Starter for Ten

by David Nicholls

  The ironic, tongue-in-cheek slowies are beginning now, “Careless Whisper,” but everyone's either too cool or too drunk to dance, so I decide it's time for bed. On the way out along the corridor, I go into the toilets and wipe the syrupy sweat off my spectacles with the corner of my cardy so that I can get a better look at myself in the mirror above the urinals. My shirt is stuck to my skin with sweat and undone to my belly button, and my hair is matted to my forehead, and all the blood has rushed to my head, specifically to my acne, but I still think that on the whole I look pretty good. The room's spinning now, so I rest my forehead on the mirror in front of me to make it stay still while I pee, and from one of the cubicles comes the smell of marijuana smoke, and two low voices, giggling. Then there's the sound of the toilet flushing, and two tarts come out, one female and wet-faced, adjusting her hockey shirt, the other a broad-shouldered rugby-player tart. Both have lipstick smeared over their faces. They look at me challengingly, daring me to say something disapproving, but I'm full of elation, and passion and love for the sheer, joyous recklessness of youth, so I smile woozily back at them.

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

  “Oh, do fuck off,” he says.

  6

  QUESTION: Book Nine of Wordsworth's The Prelude contains the exhortation: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive …”?

  ANSWER: “But to be young was very heaven.”

  As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.

  It's not even dawn, it's 10:26. I thought I'd wake up on my first day here full of health and wisdom and academic vigor, but instead I just get the usual: shame, self-loathing and nausea, and a vague feeling that waking up needn't always be like this.

  I'm also pretty indignant because someone has clearly come into my room while I was sleeping, lined my mouth with felt and then stamped on my head. I'm finding movement difficult, so I lie for a moment and count how many consecutive nights I've gone to bed drunk, and come up with the approximate figure of 103. And it would have been more if it weren't for that last bout of tonsillitis. I contemplate the idea that maybe I'm an alcoholic. I get this occasionally, the need to define myself as a something-or-other, and at various times in my life have wondered if I'm a Goth, a homosexual, a Jew, a Catholic or a manic depressive, whether I am adopted, or have a hole in my heart, or possess the ability to move objects with the power of my mind, and have always, mostly regretfully, come to the conclusion that I'm none of the above. The fact is I'm actually not anything. I'm not even an “orphan,” not in the strict sense, but “alcoholic” seems the most plausible yet. What other name is there for someone who goes to bed drunk every night? Still, maybe alcoholism wouldn't be the worst thing in the world; at least half the people in the postcards on the wall by my head are alcoholics. The trick is, I suppose, to be an alcoholic without letting it affect your behavior or your academic work.

  Or maybe I've just read too many novels. In novels, alcoholics are always attractive and funny and charming and complex, like Sebastian Flyte or Abe North in Tender Is the Night, and they're drinking because of a deep, unquenchable sadness of the soul, or the terrible legacy of the First World War, whereas I just get drunk because I'm thirsty, and I like the taste of lager, and because I'm too much of a prat to know when to stop. After all, it's not as if I can blame it on the Falklands.

  And I certainly smell like an alcoholic. After less than twenty-four hours, the new room has started to smell. It's Mum's “boy” smell—warm and salty, a bit like the back of a wristwatch. Where does it come from? Do I just carry it around with me? Sitting up in bed, I find my shirt from last night on the floor nearby, still soaked with sweat. Even my cardigan's damp. A little momentary flash of suppressed memory comes back to me—something about … dancing? I lie back down, and pull the duvet up over my head.

  In the end, it's the futon that forces me up. In the night it seems to have compacted, and I can feel the hard, cold floor against my spine, so that now it's like lying on a large moist towel, one that's been left in a plastic bag for a week. I sit on the edge of it, knees up under my chin, and search through my pockets for my wallet. It's there, but worryingly only contains a fiver plus 18p in change. That's got to last me till next Monday, three days' time. How much lager did I actually drink last night? And, oh, God, there it is again, the suppressed memory, bubbling to the surface like a fart in a bath. Dancing. I remember dancing, in the center of a group of people. But that can't be right, because usually I dance like Saint Vitus, and these people were smiling and clapping and cheering.

  And then it comes to me, with a terrible clarity, the realization that the applause was ironic.

  The Student Union building is an ostentatiously ugly, rain-streaked concrete hulk, marooned in the middle of terraces of neat Georgian houses like a bad tooth. This morning they're pouring in and out the swing doors, singly and in tight little groups with their day-old best friends, because it's the last day of Freshers Week, and there are no lectures till Monday. Instead today is our opportunity to join Socs.

  I join FrenchSoc, FilmSoc, LitSoc, PoetrySoc and the writing staff of all three student magazines: the literary-minded Scribbler, the irreverent, salacious Tattle, and the earnest, campaigning, left-wing By Lines. I sign up for DarkroomSoc (“Join us and see what develops!”), even though I don't have a camera, and then contemplate joining the FeministSoc, but whilst queuing at their trestle table I get glared at confrontationally by a Gertrude Stein look-alike and start to wonder if maybe joining FeministSoc might be trying just a bit too hard. I made this mistake once before, on a school trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum, when I followed a sign marked women, thinking it was an exhibition on the changing role of women in society, and actually ended up standing in the ladies' toilets. In the end I decide to give FeministSoc a miss, because while I firmly support the women's liberation movement, I'm not entirely confident that I'm not just joining as a way to meet girls.

  I hurry past the fresh-faced, pastel-colored sweaters of BadmintonSoc, just in case someone calls my bluff, then wave to Josh, who's surrounded by pals in the queue for BeefyToffSoc, or whatever it is, something to do with skiing and drinking and harassing women and extreme right-wing views.

  I also decide not to join TheaterSoc. Like FeministSoc, it's a pretty good way of spending time with girls, but the downside is that it's usually just a ruse to trick you into putting on a play. This term TheaterSoc will be producing Charley's Aunt, Sophocles's Antigone and Equus, and I just know I'd get cast either as a member of the Greek chorus, all shouting simultaneously through papier-mâché masks in ruined bedsheets, or one of those poor saps in Equus who spends the whole evening in a leotard wearing a horse's head made out of coat hangers. Well, TheaterSoc, thanks, but no thanks. Besides, I'll have you know that in my last year at school I played Jesus in Godspell, and once you've been whipped and crucified in front of the whole school, there isn't really anywhere to go performance-wise. Tone and Spencer laughed all the way through, of course, and shouted “More! More!” during the forty lashes, but everyone else said it was a very affecting performance.

  When I think I've had enough Socs, I wander the room looking for the mystery girl from last night, though God knows what I'll do if I see her. Certainly not dance. I do two circuits of the sports hall, but there's no sign of her, so I head upstairs to the room where The Challenge heats are taking place, just to make sure I've got the right room and the right time. Sure enough, the poster's on the door: YOUR STARTER QUESTION FOR TEN POINTS. ONLY THE FINEST MINDS NEED APPLY. “Fancy your chances?” she'd said last night. “Maybe see you there?” she'd said. Was she serious? And, if so, where is she? I am an hour early, though, so I decide to go back to the sports hall, to have another look round.

  Walking back downstairs, I pass the dark-haired Jewish girl from last night on the stairwell; Jessica, was it? She's standing with a bunch of skinny, pale men in black denim jackets and tight black jeans, handing out leaflets for the Soc
ialist Workers Party and all looking fuckingangryactually, so in a spirit of solidarity, I approach and say, “Greetings, comrade!”

  “Morning, twinkle-toes,” she drawls, glancing at my clenched fist, unamused, and quite right too, because it's not funny. She goes back to handing out the leaflets. “I think DanceSoc's through there somewhere.”

  “Oh, God, was it really awful?”

  “Let's just say I was all for putting a pencil between your teeth, stop you biting your tongue off.”

  I laugh self-deprecatingly, and shake my head, in an I'm-mad-me kind of way, but she doesn't smile so I say, “You know, life's taught me two things: Number one is don't dance when you're drunk!!!” … Silence … “Actually, I wondered if I could take a leaflet?”

  She looks at me quizzically, intrigued by my hidden depths.

  “You're sure I wouldn't just be wasting paper?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “So are you already a member of any political parties?”

  “Oh, you know. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament!”

  “That's not a political party.”

  “So you don't think defense policy is a political issue?” I say, enjoying how it sounds.

  “Politics is economics, pure and simple. Single-issue groups, pressure groups like CND or Greenpeace, have an important and valid role to play, but saying that whales are big and nice, or a nuclear holocaust is nasty, is not a political stance, it's a truism. Besides, in a true socialist state the military would be disenfranchised automatically—”

  “Like it is in Russia?” I say.

  Aha!

  “Russia isn't truly socialist.”

  Oh …

  “Or Cuba?” I say.

  Touché!

  “Yes, if you like. Like in Cuba.”

  Um …

  “Oh, so I suppose Cuba doesn't have an army, then?” I say.

  Nice recovery.

  “Not really, none to speak of, not in terms of gross national product. Six percent of tax is spent on defense in Cuba, compared to forty percent in the USA.” She must be making this stuff up. Not even Castro knows this stuff. “If it wasn't under constant threat from the USA, it wouldn't even need to spend the six percent. Or do you lie awake at night and worry about being invaded by Cuba?”

  It seems a bit too school-playground to accuse her of making stuff up, so I just say, “So do I get a leaflet or what?” and grudgingly she hands me one.

  “If it's too outspoken for you, the Labour Party's over there. Or you could just go the whole hog and join the Tories.”

  She says it like a slap, and it takes me a moment to take it in, and then while I'm thinking of what to say, she turns her back on me, just turns around and carries on handing out leaflets. I want to put my hand on her shoulder, spin her round and say, “Don't turn your back on me, you prissy, bigoted, self-righteous little cow, because my dad's job actually killed him, more or less, so don't lecture me about Cuba, because I've got a better sense of fucking social injustice in my little finger than you and your whole gang of bourgeois, art-school boyfriends have got in your whole complacent, smug, self-satisfied bodies.” And I almost say it, I really do, but in the end what I choose to say is, “Of course you do realize that if you shortened your name, you could just become SocSoc!”

  She turns to me, quite slowly, narrows her eyes and says, “Look. If you're really committed and passionate about opposing what Thatcher's doing to the country, then you should come along. If on the other hand you're just interested in making a whole load of sixth-form jokes and banal comments, then I think we can probably manage without you, thanks very much.”

  She's right, of course. Why do I always sound facetious and unconvincing when I talk about politics? I don't feel ironic about it. I think about trying to convey this to her, just by having a proper intelligent adult conversation, but a skirmish has broken out between one of the skinny boys in black denim and someone from the Revolutionary Communist Party, so I think better of it, and move on.

  7

  QUESTION: Devised by the German psychologist William Stern, what controversial measurement was originally defined as the ratio of a person's mental age to his physical age, multiplied by one hundred?

  >ANSWER: IQ.

  I walk back upstairs to Meeting Room 6, where a tall, fair man is setting out tables and chairs in exam formation, thirty or so, with an air of bureaucratic officiousness. He's clearly a lot older than me, twenty-one or twenty-two or something, tall and fit in an official burgundy university sweatshirt, tanned and blandly handsome with very neat, short reddish-blond hair, the kind of hair that looks as if it's been molded from a single piece of plastic. I watch him for a while through the glass door. He looks like an astronaut, if Britain had astronauts, or a nonthreatening Action Man. What's troubling about him is that I seem to remember him from somewhere.…

  He catches sight of me, so politely I stick my head around the door and say, “Excuse me, is this the room for the University Chal—?”

  “Fingers on the buzzers, your first starter question—can you read the sign?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Meeting Room Six, one o'clock.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Twelve forty-five.”

  “So I presume that answers your question?”

  “I suppose so.”

  So I sit down outside the door and limber up by running through some lists in my head; the kings and queens of England, the periodic table, the American presidents, the laws of thermodynamics, the planets of the solar system, just in case; basic exam technique. I check that I've got a pencil and pen, a tissue, a box of Tic Tacs, and wait for the other contestants to turn up. After ten minutes I'm still the only one here, so I sit and peer at the guy sitting at his teacher's desk, as he solemnly sorts out and staples question papers. I assume he must be something pretty high up in the University Challenge selection committee, and is giddy on the sheer intoxicating power of it all, but I must keep on his good side, so at 12:58 precisely, and no earlier, I get up and enter the room.

  “Okay now?”

  “Fine. You can come in. How many others out there with you?” he says, without looking up. “Um—none?” “Really?” He looks past me, because I clearly can't be trusted. “Oh bugger!

  It's nineteen eighty-three all over again.” He tuts and sighs, and perches on the edge of the desk, and picks up a clipboard, then looks me up and down appraisingly, and glances at my face, before settling on a point twelve inches to the side of my face, which he seems to prefer. He sighs mournfully again. “Oh, well, I'm Patrick. What's your name?”

  “Brian Jackson.”

  “Year?”

  “First year! Just arrived yesterday!”

  Tut and sigh. “Specialist subject?”

  “You mean what am I reading?”

  “If you like.”

  “English literature.”

  “Christ, another one! Well, at least you're not completely wasting three years of your life.”

  “I'm sorry, I—”

  “Whatever happened to all the mathematicians, that's what I want to know. All the biochemists? All the mechanical engineers? No wonder the economy's going to the dogs; everyone knows what a metaphor is, no one can build a power station.”

  I laugh, then check to see if he's joking, but he isn't. “I have science A-levels!” I say defensively.

  “Really? What in?”

  “Physics and chemistry.”

  “Well, there you go, then! A Renaissance Man! What's Newton's third law of motion?”

  Oh, my friend, you're going to have to try a lot harder than that.…

  “Reaction is equal and opposite to action,” I say.

  Patrick's reaction is pretty equal and opposite too: a brief, begrudging raising of the eyebrows, before he goes back to his notepad.

  “School?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I said ‘school’? Big building
, made of bricks, teachers in it …”

  “I understood the question, I just wondered why you wanted to know?”

  “All right, then, Trotsky, you've made your point. You've got a pen? Good. Here's your paper, and I'll be with you in a minute.” I take a seat near the back of the room as two more people arrive behind me. “Ah, the cavalry!” says Patrick.

  The first potential teammate, a Chinese girl, causes a bit of a stir, because she seems to have a panda bear clinging to her back. Closer scrutiny reveals this not to be a real-life panda, but an ingeniously designed rucksack! It shows a quirky sense of humor, I suppose, but doesn't bode well for her chances on a serious, advanced general-knowledge quiz. Anyway, from her conversation with Patrick, I hear that she's called Lucy Chang, that she's a second year, reading medicine, and so may possibly have an edge on me with some of those science questions. Her English seems pretty fluent, though she speaks incredibly quietly, with a slight American accent. What do the rules say about foreign nationals?

  The next contestant is a big, loud-voiced northerner, dressed in olive-green army surplus, big, heavy boots and with a little blue RAF knapsack at his hip with, somewhat inconsistently, a CND sign Magic Markered onto it. Patrick interviews him with a kind of begrudging civility, NCO to corporal, and it transpires that he's a third-year politics student from Rochdale called Colin Pagett. He glances round the room, nods, and then we wait in silence and fiddle with our pens, all sitting as far away from each other as the laws of geometry will allow, waiting ten, fifteen minutes, until it's absolutely clear that no one else is going to turn up. Where is she? She said she'd be here. What if something's happened to her?

  Finally Patrick the Astronaut sighs, stands up behind his desk and says, “Right, well let's begin, shall we? My name's Patrick Watts from Ashton-Under-Lyme, reading economics, and I'm the captain of this year's University Challenge team”—hang on, who says?—“Regular viewers of the show may recognize me from last year's tournament.”