by Ian McGuire
‘I really hate that title.’
‘You’ve made that absolutely clear,’ he said, ‘on more than one occasion. I’ve been left in no doubt as to your opinion on that matter.’
‘Don’t get bureaucratic on me, Morris. You’re sounding like a press release.’
‘With respect, you’re driving me to it. I’d envisaged a brief and happy chat.’
‘That’s what we’re having.’
Morris sighed. He had the urge to drop the phone in boiling water.
‘Don’t sigh, Morris, it makes you sound so defeated. Oooo, I think junior’s just woken up. I just felt a big kick.’
Defeated? And Morris hated the way she always brought the foetus into it. Whenever things got heated these days, she always played the foetus card. It was so infuriating.
‘Leave the foetus out of this,’ he said
‘The foetus?’
‘Listen, I have to go. Zoe’s paper is in five minutes and the rates here are a sick joke.’
‘Aren’t you on expenses?’
‘There’s always a deductible.’
‘OK, then. We miss you Morris. Don’t drink the mineral water.’
Chapter 14
Zoe Cable’s paper, ‘Radical Puke’, was a tremendous success. She had known it would be. She had planned it that way. Nothing had been left to chance, or rather, once chance had tossed her the opportunity of sitting on a panel with Firenze Beach at the LA Body Conference she had nudged chance to one side and taken over herself. The primary purpose of her paper was to ingratiate herself with Firenze Beach, whose recommendation, could she secure it, would all but guarantee them the Research Hub. She was the leading figure in Body Studies, yet she was notoriously reticent at back-scratching. No one else had her yet, of that Zoe Cable was sure.
Months ago, when the panel had first been mooted (not long, funnily enough, after the Dirck van Camper incident), she had set Darren and Jocelyn to work. They had rooted up everything on Beach, not only the books and articles and interviews, but unpublished conference contributions, lecture notes, seminar series. They had photographs, videos and bootleg tapes. And once the information had been gathered they processed it, they boiled it down. Jocelyn wrote a special programme. They traced the recurrence of ideas, the growing and waning popularity of certain turns of phrase. You could diagram it all: the breakthroughs, the failures and cul-de-sacs. If you look hard enough into anything, Zoe thought, you will find the throb. There is always a throb. They got it down to one side of A4 – everything she had ever written or said. Then they carefully inserted it, like a strand of alien DNA, into Zoe Cable’s work on urban inebriation. At first the combination seemed gawky and unnatural. The rococo theorising of Firenze Beach seemed to clash, to grate with Zoe Cable’s sinewy cyber-argot. Certain adjustments needed to be made: sentences were clipped and joined, vocabulary was subtly altered. It began to come together. What had seemed merely awkward become dialogic, incoherence slid into multiplicity and ‘Radical Puke’ was born.
The drink-addled bodies of the youth of Greater Coketown (of which Zoe Cable had a small library of digital images) gave damp and stinky form to Firenze Beach’s seminal notion of the unbody, the body without bounds. French feminism meets the Bacardi Breezer. It was a perfect instrument of intellectual seduction – flattering but cheeky, sexy yet censorious, serious and scatological at the same time. It could not fail. It did not fail.
After the question period, Zoe stayed in her seat. She pretended to adjust her Palm Pilot. She waved absent-mindedly to friends. She waited for Firenze Beach to approach. Zoe Cable believed in patterns, webs, indefinite chains of causality and chance. It was not a question of law or fate – since law and fate were just constructs designed to head off the multiplicities of desire – but of patterns of energy, intensities ebbing and flowing across space-time: jealousy, need, anger, love. She didn’t know Firenze Beach would approach, but she knew it. It was not true but it would certainly happen.
Firenze Beach came from the left out of a ruck of admirers and hangers-on. She was wearing a knee-length linen tunic embroidered with images from ancient Greek pornography; she had a heavy bosom, the thighs of a footballer, her hair was hennaed and lengthy. Her glasses spoke of Paris in June.
‘Zoe Cable,’ she declared. ‘I am astonished.’
They embraced. Zoe had imagined it would be like this – the astonishment, the embrace.
Firenze Beach sniffed.
‘You smell of mulled wine and coconuts.’
‘It’s new.’
‘Delightful.’
A semicircle formed. People were actually watching, trying to take notes. Firenze Beach was whispering in Zoe’s ear.
‘Tell me about these practices of vertical drinking. I am fascinated. What is their disciplinary context? How are they policed? Is there really a club called the Vomitorium? What is the genealogy of the kebab?’
‘It all comes back to bursts, Firenze. If I may borrow your own terrific metaphor. The burst is crucial in this context. The burst of ketchup, urine, hot sauce, vomit, blood vessels – the shattering of containment and decorum. You should see the pavements afterwards.’
‘I can only imagine.’ She squeezed Zoe Cable’s elbow. ‘Those pictures – truly astonishing.’
After several more congratulatory minutes, Zoe beckoned to Morris. He ascended the platform and was introduced. ‘Morris taught your stepson, Dirck,’ she said, ‘before the unfortunate collision.’
‘Oh Dirck!’ Firenze Beach opened her arms to Morris as though Zoe had just introduced him as a long-lost grandchild. Morris, who had turned greyish white, descended into the embrace. Zoe watched them carefully.
‘How is Dirck?’ he asked upon release.
Firenze Beach’s eyes moistened, her jaw stiffened. She seemed in an instant both softer and more virile. Zoe felt these to be good signs. Even if Dirck hadn’t told his mother the whole thrilling truth about his relationship with Morris, perhaps he had at least hinted at its unusualness.
‘He has a new wheelchair. He is learning the harpsichord. He and Dorothy are living with us for a while, en famille. It’s terribly nice. Dorothy’s ratatouille is remarkable.
‘We were in Thailand of course, Bertrand and I, at the time of the collision. But our gratitude to all of you is boundless. I must buy you dinner. Dirck will be angry if I don’t. Here.’
Firenze Beach scribbled her room number on the back of a business card. As she did so, there was the tiniest of pauses into which a conference organiser inserted herself with urgent demands for Firenze Beach’s presence. Firenze Beach bent a heavily jewelled ear then threw up her arms in disgust.
‘I must leave. The transgender caucus have organised a balloon ride. Why do we do this to ourselves?’ She laughed. ‘Please call me about dinner. I know a fabulous Polynesian place. The breadfruit … Ah!’
At 8 p.m. Zoe Cable and Morris were seated at a thatched corner table in the Kon Tiki Restaurant. They were sucking large, volcano-shaped cocktails called Krakatoas.
‘This tastes like kerosene,’ Morris said.
A waiter approached them.
‘Not more breadfruit, please,’ said Zoe.
He handed her a message from Firenze Beach. Zoe read it.
‘Let’s see,’ she summarised. ‘Meteorological cock-up. Balloons blown off course. Trannies crash land in an avocado grove in Orange County. All hell breaks loose as you can imagine. In short, Firenze Beach is a no-show, but she’s given the maître d’ her credit card number so all is not lost.’
Zoe called for more Krakatoas.
‘Will this impact the Hub?’
Zoe shook her head without ceasing to suck.
‘I’ve already sunk my teeth in on that one. It’s non-negotiable – not that she realises it yet.’
After the second Krakatoa, Morris started fumbling his cutlery. At one point he had three cigarettes alight at once.
‘Are you OK, Morris?’
‘I’m a little drunk.
’
His hair had become ruffled; his tie was askew. He looked at that moment, Zoe thought, crumpled and charming, as if drink had naturalised his awkwardness.
‘Can I ask you something?’ he said.
They were eating pineapple fritters and boar burgers. Zoe had rather lost track of which course was which.
‘Is this goat or wild pig?’
‘Is that the question?’
‘No. My question concerns Firenze Beach.’
‘The wondrous Ms Beach.’
‘Her. My question is …’ He leaned forward. Zoe could see tiny pimples of sweat on the slopes of his nose. Up from his unbuttoned shirt collar poked two tufts of hair, one grey and one black. ‘Do you really believe any of that?’
‘Absolutely, yes. Although believe is not quite the right word.’
Morris had his elbow halfway across the table. He was leaning his head on one hand and moving his jaw from side to side. His lips looked red and ponderous.
‘May I say something, Zoe?’
‘You may.’
‘I have read Incredible Bodies quite recently and in some detail. My conclusion? It is a melange of verbosity and half-truth.’
‘A melange?’
‘A melange I say!’ He waved his arms about like Kenneth Branagh. ‘Should we have another Krakatoa?’
‘Why not?’
‘The body is not a verbal construct. Only an academic would believe that.’
‘You’re an academic, Morris.’
‘Quite, so I see the attraction. But you have to remember I’m an unsuccessful academic, or at least I have been for some time, so I can see around the edges.’
‘You’ve glimpsed the other side?’
‘Yes.’
The Krakatoas arrived and with them something pink which may have been dessert. Morris’s appetite seemed to be increasing as the meal went on. He finished the pink thing and called, incredibly, for more breadfruit.
‘Why do men persist in believing in reality?’ Zoe asked. ‘It’s touching, but really.’
‘You’re being deliberately aphoristic. May I direct your attention to this table?’
‘Oh it’s always the bloody table.’ Zoe plucked Morris’s cigarette from his lips to light her own. ‘Who cares about tables? Do you ever fall in love with a table? Did you ever fuck a table? Don’t answer that.’
‘People are real.’
‘Power is real.’
‘That’s an appalling statement. Simply appalling.’ His anger spiked for just a moment.
Zoe raised her eyebrows, leaned forward and whispered. ‘Perhaps, but what if it’s true?’
‘Firenze Beach doesn’t believe in truth.’
Morris had sat back and folded his arms. His shirt sleeves were rolled: he had the forearms of a gardener, sinewy, freckled, sparsely haired. His skin was just beginning to lose its elasticity.
‘No, but like me she believes in truths – multiple, contingent, contestory, always at odds.’
‘You can’t make a philosophy out of squabbling.’
‘Squabbling? Is that what we’re doing now?’
He flashed her an uncertain look which Zoe held on to a second or two longer than was really necessary. Had Dirck van Camper been Morris’s first lover, she wondered, or was Morris one of those Harold Nicholson, cottaging types, for whom being regularly rogered was a kind of marital safety-valve, a way of expunging his beastliness before returning to wifey? Was Morris really one of those? Did he loiter in the late-night toilets in Palmerston Square? Did he lurk amidst the unkempt rhododendrons of Macaroni Park? Did Morris, for Christsake, actually cruise? She gave him a hard, if drunken, stare. If he did, then his powers of disguise were truly impressive. Zoe had known, in both a professional and personal capacity, any number of closeted, semi-closeted, questioning, confused or downright clueless homosexuals, but hitherto she had always recognised what they were and what they wanted, quite often before they recognised it themselves. When it came to desire Zoe’s sensitivities were seismographic. But Morris Gutman? There was nothing to work with. Perhaps Dirck really was the first. But if so, how on earth had it happened? She was, she realised, as she blinked back a wave of inebriation and sucked down some more Krakatoa, deeply intrigued by Morris Gutman. He was, she thought with a nigh-on zoological thrill, a brand new species, something beyond even her vast and liquid experience.
‘So Morris,’ she ventured, ‘how did you and Dirck first, you know, meet?’
Morris looked at her strangely for a moment.
‘Um,’ he said. ‘Well …’ He shook his head as though the answer was both blazingly obvious and quite difficult to remember. ‘“The History of Critique”. God!’ He snuffled and loosened his tie. ‘And what a fucking disaster that was. Did I ever tell you about the time he completely took over the class? Started banging on about Kant. I could have killed him, honestly. If I’d have had a weapon, God help me, I would have used it.’
Zoe chuckled conspiratorially.
‘Love n’ Hate,’ she said, executing a one-two punch over the empty breadfruit basket. ‘So that was how it started, eh? And one thing led to another.’
‘Well …’ Morris had finished all the available food – his tie was lightly breaded and his hair was streaked with avocado and cigarette ash. He tilted unsteadily backwards in his chair. ‘Maybe it did. Maybe unconsciously at least, you know …’
‘Right.’ Zoe was feeling peculiarly excited by all this. Was it the Krakatoas, she wondered; was it her successful courting of Firenze Beach; or was it this odd, even surreal idea of Dirck van Camper and Morris Gutman getting it on? The deep, transfixing, wondrous absurdity of that idea brought tears to her eyes. She wanted more.
‘Unconsciously at least …’ she repeated, letting the ellipses float out over the table like soap bubbles.
‘Maybe that led to the car park,’ said Morris.
‘The car park?’ said Zoe.
Morris nodded.
‘The rear-ending,’ he said. His eyes dropped for a moment and then picked themselves up.
Wow! thought Zoe. Jesus Christ! Rear-ending in the Dalton Street car park. Why had she not heard of this before?
‘The car park,’ she gurgled. ‘Is that common?’
‘Common?’
‘Is there a scene?’
‘How could there be a scene?’
‘Oh God, Morris, I just realised!’ Zoe had her hands in the air and was shouting like an evangelist. ‘The terrible irony of it. That was where you two first, you know, got together. And that was where someone almost killed Dirck. It’s horrible, and really weird.’
‘Horrible?’ Morris’s long face, blurred and blotched by alcohol, looked first blank, then angry, then terribly sad. ‘You said it was all right,’ he said. ‘You told me it was common. OK, I ran him down, strictly speaking, yes. But we agreed that it was consensual, that despite the apparent randomness he wanted to be there. It was his fault. Or at least it wasn’t mine. That’s what we agreed.’
Zoe tried to remember how many Krakatoas she had had. Five? Six? Seven? She was having trouble making sense of this, which normally would have been OK – she was quite comfortable with alcohol-induced confusion – but Morris appeared genuinely upset.
‘We agreed that?’
‘At the hospital.’
Zoe’s drink-fuddled brain ratcheted back to the scene two months before: CRI, Dirck van Camper’s bedside. What she thought they had agreed – implicitly, knowingly, and with a level of unspoken sophistication which did them both proud – was that Morris was Dirck’s secret lover, not (and was this really what he was suggesting?) that Morris had run Dirck down. That was absurd.
Morris lit a cigarette, stubbed it out, then immediately retrieved it from the Captain Cook ashtray and began incompetently trying to straighten it again.
‘Have one of mine,’ Zoe said. ‘Really.’
Around her, the restaurant’s pink interior was beginning to undulate like a colon. She gripped the e
dge of the bamboo table. Was it possible, she wondered, that she had entirely missed the point? That Morris, rather than being a fascinating pan-sexual Bloomsbury throwback, was actually a hit-and-run driver?
‘So let’s get this straight, Morris.’ Her voice was slow and overpunctuated. ‘You ran Dirck down? Was this, like, a lovers’ tiff?’
‘Are you taking the piss?’ yelled Morris. ‘A lovers’ tiff! Is that a cheap attempt at surrealism?’
‘Right,’ announced Zoe, standing up with an inadvisable suddenness. ‘OK. I am now going to the ladies’ to regroup.’
In the relative sanctuary of the coconut-lined lavatories, Zoe looked at herself in the mirror. Her three-tone hair was chaotic, but in a good way. Her make-up seemed en masse to have shifted a little to the left.
‘Wow.’
Her evening with the urban primitives had been wild enough, but this. Morris Gutman was a murderer, or if not a murderer a manslaughterer, a grievous-bodily-harmer, a fully-fledged criminal. She blinked, sniffed and began woozily to plot the implications of this new alignment. If Morris was not Dirck’s secret lover then her plan of cultivating him as an alternative route to Firenze Beach was completely crocked, of course, but then again, since the triumph of ‘Radical Puke’ Firenze was on board anyway, so that hardly mattered. Qué sera, sera.
What else?
If Morris was not Dirck’s secret lover then he was probably not gay at all, not even a little bit, which explained the almost total lack of gay indicators. And if Morris was not gay at all then she was currently enjoying breadfruit and Tahitian cocktails with a straight man who was six thousand miles from his wife and children. The dots, she realised, were not difficult to join: by all the unwritten conventions of academic conferences they were practically betrothed. Zoe did not need to check her Palm Pilot to know that shagging Morris Gutman had not been on her ‘to do list’ for the day, but blindfolded by her own enthusiasms she had, it seemed, stumbled so far in that direction that backing out now might pose practical problems, besides being crucially uncool. To admit her deep misreading of Morris’s motives was unthinkable – what if it ever got out? – whereas having sex with him would furnish an excellent alibi. Besides the pleasures it might offer – she thought of his inelastic skin, of his salt-and-pepper chest tufts – it would be an ironclad explanation for all that faghaggy flirtiness.
