Black Chalk (34 page)

*   *   *

LVIII(iv)
   Chad pleaded with Jolyon but Jolyon stared into the distance as if unable to hear, his fingers feeling like they had been crushed in a car door.

‘Please, Jolyon. And not so I can win,’ said Chad. ‘but so we can stop. If you refuse to give in, it has to get worse. What other choice do we have?’

Jolyon looked up with his good eye. ‘Well,
you
could quit,’ he said.

‘You do understand I can’t do that, Jolyon,’ Chad scoffed. ‘Which means anything more that happens to you is as good as self-inflicted. Logically, you’re pretty much doing this to yourself. Come on, this isn’t the time to make your big stand in life. You’ve already had your way with Emilia and Dee, so I get it, you’re the big man. You won, Jolyon, OK? But you have to let me have just
one
thing. Because if you don’t … Jolyon, what just happened was terrible and I’m sorry, I swear I mean that. But from now on, no apologies, we’re not responsible. Please, for everyone’s sake. There’s nothing more you need to prove.’

Dee crouched down and laid her hands on his knees. ‘Please, Jolyon. Listen to Chad,’ she said, tears gathering in her eyes.

Jolyon stood up and decided he could limp well enough. Tallest tried to take his arm but Jolyon pushed him away. ‘Why don’t you all get back to the game?’ he said, looking across at the stadium. ‘I was really enjoying it but things took a turn for the worse. And I think I should leave now.’ He started to limp away but then turned, looking thoughtful, and added, ‘Oh, Dee, you know I just realised something.’ Dee wiped her eyes and Jolyon gave her a grim smile. ‘You’re the only one who can stop this,’ he said. ‘It’s really all up to you now, Dee.’ He put his hand in his pocket as he turned again and left.

*   *   *

LVIII(v)
   In front of the mirror in his room, Jolyon decided he wouldn’t go to the dentist. The tooth was one of the lower molars and you could barely notice its absence, not unless he opened his mouth very wide.

He placed the tooth inside the mug with his pills and his toothbrush, the fork and the photos. And then Jolyon drew his curtains, lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. Tomorrow was the first day of Trinity, Chad’s final term.

*   *   *

LIX(i)
   I lost Dee today. Chad arrives tomorrow. A fine symmetry.

*   *   *

LIX(ii)
   And where was routine when I needed it? Dee’s book, the most important thing of all and I failed to find a place for it in my life. And now routine has abandoned me.

Did I take it on my walk? I don’t remember.

Where did I walk today? I don’t remember.

If I took the book out with me then it is lost. It must still be inside this apartment, it must be. It has to be.

Feebly I cast around my apartment as if the same old looking in the same old places might not have the selfsame result. But all I find is the destruction of my daily bread. Mnemonics scattered, life overturned. The only things I fish out from the stew are a whisky bottle and pills, prompted to find them by an itching beneath my skin. And laughably, amid all the wreckage, my evening routine ice-cube tray has held on to my pills as if cupped in a mother’s outstretched palm. Four pink pills, three yellow, three blue. I swallow them with swigs of whisky straight from the bottle. I have only my cravings to remind me how to live now.

This apartment, this miserable machine of my life, its laughable ticky-tacky parts discarded and strewn.

Curtains closed, blinds lowered. The hermit returns. Long live the hermit.

*   *   *

LX(i)
   Third term began with an act of generosity. They pushed a note under Jolyon’s door to inform him a vote had been taken, the Game was in hiatus, they would skip a round. And perhaps the extra time would give him a chance to reconsider his position.

Jolyon screwed up the piece of paper, returned to his bed and with a sudden gasp began to cry. Warm tears of relief flowed down his bruised cheeks, over his swollen lips.

And so, temporarily, the battle could be fought on only one front. A new term and Mark had promised a new phase. But the start of Trinity term didn’t lead to the abandonment of his sleep-deprivation tactics, although there was no longer much sleep to deprive. The doctor’s pills could send Jolyon only into fogs, sleeplike hazes but not sleep itself, and the tappings and roarings became mere annoyances. Soon Jolyon began to regard them only as distance markers in the slow race for the night to be over.

In the daytime Jolyon sometimes thought about stoicism, facing hardship like a man, like Santiago in
The Old Man and the Sea
. And because manliness was a notion that appealed to him, he clung to the thought of not surrendering until he didn’t know whether his refusal to surrender was genuine determination or merely a literary reference.

On the fourth day of term, Jolyon returned to the college doctor. Yes, there were indeed further options, old chap. Simply a case of finding the right combination apropos the particular patient – he began to scribble excitedly on his prescription pad – and they could bump up the doses, of course. Not to worry, the ship would right itself in time. No need to wave the white flag quite yet, old chap.

*   *   *

LX (ii)
The first act of phase four was played out the next day. When Jolyon went to the bathrooms at the bottom of staircase six in the morning, there were two sheets taped to the wall. The
Pitt Pendulum
, as usual, but also a photocopied page from Jolyon’s diary. It was a copy of an entry he had made two weeks after arriving at Pitt. Mark, helpfully, had provided a title.

Excerpts from the secret diary of Jolyon Johnson no. 1

Met a guy called Dorian today. Clearly an Etonian. He tries to convince himself and everyone else he’s clever, as opposed to well trained, by learning answers to a quiz machine in the Churchill. Like a parrot. And with a parrot’s capacity for understanding the information being blandly recited. I think they actually teach them charm at Eton and some of them wear it well. But on others it sits uneasily. Dorian is in the second camp.

Jolyon tore the sheet from the wall and checked the next bathroom where he found the same taped-up piece of paper. He went to the bathrooms on staircases seven and eight. And then he realised it was futile and hurried back to his room.

He wondered how he might avoid ever seeing Dorian again and pinched the bridge of his nose, there was such a knot of pain there. He tried to think about who else he had written about negatively in his diary. The pain flared as names flashed through Jolyon’s head. He curled onto his bed and pushed his forehead up against the coolness of the wall.

*   *   *

LX (iii)
Jolyon stopped attending lectures the next day and started to leave his room only in the middle of the night. In the library at three in the morning, he would photocopy the cases and articles he had to read and then hurry back to his bed. And when he visited the bathroom at four in the morning, Jolyon found that, every day, another page had appeared.

Excerpts from the secret diary of Jolyon Johnson no. 2

Two of the most ludicrous characters at Pitt go by the names Jamie and Nick. Jamie is the son of a renowned Cambridge scholar but acts like one of the street urchins from
Oliver Twist
. His accent changes wildly according to the company he keeps. Conversing with any of us, he starts dropping and morphing his consonants, saying things like ‘it’s a bit fin on the ground, mate’ or ‘what do you fuckin fink?’ He’s good-looking, insecure and utterly insincere.

Nick, the sidekick, doesn’t hide his accent so carefully but he does conceal his name. On the room board he’s N. Risley. But on a tip-off from Jamie, I peeped at a letter in his pigeonhole. It was addressed to ‘The Hon. Nicholas Tower Wriothesley’. Apparently, Wriothesley is pronounced Risley, and he’s officially ‘the honourable’ because he’s the son of a baron. Meanwhile, the honourable Nick has had a string of girlfriends at least sixty or seventy points higher than him on the scale of attractiveness. Maybe they use Jamie as bait. Or perhaps everyone’s now heard tell of the £250 million family fortune the honourable Nick stands to inherit. The girlfriends never last more than a week. But I’m sure he treats them all honourably.

And what was Jolyon to do but hide? He thought about making a statement, pasting his own sheets to the walls, explaining that any diary was a place of secret thoughts. That his own diary was simply a way of purging these thoughts. He considered appealing to everyone’s secret self, don’t we all have dark thoughts from time to time? The only thing that matters is how we behave, how we
act
on those thoughts.

But Jolyon did nothing, only hid in his fog of pills and doubled the dose. As he lay on his bed he became very good at picturing everyone at Pitt. In his mind he could hear their accents and mimic their verbal habits, he could imagine their physical tics as they spoke. Jolyon was able to create puppets of everyone he knew inside his head. And he spent hours pulling their strings, acting out their hatred in intricate detail.

Sometimes he held the tooth clenched tight in his palm. And although he constantly fantasised about breaking down Mark’s door, taking back his diary, attacking Mark, punishing Mark, Jolyon knew that his body had no more strength to give.

The truth was that suffering in silence was no longer only a romantic notion. Suffering in silence was now Jolyon’s only remaining choice.

*   *   *

LXI(i)
   My hangover and the pain in my nose wake me at five in the morning, eight hours before I have agreed to meet Chad at JFK. I fall out of bed and stumble around looking for something to tell me what to do. But the sprawling mess of my apartment is like a thousand instructions yelling themselves at once.

My story, my pills, my whisky. These are the only voices that rise above the roar.

Just before I leave, I notice a distinct absence of clothes on my body. But there are clothes everywhere across the floor, how could I forget?

The few minutes it takes to dress give me enough time for one more whisky.

And now I must face him.

*   *   *

LXI(ii)
   I am watching the passengers emerge into the arrivals hall when there is a
tap tap tap
on my shoulder. I jump, a brief panic, and then I turn and see him. For a while I stare stupidly as if Chad’s is the last face I would have expected to see in this place.

He is still young-looking, his hair smooth, not receding. He offers his hand to shake but I am caught unawares and fail to respond. Chad laughs, a gentle laugh, not a scornful one. And then he speaks. Should we hug instead? Chad’s voice is softer than I remember, not English exactly but less acutely American.

I shake his hand quickly, my fingers limp in the firm grip of his palm.

You were late, he says. Or maybe I was early.

The arrivals board said you landed on time, I say.

Chad points down to his small carry-on case. No waiting at baggage, he says, I zipped on through. Then when I didn’t see you, I got some coffee. Chad squints at my face and says, Man, what happened to you?

I touch my nose. Christmas-tree accident, I say.

Christmas tree? Chad says. Jolyon, it’s
May
.

I can’t think what to say, how to avoid mention of Dee. There is a great tranquil presence about this older Chad, an aura that makes me nervous. I blurt out the first thing I can think of. Great weather, I say. No humidity yet.

Chad only nods with a trace of bemusement.

I thought about making you one of those name signs, I say, feeling myself beginning to blush. And why did I say this? It’s not even true.

Hey, you should have done, Chad says, with a genial laugh. A sign with my name, that would have been great, I’ve never had one of those.

But you wouldn’t have seen it, I say.

No, he says, I guess that’s true.

I try my best to listen for clues, to feel for invisible currents. I used to be good at this but I can tell nothing more about Chad than what lies on the surface. Good-looking and happy, at peace with himself.

Chad puts his hand on my shoulder. It truly is good to see you, Jolyon, he says.

His touch makes me flinch inside. I should go, I say.

Go? Chad says. But you only just got here. Jolyon, I asked you to meet me at the airport because I thought we might catch up. At least share a cab with me, that’ll give us an hour to chat. I’ll drop you off at your place on the way to my hotel.

I flinch when Chad talks about
my place
. It reminds me that he has found me here, has hunted me down like a fugitive from justice. I really think I should take the subway, I say.

I’m paying, Chad says.

I just bought a Metrocard, I say, quickly blushing again.

Sure then, Chad says. We can play this any way you want to, Jolyon. Chad looks muscular and tanned, he doesn’t even look tired after his flight. We really do need to talk though, he says. Can I come to your apartment tomorrow? What time’s good for you?

Any time, I reply, I don’t think my schedule’s especially hectic tomorrow.

Good, Chad says, see you tomorrow then. He shakes my hand firmly again. But then, as Chad is about to leave, he turns back and says, Oh, I nearly forgot, I have a present for you, Jolyon. I mean, it’s dumb really. He reaches into his suitcase and hands me a small gift in silver wrapping. But don’t open it here, he says, you’ll embarrass me.

I am shaking the gift next to my ear, feeling its weight.

Come on, I’m like beetroot over here, Chad says. But this isn’t true. He swipes paw-like at the air. It’s really great to see you, Jolyon, he says. And then as Chad walks away, not looking back, he raises an arm as high as it can stretch. He points at the sky with his forefinger, waves a loose farewell. When he lowers the arm he is lost in the crowd.

*   *   *

LXI(iii)
   I open the present while I ride the Air Train to Howard Beach. Inside I find, folded up so that it is no bigger than a deck of playing cards, a small tablecloth. It is round and white, made of delicate lace. Also there is a box. I remove the lid and peer inside. The box is lined, foam rubber with two cut-out holes that nestle two eggs. Chad has carried with him, more than three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, a tablecloth and two hard-boiled eggs.