by Paul Sussman
‘How do you build caviar?’ whispered the blonde girl.
‘I shall crush my enemies,’ he yelled, stamping on the bottom of the punt, ‘and rip out their eyes with my fingers, and bite off their ears. And I shall hunt lions and elephants and tigers and buffalo, and kill them with my bare hands!’
He was now bouncing up and down.
‘I shall be the greatest ruler in Africa! The name Ogunmola shall be spoken with awe. People shall bow down and kiss my knees! I shall be great. I shall be supreme. I shall be . . . I shall be . . . I shall be king!’
Whereupon he raised his fly-whisk high into the air and duly tumbled backwards into the river, surfacing a moment later with a large wig of foul-smelling weed clamped to his skull.
‘Bugger,’ he sputtered. ‘I’m sopping wet!’
Of the subsequent events of that most eventful of evenings I recall little, my memory from that point onwards becoming rather confused. I know for sure we made a campfire on the bank and sat beside it singing ‘We won the war’ over and over again. And I’m also pretty certain I drank a lot more champagne, smoked more cigarettes, and went swimming in the freezing river. Whether or not Meaty fell face-first into a cowpat whilst chasing the red-haired woman around a field, however, I cannot be certain. I seem to remember it, but then again it might have been a memory transplanted from some totally different night. Likewise Meaty trying to pole-vault over the river using a punt pole, and Gummy singing ‘Roll out the Barrel’ whilst eating a champagne glass, and my vomiting copiously from the side of the punt as we slipped back into Cambridge with the dawn. Things only came back into focus when, somewhat to my amazement, I found myself in bed with the pretty blonde-haired girl, my pyjama trousers around my ankles, making love for the first time in my life. I would like to say it went on for hours, but in truth I think lasted 30 seconds, if indeed that. Crisp November sunlight was pouring through the window, and birds were twittering in the trees.
‘I think I love you,’ I whispered to the girl beneath me.
‘That’ll be 20 shillings,’ she said coldly. ‘And you can’t stay over.’
From that point forward things went rapidly downhill. Meaty was an appalling influence, and I fell under his spell entirely. As speedily as I had converted from school dunce to school swot after the departure of Emily, I now reverted to my former state, adding to my old vices of laziness and murder new ones of drunkenness, loutishness, promiscuousness and a 50-a-day cigarette habit.
Meaty was the self-proclaimed president of The Invincibles, a motley collection of university ne’er-do-wells including Pepper and Gummy from Magdalen, Topper Harris and Jonty Johanssen from Christ, Bunty Grosvenor from Jesus and Lord Charlie Gore Evans from Pembroke.
‘It’s a strictly British cabala,’ admitted Meaty, ‘although Gummy’s an exception. When you buy as much champagne as he does, nationality ceases to count.’
Two weeks after first meeting Meaty I was admitted to The Invincibles as a junior member, undergoing a rather unpleasant initiation in which I had to drink a pint of brandy down in one, push a walnut up my bottom and jump naked off every bridge from Magdalen down to Queens’.
‘Bwavo!’ lisped my patron as I clambered ashore after the last of these initiatory immersions. ‘An Invincible is born. Let the glad tidings wing out. Now you’ve got to buy us all a dwink.’
As a junior Invincible I seemed to be expected to buy rather a lot of drinks, a fact which, taken with my perpetual and not inconsiderable losses at cards and billiards, soon exhausted the small allowance granted me by my father. I wrote to him requesting more money, saying it was for books, and he sent some, but that particular ruse could only be used on a limited number of occasions, and eventually I was forced to take out a large loan at an extortionate rate of interest with a local moneylender. Even that wasn’t enough, however, and in desperation I began pilfering volumes from the college library and selling them to a shady second-hand-book dealer in Huntingdon. Where once I had enthusiastically read these works, I now, with equal enthusiasm, purloined them, walking from the library with an innocent smile on my face and half-a-dozen volumes concealed beneath my gown. How the librarian failed to notice my activities I shall never know, particularly when I removed an entire set of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Somehow, however, I got away with it, and by the time I left John’s in the summer of 1919 its book stacks were looking noticeably sparser than when I had arrived 18 months previously.
Involvement with The Invincibles was wholly incompatible with any form of scholastic endeavour, and the achievements of my first year were quite forgotten in a welter of missed lectures, bunked tutorials, never-completed essays and half-hearted, mistake-strewn translations. Whereas previously I had risen at seven and spent the morning in lectures, I now rose at four of an afternoon and spent the rest of the day getting drunk with Meaty and my new-found friends. Plato and Aristophanes, Ovid and Horace, Virgil and Quintilian were all forgotten.
If one area of study was dropped, however, another was taken up and pursued with equal gusto, namely the Science of Vice. I learned all there was to be learned about wine, and cards, and billiards and gambling. I was initiated into the subtle and inestimably valuable mysteries of playing one debtor off against another. I discovered how to take care of myself in a street brawl, how to drive a car and the best way to mix a Harvey Wallbanger (‘Dweadful American habit, cocktails,’ sighed Meaty, ‘but quite iwwesistible!’). After its rather precipitous 30-second start, meanwhile, my sex life went into top gear, one of my many willing partners being none other than the dean’s secretary, the latter taking particular delight in bonking me immediately after I’d been given a good dressing-down in her employer’s study.
The Invincibles were inveterate pranksters, and no evening was complete without Meaty crying at the top of his voice, ‘To work, dear boys!’ Whereupon we would troop off like a platoon of soldiers, Gummy blowing strident blasts on an old hunting bugle, in order to wreak havoc the length and breadth of Cambridge.
The ambitiousness of Meaty’s pranks increased in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol we’d consumed beforehand. A reasonably sober evening might culminate in the unleashing of a dozen or so helium-filled contraceptives into the College Chapel, or the lashing of Reverend Creed’s bicycle to the weathervane on the roof of the library. More inebriated occasions, on the other hand, would generally result in various (live) farmyard animals being released into the bedrooms of unwitting undergraduates, or the careful sprinkling of mustard seeds on the college lawns, said seeds spelling out the words ‘Bugger the Bursar!’ once they’d grown.
Our truly legendary pranks, however – the ones that made the front pages of local newspapers and led to police investigations, and are, so far as I know, still talked about even today – were the ones performed at a level of intoxication so great that any fears as to the possible consequences were dulled to the point of non-existence. Many of these pranks have now attained the status of urban myth, with successive generations of undergraduates claiming them as their own. It is therefore as much to set the record straight as to advance this, my life story, that I confess it was we, The Invincibles, who first stole a car, rolled it on to a pair of punts, took it downstream to the Bridge of Sighs and suspended it therefrom, leaving the unfortunate vehicle swinging a couple of feet above the Cam whilst we punted off into the night. It was we who removed an amputated forearm from Addenbrooke’s Hospital and posted it to a local vicar who’d advertised for ‘willing hands to help decorate our church for harvest festival’; and we who dumped two barrels’ worth of potassium permanganate crystals in a local reservoir, thereby turning the town’s water supply bright purple. Most famous – infamous – of all, it was we, The Invincibles, who distributed letters to all St John’s College first-year students instructing them, as a matter of national security, to post a stool sample to No. 10 Downing Street, something which, amazingly, 96 of them did. That little escapade resulted not merely in a poli
ce but a full government investigation, in the light of which we decided to curtail our activities somewhat.
Although we all enjoyed our pranks, none of us did so more than Prince Gummy. His enjoyment was such, indeed, that his involvement in our escapades could often prove something of a liability, his booming laugh and cries of encouragement more often than not alerting the authorities to our activities long before those activities had come to a proper fruition. I remember several occasions on which I was caught weathervaning Reverend Creed’s bicycle because Gummy’s shouts of ‘Higher! Higher!’ were heard by the college porters, whilst he had to be forcibly bundled ashore the night we punted our stolen car towards the Bridge of Sighs because his giggles threatened to upset the entire convoy.
‘Pity the poor buggers who end up with him as their wuler,’ sighed Meaty. ‘The man’s a wewitable fwuit-cake.’
The more I associated with Meaty, Gummy, Pepper et al, the more degenerate I became. I smoked opium – supplied by Gummy, who kept a large hookah pipe in his rooms and was, I suspect, addicted to the drug – and augmented my local romantic dalliances with regular trips to a brothel in London. I ran up monumental debts; became incapable of coherent conversation unless I had at least half a bottle of Cognac inside me; and lied, cheated, stole and swindled as though these traits were second nature to me.
In the eight months from November 1918 to June 1919 I plummeted into the abyss as precipitously as Icarus plummeted into the turquoise waters of the Aegean. So daring did our escapades become, and so universal our debauched reputation, that we began to believe our own myth and suspect that we were, indeed, invincible. For Meaty and Gummy and the others, this may well have been the case, for they were all fabulously wealthy and the university could ill afford to lose them. For me, however, such considerations did not apply. The debtor son of a failed inventor, my presence was by no means integral to the continued prosperity of the college. To their credit, they gave me every opportunity to mend my ways. When I failed my end-of-year exams, however – with the lowest marks ever recorded in Part I of the Classical Tripos – they finally decided they could muddle along without me. I was summoned to the office of Reverend Creed, the dean, and duly sent down. To add insult to injury, his secretary refused to have sex with me afterwards, explaining that, as an ex-student, I was no longer worthy of her affections.
‘Don’t worry, old boy,’ Meaty consoled. ‘Come down to Hampshire for the weekend. Mumsy and Pa are away and I’m having a house party. You must dwink yourself cheerful again!’
Which is precisely what I did. The fact that I also murdered Gummy merely added to the fun.
On the way down to Lord Heaty’s Hampshire estate, I stopped off in London to visit my father.
Although I’d written regularly, usually when I needed money, I hadn’t actually seen Father since the spring of the previous year, the intervening holidays having all been spent up at Cambridge. I was neither dreading nor especially looking forward to the meeting. Engaged as he habitually was with his inventions, he’d never taken much interest in my affairs. Nor I, for my part, in his. We lived in very different worlds.
I reached White Lodge, our crumbling, whitewashed abode in Regent’s Park, late in the morning, and was let in by Mrs Eggs, the housekeeper. She looked the same as ever, with her bright piggy eyes and enormous bosom squashed beneath an overly tight white apron, and clapped me in a lung-bursting hug.
‘Master Raphael!’ she cried, delighted. ‘Oh, you naughty boy, surprising me like that! You always were a naughty boy, and you haven’t changed a bit. My, how you’ve grown.’
‘I do believe I’m the same size as when you last saw me, Mrs Eggs.’
‘Stuff and nonsense. You’re at least a foot bigger, and so handsome. I could marry you myself.’
She planted a rubbery kiss on my cheek.
‘Will you be staying?’ she inquired, indicating the suitcase in my hand.
‘Not this time, Mrs Eggs. I’m on my way to Hampshire. I just thought I’d pop by to see Father.’
‘Well, he’ll be very grateful, I’m sure,’ she said, bustling me into the house and closing the door behind me. ‘And how’s our young professor? Still top of the class, eh?’
Mrs Eggs had always been far more excited by my academic achievements than my father – she wept for three days when I announced I’d won a scholarship to Cambridge – and I had not the heart to confess that those achievements now lay in ruins. I therefore answered her question with a wan smile and, tickling her beneath the chin, left my suitcase in the front hall and set off in search of Father.
Lawrence Boethius Phoenix, for such was my father’s name, was an inventor. A spectacularly unsuccessful inventor, I might add, for in a lifetime of determined appliance-making he’d never once produced anything the general public considered worth spending their money on. He had, I believe, sold three of his steam-driven bottle openers in the early 1900s, and his plans for a cream-whipper powered by mice had caused quite a stir at the Royal Society. Those exceptions aside, however, the remainder of his life’s work had crashed headlong into a wall of universal indifference. Nobody wanted ice skates that, with a subtle modification, could be turned into tap shoes; nor were they interested in wind-powered gramophones, or croquet mallets that played ‘Rule, Britannia!’ whenever they hit a ball. His motorized tennis racquet attracted nothing but derision, as did his proposal for a cavalry division mounted on pogo sticks and, had he not been left a sizeable inheritance by an elderly dowager aunt, he, and me too, would long since have tumbled into abject penury.
His workshop was at the back of the house, overlooking the gardens: a large, chaotic room smelling strongly of chemicals, its floor knee-deep in tools and gadgets, its shelves piled high with back copies of the various obscure publications to which he subscribed (Patents Magazine, Inventors’ Review, etc.). It was here that he spent most of his time, and it was here that I found him that day, standing at the far end of the room wearing what looked like a large colander on his head, the latter sending forth a tangled spaghetti of wires into a metal cabinet with flashing lights on the front.
‘Hello, Father,’ I said, crossing the room.
‘Ah,’ he mumbled, turning towards me, seeming, as he usually did, rather embarrassed by my presence. ‘Um . . . yes! Very good.’
He was by that point close on 75 years of age, having been well into his fifties when I was conceived, and, although much the same height as me, was now rather stooped. Since our last encounter the skin of his face had yellowed somewhat, and his beard seemed a little threadbare. There were heavy bags under his eyes.
‘You look well,’ I said.
‘Yes, yes,’ he replied. ‘Trundling along.’ And then, almost as an afterthought: ‘You?’
‘Fine, thank you. I’m afraid I’ve been sent down from Cambridge.’
‘Oh well.’ He shrugged, displaying, as I knew he would, not the slightest interest in my news. ‘Can’t be helped. Look at this.’
He stood aside and indicated the metal cabinet with the flashing lights on the front, patting it with his hand.
‘This is it,’ he announced excitedly. ‘This is the one. They won’t be able to ignore me after this!’
I said nothing, knowing he would, without prompting, explain what the cabinet was all about.
‘It’s an echo-box,’ he continued. ‘A gateway to the past. With this machine we can listen to the voices of our own history. It’ll cause a revolution. They won’t be able to ignore me now!’
He adjusted the colander on his head, and fiddled with some dials.
‘What I’ve discovered, you see, is that sounds don’t actually disappear. They simply get absorbed into their surroundings, like water into a sponge. As I’m speaking now, my words are sinking into the walls and the floor and the ceiling and the furniture. They’re sinking in all around us. And so have voices throughout history. They’ve been absorbed and locked in. And now with this’ – he tapped the cabinet – ‘we can release t
hem. Listen once again. Five years it’s taken me. But it was worth it. It’ll cause a revolution, by God!’
He removed the colander from his head and placed it on mine before picking up what looked like a large stethoscope and applying it to the forehead of a small Egyptian bust sitting on the floor.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen to the past.’
He bent down and fiddled with some knobs. A faint buzzing sound echoed in my ears, as of a distant swarm of bees.
‘Hear anything?’ he asked.
‘A sort of buzzing.’
‘Any voices?’
‘Not really.’
He played with the dials some more, and flicked a couple of switches.
‘Now?’
‘No. Just a buzzing, with an occasional crackle.’
He looked disappointed, and checked over the wires on my helmet.
‘You should be hearing voices. I spent the whole of yesterday listening to the High Priest of Amun. Clear as anything. Ah, there’s a loose connection. Just tighten it up a bit. Now it should be working.’
He seemed so expectant, so needful of my acknowledgement, that I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that even the buzzing had now ceased.
‘Yes!’ I cried, with as much conviction as I could muster. ‘Yes, I can hear it. Voices! Egyptian voices!’
‘By God, I knew it worked!’ he cried. ‘I knew I wasn’t mad! Old Eggs said I was, but I knew better. Oh, I’m so happy! They won’t be able to ignore me now!’
He capered around the room – cutting a rather ridiculous figure in his sky-blue velvet smoking jacket and embroidered slippers – before collapsing into an old armchair from which a cloud of dust flew up all around him. I removed the colander from my head and went to his side. He was breathing heavily.
‘Congratulations, Father,’ I said.
He removed a handkerchief and blew his nose.
‘Actually,’ he snuffled, ‘I was rather hoping to hear your mother’s voice again. It’s been such a long time.’
