Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  ‘Very postmodern.’

  ‘I’m practising. How do I sound?’

  ‘Like the inside man.’

  * * *

  Their car squirted erratically down Sheffield Road. Morris needed to have the clutch looked at again. The MOT was due soon. He feared the garage. Whenever he went there he felt his manliness was on trial. The frequent and incomprehensible payments he made to Derek the mechanic served only, he felt, as a kind of bail whose term he was sure would eventually, inevitably expire. Last time, Derek had implied that the effort of getting the car through its MOT was above and beyond the call of duty, and that Morris should really consider upgrading his vehicle. The thought of doing so filled Morris with horror: the money, the decision – which he would almost certainly get wrong. He hoped vaguely that Derek, whose mental processes were as much a mystery to Morris as the machinery he worked on, would forget or forgive his previous prophecy.

  ‘Funny game!’ cried Molly as they kangarooed away from a zebra crossing. E was reading her work diary.

  ‘My boss really is a bitch on wheels,’ she said.

  ‘Yes you’ve mentioned that before.’

  ‘Oh have I? Well I’m sorry to bore you. I’m sorry to make your life so fucking dull!’

  Morris held up his hands.

  She yelled: ‘Idiot! What are you doing? You’ll crash!’

  He put his hands back on the wheel.

  There were several minutes of silence.

  ‘Sorry to be an arsehole,’ she said. ‘My diary is a real horror story.’

  Morris nodded. In the back, Molly was beginning to voice her feelings about going to nursery. The rain blew hard and horizontal.

  ‘Is it all worth it?’ Morris asked.

  ‘You’re not thinking of Majorca again?’

  ‘Majorca is just a symbol, just a metaphor.’

  ‘Then it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘You should read Coleridge.’

  ‘Are you still practising?’

  ‘No.’ He looked sullen. ‘When are we ever happy?’

  ‘Is that a real question?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You arsehole.’

  ‘I want an answer.’

  ‘All the time, that’s when we’re happy, Morris. All the bloody time.’

  Chapter 2

  Zoe Cable was woken at 7 a.m. by the monotonal trills of her Nokia. She reached over blurrily.

  ‘Who on earth is it?’ she shouted. ‘And have you even the merest conception of the fucking time?’

  ‘Gaston, no, we’re eight hours ahead you twat. You’re having drinks with who? Well tell him From Dusk Till Dawn was unwatchable. Love you too. Buy another watch. Taarah.’

  Zoe Cable stood up and stretched. She blinked twice and shook her head. The purple parabolas of her bedroom partition shuddered then settled. She had been up late working on a funding proposal, then a swift nightcap at the Pooh Bar had turned into three or four, as it usually did. At least, she thought, in her own defence, she had fended off Berthold the web designer. Sunday-night shagging, for all its charms, played hell with one’s schedule. Talking of which, she picked up her Palm Pilot. Before lunch she had her serial killer seminar, then in the afternoon a meeting with Jocelyn and Darren, her research assistants; her regular weekly cabal with Donald; Faculty RPC at four; workout with Rumi at five; then, in the evening, noodles and dancing with Melvin, her editor, up from London for the night. She was trusting that if she got Melvin sufficiently pissed and showed him the delights of the ladyboys of Coketown he would stop dragging his high heels on that series proposal. She went into the kitchen, switched on the coffee maker, got a bottle of seaweed smoothie from the fridge and lit a cigarette.

  She looked out of the circular kitchen window: Corporation Square was already clogged by traffic; sad-looking commuters were traipsing like a beaten army over the new teak and steel footbridge linking Peterloo station with the Metro tram depot. It was raining torrentially, of course, but that barely registered: in the six months Zoe had been in Coketown she had already become acclimatised – here, as someone had mentioned at the interview, soddenness quickly became a way of life. But at least it was only for three years. After that, London; then, when her contacts panned out, America. Coketown was just a stepping stone, albeit a particularly wet and slippery one.

  After finishing her cigarette, Zoe Cable lay down on the kitchen floor and imagined a warm golden light was sweeping over her body from head to toe. As the light passed over, her muscles relaxed one by one. After a few minutes her flesh felt sodden and imprecise. She breathed deeply in and out five times and began to visualise the scene. The scene in essence had not changed for three years. She had allowed herself certain updates – mainly dictated by changes in circumstances and developments in technology or fashion – but at heart it was the same. Indeed, with every step she took forwards (and over the last three years she had taken very many steps – some small; some, even to her, astonishingly large) the more the scene solidified and the less possible it was to imagine it as anything other than it always was.

  Zoe is sitting by a pool in Beverley Hills with cult movie director Hoyt Dashell. She is wearing a black T-shirt and sunglasses. Her hair is cut short and dyed bright red. Hoyt Dashell, who has aged poorly, is wearing a red cheesecloth shirt and matching sweatband. He has a grey beard and bright green contacts. It is early evening. She is smoking. You can hear cicadas in the background. Hoyt Dashell occasionally brushes away a fly. They are discussing his next film project, which is to be based on her last book, Again, Again – serialcomputersexcrime.

  ‘This’ll be the first feature based on an academic work,’ Hoyt Dashell explains. ‘I’m real excited.’

  ‘Oh, Hoyt, you old curmudgeon, those labels are all out of date. The publishers boggle when they see my books. Look how it’s listed.’ She picks up a copy of Again, Again from the mosaic coffee table next to her. ‘Fiction, Faction, Autobiography, Travel, New Age, Theology, Economics, History, Technology, Erotica … Young Adults.’

  Hoyt Dashell jumps.

  ‘I’m just being facetious, but really, academic schmacademic. Now, who have you got lined up to play me?’

  Hoyt passes her a sheaf of headshots. Zoe rifles though them rapidly.

  ‘This one,’ she finally announces. (It is a woman of astonishing, alien beauty.) ‘This is the one.’

  Hoyt Dashell looks at it.

  ‘This is the one,’ he says. He makes a series of rapid phone calls. Zoe Cable lights a humungous joint. The kidney-shaped pool is lit from below; next to it the hot tub steams. There is a whiff of mesquite and swordfish from the outside grill.

  ‘Let’s talk money,’ Zoe says. ‘What’s my cut?’

  ‘Oh, millions and millions, I guess. But really, Zoe, man,’ Hoyt Dashell gestures around. ‘You’re not hurting.’

  The coffee machine pinged and Zoe Cable slowly opened her eyes. She smiled gently and began her daily affirmations.

  ‘You zig,’ she stated, ‘and I zag.’

  She drank her coffee, took two vitamin tablets, ran a bath and opened her laptop. She had seventeen emails. She discarded five of them and opened one from Declan Monk. Subject: Interviews on Friday.

  Hey Zoe, I attach all the guff for Friday. It’ll be piss easy (fingers crossed). There’s you, me, the Crocodile, nutty Darian, and Mohammad from Middle Eastern Studies. Crocodile wants anyone willing and cheap, I play squash with Mohammed so he’ll do what we say, Darian probably wants a Jesuit or at least a Catholic, but since there’s none on the shortlist (as far as I can tell) I’m assuming she’ll sulk. Have a gander anyway. We’ll meet @ 12. You’re a champ. Luv Declan.

  Zoe Cable printed the attachment (CVs and cover letters) and read it in the bath. There were five people on the shortlist. She had slept with only one of them. Having swiftly read each application, she arranged them in order of preference, placed the pile on the toilet seat and got out of the bath. The person she had slept with was second. Morris Gutm
an was fourth. Her decisions were not tainted by emotion or guesswork. There was no one in the country with a subtler sense of the academic job market than Zoe Cable. She had tracked its patterns for years, she had observed and absorbed its quirks and trends, its aberrations. She understood it, she trusted it, perhaps in some odd way she even loved it – it was after all her chosen vehicle. So when she rated Morris Gutman fourth in a field of five, it was not a sign of peevishness, prejudice, ideological disagreement, ignorance, or even (hardly!) jealousy. It was a clearheaded assessment of his candidature, which was – to put it frankly and in layman’s terms – piss-poor. She knew Morris, of course, from corridors and staff meetings and recognised that his position as inside candidate offered certain advantages, but these advantages were outweighed, far outweighed by the horrors of his CV. Reading it prompted within her sensations of compassion, disdain and mild nausea. Compassion: well with better guidance, with any guidance, some of the worst things might at least have been avoided. Disdain: Alderley for Christsake. Nausea: the Eccles Institute – was that a cry for help?

  Zoe Cable got dressed, messed up her hair and put on her waterproofs. She walked through the usual downpour to the tram stop. As she waited amidst a gaggle of gloomy temps, gay businessmen and sodden students, she closed her eyes and imagined that there was a silver cord linking the crown of her head to the dark blanket of clouds above her and another linking the soles of her feet to the centre of the earth. This provoked, as usual, a sense of immense certainty and inner spaciousness. She smiled. The tram arrived, the doors slid open directly in front of her and Zoe got on, taking the last available seat.

  The tram started with a hum. Zoe looked up: one of the temps wearing a goatee beard and a sou’wester smiled at her lasciviously. She winked back at him and bared her teeth.

  You zig, she silently reminded herself, and I zag.

  Chapter 3

  Morris Gutman’s 11–1 class, ‘Misogyny and the Novel’, was not going well. It was not going terribly badly, he thought to himself as he waited for an answer to what he considered a rather good question about vaginal symbolism, but it was certainly not going well. The group had never really rebounded, he felt, from learning in week two that this semester’s course would be taught not by Professor Deirdre Pluck – author of the bestselling The End of Sex, well-known 70s feminist and occasional contributor to Going Critical on BBC2 – but instead by Morris Gutman, author of ‘Arthur Alderley in America’, published to vast uninterest in the Hong Kong Journal of English Studies, as well as numerous (unpaid) book reviews in the same organ. Yes, ever since then he felt there had been an atmosphere of languid belligerence about them. A tendency to clam up was not, in itself, unusual among Coketown students, but on this occasion it was combined with sporadic outbursts, either individual or communal, which seemed to Morris to express a belief that they had been somehow duped – though whether they considered themselves victims of Morris, Professor Pluck, the University of Coketown or life in general, he found it impossible to say.

  ‘Let’s put it this way then,’ Morris said after three and a half minutes of silence. ‘Has anyone here been potholing?’

  Rather surprisingly, a feeble-looking youth with bleached hair raised his hand.

  ‘Urr, yeh,’ he said. ‘When I was a Venture Scout, we went to Derbyshire a lot.’ He blushed.

  ‘Ah, Derbyshire, the High Peak, prime potholing country.’ Morris felt enlivened by this unusual level of cooperation. ‘So what was it like?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The caves, the potholing … If you had to choose the word to describe it, what would it be?’

  The youth thought for a moment.

  ‘Life-threatening,’ he finally said.

  ‘That’s two words,’ someone objected.

  ‘It could be hyphenated,’ Morris said. ‘We’ll let it pass. Let’s not get entangled in minutiae. Life-threatening is good. Anything else?’

  The youth thought again.

  ‘Dark,’ he said, ‘wet, smelly. Er, it were quite exciting though.’

  ‘Great.’ Morris wrote a list of the youth’s words on the whiteboard.

  ‘All right, anyone else? You don’t have to have had personal contact with caves – just whatever springs to mind. Free association.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Just whatever you think of.’

  ‘Hermits,’ someone said. Morris wrote that in small letters.

  ‘Safety,’ someone else said. Morris wrote that in rather larger letters.

  ‘Holes.’

  ‘Hiding.’

  ‘Smugglers.’

  ‘Plato,’ (a foreign student).

  After a few minutes, the whiteboard was quite full.

  ‘OK,’ Morris stepped to one side. ‘Ring any bells?’

  Morris felt he had them, for once. They seemed, if not interested, at least alert.

  After a few minutes, Peter – twenty-seven, keen, idiosyncratic, disorganised hair, Oxfam poncho, new tongue stud – raised his hand.

  ‘I’m a bit confused,’ he said. ‘I read the whole thing. OK, I may have skimmed some bits, but I don’t remember any potholing in it at all.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said someone else.

  ‘Not potholing per se. But the Marabar Caves – remember them?’ Several people nodded. There was life in them yet. ‘So what do you think?’ he pointed at the board.

  Peter squinted. ‘Those words are misogynist words. This must be another of them misogynist novels.’

  ‘Well, yes, but hold on a second.’ But before he could intervene, they had all written it down (except of course those that never wrote anything down): ‘Misogynist novel.’

  Peter was shaking his head. ‘I read the whole thing,’ he said, ‘and I never realised.’

  ‘Are there any novels which aren’t misogynist?’ someone clever shouted out belligerently from the back.

  ‘Well that’s a good question,’ said Morris, whose enthusiasm was not entirely dampened. ‘If you look, for example, at the oeuvre of Arthur Alderley, a self-proclaimed feminist, albeit to modern eyes of a rather Victorian kind …’

  They were looking at their watches: it was already one. The corridors were filling with hordes of hungry students; a chattering, grumbling mass in quest of food. Baked potatoes, chunky soup, meat pies, pasties, curry – they were omnivorous as lava.

  ‘To the Lighthouse next week,’ he shouted above the noises of departure.

  Morris yawned and aimlessly scanned the smelly and denuded seminar room. He had an hour. If he ate quickly, that would give him forty minutes to at least half-prepare for the very dreadful ‘History of Critique’. What was it this week? He found a syllabus near the bottom of his briefcase: Kant and Foucault. Shit. He would have to skim even more aggressively than normal.

  On the way to the Staff House, Morris ran into Bernard Littlejohn, romanticist and notorious malcontent.

  ‘Morris,’ he called, ‘will you join me in a mess of pottage before the swine descend once more?’

  ‘How are you Bernard?’

  ‘What? Oh, don’t ask. They’re banging on my door asking for essays already. I tell them to fuck off. I send them to the Mad Monk – go and ask him why I haven’t marked your bloody essays. Ask him about the whereabouts of Professors Greenspot and Dawlish while you’re there. One’s in the Priory sipping nonalcoholic cocktails, and the other’s sitting on his fat arse in Ho Chi Minh City; they’re both pulling down three times my salary. How are you, anyway?’

  Morris grimaced. ‘“History of Critique” after lunch.’

  ‘“History of Critique”, bloody hell. That’s one of Green-spot’s, isn’t it? No offence Morris, but really, what’s the bloody point? This lot can’t read a poem. Their ignorance astounds me; they’re so ignorant they’re not even ashamed of it. I tell them to bugger off and read the Bible. They think I’m joking. They think the Passion is some kind of fruit. Ecclesiastical history is a completely closed book. They ring me up at home to compl
ain about their marks. They ask for pointers on how to improve. I tell them: switch off your mobile phone, take out your nose ring and read a bloody book or two. They don’t like that one bit – they want handouts, websites. They ring me at home! In my day … What have we got here then? The usual array of insults.’

  Bernard was surveying the sandwiches on offer in the Staff House chiller cabinet. He selected one with a look of revulsion and they joined the rag-tag queue of bearded men in patterned sweaters. ‘Coronation chicken,’ Bernard read from his sandwich box, ‘but which coronation, I’d like to know – George the bloody V I bet. It’s all frozen and microwaved – two pounds ten. What’s wrong with a nice hot lunch? Bit of beef, few veg, sets you up nicely for the afternoon. With this stuff, I’m farting till five o’clock. It’s no wonder the peasants are revolting.’

  Morris ordered a baked potato and a cup of tea. They sat down at a wobbly table beside a dusty cheese plant.

  ‘I’ve got my interview on Friday. There’s a presentation.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Bernard looked suddenly alarmed. ‘Who’s on the panel?’

  Morris told him. Bernard grimaced. ‘If they had one slightest shred of common decency between them, you wouldn’t even have to interview. What’s your presentation?’

  ‘Alderley.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve always meant to read him. Who was it who wrote the biography? Bloke from Bangor?’

  ‘Conrad Underseel.’

  ‘That’s right. Solid stuff, real scholarship. Won’t go down too well with Zoe Cable, I’m afraid. She’s all hegemony and decentring. Perhaps you could spice it up a bit.’

  Morris looked blank and fearful.

  ‘No, of course not, why should you? Stick to your guns.’

  Bernard bit into his sandwich; the pale yellow filling oozed from its seams. Morris poured his tea. Half of it dribbled down the spout and on to his jeans.

  ‘Those teapots are made in Taiwan,’ Bernard said. The Vice-Chancellor has Wedgwood apparently. Oh yes, at his official residence. Declan was there the other day. Did you hear? Official luncheon for some bigwig from the Ministry. So much for left-wing politics – don’t suppose Declan sold too many copies of Socialist Worker over the canapés.’