Starter for Ten

by David Nicholls

  “Maybe. Except I'm Jewish.” She takes a swig from her own can. “Funnily enough, fancy dress has never really taken off amongst the Jewish community.”

  “You know, I sometimes wish I was Jewish,” I say. As a conversational gambit, I realize that this is pretty bold, and I'm not entirely sure why I say it; partly because I think it's important to be up front about issues of race, gender and identity, and also because by this stage I'm pretty pissed.

  She narrows her eyes, and looks at me for a moment, a spaghetti-Western look, sucking on her rollie, deciding whether to take offense or not, then says quietly, “Is that right?”

  “I'm sorry, I'm not being racist, I just mean that a lot of my heroes are Jewish, so—”

  “Well, I'm glad that my people meet with your approval. Who are these heroes, then?”

  “Oh, you know, Einstein, Freud, Marx …”

  “Karl or Groucho?”

  “Both. Arthur Miller, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Philip Roth …”

  “Jesus, of course …”

  “… Stanley Kubrick, Freud, J. D. Salinger …”

  “Of course, strictly speaking Salinger's not Jewish.”

  “Oh, he is.”

  “Trust me, he's not.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We know—we have a special sense.”

  “But it's a Jewish name.”

  “His father was Jewish, his mother was Catholic, so technically he's not. Jewishness passes through the female line.”

  “I didn't know that.”

  “Well, there you go, the beginnings of your university education,” and she goes back to glowering at the dance floor, now crammed with tarts hobbling along to the music. It's a pretty grim sight, like a newly discovered circle of hell, and the girl watches with knowing contempt, as if waiting for the bomb she's planted to go off. “Christ, will you take a look at this little lot,” she drawls wearily, as “Two Tribes” segues into “Relax.” “Frankie Says ‘Ab-so-lute-ly Noooo Fucking Idea …’” Deciding that world-weary cynicism is definitely the way to go here, I make sure that I chuckle audibly at this, and she turns to me, half-smiling. “You know the greatest achievement of the English boarding school? Generations of floppy-haired boys who know the correct way to adjust a garter belt. What's amazing is how many of you lot arrive at university with your women's clothing already packed.”

  You lot?

  “Actually, I went to a comprehensive school,” I say.

  “Well, bully for you. You know, you're the sixth person to tell me that tonight. Is it some kind of weird left-wing chat-up line, I wonder? What am I meant to be more impressed by? Our state school system? Or your heroic academic achievements?”

  If I know anything, I know when I've been beaten, so I pick up my three-quarters-full can and wave it in the air like it's empty; “I'm just going to the bar, can I get you something, um … ?”

  “Rebecca.”

  “… Rebecca?”

  “I'm fine.”

  “Right. Well. See you around. I'm Brian, by the way.”

  “Good-bye, Brian.”

  “Bye, Rebecca.”

  I'm about to go over to the bar, but notice Chris the hippie lying in wait, up to his elbow in a big bag of crisps, and so head out of the hall and decide to go for a walk.

  I wander down the wood-paneled corridor, where the last batch of new students are saying good-bye to their parents to a soundtrack of Bob Mar-ley's Legend. One girl sobs in her sobbing mother's arms whilst her impatient dad stands stiffly by, a little roll of banknotes clutched in his hand. A lanky, embarrassed black-clad Goth with a prominent dental brace is almost physically pushing his parents out of the room, so that he can get on with the serious business of letting people know the dark and complex creature that lies behind all that metal and plastic. Other new arrivals are introducing themselves to their next-door neighbors, delivering little potted biographies: subject, place of birth, exam grades, favorite band, most traumatic childhood experience. It's a sort of polite, middle-class version of that scene in war movies, where the raw young recruits arrive in the barracks and show each other photos of the girl back home.

  I stop at the Student Union notice board, sip my lager and idly scan the posters—a drum kit for sale, calls to boycott Barclays Bank, an out-of-date meeting of the Revolutionary Communist Party in support of the miners, auditions for The Pirates of Penzance—I note that Self-Inflicted and Meet Your Feet are playing at the Frog and Frigate next Tuesday.

  And that's when I see it.

  On the notice board, a bright red photocopied poster reads:

  Your Star ter Question for Ten Points!

  Know your Sophocles from your Socrates?

  Your Ursa Minor from your Lee Majors?

  Your carpe diem from your habeas corpus?

  Think you've got what it takes to take on the big boys?

  Why not come along to the University Challenge auditions?

  Qualification by brief (and fun!) written exam.

  Friday lunchtime, 1:00 p.m. prompt,

  Student Union, Meeting Room 6.

  Commitment required. No slackers or chancers.

  Only the finest minds need apply.

  Here it is then. This is the one. The Challenge.

  5

  QUESTION: Which black American entertainer, the self-proclaimed “hardest-working man in show business” and a pioneer of funk music, is commonly known as “the Godfather of Soul”?

  ANSWER: James Brown.

  The thing that used to strike me most was their hair; great, improbable waves of brittle hair like parched wheat; swooping curtains of silky fringe; Sunday teatime costume-drama muttonchop sideburns. Dad could be reduced to a white-faced rage by anything other than a short-back-and-sides on Top of the Pops, but if you made it on to University Challenge, then you'd earned the right to any damned hairdo you wanted. It was almost as if they couldn't help it, as if the crazy hair was just an outlet for all that incredible, uncontrollable excess mental energy. Like a mad scientist, you couldn't be that clever and still expect to have manageable hair, or decent eyesight, or the ability to wash and dress yourself.

  And the clothes: the arcane, olde-English tradition of scarlet gowns combined with the self-consciously wacky piano-keyboard ties, the endless home-knitted scarves, the Afghan jerkins. Of course, when you're a kid watching telly, everyone seems old, and retrospectively I suppose they must have been young, technically, in earth years, but if they really were twenty, then they were twenty going on sixty-two. Certainly there was nothing in the faces that suggested youth, or vigor, or good health. Instead they were tired, pasty, careworn, as if struggling with the weight of all that information—the half-life of tritium, the origins of the term éminence grise, the first twenty perfect numbers, the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet—had taken a terrible physical toll.

  Of course, Dad and I rarely got any of the answers right, but that wasn't really the point. This wasn't trivia—it wasn't about feeling smug and complacent about all the things you knew, it was about feeling humbled by the whole, vast universe of things about which you had absolutely no idea; the point was to watch in awe, because it really did seem to me and Dad as if these strange creatures knew everything. Ask any question: What's the weight of the sun? Why are we here? Is the universe infinite? What's the secret of true happiness?— and even if they didn't know the answer immediately, they could at least confer, muttering to each other in low, lisping voices, and come up with something that, if not quite correct, still sounded like a fairly good guess.

  And it didn't matter that the contestants were clearly social misfits, or a little grubby or spotty, or aging virgins, or in some cases just frankly strange, the point was that somewhere was a place where people actually knew all these things, and loved knowing them, and cared about that knowledge passionately, and thought it was important and worthwhile, and that one day, Dad said, if I worked really, really hard, I might actually get there too.… />
  “Fancy your chances?” she says.

  I turn around and I swear she is so beautiful that I nearly drop my can of lager.

  “Fancy your chances?”

  I don't think I've ever stood this close to anything this beautiful. There's beauty in books, of course, or in a painting maybe, or a view, like on that geography field trip to the Isle of Purbeck, but up until now I don't think I've ever experienced true beauty, not in a real live, warm, soft human being, something that you might be able to touch, in theory, anyway. She's so perfect that I actually flinch when I see her. The muscles in my chest tighten up and I have to remind myself to breathe. It sounds like outrageous hyperbole, I know, but she really does look like a young, blond Kate Bush.

  “Fancy your chances?” she says.

  “Hmhm?” I riposte, sharp as a tack.

  “Think you're up to it?” she says, nodding at the poster.

  Quick, say something witty.

  “Ffnagh,” quip I, and she smiles at me sympathetically, like a kindly young nurse smiling at the Elephant Man.

  “See you there tomorrow, then?” she says, and walks away. She's in fancy dress, but very cannily, with great wit and aplomb and taste, she's gone for the far superior French tart option—a tight black-and-white-striped top, wide, black elasticated ballet-dancer's belt, black pencil skirt, fishnet tights. Or are they stockings? Stockings or tights, stockings or tights, stockings or tights …

  I follow her back along the corridor, a decent, nonthreatening distance behind, and watch her walk her metronomic walk, like Monroe coming out of the steam in Some Like It Hot, stockings or tights, stockings or tights, and as she passes each bedroom door someone will pop their head out and say hi, and hello, and how are you and you look great; but she can only have been here eight hours, a day at most, so how come she seems to know everyone?

  Then she enters the party, walks through a crowd of gaping vicars and across to a little cluster of girls standing by the edge of the dance floor, the kind of hard, pretty, trendy girls who always sniff each other out and flock together. The DJ is playing “Tainted Love” now, and the atmosphere in the room seems to have got darker, more sexually predatory and decadent, and if it's not quite Weimar Republic Berlin, then it's at least an East Sussex sixth-form-college production of Cabaret. I stand in the shadows and observe. I'm going to have to have my wits about me, if I'm going to do this properly, and I'm also going to need more lager. I go and buy can number six. Or is it seven? Not sure. Doesn't matter.

  I hurry back, in case she's gone, but she's still there at the edge of the dance floor with her gang of four, laughing and joking as if she's known them for a lifetime rather than for a whole afternoon. I arrange my face into something like a look of wry, amused boredom and make a couple of sorties, walking close by her with a nonchalant air, in the hope that she'll catch my eye, grab me by the elbow and say, “Tell me everything about yourself, you fascinating creature.” She doesn't, so I decide to walk by her again. I do this maybe fourteen or fifteen times, but she doesn't notice me, so I decide to take a more direct approach. I go and stand behind her.

  I stand behind her for the whole of the extended twelve-inch version of “Blue Monday” by New Order. Eventually, one of her new friends, a triangular-faced, thin-lipped girl with cat's eyes and a bleached-blond crop, catches my eye and instinctively puts her hand on her handbag as if she thinks I'm there with the intention of stealing someone's purse. So I grin reassuringly, and her eyes start to flick madly round the group, and maybe she emits a high-pitched warning signal or something, because finally the group turns and looks at me, and all of a sudden the blond Kate Bush is right there, her beautiful face just inches away from mine. I've got my wits about me this time so, pithily, I say, “Hullo!”

  This intrigues her less than I'd hoped, because she just says “Hi,” then starts to turn her back on me.

  “We met? Just now? In the corridor?” I gabble.

  Her face is blank. Despite the volume of liquid I've drunk, my mouth feels thick and gluey, as if the saliva has been thickened with corn flour, but I lick my lips and say, “You asked me if I fancied my chances? On University Challenge?”

  “Oh, yes,” she says, and turns again, but her friends have scattered, sensing the electricity between us, and we are alone at last, as fate has decreed.

  “The ironic thing is I actually am a vicar!” I say.

  “Sorry?” She leans in closer, and I take the opportunity to put my hand to her ear, and let it brush against her lovely head.

  “I actually am a vicar!” I shout.

  “Are you?”

  “What?”

  “A vicar?”

  “No, I'm not a vicar.”

  “I thought you said you were a vicar?”

  “No, I'm not …”

  “What did you say, then?”

  “Well, yes, I mean, I did, yes, say, I was a vicar, yes, but I was, I was joking!”

  “Oh. Sorry, I don't underst—”

  “I'm Brian, by the way!” Don't panic …

  “Hello, Brian …” And she starts to look around for her friends. Keep going, keep going …

  “Why? Do I look like a vicar?!” I say.

  “I don't know. A little bit, I suppose …”

  “Oh! Right! Well, thanks! Thanks a lot!” I'm trying mock indignation now, arms folded high across my chest, trying to make her laugh, to get some witty, lighthearted banter going. “A vicar, eh! Well, thank you very much! In that case, you look like a … like a real … a real tart!”

  “I'm sorry?”

  She can't have heard me properly, because she's not laughing, so I raise my voice.

  “A TART! You look like a prostitute! A high-class prostitute, mind you …”

  She smiles at me, one of those very small, subtle smiles that resemble contempt, and says, “Will you excuse me, Gary, I'm desperate for the loo …”

  “Okay! See you round!” but she's already gone, leaving me with a vague feeling that things might have gone better. Perhaps she's taken offense, even though I was obviously putting on a funny voice. But how does she know it's a funny voice, if she's not accustomed to my usual voice? Maybe now she just thinks that I've got a funny voice? And who the hell is Gary? I stand and watch her head off to the toilets, except she only goes as far as the dance floor, where she stops, and whispers in another girl's ear, and they both laugh. So she doesn't need the toilet after all. The toilet was just a ruse.

  Then she starts to dance. They're playing “Love Cats” by the Cure, and in a witty and incisive interpretation of the song's lyric, she's dancing a little bit like a cat, bored and aloof and supple, with one arm occasionally flung up above her head like a, well, like a cat's tail! She is the most amazing dancer in the world! Now she's got her hands under her chin like two little paws, and she is the eponymous Love Cat, and she is so wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty, and an idea hits me, a plan so beautiful in its simplicity and yet so ingenious and infallible, that I'm amazed I haven't thought of it before.

  Dance! I will woo her through the medium of contemporary dance.

  The record changes, and it's “Sex Machine” by James Brown, which is fine by me, because I do feel like getting up and being a sex machine now you come to mention it. I carefully place the can of Red Stripe on the floor, where it is immediately kicked over, but I don't mind, and it doesn't matter. I won't be needing it where I'm going. I start to do some warm-up moves at the edge of the dance floor, a little gingerly at first, but I'm glad I wore my brogues instead of my Green Flash, as the flat soles slide gratifyingly on the parquet floor, giving me a kind of funky, loose-limbed feel. Then, warily at first, like I'm back at the ice rink, clinging to the walls, I carefully make my way on to the dance floor itself, and get up get on up over to her.

  She's dancing in her little group of five again, tight as a fist, one of those impregnable defense formations that the Roman infantry used to repel the barbarians. The cat-eyed girl s
ees me first, and emits her high-pitched warning signal, and Blond Kate Bush breaks formation, turns and sees me and looks me in the eye and I take my cue, let the music enter me, and dance like I have never danced before.

  I'm dancing as if my life depended on it, biting my lower lip seductively, both as an erotic signifier and an aid to concentration, and looking her straight in the eye, daring, just daring her to look away. Which she does. So I slide on round, back into her eye line, and I let rip. I'm dancing as if I were wearing the Red Shoes, and then I think maybe I was right, maybe it's because of those underpants, the underpants Mum gave me, the Red Underpants, but whatever it is, I'm dancing like James Brown, I've got funk and soul and a brand-new bag, I'm the hardest-working man in show business, I'm a machine made specifically for the purpose of sex, sliding and spinning through 360, 720 degrees and once actually through 810 degrees, which leaves me facing the wrong way, and momentarily disoriented, but it's okay because James Brown is saying “Take it to the bridge,” so I do, I take it to the bridge, wherever that is, and on the way to the bridge my hand goes to my neck and rips away the white cardboard dog collar in a gesture of righteous contempt for organized religion, and I hurl the cardboard dog collar onto the floor, into the middle of a group of people who've formed a circle around me now, and are clapping and laughing and pointing in awe and admiration, as I spin and duck and touch the floor, my cardigan flying free behind me. My glasses have steamed up a bit, so I can't see Kate Bush's face amongst them, just a glimpse of that chippy, dark-haired Jewish girl, Rebecca Whatsername, but it's too late to stop dancing now, because James Brown is asking me to shake my money-maker, shake my moneymaker, and I have to think for a minute because I'm not sure what my moneymaker is specifically. My head? No, my ass, of course, so I shake it as best I can, anointing the crowd around me with sweat, like a wet dog, and then all of a sudden there's a jab of horns and the song is over and I.

  Am.

  Spent.

  I look for her face among the cheering crowd, but she's definitely gone. Not to worry. The important thing is to have made an impression. Our paths will cross again, tomorrow, 1:00 p.m., at The Challenge auditions.