The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  I think there are lots of nice bits of countryside around Birmingham, whatever people say, but after a few months we managed to exhaust even those and then one week Mr. T had a brainwave and decided he was going to take us on a walk around all the disused canals. Most of us didn’t even know that there was a canal system in the city, but we were wrong—there are miles and miles of canals in fact, none of them in use any more, all superseded by the motorways now, of course. It was very atmospheric, I must say: a view of the city you don’t normally get, just the backs of dozens of empty factories and warehouses, all cracked window-panes and creepy abandoned spaces. Apart from anything else, it was an ideal place to get lost.

  Benjamin and I managed to become separated from the others and after a while it began to grow dark and frankly we were starting to get a little scared. We hadn’t a clue where everyone had got to but we reckoned the safest thing would be to stay exactly where we were, at least for a while, and wait for someone to come by rather than running around in a different direction and getting hopelessly confused.

  So then we sat down and we started talking.

  Benjamin made some remark about the canals and I can remember that was what got us going. He said that apparently—or at least this was what Mr. T had told him— Birmingham had more miles of canal than Venice. Sounds incredibly unlikely, doesn’t it: perhaps you could nip across there one day and do some measuring and tell me what you think. And I said something like, That’s all very well, but at least when you go round the canals in Venice you’ve got all those palazzos to look at, and those beautiful churches. And then Benjamin said a funny thing: he said it annoyed him when people made comparisons like that, and the important thing about a church wasn’t what it looked like, it was the kind of worship that went on in it, the sincerity (or something) of the religious feeling, and he said that in that respect the churches in Birmingham were just as impressive as the churches in Venice or anywhere else.

  He said it with amazing passion, I thought, and it came quite out of the blue, so I said to him, “Benjamin, you’re not religious, are you?,” and he said, “Yes I am, actually,” and when I asked him why he’d never mentioned it before he said that he’d been wanting to talk to me about it for some time but the right moment had never come up, and he’d never joined the Christian Society because he thought that belief was a very private thing and not something he felt comfortable sharing with other people.

  Now, I bet that’s surprised you, hasn’t it? And I dare say you’re none too pleased to hear it. I know you’ve always hated any kind of religion and I’ve never said anything about it before, but I can say it to you now, in a letter: I can say that you’re wrong, Claire, and I know why you feel the way that you do, but the kind of religion your parents go in for has got nothing to do with real Christianity, it’s just a perversion of the Faith as far as I’m concerned. Real Christianity is about love and forgiveness and understanding people and being tolerant and not condemning people when they make mistakes and there is nothing sinister about it, nothing to be suspicious about. But no, I’m not going to get evangelical on you now, I just wanted you to see why it is that there’s some kind of sympathy, some kind of connection between Benjamin and me, however different we might be on the surface.

  I asked him then when he had found God and he told me but he didn’t go into details. He said that when he was younger, about thirteen or fourteen, he had got himself into some sort of fix and he had started praying, and then incredibly his prayers had been answered. There and then! He said it was some sort of miracle but he never told me what had happened, exactly. He said it was a secret between him and God and that he had never told anybody, not even Philip. Then he said, Oh, I did tell one person once, but that was Lois. I told her when she was really ill because I thought it might make her feel better.

  So that got us talking about Lois. He began to tell me what really happened to her that night, and I have never forgotten a word.

  All I knew were the same things that you probably knew and everybody else knew. She had been out at the pub with her boyfriend when the bomb went o f, and he was killed and she wasn’t. She was very badly injured in the leg, though, and had to walk on callipers for months afterwards. And there were burns, too. Really she was terribly lucky, from that point of view, but the main effects were psychological and nobody really knows how deep those kinds of wounds go, how long they are likely to last. Sometimes they never heal at all. There was a very long period when she was in total shock and after that she seemed to be OK for a while, but then she would relapse and gradually these relapses got worse and worse, until she succumbed to complete depression and had to be hospitalized for a long time. This was about two years after it happened, I think. As far as I know that lasted for a few months and then she came home again, but the family always had to be very careful not to do anything to upset her. Philip told me something about this once, I remember: a little detail that Benjamin had let slip to him one day. He said that at the moment the bomb went off the juke box was playing “I Get a Kick Out of You”—you know, the Cole Porter song?—and always after that they had to make sure that she never heard that song, because it would just set her o f, crying uncontrollably. They were living on a knife-edge with her all the time.

  Anyway, it was while she was in the hospital that Lois and Benjamin got really close. He used to go and see her at weekends and take her for long walks up on the hills. I don’t know how often her parents went to see her, or Paul, for that matter—probably never, in his case, nothing would surprise me as far as that little weirdo is concerned—but it was Benjamin that she started to bond with. They started to call themselves The Rotters’ Club after a record that they both liked (you remember at school how people used to call them The Rotters?) and Benjamin would tell her about everything that had happened at school that week because he couldn’t think of anything else to talk to her about, and he always used to wonder whether she was taking any of it in, because a lot of the time she would never answer him, never say a word to anyone, but he told me, that afternoon on the canal, that in fact she could remember everything about it, every tiny detail, she had perfect recall of all his stories and ended up knowing more about his schooldays than he even did himself. Ironic. So that was when he told her about the mysterious miracle. And slowly she began to say things to him as well, started talking again, and that was how he learned the story of the bomb and what happened to her boyfriend.

  I suppose it’s another kind of miracle that Lois could have been through an experience like that and one of the consequences was that it brought her closer to her brother. God makes sure that some good comes out of everything, you see. But I’m not going to start preaching at you.

  Lois’s boyfriend was called Malcolm, and she was totally, deeply in love with him, and when they went out to the pub that night it wasn’t for just an ordinary date. Benjamin knew what was going to happen, because Malcolm had told him, but Lois didn’t know. It was going to be a surprise. Malcolm had bought her a ring and he was planning to propose to her.

  It’s funny as I write this that I have two pictures in my mind. One is of Malcolm and Lois sitting in the pub together but the other, the one that stays with me more, is of Benjamin and me as we sat by that freezing canal in the dark, with a few lights beginning to come on in some of the factories, sending reflections over the ripples in the water. Only a few, as I said, because it was very quiet, and ghostly, in that forgotten part of Birmingham where nobody came any more. Just us, today. And that was more or less by mistake.

  “And did he ever propose?” I asked, egging him on to finish the story, because Benjamin was becoming very silent. His words were coming very slowly and he was starting to shiver.

  “No,” he said. “No, he never got the chance. He was going to, but . . .”

  His voice tailed away, and I put my arm on his. It was a brave thing to do, really, only I wasn’t thinking about it. He’s the kind of person you don’t touch, the kind who doesn�
��t like it when you get physical with him.

  “You see,” he went on, after what seemed like ages. “That was when it happened.”

  Then he said: “Lois doesn’t remember anything about the next few minutes. She doesn’t remember feeling any pain. It went completely dark and there must have been screaming everywhere and it would have been a while before she could see anything at all. After that, all she remembers . . . is looking down . . . and seeing Malcolm.”

  “Where was he?” I asked, and Benjamin said:

  “She was holding his head in her hands.”

  I can guess what you’re thinking when you read those words; it’s the same thing I was thinking when I heard them. I thought—and it was a stupid thought, but it came to me anyway—I thought, Well, that’s a romantic image. The two lovers. He’s lying in her lap. She’s cradling him as he dies. Maybe they whisper something to each other. Benjamin said that was what he’d thought, as well, the first time Lois told him. But no.

  “Not him,” he said to me. “She wasn’t holding him. Not Malcolm. Not the whole of him. She was holding his head.

  “Just his head.”

  And while I was trying to take this in he managed to say a few more words, he said, “A bomb . . . A bomb can do terrible things to a human body . . . You’ve no idea . . . There were people there . . .”

  And that was all he said. Then he started crying. And I put my arms around him properly and he cried into me for I don’t know how long, these huge sobs, just the two of us, in this weird, empty place, this weird, empty place where we had found ourselves (or I should say, lost ourselves) that frosty afternoon I’ll never forget.

  I’ll never forget it as long as I live.

  What some people have to survive . . .

  So now I’ve told you the story of Benjamin and Lois and Malcolm. And I wonder where you’re sitting when you read it. Out at that table, I hope, in the piazza, under the colonnade. Perhaps your cappuccino has gone cold.

  I think I shall go and get myself a coffee, now.

  I shall write to you in a few days and let you know what it was like having Benjamin to stay for the weekend. And you can do the same when Philip has been to see you. We must never lose touch, you and me, never stop sharing things with each other. My memories of schooldays are very precious and I can already feel them fading away. What fun we had, putting that paper together! I loved that time and you were one of the very best things about it.

  Oh well, I’m getting maudlin. Time to put a stop to all this. Life beckons. Or what passes for it, at the moment.

  Work hard and enjoy this wonderful opportunity you have made for yourself and don’t trust those Italian boys with their motorbikes and their surly Latin good looks.

  Ciao Chiara, bella amica,

  With very much love,

  Emily xxx.

  25

  Months passed, and Cicely fell ill. Just before her exams began, in the summer of 1978, she was struck down by glandular fever. Her friends said that she had been overworking, that she was having a nervous breakdown because of her complicated emotional life, and that they should have seen it coming. Her detractors said that she was an incorrigible self-dramatist and the whole illness was psychosomatic. Whatever the truth of the matter, she was laid up in bed for three weeks and then sent away to her uncle’s house in Wales to recuperate. She had missed her exams. She would have to come back to school next year and study for them all over again.

  On the very last day of term, 20th July, 1978, Emily found Benjamin tidying out his locker and handed him a card to sign. It was a get-well card for Cicely, with about thirty signatures on it. Benjamin looked at the envelope, which had already been addressed, and the first thing he said was: “But that’s where my family go on holiday every year.”

  “Really? Well her uncle lives there, too.”

  The name of the house was Plas Cadlan, and it was in a village called Rhîw, through which Benjamin had passed many times with his family, on their drives to Aberdaron and Bardsey Island. The caravan site where they stayed every year was only about five miles away. He could scarcely believe that Cicely herself might have some connection with this place, which he considered sanctified, holy, not because of its history of religious settlement dating back to the fifth or sixth century, but because it had come to be a repository of some of his own most treasured childhood memories. Paul, Lois and his parents would be going there again, in about two weeks’ time. Benjamin had resolved to stay at home, this year, and to spend some time with his grandparents instead, since his grandfather had now been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was too ill to travel. He had been looking forward, as well, to a fortnight of relative solitude and freedom. But still, if Cicely was going to be there . . .

  “How long will she be staying with her uncle?” he asked.

  Emily had no idea. Perhaps she would be in Wales all summer, perhaps she would be back in Birmingham next week. Everything depended on her health.

  This information merely added to the strangeness of what was already a thoroughly strange day. Ever since exams had finished a few weeks ago, school had had an unreal, carnival atmosphere. There were no more lessons. For the thirty or so boys who, like Benjamin, would be coming back in the autumn term to sit the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams, there were informal meetings called “Syndicates” to discuss possible reading programmes for the summer. The House sporting championships were still in progress. Otherwise, there was no incentive for any of the upper sixth to come to school at all, and most of them didn’t. Benjamin spent much of the time hanging around at home, listening to records, making trips into Birmingham to buy more records, taking Jennifer out for occasional drinks and telling himself that he really must think of a way of ending the relationship before she ended it first. As House tennis captain (being too hopeless to make the cricket XI), he led his team to an ignominious nine defeats in a row, each match being lost 6–0, 6–0, 6–0. And now, on the last day of all, everybody he knew was roaming the corridors, signing each other’s leaving books, making protestations of eternal friendship or, just as often (and with rather more feeling), telling old enemies in no uncertain terms how happy they were at the thought of never seeing them again. It was all a bit overwhelming.

  By mid-afternoon, word got around that a party was developing up in the Carlton Club. Benjamin went to investigate and found that the place had been taken over by non-members. A marathon game of pontoon was in session around the main table and the air was thick with cigarette smoke. Culpepper was acting as banker and doing very nicely out of it. His laughter and cries of triumph could be heard halfway down the corridor. Meanwhile someone had filched a crate of the Founder’s Port from the kitchens and most of it was already gone. A boy called Foote had thrown up into the quadrangle outside, leaving a long trail of buff-coloured vomit down the window of the Chief Master’s study, which stood directly underneath. He had been expelled. Apparently it was quite common to get expelled on your last day at school. As a punishment, it was somehow lacking in sting.

  Only one person failed to join in the revelry. He sat in one of the leather-covered armchairs and drank his way steadily through some port, the scowl of depression on his face gradually, with every drained glass, transmuting into anger and outright hostility. It was Steve Richards.

  Steve had been behaving very oddly for these last few weeks. He was convinced that he had done badly in his exams; or, to be specific, that he had failed one crucial physics paper: failed it so decisively that it had killed his momentum and made him under-perform on the other papers as well. At Speech Day, the previous weekend, he had taken Benjamin aside during a break in their official duties and confided further in him. Messing up that paper, he said, had not been his own fault. He had fallen asleep in the exam hall.

  “You fell asleep?” Benjamin repeated.

  “I must have done. I’m telling you, I looked at the clock and it was 2:15 and the next time I looked it was 3:50 and I hadn’t written a bloody thin
g, Ben. I hadn’t written a thing.”

  This seemed to make no sense. Benjamin said: “Were you tired?”

  “Of course I wasn’t tired. I was on peak form, for God’s sake. I’d been working up to it for weeks.”

  “There’s this disease where people fall asleep,” said Benjamin, pensively. He had just been reading The Third Policeman, in which Flann O’Brien (another of his new passions) had wrung some comic mileage out of the narcoleptic episodes suffered by one of the main characters, a mad scientist called De Selby. “Maybe you should see a doctor about it.”

  “I don’t have any disease,” Steve insisted. “Somebody did something to me that day.”

  “Did something to you?”

  “They messed with my brain.”

  Benjamin had found some excuse for cutting the conversation short soon after that. He was beginning to think that Steve, like Cicely, had perhaps been working too hard and was losing his grip. But Steve didn’t drop the accusation. He started spreading it around his other friends and linking it with Culpepper’s name, implying that his old rival had found a way of taking some twisted sort of revenge for all the defeats and embarrassments he had suffered over the last two years. Nobody wanted to listen. The general perception, in any case, was that Steve and Culpepper had buried their differences in the run-up to exams. By coincidence they had even applied to go to the same Cambridge college, and this seemed to have made them accept, ruefully, that their paths were destined to run together. Culpepper himself had even discovered the famous St. Christopher’s medal, at last, while rooting around in Mr. Nuttall’s lost property box, and he had given it back to Steve personally. They had shaken hands on it. So nobody could see what Steve was getting at, when he started dropping these sinister hints. Nobody took him seriously.