‘What, you want more?’
Joe laughed, which caused Kit to laugh. She counted it as their second joke.
Their first, which this exchange now brought back to her, had felt propitious. When Joe had helped her back in off his balcony the previous week, in through his sitting-room window, he had kept hold of her hand and had kissed her.
Out on the balcony he had said, in his humorous way, ‘I didn’t mean out here’, and she had omitted to reply, and things had grown awkward.
But upon being kissed, for want of anything much better to do—and for want, it felt like in her whole life, of being truly wanted—there it was. Like that, once again, Kit gave way.
As he’d taken her in his arms, however, she had found herself still bothered wondering what it was to kiss someone you knew so little. And no doubt because of this, as they’d tended towards his bedroom, he had said to her, ‘Perhaps this time you’d consider a little less of the old—of the, lie-back-and-think-of-England approach? How about it?’
And she had said, ‘England? But—but I find the thought of England so tremendously sexy.’
Which had made him laugh, which had made her laugh: propitiously, their first joke.
They went across the Woodstock Road at one of the pedestrian-operated light crossings, too lazy to dodge through the traffic; not either of them, though Kit thought of it, stooping to press the button with their nose.
‘You know, you have a curvy voice,’ said Joe.
‘Curvy?’
‘I can’t think how else to put it. There’s a curviness to your voice.’
Kit shook her head. ‘A girl I knew at school once said she wished she sounded like me.’
‘I can believe it.’
‘Well, thanks.’
‘Pleasure.’
‘Now I’ll feel self-conscious talking.’
‘Please don’t,’ he said. ‘I like it when you talk.’
Out in the night air, with the trees shushing in the wind, the scene they’d left behind them at The Forfeit already felt to Kit as though it had taken place hours before. ‘What branch of maths are you in?’ she asked. ‘I may not have heard of it, but please tell me anyway, the general area.’
‘Number theory.’
‘Oh, yes. That, I have heard of.’
‘Yes?’
‘I liked Pauly,’ she said.
‘Pauly? He’s a French polisher,’ said Joe. ‘It’s skilled, but tedious. I suppose it gives him the freedom to think a bit. I think he’s wanting to shift out of furniture and into guitars, but I don’t know if he has what it takes or not. He’s a good bloke. Makes the heart bleed a little sometimes.’
‘I can see that.’
‘Frankly, I think any of them might—if you knew them better. What’s more,’ Joe said, ‘don’t assume that if they knew a bit more about you, you wouldn’t have the same effect on them.’
Kit struggled. ‘You mean, I’d make their hearts bleed?’
‘It’s not impossible.’
‘Maybe I would,’ she said. After all, it wasn’t such an outlandish idea. ‘There seems to be a lot of talk about birds, one way and another,’ she said, rather changing tack, though not on purpose.
Joe glanced upwards in the semi-darkness. ‘Starlings. Medium-size passerines,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Passerines. Basic sparrow-shaped perchers; though for whatever reason, a sparrow’s size isn’t a benchmark of the term.’
‘Good for them?’ Kit ventured.
‘It’s disorderly, I think.’
‘How come Dean was at the dance class?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t see him. He told me he was there the last time; I mean the time I sort of fainted.’
‘Yes. Well, that’s—I mean, it’s because of Dean that Humpty ever heard about it. And it was Humpty who proposed it to me.’
‘He mentioned.’
‘He did?’ Joe, without slowing down, kicked a small stone sideways into the road. ‘Did he tell you it was my birthday present?’
‘What was?’
‘I happened to say that I’d like to know, just once in my life, what it was like to be led on the dance floor—just to know what that felt like. So Humpty offered it as my birthday present, which was inspired in a way, or would have been if he’d actually gone through with it. He owes me so much money, if he’d bought me something there would have been the annoying sense that I’d effectively paid for it myself. I don’t know how you avoid that, really. And although the greatest thing he could do for me would be to leave me alone, you can’t just give that to someone as a present.’
‘Happy birthday, by the way,’ said Kit.
‘Not at all.’
‘I mean—well. I mean, of course I didn’t realise any of this when it was me instead, dancing you around.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Can that be my birthday present from me then?’
Joe said, ‘Kit, you know, I—you were late, and I’d waited for you the day before as well, in case; and I was still angry, pointlessly enough, with Humpty, for failing to show up the week before. I didn’t plan to ask you instead, I just—asked you.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said again, ‘seriously.’ To her, it was okay somehow—now. ‘What do you do other evenings?’ she said.
‘I don’t know, Thursday nights I play a regular poker game.’
‘Really? You mean it? Who’d play poker with a mathematician?’
‘Other mathematicians.’
‘Of course. Silly me.’
‘Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I suppose things tend to come up, or they don’t. I try to have dinner in hall at least once a week. But otherwise, well, I tend to try and get on with my research. Often I lie on my balcony when I’m working on a maths problem, pad of paper, pencil, so long as the weather’s bearable.’
‘You have a mattress kind of thing?’
‘I do, yes. And a brain.’
‘Indeed.’
‘There’s a camping mattress rolled up behind my sofa,’ he said. They had reached Kit’s house. They wandered through the gate posts and half way across the gravel drive. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Here we are,’ she replied, and came listlessly to a halt. He had put a question to her, but she’d lost hold of it. She was remembering how much she had desired him at the start of the evening, when she’d caught sight of him leaning against the back wall at St Christopher’s, tensed, waiting alone, she wouldn’t have—
Joe gathered her up and held her, speechlessly, just long enough for her to start to wonder quite when he planned on letting her go again.
She stood there and told herself that, wonderful as the dancing had been—or perhaps because of it—on balance, anyway, she was glad there didn’t have to be any question now of, yes or no—not this time. She was glad they could part simply as friends, so she told herself. ‘I have to go and do Orson’s reading list,’ she said apologetically, only to remember that she’d done it already. She took a step back towards the house.
Joe said, ‘Meet you here in a week?’
‘Here?’ she asked, pointing at the ground. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Absolutely.’ Next week; she hadn’t got that far yet.
‘Kit,’ said Joe quietly, ‘would I be right in thinking that your romantic history is one to which the word “romantic” doesn’t really apply?’
In a mumble, she replied, ‘Pretty much.’
He pulled one of the faces she couldn’t interpret.
She wanted to say something further, but didn’t know what, and any sense of it slid rapidly away.
Still Joe hesitated.
‘I know you’ve got to go,’ she said, ‘but just tell me, what happened to your eyebrow? I’ve been meaning to ask.’
‘This?’ He touched it. ‘I was hit by a firework as a kid, at a friend’s house, one of those occasions where everyone says how lucky you were not to lose an eye, but you yourself are thinking, how unlucky to be hit in th
e face by a firework. The dad who set it off was disturbingly upset, I remember, but I healed up fine except for this slight scar,’ he rubbed it with his thumb, ‘and the end of my eyebrow not growing back.’
‘Do you still like fireworks?’ Kit asked, thinking that it wasn’t long till Guy Fawkes Night.
‘Yes, I like them.’ He took a sudden deep breath and looked at his feet. ‘Next Friday, then.’
‘Great,’ said Kit.
‘Right.’
And he left her like that, so that she felt a little sad.
Kit baulked at the idea of being back indoors again so soon. The night breezes had revived her. Only when Joe was out of earshot did she murmur, forlornly, ‘Goodbye.’
She went up the stairs to her room praying that she wouldn’t have to talk to Michaela, and was relieved when she reached her own door unaccosted.
She closed it behind her, dropped her bag down and did a somersault along the length of her bed, and as this felt good, stepped round and did another one. This time, however, coming out of it, Kit deliberately punched the plywood headboard, which, being poorly attached, gave a little so that her knuckles were grazed. She hunched up at the pain and licked her hand like a dog. Oliver Twist lay on the floor next to her bed. She bent down to retrieve it and began to read:
The housebreaker freed one arm, and grasped his pistol. The certainty of immediate detection if he fired flashed across his mind even in the midst of his fury, and he beat it twice with all the force he could summon, upon the upturned face that almost touched his own.
She staggered and fell, nearly blinded with the blood that rained down from a deep gash in her forehead, but raising herself with difficulty on her knees drew from her bosom a white handkerchief—Rose Maylie’s own—and holding it up in her folded hands as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would let her, breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker.
It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer stag gering backward—
‘You in there?’ shouted Michaela’s voice through the door. Fuck, thought Kit.
—murderer staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy club and struck her down.
Still reading, Kit quickly got herself into her desk chair, placed the book open in front of her and in meek tones sang out, ‘Yes?’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Michaela as she walked in; she threw herself onto Kit’s vacated bed, ‘he’s a bloody lecturer. He’s taking advantage. You should get out of it, girl. I’ve been thinking about it. I should’ve never encouraged you. I don’t know what I was on about. You should chuck him. You should chuck him. It’s all wrong.’
‘Please.’
‘You don’t ever stay over at his place. Why not? I don’t reckon you even like him all that much.’
‘God, a lecturer doesn’t matter. We’re not the same subject, college or anything. What do you know about how I feel?’
‘So where is he now?’
‘What do you mean? He had to go and look after his brother.’
‘You believe that?’
‘Yes, I believe it.’
‘Has to look after his brother? Seriously? Did he tell you that? What, he’s his dad or something? Come on, Kit. What’s wrong with his brother?’
‘I’m not completely sure.’
‘He’s pissing you about. Don’t be a fool about this. He’s making you do everything his way. Stand up for yourself. What do you want? You have to make things happen in your life.’
Kit thought about the dancing, how extraordinary it had felt, blissful, until she had almost ceased to be herself—and about how for her sake Joe had read half of Oliver Twist. He had been reading a book because of her. What did she want? What did anybody want?
‘If you asked nicely,’ said Kit, ‘do you think you could persuade your father to give someone a job in his bottle factory, I mean a non-skilled job?’
‘Sure, probably, but don’t change the subject.’
‘Okay,’ said Kit. ‘Okay. Not changing the subject, I really don’t think you know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’m talking about,’ replied Michaela, her eyes now shut, ‘I’m talking, he’s probably just been dumped or something, and he wants to make this girl jealous, so he thinks, I’ll get a quick one in, and make her want me back. I’ll bet you anything he’s using you, Kit. You don’t believe me, but I totally bet you there’s something else going on. He’ll keep coming back until he finds some other girl he wants to sleep with, or his girlfriend takes him back. He’s got some girl, right, he’s just using you, and—’
As Michaela started going round in circles, Kit allowed herself to look down once again at the page in front of her:
He had not moved: he had been afraid to stir. There had been a moan and motion of the hand; with terror added to hate he had struck and struck again. Once he threw a rug over it; but it was worse to fancy the eyes, and imagine them moving towards him, than to see them glaring upwards as if watching the reflection of the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling. He had plucked it off again. And there was the body—mere flesh and blood, no more—but such flesh, and such blood!
He struck a light, kindled the fire, and thrust the club into it. There was human hair upon the end which blazed and shrunk into a light cinder, and, caught by the air, whirled up the chimney. Even that frightened him, sturdy as he was, but he held the weapon till it broke, and then piled it on the coals to burn away, and smoulder into ashes. He washed himself and rubbed his clothes; there were spots that would not be removed, but he cut the pieces out, and burnt them. How those stains were dispersed about the room! The very feet of the dog were bloody.
‘—don’t you?’
Kit jolted to attention. ‘Say again?’
‘Don’t you?’ said Michaela peevishly, opening her eyes.
‘You just don’t get what it feels like,’ replied Kit, hoping this answer would do.
‘What it feels like is all in your head,’ said Michaela. ‘I’m telling you, you’re too free and easy. Just think about it for a minute, please? You’ve made mistakes before. You don’t tell me stuff, but I’m on your case and I see. I don’t care whether you like me or not—’
‘Michaela!’
‘—it doesn’t mean my advice is wrong.’
Kit couldn’t come up with any sort of reply to this. Advice? She sat there, dumb.
‘Well, I’m all done in. I’ve had a shocking day, thanks for asking. I am so looking forward to the end of term, already.’ Michaela swung herself up into a sitting position, then got back up onto her feet. ‘I’m going to hit the hay. Won’t be a minute in the bathroom.’
Kit nodded to acknowledge what she considered the one practical remark.
Not so much later, in a tepid and functional bath of her own, worrying about her worthless existence, Kit was assailed from nowhere by the thought that it was odd, wasn’t it?—was it not odd?—that Dickens had opted to kill Nancy by having her pimp, Bill Sikes, savagely bludgeon her to death in their sparse bedroom in Spitalfields, only for Eliza Grimwood, a few months later, to be no less savagely butchered for real, also a prostitute, also in her sparse bedroom, not so far away in Waterloo, very possibly also done in by her pimp, both women struck down to the floor from a kneeling position, both omitting to cry out for help, blood absolutely everywhere: were the two cases not curiously similar? It was a crazy idea, as well as a terrible one, but for a flickering instant, Kit wondered whether Eliza’s killer hadn’t been inspired by reading Dickens—hadn’t been unhinged even, by Sikes killing Nancy the revolting way he did in Oliver Twist.
Kit stood poised and freezing in the middle of her room in her pyjamas. She had started to shiver violently in the bath, had got out in a panic and had done a kind of war dance, while drying herself, to try to warm up.
Now she assumed ghost position, as it was apparently called, her arms in jointed arcs,
one foot part way through a slide, whap, whap, whap, whap. Not that Kit did dance. She just stood there, thinking nothing.
Then she went to bed.
So who was Evalina, the girl who could dance on a brick? And who was the quality-goods blonde? Kit replayed, in her mind, the incident in the pub with the bar mirror—fuck Michaela. Her mind returned to Dean Purcell’s encouraging question. What had happened to the blonde? Quality goods, mate.
Kit, on her uncomfortable mattress, lay uselessly discomposed; in bed ghost position: lonely.
CHAPTER 5
The following Thursday, Orson was ill; a hangover, Kit decided. He emailed at the last minute asking whether it would be possible to move his tutorial back twenty-four hours. As Kit had set Friday aside for the Bodleian, she arranged to meet him at 8:30 in a café on the High Street—absurdly early, to punish him for messing her around. But he took it on the chin. Perhaps it hadn’t been a hangover after all.
She set out at 8:10 in a light mist, which lingered, so that she and Orson, tucked in at the counter along the café’s front window, seemed the more enclosed in their retreat, and also warmer. He looked depressed, despite caffeine and two chocolate croissants. What about a sugar rush? Kit took a rapid decision not to push him, or even tease him, much. Why should it matter to her whether he was paying attention or not? Everyone had warned her—first teaching job—not to put too much work in. Typical beginner’s error was to attempt to do so much of a student’s work for them that they would find it more of an effort to fail than to succeed; but besides this being a waste of your own time, she’d been told kindly, if you did their thinking for them, they didn’t learn how to learn—a line Kit had come to think of as the teacher’s sink-or-swim get-out clause.
After a meagre discussion of Orson’s essay, forty minutes maximum, Kit opened her eyes wide at him, as a sort of exclamation mark, and said, ‘Okay, well, I took the liberty of bringing a new reading list for you—’ Orson plainly relieved it was all over, ‘—since we were meeting today anyway.’ He slumped down an inch or two on the counter top. ‘I’ve pointed you towards as much material as you could possibly need to get cracking on next week’s essay. We can discuss it if you like, but I thought you’d probably be happy just to plunge in. You look to be getting on well with this stuff. You can always email me any queries if you have them.’ Kit searched through her bag for the piece of paper.
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