Jammy Dodger (5 page)

‘Kind of. It's not exactly a crotch-gripping read …' He scratched at his designer stubble. ‘… It's mainly about Sylvia Plath.'

‘I fucken
knew
it!'

‘Anyway, I'd better go and lay some groundwork.' He drained his glass and picked up two more. ‘As the Chinese say:
dig the well before you're thirsty
. Catch you later.'

He slid away in the direction of a group of undergraduettes who were chatting innocently near the snacks table. I could almost hear the theme from
Jaws
.

Further down the room, in the armchair section, the silverbacks were in their customary drinking formation, their leader, an out-of-focus Ernest Hemingway, holding court. Near them, in trademark Resistance-style beret and cloak, was the Irish-language poet Grainne MacCumhaill. She had backed one of the librarians against a pillar and was stabbing her repeatedly in the chest with an emphatic index finger. I made a mental note to steer clear.

There was a sudden whiff of expensive leather and Boyd Monroe, my former tutor, swept up on my blind side.

‘How's the wine? Is it amusing?' he asked, slapping my shoulder.

‘Oh, it's hilarious. Just don't get any in your mouth.'

He sipped, swilled, did hamster cheeks and a couple of fake retches.

‘Mmm, I'm getting … molasses, burnt hair … a hint of tramps' underpants. Yes, I do believe they've broken out the good stuff. By the way, have you seen the state of Trenchie?'

We settled in for a session of mockery and cynicism. Monroe, tall, languid, prematurely grey – a man for whom soft corduroy had been invented – had briefly, as a young buck, been the toast of academe for an elegant treatise on the poems of Louis Aragon but had long since given up on conventional measurements of success and dedicated himself to a life of indolent hedonism. Robert Frost's epigram, ‘
College is a refuge from hasty judgment
' – a handy ice-breaker for postgraduates – had eventually hardened into his credo.

Beside us at the bar, Professor DeVille was sparring with Professor Cornelius O'Toole, a diminutive medievalist from Limerick. O'Toole had come north for a weekend in the late 1950s, ostensibly to buy a copy of
Lucky Jim
(which was banned in the Irish Republic), and never found his way home. They were supposed to be entertaining a visiting poet, one of the Martian crowd, who was blinking suspiciously at them through large steel-rimmed spectacles.

‘That reminds me of the story Dougie Dunn tells about arriving at Hull, do you know it?' DeVille was saying in his best Oxbridge drawl.

‘Yes, old Phil Larkin,' he continued. ‘Who was quite senior by then, calls him into his office.
There's too much poetry in this department, Douglas
, he says,
and I'm relying on you
– wait, wait, this is good –
I'm relying on you to STAMP IT OUT!'

DeVille and O'Toole broke into uproarious high-pitched laughter.

The poet nodded humourlessly. He was wearing a strangely-textured, cream waistcoat that appeared to be made of tripe.

‘Yes, I had heard that one as a matter of fact. From Dougie himself.'

‘Tell me, is this your first visit to the land of saints and scholars,' O'Toole enquired.

Before the Martian could reply Monroe broke in: ‘
Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush, / Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints
 …'

They stared at him. Monroe beamed back.

‘Good evening Boyd,' said DeVille icily. ‘Still working part-time for the Irish tourist board I see.'

 

We persevered with the red, which had stopped stinging and become sweeter after the fifth glass. The evening had already passed the half-way stage and gone through a perceptible step change in noise volume, collective animation and traffic speed. Faces loomed in and out at the bar. More drinks were poured. More words filled the air. Faster. More.

Monroe had settled fully into the quotation mode that alcohol seemed to activate in him – a facility that even I found wearing after a while.

‘I think I'm starting to
feel the drunkenness of things being various
,' he remarked, as Grainne McCumhaill came to a swaying halt in front of us. Her beret was askance and the red wine stains curving up from either side of her mouth were reminiscent of Batman's arch-enemy The Joker.

‘What are you two laughing at?' she demanded.

No answer.

‘I've been watching you,' The finger was cocked. ‘And you're up to some kind of …
badness
.'

‘Grainne, I assure you, there's no badness here, only love, peace and understanding,' Monroe said. ‘How's the poetry going?'

‘I don't believe a word of it – you're a pair of …' She caught sight of the librarian heading for the door and took off in pursuit.

 

The Merlot and the tobacco fumes were starting to get to me so I excused myself and slipped out for a Marlboro. It was warm outside and the air was musky with the scents of blossom and cooling vegetation. Overhead, the odd star was just visible above the yellowish aura of the campus lights. I ignited the cigarette and it too was sweet, and dry, and somehow empowering. It tasted good. I goldfished out a row of blue-tinged smoke rings and watched them disintegrate into the ambient darkness: chaos theory made visible. From beyond the cloisters came the sounds of the city at night: whoops of desire, sirens, cars, rhythmic bass, the grunts and cries of the higher primates at play … It was nice here. I felt safe. The wine, inferior though it was, had done its job on my bloodstream and frontal lobe. This wasn't such a bad life. Okay, so there was pretension, and pretentious people, and incomprehensible prose, and migraine-inducing poetry, and smart-arse theories, and false bonhomie, and paranoia and spite and all those other human failings that become evident in a tight space, but there was also vitality and creativity: a need to examine, to explore, to know.
Attunedness
. To the sonic boom of being here. An awareness that
world is crazier and more of it than we think
. That all this is
incorrigibly plural
. Besides, what was the alternative? As the man said,
the unexamined life is not worth living
. That's a bitch of a responsibility to bear on your own.

I blew a solar flare of smoke towards the moon, which was new and as slender as a fingernail paring. I was just thinking about rejoining the fray when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a small movement and, as I turned my head, I saw it: a fox, slinking between the shrubbery and the wall of the building. Leading with its nose, the animal sniffed its way delicately to the edge of the lawn where it stopped, one front paw poised in mid-step, to listen. Even in the shadow I could make out the almost toy-like sharpness of its muzzle and the creaminess of its breast. I tried not to breathe. Commitment made, the creature launched forward into a single-minded, staccato trot across the grass.
An urban fox!
I caught myself grinning inanely. Then, halfway across it sensed my presence, halting as suddenly and completely as a freeze-framed film, and I was given the full-beam brilliance of its amber-green eyes. A moment later it was in the bushes on the other side. Gone.

I could hear, now, the throb of music starting up in the students' union – Disco Night – Hot Chocolate's belief in miracles drifting across the quadrangle … Did I believe in miracles? I flicked the cigarette-end high into the air where it seemed to hover at its apogee before falling to earth in a burst of fiery flakes.

Look around you, I know of nothing else.

 

When I returned to the bar Monroe had just been joined by Tristan Quigley, the Lagan Theatre's resident director. Beside him was a young man dressed entirely in black, smoking a Sobranie Black Russian.

‘God, is everybody here drunk or what?' Quigley exclaimed, plucking imaginary fluff from the lapels of his immaculate cream jacket. ‘We're a bunch of degenerates!'

‘There's nothing like free booze to bring out the greed in people,' I observed.

‘
When night / Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons / Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine
,' Monroe said.

Quigley flapped his hands and rolled his preternaturally blue eyes to the ceiling.

‘Don't tell me, don't tell me … I know this …
Paradise Lost!
Am I right?'

‘You are, sir.'

‘God, aren't we cultured!' he crowed.

‘
Culture is always something that was, / Something pedants can measure
,' Monroe intoned. ‘
Skull of bard, thigh of chief, / Depth of dried-up river. / Shall we be thus for ever? / Shall we be thus for ever?'

‘Right, okay, you have me there,' said Quigley, crestfallen. ‘Here, have you met Barney? Barney is Stanford Winks' partner.'

We shook hands with the cartoonishly handsome Barney.

‘Look, there's Stannie over there! Stan-nie …' Quigley called.

On the other side of the room, the bespectacled Winks, dressed as though for the golf club in gold-buttoned blazer and grey slacks, waved back bleakly, the lower half of his face periodically eclipsed by the angry bobbing of a beret-clad head.

‘Barney's an actor. A very good actor.' Quigley announced.

‘We're all actors,' Barney said, expelling a geyser of smoke.

‘He's right, you know.' Monroe, bang on cue. ‘
All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players … / And one man in his time plays many parts.
'

‘Jesus, Boyd, have you been revising all day or something?' Quigley said. It wasn't clear whether his irritation was real or not.

‘Tell me, Tristan, what's up next at the Lagan?' I asked in an attempt to distract.

‘Oh, don't talk to me!' he cried. ‘It's an almighty bollocks. Those old …
scrotes
on the board want to put on some boring old crowd-pleaser but I've told them – and I've told them loud and clear – it's something new or I
walk
. I am
fucked
if I'm doing
Where's The Vicar's Trousers?
AGAIN! They just cannot seem to grasp that I am about the transformation of metaphor into stage reality! That theatrical conceptualisation is my raison d'etre!'

‘Fuck them,' said Barney.

‘Oh I
will
fuck them Barney, don't you worry,' Quigley muttered and, again, it wasn't quite … clear.

Attention shifted to my left, where DeVille and O'Toole, having been ditched by the Martian, had been joined by an exceedingly drunk civilian deflected from his homeward path by the buzz of conversation in a well-lighted space. He was of indeterminate middle age but dressed in the frosty-wash-denim garb of a younger generation. He sported a full dark beard, wore his hair tied back in a ponytail and reeked of kebab. I'd noticed him when he first came in, how he was walking as though his feet didn't quite reach the ground. The professors were willing him not to be there and had switched into scholarly vernacular in an attempt to drive him away.

‘In that case one would need to access Continental, ah, thinking,' DeVille groped. ‘Phenomenology, hermeneutics and so on – not particularly helpful in this analysis.'

‘Christ, you said it mate, my hermeneutics are killing me,' groaned Frosty-Wash, leaning one hand on the bar for support.

‘But when you posit such a situation, are you doing so in a Kantian or a Marxian sense?' bluffed O'Toole.

‘Oh Kant, of course.'

‘Who you calling …
Kant
?' growled Frosty-Wash, attempting to focus.

DeVille took a deep breath.

‘I see what you're getting at Cornelius and I agree with it up to a point, but these are, don't forget, essentially postmodern modalities …'

‘I'm not so sure,' said O'Toole, wiping the sheen off his bald pate.

‘Well, let's face it, none of us are Saussure,' cracked DeVille. Both men guffawed.

‘Foucault …' O'Toole began.

‘Foucault yourself …' yelped Frosty-Wash, who was gripping the bar with both hands now and making ominous Funky Chicken movements with his neck.

‘I don't like the look of that,' said Monroe, catching my eye.

‘Stanford, darling, there you are!' Quigley shrilled.

Winks had been delivered to us via the peristaltic motion of the crowd.

He shook hands with each of us in turn, including Barney. He was noticeably sober.

‘Stanford, you look miserable as sin,' said Quigley. ‘Who pissed on your chips? You just tell me and I'll deal with them.'

‘Wind your neck down, Tristan, no one, as you put it, pissed on my chips. It's just been a long day and I want to get home and have Barney here work on my back.'

‘Ooh, you dirty skitter,' Quigley squealed.

‘He means a massage,' said Barney, holding up muscular, manicured hands.

Winks turned to me.

‘How are things Artie? Everything under control?'

‘Steady as she goes, captain,' I replied, raising my glass.

‘Good, good, glad to hear it.' He continued to stare at me. ‘Um, by the way, I'll be dropping round to you on Monday, to the office – we need to look at the
Lyre
accounts and to discuss a couple of, er, matters.'

‘Anything specific?'

‘No, no. Just stuff.' He pointed at the ceiling. ‘From on high.'

‘The Hawk?'

Winks glanced round fearfully.

‘What? Where? Is he here?'

‘There was a rumour he might be,' I said.

‘
The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats though unseen among us,'
Monroe chipped in. He followed up with a horror film laugh.

‘You're not as funny as you think you are, Boyd,' said Quigley. ‘In fact you're – '

At that moment Frosty-Wash, having vainly tried to refresh himself with the Vietnamese Shiraz, lost the tug-of-war he'd been having with his vestibular system and full-scale chaos broke out at the bar. Panicked drinkers stumbling back in waves from the epicentre were treading on the feet of those behind them, the resultant shrieks of pain mingling with screams of terror. In later accounts, some would claim the situation had been exacerbated by Frosty-Wash, disoriented but still active (in the volcanic sense), attempting to flee his own handiwork. Escape was further hindered by the prone – and not insubstantial – figure of the Sea Devil, who had gone down heavily in the initial melee. My own lasting impression from the cavalcade of broken images that night was of a frieze of anguished faces painted in the style of Edvard Munch. That, and the Martian poet tearfully contemplating the encrusted mosaic that had been applied at high velocity to his tripe waistcoat.