Starter for Ten

by David Nicholls

  “Three bonus questions on battles. What year was the Battle of Blenheim fought? Anyone? No one? Lucy?”

  “Seventeen … twelve?” suggests Lucy.

  “Nope. Seventeen-oh-four.”

  “Where is the Bulge, as in the Battle of the Bulge? Anyone? The Bulge? Anyone have any idea at all? The Bulge. Come on, think about it, the Bulge, the Battle of the Bulge …”

  “Holland!” I mutter from under my coat, partly just to stop him saying “Bulge.”

  “The Ardennes in Belgium,” says Patrick, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. “Question number three. Also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, the Battle of Austerlitz was fought between which …”

  “Patrick, can I just ask, what is the actual point of all this?” I say, leaning forward in my seat. “I mean, do you honestly think that, by some miracle, any of these questions is going to come up in the actual quiz? Because if not, it's a bit of a pointless waste of everyone's time, isn't it?”

  “Brian …” says Lucy, a hand on my arm.

  “It's a warm-up, Brian!” screeches Patrick, leaning round in his seat so we're face-to-face. “A warm-up for those of us who aren't quite as fresh this morning as we maybe ought to be?”

  “I don't know why you're getting at me!” I say, shouting now. “What time did you get to sleep last night, Alice?” and she glares at me in the rearview mirror, her cool, contemptuous head-girl glare.

  “Brian, we'll talk about it later, all right … ?”

  “Talk about what later?” asks Patrick.

  “Nothing,” says Alice, “nothing at all …”

  “So is it just the four of us today, then, Alice, or have you got someone hiding in the boot?”

  “What?” says Patrick.

  “Brian, not here, all right … ?” hisses Alice.

  “Will someone please tell me what's going on … ?” barks Patrick.

  “Okay, everyone! Okay! Let's all … just listen to some music, shall we?” says Lucy, the peacemaker. One hand is holding on to my arm, kindly but firmly, and I almost expect to see a hypodermic syringe in the other hand, so I slump back into my seat, pull my coat up high over my head again to try to get some sleep, and we listen to a warped, warbling cassette of “The Look of Love” by ABC over and over and over again, all the way to Manchester, until I think I'm going to start screaming.

  Shortly after I accidentally breathe booze in Bamber Gascoigne's face, he disappears off to his office to look through the questions and it's left to our old friend Julian, the nice young researcher, to unveil the opposition for the first time. It's just as we feared. One word. Oxbridge. Patrick forces a great big smile, and the sound of his teeth grinding together echoes round the studio.

  The four of them amble casually across the studio floor toward us in a long line, like gunslingers. They've all gone for the matching-blazer-and-tie look, and are all wearing college scarves and spectacles in a further attempt to intimidate us. Theirs is an all-white, all-male team, so I suppose we can at least congratulate ourselves on striking a blow for sexual equality by having two women on our team, even if one of them is a vicious, deceitful, scheming, two-faced witch.

  Of course, our rivals have yet to discover Alice's true nature, so they all make straight for her, and cluster round as if they're asking for her autograph, while Patrick bobs uselessly at the edge of the circle, desperately trying to shake someone's hand, anyone's hand. Their captain, Norton reading classics—a complacently handsome broad-shouldered, floppy-haired type, the kind of good-looking bastard who looks as if he rows everywhere—is shaking Alice by the hand and refusing to let go. “So—you must be the mascot!” he drawls lecherously, which strikes me as a pretty obnoxious and chauvinistic thing to say, and I have a moment of feminist indignation on Alice's behalf, but then I remember last night, the wardrobe. Besides, Alice doesn't seem to mind, because she's laughing too, and biting her lip, all doe-eyed, and tossing her freshly washed hair, and Norton tosses his lovely, glossy hair back, and she tosses her hair in return, and he tosses his, and she tosses hers, and it's like some mating ritual on a wildlife program. I'm ashamed to say that the words “prick-tease” enter my head, but because the phrase is both gender-specific and misogynist, I suppress it, and instead stand just outside the group, with no one to shake hands with, and watch. Lucy Chang spots me, comes over, takes me by the elbow and introduces me to Partridge, a peachy-skinned, balding nineteen-year-old from Saffron Walden, reading modern history, and I smile, and smile, and chat, and smile and wonder if there's somewhere I can go and have a little lie-down.

  But there's no time, because Julian is jollying us over to our seats for a quick rehearsal, just for fun, with him standing in for Bamber. Needless to say, Patrick has fixed the seating plan, so that I'm at the very, very end, as far away from him and Lucy as possible, more or less in the next studio, in fact. Alice sits between us, which would have been fun twenty-four hours ago, but now is just pure misery, and we sit there, staring blankly and silently ahead, as Julian reminds us that it's only a bit of fun, only a game, the important thing is to enjoy ourselves. The desk and buzzers all feel surprisingly shoddy and makeshift, as if someone's knocked them up in a woodwork class, and I can actually see the bare lightbulbs that are illuminating my name on the front of the panel. I could unscrew one if I wanted to, maybe steal it after the show and keep it as a souvenir, as a kind of studenty, undergraduate lark. I think about pointing this out to Alice, then remember that we're not meant to be talking to each other, and feel sad again. Julian, meanwhile, is inviting us to try out our buzzers, just to get the feel of them. We all do so, and I lean forward over the front of the plywood desk, to see my name flashing on and off. Jackson. Jackson. Jackson …

  “At last! My name's in lights!” says Alice. I don't look at her, of course, but can tell by her voice that she's smiling desperately. “You know, I always thought the only way I'd get my name in lights is if I changed it to Fire Exit!” she says, but I don't smile, I just tap out some Morse code on the buzzer: dot dot dot, dash dash dash …

  “Strange, isn't it? Finding ourselves here! After all this time … !”

  But I still don't reply, so she reaches across and takes my hand, pulls it off the buzzer.

  “Brian, talk to me, please,” says Alice, unsmiling this time, then in a whisper, “Look, I'm sorry about last night, and I'm sorry if you feel I've led you on, but I never made any promises, Brian. I was always honest with you, always very, very clear about how I felt. Speak to me, Brian, please? I can't bear you not speaking to me.…”

  I turn to her, and she looks sad and beautiful and tired around the eyes. “I'm sorry, Alice, but I don't think I can.” She nods, as if she understands, and then before we can say anything else Julian is clearing his throat and the rehearsal is beginning.

  “The final separation between the Eastern and Western Christian churches, sometimes known as the East-West Schism, happened in which year?”

  I think I know this one, so I buzz.

  “Fifteen-seventeen?”

  “No, I'm sorry, I think you may be thinking of the Reformation. I'm afraid that's a five-point penalty.”

  “Ten fifty-four?” says Norton, with the floppy hair, reading classics.

  “Correct,” says Julian, and Norton smiles and gives his lovely hair a victory toss. “So, Norton, that's ten points, and your team now get the chance to answer three bonus questions on the Roman gods.…”

  And ironically, of course, I actually know all the answers.

  At the end of the fifteen-minute rehearsal, which is just for fun, just to get us all relaxed, remember it's only a game, we've lost by 115 points to 15. Standing in the scenery dock behind the set, Patrick is so angry that he can barely speak. He just walks in tight little circles, clenching and unclenching his fists, and squeaking. Actually squeaking.

  “Good, aren't they?” says Alice.

  “They're okay,” says Lucy, “they got lucky, that's all. Partridge is the one to
watch.…”

  “… Three years I've been waiting for this, three years …” mutters Patrick, walking in his tight little circle.

  “… We're just a little on edge, that's all,” says Lucy, “we just need to lighten up a little! Start to have fun, relax!”

  I suddenly need a drink. Is there a bar in the building? I wonder. “Maybe we should all just go to the bar, have a pint or two, just get loosened up a bit?” I suggest.

  Patrick stops walking. “What?” he hisses.

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

  “Brian, you answered eight starter questions during that rehearsal and got six of them wrong. That's minus thirty points.…”

  “That's not true …” I insist. “Is it?” and I look to Lucy for some support, but she's just staring at her shoes. Patrick turns on her.

  “Lucia, dimmi, parli Italiano?” and, embarrassed, Lucy says, “Sì, un pochino.”

  Then to Alice, “E tu Alice, dimmi, parli anche tu l'italiano?”

  “Sì, parlo l'italiano, ma solo come una turista …” sighs Alice.

  Lucy whispers, “He's asking us if we speak Ital—”

  “I know what he's asking, Lucy!” I snap.

  “So, do you speak Italian?” asks Patrick.

  “No! No, not as such …”

  “And yet Lucy does, and Alice does, and I do, and yet it was you, Brian Jackson, you, the sole non–Italian speaker on the team, who felt qualified to attempt to answer a starter question on Italian musical terms.…”

  “No one else was buzzing, so I thought I'd have a stab.…”

  “And that's the problem with you, isn't it, Brian? It's just stab, stab, stab with you, stabbing away in the dark, getting it wrong every time, but just stabbing away, over and over again, just getting everything wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and losing the game, and dragging us all down with you.” His face is bright burgundy now, the same color as his university sweatshirt, and inches away from mine.…

  “Hey, come on, guys, it was just a rehearsal,” says Lucy, trying to squeeze in between us while Alice stands a little farther off, her hands over her face, peeking through her fingers.

  “… I don't even know why I let you on this team in the first place! You turn up pissed and reeking of booze, you act like you know it all when in fact you know nothing. As far as this team is concerned, you're a complete deadweight …”—his hands on my chest, fingers splayed and I can feel a fine spray of his saliva on my cheek—“we'd probably be better off with some bloke off the street, even that stupid bloody mate of yours, Spencer, you're both as pig ignorant as each other. It's like they say, you can take the boy out of Essex, but you can't take …”

  And I suppose he must carry on talking after that, because his mouth continues to move, but I don't really hear what he's saying because all I'm aware of is his hands tugging on the lapels of Dad's brown corduroy jacket, pulling me up onto my toes. That's when I make my decision, that's where something snaps—except it doesn't really snap, just stretches—and maybe it's the mention of Spencer, or the remnants of last night's booze, but that's the point at which I decide to head-butt Patrick Watts. I take a little leap up into the air, not a basketball player's leap, by any means, just a little spring on the balls of my feet, and I bring my head down as hard as I possibly can into the very center of his screaming burgundy face. And I'm ashamed to say that I have a fleeting but intense sense of pleasure and satisfaction and righteous vengeance before the pain finds its way to my brain and everything goes black.

  40

  QUESTION: In T. S. Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the evening is “spread out against the sky …”?

  ANSWER: “… Like a patient etherised upon a table.”

  “As a Glaswegian, born and bred, I think it's safe to say that what we're looking at here is an absolutely classic misunderstanding of the basic principle of the head-butt,” says Rebecca Epstein. “The whole point of a head-butt is to bring the hard part of your forehead down with as much force as possible onto the soft part of your opponent's nose. What you've done here, Brian, is bring the soft part of your nose down against the hard part of his forehead. Hence the blood and the loss of consciousness.”

  I open my eyes and find myself lying on my back on two office desks pushed together. Lucy Chang is standing over me, brushing my fringe back out of my eyes, holding up three fingers and asking, “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “If I get the answer wrong, do we lose five points?”

  She smiles. “Not this time, no.”

  “Then the answer is three.”

  “And the capital of Venezuela is … ?”

  “Caracas?”

  “Attaboy, Mr. Jackson,” says Lucy. “I think you're going to be just fine.”

  We seem to be a couple of floors up; looking out over the back of the TV studios in the University Challenge production office; reference books scattered everywhere, photos of past winners on the walls. I turn my head to the side and see Rebecca, sitting on the edge of a desk opposite me, looking pretty—not pretty, because the word “pretty” is reactionary and gender-specific, but attractive—in a long, plain, clingy black dress under a black denim jacket, swinging her Doc Martens backwards and forwards.

  “You came, then?”

  “Oh, aye. Wouldn't have missed this for the world. There I was on the minibus with a bunch of pissed-up Young Conservatives all with their college scarves and their ironic teddy bears, and paying three quid toward the petrol, I might add, which is an absolute rip-off if you do the maths, and I thought, Christ, what am I doing here? This is hell! And then we arrive and we're all getting a wee preshow tour of the studio, and we turn a corner just in time to see you lying on the floor unconscious in a pool of your own blood, and I thought, Well, there you go, if that's not worth three quid, then I don't know what is.”

  I look down, and see that I'm wearing just trousers and a vest, the same vest I've been wearing for the last thirty-six hours, which is dappled in blood down the front, and has a tang of gin to it. In fact, it's more than just a tang. It's fumes. I'm giving off fumes.

  “What happened to my clothes?”

  “We ravished you, Lucy and me, while you were unconscious. Don't mind, do you?”

  Lucy blushes. “Alice is washing your shirt in the ladies' washroom, trying to get it dry under the hand dryer.…”

  “Is the jacket all right?”

  “The jacket's fine.…”

  “… It's just it was my dad's jacket.…”

  “It's fine, really.…”

  Gingerly I sit up sideways, on the edge of the desk, and imagine that I can feel my brain shifting too, buffeting against the sides of my skull. Lucy holds up the mirror from her makeup kit, and I take a deep breath and look. It could be worse, I suppose; my nose seems no more lumpy and misshapen than usual, though there's a dark waxy rim of what looks like red crayon around each nostril.

  “How's Patrick?” I ask Lucy.

  “Not a scratch on him,” she says.

  “Pity,” I say.

  “Hey, that's enough now,” she says, but smiling conspiratorially. Then, with a straight face, “There is a problem, though.”

  “What?”

  “Well … I don't think they're going to let you do the show.”

  “What? You're kidding!”

  “I'm afraid not.”

  “But why not?”

  “Well, you did assault our team captain.”

  “I didn't assault him! I hit him once! And he provoked me, you saw that, he was lifting me up by my jacket! And, anyway, I'm the one who got hurt! How can I have assaulted him if I'm the one who got hurt?”

  “And that, m'lord, is the case for the defense,” says Rebecca.

  “I know, Brian, but, still, Patrick's not happy. He's got a friend, from the Economics Department, who's prepared to take your place at the last minute.…”

  “You're kidding.…”

  “You can
't really blame him, Brian. You turn up stinking of booze, get a whole load of questions wrong, then try and break his nose.…”

  “But my mum's here and everything!”

  “It's only a stupid quiz, Brian,” says Rebecca, still swinging her feet.

  “But she's come all the way from Southend! …” And I can hear my voice crack slightly, which is pathetic in a man of nineteen, I know, but I wanted so much to be on the show. I have a sudden vision of me trying to explain to Mum why I'm not out there after all. It's going to feel like being sent home early from school, it's so embarrassing, so shaming, that I can't bear to think about it.

  “What does Julian say?”

  “Julian says it's up to Patrick. He's with him at the moment, talking it through.…”

  “And what do you think?”

  Lucy frowns for a moment, then says, “I think that if you both promise to play nice, and stop behaving like children, and agree to work together as a team, and go a little easy on the buzzer, then I think that, yes, you should do the show.…”

  “Well, can you say that to him for me, Lucy? Please?”

  And she sighs, checks her watch, looks at the door, and says, “I'll see what I can do,” then she heads out, leaving me and Rebecca in the production office, sitting on the edge of opposite desks, about fifteen feet apart from each other, both swinging our legs and trying to ignore what I think is called “an atmosphere between us.” When the silence becomes too uncomfortable, Rebecca nods toward the door.

  “She's nice.”

  “Who?”

  “Lucy.”

  “Yes. Yes, she is. Really, really nice.”

  “So why don't you go out with her then?” says Rebecca.