Starter For Ten (23 page)

'Now look - I've snagged my bloody tights . . .'

'At least let me walk you home.'

'No thanks.'

'I don't mind . . .'

'I'm all right . . .'

'You shouldn't walk back by yourself . . .'

Till be fine . . .'

'Really, I insist . . .' and she wheels around suddenly, and points her finger at me, and snaps, 'And I insist you don't! Is that understood?' We're both thrown by the sharpness of this; it may be that I even take a step backwards. We look at each other, wondering what is going on, and eventually she says 'Besides, you should go to bed. You're "on", remember?' She opens the door. 'Let's never talk about this again, okay? And don't tell anyone, all right? Especially not Alice-bloody-Harbinson. Promise?'

'Of course not. Why would I tell Alice ...?'

But she's already halfway down the steps, and without looking back she runs off into the night.

'I'm sorry,' said Sebastian, after a time. 'I'm afraid I wasn't very nice this afternoon. Brideshead often has that effect on me.'

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

QUESTION: Striated, cardiac and smooth are three types of which tissue?

ANSWER: Muscle.

Some New Year's Resolutions

1 Spend more time working on my poetry. If I'm serious about poetry as a literary form, as well as a way of earning extra money, then I'm really going to have to work at it, especially if I'm to discover my own distinctive voice. Remember, T.S.Eliot held down a job in a bank and wrote The Four Quartets, so not having enough time is no excuse.

2 Stop picking at my face, especially when I'm talking to people. If science has taught us anything, it's that picking at your skin just spreads the infection and causes scars. Just leave it alone, find something else to do with your hands, learn to smoke or something. Remember - no one wants to kiss a bleeding face.

3 Be aloof. Play it cool with Alice - she'll respect you more for it.

4 Become lightly muscled.

The above were written at about 10.45 p.m. on New Year's Eve, and I was pretty drunk by then, which means that the handwriting's a bit slurred. Twenty minutes later I was asleep, thereby flouting the conventional, cliched notion that says we're obliged to have an amazing, fun time on New Year's Eve, by having an unconventional, unbelievably shitty time.

Festivities began at 8.35, when I found a screwdriver in the kitchen drawer, and unscrewed the doors of Josh's wardrobe so that I could get to his portable television. I then sat and watched the James Bond film on ITV, joining the massed ranks of elderly windows, mental patients and everyone else who stays in on New Year's Eve. But the more I drank, the more I thought about Dad, and Alice, and the two got strangely muddled in my head so that by the time Agent 007 had foiled Scaramanga's evil plan for world domination I was pretty much a physical and emotional wreck, thereby becoming the only person in the history of the world ever to cry watching The Man With The Golden Gun with the possible exception of Britt Eckland. Then I pulled myself together, and wrote the resolutions.

And now, two weeks later, the resolutions still stand. True, I haven't really grappled with my poetry yet, but will soon, when I get time. And I've barely touched my face. I've also been very aloof with Alice too, largely because I haven't seen her or heard from her and have no idea where she is. In fact, socially, things have been a bit quiet since term began again. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles' cousin warns him that your second term at university is generally spent avoiding all the undesirable people that you met in the first term, and I'm starting to suspect that I am, in actual fact, one of those people.

But back to the resolutions. The last one needs some elucidation. I've decided that it wouldn't do me any harm to have a muscle or two, and, no, this isn't because I'm buying into some shallow, gender-based notion of what the advertising media chooses to define as 'masculine' or attractive, and it's not because anyone's started to kick sand in my face, not literally anyway. It's just that I think I've taken the tubercular look to its natural conclusion really. Also, ever since school, I've been working on the principle that you're either clever, or you're fit, and the two are mutually exclusive, but actually there's no reason you can't have both; Patrick Watts for instance, is clever and really, really fit, even if he does have personality problems. Maybe Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man is a better example; he's fit and clever, and has integrity too, the kind of guy who runs five miles carrying a load of library books. Or, from the real world, Alice Harbinson. Alice Harbinson is amazingly fresh-faced, healthy and intelligent. Or at least she was the last time I saw her. Two weeks and three days ago. Ages ago.

Not to worry. I'm going to sublimate all that energy into a fitness campaign. I'm thoroughly committed to a strict daily Canadian Royal-Air-Force-style regime that involves wedging my feet under the wardrobe, having first ensured that it won't topple over on top of me, and doing sit-ups, numbering eight, and press-ups, four. This is fine, but it doesn't really feel as if I've had a proper, thorough full-body work-out, and I think I'm going to need something extra. I think I'm going to need weights. I decide to spend my Christmas money on weight-lifting equipment.

I eat a healthy, nutritious breakfast from the newsagents, a chocolate covered muesli bar and a litre of pineapple Just Juice, and scout-march (run for thirty, walk for thirty) towards the City Centre, which suddenly seems like an incredibly long way away, especially when jogging in a donkey jacket and jeans. But I keep going, along residential streets littered with the skeletons of all the Christmas trees that the bin-men are refusing to take away, every now and then giving these little pineapple-juice burps. It's not long before I get a stitch, which suggests that perhaps I need to put some work into cardiovascular health, but this can come later. My first priority is to increase body mass and improve muscle definition. I don't want to get all stocky, like a boxer or weight-lifter or anything,

just to get more of a gymnast's physique, like one of those guys on the parallel bars. If at any point it looks like I'm going to get massively over-developed then I'll pull back.

I arrive at Sport! shortly after it opens, sweating pretty heavily. This is perhaps the second time in my life that I've entered a sports shop, because up until now Mum's bought all my sports kit for me. I'm pretty nervous about going in, as if I'm about to enter a pornographer's or something. Once inside, there's definitely a whiff of the boys' changing room about the place, emphasised by the shop's manager, who's about my age, stocky and bullish, and who approaches as if he's about to flick me with a wet towel.

'Need help, mate?'

'Just looking thanks!' I say, in an ever-so-slightly deeper than-usual voice, and I browse around the shop, appraising badminton rackets with an expert eye, before casually heading over to the dumb-bells. There they are, two of them, made of heavy-duty iron, with adjustable weights, allowing me to gradually increase the load so that I am Adonis-like, but no more. There's something pretty self-explanatory about dumb-bells, so once I've established that, yes, they are very heavy and made of iron as opposed to grey-painted polystyrene and, yes, I can afford them, just about, at Ł12.99, then I heft them over to the shop assistant. It's only when I've handed over the cash, and he's put them in a heavy-duty plastic bag and I've left the shop, that I realise that I've made an extremely basic logistical error, and it's this: I can't carry them home.

For the first twenty-five yards I convince myself that it's possible, if I walk quickly enough, and change hands when the pain of the plastic bag cutting into flesh proves too much. But outside Woolworths the inevitable happens, the bottom falls out of the bag and the weights hit the pavement with a heavy-industrial crunch that causes shoppers, young mums with their kids in pushchairs mainly, to look at me, and at the dumb-bells, and in return I give them a 'who snuck dumbbells in my bag!' kind of look. The paving-slab seems undamaged, but one of the dumb-bells is trundling heavily off towards Boots the Chemist like a tiny tank, and I have to lunge and stop it with my foot, which causes a certain amount of mirth amongst the young mums, who are pointing me out to their kids - 'look at the funny under-developed man!' I pick up a dumb-bell in each hand and walk briskly away.

I make it to Dorothy Perkins, twenty yards away, before I have to stop again for breath. Teenage girls see the dumbbells and grin at me as I lean against the shop window. I decide that forward momentum is the key; the trick is to keep moving. I'll be fine if I keep moving. After all, there's only maybe a mile and a quarter still to go.

Once I'm out of the shopping centre, past the ring road and into the residential streets, it becomes a little easier to take regular rests without being stared at. I wait for my breathing to stabilise, then pick the weights up, arms hanging baboon-like, and make little stooped runs along the street as if under machine-gun fire, for as long as my heart can take it. I feel like I've just been resuscitated. I'm sweaty and red-faced, my shoulders feel bruised, wrenched and sore, my arms feel cartoonishly stretched, and the metallic diamond pattern on the bar of the dumb-bells has transferred itself indelibly to the palms of my hands, making them look reptilian and raw. I have a personal tutorial this afternoon, and I'm still nowhere near home, so I pick up the dumb-bells again, and stoop and run.

Eventually, I reach the south face of Richmond Hill, stretching vertically up before me, its summit lost in low-level cloud. I manage to yomp about twenty-five yards before I slump, doubled over, against a wall. It feels as if someone's stamped on my lungs, popped them like blown-up crisp packets. I'm coughing uncontrollably, the breath rasping over the back of my throat, which is parched, causing me to retch dryly. There's a sweetly bilious taste in my mouth where I've coughed up some pineapple Just Juice, and the sweat is pouring off my face and dripping off my nose onto the pavement, and then suddenly there's a hand on my back and a voice saying, 'Are you all right, are you okay,' and I open my eyes and look up and it's Alice ...

'D'you want me to call you a ... Brian?'

'Alice!' breathe, pant, 'Oh ... hi ... Alice,' straighten up, breathe, pant. 'How are you?' I gasp, aloofly.

'I'm fine, it's you I'm worried about. I thought you were some old man having a heart attack or something . . .'

'No, no, it's me. I'm fine, really . . .'

She sees the dumb-bells, wedged under my foot to stop them bouncing off down the hill and killing a child. 'What are those!'

'They're dumbbells'

'I know what they are, but what are you doing with them?'

'It's a long story.'

'Need a hand?'

'If you could . . .'

She scoops up a dumb-bell, like she's scooping up a small dog, and strides on up the hill.

QUESTION: What was identified by Hegel as the tendency of a concept to pass over into its own negation as the result of conflict between its inherent contradictory aspects?

ANSWER: Dialectics.

I leave Alice in my bedroom, listening to my Brandenburg Concerto LP and giving my bookshelves marks out of ten while I go and make coffee. The bedroom is not in an ideal state to be honest. I've made sure that I've not left my poetry notebook or underpants lying around, but I still don't like leaving her alone in there. The kettle is taking forever to boil, so I distract myself by rushing to the bathroom, splashing my face, and brushing my teeth very quickly to get rid of some of the biliousness. When I get back to the kitchen, Josh is there, helping himself to my newly boiled water.

'Of course you do know there's a fox loose in your bedroom?'

'My friend Alice.'

'Well hellooooo, Alice. Mind if I join you?' 'Actually, we're sort of talking about work, actually . . .' 'All right, Bri, I get the message. Just send her in to see me on the way out, will you? And you might want to do something about that?' and he gestures to the corner of my mouth, where there are two little crescents of toothpaste. 'Bonne chance, mon ami . . .' he says, and heads for the door - 'oh, and someone called for you - Spencer, is it? - says to give him a call.' I make the coffee, pick up the mugs, steal two of Marcus' biscuits, and head back into the bedroom.

Alice is reclined on the futon, flicking idly through my copy of The Communist Manifesto, so I hand her the coffee, and remove the cloudy glass of water and the encrusted old mugs from the side of the bed, and take a mental photograph of her head on my pillow.

'Why's your bed-frame behind your wardrobe, Brian?'

'I thought I'd try the futon thing.'

'Right. Futon. Nice.' And she looks at the postcards and photos Blu-Tacked by the bed. 'Is this your dad?'

'Uh-huh.'

She peels the photo off the wall, looks at it. 'He's very handsome.'

I take my donkey jacket off, hang it on the wardrobe door. 'Yes, he was.'

She inspects my face, trying to work out why it should have skipped a generation, then gives me one of her frowning smiles. 'Don't you want to get changed?'

I look down at my sweater, which is living up to its name and has dark, oily damp patches under the arms, and smells of wet dog. I hesitate though, bashfully; 'No, I'm fine, really.'

'Go on, get changed. I promise I won't touch myself while you're doing it.'

And, in the racy, erotically charged atmosphere that this last remark creates, I turn my back on her and take my top off.

'So what are the weights for, big guy?'

'Oh, I just thought I'd try and get a little healthier . . .'

'Having muscles isn't the same as being healthy - my last boyfriend had the most amazing body, but could barely walk two hundred yards . . .'

'Was he the one with the massive penis?'

'Brian!! Who told you that?'

'You did?'

'Did I? Well, yes, that was him. Anyway, your body's fine.'

'You think?' I ask, holding the jumper in front of me, like a bashful bride.