House of Windows (7 page)

‘Hey, Nick, you OK?’

Susie was reclining elegantly against a lamp post, looking at him with amusement.

He raised his hands to smooth his hair down, trying to calm his breathing. ‘Fi-ne,’ he panted. ‘Just came from … one of these “welcome to our club” squashes, only it was …’ He shuddered.

Susie grinned. ‘Yeah, I went to a few of those as well. I’ve also managed to get chucked out of a society.’

‘It’s still only Week 2.’

Susie shrugged. ‘Yes, aren’t I efficient?’ She sighed, turning to lean her back against the lamp post so she didn’t have to crane sideways to look at him. ‘I overheard some of the society officers talking about their accounts, so of course I went over to have a little look, and then I spent a little while explaining the many things they were doing wrong and why they should appoint me secretary on the spot … and then they asked me to leave. So, really, their loss. If they hadn’t made me secretary I wouldn’t have stayed anyway.’

Nick opened his mouth, closed it.

‘Well?’ Susie demanded, crossing her arms. ‘What were you going to say?’

‘I’m not going to say anything. At least about you being secretary. I am trying to be more easy-going.’

Susie snorted. ‘Not to be discouraging, Nick, but I don’t think that’s likely to work out for you. You might as well start as you mean to go on.’

‘So you love my charming personality?’

Susie grinned. ‘Touché. To be fair, until you stop being the best in every supervision you’re kind of on my blacklist. I’m not much enjoying my fall from being top of the class at school. But give me a few weeks and we’ll see.’

With over an hour left before dinner with his ‘College Parents’, there was just time to try the other literary society squash of the day. By the time he arrived at Pembroke and found the right room, the meeting had already kicked off, but the door was ajar so he slipped in almost unnoticed.
Someone offered him a wine glass filled with something surely too yellow to be wine and a plastic cup of something surely too orange to be potable. He accepted the orange drink, grimaced a smile of thanks and slid into a seat at the back of the room.

‘But the problem, of course, is that this essentialises the Other as atavistic and unchanging without a concurrent appreciation of the socially constructed nature of this framing device. It also implies that patriarchy belongs to the Global South, failing to address its primacy in all forms of hegemonic masculinity,’ said the person standing at the front of the room, waving a book bristling with page-markers.

‘But don’t you think that the carnivalesque mode of the intertextual references problematises the binary oppositions implied by the Orientalist discourses the author appears to be prioritising?’ someone else called out.

‘Yes, but doesn’t Derran’s notion of Zylonation explain both those objections?’ Nick interrupted.

For a moment the room was silent. Several people nodded. A few murmured in assent.

‘Good point,’ said the man at the front of the room. ‘Would you care to expand further for us?’

‘Not particularly. I’m not sure I’m up for weekly meetings of talking rubbish, just with really clever-sounding words. I think I’ll go and Zylonate elsewhere,’ he said, getting to his feet.

A heated debate broke out behind him as he slipped away.

Nick arrived back in College in time to find Tim
hurrying across Front Court, a redhead in pursuit, screaming incoherently at his back.

‘Oi! ’Nuff of that!’ shouted a porter, leaning out of the p’lodge. ‘Ange,’ he called, gesturing to someone passing through the gateway behind Nick. ‘You’ll go sort that for me, won’t you, love?’

‘Sort what?’ asked a short figure so muffled between a huge trenchcoat and a furry black Russian hat that almost nothing of her face was visible. She tilted the hat back and peered ahead. ‘Oh, that,’ she said, and heaved a sigh. ‘You’ll owe me a hug,’ she told the porter. ‘A really big one.’

Nick saw Tim’s face do something very odd when he spotted the small figure in his path, his expression half relief and half guilt. He darted around her and sprinted out through the gateway while the redhead gave one last scream of fury and frustration as she slowed to a stop. The girl in the Russian hat stepped forwards and put an arm about her. The porter ducked quickly back into the p’lodge while Nick hurried on, eyes averted from the crying and shushing.

Susie was leaning against the wall in the narrow tunnel into North Court, waiting outside the Senior Tutor’s office with a form. ‘You look like your day’s not improving,’ she told him.

‘I obviously followed a white rabbit with a pocket watch this morning and have since suffered traumatic amnesia about that fact.’

She shook her head. ‘Cambridge is mostly like this. Trust me. I grew up here.’

‘Explains some things,’ Nick said. With a sigh, he headed past into North Court and then up to the A staircase set where his College Parents had asked their ‘children’ to gather.

His College Parents turned out to be a Laurel and Hardy couple who had decorated their sitting room with photos of Harrow-on-the-Hill and class portraits of boys in a variety of startlingly coloured blazers.

‘Perfect,’ said the tall one, when Nick sank on to the corner of the sofa. ‘Our little family is complete. Now, you should just think of us as your gay Cambridge dads.’

‘Only we’re not actually gay and, like, incest with your College Parents is totally the done thing, so don’t be shy, girl-children,’ said the short one.

The tall one laughed into the stricken silence. ‘So this is just a little “get to know you” gathering, but of course our role in your lives is to provide support and info and the low-down on all things Cambridge, like where to get the cheapest booze and how to get the best grades with the least work. Lots of fun ahead. First up, Pot Noodles for all. Tallest Child,’ he said, pointing to a boy folded uncomfortably into a low armchair, ‘can you bring cutlery while we dish up? Oh, before I forget, I’ve got a present for the baby of our family.’

The short one reached into a drawer, scuffled around in it and then raised his hand aloft in triumph, brandishing a dummy and a bib. ‘Haha!’ he said.

On his way down A staircase a minute later, Nick stopped to glare at a poster advertising ‘Linkline: Listening and
support for students by students’.
At the moment, I shudder to think.

He turned away from the sound of laughter echoing from the JCR and hunched into his jacket. In the p’lodge, he pulled the Friday SuperHall sign-up list towards him, only for a porter to pull it away. ‘Why can’t I put my name down?’ he snapped.

‘Sorry, Nick. You’re fine at regular Formal Hall next Thursday if you’ve got an adult with you, but there’s no visitors at SuperHall so it’s a non-starter, that.’

‘What if I got one of my friends to be my responsible adult?’

The porter shook his head. ‘The day they make a responsible Fresher is the day I grow my hair out and dye it green. Don’t take on, OK? SuperHall’s no great shakes. It’s a dinner of rubbish foreign-themed food and a load of rowdy drinking games—’

Nick shoved away from the counter and stormed out of the street door while the man was still speaking.

Senate House Passage was damp and grey, a fine mizzle turning the world distant and untrustworthy.

So much for never being miserable here.

At nine o’clock, with no message from Michael that he’d get home at all, Nick set off, head down into the blustering rain, for the post-SuperHall ‘Viva’ disco. The sound of the cars
on the wet roads, the water cast over his feet by their tyres, turned the pavement into a storm-soaked sea promenade. He barely looked up until he reached the p’lodge. In Front Court, the buildings glowed eerily through the rain, the stone a fleshy white-gold. The glass in the windows throbbed dully with the bass beat of music from the JCR, humming in his bones and making his fingertips tingle.

Up the stairs between Latham Building and the Old Library, he found students sitting in listing clusters, eyes blindly reflecting the light. Over-bright liquids shone poisonously through the flimsy white plastic of disposable cups. One had spilled, a tiny aquamarine cataract flowing down the steps. A boy puked into the stone birdbath in the corner. The flashing lights, strobing like emergency vehicles, made the scene look like the aftermath of a disaster.

Nick wound his way up the steps, unable to shake the sense that the laughter was shrieks, the shouts horror rather than delight. He slipped into the line of people waiting to enter the JCR behind a girl wearing little more than gold straps, her lips purple-blue, perhaps from make-up, perhaps from the cold.

‘Students only,’ said a porter, holding a hand across the door when Nick tried to step through.

‘I’m Nick Derran. I matriculated this year.’ He fished his ID out of his pocket.

The porter glared down at it. ‘Oh, the genius kid,’ he said.

‘I’m not …’ He broke off with a sigh, taking his ID back. ‘Can I go in now?’

The porter shook his head. ‘Sorry. Over-eighteens only.’

‘Some of the others are definitely seventeen still.’

‘Maybe. You’re definitely not.’

‘But—’

‘What’s the hold-up?’ someone shouted behind them.

‘Let’s not argue, Nick,’ said the porter. ‘It’s not going to happen. Your parents can talk to the College if they want, but I’m pretty sure the word’ll stay the same. Either way, it’s a no for tonight. Off you go now.’ He gently tugged Nick to the side to clear the doorway.

Nick flung the porter’s hand off and shoved his way back down the steps, nearly toppling over the shoulder of a girl who suddenly leaned sideways into his path, vomiting on to the stone. At the bottom of the stairs, he turned and glared up at the party above.

‘About the only fun you’ll have watching from here is seeing who ends up bundering in the bushes,’ someone said.

Nick spun to find Tim standing behind him.

‘You might want to turn that frown upside down before you head up to the bop,’ Tim said. ‘But, hey, you get points for turning up to be sociable.’

Nick heaved a sigh and looked away to the river.

‘You haven’t been hovering out here all evening, have you?’

‘I thought we weren’t doing the whole “asking questions, getting to know each other” thing?’ Nick snapped.

‘Just go on up, Nick. It won’t be so bad. You do a bit of the Amazing Pointy Dance,’ Tim stuck a finger in the air then
pointed it downwards to his opposite knee, ‘and you sway a bit from side to side, and there you have every step you ever need to know for College bops.’

‘How drunk do you have to be to want to do that for five hours at a stretch?’

‘Pretty drunk, but just go with the flow. Trust me, no one will think you look stupid: for a start, no one can even see straight by this point.’

‘So why are you standing around talking to me? Why don’t you go and get pointy dancing already?’

‘Seriously?’ Tim shuddered. ‘Do I
look
like I want to hang out with a bunch of lacquered undergrads?’

‘Then why are you so dead set on sending me up there?’

‘Because this is
your
first Trinity Hall Viva! It’s a rite of passage. Go thou forth, little Fresher, and … OK, so no drinking till you puke for you … but you could go and snog a bunch of inappropriate people.’

‘Oh yeah, because eighteen-year-olds love snogging short fifteen-year-olds. And then there’s the whole possibility of going to jail—’

‘I said go and get your snog on, not go and sleep with anyone. There will be plenty of people up there so drunk they’d snog the Master if he gave them half a chance. And, OK, you’re a bit on the short side, but you’re taller than
some
of the girls … and I’m sure there are plenty of boys who like short guys if you’re more that way inclined.’

‘Just when I thought my evening couldn’t get worse, there’s you and this conversation.’

Tim frowned at him. ‘It must be bad: you forgot to mutter. What’s got your knickers in a twist now? I mean, you can’t have been expecting SuperHall food to taste like, well, food. I mean, you were at the Matriculation Feast: you had to have guessed that SuperHall was just going to be all the bad bits squared and a tenner for your stomach pains.’

‘Don’t you have somewhere else to be?’

Tim grinned broadly. ‘Definitely, but since I’m having so much fun basking in the warmth of your charming company—’

‘Mr Brethan, I can hear you trying and failing to be humorous from my room,’ cut in a sharp voice. Nick looked around to find Professor Gosswin glaring up the stairs to the JCR. ‘Why must these dreadful sounds be amplified past all reasonable limits? Surely there is some health and safety regulation against it.’

‘Nope,’ Tim replied, rocking backwards and forwards on his heels. ‘They’ll shut it off just after midnight like they do every bop. But we can stand here and listen to you whinge till then if that’ll brighten your evening.’

Professor Gosswin gave him a withering look. ‘Good night, Mr Brethan.’

‘Oh, but Nick and I were—’

‘Go away, Mr Brethan.’

Tim grinned, but sauntered off obligingly.

‘If you are going to go and permanently damage your hearing, you should get on with it, Mr Derran.’