Jack drops a penny in my drink, so I down it, because since time immemorial that’s what you do when someone drops a penny in your drink. I drop the penny in Sanjay’s drink and he downs his. Rules be rules.
Wellingborough. Trinity term lately over, and me and my old schoolmates sitting in the Tin Whistle bar, reconvening for our first university summer vac. Placable August weather. As much drunken carnage in the nighttime streets, as if all water had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a massive munter, forty feet wide or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up to the bar.
Wellingborough. A place of no enterprise. Just a bustle of grim day-to-dayness and littered souls. (I am an Oxonian, but Wellingborough born—Wellingborough, that humdrum town—and go at things as I only know how …)
But it was on that first return, with a year of university under our slightly tighter belts, that I most acutely felt a divergence of experience. The worlds me and my mates now inhabited seemed radically different … or the world
I
inhabited. To make matters even more complicated, Lucy had been accepted into the University of Northampton, our local, coming in around the 100 mark in the university hit-parade, to study Travel and Tourism. She was set to begin that coming September and my paranoid foresight had been burning all vacation like some lust-addled Cassandra: one coloring-in exercise per semester supplemented by extracurricular binge drinking and blowjobs. My home-mates weren’t much help, what with their reports of campus lust-plots and student-union sexcapades.
“I shit you not, mate,” said Rob as he arched his body over the pool table and lined up the shot (staring down the cue, one eye closed, forehead tensed), “I fingered this girl up the bum-hole at the Christmas party in the student union.” I sipped my beer in awe as he banged the red in off the cushion, retrieved his pint from atop the fag machine at the side, and took a contemplative chug. “Simple really. Started on the dance floor with a few drinks in us—quite romantic—and then moved away to a dark corner for some privacy. Bing bang bong.”
“You’re pure filth,” said Anne (an ex-girlfriend from when I was twelve, now studying Socio-Bio-Dance Studies with History at some uni up north), twirling her vodka and Coke. I was with her on this one, though slightly impressed. Rob shrugged and eyed up his next shot.
“That’s not what your mum said,” he muttered as he smashed the cue ball. “You’re just jealous.”
“Not really. I had my fair share of pulls this past year thank you very much,” boasted Anne before breaking out in a blush.
“Did you get fingered up the shitter though?” asked John (a blond pretty boy, studying Applied Agriculture with Media Studies at some university down south).
“No, I did not! You lot are disgusting. I just had a lot of pulls is all.”
“Well done,” I said sarcastically.
“You can shut up, posh boy,” replied Anne. “Just because everyone’s asexual at Oxford … too busy being butt-ugly and nerds.” The rest of the group chuckled. I never have a comeback for this kind of dig. I tend to keep quiet, knowing that a response of any form would be deemed snobbish or elitist.
“Eliot’s pussy-whipped by Lucy,” suggested Natalie (huge girl, studying Golf Course Management and Experimental PE at some university out east). Ouch: that one was pretty harsh.
“Anyway,” I said in a dragged-out voice. “You need to be careful, Rob, you’ll be riddled with STIs before you know it.”
“Uh-uh, no problems there, bro. I had one of those tests, didn’t I.” We were all slightly taken aback; I mean that’s pretty organized and responsible for Rob. Maybe university was changing him … maybe he was growing up. “I shit you not. They shove like a fob mathingy up your jap’s eye.” Anne, who is half Japanese, doesn’t even flinch at this. “It’s like an ice-cream stick. And I’m not talking Mini Milk … I’m talking Magnum.” Everyone gasped with wonderment, the boys squirming in addition.
I wanted to say something about Rochester’s “common fucking posts” and “tingling cunts,” or Thomas Nashe’s “one eye wherein the rheum so fervently doth rain” … and what about Herzog going to the doctor thinking he’s got clap: “
What have you been up to? Are you married?
” Instead I tried to be funny and said, “Those tests should be like an MOT: annual, and with a little record book for all future purchasers.”
“Do you reckon I could take out insurance on my knob?” asked Rob with touching seriousness.
“You definitely wouldn’t maintain your no-claims bonus,” said Anne.
“Well, I gave someone a rim-job in a club at uni,” announced Holly out of nowhere (tiny girl, studying Fuck Knows at some university near Wales). A rapid-fire of chokes and splutters exploded down the line, splashing into an assortment of drinks. That’s a bit much, even for us. I found myself transfixed by her teeth and upper lip …
“Serious?”
“Of course not! You’re such a bunch of douches.”
We sipped our drinks, mildly disappointed.
“I knew she was joking,” said Rob (I’ve no idea what Rob studies: perhaps a BA in Throwing Up, or a short course on The Reception of STIs in the Period 2006–9. I’m sure he’s told me at some point, but I can’t have been listening). He missed his next shot.
“You’re shit,” said John, his opponent.
I had switched off, thinking about Lucy and how we’d done well to keep things aloft all through that first year; wondering how it would go once she started uni and I got further into my studies. I didn’t have anything to say to anyone around me, and longed for my Oxford acquaintances who understood me better; which is exactly how I had felt in Oxford all through my first year, longing to return to my home-mates who, I had convinced myself, understood me better.
“Your mum’s shit.”
“Cock.” That was Jack. He’s just seen Terrence walk into the King’s Arms. Terrence and Co. He’s wearing his blue
crushed-velvet jacket (collar up), a paisley scarf intricately folded and tucked, some red corduroys, and a pair of blue and white boaters (no socks). Massive hair, baby face, gerbil nose. Before I got to Oxford, a dandy, to me, was just a comic book; but now I’ve learned that it’s an actual kind of person, though the reality of such a type is something I still have problems grasping. Over the years I have applied qualifications: for instance, I don’t see anything wrong with the theorized, aesthetic variation (Oscar Wilde, big fan). But then there’s this subset of dandy with no substance; a kind of upper-class grotesque, more toff than artiste. These chaps move in exclusive clusters throughout Oxford, flawlessly reflecting each other.
Am I a hypocrite?
Terrence sees us and smirks, before carrying on to the bar, where he’ll probably purchase a quart of port and crack out his snuff tin.
Terrence Terrence: first name Terrence, second name Terrence. He’s a ditto; a fellow of incestuous title, one begetting the other, same rubbing against same; a pleonastic preponderance; a tautological tit. He studies English at Hollywell College, unfortunately, like me. He’s one of those kids who have two thousand “friends” on mugshot.com. It’s ludicrous. Just think about it: if he were to bestow each of his “friends” with the most bog standard of birthday gift—I’m talking a fiver in a card—it would cost him ten grand a year … which he could probably afford, but still … He says things like mama and mummy instead of mum, and calls champagne (which he has for breakfast) “pooh.” You know the type: goes for weekends in Rome, Milan, and Paris, just to snort cocaine off a prostitute’s left nipple.
Well, actually, I emphatically did not know the type before I got to Oxford. They don’t call it a great seat of
learning for nothing. It was at my entrance interview that Terrence made his first cameo (what he’d call his début, or, having been on an extensive gap year, his đëƀûţ) in my life—
Marching in streets of Oxford, I came to court the fruitful plot of scholarism. Dad dropped me off on Broad Street.
“Just do your best,” he said, gripping my shoulder and ruffling my stupendous barnet. “There’s nothing more you can do. Good luck, son.” What else could he say? The situation and setting were even more alien to him than they were to me.
I didn’t have a clue where I was and found myself stumbling onto Radcliffe Square, hemmed in by the Bodleian and All Souls, the spire of St. Mary’s Church rising in the background. The Radcliffe Camera, in all its enlightened splendor and sanctity, pounced monstrously into view. The colossal building receded and protruded, dilating and contracting before my dimming eyes. I stood minuscule at its base, paralyzed by the dimensions and their impossible drift into infinity. I clutched my rucksack, my scarf streaming over my shoulder in the wind like a flapping tongue of dogged bewilderment. The whole building could not be taken in at once, evading my grasp at its very edges; its incomprehensible limits. Gazing upward, the golden structure seemed as if it had been placed against a green-screen sky, leering over me with CGI prodigiousness. But it was all real. I sensed the floor swaying and my body moving away from me as the tip of the dome kissed sulky clouds in strenuous proximity. Then felt I like some watcher of the sky, when his ken is royally fucked: squashed and stretched; handed new coordinates; recalibrated. I eventually managed
to drag my sorry self away and went in search of Hollywell College.
Having blubbered my way through the porter’s lodge (the head porter glaring at me like he wanted me dead, some latent class antagonism animating his inanimate stare—“But I’m with you,” I wanted to plead. “I’m with you”), I was shown to the common room by a group of surprisingly good-looking students with names like Rupert and Cecilia stuck to their breasts (
“here to help”
). Fuck me, I could smell the stench of fear and ambition before I even entered. Girls with grandma pashminas and electric-socket beehive hairdos (the kind of mop private schoolgirls spend hours crafting for optimum “just got out of bed” effect) flitted about the room, and boys in brand-new suits stood stiff. Fewer people looked like horses than I had anticipated, but there were one or two for sure: facial features wrenched upward by some counter-gravitational force that only breeding can buy. I was casual in jacket and shirt, unbuttoned, and jet-black jeans. My bouncy, sun-kissed hair gave me an appearance of … well, how the hell should I know? I haven’t a clue what impression I give.
This was where we were to wait till picked off, one by one, by a cocky undergraduate who would lead us to the firing squad. Pool table, Sega Rally, buzzing Coke machine, and shelled-out newspapers were to keep us preoccupied in the meantime. I couldn’t be arsed to make conversation with the competition: too frazzled and hung-up about what they might actually have to say. Instead I stared blindly at a copy of
The Times
, cultivating my best don’t-talk-to-me pose. A right bell-end to my left had already formed a harem, preaching some shit about how poetry was the essence of truth and existentialism the curse of the novel. What a wanker, I thought. I mean, what a
wanker
. That was
Terrence Terrence. He was like an exotic bird, and I couldn’t tell whether he was dangerous or tame. He said sentences that ended in “like” (which sounded more like lake), “actually” (hactually), and “so,” applying major tremolo to the vowels so that they had a trombonic quaver of social pretension. In fact I noticed that a lot of people did this, always in a nonchalantly posh manner. Out of boredom and nervousness I silently completed many of his sentences for him: “I’ve done quite a lot of practice interviews at school, soooooo …”
you might as well give up now, scum
; “I should have lots to talk about, you know … I mean I read
Ulysses
this morning liiiiiike …”
a complete twat
.
Deep breaths. Deep breaths.
I checked the timetable on the notice board and saw that I had a couple of hours to kill. I was getting mobbed left, right, and center by pompous conversations about favorite authors and books, and people spitting the heinous falsities of their personal statements—how many schools they planned to build in Rwanda on their gap year and how their favorite hobby was volunteering at their local soup kitchen, which, remarkably, they managed to balance with all their sporting commitments as captain of six different school teams (rowing, lacrosse, shooting, water polo, equestrian dressage, interbreeding).
I’m in over my head, I’m in over my head. Shit shit shit shit shit.
Then Terrence began showing off his insider knowledge of Hollywell College, most likely gleaned from the untappable private-school network of gossip and know-how, spurting rumors that Dr. Fletcher (the English Literature Fellow) was notorious for favoring pretty girls. Apparently there had even been an inquiry into this by the college dean, but few complaints about Dr. Fletcher ever resulted in serious
action, what with him being the superstar of the Senior Common Room.
I went to the toilet like a sprinkler set at five-minute intervals and gorged chunks of skin from my already battered fingertips.
Settle thy studies
, soliloquized a voice inside my head.
Settle thy studies, Eliot
. I shut myself in a cubicle with a car-crash edition of
Doctor Faustus
and lapped up cringing A-level annotations, priming myself for interview regurgitation.
Back in the common room, some time later, I heard my name being called like never before; as if it were being sucked through a vacuum cleaner:
“Eel-iot Larmb.”
And again: “Eel-iot Larmb.”
“Here.”
“Thart’s gurrreat. Fellow may.” I understood that he meant for me to follow him, and rose with a sudden flurry of panic and trepidation.
This lad (a volunteering third-year) had stocky inclinations—could be hard if he wanted—and a face like the back of a shovel. He carried a piece of paper that bent and crumpled in the wind. (I was to sit in a secret room for half an hour and analyze the contents of this sheet, preparing clever-clogs things to say about it in my interview.)
“Ah,” he said, peering at the paper. We were walking along the grassy edges of the main quad, boxed in by neat angular buildings straight out of the movies. “We read this poem for a tute last week.”