Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  She was putting Marmite on toast. Molly was climbing into her chair.

  Morris shook his head.

  ‘What did Molly dream about?’ E asked.

  Molly thought.

  ‘Balloons,’ she said.

  ‘What did Daddy dream about?’

  Morris looked up. What should he say? Dead bodies, manslaughter, the unravelling of their lives?

  ‘Balloons,’ he said emptily.

  E tutted and smiled. She was still feeling cheerful from the night before.

  ‘Liar.’

  E was frying an egg, Molly was eating her toast. Morris remembered their lovemaking. In his memory it seemed ghastly: a clashing of gross, untended flesh; a futile, pathetic denial of the doom that surrounded them. Then he remembered the pregnancy, his foetal child, a whole hive of new difficulties waiting to be born – just add time. It was all too much. He needed to extend his brain to house all this stuff, add another room, build a conservatory, a shed. He couldn’t cope. He thought of biting off his own fingers, sticking a ballpoint pen in his eye.

  ‘Are you OK?’ E asked. She waited several seconds for a reply.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep at all. I’m utterly exhausted.’ It was as though the words had to be hauled from a tremendous depth, and the effort of hauling was almost too much for him.

  ‘You were up late last night.’ E winked and pushed her tongue into her cheek.

  Morris scowled. ‘What?’

  E reddened. She turned abruptly back to her egg.

  Morris closed his eyes. He noticed he had a headache. At some point, the central heating had clicked on; that, plus the boiling and frying, left the atmosphere inside his duffle coat damp and fetid. He could hear the crinkling of the oil in the pan, the insistent banging of Molly’s teddy-bear spoon on the table: bang, bang, bang, bang.

  ‘Please don’t bang, Molly, sweetheart.’ E’s voice was gruffer than before, constrained by her awareness of Morris’s mood. There was silence for a few seconds then: bang, bang, bang, bang.

  Morris’s whole body felt tense, tight as though he had recently undergone comprehensive cosmetic surgery. His throat was raw, his eyes were outlined with pain. Was he going down with something? He had six hours of teaching on Tuesday and hadn’t prepared a thing. He was weeks behind with marking.

  ‘Molly, please stop.’

  He hated that tone of pleading in E’s voice. They were being bullied by a bloody two-year-old.

  There was another pause then: BANG, BANG, BANG.

  Morris stood up and violently threw off his hood like a disguised nobleman revealing himself at the end of a melodrama.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ he yelled. His voice felt awkward and high-pitched. ‘Shut up NOW!’

  There was half a second of silence during which they both looked at him with open mouths, then Molly’s head turned purple and she began to scream like a jet engine. E plucked her out of the booster seat and hugged her.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’ She stared at Morris. ‘That was unforgivable,’ she hissed at him above the screams. ‘I hope your interview’s a bloody calamity. You’re such an arsehole.’

  Morris stamped up the stairs like a pantomime giant. He put yesterday’s clothes on; he didn’t wash or brush his teeth. In three minutes he was back in the car. The death car! It took him a few moments to readjust. The steering wheel was cold and clammy to the touch, the interior smelled as usual of mildew, sourness and burning. Had he checked his bumper for damage? Might there be bloodstains, fibres, fluids, tell-tale signs? He dashed round the back, but as far as he could tell there was no difference, just the usual bowing plastic and rust blisters. It was a cold, windless morning; the cloud cover was solid grey and seamless, like a high ceiling. What could he do? He ran his hand over the crude fibreglass patch which constituted his rear offside wheel arch. Nothing. It was obviously best to do nothing at all: lay low, keep your head down, do your work – the time-honoured academic tactics. They would not think of him; he would be overlooked. He had always been overlooked before, so why not now, when it mattered most? Temporary lecturers were all but invisible anyway. Yes, nothing was obviously the thing to do, but could he do it?

  He started the car with some difficulty, then reversed with minute attention to detail into the empty road. He already felt an itchy, irrational urge to return to the Dalton Street car park. Wasn’t that the normal thing to do? Not at six-thirty in the morning. He needed to kill some time. What would he see there anyway? The blood would have washed away. Perhaps the police had taped the area off or put up one of those signs: ‘Accident Here. Can U Help?’ Morris gulped and missed a gear – he had just had an image of cheap floral tributes taped to the lamp standard, laser-printed farewells covered in cling film, cards, cuddly toys. Surely it would be too soon for that? But still, he should use the Apollo Avenue car park instead, and he should certainly not seek information about the incident, even if such information took days or weeks to reach him or never came at all. He must remain quite firmly, as he always had been, out of the loop.

  Morris drove around Coketown for two hours. He tried to daze himself with driving, to lose himself in the dull mechanics of it. He checked his mirror frequently, he used the handbrake at traffic lights, he assiduously obeyed the speed limit. He drifted into parts of Coketown – Brotdean, Sanctum, Boilswitch Moor – that he had never seen before. He was surprised by their ugliness and lack of vim. They reminded him of Rotherham twenty years before: concrete shopping precincts and Mecca bingo halls. There were no coffee bars he could see, no chain stores worthy of the name. The people, as they stood by their shattered bus stops or drove their ancient British cars, seemed grainy and pre-Thatcherite. The buildings were dark and moist. There was a general smell of soot and gas, a palpable air of public ownership. Had Morris simply forgotten such people and places still existed, he wondered to himself, or had his crime actually conjured them into being like ghosts of the future, images of what he might yet become?

  He drove on past Victorian swimming pools, free-standing pubs and cinder car parks until he crossed the border into the strange, unpeopled landscape of the East Coketown redevelopment zone. Wide new roads wound past empty office developments and hangar-like supermarkets. Most of the zone still lay fallow – there were prairies of hard core and high, rough grass where slums had disappeared and where, according to the frequent hoardings, there would soon be high-class housing and retail opportunities. The centrepiece of the zone was to be The Matterhorn – the world’s largest indoor ski-slope: artificial snow, hotels, restaurants, go-karting. Already half-built, it struck Morris as hubristic and Babylonian. The thought of its vast and inevitable success, conjuring as it did thoughts of his equally vast and inevitable failure, made him furious. Now he was jealous of a leisure complex! He felt an urge to beat himself with his car lock, tear at his nostrils with pliers.

  An hour or so later, Morris sat in his swivel chair, hugging himself and dreading the arrival of the ten o’clock students – ‘Aspects of the Augustan Age’, Level One. Alone, if he tensed all his muscles and allowed himself only one small thought at a time, he could manage, but with other people around there were too many dangerous variables. He would have to loosen his grip, unclench his jaw, exhale. And once that happened, the deluge. Even the thought was disturbing. He needed to read something bland and cakey to settle his mind. He went to check his pigeon-hole. There were bound to be some committee minutes in there or a lengthy memo or two, mental wadding.

  The departmental office was down the corridor on the right. It housed three vicious secretaries: Mabel, Heather and Joan. Mabel and Joan had both been there thirty-five years. They were tall and grey with gaunt, rather hungry faces. Joan was married to a librarian. Mabel was unmarried, although it was well-known that in the 70s she had had several affairs with faculty members. Neither had children. Heather, who was nineteen but wore kilts, was new, a sort of apprentice. Bernard had long since advised Morris not t
o ask for anything or even speak to the ‘Furies’ (as he called them) before elevenses: ‘They can turn nasty when they haven’t been fed.’

  When Morris entered, Heather was glumly filing and Mabel and Joan were laying into an unfortunate student who had enquired about his exam marks.

  ‘What’s the exam code? What was your seat number? No seat number? Look at this.’ Mabel waved an armful of box files which may or may not have had anything to do with exams. ‘Do you expect me to go through this for your benefit? Do you imagine I have nothing better to do with my time?’

  ‘I think he does think that,’ Joan chipped in. ‘They all do. They think we’re all here to serve them, to bow and scrape.’

  ‘You have no idea,’ Mabel said, ‘of the pressures we’re under. No conception of the workload we’re required to do.’

  ‘And yet we do it gladly,’ Joan said.

  ‘Yes, we do it gladly. But there’s always a percentage.’ They glared at the unfortunate student. ‘A small percentage who make things difficult.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘For the rest of us.’

  ‘I thought the results might be posted on the notice-board,’ ventured the student.

  ‘No, they will not be posted,’ said Mabel. ‘Do you think we’re here to spoonfeed you? Do you imagine our role in life is to wipe your bottom? Do you think that’s what we aspire to? Botty-wiping? Hand-holding? Spoonfeeding? Cleaning up your vomit? Changing your nappy? Waking up in the middle of the night to cuddle you and make sure the bogeyman isn’t hiding under your bed?’

  The student looked entirely beaten.

  ‘So what should I do?’

  ‘See your personal tutor.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘It’s on the notice-board.’ Both Mabel and Joan had turned their backs on the student and resumed their laborious typing.

  ‘Which notice-board?’

  ‘Which notice-board!’

  The student fled.

  Morris crouched behind the counter, partly for cover and partly because the temporary lecturers’ pigeon-holes consisted of three cardboard shoeboxes on the floor. There were, surprisingly, no memos or minutes in his, only an essay. He looked at the cover sheet: ‘Total Mindfuck: A Study in Ethics and Embodiment’ by Dirck van Camper. Morris stumbled slightly and knocked over a box of student questionnaires.

  ‘Is someone there?’ called Mabel.

  Morris stood up.

  ‘Just me.’ He smiled weakly. They looked alarmed, astonished, superior, as though Morris had just committed the most appalling faux pas.

  ‘Just picking up an essay,’ Morris said. ‘From,’ he looked again at the cover sheet, ‘Dirck van Camper – do you know him?’ Morris couldn’t help himself: this was just what he had feared, that, shorn of his solitude, shaken from his traffic-induced reverie, he would lose control, begin blurting. ‘He’s Dutch,’ he offered, hoping to prod their memories.

  Mabel and Joan looked at each other as if wondering where to begin their attack.

  ‘I know him,’ said Heather. ‘Lanky sod.’ (She still had certain edges, which Mabel and Joan were endeavouring to smooth off). ‘He was in here yesterday wanting paper-clips.’

  ‘For the essay,’ Morris suggested.

  ‘Paper-clips!’ said Joan. ‘Do they think we’re stationery suppliers? Do they imagine that’s our business? I’m sorry, but is there a sign saying WH Smith above that door?’

  ‘We need to do something about those foreign students,’ Mabel said. ‘They know nothing.’

  ‘Oh really, I’ve found them quite bright,’ said Morris.

  ‘About departmental rules and procedures, I mean,’ Mabel went on. ‘They haven’t even read the handbook.’

  ‘Do we send them handbooks?’ Morris asked, unwisely.

  ‘Of course we don’t.’ Her expression seemed to add, ‘you idiot’. ‘We can’t waste handbooks on every Franz, Dirck and Heinrich. Printing costs are astronomical.’

  Mabel began briskly rearranging the fluffy parrots on her desk as a sign that their exchange was at an end. The Furies clearly knew nothing about the incident, Morris thought. The opportunities to moralise on such an event were too great for them to have remained silent if they had.

  Through the window behind Heather, Morris could see the Dalton Street car park. It was half-full. The administrators had, as usual, got there first and put their BMWs and Range Rovers in the finest spots. Now the lecturers were coming in – pre-owned hatchbacks and antique Volvos with roof-racks and ‘Baby on Board’ stickers. There was no sign of police activity, no obvious tape. The landlady of The Revolving Door, which edged onto the car park, was sweeping the pavement in her slippers. Might she have seen something, Morris wondered? What about her customers? The Revolving Door was a deeply unpopular pub; its financial survival was a constant cause of wonder on campus. But still, there must have been one or two people in there and the crumbling bay windows looked right across the car park. Morris dashed from the office like an addict in search of his next fix.

  The interior of The Revolving Door was murky and water-stained, as though it had been flooded some time after the war and never properly redecorated. There were curling posters of the 1973 Coketown United squad and advertisements for drinks whose manufacture had ceased some years before. The bar was plywood stained with creosote and the beer towels seemed capable of sustaining a variety of wetland fauna. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Could I have a cup of tea?’ Morris asked. The landlady had followed him in.

  ‘This is a pub, love.’

  ‘Right. A pint then.’ She checked her watch, raised her eyebrows and walked round the bar. It took her a surprisingly long time to find a glass. Morris wondered how to broach the subject of hit-and-run.

  ‘That’s ones pound seventy.’ Whilst she was getting his change, it seemed to occur to the landlady that it was usual to chat with the customers.

  ‘Hear about that accident last night?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bald student. They carted him off in an ambulance.’ She spoke as if all this was common knowledge, as though the morning papers had been full of it.

  ‘Was he OK?’

  ‘I should think not. His head was cracked open like a cantaloupe.’ She lit another cigarette and wrapped herself more tightly in her lengthy mohair cardigan.

  ‘Mind you,’ she said speculatively, ‘it’s amazing what they can do.’

  ‘But he wasn’t dead?’

  ‘Not as such, no.’

  The beer had an unusual taste which Morris couldn’t immediately identify. That was it: formaldehyde. He took several more compulsive gulps then ordered another one. The landlady disappeared to make sausage rolls for the evening’s darts match. Morris stared at the grim effluvia that topped his pint. He thought about the students waiting outside his office door. At first they would be irritated that he was late, then, when they realised he wasn’t showing up at all, they would be pleased. What did they think about him anyway, those eighteen-year-olds? What did they imagine his life was like? To the extent that they thought about him at all, Morris assumed they considered him to be a giant swot, someone who read books all the time and possessed a bizarre, unbroken knowledge of Augustan Literature and its environs. As they sat in his office he could sense their careless laconic faith; when he said things they wrote them down and quoted them back to him with embarrassing accuracy in exams. When he admitted he didn’t know something they assumed it wasn’t worth knowing. They had no idea that his knowledge was a loose crochet-work of platitudes and cramming, that he was drifting helplessly away from the things that mattered most. They were like children. They believed in him.

  He was at the bottom of his second pint and the thought brought tears to his eyes. The beer, for all its ghastliness, was having an effect. Morris began to imagine that he had a real rapport with his students; he began to think that teaching was his passion. It was the teaching that was important after all,
he said to himself, the lives he touched. That would survive him, not the writing which no one ever read, not the grubby politics of promotion. He was sitting on his own in a side room that smelt of Dettol and was painted entirely brown. He saw the way forward quite clearly. He would go to the hospital, find Dirck van Camper, assess the extent of his injuries, then confess. He would accept the consequences of his actions. If he had to spend a year or two in an open prison, so be it – it would give him time for reading, lesson plans, correspondence.

  That was the impulse that brought Morris to Dirck van Camper’s hospital bed. His enthusiasm for confession was dulled a little, however, when he realised that Dirck’s injuries, although serious, were not life-threatening. Moreover, Dirck had no memory at all of the incident.

  Then Zoe Cable appeared, like a visitor from another dimension. She was wearing a long white overcoat, her lips were purple, her hair was asymmetrical; she smelled of grapefruit and plasticine. Had they found him out already?

  ‘Morris, it’s you,’ she said.

  Morris was filled with terror. Dirck van Camper and Zoe Cable. What could he do? Running away was an obvious option, so was bursting into tears, but instead he stood up slowly and shook her hand. At some deep and entirely irrational level, he realised, he was still hoping to get the permanent job.

  ‘I didn’t know you two were close,’ she said.

  Morris realised with a sudden start how peculiar this must look to her – him standing by Dirck van Camper’s hospital bed when he should, by rights, have been in room N2B of the Mick McManus Building teaching ‘Aspects of the Augustan Age’ for the third time that day.

  ‘Well,’ he mumbled, ‘not in an orthodox way. I mean an incident like this, a terrible incident such as this one, brings things to the surface which might otherwise remain concealed.’

  Zoe looked unconvinced.

  ‘Oh absolutely,’ she said. ‘By the way Morris, do you know if any of Dirck’s relatives are coming over? Parents? Mother?’