Black Chalk (18 page)

‘Look, everyone,’ said Emilia, ‘I really think we’ve played as much as we can today. It’s lunch in five minutes, so why don’t we all go down early for once?’

Chad threw down his cards. ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘But first things first, Mark has to pick his consequence from the pot.’

‘No, Chad,’ said Emilia, sounding unnaturally stern. ‘That can wait for later. We’re all going for lunch, we’re going to sit down together and we’re going to talk about anything but the Game for at least an hour. Right now. You understand?

*   *   *

XXXV(i)
   Was I to blame when everything fell apart? When everything went wrong with the Game, was it because of mistakes made by me? I don’t think so. Maybe we should all share the blame. The right cocktail of people, the perfect blend for calamity. Every one of us secret competitors who kept our desires carefully hidden at school, where aspiring to be the best is acceptable only in sport or fashion or dating. So you keep your secret inside, your ambition to be the cleverest, the most successful. You shrug and pretend that good luck is behind your high marks. So many years suppressing a secret, the strength of it building and building inside. Then you arrive somewhere like Pitt and something dark and dangerous becomes unleashed.

Although I don’t think you can blame anything on Emilia. The sea change may have started before she left us but it was only afterwards that life in the Game began to deteriorate rapidly.

*   *   *

XXXV(ii)
   There now reside in my apartment two items I do not necessarily remember being here before. On the kitchen counter sits a beer coaster printed with a large and intricate B like a sailor’s knot. It is a white B set on a green disc. Brooklyn Brewery, the coaster reads at its edges. I also find, inside a cup on the same counter, a book of matches bearing the name of a bar – ACE bar – a place I have seen on my walks, several blocks from here. About a third of the matches poke out from the matchbook, curled and burned. Years ago, when I was a smoker, I never tore the paper matches from their books. I bent them out against the strike strip and flicked them with my thumb to light them. To extinguish the flame I always gave the matchbook an insouciant wave, leaving the match in place. I used to have such an easy manner, a certain cool lack of urgency.

But as far as I remember it has been maybe a decade since I last smoked a cigarette.

I picture the bar, its three neon letters red and glowing in the night. ACE. Fate plays mischievous games – it had to be
that
playing card! I imagine myself standing out front and lighting a cigarette for someone else.

But for whom?

Nothing comes to me. The entire set-up feels false in my mind. Right now, life feels like one long series of stabs in the dark. And I am locked inside a room that I never saw lit from the start.

This entire search is futile. One simple truth.

I don’t remember her.

*   *   *

XXXV(iii)
   It is nearly noon. Soon I will put on my shoes and leave, will keep my fingers crossed as I make my way around the block.

If my visitor comes back, I ask of her only one thing. Please forgive me.

Please. This here and now is not the whole man. Give me just a few weeks.

*   *   *

XXXV(iv)
   She didn’t come.

I can hardly bear to type another word. She didn’t come. Of course she didn’t come.

*   *   *

XXXVI(i)
   The Churchill Arms felt sleepy after lunch, its air draped across the lounge bar. Mark lit a cigarette and soon his smoke filled the wall of sunlight dividing the space from corner to corner. The quiz machine flickered festively across from them.

Dorian, a fellow freshman, played the Churchill Arms quiz machine several times a day. Whenever it was ready to be milked, as Dorian described it. Ready to be milked meant the machine was full of tourist money and therefore the questions were easier and you had to answer fewer of them to win the grand prize. Twenty pounds.

Dorian made notes of the questions he answered incorrectly and went to the library most evenings to research. He kept a red folder full of information and spent an hour each day memorising new facts. Jolyon had told all of this to Chad some months ago and Chad held on to everything Jolyon told him. This had been Chad’s idea.

When Dorian entered the pub he moved purposefully toward the machine but glanced around long enough for Jolyon to catch his attention and beckon him over. If you looked closely at Dorian you could see the haemorrhoidal outline of the pound coins bunching in his front trouser pocket.

Jolyon greeted him and they shook hands. Dorian nodded hello to the others, Chad and Mark and Jack.

‘How much are you taking from it these days?’ said Jolyon.

‘Single digits on bad days. Twenty, sometimes thirty, when the going’s good.’

Jolyon smiled approvingly and Dorian shifted to and fro on his feet, not nervous but itching to be some place else.

‘Mind if we join you?’ said Jolyon.

‘Erm…’ said Dorian. He couldn’t say no to Jolyon, not many people could. At best he could indicate his reluctance, shifting his weight back and forth, hoping for release. ‘Well, I suppose…’ His jiggling increased.

‘Just say no if it’s a problem.’

‘No, no, it’s not that.’

‘Great,’ said Jolyon. ‘Look, we’ll stick to one simple rule. None of us will say anything unless we’re one hundred per cent sure of the answer.’

They huddled around the machine and Dorian fetched a coin from his pocket. When the coin dropped, the machine’s lights flashed faster and Dorian pointed at a trail of colours that appeared on the screen. ‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘that’s really good.’ He gazed into the glass, lost and happy. ‘You have been fed, my beauty,’ he said, ‘time to be milked.’

By dint of both his knowledge and his daily research, Dorian’s playing of the machine impressed them all. On history, the subject he was studying at Pitt, he was always quick to hit the correct answer. And whenever instantly certain he would hammer the button with his fist like a mallet. He hesitated sometimes but only to look to the ceiling and call on his memory, to rifle fast through its index cards. He even knew the answers to questions he referred to as deliberate trip-ups, questions with obscure statistical answers. The number of UK convictions for bestiality in 1987. The average annual precipitation on Blackpool beach. The number of golf balls on the moon.

Dorian quickly progressed to potential winnings of ten pounds, and although any mistake would nullify what he had already gained, he played on without a moment’s hesitation.

Up to fifteen pounds. And then –

WINNER OF THE 1932 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS, WHAT WAS THE FIRST NAME OF GERMAN SCIENTIST HEISENBERG?

A. KARL B. MAX C. NIELS D. WERNER

‘Shit,’ said Dorian. ‘This hasn’t come up before. Anyone?’

‘It’s Niels,’ said Mark.

‘One hundred per cent?’ said Dorian.

‘I’m studying physics.’

Dorian gave button C a tentative prod with his forefinger.

INCORRECT – YOU LOSE.

‘Fuck, Mark.’ Dorian, irritated, bounced up and down and the coins jingled in his pocket. ‘I still had a fucking pass available.’ Jingle jingle jingle. ‘We said only answer if you’re one hundred per cent certain.’

‘I was,’ said Mark. ‘But now I come to think of it, the machine tricked me. Werner Heisenberg worked with Niels Bohr. I guess I got their first names muddled up in my head. Sorry, Dorian, really.’

‘It’s all right, it’s fine, it’s fine.’ Dorian took a deep breath. ‘The trail should still be short next time. She thinks we just got lucky. She thinks we play fast and loose. Don’t worry, she’ll sell herself cheap for a little while yet.’

Jack clapped Dorian on the back. ‘She?’ he said. ‘Dorian, you spend nearly every waking hour with this machine and you call it she?’ Jack paused. ‘By the way, how’s your sex life these days?’

Dorian didn’t turn to answer, he stared into the flashing lights. ‘She’s always hungry for me,’ he said, dropping another pound into the slot, ‘and the more time we spend together the less often she tells me I’m wrong. Good luck finding an improvement on this model, Jack.’

In the next game the question that stumped Dorian arrived early on. The winner of the 1971 Epsom Derby.

‘It’s Nijinsky,’ said Mark.

‘Are you sure this time? It’s not Mill Reef?’

‘My dad’s a horse-racing freak.’

‘Mark’s truly amazing on sport,’ said Jolyon.

Dorian, with no great enthusiasm, pressed Nijinsky.

INCORRECT – YOU LOSE.

*   *   *

XXXVI(ii)
   Mark lost three further games for Dorian, each time with escalating promises regarding his certainty. After Mark had sworn on both his mother’s and sister’s eyes and again been proved wrong, Dorian ceased to listen to him entirely.

Mark then began to increase the frequency with which he offered his opinion, while providing more and more patently absurd answers to the simplest of questions. Mars was the closest planet to the sun. General Franco had been an operatic tenor. The winners of the 1970 football World Cup had been Scotland.

Dorian asked him to leave and Mark promised not to say another word. In the sixth game Mark kept to his promise. But when Dorian hesitated as he summoned up his recall of the distance in miles between New York City and Toronto, Mark leaned forward and without uttering a word pressed the button for the answer 2,698, the three other options having been 243, 343 and 443.

Dorian swung quickly around, his arm tensed and his hand bunched as if to throw a punch. ‘You fucking arsehole, Mark. You fucking fucking arse.’

‘Chill out, Door, it’s only a game,’ said Mark.

‘You owe me six fucking pounds.’

‘Look, Door, you have free will. We don’t live in a fascist dictatorship. Nobody made you listen to me.’

‘You hit the fucking button.’ Dorian was incredulous.

‘Once,’ said Mark. ‘Fine, so I owe you one pound.’

‘OK then, where is it?’

‘I’ll give it to you later,’ said Mark. He shrugged as if Dorian were being inexplicably rude.

Dorian poked him in the shoulder and held the finger there, pushing into him as Mark spread his arms and grinned.

‘You’re a cunt, Mark,’ said Dorian. ‘Don’t you ever ever come near me again.’ Dorian stroked the machine goodbye and rushed out from the pub, shaking his head.

Shortest had been watching and listening from the table nearest the quiz machine. He looked like a movie director, imperious and leaning back in his own special chair. One of his legs was crossed high over the other. Shortest scribbled into his notebook, then looked up and nodded at Jolyon.

Jolyon handed to Mark a small card, printed with the words ‘The Picture of Dorian’s Rage’. Mark tore it in four and pushed the pieces into his pocket. ‘That’s enough now,’ he said. ‘Come on, Jolyon, one consequence a week is more than enough. Surely I don’t have to do another one as well.’

‘Of course you do, Mark.’ Jolyon’s eyelids slid slowly down as he shook his head. ‘It’s the rules. Of course you do.’

Mark shouted, ‘I’ve fucking had it with this.’

‘Then quit,’ said Jolyon calmly. ‘You perform your next consequence and you’re all square with the Game. You do that, then you quit before the next round begins, and you get your deposit back.’

‘Just give me the money back now. I’ll quit now if that’s what you want.’

‘I don’t want any one thing more than another,’ said Jolyon, ‘apart from the observance of the rules. We have to be fair to everyone. You know we can’t give you back the money until you’re all square with the Game, Mark. Don’t ask the impossible.’

‘Come on, Jolyon. Don’t be an arse about this.’

Jolyon’s body snapped back. ‘Why pin this on me?’ he said. ‘Why do I have to play sheriff? Ask them if you can just walk away and break any promises you made.’ Jolyon was pointing at Chad and Jack but they weren’t looking, their eyes elsewhere, lips clamped tight. ‘Ask Emilia, ask Dee. And don’t call me an arse.’

‘OK,
fine
, Jolyon.’ Mark was rubbing his face. ‘Shit, but I really liked Dorian,’ he said. ‘I met him on my first day here and he came over when he saw I was on my own and introduced me to a whole bunch of people. I really fucking liked him.’

‘Why the use of past tense, Mark?’ said Chad, putting his hand on Mark’s shoulder. ‘You can still like Dorian. Just because he now despises every last human fibre of you doesn’t mean you have to hate him in return.’

‘Fuck off, Chad,’ said Mark.

Chad laughed. Jack laughed too, it was his favourite type of joke. But Chad laughed harder than Jolyon had ever seen him laugh before.

*   *   *

XXXVI(iii)
   In Jolyon’s room that night they smoked joints and ate salted pistachios. As they threw the half-shells into a metal wastebasket in the middle of the room, they recounted the tale of the quiz machine to Emilia and Dee.

Jack told the tale. He was the best storyteller by far with his tweaks and his colourful untruths and his timing. No one objected to Jack’s fish-eyed accounts of various incidents, even when those incidents were fresh and different in their own minds. They even nodded along harder with the best of the lies, each of them sounding a much better person when Jack told the tale.

Chad, sprawled in the armchair, was considering Dee’s latest outfit. She was wearing an extended pair of bicycle shorts, or cropped leggings perhaps. Whatever they were they were black and tight and they came to an end an inch beneath Dee’s knees. Over these she wore a yellow tutu poufed and patterned with black polka dots. She was sitting on the floor, her back against Jolyon’s bed, with her knees steepled and legs disappearing into a large pair of construction worker’s boots coloured oxblood, their toes nicely scuffed.

It had taken Dee’s unique eye to match to her lower half a strikingly red military jacket. The jacket was weighed down heavily with gold. Gold chevrons and braids and epaulettes. Gold buttons unfastened and the open jacket revealing glimpses of a Sex Pistols T-shirt. Her breasts made the shirt stretch wide at its middle, taut like the plastic wrap over a joint of beef.