The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  “Well, look, we don’t want you talking to us.”

  “It’s a free country, like I said. Anyway,” (he was addressing Doug now) “I asked you a question.”

  Doug could not believe the boy’s presumption. He gazed at him with the cold disdain of a pedigree bloodhound whose tail has just been tweaked by a mongrel pup.

  “Have you been asked to join?” Paul repeated.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, there you are then. You’re only jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “You don’t fool me with all that guff about elites. If you’re not an elitist, what are you doing at this school? You had to take an entrance exam, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Elitism’s a good thing. Everyone but a handful of blinkered ideologues knows that. Elitism leads to competition and competition leads to excellence. And as for The Closed Circle, I’m going to ask if I can join.”

  Benjamin howled with incredulity. “You? You’re about five years too young, for one thing. And you don’t ask to join. They have to ask you.”

  Before Paul could enrage him any further the bus reached Northfield, and it was time for Claire and Philip to get off. As they said goodbye Benjamin looked out of the window again, not meaning to be rude, but wanting to avoid Claire’s eyes; he knew that when she said goodbye he would find a challenge there, that she would try to force some kind of response, just as she had been trying to do ever since he had first taken notice of her, at this same bus stop, three long years ago. Since then he had probably been the last person, out of all his friends, to recognize the obvious fact that she nursed a passion for him, an inexplicable crush which he had done nothing to encourage. It had become a source of monstrous embarrassment between them. Even Claire, at some level, seemed to hate herself for it; but there it was. Apparently these things couldn’t be reasoned away. And it was hard on Doug, as well, who had his own feelings for Claire, but had never met with the slightest encouragement. So there was always a little tension in the air, between Benjamin and Doug, whenever Claire was around, or in their thoughts. Which was why, perhaps, they said nothing to each other for a while (Doug having moved on to Benjamin’s seat) after she had gone.

  “So,” Doug asked finally, “are you coming to London with me at the weekend?”

  This, too, was ground they had covered before.

  “I don’t think I should,” said Benjamin. “I haven’t been invited.”

  “I’m not the only one who’s been invited. They’d like to meet anyone from the magazine.”

  Benjamin squirmed in his seat.

  “I think you’d better go by yourself.”

  Doug looked at his friend for a moment, then laughed—a short, sad laugh—and said: “You just won’t do it, will you?”

  “Do what?”

  “You won’t get out there. You won’t take life by the throat and give it a good old shaking. You’ll never do that, will you, Benjamin? You’ll never take your chances. Someone gives you a way to get out of this shitty place for a day or two, and go and see something happening, something really happening, but no, you won’t do it. You’d rather stay home with your mum and dad and . . . I don’t know, put your stupid record collection in alphabetical order, or something. Make sure your Soft Machine comes before your Stackridge.”

  Benjamin could feel the sharp justice of these words. They were like a rain of blows, each landing on their target with perfect aim. He cowered beneath them. It was true, he would never have gone down to London with Doug, whatever the circumstances. He could never walk brazenly into an unfamiliar office and introduce himself to a roomful of strangers, all older than him, all more experienced and knowing and bristly with metropolitan cool. The very idea terrified him. But he also had an excuse, a real excuse, and he felt entitled to use it.

  “It’s not that,” he said. “I just have to be back here on Saturday. There’s something I always do on Saturdays.”

  And he told Doug that on Saturdays, he always visited the asylum. Which was true. And so Doug said that he was sorry and then fell silent. There could be no arguing with that.

  4

  Every time he drove past the end of her street, Bill felt peculiar. This, after all, was not just where she had lived, but where he had last seen her. It was here that she had broken down in his car and begun screaming, threatening to kill herself if he did not leave Irene. He had pulled over to the side of the road and attempted to comfort her. For five or ten minutes they had raged at each other and later that day he could barely remember a word they had said. And even now, so long after the event, this otherwise anonymous junction where her street intersected with the Bristol Road preserved the terrible, savage energy of that encounter somewhere in its memory; Bill had to pass through it, like a forcefield, every time he drove this way into central Birmingham.

  She had not turned up at his house, as he had feared. She had attempted to contact him only once, phoning him at home and requesting that they have an urgent conversation. He had agreed to see her at their regular meeting-point, one of the shower blocks at the plant, the scene of some of their most frantic clandestine lovemaking. But Bill didn’t go. His nerve had failed him.

  For most of the next two evenings he had surreptitiously left his phone off the hook, wedging the receiver away from its cradle with a pellet of india rubber, but it soon occurred to him that he couldn’t do this forever. At 9:30 on the night after he had broken his appointment, he returned the telephone to its normal state, and within five minutes it was ringing. He picked up the phone and found himself speaking to Donald Newman, Miriam’s father. He seemed to be on the verge of hysteria and the first thing he did was to threaten Bill with murder, but Bill was not scared of violence, and he knew that he had to allow this man to confront him. They arranged to meet in The Black Horse in Northfield, half an hour later, and that was where Donald had told him the extraordinary news: Miriam had disappeared.

  He was a violent man, Bill could see that. Potentially, at any rate. But that night he confined himself to abusing Bill verbally, calling him every filthy name in the dictionary, accusing him of having seduced his daughter and corrupted her and defiled her and probably getting her pregnant and forcing her to have any number of abortions and anything else that was thrown up by an imagination Bill might have characterized as raving if so many of the accusations had not been, in point of fact, uncomfortably close to the truth. Anyway, he barely heard or understood most of what he was being told: his mind was reeling from the impact of so much new and horrific information. Miriam had kept a diary, apparently. She had never told him that. Not for the whole of their time together, thank God, but certainly at the beginning, and now her father had read all of it. Humiliation and exposure stared him in the face that night—the end of his marriage, the loss of his job—and he found himself pleading with Donald, begging him for the sake of Irene and Doug to keep the affair secret. But Donald wasn’t interested in any of this. All he wanted to know was where Miriam was. Where is she, he kept repeating, where is my daughter, and all that Bill could answer was, I don’t know. I really, really don’t know.

  The only thing he could think to tell Donald was about the other man. He remembered the teasing way—except that it was too reckless to be called teasing, too desperate—Miriam had led him to believe that there was someone else, another lover, some unnamed rival who was “not from the factory, not from anywhere round here.” She had even threatened to run off with him, and perhaps that was what she had done. Donald pressed him for the man’s name but he didn’t know it. And then Donald asked: Do you think she could have killed herself?, and once again Bill shook his head and this time behind his wire-rimmed glasses his haggard grey eyes were pooled with tears as he said: I don’t know.

  Donald had gone.

  Eight anxious days later there had been a curious, inconclusive postscript. Bill had contacted some of his friends in the Anti-Nazi movement and made some further inquiries about
the Association of British People, the group to which Roy Slater belonged. It turned out to be just the sort of rabble he had expected, on the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe, too minor to be considered dangerous although it had a record of involvement with small-scale racial violence. Bill had called for a meeting with Roy Slater and accused him of disseminating racist propaganda in the workplace. Slater asked him what he was going to do about it; Bill said that he would report it to the union, with the recommendation that Slater was stripped of his position as shop steward and, quite possibly, his job.

  “Do it if you like,” Slater had answered, unexpectedly. “But if you do—I’ll tell Irene about you and Miriam Newman.”

  The blackmail had worked. Bill said nothing to his union colleagues, and Slater had been more than true to his word. The last thing he had told Bill at that meeting was: “No one will hear about it, Brother Anderton. Ever. You have my personal guarantee.”

  Bill didn’t know what he had meant by that, exactly, any more than he knew how Slater had found out about the affair in the first place. He decided, in the end, that he had probably heard about it from Victor Gibbs, and he continued to suspect that there was some murky, unfathomable conspiracy between the two of them. But he had no evidence more concrete than the words in which they had both, independently, described Doug’s school—“that toffs’ academy”—and later on, when he was able to reflect upon the whole business more calmly, he even wondered whether Gibbs had known so very much about Miriam and him. Had it not been all bluster, and Bill’s own paranoid imagination? Speculation was pointless by now. Gibbs’s embezzlement and forgery were exposed and he had been dismissed. Bill never heard from him again. And one year later, Slater got married, moved to Oxford, and managed to get himself a job at Leyland’s Cowley plant, with the help of a laudatory reference provided, in what he was determined should be his final act of dishonesty, by Bill himself.

  As for Miriam, he did his best to forget. It had been impossible at first. Night after night he found himself on the point of phoning Donald Newman and asking if there had been any news. Each time, he stopped himself; he couldn’t face the man’s rage and contempt a second time. There was no story in the newspapers, and no word in the factory except a fragment of conversation, half-overheard one day in the canteen, about Miriam having run away with another man. Bill could never know how well-informed this gossip had been, but he was forced to accept, in the end, that the other, mysterious lover must have existed, and that she had fled to him. For months relief and jealousy fought for supremacy in his heart and in the end they called an exhausted truce. Nothing took their place. He struggled to kick the habit, the draining, corrosive habit of thinking about Miriam day in day out, and tried to reconcile himself, instead, to the virtues of routine, of self-control; of marriage. He had stayed faithful to Irene from then on, in deed if not in thought. But even now, almost two years on, all it took was a journey like this, a quick glance out of the car window, to bring all the grimness of that final weekend back to him. To have come so close to the brink, without even knowing it, without having the faintest idea, really, what he had been dealing with! A long shudder rippled through him whenever he thought of it.

  He found that he had driven almost as far as King William’s, and could remember nothing about the last four miles, not even the Selly Oak stretch where there must have been heavy traffic. It was a miracle that he never had an accident. Doug was waiting for him outside the school gates. He had changed out of his uniform, which he had scrunched up and rolled under his arm. After years of wearing flares, he had suddenly converted to black drainpipe jeans which made his legs look impossibly thin and reedy. He was wearing no jacket, just a white T-shirt.

  “Get in, for God’s sake,” said Bill. “You must be freezing out there. What’s happened to your jacket?”

  Doug threw his uniform and his black sports holdall into the back of the car, then climbed into the passenger seat next to his father.

  “I don’t need one, Dad.”

  “You’re not going down to London without a jacket.”

  “I left it at home.”

  “Then put your blazer on.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Take it down with you in your bag. You’ll need it.”

  Doug snorted and buckled up his seat belt. “Thanks for the lift,” he muttered.

  “No problem.” Bill eased the car back into the line of traffic streaming into Birmingham. It was only two o’clock, but the rush hour seemed to have started early. As usual, the gear change from third to fourth proved difficult, prompting a violent lurch forward and a groan of complaint from the engine.

  “Bloody gear box,” said Bill.

  “Why don’t you buy a decent car for once? A foreign one.”

  “Less of that,” his father snapped. “This car was made by craftsmen. British craftsmen. And I should know.” He slipped through a set of lights as they changed back to amber. “Anyway, how can I? What would people say?”

  It was Friday, 29th October, 1976, and Doug was about to embark upon a great adventure: a trip to London, his first without parental supervision. He would be travelling entirely alone, in fact, although it hadn’t exactly been planned this way. Without really knowing why—except that he had somehow wanted to impress his heroes—he had sent a copy of The Bill Board’s Eric Clapton cover and article to the offices of the NME, and two weeks later the magazine’s assistant editor, Neil Spencer, had sent him a brief, generous reply. The issue had been passed around the NME staff, apparently, and much admired. Doug and the magazine’s other contributors were invited to submit ideas for features, if they had any, and to send in reviews of any noteworthy gigs in Birmingham. A scribbled postscript added that if they ever found themselves passing through London and wanted to drop by, they should feel free. Doug had read this letter aloud at the last editorial meeting and was astonished that his colleagues not only showed little interest, but actually refused to believe that the invitation was meant seriously. For no other reason than to prove them wrong, he had phoned the NME offices a few days later and spoken to a staff member. True, this person had seemed to know nothing about the letter, but he was very friendly, and when he heard that Doug was planning to come to London that weekend (something he had made up on the spot), he had said, Yes, sure, pop in whenever you want. Friday afternoon would be a good time. Doug had mentioned that he didn’t, at the moment, have anywhere to stay in London and the voice at the other end of the line had said that was no problem, he was sure something could be fixed up. It was all turning out to be fantastically easy.

  “Have you not even got a phone number?” his father was now asking. “Just somewhere we can contact you in an emergency.”

  “They didn’t say exactly who would be putting me up,” said Doug. “The editor, probably. I’ll give you a call when I get there.”

  Bill’s next question was the inevitable, “They don’t take drugs, do they, these people? You’re not getting into that kind of scene?”

  “Of course not, Dad. It’s not that sort of paper. They’re respectable journalists.” Doug was hoping and assuming, even as he said it, that this was anything but true. The procurement of mind-altering substances was the second of his reasons for going down to London. It was a little habit he’d got into in the last few months. “Anyway, I can look after myself. I know how to say no.”

  If you do, Bill said to himself, you didn’t learn it from me. He dropped his only son off at New Street Station, waved goodbye to the disappearing figure who failed to wave back and still looked, to his eyes, absurdly frail and vulnerable, then glanced at his watch and realized that he had about three hours to kill before tea-time. The latest strike was well into its second week and he had cleared his backlog of paperwork days ago. A free afternoon in Birmingham stretched before him. What could he do with all that spare time, given that the pubs were firmly shut? Go to Samuel’s in Broad Street, maybe, and buy Irene a surprise present. There was no money coming
in at the moment and they had no savings to speak of, but the nice earrings he had noticed in the window last time were only fifteen pounds the pair, and she would appreciate it. It would be a gesture.

  There could be no end to the gestures he owed her.

  London was brown and grey. That late October afternoon, almost every other colour seemed to have been bleached out of the city’s palette, so that the peeling red and white railings of Blackfriars Bridge appeared shockingly festive; frivolous, even. Beneath Doug’s feet, the waters of the Thames churned queasily, sewagebrown, with just a hint of Joyce’s snotgreen. It was coming on to rain, as it had been threatening to do ever since the train had disgorged him at Euston Station half an hour earlier. Doug had struggled to Blackfriars on the unfamiliar tube system, confounded first of all by the branching of the Northern Line at Euston, and then by the thoroughly ambiguous relationship between Bank and Monument, where there both did and didn’t appear to be a real interchange. Now he stood on the bridge, somewhat rattled and hugging himself with goose-bumped arms, for although the wind coming off the water was fierce, nothing on earth would have persuaded him to wear his King William’s blazer this crucial afternoon.

  It was approaching 4:30, and night was falling fast. The shadowy, looming bulks of countless brutalist tower blocks, their office windows dotted with squares and oblongs of strident neon light, made the city seem even stranger, even less hospitable; a concrete encyclopedia of hidden stories, unguessable shards of secret life. Doug supposed that the tallest of the buildings on the South Bank, a monstrous symphony of variegated browns jutting rudely over the others like a sculpted turd, must be King’s Reach Tower, the final object of his journey. Jostled by early commuters, flayed by the lashing rain and the wind rising in random, vindictive gusts off the filthy water, he made heavy progress towards the end of the bridge. Apprehension slowed him down with every footstep.

  King’s Reach Tower seemed to be home to any number of magazines. Blown-up covers of Woman and Home, Amateur Photographer, TV Times and Woman’s Weekly graced the smoke-tinted windows. There was no sign of the NME, but when Doug approached the uniformed doorman sitting behind his mean little desk, looking very much like a junior porter in a two-star hotel, his inquiry met with a cursory nod. “Twenty-third floor,” the doorman said, and pointed him towards the bank of lifts.