Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  ‘You know I’m delighted to hear you say that, Zoe,’ said Deedpole, sinking back into a pile of Bedouin cushions. ‘I was beginning to feel like I was on my own.’

  ‘Christ no, Angus. The forces of pedantry still aren’t entirely in control.’ Zoe offered him a concerned frown and a pat on the knee. ‘And by the way, Vagina Dentata is always eager for original work on film. I mean, if you happen to have anything to hand.’

  Frankfurt, 10 July – the Pan European Queerness Convention. Zoe Cable sat in an Ethiopian restaurant on Bleidenstrasse with Daze Krakov and Rupert Venison. They were, all three, coked up to the eyeballs.

  ‘Listen,’ said Zoe. They were drinking white wine, a bottle each. They had ordered a confusing battery of dishes, none of which looked appetising, some of which appeared straightforwardly inedible. ‘The Hub thing – can we just get that out of the way?’

  ‘You wish to buy our votes,’ giggled Daze.

  ‘It’s a votes-for-coke scenario,’ added Rupert.

  ‘Does that work for you?’ Zoe asked. ‘What have the others offered?’

  Daze and Rupert compared notes.

  ‘West Lanarkshire took me to dinner.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘It was nice.’

  ‘Nice but, through no fault of their own, rather sausagey.’

  ‘Yes, terribly sausagey.’

  ‘Clapham College sent scantily clad graduate students to our room.’

  ‘They did not.’

  ‘No, they didn’t, but I intend to suggest it. Isn’t this music fantastic?’

  They all listened to the music. It was terribly good.

  Rupert semaphored to a waiter.

  ‘Die Musik,’ he yelled, ‘was ist das?’

  The waiter knuckled his brow. Zoe pointed frantically to the loudspeaker, Daze made drumming motions. The waiter nodded, smiled broadly and returned a few moments later with a side order of what appeared to be curried goat’s cheese.

  Vienna, 21 July – EU-funded Summer School: The Transnational Body. Zoe sat in the Prater ferris wheel with Helmut Dawlish. Helmut, annoying at the best of times, was doing an Orson Welles impression.

  ‘Look down there,’ he said, nodding through the window. ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?’

  ‘The Third Man, yes.’

  A month of oversauced food and brown-nosing had taken its toll even on Zoe, whose patience was wearing thin.

  ‘I’m on the panel for the Hub you know,’ said Helmut.

  ‘Are you really?’

  He smiled. ‘I hear the Ethiopian food in Frankfurt is excellent.’

  Zoe winced.

  ‘The body truly is a fascinating subject, isn’t it?’ Helmut went on. ‘All those ins and outs. And I realise your expertise in that area is,’ he paused, ‘second to none.’

  Zoe was looking out of the window. Austria was so clean. Ground level was bad enough, but from here it looked absolutely, revoltingly perfect. She looked back at Helmut, whose chinos had wigwamed at the groin. She only needed a simple majority. Helmut was insurance at most.

  ‘Give it a rest, Helmut,’ she said. ‘There’s enough pussy at this conference to feed the five thousand. You don’t need me.’

  ‘Ah,’ he sighed, ‘pure Billingsgate, Zoe. Your gift for vulgarity hasn’t waned. I thought perhaps a quick one for old times’ sake.’

  ‘Old times’ sake?’ Zoe cast her mind back. Oh Christ yes, she remembered now: Kingston Poly, 1992. ‘Bloody hell, Helmut,’ she said, ‘I was a graduate student. There’s a statute of limitations.’

  Helmut placed a hand on his heart.

  ‘Consider me truly contrite. And as for the pussy, if you have any specific names in mind please let me know.’

  As they got off, Helmut did the line about cuckoo clocks then kissed Zoe on the cheek. He whispered in her ear, ‘You’re halfway there, but the one to watch is Hellespont – I’ve been hearing rumours.’

  Before Zoe could press, Helmut had left in pursuit of an independent scholar from Estonia.

  London, August Bank Holiday weekend – the National Funding Fair. Zoe sat in a Starbucks in Covent Garden, alone. She was worried. Gantry Hellespont was late, and she too had been hearing rumours. Rumours of politicking, of sideways moves, of guideline revision, strategy rethinks. Everything was suddenly airborne. Nothing was fixed, which was fine in principle, but for once Zoe felt behind the game, out of the loop, as if all the while she had been in Europe other forces had been at work: large, strange, dark forces which operated at a frequency she could not pick up. She felt, for one of the few times in her professional career, disorientated and out of sorts. And now this. Fifteen minutes late. Perhaps she had chosen the wrong Starbucks, there were so bloody many of them. These days they seemed to build them in clusters. Zoe stood up. She could do a brisk check of the nearest three or four and be back in less than ten minutes. Just then she noticed someone standing in the doorway: a small, bewhiskered man, wearing an aged three-piece suit, Varilux glasses and fiercely polished brogues. Noticing Zoe, he strode forward. His little heels clicked chirpingly, annoyingly, ominously on the terracotta floor tiles. Zoe sat down again.

  ‘Mordred.’

  ‘Zoe.’ His smile seemed indirect, carefully learned, like the speech of the profoundly deaf, as if it might have been produced by some precise and skilful tightening of the sphincter rather than anything directly facial.

  ‘So that’s how it is.’

  ‘Yes.’ He perched on the edge of a chair and looked around for a waiter.

  ‘You have to order at the counter.’

  ‘Oh really. Would you mind? A pot of Earl Grey would be lovely.’

  Zoe returned with a mug of hot water and a cranberry and blackcurrant teabag.

  ‘It’s the best they could do.’

  Mordred looked faintly disgusted.

  ‘I’m not a supporter of the teabag,’ he said after a moment.

  He stirred then sipped. His glasses paled in the air-conditioned shade. The eyes thus revealed were raw, pink and ferrety; they were edged with hardened crusts of pus. They had been damaged, brutalised by decades of manuscript work. Mordred Evans wore them like battle scars, he used them to frighten people. ‘If I can do this to myself,’ they seemed to say, ‘what might I do to you?’

  ‘I’m expecting Gantry Hellespont,’ said Zoe Cable, in a futile attempt to claw back the initiative.

  ‘What is that person drinking?’ said Mordred, nodding at the woman sitting opposite them on a lip-shaped sofa.

  ‘I believe it’s called a Frappuccino.’

  ‘Really?’ Mordred Evans’ fingernails, Zoe noticed, had been recently buffed. ‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘Professor Hellespont will not be coming. It was thought best under the circumstances that I should serve as his replacement.’

  ‘For this particular meeting?’

  ‘No, in general.’

  ‘Temporarily, you mean?’

  ‘For the foreseeable future.’

  Zoe Cable said nothing. She lit a cigarette.

  ‘I believe this is a no-smoking area,’ Mordred commented.

  ‘I believe you’re right.’

  Zoe continued to smoke. Mordred manifested another, smaller smile.

  ‘Donald is a terribly talented man,’ he said after a moment of silence. ‘You know this, of course. He is a man of ambition and foresight. He has, we might even say, a genius for strategy. For example, the recent Digital Faculty Proposal – quite spectacular. My talents, modest as they are, lie elsewhere. I concern myself with detail, with, we might even say, minutiae. You will be aware of my survey of early English spelling.’

  Zoe shook her head. Mordred’s jaw tightened faintly.

  ‘Whereas others like to travel,’ the brutalised eyes lifted and lingered for a second on Zoe, ‘I prefer to remain at home. I have a genius, one might say, for
persistence. It is surprising how much one can learn at home. In the case of poor Professor Hellespont, for example, on closer inspection certain significant details came to light (I won’t bore you with them now) which made his position as Chair of the Panel for the Body Studies Research Hub less appropriate than it had earlier appeared to be. Under the circumstances, as I say, I was deemed a suitable alternative.’

  ‘You have no experience in the field.’

  ‘Of Body Studies? No, indeed. But as you know, I have considerable experience of the process of competitive bidding both in the UK and the EU. It was felt that my grasp of the regulatory requirements was enough to outweigh, in this instance, my relative ignorance of disciplinary specifics.’

  ‘You stitched him up.’

  ‘Professor Hellespont?’

  ‘Donald.’

  Mordred made a noise somewhere between a gurgle and a whistle. For another person such a noise might have indicated a blocked airway, clogged sinuses or an attack of asthma. For Mordred Evans, Zoe Cable realised, it constituted a laugh.

  ‘That rather depends on you.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Mordred paused. Zoe waited.

  ‘In three weeks’ time there will be an official disciplinary hearing for Bernard Littlejohn during which charges of gross professional misconduct will be considered. Bernard’s defence is that he has been the victim of falsification and intimidation due to his opposition to the Digital Faculty Proposal; Donald, as a consequence, has rather a lot at stake. Defeat could be quite damaging.’

  Zoe shook her head.

  ‘Try plan B, Mordred. There are witnesses. I don’t know who’s put him up to this, although I can guess, but Bernard can kiss his pimply arse goodbye.’

  Mordred was utterly unmoved by her bolshiness.

  ‘There is one witness, I believe – Morris Gutman. There is also a certain amount of material evidence, of course, but that can be dealt with. Aside from Gutman, there is, as I believe they say, a high degree of deniability. Bernard Littlejohn, despite appearances to the contrary, is not entirely stupid.’

  Zoe stubbed out her cigarette and frowned. The teenage baristas who had been looking at her uneasily returned with some relief to their gargling machinery.

  ‘So it’s Morris,’ she said. ‘Again.’

  ‘Again,’ Mordred agreed. ‘Yes. He is proving surprisingly useful isn’t he? Who would have guessed?’

  Chapter 23

  That summer, Morris studied pleasure. He began with Dirck van Camper’s footnotes. He plumbed their depths, he examined their entrails, he squeezed them for all they were worth and then he moved on, and in, through the academic web of reference, cross-reference, refutation and disavowal. He took names, he gathered notes, he surveyed the literature, he built up a picture – a strange, unholy picture – and then he planned his riposte. His book already had a publisher, a title (Was it Good for You? Culture, Literature and the Ethics of Pleasure) and a deadline, but as yet no content. Did this worry him? No it did not. He had developed a trust, a faith (perhaps it was sleeping with Zoe which had done it) in his own possibilities. Ideas would occur, words would arrive, pages would be filled. He was after all the author of the well-received ‘Total Mindfuck’ and of ‘Seven Year Scratch: Ethics and (in)Fidelity’, forthcoming in Hank Bernebau’s volume Autobodies: Writing Beyond Flesh. He knew what he was talking about. He was cutting-edge.

  It was not, of course, that Morris had forgotten the dubious origins of his current success. They existed; he remembered them still with an occasional pang. He was not immune to the flailing edge of guilt, but the memories grew smaller, slighter every day. And what grew larger with every fax from his editor, with every congratulatory email, with every invitation to speak, examine, preside, was his sense that he could do it. That he could become this person, this other person, who he had never been before, who he could never have imagined being before.

  He stopped wearing ties. It was a small gesture but one which E noticed.

  ‘What on earth will my parents buy you for Christmas?’ she asked.

  ‘Socks are still an option. I’m not planning to go barefoot for another year or so at least.’

  He bought himself a T-shirt with a picture of Lenin on the front.

  ‘It’s ironic,’ he explained.

  ‘It’s confusing,’ E replied. ‘What’s next? Tattoos?’

  Tattoos had occurred to him, but he let it pass.

  Pleasure: amorphousness was the key – fluidity – its tendency to pop up anywhere. No human practice, however dreadful, Morris discovered, was immune to pleasure. It would worm its way in, make a place for itself. Pleasure was the death of ethics, or at least of ethics as a system, of ethics as a law. It was uncontainable, intangible, omnipresent. The ethics of pleasure were, by necessity, temporary and contingent. Since pleasure, real, excessive pleasure (and real pleasure, Morris had learned, was always excessive), was not a case of either/or, was not about choices, priorities, it eradicated all that; it swept it all away in a flood of excitement, a flood of openness.

  15 July. Morris sat in front of his computer (new, black, unnecessarily powerful). He had a stack of notes, a pyramid of books, an espresso machine and a carton of illegally imported Marlboro Reds. He began to write. It started slowly: he sketched out his theory; he rather pedantically positioned himself vis-à-vis the big guns (classical and modern). This took him a week. As he wrote he felt himself gradually entering another world, a world of extreme forces, a world arcing with illumination and energy. It was as if he had stuck his head into the hot centre of a thundercloud, and from that strange and elevated vantage E, Molly, everything (everything except the book, Zoe and Morris himself) seemed tiny and black – like figures on a far-flung horizon.

  Chapter 1 – Freud and the Pre-History of Pleasure: a bugger to be sure but he broke the back of it in two tumultuous days: days during which he never left his study; days during which E and Molly heard as they passed the locked door – above the stuttering hum of the laser printer and the occasional whirr of the hard drive, noises both more human and more terrible – cries and sobs, gurgles of frustration, anger and joy. He emerged with a short beard, a long draft and appalling constipation. After that initial, life-threatening struggle, however, it was easy. Freud fell swiftly into place. He had a bath, ordered a prawn madras and finished it in a weekend. ‘Sigmund,’ he joshed in an email to Zoe, ‘is my bitch.’

  Chapter 2 – Masturbation and the Novel: it was workmanlike – his mind, to be honest, was on other things. Zoe was back from Vienna: two more tumultuous days. Morris began to take risks -returning home dishevelled at 7 a.m. he claimed he had fallen asleep in the Vodafone Library and been locked in. Unprecedented, actually impossible, but he offered it up nonetheless as true, plausible, real. E looked at him and laughed. He could barely see her. Molly sniffed him like a suspicious terrier.

  With Zoe, he talked and talked. She seemed surprised about how much he said, about his vehemence. In her bed, in her arms, the book seemed to write itself. He tasted (literally, metaphorically, whatever) the intricacies of pleasure, its fragile absolution and he felt – that was his point – its goodness, its rightness and its absolute priority.

  ‘My thesis,’ he explained to Zoe, not for the first time, ‘is that pleasure, bodily pleasure, properly understood, is the only possible basis for the “good life”.’

  Zoe was masturbating. She liked to do that sometimes, go for seconds. Morris had assured her (not that Zoe had ever asked) that it was OK with him.

  ‘Works for me, Morris,’ she groaned. Then afterwards she added. ‘You mean properly misunderstood?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Morris made a note of it, misunderstood. ‘Because my point is, of course, that pleasure evades conceptual understanding, it’s slippery.’

  They kissed. Morris felt like a planet being tugged into an entirely different orbit, as though his switch of allegiances was neither voluntary nor accidental but rather an offshoot of the imp
ersonal laws of physics.

  ‘How was Vienna?’ he asked.

  ‘Clean,’ Zoe said. ‘Worryingly clean.’

  Chapter 3 – Blood Screening: Horror Film and the Pathological Imperative: E rented a cottage in Cornwall for two weeks. Morris took his book, his notes, his computer, his newly purchased DVD collection. They had to borrow a roof-rack for Molly’s clothes, toys and medical supplies.

  The weather was remarkable. The sun shone, there was a light breeze, small innocuous clouds hung in the sky like cottonballs, like the frozen residue of ack-ack guns. Morris wrote. E and Molly went to the beach. Every morning they would leave, cluttered like tinkers with buckets, balls, hats and towels. Every afternoon they would return pinker, wetter, wrapped with seaweed, laughing at some coastal absurdity. He would see them coming up the path. He would pause from his labour to wave, perhaps to make a cup of tea. At this point, the issue of deception usually arose in Morris’s mind. Who was fooling whom? Or alternatively, was no one being fooled? Was it all as real as it seemed? Were they really happy? Did marriage rely on infidelity? Did it feed off its own decay like a collapsing sun?

  Chapter 4 – Pleasuring the Postmodern: On the Wednesday of the second week, E asked him to come with them to the beach, to have a day off work. She said this quite casually. Her tone was hard to judge, but there were undercurrents, Morris sensed, of euphemism and rancour. Although he would have preferred not to, he agreed. The next morning they walked down to the beach together. Without his computer and books Morris felt naked and weightless, as though a gust of wind might suddenly pick him off the path and carry him high and away like a lost balloon. E and Molly seemed not to notice his fears; they walked cheerily, confidently to their preferred spot – under the sheltering lee of a rust-brown boulder. Molly ran off to dig, E stripped to her swimsuit. It was already warm. The size of E’s belly took Morris aback – it seemed odd and unnatural, like the nose on an AWACS aircraft.

  ‘You’re huge,’ he said.

  ‘The baby’s moving. Have a feel.’

  She put his hand on her belly. Under the lycra he felt something slide, like a tongue moving beneath a large cheek.