by Ian McGuire
‘That’s where the other file comes in. For each mark I have a selection of eight to ten comments – drawn of course from the days when I actually read the things. I then select from them on a random basis. Look: 66%. You make a good effort with a challenging question. Your analysis of ............ is probing and perceptive at times, but also on occasion lacks detail. And your conclusion veers between the tentative and the overegged. Please be careful with that in future but overall keep up the good work! I also scatter a few ticks and question marks about of course. Student feedback suggests my marking is firm but fair.’
‘What if they complain?’
‘Well no one complains about being marked too high of course. If they want me to raise the mark I always do it, but I look pained, tell them it’s a one-off and swear them to secrecy. They end up feeling special, which, it seems to me, is more or less the purpose of a university education these days.’
Morris paged woozily through the comments file.
53%. A curate’s egg of an essay. Stylistically you shimmy across the surface of this work rather than sounding its dark penetralia. Although light-footedness is sometimes charming, do try in future to be less of a ballerina and more of a bombardier – less Fred Astaire, more Red Adair, if you know what I mean.
‘Does this really work?’
‘Unfortunately, yes. At the beginning it felt like a reckless gamble. I just needed a short-term fix, but now I realise I could go on indefinitely.’
‘So we’re irrelevant?’
‘Yes and no. The essays get written. Knowledge of a kind is passed on. Is a mark so important? Remember they’re not students anymore, they’re consumers. If we don’t give them what they want they get all blubbery and run off to Student Counselling, and believe me, the last thing they want is to be confronted with the details of their own appalling ignorance. Our role is no longer to judge, sift, discriminate. Wheat and chaff? Sheep and goats? These are old-fashioned hierarchies. Suggest someone has a third-class mind and they’ll have the Anti-Nazi League round picketing your lectures. We’re not critics any more, Morris. We’re not even teachers, we’re servants, hired help. Our true purpose is to write ebullient and semi-truthful references, to ease them into the corporate world. And believe me, my references are exemplary: half a page of letterhead from me and the next thing you know, you’re sitting in a warehouse conversion in Shoreditch pulling down forty grand. I say sod it, give them what they want. I’m not proud, but my conscience is clear.’
At the mention of conscience Morris shrivelled a little inside. The guilt of adultery, like its more intense pleasures, still sometimes took him unaware. There would be long stretches – hours, whole mornings even – when he would forget what he was up to, when he would assume half-consciously that this gentle welling up of pleasure, this sense of being shallow-fried in glee which he felt now almost continuously, was all OK, above board, legal. And it was only at moments like this when he caught sight, out of the corner of his eye, of the dark sternness of the law, that he remembered to feel guilty, contrite, like a louse. But strangest of all was what invariably came next, after the first bite of these feelings, the way that instead of just subsiding they changed their form, their taste. Wrongness became part of the pleasure. Guilt and contrition, just fuel to the flames. As Bernard pursued his point about the decline of the academy, Morris held tight to his threadbare armchair and waited for that dialectical kick, the moment when, after the grind of conscience, the superego flipped over into the id.
The music was building to a conclusion. Morris gave himself up for a moment to its aural gymnastics, the asynchronous throbs of fullness and depletion. Bernard noticed.
‘Terrific, isn’t it? Herbert von Karajan, 1959 – never been bettered if you ask me.’
Morris nodded. He could feel it happening: joy springing from pain, delight emerging from sin. Lies sprouting from truth, you could say, although of course that was not the right way to look at it at all since if so-called truth could grow out of a lie, how could it really be a lie in the first place? A lie was just a different version of truth, truth placed in a different context. Just as guilt, if you looked at it in another, a bigger, way, became a kind of freedom – an openness, a willingness to live beyond the rules. That was where he was, outside the rules, outside the lines looking back in. And so, as it turned out, was Bernard, in a sense at least – how lucky, he thought, and how unexpected.
Morris blinked. They were both badly drunk. Above the grey marble mantelpiece, the flock wallpaper was beginning to shimmy and swerve.
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
Bernard thought for a moment, as if the question hadn’t occurred to him before.
‘Because I trust you. Because you are a person of character. I accept you are currently bonking Zoe Cable, that you’ve given up Arthur Alderley and, if what I hear is true, you’re now doing this,’ his arms flailed for a moment and he pulled a face like Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘Body Studies. But all that aside, I see you as a man of clear vision and stout heart, a man who can distinguish at a glance his arse from his elbow, a man who is prepared to mucky up his hands on occasion. All in contradistinction, of course, to those repellent and bone-idle bastards who ponce through the Department issuing orders and licking arse in the name of research. The God of research, Morris, is a false God – you know that, I know that. We may pretend otherwise, we may doff our caps on occasion, tug our forelocks if that eases things along. But deep down we know it’s bollocks.’
‘Literary criticism you mean?’
‘Utter nonsense.’
‘So what’s the point?’
‘We survive, Morris, we make ends meet. And in a world of unadulterated bullshit, we are at least human beings.’
‘We’re beacons of hope.’
‘Well I wouldn’t go that far. But put it this way, at least we’re not Declan Monk. I’m not whispering sweet Fenian nothings in their ear while sticking my hand down their Wonderbras. You’ve noticed his admissions policy for the MA in Oirish Studies – chest size seems the decisive factor.’
‘It’s all about decency,’ Morris suggested.
‘The Orwellian virtues.’
Morris sat with that for a moment. Decency. It spread in front of him like the well-scrubbed deck of a battleship, clear, clean and solid. Was that it then? Decency, the simple virtue of his class which he had always fled from, always been embarrassed to admit? Had he circled round again to that? Sitting in the styleless unadornment of Bernard’s sitting room, drinking Tesco brandy, listening to Richard Strauss, it seemed to work, it seemed to make a kind of sense. That when you boiled it down, when you swept away the froth, there was just this effort to be good, to be kind, to get by. From the hallway, a walnut-veneer wall clock whirred and began to slowly beat out the strokes of midnight.
Ten minutes later the minicab honked from outside. Standing in the swirling purple hallway, Morris gave Bernard a brief but unprecedented hug. Beneath the skin-tight turtleneck his back was bowed and knobbly. Morris remembered the varicose vein like a dull blue worm crawling up his calf. He thought again of his grandmother in the nursing home, slack-jawed and drooling.
‘I’ll sign that letter anyway,’ he said.
‘What? Oh sod that. I’ll keep my head down and leave it to Darian. It’s always worked before. Only three more years to my pension. I’ll sell this shithole for two hundred grand and bugger off to Provence. Truffles and Côtes du Rhone.’
As Morris stumbled down the fissured and crumbling garden path, Bernard waved. As he got into the cab the front door closed with a creak and a snap. The living-room light went off. Bernard was retreating into his lair, reverting, Morris assumed, to his strange, timewarped kitchen then to his barely imaginable bedroom. Back again in the outside world, driving down Roosevelt Road past a strip of Polish restaurants and a late-night driving range, Bernard’s house seemed like something from a fairytale, a house of gingerbread or straw. It was hard to believe it really existed, a
nd that all that had been said there had actually been said. Morris reached, as if for confirmation, into his jacket pocket and pulled out a digital voice recorder. He rewound it for a couple of seconds then pressed play.
‘Sticking my hand down their Wonderbras. You’ve noticed …’
The sound was good considering, and Zoe had been dead right about the longplay option.
Chapter 19
E’s eyes widened as the foetus-baby’s fist humped out the wall of her uterus. She made a tiny ‘Eek!’ but no one noticed. There was no one really to notice except the children of Orpington Primary, to whom the small vagaries of anonymous adults had long since ceased to be of interest, and of course Nick Kidney, who was so deeply immersed in explaining his toilet panorama to them that if a car bomb had gone off outside E doubted whether there would have been a noticeable pause in the gush of words.
‘Yes, it’s me on a toilet. Fifteen times. No, no, the same toilet fifteen times. Why are you laughing? Why is it so funny? Why are toilets funny? Because they smell? Well sometimes they do. What else? Because they are secret. I like that – toilets are secret. We lock ourselves in, we lock other people out. We’re all alone in a tiny room – this is funny. You think my face is funny too? You mean my expression? What kind of expression do you think I have then? Happy? Sad? Scared? Sad? Do you all agree? Why do you think I am sad? Because I’m all alone in the toilet? Or, what did you say? Because someone has taken my picture on the toilet – so I’m not alone. Ah, interesting!’
After forty-five minutes of this manic dialogue, Nick Kidney had a tea break and the children set about drawing pictures of their own most secret places. They were wearing green sweatshirts with ‘Orpington Primary’ and a picture of an oak tree on the front. Crowded on the gallery floor, scribbling, they looked like a gang of giant toads.
‘What does it feel like?’ Nick asked. They were sitting in the gallery bistro. In front of E was a glass of mango juice and a pile of Danish pastry. She was steeling herself against the smell of broccoli soup and tofu chilli.
‘What does what feel like?’
He nodded towards her abdomen. ‘Pregnancy. The miracle of life.’ He was wearing a fisherman’s smock made of camouflage fabric. Since their last meeting he had grown a fashionably sporadic beard. E pondered.
‘I feel,’ she said after a moment, ‘life-size. Full-scale.’
‘Ah reality,’ said Kidney opening his eyes wide and taking a noisy slurp from his mug of tea. ‘I know just what you mean. Or rather of course, I don’t at all, but let’s put it this way. I only understood surrealism after Xavier was born, after the actual birth. I mean, a head coming out of someone’s vagina. A purple head. How real is that?’
‘Entirely.’
‘Right. The most real thing in the world is completely fucking weird. There is a lesson there.’
‘I thought you were great with the children. You really got them going.’
‘Kids are brutal and unrelenting. I respect them for that. They understand things we don’t – physically I mean, they have several extra senses like bats or dolphins.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ The mango juice was sweet and fibrous, like swallowing a soft, yellow rope.
‘Do I really believe it? What kind of question is that? I’ll tell you what kind of question it is: it’s an academic question – you’re trying to bring me before the court of proof, rationality. You’ve been talking to your partner too much.’
‘Morris?’
‘Morris. You’ve been talking to him too much.’
‘I do live with him.’
‘Of course you do.’
A strange accusation, E thought, given that she and Morris seemed, these days, to be talking less and less. Having sex more, certainly. Late at night when he came in from working or early in the morning before even Molly started up, she would feel his eager hands, like crabs scuttling over her dormant body bringing her back to semi-wakefulness. Eager was the word. Keen. Like a man who has rediscovered a hobby of his youth. There was a childish glee to it, like they were dressing up in funny clothes, giving up for a moment their adulthood. And afterwards not truculence – not the silences she had become used to, not that moping, clammy gruffness – but something much brisker and more curt. As though he had other tasks, not, as previously, to dwell upon or ponder, but to pursue, to carry out. These days, it seemed, he was always on the edge of leaving, even in the moment of arrival.
‘You know Nick,’ she said (risking something a little personal, a little close to the bone, perhaps), ‘I don’t think you’re quite as primitive as you like to think you are.’
‘How dare you. I am an enfant terrible. It says so here.’ He waved a copy of the Observer magazine.
‘The pickled penises are pure Cézanne.’
‘That’s libellous. Sod Cézanne.’
‘Sod Cézanne? Didn’t you say that once in Artforum?’
‘That’s right, winter 2000. It worked quite well.’
‘But you don’t believe it?’
‘Don’t let’s start that again. Would you go out there and ask those children if they “really believe” in Winnie the Pooh? It’s a meaningless question.’
‘Because all truth is relative?’
‘No, because all truth is imaginary. Truth is beauty, beauty truth. Can I smoke in here?’
‘No, of course not. You know,’ she licked a shard of icing from her thumb and thought for a second, ‘I’ve never met anyone who could say that with a straight face.’
‘Morris teaches literature doesn’t he? Poetry?’
‘It’s not the same.’
Kidney shrugged. His mobile phone rang. It took him a few moments to locate it under the folds of camouflage material. When he answered, he didn’t have a chance to say hello. The other person began talking immediately. ‘Yes!’ he started, then, ‘No! When? Where? Why?’ Then finally in an almost somnolent whisper, ‘Yeah, OK, bye then.’
‘My ex-wife.’ He tugged morosely at a particle of beard then smiled suddenly as if struck by a cheerful thought. ‘Hey, do you want to come to the Laugh Riot on Sheffield Road?’
‘The Laugh Riot?’
‘It’s one of the new indoor play arenas for kids. There’s a rash of them in London. I’m taking X for tea – it’s his favourite place. Bring Molly.’
‘Don’t you want some time alone?’
‘You’re joking. Have you ever been inside one? It’s like Beirut in the 80s. I need support. Bring Morris.’
‘Morris has a late meeting.’
‘Perfect.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Saves you eating alone.’
Inside the Laugh Riot, bright red children roamed in loose-knit packs through a ruined landscape of vinyl and foam rubber.
‘It’s Claus Oldenberg meets Blade Runner,’ yelled E above the savage roars of victory and defeat.
‘Civil unrest for the under tens – it’s a brilliant concept I must admit.’
Xavier was a short, intense five-year-old with a Kazmir Malevich T-shirt and a vertical shock of blue-black hair. As they queued for their colour-coded stickers, he looked on Molly with distrust.
‘Does she even know what to do?’ he asked Kidney.
‘Yes I do,’ Molly insisted, although she had never been there before and looked frankly scared by what she had seen so far.
‘What to do?’ said Kidney incredulously, as much, it seemed, to E as to Xavier. ‘It’s not like there are any rules. It’s anarchy out there. It’s Lord of the bloody Flies.’
Xavier looked suspiciously at E, then back at his father. ‘Don’t try to be clever Dad,’ he warned.
There was a free table between the toilets and the pneumatic elephant.
‘An hour in here,’ commanded Kidney, ‘then it’s next door for ghastly overpriced food.’
Xavier rolled his eyes back then hurled himself bodily into a cage of spring-loaded toadstools. Molly stood suspiciously a yard or so from the table,
watching the tides of sweaty children ebb and flow. E wished vaguely that she had had time to change – in her all-black workwear she looked like a pregnant Ninja – although what she might have changed into she didn’t know: elasticated jeans, one of Morris’s old sweatshirts? Perhaps it was better as it was. Kidney went for drinks. E chivvied Molly along and soon she was neck-deep in plastic balls and giggling wildly.
‘Mango juice,’ Kidney said, letting himself down with a gasp, ‘and triple espresso. I’ve been up since five.’
‘This place is insane,’ said E. ‘Look at them.’
Molly was sliding gleefully down a giant purple clown’s tongue; Xavier was being dangled off the rope bridge by a gang of schoolfriends.
‘It’s quite unruly,’ agreed Kidney.
‘Isn’t there an age limit? Some of these children look rather large.’
‘Eight I think.’
‘That girl’s wearing a bra.’
Kidney looked carefully.
‘I think you’re right. She must be a big burger eater. McDonald’s put all their cows on anabolic steroids you know.’
‘Is that true?’
Kidney rather theatrically straightened his face.
‘It’s a plausible rumour.’
E took a sip of mango juice.
‘I’m amazed there aren’t more serious injuries.’
‘To be honest, so am I, but children are more pliable than we sometimes imagine. They’re quite hard to break.’
‘You make it sound like you’ve tried.’
Kidney cackled and rubbed his hands witchily.
‘Morris would hate this place,’ E commented after a moment.
‘Why?’
‘Oh, the noise, the expense, the sense of imminent danger.’
‘He’d be right then in a way.’
Xavier appeared from behind a shattered plastic column and started hurling coloured balls at them. Nick Kidney caught the balls and threw them back. There was a brief fire-fight. The man at the table behind him had his glasses dislodged. ‘Oi!’ he said. ‘Sorry,’ shouted Kidney. Xavier made a face and disappeared. Molly ran past them wrapped in a large rubber snake and calling down curses on her enemies.
