a rational man

by J S Hollis

  The interview was uncontroversial until we reached the topic of why they had never had a second child. Cecil looked straight at me for the first time and said, “We discussed it. But decided that we didn’t want one.” Clara didn’t move.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, why didn’t you?”

  Cecil responded again, “I don’t mind at all, Noa. We had two reasons, as far as I remember. We are deeply concerned about our environmental footprint and so we felt another child was a luxury that was too damaging to the environment. We also agreed that there are too many children in the world who lack adequate food and care, and we would prefer to use our time and money to help those children.”

  The response was reasonable enough but Clara had seemed to disengage (if she was ever engaged) so I asked her if she had ever regretted the decision.

  Clara lifted her white veiled head. “I did want to have another child but Cecil’s reasoning convinced me otherwise.” She said “reasoning” with a tiny lilt that sent a tremor through the room. I scanned for damage while Clara stroked Cecil’s neck as if nothing had happened. I doubted myself. I wondered whether the problem was me. I could find disharmony in a sunrise.

  “That is quite a difficult decision to make,” I said, “to choose the benefits of others over your own desire to have a child. Didn’t you feel this was something you should be able to do for yourself?”

  Cecil responded even though the question had been directed at Clara. “Surrendering ourselves to the greater good of society is what we aspire to. We are, sadly, far from getting there.”

  Clara turned towards Cecil, her veil shimmering. “It’s hard to disagree with that sentiment,” she said.

  I felt strangely alone and unwelcome. Part of a joke I didn’t get. Cecil and Clara seemed perfect, loving, considered. Everything we want people to be. They were great role models. And yet, I felt unspoken words crashing against me.

  I had a glimpse of something beneath the smog of charm. Clara’s strange demeanour required an explanation. Consciously or unconsciously, she was leaking pieces of incriminating but cryptic information. If only I had fully grasped their meaning before it was too late. But I was no more naïve than Clara was thirty years ago.

  We were both like ramblers who come across occasional markings on the ground and ignore them as insignificant. Only later, when the ramblers reach the bottom of the hill, do they see that they have been walking across a giant phallus, meticulously sculpted out of the chalk over decades.

  1

  Materials

  Back when London still rumbled, a tuition room hanging over one of those idealistic Euston squares was transformed from a dull array of desks and chairs into a kaleidoscope. The colours flowed and shifted in order and disorder as they moved hypnotically to the chanting and the drumbeats. The men and women spun and jumped, spun and jumped, faster and faster, losing their breath and entering a trance in which there was nothing but the endless prospect of whirling.

  The beauty of this display was lost on Cecil, who pressed his SpeX7 against the small window in the door. He was looking for his housemate, Sylvio, who had badgered him into coming to the class. His untrained gaze found the contents of the room to be in chaos but he managed to spy Sylvio at the opposite end, his plump limbs splaying out, seemingly disinterested in Cecil’s whereabouts. Cecil considered entering but only so that he could tell himself that he had entertained the thought.

  Without taking the time to formulate a reason, Cecil was opposed to whirling and he had already told Sylvio as much. Sylvio was, however, for some unknown motive, determined to bring Cecil along. During their lecture the previous day, he had scratched away at Cecil. “It’s transcendental,” he whispered. “The more chaos there is outside, the calmer you are inside. It’s like your brain and the world swap places.”

  Cecil made a point of highlighting the text that was being generated as the lecturer spoke, his index finger drawing lines in the air with a particular flourish of exaggerated concentration.

  “It is not so different to theoretical physics,” Sylvio continued while his body echoed the memory of a dance. “The consequences may be unclear but they could change your life.”

  Cecil shook his head and dropped his insistent finger. “You’re just defining transcendental,” he said. “Anyway, you know I have no interest in an endless quest to find smaller and bigger things.” Cecil crossed his arms to reboot his concentration.

  Sylvio remained undeterred. He brought his lips close to Cecil’s ear and said, “There are many beautiful and interesting people there too.”

  “That’s great, Sylv, but if I don’t actually listen to the lecture now, there’ll have been no point in me coming.”

  “I thought the reason we started attending was to see people in the flesh. I’m a person.”

  Cecil stroked the small scar on his forehead, feigning indifference. Sylvio sat back in his chair but within a moment was back in Cecil’s ear.

  “Look, will you just come with me? I want you to.”

  “Sure,” Cecil said, unaware of the cosmic importance of that one decision.

  But while Cecil was happy to attend whirling out of loyalty, he wasn’t enthused enough to jump into the activity without Sylvio’s guidance. He was also embarrassed about being late. A lecture on inorganic chemistry had overrun and Cecil had decided that, on balance, it was ruder to walk out early on an individual lecturer than to arrive late at a group activity.

  He sat down on the floor outside the tuition room with his back against the wall and began to flick through a chemistry book on his SpeX. To any onlooker, it would seem his hands were playing with the empty space in front of him. It was some minutes later when a young woman tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up to see an unspectacled almond face framed by countless cinnamon curls that asked him whether he thought it was rude to enter the room while the whirling was flowing.

  “I’m sure it’s fine” Cecil replied. “I was just too scared to go in.” The almond face chuckled hoarsely, as if she had learnt how to laugh from an old smoker, and then turned to look through the window. “Oh come on,” she said, “it’s easy. They’re so into it, they wouldn’t even know if we joined ‘em. Come on!” She offered Cecil a soft dark hand that contrasted with his and which he took with the innocence of a giant lost child.

  The almond faced lady pushed open the door and dragged Cecil in behind her. She tossed him one of the colourful robes in the corner, which he dutifully put on, and together they squeezed into the outer ring of whirlers. Cecil began with enthusiasm, no doubt in an attempt to impress, but when he turned to his new friend she was already lost among her thoughts in the stream of drumbeats.

  Very conscious of his size, Cecil was careful not to get carried away with the sudden movements. He awkwardly jumped and twisted as he focused on the others, trying to follow them and find a pattern, but there was no precise plan to their jolts and twirls. He felt constantly one step behind, when there weren’t any steps at all. Soon he was nauseous from the accumulation of sweat and sound, his mind travelling through a series of empty places: beaches, fields, space.

  Straining with concentration, he failed to become consumed by the moment and his enthusiasm seeped away until he became a shadow of the other dancers.

  And then the drums stopped, the arms flopped down and the swirling madness was just a room full of colourfully dressed panters. As Cecil blinked, the almond faced woman came up to him and asked him how he had found the experience. “I was getting into it at the end,” he said earnestly.

  “Well then,” she said, “you must come again.”

  “Clara, isn’t it?” Cecil half asked.

  “Yes, and you?” she replied, pointing at her unspectacled face.

  “Cecil.”

  A moment of silence arrived and before either Cecil or Clara could squeeze past it, Cecil’s attention was disturbed by
the sound of his own name. “Alice!” Clara giggled, sending an arrow straight into Cecil’s heart.

  “I can’t believe you came,” Sylvio said as his arms embraced what they could of Cecil before pushing him away. Sylvio let loose a tide of accumulated thoughts. “What did you think of it? I saw you jumping and spinning, you know, like a pro. You loved it. I can see it in your eyes. Did you see me? My face all red and gaping like a goldfish. Like this.” Sylvio started opening and closing his mouth. “It’s a travesty. I want to be a beautiful spinning top at one with, you know, the ebb and flow. But with these fat arms I am just a … puffer jacket hanging from a line and being tossed and turned in the wind. Such a shame! So Alice, where to? The pub, yes?”

  By the time Sylvio had finished, Clara was talking to another whirler. Cecil had a moment to watch the ugly pink robe flutter around her languid body and then rushed out to keep up with Sylvio.

  Cecil sipped a pint of soda water in the Jeremy Bentham while Sylvio bombarded him with his views on whirling, chemistry and everything else he could think of to jam into his monologue. Cecil would normally have cut in but he was elsewhere. His immediate infatuation with Clara was obvious to anyone who cared to look; he had spent most of his time at whirling passing his eyes over her while trying to seem innocuous. Now he stared into his glass hoping for a revelation to emerge from the bubbles, a strategy to get close to Clara. Cecil wondered why he hadn’t just asked her out for a drink.

  “If you don’t know a girl, would you still ask her out for a drink?” Cecil suddenly said to the glass as much as to Sylvio.

  Sylvio’s dark eyes lingered on Cecil for a moment and he stroked his patchy beard. “Hmm. Probably yes, but I can get away it. My people are more traditional. But you? No. I mean, well, no. Your people are different. When was the last time you met a girl who didn’t loathe that kind of thing? Certainly not on campus. Pretty medieval now, going out with a random. With the older ladies, you might get away with it, but not with these uni types.”

  “What do you mean, ‘your people’?”

  “You know what I mean. You are one of those liberal metropolitan types, who have lost all sense of another identity. You run too much risk of losing their acceptance. If I’m rejected by the liberals, I can fall back on my Mediterranean blood.”

  “So much for the spontaneity of romance,” Cecil mused.

  “Ha. Don’t give me that shit. As if there was romance before! Before W my brother Gio used to just match up with women on his phone, do them and then move on.”

  “People still do that. You still do that!”

  “Yeh but now we have to basically wear a label that says ‘I choose to be promiscuous’ and only mix with those people. Anyhow, who is the mystery senorina?”

  Cecil didn’t warrant Sylvio’s request with a response, didn’t ask Clara out and, through an impressive demonstration of willpower, restrained himself from looking at her on W in case it made the wrong impression. He took the approach of a pawn inching its way to the end of the board, square by square, so it could take control. His only option was to return to whirling.

  Clara, on the other hand, would have been delighted if someone had asked her out for a drink. She appreciated the Invanity8 movement’s mission – she hated the pressure to look good even when sleeping – but now vanity had swung too far the other way. Her friends spent almost as long trying to look like they didn’t care how they looked. They then rejected the advances of anyone who was attracted to them. Being attractive shouldn’t be a life goal but there was nothing intrinsically wrong with it. Aesthetics mattered. She was reminded of this every time she looked out of her bedroom at the concrete apartment block that stood like a ripe blackhead among the shimmering glass towers. She kept these views to herself though. The one time she had criticised Invanity to her friends, they told her “it’s easy for you to say”. And then she received around fifty passive aggressive messages from other acquaintances to the same effect. “Cla – appreciate ur op on Inv but ur skin is naturally beautiful.” “Totally fine if u wana sleep with as many guys as u want – ur choice.”

  She returned to her apartment after whirling to find her flatmate, Jude, watching her face on the big screen in the living room. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” Clara asked.

  “How’s Cecil?” Jude asked while stroking the pale bit of her belly that distended over the top of her tracksuit bottoms.

  Clara bit the right side of her lip, her brain asking the question “Cecil? Cecil? Cecil?” while she simultaneously removed her black bomber jacket. “Cecil?” she said.

  “Your new friend from whirling.”

  “I have literally no idea what you are talking about.”

  Jude, frustrated that her little tease hadn’t quite worked, replied in a matter of fact way, “You met a guy at whirling, he was called Cecil, he drooled over you for about an hour, he then asked his friend if it was OK to ask a girl out if he doesn’t know her.”

  Clara left the room to put her coat away and replied, “Oh, that guy. He wasn’t interested in me. He couldn’t wait to get out of the place.” When she returned, Jude had flicked to an American couple bickering while they cooked pasta.

  “They are actually arguing over what type of salt to use in pasta water,” Jude said. The man and woman were both silent for a minute allowing their anger to ferment rather than dissipate. Then the man turned to the woman and said, “What makes you a salt expert?“

  “I think I am going to do some work,” Clara told Jude. She was rarely able to watch the screen for more than a few seconds. She returned to her small room, opened the window to let some air in, and when the streetlights flicked on in response to a passing car, she tracked the damp pavement reflecting their glow. The car moved up the street past a group of children playing football, which split and merged again like a shoal of fish. Clara had never been allowed to play in the street when she was their age.

  Cecil returned to whirling week after week and began to develop a limited affection for the activity. He told Sylvio, who remained astounded at Cecil’s persistence, that he enjoyed the workout and gritted his teeth when the other participants discussed entering another world. He dreamt of shouting “you’re just dizzy!”

  Cecil always arrived early even though Clara was always late. But by ensuring that he was in her vicinity before the dance ended, he managed to chat to her most weeks after the session. He still knew very little about her and so conversation remained a mundane selection of “how are you”s, discussions about the last session of whirling and the odd comment on Clara’s outfit, which was invariably distinctive. Cecil struggled to break through this wall to more meaningful conversation and yet he became increasingly convinced that Clara was the most wonderful woman he had ever met. Every time he saw her, every time they spoke, it filled Cecil with so many hormones he felt like he was deflating when they separated. These little bites of joy were better than the risk of rejection.

  As Clara’s initial oblivion was replaced with the certainty that Cecil was attracted to her, she began to browse his actions on W. She wasn’t really sure what to look for though. Other than his aversion to using W, Cecil seemed to be a fairly typical student. She was impressed however when she saw Cecil in the Vice Chancellor’s office. Cecil was appealing against his friend’s expulsion from the university. His friend had routinely failed to complete the required number of study hours. He looked straight into the Vice Chancellor’s eyes and gestured with his hands pressed together like he was praying with particular enthusiasm.

  “Dr Tavare,” Cecil said, “I am aware that the university’s rules regarding study hours are clear and, as you say, not particularly stringent. But they are still unnecessary. I am sure you will agree that the point of higher education is not to enforce discipline but rather to further learning and innovation. This can be achieved in many ways. Lily may not have been studying as much as you require her to, but
she is still learning about the subject. If you have watched Lily, you will no doubt know that there are few people as enthused by chemistry as she is. She loves the subject. She even has trousers with the periodic table printed on them. I have no doubt that when she is silent or when she is sleeping, she is pondering molecular structures and entropy. But these minutes are not included in your figures. The university just focuses on time spent reviewing study materials and writing about them. But I am sure the minds of those looking at the course materials for forty hours a week are wandering for large chunks of that time.”

  Cecil had finished but the Vice Chancellor continued to stare right back at him. The staring game appeared to be more important than Cecil’s rhetoric. Dr Tavare turned away and said, “Cecil, when we can follow our student’s thoughts, we can change the system. But the university needs to enforce minimum standards to reassure parents that their children are not coming here for a jolly.”

  “Is there any way I can change your mind, professor? You are losing a fine student.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr Stanhope. I understand your arguments but we need to have standards.”

  “Thank you for making yourself available,” Cecil concluded, and he left the Vice Chancellor, who continued to peer at the place Cecil had been sitting.

  Clara found this tame exchange rather attractive. She was surprised to discover that Cecil was not a simple conformist. Clara was normally attracted to the absurd, the exhibitionist, the controversial, and Cecil was none of those things. Yet there was something unusual about Cecil’s approach to life, some deep confidence in his relentless resort to logic. Her view of his attempts to woo her altered in this light. No longer was he shy and, perhaps, a little pathetic. He was a masochist, who persisted in developing the relationship in the right way.