Suzerain: a ghost story

by Adrian John Smith

  After Heinrich, along came Suzy, who had recently moved into the apartment below (which she called a 'flat'; she was probably right, but I'd paid for an 'apartment' not a 'flat', so I persisted with the agent's nomenclature). One day in the lobby (a shifting ziggurat of books threatening to avalanche from my grasp, brown curled leaves scuttling across the tile floor, the wind shrieking at the corner of the building) Suzy said: What happened to the German? How do you know he was German? I said. Suzy made a little upward jab with her finger. Thin ceiling, she said, smiling in a way which let me know that she'd heard me availing myself of Heinrich's biggest asset.

  Suzy wearing a leather jacket and faux Celtic jewellery. Suzy friendly with guys who rode low-riders and street-fighters. Suzy drinking red wine with Camel cigarettes. Suzy working out at the gym three times a week. At that time she'd recently finished with her boyfriend because he'd had silicon pads implanted beneath his shaven scalp to make him look like a demon. I'm all for weird, Suzy said, all for self-expression - but Christ! Quite, I said. Making light of it. The truth was, the boyfriend had scared me. One night, I'd gone out onto the landing because I'd heard voices - it was late, and sometimes, if the communal door hadn't swung closed properly (which was often), teenagers would sometimes sneak in to the lobby to have a smoke out of the weather. Nothing heavy - they'd cut and run if you yelled down. But it wasn't teenagers, it was Phil, Suzy's boyfriend. They'd been talking at the threshold for long enough for the timer to switch off the light so that when I looked down over the railing he was in darkness in the shadow of the stairs. Sinisterly, he lit a cigarette at the exact moment of looking into my eyes, so that it illuminated his cheesy face and sunk his eyes in shadow. Then the flame went out. You want something, he said, from his little pocket of darkness. I didn't answer. I just closed the apartment door on the creepy bastard. That was before Suzy and I had met (or at least spoken), before Phil had been transformed into a demon.

  Suzy struck me immediately as being bright, interesting and un-educated (in the best sense). Plus, she gave superlative head. It was an attractive combination and made a change from the poundings I had taken. She had a cat called Eddy and an interest in esoteric, often erotic film. She was (and is) a sporadic writer of poetry which is mostly serviceable, occasionally very good. She has a sexy little butterfly tattooed sexily into her left thigh and she keeps a collection of sex toys in the drawer of her nightstand (which is a lot of sex in one sentence). She screams when she comes and once bit my neck like a vampire so that I had to wear a scarf for a week. You bite me again, I said, I may just have to hurt you back. I won't, she said, I promise. She bared her teeth when she smiled.

  We got on well, and I quickly began to look forward to our evenings together. Tuesday and Thursday with irregular weekend fixtures. Suzy would usually play host and I didn't protest because I was aware that my erudition - manifest in my shelves of books (the dry gravitas of some titles, the empty pretensions of others), the scattered papers on my desk, the essays I'd written which begged explanation, the modernist prints on the wall - made her uncertain of her own intellect. As far as I was concerned, this stuff had just become the material paraphernalia of my job. I didn't want Suzy to feel the way she felt but she did feel that way and there was no verbal exit from the situation without the risk of patronising her. Iridescent was a word I might have chosen for Suzy's intellect. Bright and beautiful would certainly cover it. Tell somebody that without patronage.

  So it was mostly Suzy who cooked (usually something with rice or pasta, seldom fish, meat never), who chose films (often European) and opened wine (sometimes expensive). Suzy too who provided grass and resin. Comfortable in her own flat, and being free of the curse of literary ambition, Suzy was happy to read her poems aloud. She did so with an honest, un-self-conscious voice, avoiding either the pretentious sonority of a Radio Four luvvie on the one hand, or ironic self-deprecation on the other. I knew better than to comment.

  Are we lesbians, she said one evening as she was clearing the table of the half-eaten salad and the bread-wiped soup bowls. I don't think so, I said. Do you? No, Suzy said, we're just having fun. Which was what I thought. Suzy was the second woman I'd slept with since my undergraduate days.

  A memory: moderately drunk and very stoned, I'm using a vibrator on Suzy while teasing the skin on her neck with my teeth. Suzy wants me to bite harder, but I won't break the skin. I won't draw blood. I won't mark her.

  Mnnnn, nnnnnn, Suzy murmurs. Deeper, she says. I sink the vibrator - a comically realistic representation of a penis with a fleshy pink coating - a little deeper and incline it against her G-spot. Is that better? I enquire, my teeth full of Suzy's hair. Ooooh yes, Suzy confirms. I begin to slip the vibrator in and out very slowly. Suzy moans deeply and arches her back, her thighs taut and quivering. I give her room and manipulate her inexorably toward orgasm. I like to look at her in the candlelight, the way she draws her teeth over her bottom lip, the twitch of her stomach muscles, the flutter of her eyelids, the strand of hair which sticks to the sweat on her brow. I lean back in and bite hard, as hard as I dare, around the ring which Suzy has recently had inserted into her right nipple - a direct line, she claims, to the depths of her womb. All the while quickening and deepening the thrusts of the vibrator. Then she groans, pumps her ass and begins to scream. Her nails bite hard into my back which makes me shiver with pleasure. When Suzy clamps her thighs around the vibrator I release my grip on it to let her suck it deep inside her. I bite a little harder around the nipple ring. Frantic Suzy knocks the bedside lamp to the floor. It doesn't break. She lets out a long, loud sigh and then relaxes. She expels the vibrator and it slides out onto the sheet, buzzing and twitching in a pathetic parody of life. Then I turn it off.

  We share the silence and I stroke the butterfly on Suzy's thigh, wondering, as I often do in this situation, if we are in love. If love is possible. Later, when Suzy expertly circles my clitoris with her tongue, I no longer care about love. My only concern is that sweet point of contact. Ooooh, I breathe; superrrrrlative, I groan. Later, breathlessly: Suzy, you really are a woman of extraordinary gifts.

  One day it just stopped. We just stopped it. Suzy moved out of her flat, which was rented. She'd landed a job on the other side of town. It was a step up, a supervisor at an electronics factory. I was too embarrassed to ask what she'd been doing up until now. I knew that she had told me, and I remembered that it had something to do with "logistics" but that's all. Suzy was probably right about me. We were sad for a while. I began to drink alone and I drank too much. I wasn't sure who to miss. Who to miss most.

  Next came two one-night stands - one with a man called Alan, and one with a man who was not called Alan. The one who was not called Alan fucked me standing up against the back wall of the Dancing Bear. I bit his neck. Hard. I tasted blood and thought of Suzy. The man who was not called Alan didn't complain at being bitten. He was as drunk as I was.

  You would think, Dr Moor, I told my hung-over self in the mirror the following morning, that a professionally-minded academic and tutor would behave with a little more decorum, self-restraint and plain common sense. Wouldn't you?

  I was cracking up. It was becoming obvious to me, if not yet to anyone at work (and, as it turned out, I was wrong about even that). I was thirty-one years old and I was cracking up. I was disillusioned with my career and I missed Steve very much. That was the morning's epiphany; no matter who else, I would always miss Steve very much.

  I met Darren on the 8.45 to London. He was very expensive. He wore an expensive suit, carried an expensive briefcase and smelled of expensive cologne. When he made a cheap joke, I laughed. I was in a cheap mood. Darren had a free afternoon, as did I. My lecture as guest speaker went well - the preservation and subversion of social hierarchy in eighteenth century pornography, which was a sideline to my expertise in the American Renaissance, which was losing its lustre (Whitman would be howling in his grave, was how I felt about it). Afterwards I met Darren for an expensive lunch, th
en allowed myself to be taken to an expensive hotel. We drank expensive champagne in bed and snorted some very expensive coke from my compact mirror. Darren (expensive but not entirely uncouth) tore off a cheque to snort the coke through. He looked like he had stamina, and, because I didn't want it to be over too quickly, to deal with the inevitable come-down, I drew his fangs with a blow-job, making him fire his wad over the expensive sheets. You little bitch, he groaned. Such eloquence, I said. I want to do things to you, he said. I want to fuck you in the ass. You'd better not hurt me, I told him, otherwise I might just have to hurt you back. I broke the bedside lamp over his head. Cocaine is an evil drug. When things had calmed down I substituted two sixes for a seven and an eight when I gave Darren my number. I recorded his with accuracy.

  It was midnight when I arrived back at the apartment. I lay on the sofa and cried a little. It had all amounted to a very expensive fuck. I stopped crying. I'd blown away the pleasure of my morning's accomplishment, once again screwed up my expensively-educated mind with drink and drugs, and been fucked in the ass by a stranger I'd met on the 8.45 to London. That was all. I ran a bath. As far as I could tell I was intact. Perhaps I should get a cat. I missed Eddy. I miss you, I said.

  Drifting off to sleep that night, I wondered about the kind of man who'd keep lubricant in his briefcase.

  I kept a fridge in my office so that I could have milk for tea and coffee, and one day I caught myself slipping two bottles of cheap Rose that I'd bought at the garage into the fridge door, next to the milk. Just in case. What are you doing Karen? I actually said this aloud. Of course, I simply closed the fridge door on the question. The wine was on offer - it looked warm and full of summer and was a comforting 12.5%; who wouldn't buy it? But the truth was, of course, there was a reason I'd bought it up to my office rather than leaving it in the car. That's one example of how things were going at work. Here's another.

  One morning further into term there was a message on my office answer-phone. Left by David Silverstein, head of English. Which, even in the ostensibly non-hierarchical working atmosphere and bonhomie of academia, made him my boss.

  When I entered his office David was in officious mode. Offering only a curt salutation (which itself was enough to let me know that this could be very bad), he stood, smiled perfunctorily, and motioned for me to sit. We sat with the desk between us.

  "Karen," he said, "you cannot call one of our students a 'spoiled little cunt'."

  I blinked. He really had caught me unawares. I thought I'd been summoned there regarding something more pressing. I was going to have to publish a paper sooner or later. Sooner. Of course, I would have to write something first. "Oh," I said. "That."

  David was giving me the old eye-ball. We were friends, old friends too, but his sharp and incisive gaze could still make me nervous. His office shelves might be creaking from the weight of a lifetime's reading, but his mind wasn't. And let's not forget that David was (is) head of department, a job he took very seriously indeed. And of course, I was at less than my best. I was aware, for one thing, that my eyes were bloodshot - I'd have given anything to be able to keep my shades on. Despite the fact that it was a foggy February morning with the sun only now breaking through, I'd worn my shades from the car to the lecture hall (which was mercifully darkened), from the lecture hall back to my office. Suzy had called out of the blue. Eddy had been squashed by a builder's truck. He liked to sleep under warm engines and it was a predilection that had finally done for him. Come over, I'd said. We drank and we smoked some grass and had a very long, very beautiful fuck. I was sorry about Eddy. Suzy had cried a little, but not over the cat. We were together again. I love you, she said.

  David raised his eyebrows, just to let me know that I was invited to offer an explanation.

  "This is Helen we're talking about?" I said. "Helen Stansfield?" I was pretty sure it must be Helen. I might have said other things to other students, but that particular choice of word - I was almost certain - had been reserved for her alone. Besides, Helen was more likely than anyone else to go snivelling off to tell about big bad Dr Moor.

  "Stansfield. Yes," David said, reading from a scribbled note in front of him, "Helen Stansfield. English Lit and Sociology."

  "Have you met Miss Stansfield, Professor?" I said.

  "When did you stop calling me David, Karen?" David said.

  "When you decided to summon me here for what I assume is going to be a bollocking," I said.

  "A bollocking Karen? We don't bollock people. You know that as well as I do," David said. "Cunt," he said. "Bollock," he said, as if he were about to launch into an impromptu etymological explication. Then he smiled. "Is that the state school in you coming out?"

  With some relief I caught his shift in mood. "Fuck off David," I said, taking full advantage.

  David laughed, which made me feel better. "That's the spirit," he said. He laughed again and glanced at the copy of The Times folded on his desk. He stopped laughing. There was a picture of George W on the front. "Please turn over the paper Karen," he said. "I cannot look at that man without wanting to throw myself out of the window." I complied. I had no desire for self-defenestration either.

  "Now," David said, "where were we? Oh yes. No, what we do - as you well know - is have a little chat. You leave my office looking contrite, and I send word to Miss Stansfield that you've had a good strip torn from your delectable hide. Of course, a direct apology would probably smooth this thing over."

  "You didn't answer my question," I reminded him.

  David sighed. "No. The complaint came via a union rep. You know how it works. The little bastards all turn into Tony Blair in the end. We can console ourselves with that at least. Or not. So no, I haven't met her."

  "You should," I said. "Very pretty. Sexy even, which is rare in a student." The residue of last night's binge was making me less guarded than I would have been, back in the bright shiny past when I would come to work sans hang-over. But back then, of course, I wouldn't have lost my cool with the likes of Miss Stansfield in the first place.

  "Really?" David said. "Does that include Germans?"

  "Oh David," I said. "That was cheap. That was very cheap."

  David chuckled. "Sorry," he said. "I hear you broke that poor boy's heart."

  "He'll get over it," I said, looking at my watch to remind David that I had a seminar to take in thirty-five minutes. "Back to Helen. Sexy and very pretty in that well-groomed, home-counties way. Also profoundly shallow - yes, I know it's an interesting oxymoron - and very limited. She shouldn't be on this course," I said. "Why is she on this course, David?"

  "I don't need to tell you that," he said.

  "No," I said, warming to my theme, spinning the kind of deflection New Labour would be proud of (though, of course, I was about to be decidedly off-message) "we knew this was going to happen. We drop interviews, rely on predicted grades for devalued examinations. Get them in, get them in, get them in." I think I may even have pounded at David's desk to the beat of the reiteration (I'm a poetry professional after all). "Why?" I continued, with what I felt was a perfectly modulated blend of outrage and cynicism, which is, for me, something of a speciality. "Because it's good for business. Good for expansion. Great for the brave new world of egalitarianism. Anti-elitism. We should just hand out degrees at birth so that no one feels left out or inadequate. Then you and I could go and do something useful and forget about real education. We could contribute to the great dumbing down of society by not giving a fuck. That would be so much better don't you think? So much more constructive. Wouldn't have to upset little Josh or Jemima by planting all those nasty ideas in their heads. Then we could all just pay our mortgages, tend our gardens, watch the football, contribute our taxes to illegal, immoral and outright fucking murderous foreign policy while we all just fucking shut up. Wait David, I'm not finished. But Okay, you're right, back to the business at hand. We've got kids here from all kinds of backgrounds working their damn guts out. Mature students walking around like
zombies because they're trying to do this, raise kids, earn money. Why? Because they're interested. They want to be here. And they deserve to be here, as does anyone else who's good enough and prepared to work at it, whatever their background. Which doesn't mean, by the way, that we haven't got a handful of little thugs here just to fill the state school quota -"

  "Careful Karen," David interrupted.

  "Don't you pull me on class, David," I said. "Don't you dare. And then … can I smoke in here or have you turned into one of those awful people too?" I could have managed without a smoke, but David had ruined my flow with his interruption and I wanted a second to internally recapitulate what I'd said. I really wasn't feeling so good.

  "I won't tell if you don't," he said. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out an ashtray. David used to smoke but he'd had a real scare the previous year. The ashtray was a present from a former student who'd gone on to write excellent poetry that nobody read. "Tend the Flame" was inscribed on it in Latin.

  "And then," I went on, with a smoky exhalation, "there are the Helen Stansfields of this world. Monied little hunnies with their pretty faces and perfect asses and pick of the boys. And the first time they run into something which isn't handed to them on a perfectly warmed plate, the first time they might have to actually put some fucking effort into something to get a result, they cry 'foul!'" There, I was done.