Starter for Ten

by David Nicholls

  So maybe it's better to think of conversation as being a bit like crossing the road: before I open my mouth I should take a few moments to look both ways, and carefully consider what I'm about to say. And if this means that my conversation gets a little slow and stilted, like a transatlantic phone call, if it means I spend just a little extra time standing on the metaphorical conversational curb, looking left and right, then so be it, because it's clear that I just can't keep stumbling blindly out into traffic. I can't keep getting run over like this.

  Thankfully there's no need for conversation right now because while we wait for Alice to arrive, Patrick pops on one of his precious video cassettes—last year's grand final, and we sit and watch the Dundee team win again, while Patrick mumbles the answers and Colin eats his bucket of chicken, and for fifteen minutes, those are the only sounds: Colin sucking on a chicken thigh, Patrick muttering insanely from the arm of the sofa.

  “… Kafka … nitrogen … nineteen fifty-six … the duodenum … trick question, none of them … C. P. E. Bach …”

  And every now and again, I'll chip in with an answer, or Colin will, through a mouthful of brown meat—Ravel, Dante's Inferno, Rosa Luxemburg, veni, vidi, vici—but clearly Patrick's marking his territory, showing who's boss, because his voice gradually gets louder …

  “… THE MOODY BLUES … GOYA … TYPHOID MARY … THEY'RE ALL PRIME NUMBERS …”

  … And whilst I love the show as much as anyone, I can't help thinking that this is maybe taking things a little too far …

  “… RHINE, RHONE, DANUBE … MITOCHONDRIA … FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM …”

  … Has he learned them by rote? Are we meant to think he's never seen it before, or are we meant to think that he just knows all this stuff anyway? And what does Lucy Chang make of all this? I glance to my side, and she's staring at the floor with her eyes closed, and I think maybe she's upset, or embarrassed, understandably, but then I notice a slight shudder across her shoulders and I realize that she's trying not to laugh.…

  “… ‘ODE ON A GRECIAN URN’ … BO DIDDLEY … THE ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S DAY MASSACRE … THE BERLIN AIRLIFT …”

  … And just as it seems she might burst, the doorbell goes downstairs, and Patrick heads off, leaving the three of us staring straight ahead at the telly. In the end, it's Colin who speaks first, in a low, conspiratorial voice. “Is it just me, or is this fella completely round the fuckin' twist?”

  With Alice's appearance the atmosphere lightens considerably. She arrives breathless and bundled up in scarf and coat and suede mittens, and looks round the room, smiling and greeting everyone. “Hi, Bri!” she says warmly, and gives me a provocative little wink. Patrick buzzes around her, the sap, running his hands over his beige plastic hair, offering up his seat, and pouring her a glass of the Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon that I brought along at great personal expense as if it were his own. When Alice asks, “D'you mind if I smoke?” he says “Of course!” as if it's suddenly a terrific idea, why hadn't he thought of it himself, then he looks round for something to use as an ashtray, and finds a little desk tidy containing paper clips, which he empties onto the desk with wild, punky abandon.

  Alice squeezes in next to me on the sofa, her hip pressed up tight against mine, Patrick clears his throat, and addresses the team. “So, here we are then! ‘The Fantastic Four’! And I really think that

  we've got something special this year …” Hang on a second—Fantastic Four? “Just to explain how things work, then …” I count the people in the room: one, two, three … “… The first stage is that we need to qualify for the actual televised

  competition …” Why not say “Fantastic Five”? It wouldn't have hurt him to say “Fantastic Five.”

  “This is in two weeks' time, and it's informal, but pretty tough, so we're going to need our wits about us if we're to actually make it on air. So up until then, I suggest the four of us meet up here this time every week, and just run through some questions that I'll prepare in advance, and maybe watch a tape or two, just to keep our hands in.…”

  Hang on a second—why can't I come? I have to come—if I don't come, then I don't get to see Alice. I put my hand up to ask a question, but Patrick's putting a tape in the video, and can't see me, so I clear my throat and say, “Um, Patrick … ?”

  “Brian?”

  “So I don't need to come, then?”

  “I don't think so, no …”

  “At all … ?”

  “No …”

  “You don't think it's a good idea then … ?”

  “Well, we'll only need you in an emergency. I just think it's best if the four of us get used to each other as a team, seeing as, you know, we are the team.”

  “So you don't need me?”

  “No.”

  “Not even to come along and, you know, observe … ?”

  “Not really, Brian, no …” And he presses play on the video. “Right, this is Leeds versus Birkbeck in the quarterfinals from two years ago. A really good match …” And he sits back on the sofa, with Alice squeezed in between us, her hip pressed up tight next to mine, while I try to come up with a plan to murder Patrick Watts.

  10

  QUESTION: What is the meaning of the Latin motto that accompanies the roaring lion at the beginning of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films?

  ANSWER: Ars Gratia Artis—Art for Art's Sake.

  “Well, personally speaking, I have to say that I just absolutely hate it. I mean, the idea that this is some great lyrical love poem is rubbish. It's just this horny guy's poem, just this sexually frustrated, little twerp trying to get into his mistress's knickers by banging on about ‘Time's Winged Chariot’ and not taking no for an answer. There's nothing lyrical or romantic, and certainly nothing erotic about this poem at all, not if you're a woman, anyway,” drawls Alice's friend, Erin, the cat-eyed woman with the bleached-blond crop. “In fact, if a guy sent this poem to me or read it to me or something, I'd call the police. No wonder his mistress is coy. The poet's a complete misogynist.”

  “You think Andrew Marvell's a misogynist?” says Professor Morrison, slouching back in his armchair, the long fingers of his hands linked across his belly.

  “Basically, yes. Certainly in this poem, anyway.”

  “So the voice of the poet and the voice in the poem are one and the same?”

  “Why shouldn't they be? There's nothing to suggest any kind of distancing device.…”

  “What d'you think, Brian?”

  To be honest, I'm actually thinking about Alice, so I pause for a second and play for time by rubbing my ears, as if my critical faculties were somehow located in the lobes and I just need to warm them up. It's only my third tutorial, and I got caught out last time by pretending to have read Mansfield Park when in fact I'd only seen half of the first episode on telly, so this had better be good. From my arsenal, I select the phrase “historical context.”

  “I think it's more complicated than that, especially if you place the poem in its historical context …” And Erin smacks her lips and sighs, as she tends to whenever I open my mouth in tutorials. Erin clearly hates my guts, though I don't know why, because I'm always smiling at her. Unless of course that is the reason. Anyway. Concentrate. “For a start there's clearly a strong element of humor here. The use of rhetoric is self-conscious, and in that sense it's a bit like Shakespeare's sonnet one hundred thirty, ‘My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun’ … (nice one) … except here the poet's rhetoric renders him foolish—the desperation, the extremities to which he goes to persuade his lover to succumb make him an essentially comic figure. It's the comedy of sexual frustration and romantic humiliation. It's actually the eponymous ‘coy mistress,’ the object of his unrequited passion, who has all the power here.…”

  “Well that's a load of reactionary, chauvinistic crap,” snaps Erin, who's been wriggling in her chair throughout, making the vinyl squeak with indignation. “The coy mistress has no power, and no personality either, she's just a cipher, a blank, defined s
olely by her beauty and her unwillingness to have it off with the poet. And the tone clearly isn't comic, or lyrical, it's hectoring, manipulative and oppressive.”

  Then Chris the Hippie with the dirty hand starts talking, and I decide to let Erin use him as her scratching post for a while instead. Professor Morrison gives me a little fatherly smile, letting me know that he agreed with me all along. I like Professor Morrison. I'm scared of him too, which is probably the right combination for an academic. He looks a bit like Arthur Miller, which has also got to be a good thing in an academic, and wears a lot of corduroy, and knitted ties, and is stick-thin, apart from a compact little potbelly that looks like a cushion strapped on underneath his dirty shirt. And he listens intently when you're talking, head slightly cocked, pressing his long fingers together into a church-and-steeple in front of his mouth, exactly like Intellectuals do on the telly.

  While Erin flays Chris alive, and Professor Morrison looks on, I drift off for a bit and look out of the window at the garden outside, and go back to thinking about Alice again.

  Walking back along the High Street after the tutorial, I see Rebecca Whatsername and a couple of the fuckingangryactuallys that she's always hanging around with. They're thrusting leaflets into the hands of indifferent shoppers and for a moment I contemplate crossing the road. I'm a bit wary of her, to be honest, especially after our last conversation, but I've made a promise to myself to make as many new friends as possible at university, even if they give every indication of not actually liking me very much.

  “Hiya,” I say.

  “It's the Dancing Queen! How you doing?” she says, and hands me a leaflet, urging me to boycott Barclays Bank.

  “Actually my grant money's with one of the other caring, humanitarian, multinational banking organizations!” I say, with an incisive, wry, satirical glint in my eye, but she's not really looking and has gone back to handing out leaflets and shouting, “Fight apartheid! Support the boycott. Don't buy South African goods! Say no to apartheid! …” I start to feel a bit boycotted too, so start to walk away when she says, in a marginally softer voice, “So, how ya settling in, then?”

  “Oh, all right. I'm sharing my house with a right pair of bloody Ruperts. But apart from that, it's not too bad.” I had thrown in the hint of class war for her benefit really, but I don't think she gets it, because she looks at me, confused.

  “They're both called Rupert?”

  “No, they're called Marcus and Josh.”

  “So who are the Ruperts?”

  “They are, they're, you know—Ruperts,” but the remark is starting to lose some of its cutting edge, and I wonder if I should offer to hand out leaflets instead. After all, it is a cause I'm passionate about, and I have a strict policy of not eating South African fruit that's almost as strict as my policy of not eating fruit. But now Rebecca's folding up the remaining leaflets and handing them to her colleagues.

  “Right, that's me done for today. See you later, Toby, see you, Rupert …” And suddenly I find myself walking down the street side by side with her, without quite knowing whose idea it was. “So, where're we off to now, then?” she asks, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her black vinyl coat.

  “Actually, I'm just on my way to the City Art Gallery.”

  “The Art Gallery?” she asks, intrigued.

  “Yeah, I thought I'd, you know, check it out?”

  She wrinkles her nose, says, “Okay. Let's ‘check it out’!” and I follow her down the street.

  Ah, the timeless old check-out-the-art-gallery ruse. I've been waiting to try this for some time actually, because it's not really possible in Southend, but this is a proper art gallery: hushed library atmosphere, marble benches, security guards dozing on uncomfortable chairs. My plan, ideally, was to bring Alice here on a date, but it's good to have a dry run with someone else first, so that I can work out my spontaneous reactions in advance.

  I don't mind admitting that my response to the visual arts can be pretty superficial; for instance, I often have to resort to pointing out that someone in the painting looks like So-and-so off the telly. Also, there's a certain amount of art gallery etiquette that I need to get the hang of—how long to stand in front of each of the paintings, what noises to make, that kind of thing—but Rebecca and I soon settle into a nice, comfortable rhythm; not so fast as to seem shallow, not so slow as to be deathly bored.

  We're checking out the eighteenth-century room, standing in front of a not particularly remarkable painting by someone I've never heard of, a Gainsboroughesque lord and lady standing under a tree.

  “Amazing perspective,” I say, but drawing her attention to the way objects get smaller as they get farther away seems a little basic, so instead I decide to take a more Marxist, sociopolitical approach.

  “Look at their faces! They certainly seem pleased with their lot!”

  “If you say so,” says Rebecca, uninspired.

  “Not an art lover, then?”

  “'Course I am. I just don't think that because something's been put in a big, bloody gilt frame, I should be obliged to stand around in front of it for hours, rubbing my chin. I mean, look at this stuff …” Hands still plunged in coat pockets, she gestures dismissively round the room, with the bat's wings of her coat, “… Portraits of the idle rich surveying their ill-gotten gains, chocolate-box portrayals of backbreaking rural toil, paintings of spotlessly clean pigs. I mean, look at this monstrosity”—she gestures toward a creamily pink, plump nude reclined on a chaise longue—“soft porn for the slave-trading set. Where's her pubic hair, for crying out loud! Have you ever in your life seen a naked woman who looked like that?” I contemplate telling her that I've actually never seen a naked woman, but I don't want to blow my artistic credentials, so I stay quiet. “I mean, who's it actually for?”

  “So you don't think art has any intrinsic value?”

  “No, I just don't think it has intrinsic value because someone, somewhere decides to call it ‘art.’ Like this stuff—it's the kind of crap you see on the walls of provincial Conservative Clubs …”

  “So I suppose, come the revolution, you'd burn this all down.”

  “Och, that's a really endearing little habit you've got there, reducing people to a stereotype.…” I follow her through to a room full of still lifes, and decide to steer the conversation away from politics. “What's the plural of ‘still life’? Is it ‘still lives’ or ‘still lifes’?” This strikes me as a pretty sophisticated Radio 4 kind of thing to say, but she's not biting.

  “So what are your politics, then?” she says.

  “Well, I suppose I'm a sort of left-wing liberal-humanist.”

  “Nothing at all, in other words …”

  “Well, I wouldn't say th—”

  “And what are you studying again?”

  “Eng. lit.”

  “What's Inglet?”

  “English literature.”

  “Is that what they're calling it these days? And what attracted you to Inglet, apart from the fact that it's obviously just one big, fat, juicy scam.”

  I choose to ignore the last comment, and go straight into my number. “Well, I wasn't sure what to do, really. I had a fairly broad base of qualifications at O- and A-level, and I thought about history, or art, or maybe one of the sciences. But the thing about literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines—it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organized response to the world around him, or her, so in a way it's only natural that this response should contain a whole …”—take a little run-up—“… panoply of intellectual concepts, ideas, issues …”

  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If I'm completely honest, this isn't the first time I've said any of this. In fact I used this little number in all of my university interviews, and whilst it's not exactly “We shall fight them on the beaches …” it usually goes down a storm with academics, especially if accompanied, as here, with lots of hai
r tousling and emphatic gestures. I bring the speech to its shattering climax: “… so as the eponymous Hamlet says to Polonius in act two scene two, it's all ultimately about ‘words, words, words,’ and what we call ‘literature’ is in fact just the vehicle for what might more accurately be described as the Study of … Everything.”

  Rebecca contemplates this, nods sagely. “Well, that's certainly the biggest pile of bogus horseshit I've heard for some time,” she says, and starts walking off.

  “You think so?” I say, trotting after her.

  “I mean, why not just say you want to sit round on your arse and read for three years? At least it would be honest. Literature doesn't teach you about ‘everything,’ and even if it did, it'd only be in the most useless, superficial, impractical way. I mean, anyone who thinks that they can learn anything practical about politics or psychology or science by flicking through Under Milk Wood is talking out their arse. Can you imagine someone saying to you, ‘Well, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, I'm about to remove your spleen, and, okay, I haven't actually studied medicine as such, but don't worry, because I very much enjoyed The Pickwick Papers …’?”

  “Well, medicine's a special case.”

  “And politics isn't? Or history? Or law? Why not? Because they're easier? Less deserving of rigorous analysis?”

  “So you don't think novels and poetry and plays contribute to the quality and richness of life?”

  “I didn't say that, did I? I'm sure they do, but so does the three-minute pop song, and no one feels the need to study that for three years.”

  I'm sure Alexander Pope said something pertinent that would help me out here, but I can't remember what, and I contemplate using the word utilitarianism, but am not sure how. So instead I say, “Just because something isn't practical, it doesn't mean it isn't useful.”