The Pink and the Grey (15 page)

The first time I’d seen inside the college was soon after I’d arrived in the city a year before. Back then it was very early in the autumn term, what the toffs call
Michaelmas
term, and I was lured back to the college for a late-night party by a couple of postgrads who knew a couple of undergrads who knew about forty-nine other undergrads, as it turned out. We’d packed into some function room in some poncey court or other and danced in airless proximity for a couple of hours. It was like being vacuum-packed into a Sahara sauna. They’d called it
The Old Curiosity Bop
and I suspect a few guys had their curiosity well and truly satisfied by the end of that night. I’d left before then — it got all too
rah-rah
and
oops-a-daisy
for me. There’d been a guy wearing a top hat, and I’d wanted to toss a loose cobble at it and send it spinning, then dance on a roof with a chimney sweep from Malibu.

I presented myself at the porters’ lodge just inside the gate on St Andrew’s Street and signed in with a frazzled old gent behind a desk who introduced himself as Arthur and called me
darling
. He had shaped eyebrows and a dodgy wig and looked like the star turn at the Chelsea Pensioners’ cabaret night. With a couple of biro sweeps on a photocopied map he directed me swishily to Spencer’s room in the laughably named New Court, and then sent word ahead to let him know I was there. He used the phone rather than a carrier pigeon or a dirt-faced young urchin, I was glad to see.

When I’d skipped out of the
Bugle
office I’d co-opted the newspaper umbrella — the only one — which had a
Bugle
logo, and as I passed along the paths and through the stone archways of the college I saw whispered conversations behind the backs of hands from twosomes and threesomes rushing past me through the rain. I didn’t think I was especially welcome, and I didn’t blame them. I don’t know, maybe they thought I was wearing the wrong cut of trouser for a Wednesday.

Spencer held a flimsy, ill-fitting door open for me at the bottom of his set of stairs. Off to the right a bunch of names, including his, were painted onto the stone wall under a heavily-serifed letter T, the name of this little block of rooms. And carved roughly into a shallow arc above the door were the words
ex glande quercus
.
 

I nodded a greeting and hurried through, shaking the umbrella back outside through the doorway and dropping it in a convenient stand. The stairwell smelled of chlorine, wet stone and a cloying smugness, and was being watched by a red-lit camera in a high corner. I knew I had to watch what I said: we’d be monitored.

“What’s with the Latin over the door?” I asked.

“You must be new to Cambridge,” he said with a mild sarcasm. “College motto, I’m afraid.
From acorn to oak
.”

He led me up the stairs.

“It’s carved throughout college, almost randomly,” he continued. “We suspect a drunken classicist ran amok with a chisel in the dim and distant. It happens on occasion. The tripos, the boys — you know how it goes. Adds character, I think.”

Two flights up Spencer took me along a corridor my brain told me was listing at several degrees, and opened a door into his… room? Office? Lair? It felt claustrophobic and oppressive: dry and dusty, wallpapered in books, and liable to crackle into unquenchable flame if a bell-end with a pipe merely thought about crossing the threshold.

Over a cup of Lady Grey tea — very much not my usual tipple — and sitting on a sofa I tried not to look at too closely, I explained what the editor wanted. Spencer, sitting at his desk, rubbed a hand over his near-bald head and didn’t look happy.

“I’m afraid we don’t really do breasts, Conor. There are, of course, ladies here, and they are fully equipped, I imagine. I would hazard— without wishing unduly to stereotype, you understand— I would hazard it unlikely in the extreme that any would agree to this request.”

“There must be, you know, feminine ladies. Ones who don’t play pool.”

“Of course, of course. We do not discriminate. Modulo the limitations of the Data Protection Act I believe I can also confirm we have resident one or two heterosexual persons of the opposite gender. We are an
inclusive
establishment, regardless of the popular sentiment.”

“Great! Can’t we get those together and do a big boob jump or something?” I found myself miming it, as Geoff had, and felt my face flush.

Spencer looked at me distastefully as he lifted his cup. “I see all journalists are cut from the same cloth, notwithstanding the stitching.”

“I’m sorry. You need this front page, though, don’t you?” He did, we all did — it would set us up nicely for the big one the following week — though I couldn’t say any of that with the eye in the corner.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
, apparently, but I wasn’t sure what Spencer had was what I’d call freedom. More like trading today’s privacy for tomorrow’s security. But I suppose it wasn’t all that different from CCTV on the streets — except these cameras were exposed to a little more of the spice of life. The sofa felt suddenly less comfortable.

Spencer took a gulp of tea and set the cup down. “There is one possibility, though. Assuming the editor doesn’t want anything too racy, too explicit.”

“It’s a page one story, not a page three.”

“In which case I believe I might have a solution. Drink up,” he said, and reached across the desk for his phone.

Half an hour later we were in another part of college — Spencer called it Top Court, with an ironic smile — in a small room tucked alongside the dining hall. I could only describe it as
bright brown
: wood panelling varnished to shite, below ochre walls and a bronze-coloured ceiling. One wall was covered completely in mirrors tiled top to bottom. The whole room shimmered with specks of glitter. We were in a kind of dog-shit disco.

And with us were four students, undergrads by the look of them: still with a fierce, knowing innocence and cheekbones that could slice cheese. Barely a muscle between them, and certainly not an ounce of blubber. Spencer had called them here. He lined them up and introduced them individually, and then, with a flourish: “And together, they’re
Cream of the Crop Top
.” The guys bowed and curtsied elaborately.

It was a student fucking drag act.

“Jeez, due respect, I’m sure it’s great, but… Geoff will have my hide. We can’t do this.”

Spencer was dismissive. “You have yet to see them. It is a sight indeed to behold. I promise you, Geoff won’t only not
notice
, he’ll be positively overcome with desire.”

The act busied themselves noisily with bags and clothing and
equipment
.

“It’s madness! I’ve never seen a drag act you couldn’t tell from a mile away! I’m gonna be laughed out of the cocking paper! Are you sure we can’t lure a couple of lesbians here with a kitten and a copy of
Sporting Life
?”

“Trust me.” He patted my arm. “These boys know what they’re doing.”

And they were doing it fast. I gave them that, it was a well practised setup. They were shaved glass-smooth already — face, arms, chest and legs always ready for a bit of action — and they dressed quickly, tucking and padding and slapping on the make-up like a whore in a hurry.

Ten minutes after arriving, the wigs were on and adjusted and we were good to go.

It was an impressive transformation, I had to admit. Close-up, you could tell. You could feel the breasts weren’t right, you could spot the unavoidable physical differences. But, say, from a dozen feet, when they were jumping up in the air? The only ones who could tell would be the ones who would
never
tell.

The leader of the gang called herself Cody. Bright blue eyes, determined. Hungry, even: a man-eater. A pout of steel. Brash, confident, never short of a snappy response. Out of uniform, she’d been a mousey geographer called Jonathan.

Cody led the group out into the court and straight onto the grass. Even I, an outsider scurrying behind, knew that an undergraduate violating the turf was some kind of sacrilegious act.
 

“Cody, I don’t think—” Spencer started to object, and Cody gave him a glare that stopped him like stone.

The rest of the
Cream
gathered beside her, all four girls with legs apart and hands on hips. Like a group of superheroes:
The XX Men
, perhaps. The rain, gentler now, almost a mist, dappled their luxurious real-hair wigs and their light t-shirts and college-pink shorts. I could already see a few faces popping up at windows around Top Court as Spencer fussed me along.

I hurried to sort out my camera. It was important not to let the girls become too damp: although the editor might have wanted a wet t-shirt line-up, the wetter this lot got the less female they appeared. I scurried around to make sure the light, such as it was, was behind me.

There was a whistle from somewhere high up, echoing across the court. One of the girls waved. Then chanting began:
Co-dy, Co-dy, Co-dy
, and she waved too, to cheers.

I was ready. I called them back into position, a not-so-straight line of four, and counted down: three, two, one, jump
snap
. A second shot, and a third. I got the girls adopting different poses mid-air, with whoops and hollering and yelling all around, people banging on window frames, clapping, calling out names. I felt like I was taking photos of a girl band: a beautiful, successful, powerful girl band everybody had heard of except me. I felt like— I felt like my father.

Except, of course.

“Have we finished?” asked Spencer. “Only, the girls are getting rather rained upon.” The mist was coalescing back into small raindrops.

I quickly rattled off another five or six shots: different angles, different styles. Showing other parts of the court, showing the walls behind them draped with faces, with the girls stony-faced and arms folded, holding hands, pretending to run, anything I thought Geoff might conceivably buy. Then the rain began to splatter more heavily and it was all over: we darted back inside to the dog-shit disco with cheers ringing around us.

And in another ten minutes Cody and the girls had reverted to Jonathan and the boys and a smirking, flushed anonymity, and
Cream of the Crop Top
had been packed away into their over-stuffed kit bags until the next time. The adrenalin in my body was leeching away into nothing and I was thirsty, and hungry, and damp, and feeling like something had changed.

We thanked the boys, and then Spencer and I sprinted through the cloudburst back to his room. “Quite something, aren’t they?” he called as we dodged the growing puddles. “They sing and dance too, though that is in all honesty less refined than their overall look at present. They’re making rather wonderful progress though.”

“You know I had no idea there was a degree in drag. What is it, like a BSc in Sass and Shaving?” I had my camera bag under my jacket to try to keep it dry.

“BA, dear, not BSc. Oh, no, this is purely extra-curricular. We do very much encourage it though. We positively delight in our students graduating from St Paul’s having emerged from whichever particular chrysalis they might have arrived in.”

“Like, coming out?”

Spencer bounced through his stairwell door and held it open for me again. “There are many types of closet, Conor.”

The high I realised I was in from the photoshoot lasted until I returned to the
Bugle
office, dried off again, and sat at my desk next to a curious and restless Manish to start pulling the story together.

“Oi, ginger.” It was a muffled Geoff. He beckoned me over with one hand, the other stuffing a sandwich into his mouth.

“All sorted, boss,” I said. “I’ve got some cracking pictures. Page one copy on the way. Have you come up with a better headline yet? I’ve had a couple of ideas—”

“Hold your horses, kid. Change of plan.” Still chewing, he waved me onto the chair beside him.

“Geoff, we agreed page one—”

He swallowed. “Don’t get shirty, sunshine. You’re right, I said page one if you got the boobs. But I’m killing that story.” He gave me the full-on Churchill face.

I got louder. “You can’t, man, it’s a good story. What have you got, a councillor falling off a chair? This is better than that.”

He raised his hands to quieten me. “Listen. Who was it you spoke to at St Paul’s?”

“The guy running the race. Flowers, Spencer Flowers. He’s a good guy.”

“Was he the one you called an arsehole earlier?”

I nodded reluctantly and tried to calm down. “He’s an academic. Course he’s an arsehole. But he’s a decent enough arsehole. I’ve seen a few arseholes in my time—”

Hands up again. “Enough. And he’s a bender like you?”

“Hey, if you’re gonna get all hate crime on my arse there’s a whole bunch of better words you can use.”

“Is he?”

“What’s all this about? There’s not some radical homosexual page one conspiracy going on.” Not
quite
. I was starting to properly bristle and my gay agenda hackles were on the rise.

“I’ve heard a few stories about this Flowers bloke. I thought you might have a bit more for me, some back-up.”

“Yeah, right, because all the gays know all the gays. We all sleep with each other and use the big gay telegraph to tell each other our big gay secrets. Tell me, how
is
the Queen? You must know her, she’s straight and old.”

“You know what I mean, ginge. You’ve just come back from meeting this guy. You’ve said he’s an arsehole — your words, mate, your words. So, how much of an arsehole? Word is he’s out of control. Slagging it around. It gets a straight-up bloke like me a bit suspicious, don’t it? Taking liberties with innocent young freshers is he?”

I took a breath. Now was not the time to get all
West Side Story
. For all I knew Spencer
was
taking a few liberties with freshers, though I doubted it. What I’d seen at the college didn’t suggest that. He was genuine, decent. Proud of the girls and the boys. I reckoned they could look after themselves, no problem. In fact I could imagine one or two freshers taking liberties with him, if he’d let them.