his head. In his daydreams he would see himself from above lifting a circle of bone and reaching inside to rip out the hurt.

  He stopped. Disoriented, he couldn’t see the road or hear the traffic. He thought for a moment he must have had a stroke; and then he stopped thinking. He had no recollection of walking back to his room, or of the bottle of brandy he had drunk without drawing breath before he collapsed; or of scribbling on a post-it on his desk, parent/trepan.

  ____

  17

  The entrance to Rosie’s small rented flat in Summertown was through a florist. Sometimes, if she came home during the day, she would pretend to be a customer. She’d stand by the orchids and irises and hum and hah. “I wish my boyfriend would buy me something elegant and thoughtful like these” she would say loudly to Chrissy, the shop assistant, in earshot of any clueless young public school types, of which there were many, “rather than more carnations.” In return for the added sales Chrissy let her use the customer car park whenever the owner wasn’t around.

  Up the narrow magnolia stairs the flat was laid out in miniature on one level, kitchen and bathroom to the rear, sitting room at the front and bedroom in the middle. A giant reptile tank dominated the sitting room, full of leaves, branches, and Chris, her chameleon, named after Chris Patten, Chancellor of the University and Governor of Hong Kong at the time of the handover to China in 1997. In the years leading up to the handover there had been a mass exodus as people fearing the breakdown of the rule of law, the loss of freedom, the loss of their capitalist ways, had taken off with their British passports for other corners of the Commonwealth. Among them had been Rosie’s parents. In the years since July 1 1997 many, seeing that the doomsayers had been, if not liars then at least vast exaggerators, had found the pull of home simply too strong and returned. Rosie’s parents had been part of this tide. She had felt the pull too, but, feeling as though she were at the start of something and not the end, she had made the choice that one wrench from home was enough.

  On the other side of the room, where the electric hum wouldn’t disturb Chris, Rosie kept a small drinks cooler next to a large shot glass chess set. She used it to store vodka and dark rum for the chess set, and mail-ordered grasshoppers for Chris. There were no framed pictures on the wall, just a selection of theatre, music and film posters. Among others she had an original poster for Notting Hill that she’d blagged from the cinema, one for a performance of Ionesco’s absurdist comedy Rhinoceros at the Oxford Playhouse, and one for a Covent Garden production of La Bohème that hung alongside a still from a Nine Inch Nails video.

  “So, what’ll it be?” Rosie asked Emily who had made herself at home with a large glass of white wine on the futon where she would probably stay the night. “You can have fried crap, grilled crap, or baked crap.”

  Emily loved coming here even though she felt guilty that she enjoyed spending any time at all away from David. Rosie still lived the student life. The only person she had to compromise anything for was her landlord. Emily loved her life now, but being at Rosie’s reminded her of times when she’d had so many possibilities. She’d believed that she could have taken any path she wanted in life. She’d still believed that by the time she hit her mid thirties she’d have a house full of children. The belief that all that to come meant she had enjoyed the solitude without a trace of guilt or regret. She emptied her glass and poured another. She had to stop getting so maudlin. Wine wasn’t the answer, she knew. Not long term, anyway; but it would help for tonight.

  “Seeing as I’m trying to get in shape,” said Emily, “I think I’ll go for baked crap, please.”

  “Cool. Pizza, oven chips and sausage rolls with barbecue sauce for two,” she called from the kitchen. “So how was Tommy?”

  “I think you’d like him,” Emily called back, “I gave him your card so he could call you about picking up his wine, but he went to get it with Becky Shaw instead. Shame, really.” She wished she could see Rosie’s expression, wondered if she would be interested, imagined probably she wouldn’t. She was surprised that she’d thought of Tommy with her best friend. He must have done something to get back in her good books without her even noticing it.

  Rosie returned from the kitchen and grabbed the Mickey Blue Eyes DVD from the shelf. Tonight would be popular culture not high art, which was a great relief.

  “Glad you thought of me,” said Rosie, sitting on the futon and pulling her feet up onto the seat, hoiking her baggy
red jumper over her knees. “You could have called him, you know. Or got me to call him. Does David know you saw him?”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” Emily replied.

  “That’s not good, you know. That’s how it starts.”

  “Nothing’s going to start,” she said.

  “So why did you call him?”

  Why did she call him? There were all sorts of reasons, but none that would have a hope of standing up to cross-examination. “I was curious,” she said. It was probably the closest to the truth she could get.

  “God that’s bollocks. So has he changed in fifteen years?”

  “Yeah.” For all he was the one who was still living on his own, the one who’d had the breakdown, he’d seemed older and more mature. He wasn’t the one who still enjoyed hanging out in student digs.

  “Good; because I was beginning to wonder exactly what all the fuss was about. He seemed like any other normal bloke.”

  “Yeah,” she repeated. That’s exactly what was different about him. Normality. It was the bit of him that had been missing when she knew him before.

  “Didn’t he have a breakdown?”

  I bet David told her that, Emily thought. She’d kept enough tabs on him since they parted company to know at least that much. As ludicrous as it had seemed to every part of her, her reaction had been guilt. It was shortly after then that she’d tried to make herself stop looking for information. It was the only way to make a lean break and give herself a real chance with David. It was hard to tell which of them David liked least, but Rosie was the only one he’d met. It was best to keep it that way. “Yeah, just after he finished his doctorate. He turned up at his graduation party and nearly killed himself.”

  “Is that part of the attraction?” said Rosie. It was typical of the sort of thing she’d say. She was great at making the sort of comments that sounded crass and insensitive but actually hit the mark perfectly. That was Rosie all over, a brash superficial exterior that hid one of the shrewdest brains she’d ever met. And, she knew, one of the kindest. If she spoke too much it was only because she thought you needed to listen.

  “There isn’t an attraction. Not any more.”

  “He’s not like David, though, is he?”

  She knew that Rosie wasn’t David’s biggest fan either, not just because he didn’t like her, but for all the things she loved in him, all the things that wouldn’t fit in a student flat. Perhaps that was why she didn’t need a man with a dark side – any time she fancied tasting another side of life she could come to see Rosie – and then she could go home again, back somewhere warm and comfortable. “No, he’s not. Thank goodness.”

  “Don’t you ever think it would be nice if he had a bit of an edge? Something dark in is past somewhere?”

  “No. David is an open book. That’s one of the things I love about him most.”

  “So what’s Tommy’s dark side if it’s got nothing to do with being sectioned?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She hadn’t known when she’d first met him; he’d hadn’t given her any clues when they were together; and she had no more of an idea now. It was the part of himself he kept back from her. Maybe that was all it was. Maybe it didn’t matter what he was keeping from her; maybe she just wanted to know she had the whole story.

  “I’m sure it’s not going to help him getting tangled up with Becky Shaw,” she continued.

  “Tommy and Becky? Fuck a doodle doo!”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing like that,” she said, hoping that it was true, and straightaway wondering why she would hope that.

  Rosie nodded slowly. “Not that any of it’s got anything to do with you.”

  “I know.”

  ____

  18

  “Have you decided what you’re going to say?” If it was anything, the pitch of Jane Ellison’s voice was anxious, but only a little. Twenty years of marriage and two hundred years of breeding had flattened out any extremes.

  “Well, I suppose I should really say that I’m waiting to see.”

  Even in the darkness she could sense that her husband was still smiling to himself, pleased with his remark. She shifted in the sheets, far enough over to her side of the bed that if he noticed it was because he heard her, not because he felt her move. He hadn’t felt her touch at all now for the best part of two decades.

  “I know exactly what I’m going to say,” he said. “You needn’t worry. I won’t say anything inappropriate. I will be the very model of decorum.”

  “Of course you will be. You always are.” Even she was unable to tell whether her sigh was one of sarcasm, of exasperation, or of plain resignation.

  Whatever the sigh signified, its meaning was lost on Barnard Ellison. Jane could sense from the tautening of the linen that he had already taken himself off to wherever it was he went, deep inside his head where the outside world couldn’t reach him. It was a place she knew only from the occasional unconscious chuckle it brought on the few occasions when it broke the surface. It was place she thought was better left there, undisturbed below the horizon.

  She heard the thick wooden night door in Martyr’s Gate clank metallically shut. Eleven o’clock. Outside the windows, down in Martyr’s Quad, a small group of people staying in college for a conference on the how to put on a better public face for the carbon footprint of the advertising industry was making its way from the bar to the Porter’s Lodge. She could hear laughter approaching, hovering for a moment on the giant york stone slabs outside the window as though it might stay, then moving on into the night. It was the same every night in term time, and the nights like this in the vacation when conferences took over the college. Academics and students alike hated them, of course, resented the fact that even with the vast reserves of property the college owned it still needed their money. The rise and fall of slightly drunken laughter, though, the cadences and pitch of sentences that came easily, were not measured or considered, were not structured to impress, all of that was white noise that made the vacation nighttimes bearable.

  Especially once the children had stopped coming home from college out of term. No, even then the laughter, the easiness had always seeped in through the windows, not under the bedroom door, not from inside. Or maybe she had never heard it since, well, since then.

  In the silence her thoughts were loud. Too loud. She waited for another wave of idle chatter to sweep across the quad. She waited, but everyone staying in college was asleep; everyone except her. And Barnard, of course, but he was somewhere else altogether and the only sound that came all night was the infrequent punctuation of laughter, postcards from wherever it was; so she stayed awake, listening, waiting, wishing she wasn’t there.

  MARCH, 1993

  “Life has its own timing, far more complicated than the circadian rhythms or lunar cycles you’ll find in any self-help book. It is a turbulent system marked out by moments of existential choice, great fractures that turn you upside down. But like any other chaotic system, there’s an underlying, often very simple equation that controls everything. Currents wheel and eddy out of sight. Occasionally they break the surface, the fragile skin we think of as consciousness, and we experience them as tipping points in our lives. But the equations that govern these ripples are always the same, and have always been at work. Psychoanalysis and any other form of navel-gazing won’t help us find out what they are, but knowing that they are there at all will at least stop our lives being punctuated by a constant moments of surprise, and the circle of denial, anger, and guilt that stretch themselves out until the next rupture in our routine of self-loathing surprises us. Learn acceptance of these cataclysms, and allow yourselves to enjoy the long stretches of velvet calm between them. Learn, even, to anticipate them, to wonder what might come next, allow your mind not to close itself off to what would otherwise be surprising. These moments are as much part of the pattern of life as the periods of stability, and each can help you to understand the other, just as the rapturous events of creation, fall, cruci
fixion can help us to understand the long periods of salvation history in between, can even teach us how to anticipate the next rupture – rapture if you will. History in all its disorder is held together by the single strand of providence – miracles, catastrophes are not interventions, just the points that break the skin. So it is with an individual life full of joys and heartbreaks, full of choices that seem impossible but are nothing more than ripples reaching the surface.”

  Charles Shaw, Lecture on Chaos Theory, from his Science and Religion undergraduate series.

  FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 7, 2007

  ____

  19

  Tommy woke and felt the coldness of the Egyptian cotton sheets and the space around him in his bed. Yesterday was the first day in over five years that he hadn’t woken up alone, and now he felt absence everywhere, emptiness amongst all his beautiful things.

  He didn’t have a hangover. Instead, the throbbing in his head had disappeared. The short term effects of alcohol can be a little too attractive when you’re depressed. He looked at the note beside his bed and for a moment or so wondered if he had been doing a crossword. Then he remembered the note in the margin of one of Shaw’s papers. parent/trepan. Something was very wrong with Shaw’s notes. He fought back his suspicions and the voices of idle chatter in his head. They had no place there. What he really needed was context. Best to wait and see who was at the memorial service before he went any further.

  He changed into a respectable black cashmere suit and sat at his desk with a cup of Hawaiian Kona coffee. He put on some Philip Glass and looked into the De Kooning print on his wall. They were things that his study had in common with Shaw’s. They helped him to remember the man who had turned up back in his life after 10 years. It wouldn’t be true to say that Tommy hadn’t given him a thought since he finished his doctorate. What were they though, the thoughts he’d had in the intervening years? Guilt because he’d abandoned his old life? Of course. Guilt was the annoying friend who went everywhere with him.