by Mark Lawson
At the edge of his vision, he saw Ned shaking his head as he read.
Apart from this anthology of his communications, the two most substantial sections of the report were headed Victim Statements and Witness Statements.
The complainants were disguised by the ciphers V1 to V7, making them resemble German war weapons, while witnesses were hidden behind the letter W and a number, giving these sections the feel of a map of West London.
In a technique he had used since student days for deciding quickly which research documents required more detailed study, Tom skimmed the statements for key phrases. V1: I regard myself as a ‘good team player’ and tried to be a ‘sounding board’ for Dr Pimm, as with all my colleagues. However, I consistently found him to be distant and to appear eager to get away from me on the occasions when we would fall into conversation. V2: My GP has diagnosed me with a condition called ‘nominal aphasia’, which leads me sometimes to forget or to transpose names and words. I have never let this condition interfere with my teaching but I have been told by [W2] that Dr Pimm has on occasion ‘entertained’ other staff with cruel parodies of my lectures. V3: I was horrified to be told by [W2] that Dr Pimm would refer to me in conversation by the nickname ‘Horny’, which I assumed to be a reference to the fact that, since the death of my husband from a rare and aggressive form of cancer, I am a widow who has on occasion used newspaper or online dating sites. I found this description sexist, unpleasant and demeaning.
Ned nudged him and, when Tom looked across, was pointing to those phrases.
‘Christ,’ he whispered. ‘She’s even more Horny than we thought.’
Laughing, Tom noticed Cooper staring at them disapprovingly. He returned to his savaging by anonymous quotation. V2: Owing to a mishearing in a staff meeting, I was for a time labouring under the false impression that a lecture was being given by Professor AJP Taylor rather than, as it in fact turned out, in a room named in honour of someone who, it turned out, had been dead for some years. It was subsequently brought to my attention by [W3] that Dr Pimm had made mocking comments to colleagues about my mistake, and a story subsequently appeared in a student publication questioning my educational credentials.
Speed-reading, in this case, also solved the problem of being unable to tolerate more than flashes of the contents. V4: Although I am a long-established authority on Latin American history, Dr Pimm, in syllabus and examination meetings, would frequently challenge my arguments and opinions, even though his own specialty was the politics of the United States of America. This undermined my authority and caused me public humiliation among colleagues.
The statements were a catalogue of petulant defamations, slyly redesigned anecdotes and evangelical self-righteousness. Moments in meetings up to two decades previously – when Tom had supposedly failed to support or acknowledge a colleague’s argument – were recalled with a clarity of detail and analysis of motivation that had notoriously eluded the aggrieved in their teaching of history.
Tom thought of the former subjects of the GDR, discovering, in the Stasi files released after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that colleagues, friends and even relatives or lovers had been informing against them for decades; or elderly employees of Hollywood learning, from releases of declassified files, that there had been many more snitches than they had feared during the McCarthy period, and that the worst culprits often lay among the unsuspected. And even though Tom, unlike East Germans and movie-workers, had received some preparation for character assassination through the internet and social media, he was astonished by the monster depicted through a collage of misrepresentations and resentments.
The file alternated between allegations for which he could see no basis – such as V6’s Then Dr Pimm made a joke about paedophilia that shocked me so much that I had to check with [W14] that he had actually said it – or V7’s I am a committed Christian who was brought up in a house where swearing was not allowed and so was horrified to hear Dr Pimm, in his lectures and seminars, frequently employing the most foul expletives – and stories shorn of their context, such as V2’s: In departmental meetings, Dr Pimm would routinely adopt sceptical or sarcastic body-language. He would often sigh heavily when [W1] was presenting the agenda and, on other occasions, would seem to stifle a sigh when [W1] spoke, which was clearly a reference to the period when Rafferty, at Special’s bequest, was pushing through the particularly lunatic initiative in which students became customers and staff were warned to avoid at all costs being ‘academic’ in case the shoppers were put off. Sighed? He wished he had vomited.
Like Enigma-breakers at Bletchley Park, Tom spotted a hole in the code. From the supporting detail, W1 could only be Joanna Rafferty, Special’s steadfast deputy, apparently considered either the first or most important witness against him. Numerous internal details suggested that W2 was Quatermass (who had never forgiven him for leaving the union), which meant that it was possible to have both a V and a W code without cross-referencing.
On the notepad, he wrote: V1 = Daggers, V2 = Savlon, V3 = Horny, V4 = Quatermass. He placed question marks beside V5, V6 and V7. The last two sounded like students, although, as he didn’t recognize the incidents, it was impossible to be sure who they were.
The Witness Statements section contained the full W testimonies. Certain verbal tics and ferocious certainties confirmed that W1 was Rafferty and W2 Quatermass, while also exposing the equations: W4 = V1, W5 = V2 and W8 = V3.
In his freshers’ week lecture on sourcing, Tom warned the students about the risk of false circuits of confirmation. If B quoted the view of A, then you had one rather than two sources for the claim and, even if C and D then went into print with either the A origination or B’s endorsement of it, there still remained a single witness rather than – as, he liked to say, ‘poor historians and almost all modern journalists believe’ – four. So a ‘fact’ about the Black Death or the Suez Crisis that produced a Google-crop running into tons might have been grown from a single and possibly blighted seed.
Dr Traill, though, had either not taken precautions against, or chosen systematically to ignore, the problem of ‘Chinese Whispers’, although that term itself was probably now at risk of offending Orientals.
Special, Savlon, Horny, Daggers and Quatermass were routinely cited as ‘supporting witnesses’ to a claim made by one of the others, although, in most cases, all this meant was that they had swapped complaints or even, in an extreme case, that W8 had been told by W2 that W5 had been told what had happened to V1. So, on occasion, Traill would claim to have multiple witnesses to an incident for which the only source was the person who told the original story.
Scattergun attacks on Tom’s character had also been encouraged and the most effective under-cutter of his reputation was the ninth of the anonymous witnesses, who gained credibility from not documenting personal suffering but commenting with an air of historical authority.
I think a lot of his problems, W9 argued, come from the way he talks. Almost everything he says is a pun, a joke, a nickname: he has private names for most of the department. Yes, apparently he does have one for me. It’s [redacted]. Yes, I think what he does is to identify somebody’s weakness. He’s a world-class sarcastic. But, even if he just says ‘hello’ to you, it’s likely to be in a foreign language or accent. He says the word ‘so’ in Anglo-Saxon. Instead of ‘no way’, he started saying ‘Norway’ which then became ‘Denmark’ – it’s a sort of private language. Trying to find a time everyone can make for a meeting first thing the next day, he’ll ask: ‘Anyone for tennish?’
Tom found funny again a joke of which he had been very proud at the time – several years ago – and tried to remember what the meeting had been and who might have been there. Whereas most of the other depositions were vividly marked by the sensibility, rhythm or catch-phrases of a character in the departmental drama, W9 spoke more neutrally – and sometimes even approvingly – although with intermittent stings: Why does he talk to people like that? I suspect he finds most people r
ather boring. I think it’s twisted.
On his list of suspects, he wrote a question mark beside W9 and then tripled and underlined it.
Maida Vale
The woman checked her reflection in the mirrored wall, patting down the collar of her blouse and then trying her fringe and nape for dryness. In the days before the idea of sex became treacherous, Ned had always found the sight of a woman just dressed from the shower deeply sensual.
Looking up from his screen, the presumed student asked: ‘Are you checking out, Madam?’
So, parsimony getting the better of discretion, they must have negotiated an afternoon rate rather than paying for a whole night in advance and then leaving early, as Ned would have done in the days when he did.
Skin already pinked from hot water and almost certainly earlier exertion, the woman blushed instantly, a response that took at least two decades off her age and made her a pupil rebuked by a teacher.
‘Or, er, my, my … partner’s just on the way down. I’m, er, just taking something to my … the car.’
Although the item must be contained in the compact handbag that was her only luggage. Lowering her head so that the damp strands fell across her eyes, she hurried out.
‘So I wasn’t the only person who just spent two hours in this hotel getting totally fucked,’ muttered Tom.
‘Don’t,’ Ned said.
They were sitting on a padded bench opposite the lifts between two towering but insect-nibbled pot plants. The man from WH had left, after stuffing the two copies of the Traill Report with his Tudor thriller in a rucksack.
‘Hwæt,’ Tom said, opening his notebook, prompting Ned to do the same, but then the lift pinged and a man stepped out, flush-faced, no suitcase.
‘Romeo,’ muttered Tom, and it seemed an irrefutable guess. While the woman had left the hotel trying to look as if she had been attending a boring meeting, the man wore like an advertising board an air of giddy victory that omitted only whistling. He was paunchy and balding, another beneficiary of women’s commendable but counter-Darwinian generosity towards male decay.
Ned visualized the lingering last kiss against the door or wall of the rented room, but was surprised not to feel the usual reflex of envious resentment at lovers. His only thought was to hope that the two of them would never come to believe different histories of what had happened between them.
At the desk, the man was settling the bill with twenty-pound notes, although this precaution was being recorded on the CCTV angled in the corner of the ceiling and wall.
‘Hwæt,’ Tom asked. ‘Give it to me bare-backed. How bad was it?’
‘Honestly?’
‘Oh, Nod. That word always guarantees that someone isn’t going to be.’
‘Tom, you know me better than that. I mean, I understand that reading that stuff must be like being stuck in a cupboard at the AGM of your enemies. But there have always been two factions in that department – the high standards and the high-handed – and this is the latest battle between them. Nothing sexual, physical or financial. Not even anything that most people would think of as, I’m going to have to say it, bullying …’
‘Bensoning. Yes, well, did you read their definition of that? You could get a quadriplegic with it if someone took offence at them for not shaking hands …’
‘Or, indeed, if someone felt offended by that metaphor.’
‘Oh, Christ, they’ve got the microchip into your head now, have they?’
‘No, they haven’t. But, if you look at it, they’re mainly trying to get you over the way you speak.’
‘Look, I talk how I talk.’
‘And people hear how they hear. Especially now.’
‘One thing, Nod: I think my prat-nav has matched most of them. But Maida Vale escapes me.’
‘What? You’ve lost me.’
‘And I can’t find it. Maida Vale – W9.’
‘Oh.’
‘Who the fuck is that?’
‘Asbo?’ Ned wondered.
‘No. Asbo is W14. Definitely. I recognize his account – or rather half his account – of the meeting about no-platforming.’
‘Well, I don’t know who it is then,’ Ned said. ‘But all you need is for the appeal to show some sense. What do we know about the guy from Creative Writing?’
People of the Enemy
Henry Gibson was UME’s Professor of Creative Writing. This subject, until the Millennium a distrusted and even despised minor module of the English course, had become, in the new century, a surprising academic powerhouse, as an epidemic of self-expression spread through Britain, encouraged by the industrialization of diary-keeping in online blogs and the huge sales of autobiographies by victims of poor or abusive childhoods.
At most universities, including UME, CW was now a separate faculty, with thousands of annual applicants, apparently convinced that writing had become a vocational profession, like medicine, ignoring the brutal truth that there existed no National Literature Service and that readerships would always be more fickle and elusive than disease.
The monetization of literary pipe-dreams had obvious benefits to colleges but also to established authors who were the most plausible tutors for this sought-after craft.
At a time publishers’ advances and sales of fiction were diminishing, authors suddenly had the compensation of a new source of income – dropping monthly into bank accounts, with paid holidays and even pension contributions – from encouraging others to join their devalued profession. It was as if miners made redundant in the 1980s had been retrained to teach at an Academy of Coal-Extraction.
The Executive Dean of Humanities was also quick to see that these late-career lecturers and professors often had publication histories – including op-ed pieces for mass-circulation newspapers, or a Jubilee-pegged biography of The Queen – that amassed impact points far beyond the capabilities of traditional staff with their books and articles aimed at a narrow elite of peers.
Henry Gibson had been the department’s star catch: an English novelist who, his fame having declined at a far slower rate than his sales, was still known to those who would read fiction if only they could find the time, continued to receive prominent solus reviews on the shrinking fiction pages of broadsheet book sections and was commissioned by editorial pages to write articles on subjects such as immigration, sex education and (he was a quarter-Glaswegian) Scottish independence, making these already contentious topics even more so with his reliably counter-populist positions.
As a novelist, he had made his name in two senses. Early in his career, Gibson had become irritated that, perhaps due to the slovenly enunciation of radio presenters and increasing ignorance of classical literature, a dismaying number of those he met were under the impression that he was a nineteenth-century Norwegian dramatist. An anecdote much-quoted in profiles had the novelist yelling at a late-night local radio broadcaster: ‘I did not fucking write The Wild Duck!’ Pre-Twitter, this outburst had not ended his career, as it might now.
Subsequently, he used the name ‘Harry Gibson’ on the cover of his third novel Independent States, cross-epochally intercutting narratives featuring Earl Mountbatten of Burma dividing India, the death-bed of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, an Asian student racially murdered in 1980s London and a trans-gender Pakistani astronaut on an international space mission to Mars in 2162.
When the book was shortlisted for what was then the Booker Prize, and won the John Llewellyn Rhys, the earlier novels were reattributed to Harry Gibson, under which identity there appeared a hefty novel approximately every five years; including Watt, Watt, in which the eponymous protagonist of a Beckett novel and the Scottish engineer who gave his name to the international measurement of electricity somehow met during a power-cut in a lighthouse on the west Irish coast. Marking a change of direction, his most recent novels had been Kafkaesque fables, in which nameless protagonists in unspecified countries with impossible topography and dystopian governments suffered threats of disgrace or violence from male stranger
s, punctuated by graphic seductions from mysterious women. The Strange Day of Ignatius P had won the novel section of the Costa Prize.
For reasons of educational bureaucracy, however, the Professor of Creative Writing was listed on all campus documentation under his birth-certificate name, with the result that he was again mistaken for Henrik Ibsen by some students. Gibson was unconsoled by colleagues who told him that the ability to make the error revealed a level of literary-historical knowledge rare in those currently studying English Literature.
But under Gibson’s direction, CW, like a chain of coffee houses, had franchised out into other faculties. Tom’s and Ned’s students were now offered options on ‘Writing Popular History’ and ‘Writing Historical Fiction’.
Ray
Emma felt like a detective, except that she was hoping not to find anything. In the messages she checked, Toby and his main mates – Seb, Jordan and Oscar, plus Bobby and Aidan, two names she didn’t remember from birthday parties – traded misspelt, syntaxfree digital grunts about ‘sick’ goals and cheats on PS4. The other communications were largely pooled attempts to establish what homework had been given, when it was due and whether one of the others might share the answers.
She couldn’t decide how suspicious to be. The fact that the group included only boys was probably normal for his pre-hormonal age and conversations during a football simulation game. But might it mean that girls (encouraged by their mothers) were ignoring Toby?
She speed-read, as if with a manuscript she had already decided not to accept, what seemed to be several metres of inane exchanges. It struck her that a lowered IQ was a likely consequence of being a digitally responsible parent.
There was a lot she didn’t understand but it was in areas – gaming, American TV shows, football, the lunches at Abbey Grove – that represented no concern. Then she noticed something and checked the other messages from the same sender; it was something that had only recently begun. Was she being over-sensitive? No. The question that her historian partner had taught her to ask: what benign explanation fitted the facts?
