Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  ‘Is Declan political?’

  ‘Used to be. But I think he was mainly in it for the shagging. “Up the Revolution” and all that. Now he’s got his sights on Zoe Cable apparently.’

  ‘Really?’

  Bernard shrugged. Then his eyes widened with alarm.

  ‘Oh bugger it. It’s her and the Crocodile. They’ve seen us.’

  Morris turned round. Zoe Cable and the Dean were heading for their table. Oh God, no, why was this happening? Morris’s stomach clenched and his mouth turned suddenly arid.

  ‘Aren’t there any other tables?’ he hissed.

  Without looking at Morris, Bernard shook his head and then grinned hugely.

  ‘Donald,’ he said, ‘do join us.’

  The Crocodile, who was best known for his terrifying unpredictability, smiled weakly.

  ‘Thanks Bernard, don’t mind if I do. Hello Morris.’

  Morris smiled. Zoe Cable sat down next to him. She smelled of fruit and swimming pools.

  ‘All right Bernard? Hiya Morris,’ she touched him lightly on the shoulder.

  Morris sustained his smile a little longer.

  ‘Anyway Donald,’ she said, ‘as I was saying, this student Dirck van Camper in “Serial Killers”. He’s just so terrific and wonderful we have to keep him. I insist.’

  The Crocodile smiled. ‘He’s from the Netherlands?’

  ‘Amsterdam, yes. He’s worked with Serge Rubicon and Tatyana Balti. I’d have him as a research assistant, but I’m full up with Jocelyn and Darren. He’ll definitely stay if we put together the right package. Can you talk to Hildegaard for me? After RPC I’m in her bad books.’

  ‘Oh, are you really?’ The Crocodile licked the cappuccino foam from his moustache and looked interested.

  ‘Oh yes, you know. There was that row about bursary disembursement and I backed Géraldine. I owed her one after that UPP cock-up, but Hildegaard didn’t see it like that.’

  The Crocodile chuckled. ‘Oh no, she wouldn’t,’ he said.

  Morris was tucking into his baked potato, searching urgently for something clever, witty or at least grammatical to say. He was having lunch with forty per cent of the interview panel. He was their inside man. It was crunch time.

  ‘Honestly Donald, we should do what it takes. Dirck van Camper is simply brilliant, isn’t he Morris? You must know him from “History of Critique.” You can back me up.’

  ‘After last semester’s shortfall, and with the projected recruitment numbers, you’ll get nothing from Hildegaard. We could use the claw-back overheads, but it would have to be a very special case.’

  They all looked at Morris.

  ‘Ummm.’ Morris knew Dirck van Camper very well. He was a spindly six-foot five with a shaved head and little rectangular glasses. He wore a vintage three-piece suit to class. It was brown and the trousers were flared; it made him look like a disco Nazi. He was the only person Morris had ever met whose speech seemed footnoted. The term that sprang to Morris’s mind was ‘smartarse’.

  ‘Oh yes. He’s certainly very … very adept.’

  ‘Adept!’

  The Crocodile had pounced. He leaned forward and looked straight into Morris’s eyes. Bernard cringed. Morris shuddered and turned red. Panicking, he tried to reassure himself that ‘adept’ was a real word, an English word.

  ‘He’s always struck me,’ Morris croaked, ‘as extremely fluid, fluent. His English.’

  ‘Oh well, they always are aren’t they?’ Bernard chipped in helplessly. ‘Put our lot to shame. You’ll get more sense from one foreign student than a room full of English. I feel sorry for them sometimes, coming here. They’ve been sold a pig in a poke.’

  The Crocodile looked surprised.

  ‘Some of them have,’ Bernard backtracked. ‘Not talking about the Japanese of course. I have a Japanese postgrad. Yuka something. Bird imagery in Wordsworth, a lovely person, but it’s like getting blood out of a stone. It really is …’ Bernard faded away. He took another, rather desperate, bite of coronation chicken.

  ‘So Morris,’ the Crocodile continued as if Bernard had never spoken, ‘you’re backing Zoe on this. You think he’s worth a studentship.’ He looked over at Zoe. ‘Well, it would have to be three years.’

  Zoe nodded.

  Morris swallowed. ‘Yes I do. Absolutely.’

  The Crocodile sat back. ‘Very well, I’ll get Sam to do the paperwork. Could you ask him to come and see me, Morris? I have to go through FBC, of course, but I don’t see a problem.’

  ‘That’s smashing,’ said Zoe.

  Was the Crocodile taking the piss? Morris wondered. As if Morris’s opinion meant anything.

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat the skin, Morris?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The potato. It’s the best bit.’

  ‘Oh yes, all the vitamin C is in there,’ agreed the Crocodile.

  After a moment Morris started eating the skin.

  ‘Talking of the Orient,’ the Crocodile said, ‘has anyone met Professor Yin? He’s exchanging with Dawlish. A very unusual chap.’

  ‘Oh he’s a total wanker,’ Zoe said. ‘I asked him about Manga, but all he wants to talk about is Malory.’

  They all laughed.

  ‘He’s a real man of letters,’ said the Crocodile.

  ‘Don’t you mean pictograms?’ joked Bernard.

  As they bantered, Morris pondered the earlier exchange. Was there any way back? Adept, what could he have meant by that? Perhaps he should have told them what he really thought of Dirck van Camper. No, that would only have antagonised Zoe Cable, and the Crocodile wouldn’t have believed him. Maybe Dirck van Camper was some kind of genius; how would Morris know? God, ‘The History of Critique’, a nightmare. He looked at his watch: 1.25 p.m. He should go and cram for half an hour. But he couldn’t just leave – they would think that was odd. They would talk about him after he left. Bernard wouldn’t save him. He turned to Play-Doh whenever the Crocodile was on the scene.

  ‘Donald, can I bring you another cappuccino?’ asked Bernard, rising. The Crocodile shook his head.

  ‘Zoe?’

  ‘Double espresso thanks.’

  ‘Morris?’

  ‘Same for me.’ He had already drunk too much coffee, he was supposed to be leaving and he hated espresso. But it seemed the easiest thing to say. He immediately hated himself for it. He thought about calling Bernard back but didn’t dare.

  Zoe Cable reached into her bag (an Italian construction of fibreglass and suede) and took out her cigarettes and mobile phone.

  ‘You can’t smoke in here,’ Morris blurted before he knew what he was saying.

  Zoe was unfazed. ‘Oh Christ, I know. But I just like to look at them. It’s a comfort thing.’ Then, to the Crocodile, ‘You know I’m down to eight a day?’

  Cigarettes, Morris thought, might be a topic he could engage with.

  ‘I just started,’ he said. ‘Smoking.’

  ‘Really?’ They both looked at him with interest.

  ‘Splendid,’ said the Crocodile, who had a well-known penchant for cheroots. ‘Nothing like bucking the trend.’

  ‘Bloody hell Morris, you’re a renegade. What’s next? Fox hunting, whaleburgers, paedophilia, unsafe sex?’

  The Crocodile roared with laughter.

  ‘That’s right,’ joked Morris, getting into the swing, feeling rather encouraged. ‘I only eat genetically modified food. And my hobbies include tree felling and vivisection.’

  Zoe laughed. Bernard came back.

  ‘It’s political correctness gone mad,’ he said, half-hearing Morris’s last remark. ‘I get it all the time. They don’t know a sonnet from a hole in the ground, but they call me a sexist for not teaching Dorothy Wordsworth. I tell them if we had world enough and time, I’d do it all, but I’ve only got eleven weeks and you lot think that Ozymandias is in Black Sabbath.’

  ‘The sonnet is an inherently phallocentric form,’ Zoe said. ‘Ten lines and a climax – wham b
am thank you ma’am. Where’s the fun in that? No wonder they’re not interested.’

  ‘Wham bam!’ Bernard momentarily forgot the company he was in. ‘What about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, even bloody Sylvia Plath? That’s theoretical fascism!’

  ‘Are you joking?’ Morris asked Zoe.

  ‘Yes I am, but I like to wind Bernard up. It gives him something to live for.’

  The Crocodile roared again.

  Bernard went pink. ‘Oh bloody hell,’ he said.

  Morris drank his double espresso and looked at his watch. He felt the situation had improved, if only mildly. If he could engineer a quick and reasonably successful exit, then perhaps the lunch would not have damaged his chances too grievously. They had seemed to like the smoking thing.

  The conversation had moved on to classical music. Bernard was denouncing the conductor of the Coketown Philharmonic as a talentless fraud; the Crocodile was offering outside information on his probable successor; Zoe was explaining that she once shared a flat in Berlin with Yo Yo Ma.

  ‘Well, I have to go,’ Morris said, ostentatiously rechecking his watch. No one responded. He wasn’t sure what to do next. Should he just get up and leave, or should he say it again more loudly? He felt suddenly overheated and in need of the toilet – probably the double espresso. He stood up. ‘Well I’m off,’ he said.

  ‘Cheers Morris,’ said Bernard vaguely.

  Morris stared at the other two – were they deliberately snubbing him? Or was this normal in these circles? Perhaps goodbyes were no longer de rigueur – if so his hesitation was only more humiliating. They were talking as if he were no longer there. After a few seconds he caught the Crocodile’s eye and saw, he thought, the tiniest of nods. Zoe? He couldn’t stand there any longer waiting for her to respond, it was ludicrous. He walked away flushed and breathless. It had been a disaster after all. He passed the chiller cabinet and pushed through the double doors. He wished, madly, that he had an axe with him. He couldn’t imagine what he would do with such an instrument, but it would at least serve as a focus for the sensations of rage and shame which rocked him at times like this. It could certainly be a small axe if necessary – a hatchet – and it wouldn’t even have to be particularly sharp. He just needed something, a symbol.

  Oh Christ, it was 1.55, ‘The History of Critique.’

  Chapter 4

  Zoe Cable’s enthusiasm for Dirck van Camper had begun two weeks before, when they had run into each other at a party. It was then that she had learned not only that he had worked with Rubicon and Balti, but also, amazingly, that he was the stepson of über-theorist Firenze Beach, author of Incredible Bodies: Flesh Without Form and latterly the magisterial three-volume History of Dismay. Firenze Beach was hot, painfully, pulsatingly hot. She still rather quirkily based herself in Belgium, but after her last two books she could really have taken her pick. There were already several adulatory websites and one actual journal devoted to her work. Zoe Cable had seen her at conferences – Copenhagen, San Diego, Venice – but she had never managed to snatch more than a few words with her before Beach was swept off to a dinner or prize-giving. Now Firenze Beach’s stepson was her student. Zoe Cable was not terribly surprised – she accepted extraordinary strokes of luck as a normal effect of her visualisation regime – but all the same she was never fully prepared for the form they would take. Firenze Beach’s stepson. Bloody hell!

  The party took place in the penthouse apartment of the Cottonopolis – a new warehouse conversion on the edge of the Coketown ship canal. After chatting for a while, Zoe and Dirck van Camper wandered out onto the terrace to share a joint. Although the terrace was sensibly roofed with glass, gusts of lukewarm drizzle still occasionally reached them. Zoe was wearing red, wet-look waders. Dirck, clad only in a brown corduroy catsuit and desert boots, shivered theatrically.

  As Dirck fired it up, Zoe Cable looked eastwards along the canal towards central Coketown. There it all was, snug under a crust of drizzle and light pollution: the soot-smirched brutalism of Corporation Square, the pillowy yellow floodlights of the all-seater Postlethwaite Stadium, the velodrome, the skateboard park and, crouched like a giant armadillo among the huddled terraces of Rawpool, the lottery-funded Museum of Artificial Fabrics. Far to the west she could see the vainglorious minarets of the Beigewater shopping complex, while closer by a mile or so shone the newly completed five-star Orpington Hotel, a confection of concrete and stainless steel whose shape recalled, depending on whom you spoke to, either the subtle action of light on water or a giant silver lasagne. Dirck van Camper was rather a long way from home, Zoe thought. Much further, surely, than he himself could realise. She wondered to herself how exactly this would play out. What precise form her advantage would take. She took another huge hit and waited. She had learned long ago not to press such things.

  The lights of Coketown glowed momentarily brighter.

  ‘Great weed,’ she said at last.

  ‘Yeh, my mother grows it.’

  ‘Does she really?!’ (She was smoking Firenze Beach’s pot!)

  ‘I like your boots,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed.’ She swiveled slightly to show them off. ‘Fetishistic yet practical – nowhere else but Coketown.’

  Dirck chortled. ‘My bicycle has moss growing on it. It’s just incredible.’

  ‘Oh that’s par for the course. Wait for the mushrooms. So Dirck,’ she stood back and looked him up and down, ‘what brings you to the plughole of England?’

  ‘My lover.’ He grinned rather lasciviously and pointed back through the plate-glass double doors to a tall lymphatic woman with big earrings and extreme make-up.

  ‘Dorothy. She’s a grad student in anthropology. We met in Uttar Pradesh.’

  ‘She’s terrifically beautiful.’

  Dorothy, Zoe noticed, was wearing paratrooper boots beneath her sleeveless ivory silk sheath. She was as tall, white and ropey as he was. Zoe imagined their copulation would resemble the tying of a large fleshy knot.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Will you marry her?’

  Dirck van Camper, who was twenty-five, seemed rather taken aback by this suggestion. Zoe Cable had guessed he might be.

  ‘I have only one semester here. And then I must return to the Netherlands for my exams.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay?’

  ‘No, it is not possible. I had discussions with Barbara at Student Exchange. She said only if I pay, what, five grand?’ He shrugged at the absurdity of the idea.

  ‘Anthropology?’ Zoe said speculatively. ‘She must know Ross Goater.’ Ross Goater was a young, handsome and notoriously oversexed anthropology lecturer – he worked on patterns of promiscuity in tribal cultures and in the right light resembled Antonio Banderas.

  Dirck nodded sullenly. ‘He is her advisor.’

  So that was how it would work. Sex. What else really was there? All the energies of the universe coalesced in that one thing. If mass was energy, Zoe thought, (she really was quite stoned) what was energy but lust? Lust in action. Those worlds upon worlds, those swooping, wild-haired galaxies were just gatherings of cosmic lewdness: expansion, attraction, arousal, collapse. The pulsar. The black hole. The big bang! God, how obvious did it need to be?

  ‘I hear he’s terribly good.’

  Dirck swallowed without wishing to. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Only by reputation. I hear he’s very hands-on.’ Dirck’s eyes widened. This was easier than she expected.

  ‘Did I tell you how much I enjoyed your neo-cannibalism presentation?’ Zoe Cable had no plan, but she knew she didn’t need one. She was tuned in, swimming with the tide.

  ‘Ah, for me it was easy of course. I studied Theoretical Gastronomy with Rubicon at the Sorbonne. We covered expectoration in great detail.’

  ‘I bet you did.’ She smiled hugely. She found his polyglot Euro-arrogance rather charming given what was about to occur.

  ‘Isn’t that Ross Goater over there, now tal
king to Dorothy?’

  He turned. It was him, Ross ‘the goat’ Goater – all stubble and turquoise jewelry. He had a bottle of Peroni in one hand and half a garlic ciabatta in the other. He was gesturing furiously with the ciabatta. Dorothy was laughing uproariously.

  Looking from the silent patio through the plate-glass doors, it appeared, Zoe Cable had to admit, quite appalling. Dirck was clearly dismayed. He started biting his fingernails and spitting the pieces over the balcony into the Coketown Ship canal.

  ‘Could you help me stay?’ he asked. He sounded momentarily pathetic.

  Zoe felt a warm wave of disingenuousness break over her.

  ‘But you have already spoken to Barbara right?’

  ‘She was useless.’

  ‘I do admire your mother’s work.’

  Dirck frowned. It took him a minute or two to realize that Zoe Cable wasn’t changing the subject.

  ‘A lecture?’ he asked

  ‘A seminar series.’

  ‘That’s impossible, she’s over-committed as it is. Her schedule is berserk.’

  They looked again. The Goat had stopped gesturing with the ciabatta, but now seemed to be miming what Zoe Cable could only assume was a tribal initiation ritual. Dorothy glanced back at them. Dirck was about to wave but, before he could do so, Zoe Cable pulled his head down and kissed him fully on his thin-lipped Dutch mouth.

  It was not by any means an amateurish kiss, it was not the kind of kiss, for instance, which relies for its impact either on previous stores of goodwill or the expectation of further delights to come. No, this was a free-standing, self-sustaining kiss, a kiss which rose and fell on its own merits. And its own merits, Zoe Cable knew, were considerable. She had been developing the kiss for two decades and her field testing had been extensive. There had been several failed prototypes before she had arrived at what she now considered this final, unsurpassable version. The kiss, which had been described by one concussed boyfriend as not so much a kiss but more a total mouth-fuck, involved a combination of twirling, probing, nibbling, blowing and sucking, of such complex beauty that to do it justice would have required a page or two of quadrilateral equations or a half-decent sonnet sequence. It was not, in short, a kiss to be described. Not even, some had argued, to be enjoyed, but only to be experienced, to be marvelled at, to be lived through whenever possible.