by Ian McGuire
When it was over, E looked up at him.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘That’s Bernard Littlejohn. I just sacrificed my career to save his arse.’
‘With hindsight,’ E said, ‘probably the wrong choice. Is he telling the truth?’
‘Bernard?’
‘Yes, Bernard.’
‘Yes.’
Yes, he had said it. Yes, he had given himself up to the truth. It felt, for that first half-second, soft and forgiving, clean like a hotel bed – a place where he could stay, could become human again. Then E stuck the vegetable peeler up his nose.
‘It’s unforgivable,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant, you bastard.’ Her protuberent belly, like a vast third breast, was pressing into his groin. Morris was wondering how the kitchen floor fitted into all of this.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK. Ethically, I’m nowhere. But look at it this way …’ He paused. ‘Relationships develop, change, there are periods of alteration, backsliding. The ideal of constancy is after all purely theoretical, it has no actual equivalent in nature.’
‘You’re pathetic.’
‘Perhaps so, but hear me out. Yes, I was unfaithful, but is infidelity really so different from faithfulness? Think about it. They contain many of the same elements. We share ninety-five per cent of our genes with the banana. Perhaps it is time to think beyond these hackneyed oppositions.’
E started crying. She took the vegetable peeler out of his nose.
‘Where do you get that crap from?’ she asked.
Morris looked at her. His wife. Her face was knobbly and purple, like a punnet of plums. He felt something happening in his chest, something painful and archaic. He tried to touch her, but she pushed him away.
The Crocodile’s revenge was swift and thorough. After a dinner-less evening of serial recrimination, a deeply uncomfortable night on the tartan sofa and a dull, lonely morning watching cartoons with Molly and listening with his whole body for even the slightest sign of a lessening of connubial tension, Morris received a phone call from Doris Pamplona.
‘The Dean would like to see you as soon as possible, Morris,’ she said.
‘It’s Saturday morning.’
The Dean would like to see you as soon as possible,’ she repeated more slowly.
Morris got into the car without shaving or showering. His shaggy, pungent body struck him immediately as an affront, an insult even to the dustless vinyl swoops of its recently manufactured interior. He loved the Ford Focus; the hire-purchase payments were £250 per month. On the way to campus, he drove significantly below the speed limit; he was overtaken by a learner driver and a triumphant cyclist. Turning around occurred to him, as did sabotaging his car or getting deliberately lost, but it seemed better in the end to get it over with, to know the worst. The sun was still shining, the privet hedges were dusty, the lawns were brown, plants drooped from hanging baskets like ragged and untended dreadlocks. Perhaps he could get away with a formal warning, thought Morris, buoyed up perhaps by the signs of the marvellous, unfailing summer. An off-the-record bollocking, a pledge to scupper his career whenever and wherever possible – that would be par for this particular course, but publicly, perhaps, a warning would suffice. Wouldn’t the Crocodile want to steer clear of disciplinary tribunals for a while at least? Wouldn’t it be better for him really to stick Morris in some corner office and forget about him for thirty years or so? There were only two other cars in the car park: Crocodile’s Mercedes and Doris Pamplona’s Spitfire. Morris had always wondered about that Spitfire. The campus was, of course, deserted. As Morris pushed open the mammoth bronze doors of the Arts Faculty, he experienced a strange surge of holiday euphoria. He felt briefly, very briefly, like a schoolboy who had lingered after school and now had the run of the place. He knocked on Doris Pamplona’s door. She looked at him with gentle contempt. Morris normally found her manner irritating and inappropriate, but now it struck him as about right.
‘Go straight in,’ she said. ‘They’re expecting you.’
They? Morris was surprised that the Crocodile would want a witness. And who could it be? Zoe perhaps? The thought that they might still be in this together perked him up. Surely Zoe could soften this somehow? She had the Hub as leverage. Yes, he thought, as he slowly crossed the ten yards from Doris Pamplona’s office to Donald’s, it was definitely a good thing Zoe would be there. She owed him – not only for yesterday’s ambush, but also for the imminent collapse of his marriage.
He knocked and entered. It was not Zoe; it was Dirck van Camper. He was in a wheelchair, one of those up-to-date ones with composite wheels. His glasses were the same, but he had grown out his hair in a strange, indiscriminate style. It sat like a large, vague furball on top of his long, expressionless face. The Crocodile, whose own face suggested he had recently enjoyed a very pleasant brunch, gestured towards an empty chair. Morris sat.
‘Morning Dirck,’ Morris said. ‘You look well.’
Dirck snorted. The Crocodile grinned. He reached into his desk drawer and brought out a copy of ‘Total Mindfuck’.
‘Yes, Morris,’ he said. ‘Dirck is well. So well, in fact, that he has been able to return to his studies at the University of Amsterdam. Imagine his surprise when a month or so ago, whilst searching the MLA database for recent work on embodiment, he came across a piece by his old tutor Morris Gutman.’ The Crocodile held up the copy of ‘Total Mindfuck’. ‘Imagine his even greater surprise when he discovered it was identical, word for word, to an essay he submitted for your “History of Critique” class in the spring.’
Morris’s whole face had gone numb. It was as if his nerves had retracted, U-turned back into his head, leaving the flesh of his face stranded and helpless. He swallowed loudly. He was having flashbacks to the car park, the blood pool, the Do It to Julia fans.
‘Isn’t it possible …’ He breathed heavily once or twice. He wasn’t sure whether he was really going to say this, but then again he wasn’t sure it was possible to make things any worse than they were. He looked at the Crocodile. The Crocodile seemed quite eager to hear what he had to say. ‘Isn’t it possible,’ he went on, ‘that Dirck copied my article? What evidence have you got that he wrote this essay first?’
‘We have statements, Morris. Certified, unretracted statements from several friends of Dirck, including one Professor at the University of Amsterdam to whom he sent a copy of his essay in March. I’m amazed you thought you could get away with it.’
‘You knew a month ago?’
‘Three weeks. I suppose I should have threatened you earlier, but you live and learn. This is for you.’
He pushed a sheet of paper across the desk. It was a letter of resignation. The Crocodile offered him a pen. Morris signed.
‘Oh, by the way, I’ve also informed your publisher, who seems to be having second thoughts about your book, and the Guardian education section is running a piece on plagiarism next week, citing you as a prime example.’
‘Won’t publicity damage the Faculty?’ said Morris vaguely. He was beginning to have problems with his peripheral vision: windows and walls seemed to be leaning in towards him.
‘Perhaps, but I thought it a price well worth paying. You can keep the pen.’ It was a Bic. ‘Think of it as your leaving present.’
Part Three
Chapter 26
Morris realised with regret that he was awake again. Another day. The pleasant whirliness of his dream-thoughts had curdled, stiffened into something that was identifiably if unfortunately him. He got up, dispensed his morning bowl of generic cornflakes, opened the mini-fridge and sniffed the milk with suspicion. From next door he could hear the usual Slavic yammerings. Why did Kosovars, he wondered, have so much to talk about? The batteries in his transistor radio had been dead for several days so, for amusement, Morris looked out of the window as the kettle boiled. The view was of the communal car park, the four-lane Isaiah Berlin Parkway and, beyond that, behind a thick hedge and a newly erected council sign – Coket
own Education: Excellence Whatever the Cost – the Albert Schweitzer Primary School.
He had a shower, dried himself and put on his uniform. Morris was now a guard for Alpaca Security Services. He wore a beige shirt with brown epaulettes, brown trousers with a beige stripe and a hexagonal brown cap with a shiny black peak and a spurious gold badge. He worked in the wine and spirits section of Sir Savalot, the flagship store of the Rumpswick Shopping Precinct.
Yes, it was a step down. There was no point in pretending otherwise. No point in pretending even that it was only temporary, since any such state of temporariness would have required Morris to have a plan or at least a notion of an alternative future, and Morris had neither of those. His vision, indeed, as he paced solemnly everyday from the New World whites to the cut-price mini-lagers, was entirely rearward. All he could see was the uniformly depressing vista of the recent past: his career, terminated a month before in circumstances, according to the Guardian education section, of ‘unexampled ignominy’; his affair with Zoe Cable ended with similar rapidity once his plagiarism was made public; his marriage to E was currently under suspension pending a post-partum review, the results of which Morris anticipated with gloom. Such catastrophic and simultaneous failure was surely unusual, Morris thought. He was the victim of, if nothing else, improbability. Improbability and poor design. His life had split apart in mid-air like an ageing Tupolov, and all Morris could think to do now was to sift the wreckage looking for clues, momentoes, a little hope. That, anyway, was how he passed the long days at Sir Savalot. Between shooing off the homeless and offering directions to the condiments aisle, he stood to lopsided attention behind his mirrored aviator shades, replaying again and again in his mind the long moments before the crash.
Morris polished his shoes with yesterday’s underwear, checked the sell-by date on his flat-pack sandwiches, donned his pac-a-mac (the record-breaking summer was at an end) and set off for work. If he was honest with himself, he would admit that his choice of accommodation, like his choice of job, was mainly a gesture. When he had announced to E that he had found a place for ten pounds a week, that his neighbours would be asylum seekers and that he would be working as a supermarket security guard, he had expected some expression of sympathy or contrition, some suggestion that perhaps he had gone too far. He had been offered none of these. Instead, E’s aggressive display of insouciance had made Morris so angry that he had taken the bedsit and the Sir Savalot job to spite her.
As he locked his front door Morris waved to the Al Houja family, who were standing at the end of the corridor. The looks of shock and terror they gave back made him wonder whether the common wave might have an altogether different and more obstetrical meaning within the culture of the Maghreb. He descended the sewage-tainted staircase with a sense that yet more weight had been added to his bulging panniers of gloom. It was seven-thirty. The Isaiah Berlin Parkway was snarled with wet and honking traffic. Morris took a deep breath and entered the subway, emerging on the other side of the road blue-faced and rather more worldly than before. He passed the Albert Schweitzer Primary School then turned right into the unkempt pedestrianisation of the Brueghel Maisonettes – roaming German Shepherds, children on mountain bikes, blue-green graffiti rising up the walls like elephant grass. He crossed a ravaged play area and a residents’ car park dotted with pools of window glass. Ten minutes later he ducked under the half-open shutters of Sir Savalot.
Darren, his co-worker, Darren of the virulent aftershave and the lewd Tweetie Pie tattoo, was standing next to a bin of cut-price Pot Noodle, talking to check-out girl Rasha Jenkins. Morris took up his usual position between the eggnog and the cherry schnapps. It was five to eight. Rasha regretfully detached herself from Darren and remounted the check-out stool. Morris adopted a pose of semi-aggressive vigilance, donned his aviator glasses, closed his eyes and began to think.
He thought of E, always of E. Her pink face, glowing with pregnancy, drifted past him like a lost balloon. Perhaps this really was for the best. He had done all he could. He had. He had apologised solidly for a whole week. He had sought neither to defend nor justify his actions. When E had characterised his adultery as a desperate act born of pathetic insecurity, he had agreed that there were issues he needed to deal with. When she had thrown things at him, small electrical items mainly, he had ducked then picked up the pieces. When, temporarily defeated by the energies of her own anger, she had asked for a hug, he had given it. And when she returned again an hour or so later to the attack, he had resisted mentioning the hug. It had been, indeed, as though the hug had never occurred. He had cleaned the house while E locked herself in the bathroom and spoke endlessly to Stella on the cordless. He looked after Molly; he did long-forgotten jobs. His penitence had been exemplary, un exceptionable, but he had performed it with the expectation that it would eventually end, that one day E’s fury would abate, that her bitterness would sweeten, her verbal assaults become less frenzied and less frequent. After a good week of it, however, he realised that events were moving in the opposite direction.
Sunday morning. He rose from the tartan sofa with the usual accumulation of spinal numbness and muscular strain, collected the already howling Molly, fed her on Weetabix and precisely heated milk, anointed her eczema, dressed her after lengthy negotiations, tricked her into mounting the pushchair and then pushed her, screaming but strapped in, to the park. Before leaving he did the dishes and left a selection of bran cereal, a sliced kiwi and a large glass of cran-orange on the table for E. He hoped that they had reached a point where such open displays of affection and effort might provoke in E some recripocal softening. He was hoping, in truth, for a pang. After a week of cringing he felt that he was due a pang. When he returned from the park, however, he found E still in her pyjamas, lying on the tartan sofa watching pubescent TV and eating Tweenie yoghurt. His high-fibre breakfast was untouched on the kitchen table. Morris was not cheered by this sight, but he still thought it possible that a pang might have occurred in his absence.
‘We’ve been to the park,’ he explained.
‘You were supposed to go swimming.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Molly has her swimming lesson on a Sunday morning.’
‘Swimming lesson?’
‘Yes Morris.’ She turned to him. ‘Swim-ming les-son. Surely that’s not too complicated for a hot young lecturer like yourself?’
Morris said nothing. Molly, who had woken up from a brief but entirely revivifying nap, launched a panting, Houdini-like assault on her pushchair harness. E stood up without looking at Morris, clicked the harness open, carried Molly back to the sofa and gave her a chocolate biscuit.
‘That’s a special treat,’ she explained to Molly, ‘because you missed swimming today. And I know how much you love swimming.’
‘Swiiimmmiiing!’ Molly looked suddenly and utterly bereft. Tears rolled instantly off the chubby overhang of her cheeks and dropped on to the dark wavelets of her chocolate digestive. E plied her with another.
‘If,’ she went on, addressing Morris but still not looking at him, ‘instead of shagging your colleagues and writing your piss-poor books, you’d paid the slightest attention to your daughter, you would know she has been having swimming lessons every Sunday for the last two months.’
Morris had given up on the pang. The pang, he realised, was still a long, long way away. He reached rather wearily down into himself for another apology.
‘I’m really …’
‘Yes?’ snapped E.
‘Really …’ Instead of grabbing the usual apology Morris realised that he had come up with something quite different, something much darker and angrier, a sticky black mass that suddenly wanted out.
‘Really tired of your incessant victimhood.’
E finally looked at him. More than that, she stood up and stared at him, her eyes bulging like water balloons.
‘You don’t tell me how to feel,’ she hissed.
‘There’s enough pain to go around, you
know. You don’t have to hoard it. You don’t have to hug it like a fucking security blanket.’
Morris paused. The image of the blanket had suddenly triggered a whole range of associations in his mind. He felt that he was having a breakthrough moment.
‘That’s it. That’s it!’ he continued. ‘You’re clinging to this as a form of comfort. It gives you an identity, “the betrayed wife”. For you it’s perfect. For once you can feel good about feeling bad because you have someone else to blame entirely – me. Everything that’s wrong is my fault. It’s so simple. Morris is the root of all evil. I think you’re enjoying this. Why else would you cling on to it? Because it gives you something you can’t get anywhere else – an explanation. An explanation for everything that’s gone wrong, ever. I’m like Hitler for you, I’m like Saddam. It’s fundamentalism. You’re an emotional fundamentalist.’
‘Have you finished now?’ E shouted back. ‘Have you finished now? Because I’ll tell you, you’re a complete fucking lunatic. Did you know that? Did you …’
‘No I have not finished. I HAVE NOT FINISHED!’ Morris was shouting as loud as he could. He had not done that, not tried to do it, since he was a child. He couldn’t believe the sensation. How big it made him feel. Molly’s mouth hung open, a small red pocket, full of yellow crumbs. ‘I have something else to say. What about my pain? I’ve lost my fucking job. What about that? Does that even appear on your horizon? I doubt it, because you’re too busy cuddling up with your betrayal. “Oh my poor betrayal, my little betrayal”, like it’s a fucking guinea pig. Like it’s the end of the fucking world.’
E stepped back. She was frowning and looking amazed. Molly was clinging to her leg.
‘You’re not making sense anymore Morris. I think you should leave.’
‘You think I should leave? You think I should fucking leave?’
That was when he left. After slamming everything that was slammable he stormed out. He got into the Ford Focus and drove like a fool, a complete fool, setting off three speed cameras on the Coketown flyover alone, until he found a pub that was obviously open. He entered the Mountebank Arms glassy-eyed with a desire for oblivion, like a Lothario of the void. He ordered and drank in quick succession three pints of Superbrew, finishing the third with a long, tumultuous and symphonic burp, a burp which might have served, in its lengthy, self-regarding ugliness, as a tragic summation of his life so far.
