Black Chalk (23 page)

‘Really?’ said Jack, with a burst of enthusiasm. ‘What did he do?’

‘He tidied my room.’

‘He did what?’ said Chad.

Jolyon looked only perplexed, not overly concerned. ‘Yesterday afternoon I went out to buy some cigarettes. And while I was out, I decided I might as well go to the bookshop. And then when I got back, my room had been tidied.’

‘He broke in and tidied your room?’ said Dee. She looked around. It was certainly neater than usual.

Jolyon shrugged. ‘Maybe I should start thinking about locking my door. But I was only going to be two minutes getting cigarettes.’

‘Did he take anything?’ said Emilia.

‘No. Nothing.’

‘Just tidied up?’

‘That’s right.’

Chad let out a boozy bar-room snort. ‘Did he do a good job?’ he said.

‘Superb,’ said Jolyon.

‘Man, that does it for me,’ said Chad. ‘That guy is a freak.’

*   *   *

XLII(ii)
   Jack and Jolyon stood either side of Chad as they walked him.

In Jolyon’s room, Chad had finished the drink in a single gulp. Now he looked up at the latticed windows surrounding back quad and smiled as their diamonds of lead softened and the glass shifted woozily as if in a heat haze. The flags at the side of the tower were still and the rosettes of the college crest took on the appearance of eyes above a beaming chevron mouth. They walked through the passageway beneath Loser’s Leap and the chill of old stone soothed him. The world was cushioned and soft, he felt a sense of velvet, of feather-down and candlelight. He thought about his date later, remembering the milk running down Mitzy’s honey-nut legs, cute enough. This feeling had been mounting for days, Mitzy becoming sweeter the more he reasoned it through.

They walked back into the light and Chad felt Jolyon steady him gently at the elbow. The liaison officer had been insistent on the subject of dress code. Only subfusc was appropriate and the borrowed suit was snug to Chad’s body while the black gown above it flapped loosely as they walked. The white bow tie pinched the white shirt to his neck but it felt less uncomfortable now. The grass of the lawn was vivid in the late-winter sun and the heels of Chad’s dress shoes rang out in the stone theatre of front quad.

The liaison officer was waiting halfway up the steps. ‘Good show, good show,’ he said. ‘Brought some friends for moral support. Excellent, excellent. More the merrier.’ With a sweeping gesture he indicated the door to the Great Hall. ‘Shall we?’

As the liaison officer led the way, Jolyon removed something from his pocket and handed it to Chad. ‘Technically I’m not supposed to give this to you until after,’ he said. ‘But I thought it might bring you luck,’ he said.

Chad turned over the small piece of paper he had pulled from the pot five days earlier. ‘LUCKY JIM’ it said in large letters. ‘Thanks, Jolyon,’ he said, putting it in his pocket.

‘You’re going to do great, Chad,’ said Jolyon, ‘don’t worry about a thing. And if anything happens, I’ll be there, OK?’

Chad nodded gratefully.

‘Come on then,’ said the liaison officer, beckoning. ‘The rest of you should go in now. The warden’s ready to begin introductions. I’ll take care of Mr Mason here in the vestibule.’ He closed the ornate door and then he and Chad were alone amid the tawny panels and gold-framed oils. ‘Any jitters, Mr Mason?’ he said.

‘No way, José,’ said Chad.

The liaison officer flinched at the odd choice of words. But Susan Leonard really was a hugely well-endowed institution. And if one of their presumptuous Americans truly desired to give a speech in the Great Hall, then he supposed everyone was just bloody well going to have to fall into line.

*   *   *

XLII(iii)
   The Great Hall was far from crowded. There were three of Chad’s tutors, one of whom he was yet to meet, and the warden. There were the Americans, Mitzy and Jenna and Fredo. There were the four other players and Tallest and a handful of students whom Jolyon had talked into attending. The hall could have accommodated two hundred and there were maybe twenty or thirty, all of them bunched toward the far end where next to high table a lectern had been erected. As Chad walked the length of the hall a few heads turned. Mitzy beamed.

There was a video camera on a tripod. ‘Don’t worry about that thing,’ the liaison officer said. ‘I thought the benevolent Ms Leonard might be interested in a recording.’

There was a flutter of polite applause as they neared high table.

His charge delivered, the liaison officer waved to the warden who rose and said a few words concerning vitality and transatlantic cooperation and intellectual stimuli. He then expressed his huge disappointment that he was unable to stay and his shoes chimed his exit as he left, headed no doubt to the considerably greater enjoyment of a pipe in his quarters that lay in the opposite corner of front quad.

And there he was, Theodore Chadwick Mason, the boy from the swine-stead, game player, mouse, innocent, survivor, standing at a lectern in one of the world’s foremost centres of academia, nine parts drunk.

Chad looked down at the notes resting on the ledge. They had been typed up under more sober circumstances and he could read the title clearly because it was in a bold font and a large point size. ‘The United States, Britain and the Special Relationship: A Personal Perspective’. However, the text beneath it was lighter and smaller. And also moving erratically. In fact the text appeared to be behaving in a deliberately contrary manner. If Chad chased it to the left, it would skip to the right. If he moved his nose closer, the words would dissolve. Nose further back and the letters reassembled but then dropped away as if peered at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

But this was precisely why Chad had memorised the speech.

‘Hi,’ he said, ‘I’m Chad. How’s it going?’ And then he laughed at himself for using such informality in so grand a place. His audience laughed along, even the three tutors. It was a good enough start.

‘The United States, Britain and the Special Relationship: A Personal Perspective,’ he said.

The drink seemed to be gathering at the top of Chad’s head in a layer about two fingers thick. But this left enough of his mind to recall his words and transfer them into speech. Although for some reason he appeared to be pronouncing certain sentences in a strange English accent.

The timbers of the hammerbeam roof were as dramatic as a thunderous sky, great arches and braces and posts and a tremendous sense of mass, of something unsustainable so high and so old. The glowering weight, the dim brooding of the dark timber, made Chad feel uneasy. And though he knew it unlikely that a roof that had been there for many centuries was about to collapse, he began to feel exposed and vulnerable. He shifted his focus to the ornate screen at the hall’s far end, as intricate as lace doilies, and continued to gather more lines from his memory.

‘And so for those first few weeks in a new country, you notice a thousand small and new and exciting differences that a month later must still be all around you but to which you have now acquired a spined blot.’

Chad stopped. He had just said ‘blind spot’, hadn’t he? He let his eyes unfocus and his inner ear loop back through his last sentence. No, in fact it seemed he had actually said ‘spined blot’.

Jenna and Mitzy and Fredo were laughing. They were good people trying to make everyone else in the crowd believe this had been a deliberate joke. But the three tutors weren’t laughing, they were shifting in their seats. One of them had crossed his arms, the second was pinching his brow, the head of the third was turned away completely.

Chad decided not to look at his crowd but instead to address his words to the side of the hall, the walls lined with paintings. Portraits of college founders and bygone luminaries, bewigged men of centuries long past. Chad had the vague sense of breaking off from what he was saying to point out a Pilgrim-style hat. And then he seemed to be imitating Emilia’s northern accent, although he couldn’t piece together the sound of her voice in his head any more. He sounded Canadian, or maybe Indian, or like a man impersonating the way a cow might talk.

*   *   *

XLII(iv)
   Now he was standing very still, silently, before them. It was as if he were in a dream and unable to move. Thoughts were running through his head. Very secret thoughts and yet somehow in his dream everyone in the crowd knew what he was thinking. You could tell from the looks on their faces. The shock, the confusion. It was as if he were standing naked in a room full of mind-readers.

Chad sensed that in this dream he was standing in the Great Hall in order to talk about relationships. It then ran through his mind that he was entirely unqualified to talk about relationships, what with him being a virgin. The mind-readers all reacted with shock to this thought, as if he had spoken it aloud. This was a horrible dream.

The liaison officer got to his feet and began to gesticulate but Tallest slid quickly from his bench, placed a hand on the shoulder of the old man and whispered something. The liaison officer looked surprised and uneasy and then sat down again.

Chad wanted this nightmare to end. But as with all bad dreams he was powerless.

The main person Chad did want to sleep with was Emilia. Oh, Emilia. But Emilia was taken. Taken by his best friend. And now Chad secretly wanted his best friend, his only ever real friend, to go and screw the whole thing up.

The practice of mind-reading took an immense amount of effort. This much was clear to Chad from the way that many of the people in his dream, including Emilia, were now holding their heads and rubbing their faces.

Chad felt so guilty having such awful feelings. And another thing he felt guilty about was lying, letting everyone believe he was from New York City when really he grew up on a pig farm upstate. And on the topic of guilt, what he most felt guilty about in life was self-abuse, so guilty that he imposed a limit on himself, only once a month and even then only as a reward for good grades. Also, he had been terrified for years that it was masturbation that was causing his acne but the limit didn’t seem to help.

His thoughts continued to spin but Chad couldn’t hear them any more. Where was Mitzy? The hall was turning dark and people were moving toward him. Coming faster, then tilting, then slipping away.

*   *   *

XLII(v)
   ‘You really don’t remember anything?’ said Emilia.

‘Spined blot. Something about a hat? But after that, nothing.’ Chad pushed the damp cloth harder against his head. ‘OK, Jack. You can tell me one thing. I get why my head feels like this but what about the pain all down my right arm?’

‘Oh, that was the grand finale,’ said Jack. ‘The blackout. It was like timber going down in a forest.’

‘Yeah, I guessed it was something like that. I just hoped it had happened away from the crowd.’

‘No, in front of everyone.’ said Jack. ‘And on camera. The money shot.’

‘And why didn’t anyone stop me?’

‘Tallest whispered to the old guy you were recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Smart move because then the old guy signalled to the tutors that everything was in hand and he’d explain later. They wanted to call an ambulance when you went down but Jolyon smoothed the whole thing over.’

‘Wait,’ said Chad, sitting up, looking unsettled, ‘how long have I been passed out?’

‘A good four hours,’ said Dee. ‘It’s six thirty now.’

‘Oh shoot,’ said Chad. He tried to get up quickly from the bed but the pain was too severe. ‘Jeez, I really have to go.’

‘Go where?’ said Dee.

‘I have a date at seven with Mitzy.’

Jack started to laugh but quickly covered his mouth. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean to … Mitzy? You mean one of those Americans who came to offer you moral support? Blonde hair? California tan?’

‘What’s wrong?’ said Chad.

*   *   *

XLII(vi)
   It was a French bistro. The pain was a dark blot at the rearmost crook of Chad’s skull and the bruises showed when he rolled up a sleeve, so quickly he turned it down. He sat at his reserved table. He was certain Mitzy wouldn’t arrive but Chad knew he had to sit there anyway.

An hour alone at a table in a crowded restaurant, Friday night. But this was a punishment Chad felt he deserved. After the manager told him that regretfully he had to ask him to order or leave, Chad stood up and walked out through the whispers, past the eyebrows, beyond the over-shoulder glances.

He made it up to his room without seeing anyone. But just as he had known that sitting and waiting in the restaurant was the right thing to do, Chad was also certain what he had to do next.

He saw a light beneath her door and knocked lightly. Because perhaps if she were in, she might be listening to music and wouldn’t hear the lightest of knocks. And then he could return upstairs feeling that at least he had made the effort to do the right thing.

But she opened her door.

Chad dropped his head. ‘Mitzy, I’m so sorry,’ he said. She didn’t let him say anything more.

‘Just shut the hell up, Chad,’ Mitzy shouted. ‘You know, we just had a house meeting and everyone agreed that
noooh one
is going to talk to you.’ Chad hadn’t noticed until this moment how shapely Mitzy’s eyebrows were, neat arches made perfect by her rage. ‘
Good enough for your first time?
Who in the hell do you think you are? I’m awesome, Chad. I am
waaay
better than any of the skanks who’ll ever go near you with their filthy diseases. There’s a word for people like you, Chad. Tragic … virgin …
loser
. I was only nice to you because I felt sorry for you. Everyone agreed in the meeting, you come anywhere near me or try to talk to me ever again, the whole house will back me. We’ll all say whatever it takes to get you kicked out of college.’ She sniffed before delivering her final line. ‘So just go back to your room, Chad, do everyone a favour, and kill yourself.’ And then Mitzy slammed the door on him, just as he had imagined she would.

Chad climbed back up the stairs. And then in his room, leaning against his door, he had a terrible thought. If no one in the house were ever to talk to him again, then perhaps humiliating Mitzy had been a wonderful thing to do. No, he chided himself, that really was a terrible thought.