The Pink and the Grey

by Anthony Camber

The Acting Master flattened his piece of paper on the table. “Murray Edwards. Murray Edwards? I’m sorry, my lad, I think you have a rogue, a rogue. I shall pick again.”

  I explained that Murray Edwards College was the new name of the college he knew as New Hall. All these news had passed him by.

  “Even so. It is too far out.” He waved a hand in objection. “Virtually Huntingdon.”

  I sighed. “By implication then, Dennis, we must rule out Fitzwilliam too, as that is farther.”

  He nodded.

  “How about Churchill?” asked Helen. “Would that be too far?”

  “Too far, too far.”

  “I think perhaps we might then have to exclude the similarly distant Lucy Cavendish and St Edmund’s.” She prodded at the map. These were not much closer than Murray Edwards. Dennis nodded vigorously. I was barely convinced he had heard of Lucy Cavendish.

  This was turning into a decimation. Hundreds of students cast charitably adrift.

  “How about, say, Robinson?” I asked.

  “Robinson?” Dennis scoffed. “Acceptable distance, but the brick, my lad, the brick!”

  Down at last came my foot. “Dennis, we cannot omit a college on the grounds of architectural disfavour. Where then is the randomness?” I tipped the bowler out upon the map and scattered the colleges amongst the colleges.

  “The answer is trivial,” said Dennis. “Each of us creates a list in priority order of colleges meeting our subjective criteria, and we work through the lists together, together, until we agree.”

  “Or perhaps, to assuage Spencer’s concerns,” said Helen, “we could select randomly from the intersection of the three lists? I’m sure I could convince my spreadsheet to assist. There are functions, I’m sure.”

  “We should though weight the randomness, my dear, by acceptability.”

  “Surely, though, Dennis, each of us might assign different levels of acceptability.”

  “We could weight those too.”

  “How would those weights be decided?”

  “Perhaps by the tossing of a coin? A number of coins, as there are three of us, three of us. I forget how the mathematics expands. Should we call in Dursley? He supervises matters such as these.”

  “Would Dursley then have a vote?”

  “On what? The selection of colleges? Or the assignment of weights? Or both, or both?”

  “Perhaps the three of us could vote on that. Goodness, this is getting rather complex. I should be taking notes.”

  I had by now sunk in my seat until my eyes were level with the table, focusing upon the rough balls of paper strewn like boulders across the two-dimensional city. I resolved to continue my descent until I sobbed great tears of despair curled around Dennis’s feet and recited the committee’s lament in nineteen sections and forty-five subsections, as amended by voice vote of the Lamentation subcommittee and accepted by an appropriate quorum of the Appropriate Quorum subcommittee.

  Before that depth was reached the room became quiet, save for the ticking of a bomb in my head. It was apparently my turn to wring the process’s neck.

  I sat back upright and dared not risk a sip of water lest I set the glass flying.

  “Here is what we are going to do,” I said, my jaw clamped, my eyes iron. “I shall brook no argument. All the colleges not yet declared unsuitable will return to the bowler. Dennis will pick one at random. Should any of us find it unacceptable, Dennis will pick again. When we have two acceptable colleges, I will become soundly and severely incapacitated by gin.”

  This was, I am glad to report, a solution on which we were all agreed.

  The selection proceeded as follows. St Catharine’s: rejected as “already a saint”. Wolfson: rejected as “too far to the west”. Hughes Hall: rejected as “too far to the east”. Homerton: rejected as “practically London”. Downing: accepted, as St Ringo’s, to ironic cheers. Darwin: rejected as “inconsistent with the tenets of creationism as espoused by many of those who also believe in saints, and also too small, too small”. Peterhouse: rejected “for an unspecified feud”. Pembroke: rejected “for a specified feud”. Corpus Christi: accepted, as St George’s.

  Thus, finally, our selection was done. Our fair calloused hands had chosen Downing to be our saintly drummer and Corpus Christi to be the other one, and the band was complete. As the Corvus corone flew, if you squinted sufficiently, the route inscribed a true rhombus about two kilometres around. When we plotted the most desirable pathways on the map, it was just under half a kilometre further: and passing through prime tourist trails with plenty of befuddled visitors to shake legs-up over the collection buckets.

  I cracked a broad smile, closed the meeting, informed the police and Seb and the two successful colleges, dictated a press release leaving out all but the briefest detail, and returned to my room to spend half an hour tipping my gin down the sink.

  The three empty gin bottles stared at me accusingly. They had barely settled into my college room, huddled like nesting penguins in a cold corner, and now they flocked with the recycling.

  “It’s only temporary,” I reassured them, brushing lightly with a finger. “Consider it a vacation. A rest is as good as a change, and fine words don’t butter the parson’s nose, or thereabouts.”

  I allowed that to sink in for a moment. Quite where it was sinking, I was unsure.

  It had been entirely on the spur that I had declined the seductive advances of the bottle. I had long been a loyal friend to both Dorothy and Gordon, each bringing orthogonal and occasionally simultaneous pleasures, and yet one — for the avoidance of doubt, the gin — emptied the wallet and furred the mind, and sometimes blew the fuse. This week, this week of all weeks, I needed wallet, mind and fuse intact. It was not to be a permanent shift to teetotality, of that I was convinced — except why then did I not simply place a towel over the bottles and send them budgerigarring to sleep?

  A bus outside wheezed and beeped as it presented its rear to the terminus. It coughed and spat out a furball of children: by the mix of voices, tumbling over the cliff of pubescence. I hoped they knew how to swim. In all my years I had yet mastered only a few strokes.

  I was roused from my morbid reverie by an unconfident knock at my door. I’d had no supervisions planned for that time and was expecting no crisis-ridden weeper for at least a further two weeks according to the timetable. I called for the gentleman to enter — I knew the gender from the softness of the knock.

  It was Werner, one of our German undergraduates and unofficial deputy to Jonathan of Cream of the Crop Top. He said that Jonathan had been called away from a rehearsal by a messenger of the Archivist, and wondered if I knew why. I did not — this was one loop I was evidently excluded from. When Werner told me the messenger had mentioned the name Burnett, I assured him I would investigate without delay.

  We hurried under flat ivory skies across New and Bottom. I affected calm and confidence, primarily for Werner’s reassurance but secondarily to give the Archivist fair warning that I was attending and unlikely to bring with me panic, or brimstone and fire and all manner of crazy paving. I left Werner fretting at the ground floor entrance with a smiling promise of future tea and macaroons, then entered and descended.

  An elf waiting at the boundary of the outer sanctum showed me quickly through to the Hub, which buzzed above the warm hum of the disks. Since I had last visited yet another monitoring station had grown from the electricity and network ports peppering the floor. This was a tree trunk of half a dozen screens, with eight elf-leaf eyes seated around and the Archivist worshipping before it.

  “May I ask—” I began as I stepped into the room.

  An irritated wave from the Archivist silenced me, then summoned me.

  I orientated myself with the locations surveilled by the screens. Three showed high fish-eye overviews of the three courts, distended diamonds with no pathways unobserved. One screen was dark, showing only unidentifiable, grey-black static blobs. One focused on St Andrew’s Street by the front
gate, and particularly on the spheroidal shape draped in an ill-fitting jacket I knew to be Geoff Burnett. The view on the final screen shook and bounced, another fish-eye lens, evidently embedded in clothing. I had little trouble gauging who the clothes were currently wrapped around.

  The sound from this camera had been patched to the speakers. I could hear the ballsy percussion of heel on paving stone I knew to be Jonathan, in character as Cody. She muttered under her breath that she was turning onto St Andrew’s Street — from Christ’s Lane, which runs beside the college — and we saw, as the camera’s aperture adjusted to the change in brightness, the steadily growing beachball of the editor occupying the pavement.

  “He has been here for an hour,” said the Archivist to me in a low voice. “He has not tried to enter college, nor even to look through the gate. But every person who passes through, in or out, student or otherwise, he attempts to engage.”

  “What does he say to them?” I asked.

  The Archivist looked severely at me. “He says: ‘Tell me about the Archivist’.”

  “Has anyone—”

  “Of course not!” he snapped in a hoarse whisper that grew louder. “Most people — most people — know better than to drop my name into casual conversation. Oh, you should come and meet the Archivist, Editor, he’ll give you an exclusive.” His mocking sarcasm rang through the room, and the elves gripped their workstations more tightly.

  I clenched and attempted: “What is Cody—”

  “Enough questions, Dr Flowers. Watch.”

  Cody was approaching Burnett, heel frequency decreasing. From her embedded camera, Planet Burnett — a gas giant, I surmised — grew until his bulk filled the screen. He faced away from Starship Cody: we saw folds and rivulets in the jacket, like a satellite photo of a low-circulation desert.

  The gate camera looking down on the scene showed Cody in her mighty, blonde, taxi-rattling pomp.

  She coughed. “Roll on by, honey,” she said, her voice as smooth and soft as her legs and her accent direct from Alabama’s little-regarded county of Essex.

  Geoff spun slowly around, orbital period uncertain. “You what love?”

  “I said, roll on by. These heels don’t walk in nobody’s gutter. That’s strike one.” A finger in the air, then she flicked her long hair behind her shoulder.

  He looked down, of course, to her heels, then slowly up her endless legs, and skipping to a point — well, two points — in the vicinity of her plunging lime green neckline.

  “Rihanna and Loretta,” she said.

  “Sorry darlin’?”

  “Rihanna’s on the right, Loretta’s on the left. Cody’s the one up here doing the talking, if you’re lost on the journey. And you’re still blocking my way, honey.” On the other screen we saw her pose, hands on hips, weight on one leg, eyes of ice and thunder. Then she made a V with her fingers. “That’s strike two. Three strikes and you feel my hand, you hear?” The fingers came together in slapping configuration.

  “Where are you trying to get to, love?” he asked, briefly making eye contact.

  “College. Supervision. I’m studying—” She looked him up and down. “—Geography. And something tells me you’re pointing north.”

  The monitoring elves laughed, despite the tension in the room. The Archivist hushed them.

  “St Paul’s?” said Geoff. “You an undergrad?”

  “Under graduate, under undergraduate, under lots of things, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Tell me about the Archivist.”

  I held my breath.

  Cody looked down and then quickly away to the left, to the white stone wall of the college. Her pose shrank a fraction: her arms loosened, her shoulders drooped almost imperceptibly. “The who now?”

  “Have you spoken to him? Who is he?”

  She hesitated, seemingly unsure what if anything to reveal, and shook her head in tiny-sassy movements.

  The editor continued. “Let me take you for a coffee and we can talk about him.”

  The Archivist jumped in alarm. He gestured to a group of watching elves and told them to make ready to scramble.

  “I shouldn’t talk to strange men, you know honey,” said Cody, fluttering innocent eyelashes and lowering her voice.

  “I’m not strange,” said Geoff slowly. “I work for a newspaper. And I can write you a cheque, love, here and now, if you tell us about this Archivist fella.”

  Cody was silent again, weighing up the offer.

  “How… big is it?” she asked finally.

  We saw Geoff’s round eyes widen as she swam closer to the bait. “Let’s discuss that over coffee. I know a—”

  “No,” Cody interrupted. “I don’t like to drink in cafés. Loretta and Rihanna, they get too much of the attention, know what I’m saying?”

  “A bar then?”

  “What’s your name, roly-poly newspaper man?”

  “Burnett. Geoff Burnett. I’m the editor of the Bugle.”

  He rose to his full height and attempted to suck in his chest by twenty years or so.

  “Cafés, bars, all the same, Geoff Burnett. I have coffee in my room, and I’m always on the boil. Would the boogie-woogie Bugle boy like to come on over for a little… revision?”

  She flashed him a flirting smile: head minutely down, the barest tip of her tongue.

  “I can’t—” His voice cracked and he coughed. “I can’t go into college, love. They wouldn’t let me through the gate.”

  She turned on her heels and looked back teasingly towards him.

  “Follow me,” she said. “You’ll have to squeeze yourself in the back way, honey.”

  We watched him waddle after her, a sheen of damp already upon his forehead. The rear entrance to St Paul’s was dedicated to deliveries and maintenance, and not for daily use by the student population. Vehicles approached cautiously through the jungle of the bus terminal and waved the appropriate device or signal to cause the wide gate to unlock and swing open and beckon them through. The gate led to a small unloading bay cut into the north-easternmost corner of New Court, where it merged with Top as seamlessly as Arthur’s poor hairpiece.

  The glamorous Cody and her heels, pursued by Geoff, took the Christ’s Lane path around to the back gate. The Archivist and his elves switched cameras to view their progress. Cody always kept two or three lengthy paces ahead of the editor, glancing back to chivvy him along like a recalcitrant child.

  I learned that the back gate had been configured to accept what must have been a recently manufactured college ID card in the name of Cody. The rough oak gates were the nineteenth century originals, still flecked with dull remnants of the grey and pink college colours that once adorned them splendidly. A smaller human-sized doorway was embedded within them: we saw Cody press her ID card against the reader fixed there. A light flashed, and the door clicked unlocked.

  She pushed through, and Geoff forced himself through the narrow doorway after her. We saw a brief infrared shot cutting through the darkness of the loading bay: curious and unfamiliar greys, with shining cat-eyes. Then we followed them on the New Court overview screen along the rectangular path surrounding the lawn and across to — not Jonathan’s room, I was sure.

  The Archivist had anticipated my question. “We have configured an unused room on Q Staircase. Arthur is quite the dab hand at boy band posters, you know. Very a la mode.”

  A question formed but melted away as I watched the screens. The cameras jerked in all directions keeping them in vision into Q, up one flight of stairs, along a listing corridor — all corridors along that side of New were distinctly off the level — to room five. All the while, Geoff remained a pace or two behind Cody, a fat shadow on her tail.

  Cody’s ID card unlocked the door. The screen on the monitoring station that had heretofore remained dark glowed a brilliant white as she flicked on the lights, then faded to resolve the duller colours of the room.

  A new microphone was mixed up. The voices sounded thinner, more metallic
.

  “Make yourself at home, Bugle boy,” said Cody, still with the sultry faux-American tones. “Excuse my laundry, won’t you. I believe you’ll find the little wooden chair is made for a more delicate frame than yours, and the springs on the armchair tend to… dig in to unsightly places. The bed, however, is just right.”

  She tousled a strand of blonde and teased the end into her mouth. “Goldilocks right.”

  Geoff rested his weight on the side of the single bed, which rather groaned in panic. From our camera, tucked discreetly into the corner above a drab college wardrobe, we saw him scan the room with his dodgy journalist eyes: desk, chair, wardrobe, kettle, mess. Standard-issue untidiness. Multi-coloured posters of the year’s manufactured closet-case musical grouping stuck to the wall alongside a well-tended and mildly pornographic calendar, all dutifully breaking college rules of some kind or another. Low scattered piles of books, spines intact. A teddy bear, missing an eye, on a single pink pillow.

  “Nice place you got here, love,” said Geoff.

  Cody fussed around with the coffee.

  Part of my brain prodded an awareness into me. “Archivist,” I said quietly, “If Burnett had been doorstepping college for just an hour, how has all this—”

  “It is my job to prepare. I do my job very well. Cody’s photo was in the forged intranet seen by the newspaper. Her ID card was prepared. The room was prepared. We anticipated these tactics.”

  This silenced me for a second. “What else have you—”

  “Pay attention.”

  Cody’s coffee was instant. She joined Geoff on the bed, sitting along the end, across a corner from him — within groping distance but with sufficient time to dodge should he pounce.

  “How’s your coffee, Mr Burnett?” she asked.

  “Piss-awful, love, but I ain’t complaining. I haven’t been in a student room like this for bleedin’ years.”

  “Is it just how you remember, honey? Knickers and boy bands?” She giggled.

  “Fuck off. I didn’t have no bleedin’ teddy, neither.”

  “If he bothers you, Bugle boy, I’ll have him face the wall. He only has—” A glance at Geoff. “—one good eye.”