Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  Morris nodded. Underseel was aggressively sweeping the biscuit crumbs off his blotting pad. He was in no mood for interruption.

  ‘Because the work of scholarship, Morris, is silent. You may read for thirty, forty, fifty years. You may gather, you may clarify, you may annotate and rearrange. No one need know what you are up to – indeed, it may be better if they don’t. That is scholarship Morris. The writing,’ he actually stuck out his tongue, ‘is nothing.’

  ‘The teaching?’

  Underseed gave a look of pale dismay. ‘A disease. An allergy. You must beware of it Morris. It can destroy you. It can deceive you into believing you know something when really you know nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Allow me to explain. You aspire, as I do myself, to be scholar of the work of Arthur Alderley.’ Morris nodded once more. ‘In order to pursue this path one must first, of course, acquire detailed and comprehensive knowledge of the writings of Aiderley himself, both published and unpublished, and an understanding, as far as is possible, of his life, his contacts, his milieu. This is really only stage one (it may be less than that, but let us for now call it stage one) because to properly understand Alderley you must first understand the writings, the lives, the milieu of (to mention just the most obvious names): Hardy, Shaw, Housman, Dickens, Kipling, Meredith, Eliot, Gissing, Disraeli, Carlyle, Huxley, Browning and Clough. In order to fully understand Alderley’s immediate predecessors, however, you must already have a comprehensive knowledge of the eighteenth century: Fielding, Austen, Pope, Johnson, Defoe, Addison and Swift; and before you can gain that knowledge, before indeed ground can be broken in any meaningful way at all, you must master, not merely understand you see but master, the greats: Milton and Shakespeare; Spenser and Sidney; Malory and Chaucer. I will pass over the classical authors at this time, but I hope my point is adequately made, Morris. There is a tradition, an alphabet you must learn. You are currently at A. Are you ready to proceed to B?’

  ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘No you are not. That is the painful news I am passing on. Do you know Victor Morley-Brown?’

  Victor Morley-Brown was Conrad Underseel’s previous postgraduate. They had met only once, but Morris knew the name well. He had always wondered what had become of him but never dared to ask. There had been rumours of glamorous overseas appointments, British Council grants.

  ‘Do you know where he is now?’

  ‘Prague?’

  ‘Safeway.’

  ‘He gave up?’

  ‘On the contrary. He has reached stage two. At night he stacks shelves; in the day he reads. We are in regular contact. I can give you his number.’

  Morris looked at Conrad Underseel. His hair was dappled and strangely terraced. He had a nose like a pomegranate. His clothes were twenty years old but looked brand new, as though he had access to a secret 70s fashion bunker. His face had a menacing blankness. He was clearly brutal and unhinged, yet Morris had placed his future in this man’s hands. What did that tell you about Morris Gutman, he wondered, about his judgement and perspicuity? Perhaps he deserved what he got.

  As he left Underseel’s office and started walking back down the hill towards Deiniol Road and the Garth Street bus station, Morris felt like a child who had been violently orphaned. Seagulls barked and wheeled above his head. To the west, sandwiched between asphalt slabs of sea and sky, the edge of Anglesey lay hazed by margarine light. It was all over with Banbury.

  Rereading his dissertation now in the gathering gloom of his shared office at the University of Coketown, that mood of anguished loneliness gradually seeped back. How flimsy his words seemed, how gauche his arguments. Jam and amputation – it wasn’t interesting, just weird. Underseel’s reactionary madness was, in retrospect, written all over it. Going up against Zoe Cable, the Crocodile and Declan Monk he would normally have needed something at least solid – phrenology might have qualified – but after the events of that afternoon and lunchtime it would have to be better than that; it would have to be remarkable. Was he still capable of that? He didn’t know. After the Bangor catastrophe he had lost not only his confidence but also his bearings. That and two years’ sleep deprivation had left him essentially clueless. But he had to try. He would never get a better chance. He was their inside man. He switched on his computer, opened his dissertation file and began ferociously cutting. The dissertation was three hundred pages long, and after forty-five minutes all he had left was twenty-three pages and a footnote. It was the footnote he was most interested in. It was an offhand remark about sexual dismay in the late stories but he thought something might be made of it. Wasn’t there a new book about dismay by Firenze Beach? He had read a review and could remember the main idea. What was it – dismay as a feminised anguish and something about the beautiful and the sublime, fancy and imagination?

  He recalled the late stories, Two Masts over Hastings, The Mountebank – great works in many ways although a little peculiar because of the syphilis – and if you thought about it, they were really packed with dismay. It was everywhere you looked. He made some preliminary notes and became rather excited. He drew some arrows, a few circles and did some underlining. He got out a highlighter. This might just work, he thought. If dismay was gendered then you could make a contrast here, maybe throw in some Kierkegaard for the menfolk, and look, if you trace it out Alderley becomes a post-feminist avant la lettre. Great stuff. He imagined Zoe Cable nodding in agreement, Declan Monk giving him a grinning thumbs-up. Morris started typing like a fiend. He was really on to something, it all fell into place. He wrote seven pages without stopping (too much! he needed five) then went to the toilet.

  When he came back, he reread what he had done and felt a little less certain. Hadn’t he said essentially the same thing twice or even three times, and didn’t he contradict himself a little on page six? Never mind, a little trimming and tightening would do the trick. He cut out some of the more florid prose and then moved a couple of paragraphs from the end to the middle, to consolidate and avoid repetition. A little better, but now it seemed unbalanced – the climax came at the beginning not the end. Perhaps, he thought boldly, if he reversed it completely and began with the ending then worked back … It took him half an hour or so to make the change. On rereading it was stylistically successful but the logic seemed patchy. Perhaps he needed to bolster the discussion of Two Masts over Hastings with a reference to the implicit treatment of dismay in City of Rats. He did it, but that raised the tricky question of allegory, since City of Rats was narrated in part (in Alderley’s boldest stylistic gambit) by rodents, and the gender of the rodents was far from clear (should he go into that?). It was difficult to know where to end. Ten minutes was no time at all. What did they expect?

  He rewrote it again, adding and deleting considerable amounts. The more he worked on it however, the less clear he was about just what he was trying to say. The idea of dismay became more and more puzzling to him. He wondered what it really meant. Perhaps he should have read Firenze Beach’s book, but it was too late for that now. He had another run at it. The sentences seemed to be fading into pablum, losing colour and sense. Morris began to feel panicky. It was Monday. Tuesday night he would need to prepare for Wednesday’s classes. Wednesday night was E’s yoga, he would have Molly. There was Thursday, but he was usually knackered by then. He really needed to do something now. It was nine-thirty, he was hungry and once again tired. He went over it once more and it just fell apart – it made no sense at all. The paragraphs were just half-baked fragments shimmering facetiously on the screen – mocking him. He imagined Zoe Cable suppressing a laugh, the Crocodile looking up at the ceiling and sucking his teeth, Declan saying they would let him know. He felt like smashing his head through the computer monitor, setting his hair on fire. He was fucked. Exhausted and fucked. Underseel was right after all.

  The phone rang on his desk. It was E.

  ‘It’s nine-thirty, Morris, what’s gone wrong?’

  ‘Why do you always assume th
e worst? Why do you always leap to the most damaging conclusion?’

  ‘You said you’d be an hour or so.’

  ‘You’re such a literalist. I’m constantly amazed by that aspect of your character.’

  ‘Molly’s in bed. There’s something important I want to say.’

  ‘My presentation,’ Morris hissed. ‘I’m working on my presentation.’

  ‘Is it going well?’

  Morris was stunned by the idiocy of the question. It took him a moment to regather his forces.

  ‘It is not going well, no. In fact, I cannot imagine a situation in regard to my piece-of-shit presentation when the phrase “going well” would be appropriate.’

  ‘Sorry Morris.’

  ‘Indeed, even,’ he went on, ‘if we accept the popular theory that our universe is only one of an infinite number of parallel universes, I think it unlikely that you would find even one of that infinite number of universes in which my presentation could be accurately described as going well.’

  ‘I take your point. Don’t get frantic Morris, have a cigarette.’

  Morris was momentarily touched by this suggestion. Since E’s attitude to smoking was generally vitriolic, it indicated that she at least understood the gravity of his situation.

  ‘I will. Thank you.’ He lit a cigarette and inhaled. His eyes smarted. It tasted like car exhaust.

  ‘We’re pregnant, Morris.’

  Morris inhaled again.

  ‘You mean you’re pregnant.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I’ll let that one go. Try again.’

  Morris was thinking of computers. Computers on TV, the green and black screens, the big spinning reels – you could ask them anything. Those lines of 0s and 1s would go frantic for a while, and then you’d have your answer, bang. That struck him as deeply plausible – appropriate, right. He exhaled. His face looked like the back of a bus. Would he ever get used to the way things weren’t?

  ‘That’s great news,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s not the best time.’

  ‘I’m coming home.’

  He glanced at the garbled document once more before deleting it. Phrenology after all then.

  Walking back to the car park, Morris felt as though each one of his internal organs was under extreme pressure and might at any moment sheer off or implode. The air seemed full of animosity, and he felt like he was walking though fudge. How big would it be now, his child – a grain of rice, a nail clipping, a piece of fluff? The future was a vast vacuum cleaner sucking him in.

  The Dalton Street car park was large and empty. The halogen security lights were, as usual, not working. After starting the engine, he waited a few minutes for the car to warm up, for its heart beat to regularise. The interior still smelt faintly of Molly’s vomit; it was amazing, he thought, the crannies she could reach. With this memory of his daughter’s last regurgitation – an avocado-coloured heave en route to Rotherham two weeks before – came, for Morris, a sudden and unexpected spasm of joy. There was something about Molly’s guttural roar, her unapologetic arm-waving puke which, despite its revoltingness, touched him deeply. ‘Here I am,’ it seemed to say, ‘and why not?’ Why not indeed? Morris thought. Now another one in the pipeline. Nine months’ time, one more person, one less job. Morris laughed manically and reversed at speed without looking.

  There was a loud, gut-felt thump and also some kind of high-pitched noise. A squeal? A tear? Had he really hit something? What could he possibly have hit? An unexpected bollard? A dog? The car park was entirely bloody empty. And what about his no-claims bonus? Without switching off the engine, he got out and ran angrily round the back. Dirck van Camper was lying beneath the rear axle. His bald head was split and bleeding, his little rectangular glasses were cracked and disarrayed, part of his overcoat was pinned beneath the off-side tyre. His eyes were rolled back to the whites and there was something strange about one arm. Beside him, his copy of The Phenomenology of Spirit was flapping in the wet wind like an injured owl. Morris dropped to his knees, astonished. What, he wondered, could have prompted such an onslaught of calamity? What could have brought it on?

  ‘Dirck,’ he shouted. ‘Are you there mate?’

  Dirck van Camper moved a little; the blood was dripping off his forehead on to the tarmac. It looked black like an oil leak. Morris thought of touching it but decided not to. He shook Dirck’s shoulder – cold gaberdine. Dirck did not respond. Morris covered his eyes with his hands and groaned. This was a true disaster. He needed to act. The longer he waited, the worse it would seem. It might come up in court.

  ‘So Mr Gutman, how long were you kneeling by the deceased?’

  ‘I see, and are you trained in first aid?’

  Deceased. Why was he thinking like that? It was only a knock, a few bruises. Dirck would shake it off. He groaned. His arm had too many joints, he must have broken it as he fell. Morris needed a phone. Why had he never bought a mobile? Because they were youthful and appalling.

  He looked around the car park. A Mondeo was leaving on the far side. Had they seen? Could they help? He waved and shouted, but nobody responded. There was a phone box on Leach Street. It was half a mile. Should he run or drive? Run – but wasn’t it bad taste to leave Dirck entirely alone? The car was company of a kind, and if anyone else came it would serve as a form of explanation. But then they, this other person, would assume Morris had fled the scene. It would look suspicious; he would have to explain himself. Wasn’t the car quicker anyway, more logical? He got back in and put it in gear. It struck him that Dirck might be somehow attached to the underside, caught up in the suspension. He didn’t want to risk dragging him along. That would be grotesque. He got out to check.

  ‘I’m getting help Dirck,’ he shouted at the lifeless heap.

  As he squealed away through the automatic barrier, he could see Dirck in the wing mirror – a bundle of black and a blob of white. Morris was panting and shuddering, his head felt over-inflated by a long, internal scream. He’d known appalling coincidence before, but this … He reached the phone box and dashed out. It smelt mildly of chow mein and was peppered with ads for perverse and inexplicable practices. He had no change. He remembered he didn’t need any. The phone was dead anyway. What next? On Monday nights the campus was deserted. The Arts Faculty was locked by now, and as a temporary lecturer he had no key. The chances of finding a working phone box on the nearby Galsworthy Estate were, he estimated, significantly less than his chances of being mugged in the attempt. Rawpool Station, two miles away at least, was his best bet. He set off at speed, but ran almost immediately into a sluggish jam of cars coming from a death-metal concert at the velodrome. The creeping vehicles that surrounded him were full of sweaty Do It To Julia fans wearing rubber fright masks and ski goggles. When Morris glanced at them they mouthed obscenities and gave him the finger.

  Morris thought for a moment: once he had called the ambulance he would have to go back and wait for them. Then the police would come and ask questions. They would arrest him. Why wouldn’t they? What could he claim? That Dirck had thrown himself under the car? Hardly likely. Careless driving? Manslaughter? It would take forever; he would be embroiled in legal niceties, paperwork. And by the end? Sometimes the sentence bore no relation to the crime. He knew that, he read the South Coketown Advertiser – it was a lottery. His interview would be nullified, his job would disappear. His life was being peeled away from him. He was being raped by circumstance. Tonight, he realised, was the beginning of something (the vacuum-cleaner future was sucking him in), but the beginning of what exactly?

  Morris thought of Dirck van Camper, disabled, dying, alone in the middle of the huge empty car park, and then he thought of E at home watching the ten o’clock news, Molly snoozing above her head, the germinating proto-child bubbling inside her. How could both these things be real, he thought, amazed, how could they possibly coexist? The bleeding Dirck, the fertile E?

  Any impartial review of Morris’s life, up to this point, would have reveal
ed that his behaviour had never been characterised by clarity or decisiveness. The major turning points – Alderley, marriage, Molly – had not been proceeded by a judicious weighing of options, a sensible listing of pros and cons, but rather by prolonged periods of vagueness, uncertainty and denial followed by bouts of (often drunken) impetuosity. That night, however, as he sat sweating and fitful at the wheel of his eroding Fiesta, Morris knew an immediate decision had to be made. The stream of clashing panic that had filled his mind since seeing Dirck protrude from beneath his car like a comatose mechanic froze at that moment into a fixed, unignorable form. It was either – or. He saw that with a stark sobriety. E or Dirck? Love or death? There was no time for nuance or muddle. Not to act was to act. Rawpool Station was straight on; home was to the right down Cemetery Road.

  He lit a cigarette. His car started coughing and gulping beneath him. It began to rain heavily. That made it worse of course – Dirck would be cold and soaking. Had anyone found him yet? Was he still alive? He thought of E and Molly. They were the precipitate of his life. If you boiled it dry they were what would be left at the bottom, a yellow rubble of love. Dirck van Camper? He was nothing; a fiction, just words, mouthings, gratuitous patterns of sound and sense whirling around an empty core. He had left the car park only ten minutes before, but already it seemed to Morris like a year or more. The whole scene felt like something he had read about once in an in-flight magazine. He looked up through his squeaky windscreen wipers at the rain-soaked sky. It was blurred black and starless. Every moment, he thought, people are dying and being born. Every moment there is killing and coming, lying and prayer – a frenzy of 0s and 1s. There were billions of people on the earth and Dirck van Camper was just one of them.

  There was really no choice at all. Morris indicated right and pulled out of the stationary line, risking collision for a moment before he found the safety of Cemetery Road. Before he got home, he stopped at a remote phone box and made an anonymous call to the Coketown police. No one saw him.