Lonely Hearts (31 page)

“A New Look at Poetry and Repression.”
Critical Inquiry
, v (1979).

“Coming out of the Unconscious.”
Modern Language Notes
, xcv (1980).

Nietzsche and Woman: Provocation and Closure
. Chicago, III, and London. University of Chicago Press, 1983.

“(You said all you wanted was) A Sign, My Love. Deconstruction and Popular Culture.” University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1984.

Deconstruction and Defacement
. New York and London. Methuen, 1986.

Patel took a break from Doria’s list of publications and rested his head in his arms. The words were beginning to jump and blur. Until now he’d been the only one of his family not to need glasses. He wondered about taking a break; the rain had eased off and he could walk between the trees and down the hill to the Sports Center, take a shower. He ought to do something before two-fifteen. Doria was lecturing to the combined second- and third-year groups of his course and Patel had every intention of being there. He had been into the student shop and bought a new A4 pad for the occasion.

“What I don’t understand, sir,” Naylor was saying, “is what he’s doing with someone like this—what’s her name?—Sally Oakes? I mean, I know there’s nothing wrong with working in the Virgin Megastore, but that’s all she does, and on top of that she’s…”

“Young enough to be his daughter,” Resnick finished for him. “It isn’t unknown, Kevin. Older men and younger women, young women and older men.”

“I know, sir. But take a look at the others. A fifty-year-old Anglican deaconess and this one, a Local Studies librarian who spends all her spare time clambering over rocks in the Peak District, and the manageress of one of them posh clothes shops along Bridlesmith Gate.” He wrinkled his nose, perplexed. “There’s no pattern to it.”

“Likes variety, the professor.”

Naylor pushed two sheets of typing paper, sellotaped together, across Resnick’s desk. “Look here, sir. Eighteen months, four different women, each of them he takes out at least three times.”

“Sally Oakes, five,” observed Resnick. “That’s the most.”

“He’s not waiting until he’s through with one…”

“Or they’re through with him…”

“Before he’s on to the next. Look at the way they overlap.”

“With Oakes threaded through the middle, neat as you like, once every, what, six weeks?”

“Just about, sir.”

Resnick sighed and leaned backwards, taking the chair on to its rear legs. “The last time she saw him was between two and three months back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why nothing more?”

“She told him she didn’t want to see him again.”

“She told him?”

“Yes, sir,” said Naylor positively.

“Did she say why?”

“Got a regular bloke, sir. Didn’t see any way she could go on meeting the professor.”

“Did she say how he took that?”

Naylor’s eyes darted quickly away. “No, sir.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t worry.” Resnick stood up and walked round the desk. How long was the gap between Sally Oakes finishing their intermittent relationship and the first murder? Without working it out exactly, Resnick figured it would be somewhere in the region of six weeks.

“Well done, young Kevin,” he said. “You’ve done good work. Next thing, I think we should go and have another chat with Sally Oakes.” And he turned away to avoid the most excessive of Naylor’s blushes.

The lecture room was steeply sloped, with curved rows of bench seats and writing surfaces focused upon a blackboard, a screen, twin easels peppered with a flourish of names in many colors, a podium. The room was three-quarters full: students whose pain of comprehension showed on their faces, those who wrote continuously, others for whom the briefest of notes sufficed; a balding young man with acne and an Aran sweater spent the whole hour designing an intricate spider’s web with the finest of art pens; a girl, redheaded, front and center, kept her eyes closed, an expression of bliss on her face.

Patel’s attention seldom shifted from Doria.

The professor’s technique was to speak in moderate tones from the podium, referring from time to time to a stack of five by three cards, each one moved to the bottom once used. This was interrupted again and again by a sudden swirl towards the matching easels, a name writ large across an A1 sheet, left for several moments before being torn away, screwed into a ball and hurled aside. Lists of books and articles that had been on the board when the lecture began were pointed at, prodded, underlined, extolled as essential. At inconsistent intervals, Doria deserted the podium to sit on or lean along the front bench, his delivery becoming more familiar as he dispensed anecdotes about the Late Quartets of Beethoven, the solos of Thelonius Monk, stories by Borges, Karl Schwitters, the pervasive influence of Brian Clough upon English football in general and the Forest midfield in particular.

Along with the others, Patel enjoyed these, laughed and at the same time struggled to understand their relevance.

Once, moving swiftly away from one of these brief alightings, Doria allowed his hand to brush against the red hair of the student seated in the middle. Patel could not see her face clearly, could only imagine that, if anything, it became more blissful.

“Remember, for Derrida, ‘writing’ has a special meaning. For him, it denotes ‘free play,’ that part of any and all systems of communication which cannot finally be pinned down, which are ultimately undecidable. Writing, for Derrida, does not codify, it does not limit. Rather, triumphantly, wonderfully, it displaces meaning, it dismantles order, defies both the safe and the sane. It is,” Doria sang out, one arm aloft, “excess!”

The last word echoed from the ceiling before fading to a slow silence. Seats went up, students shuffled out. At the podium Doria was reassembling his note cards into sets and placing each within a different-colored envelope.

Patel’s head was buzzing. He looked at the top sheet of his pad, at phrases he had written down because they had struck him as important without clearly understanding why. It had been exhilarating, as he imagined skiing must be, diving beneath the Barrier Reef.

The girl with red hair had thanked the professor softly for his lecture but if he heard her then he gave no sign.

Patel was one of only three or four students dawdling behind. He was almost at the bottom step and heading towards the door when Doria’s voice stopped him.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you at these classes before.”

“No,” said Patel with deference. “No, that’s correct.”

“You are not taking one of my courses?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Another in the department, perhaps?”

“Mechanical engineering,” said Patel hopefully.

Doria was looking at him keenly, smiling now with his eyes. “I have long argued for a less rigid approach to inter-disciplinary studies,” said Doria with a tone of regret. “Alas, breaking down such rigid barriers…” He smiled at Patel suddenly. “What we want is a deconstructive approach to the formalism of the academic syllabus, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes,” said Patel. “Yes, I would.”

He was conscious of the professor’s eyes watching him to the door and he made himself turn, careful to take his time. “Thank you for the lecture, Professor Doria. It was really interesting.”

Doria made a short bow of the head and shoulders and Patel left the room.

Thirty

“What’s the coffee like?”

Kevin Naylor looked beyond the T-shirts and the cassettes towards the cafeteria. “No idea, sir.”

Resnick walked closer: it looked like a Gaggia machine to him. “Where does this Sally work?”

Naylor pointed towards the basement. “Chart albums, all the rock stuff, it’s down below.”

“Have a word with the manager, manageress, whatever, get the girl a break. We’ll talk over there.”

He ordered a double espresso, which caused some confusion, and carried it to a table by the far wall. The cafeteria was raised up above the rest of the floor, spacious; there were green plants and video screens and if you could shut your ears to the inanities of the in-house DJ it was pleasant enough.

The coffee wasn’t as strong as it could have been, not as strong as at the Italian stall in the market. They were probably using the wrong beans. He had almost finished it by the time Naylor appeared with Sally Oakes: even when you’ve got no clear expectations, thought Resnick, it’s possible to be surprised.

For a start she was slight, her black T-shirt and jeans seemed to hang from her by default; he knew her age, nineteen, but he hadn’t expected her to look it. Her light brown hair was cut in a fuzzy stubble that suggested it would fold back against the hand like fur. There was a silver stud, shaped like a star, in her left nostril, a chunky bracelet of ornamented black leather round her left wrist.

She looked at Resnick curiously before sitting down, as if wondering if she wanted to be there at all.

“Are you his boss?” she asked, nodding in the direction of Naylor.

“Sort of.”

Sally Oakes sniffed.

“Coffee?” Resnick asked.

“Coke.”

“Espresso for me,” Resnick said to Naylor. “Large.”

When Naylor had gone to the counter, Resnick introduced himself.

“You got a cigarette?” she asked.

“Afraid not.”

Sally Oakes swung up from her chair and went to where a couple of young men were sitting at a table, eating baked potatoes. Resnick watched her lean over them, asking first for a cigarette, then for a light. He was certain that she didn’t know them, nor they her.

“So what’s he done, old William James?” she asked, letting the smoke drift up from her nostrils.

“Has he done something?”

“You playing me around or what?” She swallowed some of the Coke, her eyes shifting across to Naylor and back again. “First him and then you.” She sniffed. “Not me you’re interested in, is it?”

Resnick stirred his coffee. “What do you think he might have done? Always assuming that he has.”

“I don’t know, do I?”

“Guess.”

She blinked her eyes rapidly in annoyance. “Computer games for policemen, is it? Dungeons and dragons. Got to make a move or it all grinds to a standstill.”

“Something like that.”

She blinked again through the smoke. She knows, Resnick thought, she knows or at least she suspects, but she’s not saying.

“How come you went out with him?” Resnick asked, switching tack. “On the surface it doesn’t seem made in heaven.”

“I thought it’d be a laugh.”

“And was it?”

Sally drew on the cigarette, angling her head to one side. “No it wasn’t.”

“Still you carried on going out with him. Over a year.”

“He was interesting. I never said he wasn’t interesting.”

“But?”

“But nothing.” She shrugged.

“But you stopped seeing him.”

“I was going steady.”

“You could have carried on meeting him if you’d wanted to, said he was your uncle.”

“That what you get them to say, is it?” Resnick grinned back at her. Naylor, who had been in the act of drinking his cappuccino, spluttered bubbles into it and finished up half-choking and with a cream and chocolate mustache.

“You’d have stopped seeing him anyway, wouldn’t you?” Resnick asked. “After that last time.”

“What d’you mean?”

“After what happened that last time.”

“What do you know?”

“Only what you’ll tell me.”

Sally Oakes showed Resnick her profile and took two, three deep drags on the cigarette. The DJ severed his love affair with himself long enough to play Nina Simone’s “My Baby Just Cares For Me.”

“Can I have another Coke?”

Resnick signaled for Naylor not to hurry back.

“The first time, the first couple of times,” Sally Oakes said, “I thought he wasn’t really interested, in anything happening, you know, sex. Then I realized what he was interested in, what he wanted me to do…well, he wanted to watch me, you know. So I thought, okay, fine, he wants to play with himself. I mean, if it was good enough for Elvis…” She stubbed out the cigarette. “Then, we’d been to this bar, a couple of bands were playing, just local, he’d been doing his usual thing of listening half the time like they were, you know, God’s gift to music and the rest bending my ear about some highfalutin’ theory or other, honest, I used to switch off. So, we got to my room and I thought, okay, a quick run through the usual, but this time it’s different and he’s all over the place, trying to stick it here, there, and everywhere and, Christ, I’m wondering what I’ve got myself into when all of a sudden he jumps up and he’s off in the bathroom—I don’t know what he’s doing in there except I suppose he’s jerking himself off, but when he comes back it’s all those old jokes about cold showers and he just wants to sit there with a mug of Horlicks in one hand, the other inside my knickers, and some German film boring the arse off Channel Four just for a change.”

Sitting with her back towards Naylor, who had turned a lovely shade of puce, she reached round for the glass and drank half of the Coke right down.

“Is that the way it went on?” Resnick asked. “After that.”

“You’re joking! If it had’ve been, that would have been it, then and there. No, he went back to fooling around for half-an-hour at the end of the evening and going through the tapes I’d brought back from this place. Hip-hop, that’s what he seemed keen on.”

I’ll bet, thought Resnick.

“Tell me about the last time, Sally,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

“It was like before, the one I told you about before. One minute it’s all four-syllable words and the next we’re down to four-letter ones and he’s got me rolling on the floor while he’s…” She stopped and lowered her voice still further, her eyes fixed on Resnick’s face. “There are some things I don’t mind, more than a lot of girls maybe, but I don’t mind telling you…he hurt me.”

“You mean, he hit you?”

“No. He hurt me.”

Resnick wondered what Millington and Mark Divine were laughing about and quickly decided he’d rather not know.