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Henry Edmunds Forgets - Part Three

Jill Reed sat in her headteacher's office and, as the winter sunlight dappled her spotless carpet, remembered a game she had played with her daughter that summer in the villa they had stayed in in northern Italy. Whilst her daughter's eyes were shut, Jill would throw her goggles into the azure swimming pool, and her daughter would proceed to hold her breath and plunge to the pool floor in order to locate and retrieve them, whilst Jill's skin had burned and olive trees had sighed. She shook herself out of the memory and turned her attention to the Henry affair. She had just received frantic word that an art class on the top floor of the school's tallest block had descended into chaos when the students, passionately convinced of Henry's experience - since lunchtime - had made sheet-banners that shouted 'WE SUPPORT HENRY' and hung them from the windows so the poster-paint message was now theoretically visible from the town centre. Personally, Jill was lightly amused and a little impressed by the report, but was less relaxed about information that Henry himself had not been seen by a member of staff, to her knowledge, since before lunch. She mulled over the undeniable fact that the sensible course of action was to refer Henry to the school nurse for the rest of the day, but looked ahead in dread to the unavoidable phone conversation with Mrs Edmunds, Henry's mother, a women known well to the school management for her inability to be satisfied by any official response to her increasingly hysterical complaints, and especially for her tendency to talk of her bizarre and clearly untrue dreamings as if they were fact. She had, several years previously, contacted the school to inform them that Henry had ingested her perfume draw because he was hopelessly in love with a girl in his year. The utter irrelevance of this story to anything within the management team's remit had implied to Jill that the account had been conjured up for the sole purpose of telling someone, but she had given Mrs Edmunds the benefit of the doubt at the time, and had treated the dubious incident as seriously as she could. More absurd were the fictions about the childhoods of Henry and Alice the mother had imparted to an uncomfortable english teacher one year at parents evening, while the disconcertingly alike Twins had sat snd stared, rigid, on either side of her. Reportedly, the two had had a childhood which would not be out of place in a bad gothic novel or science fiction drama, being apparently prone to knowing the exact location of the other twin at all times, speaking their first word in perfect greek-chorus unison, swapping genders several times during the first few months of their lives, and emerging from Mrs Edmunds with their arms wrapped around each other and their eyes wide open. Jill remembered well the english teacher trying and failing to suppress the laughter as she had recounted her experience to the headteacher, who had replied by saying that Mrs Edmunds' fantasies would be far more believable if she had stuck with one supernatural event and focussed on refining it for her audience. Henry, mused Mrs Reed, if today's events were anything to go by, apparently aimed to emulate his mother's habit of telling wild and weird untruths. Jill thought of the swimming pool once more. Lucy-Rose McArthur stood in the girls' toilets. She read the biro graffiti on the doors as she waited for Alice, certainly the Edmunds twin receiving the least attention of the two today, to leave the cubicle in front of her. A year older than him, Lucy-Rose had always been an unlikely mentor to Henry - in her own conception of the relationship at the very least. She liked to imagine that the younger boy looked up to her for guidance in the complex and terrifying world of adolescence, even though she was faintly conscious that she did not really know what was actually going on inside Henry's head. Sometimes, the gnawing sense that she was cynically exploiting an unpopular and vulnerable boy in order to bolster her own self-esteem crawled to the front of her mind, but these moments were very, very rare. The overwhelming majority of the time, the doubt stayed, cowed, at the back of her consciousness. As she leaned against the grimy sinks, and Alice Edmunds' feet, visible though the gap between the toilet door and the wet floor, shuffled, Lucy-Rose reflected coolly upon the possibility of Henry having forgotten everything. Far from the confusion and disbelief that is perhaps to be expected, the idea was accompanied, to her, with a calmly thrilling sense of possibility. There had long been aspects of Henry's mindset, behaviour, home situation, that Lucy-Rose had been slightly repulsed by, or felt that could vastly improve Henry's life by their alteration. She recalled that Henry's parents worked some distasteful low-paid job, possibly at a budget supermarket, and so survived almost completely on government benefits, which was always somewhat unpalatable to Lucy-Rose and the imagined attitude of her aspirational parents towards Henry - whom they had never met. He also had a severe self-confidence deficit - his head was almost constantly lowered, dragging his neck into curvature and, Lucy-Rose feared, permanently damaging his posture. He was completely uninterested, furthermore, in becoming respected or even liked by fellow students, other than perhaps the tech crew which he had mentioned to Lucy-Rose a handful of times, preferring to focus on collecting trading cards. In addition, his persistent sexual interest in Olga Smith, who Lucy-Rose had never liked as much as she knew she was supposed to, was just a little unpleasant and embarrassing. As his sister stood up to open the door of the cubicle, Lucy-Rose decided that if Henry really had forgotten everything, none of the unfortunate facts above needed to be facts any more - not if she was clever about what she had already begun to think of as his re-education. Her drifting mind was brought sharply back into focus upon her immediate surroundings, pungent of urine, by a horrific, unreal noise which seemed to last for a period of time which was strangely impossible to gauge, dream-like. It felt like escaping steam and contained within it every imaginable form of pain, some of which apparently finding expression for the first time since prehistory. It took Lucy-Rose a number of seconds to realise that the sound was a human scream, and it had come from within the cubicle Alice Edmunds was about to vacate. Later, Alice would tell Mrs Reed the reason for the scream: she had remembered everything.

#short story #writing #creative writing

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Henry Edmunds Forgets - Part Two

Ten dazzled minutes later, Henry sat slumped in a leather chair in a windowed booth with a proud, elevated position above the main hall and privileged views over the teeming waterhole it had become for lunchtime. Amongst the nest of dusty, winking LEDs and tangled wires surrounding him sat Jordan Nelson, Billy Franklin and Arthur Yarmouth, a spotty, ramshackle coalition of boys of wildly varied ages and the closest to friends that Henry, an extremely isolated individual, had assembled during his four years at the school. Before Henry had claimed to forget everything, he had spent successive lunchtimes that were neither happy nor miserable with the tech crew, the group responsible for the facilitatory aspects of school productions and rock concerts, and his fellow victims of entirely intentional and consensual social exclusion. They would discuss the effectiveness of different guitar-lead inputs and the comparative quality of computer games from the same series, and whilst they inspected Henry's swollen face blankly, wilfully unhelpful by their own admission, they were unashamedly anxious to return to these familiar activities and were not willing to allow either Henry's temporary acquisition of the status of a celebrity or hate figure, or his recent bludgeoning, to come between them and comforting routine. In-between sandwich bites, they had been told of Henry's claim by Simon Clark, the twenty three year old technician the school employed to supervise them. They had coolly decided with minimal discussion that they would not indulge Henry by believing a word of it, and informed Henry of this shortly after Billy had escorted him into the tech room, having noticed him trying, and failing, to lift himself off of the playground floor. Henry had seemed entirely disinterested, instead opting to peer out of the grubby window to inspect the unknowable operas below. Jordan had attempted to divert his attention from the carnival outside the dark meeting room by suggesting, with a directness which made clear that the proposition was an act of compassion, Henry's favourite activity - the joyful planning and inevitably seamless execution of a customary prank on Simon, one of the few tech room traditions that would, years later, arouse flutters of nostalgia for the acquaintances' accidental camaraderie. Henry had not heard the proposal, however, or had not understood it, sparking a suspicion in Billy's mind that the certainty with which the trio had dismissed Henry's story may have been mistaken. Before the heretical thought could gain imaginative momentum, it was stopped by the sudden, invasive presence of Olga Smith in the doorway. It was common knowledge across the age group that, for many years, Henry had been enamoured with Olga in the uncomfortable way that teenage boys have it within their palid, awkward capacity to be. It was the kind of infatuation that is completely non-contingent on any aspects of the subject's personality, character, or individuality; their complicated existence as a human being, and instead resembles the relationship between a limpet and the underside of a ocean liner. Onto the blank slate symbolised to him by Olga (but it could just have easily been any other pretty, popular girl he had focussed his terrified gaze upon during the first few weeks of year seven), Henry was able to project the abstract needs and sore yearnings and needs which he wouldn't have even admitted to himself; for friendship, acceptance, connection. Adolescent obsessions such as these have a tendency to sink into obscurity in the dark trenches of the perpetually depending memory pits in the mind as one gets more and more distant from their teenage self, but at the time, Olga Smith's recurring image in Henry's imagining felt as immediate and vital as an open wound. When he was thirteen, he had hospitalised himself by drinking a cocktail of perfumes taken from his mother's room because the smell that rose from the mixture seemed, to him, identical to Olga's. While Henry had been carried, twitching, to the tech room that lunchtime, a committee of the exclusive elite of the school's female student population had decided that the proof, or, more realistically, the definitive disproof, of the truth of what was to their minds his flagrant attention-seeking, was imperative. The discussion as to the most thorough way to get Henry to admit that he had not forgotten anything after all did not last long; all eyes settled on Olga. At first, she had refused defiantly, but her protestations grew fainter and paler with every reward the high priestesses of teenage social hierarchy implied that she would receive for her cooperation: unprecedented cowed respect, invites to parties only a fraction of the year would even be aware of, possible access to Katie George's seventeen-year-old boyfriend's heartbeat-quickening friends. Perhaps more influentially, Olga was intensely aware that if she did not accept her role in the girls' plans to expose Henry, fabricated stories, possibly starring the social pariah in question alongside her, would soon be echoing along the school corridors, and their correspondence with reality would be utterly irrelevant. She had therefore, eventually, grudgingly agreed to venture to the dark recesses of the tech room, where it was known that Henry would be found, and, with her characteristic nonchalance, ask him to be her boyfriend. The rest of the tech crew froze on contact with her unconvincing words, and looked to Henry, a fevered, shocked curiosity burning on their faces. After four endless seconds, Henry spoke. "I'm sorry, but I can't remember who you are. I can't remember anything." Olga's chocolate-brown eyes had not even had time to adjust to the sweaty gloom before she left. She reported back to the assembled masses that Henry's face had shown no recognition of the long-standing object of his fascination. The crowd dispersed, a muttering explosion. The keepers of the social order pierced Olga with disbelieving glares, to which Olga gave a shrug. She had not cared about the truth of Henry's story nearly as much as everyone else seemed to to her, mainly because she had spent the last few years training herself to care as little about Henry as possible as a matter of self-preservation. For those students who were intent upon following the tale like a soap opera, her news was almost definitive proof that Henry really had suffered precisely the strange occurrence he had been describing since the morning. As Henry drifted to what the tech crew had informed him to be his next lesson, Harry Phillips, a young geography teacher, seized him by the unresponsive shoulders and steered him into a supply cupboard, where, amongst the stacked cleaning spirits and leaning mops, he asked in a broken voice how Henry had managed to forget everything. His wife had recently been killed at the age of twenty-seven by a horrific alliance of diseases, and Mr Phillips remembered so much of the eighteen-month process that he had forgotten how anything but numbness felt. Henry said that he didn't understand, to which Mr Phillips replied that he didn't, either. PART THREE TOMORROW.

#writing #creative writing #short story

Henry Edmunds Forgets - Part One

On the day Henry Edmunds claimed to have forgotten everything, Sophia Burnley sat in her classroom and contemplated the way in which, after a sustained period of reading bad GCSE set-text poetry to fatigued adolescents, everything acquires romance and mythological sheen - every cliched observation becomes jarringly strange, worth noting down, a potential seed for the next epic. Every memory becomes worth soaking in thick, sticky poetry; worth the accompanying sogginess of distortion. With this rumination occupying her drifting and dreaming mind as the excessive warmth of the classroom buffered against the bitterness besieging her students outside, there was little room for endowing the faint recollection of Henry’s words, spoken early in the lesson she had just finished teaching, with the importance owed to them - an importance which the rest of the day would confirm as its events, primed to occur at this stage in the cold morning like a waiting gun, unfurled.

Laura Tyrell would, by contrast, remember for the rest of her life Henry’s proclamation to Mrs Burnley that he didn’t, in fact, recall anything about Carol Anne Duffy, or any of his classmates, or his teacher, or indeed himself. The strange blot on her otherwise rosy school memories that that day would become would force her, before second period was over, to scan her miscellaneous observations from first period English like a fisherman inspecting a glassy lake surface for signs of concealed activity, and spear that memory of Henry, bringing it above water and proceeding to tell anyone who would listen that she had been the first person he had told. As she reflected with more and more clarity on the event that Sophia had dismissed as an eccentricity characteristic of a lesson swamped in sleep deprivation, she remembered, or invented, or filled in like a sketch which one adds detail to over time, the prickly fear which had seized her upon Henry’s announcement. She had watched as Henry’s identical twin, Alice Edmunds, sat opposite her and next to Henry, had placed her hand on Henry’s arm and gripped him tight, hissing in an aggressive whisper that he should stop talking, and asking why on earth he would say something like that. He had looked at her, empty-gazed, and slowly removed her pinch from his loose elbow skin. Mrs Burnley had squeezed her mouth into a corner of her face in a way that was non-committedly disapproving, and moved on to the next student without their hand raised.

On leaving Mrs Burnley’s classroom and her absence of concern for his bizarre response to a warm-up exercise, Henry walked to second period French like an astronaut climatised to an alien environment re-adjusting to Earth. The complete absence of anything communicatory in the black pits of his pupils or fringing his jungle-green irises, let alone the resigned solidarity his fellow students expected from one another on a Monday morning, did not go unnoticed on his airy transition between languages. Curious and mean whisperings fluttered outwards from him and bounced off of the walls of the corridor like ripples from a dropped pebble in a pond. When he was jostled by the irrepressible tide of people the bell released like a break in a levee, he gripped his face with his hands and crouched into a precarious foetal squat, sending the classmates behind him stumbling, disorientated, onwards through the churning concentration of bodies. Many reacted with anger and clumsily swung open palms at his braced head as they passed.

When David Barnes, a passing student, stooped to inspect Henry’s alarming position, he insisted for the second time that morning, determined in his terrified confusion, that he had forgotten everything - where he was, why he was there, the meaning of the clanging bell that had just ceased, what David meant when he asked if Henry needed to go to welfare. David inquired if he was in shock, and then whether something had happened. Henry replied to the first question with a firm no, and to the second with a similar hollow expression to that which had alarmed his sister in English and the students who had happened to look Henry’s way before he had collapsed. David, mature beyond his age, took on a paternalistic tone in his inspection of Henry’s requisitioned timetable, and then, after Henry had followed David’s directions to French, a paternalistic conviction that the role of informing authority within the school that something strange was occurring inside Henry’s head was David’s own. In his well-meaning naïveté, he failed to appreciate that the impact parameters of stories are as hard to gauge and regulate as that of forest fires in the age of enraged climate and erratic heat, and by the time Henry emerged from French, squinting and blinking like a newborn, most of the teachers in the school were aware of his professed situation, whether or not they were central to solving the issue. Accompanying these by lunch, by which time Henry had been bombarded by the bluster and chaos of two more entirely unintelligible (if his story is to be believed) lessons, were teaching assistants, librarians, science and IT technicians, most of the cafeteria staff, a solid majority of the board of governors and, via the impatient inability of bored professionals to keep an unresolved yarn from the potential represented by fertile, itching teenage imaginations, nearly all of the school’s students.

A group of boys, whose drifting, alienated fear of the world was as fierce in reality as Henry’s was in accordance with the fiction most of the school currently believed his stammered mantra to be, decided to resolve the issue of dissonance between Henry’s claim and most people’s understanding of the workings of the universe in the simplest way possible. Like antibodies neutralising a viral threat, bound into a unified crowd around him by common purpose, they bloodied his lips and rearranged the structure of his nasal cartilage with their fists and then their feet. Henry buckled between their angry bodies and the school’s outdoor climbing wall, his head ricocheting off of its amoebic protrusions as he sank to the ground. When the boys had finished, they projected a shower of hot phlegm onto the twitching, purpled body and dispersed - they had not said a word to each other or to their victim.

TO BE CONTINUED.

(N.B. I started writing this short story earlier in the summer, when I was halfway through ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and reading it back, I think I’m subconsciously trying to emulate his style here, which prob wasn’t a great idea because a.) He’s one of the best writers of all time, b.) his prose is actually very traditional and elaborate, which isn’t my comfort zone at all, and c.) I read him in translation from Spanish (ha.) But hey, it’s an experiment - hope you enjoy it! Parts two and three will be posted tomorrow and Saturday.)

#writing #creative writing #short story

Courtroom

To cringing at sexual politics in nightclubs, To voting based on feeling, and warmth, and surging excitement, To relief when the hot sun goes in for another nine months, To boredom on Christmas, To all non-seasonal emotion, To despair as the future one-ups itself for bleakness, To refusal to blink in the face of its approach, To not buying newspapers, To demanding to be told a more true story, To neglect of exercise, To judging each other based on our clothes, To joy on a day that someone will die, To crying on days when people are born, To splintering our voices, To wasting money on a university education (for its own sake), To entering long-term relationships with social media companies, To wanting our art to be thought of as worth something, To defining ourselves, To asking for more, To settling for less, sometimes, To upsetting rightwing grandparents, To apologising for our painful crushes, To being left cold by the opening of A level results, To making new words, irreverent, To terror at sprawling afternoons, unstructured by to-do lists, To doubting mechanical, soundbitten rationalisations for savegery, To fogging our lightweight minds, To denial of our political delusions, To wanting to plaster our new rooms with photos of our old friends, To sitting in the shower, sometimes for twenty minutes, To seeing the interior of minds we are told to hate, To imagining each other naked, To dreaming twisted comeuppances for the world to hand out, To allowing our bullies to impress us, To enthusiasm (unbound, limb-springing, mind-sparking), To hoping, To giving up, To self-romanticising, We plead guilty,

But we demand to know Who the prosecution is.

#writing #poetry #kind of #undeveloped idea #will probably resurface in something else i do

Tide

It was there And then it wasn’t.

We clear remnants of the goodbye party; Replace bottles, empty of spirit, with family photos and vases, Temporarily removed - restored now, nothing broken. Two worlds fade alike: That is, gently. Neither like a shatter. Later, I shower.

The water slips, deceitful, past alcohol spots, Blank-canvas skin; And takes with it, covert, A spring-lit, blush-struck Wall-side walk, and everything else - Hips and teeth and regrettable jokes - Which made us glow, and dry. It waits for the plughole, patient as fate, Bound, I imagine, for some beach, Where it will, froth fringed, return again To life and land, better than memory. Like the anxious rhythm of self-confidence, That outgoing tide.

It wasn’t there And then it was.

#poem #poetry #writing #creativewriting

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Post 6 | 02.03.15

Seven Seconds.

Sam.

16th April: Jack visited today. He told me that buttons on lifts don’t actually have any effect on the closing of the lift doors whatsoever. He’d heard it on the radio, he said. Well. I didn’t say anything at the time, but now I think about it, I’m very concerned about this indeed. If it doesn’t make the doors close when you press it, then what on earth is the button there for? Is it just there so that we feel better? Has someone gone to the trouble of making a machine in a factory somewhere which makes buttons for lifts for absolutely no reason? Has an engineer actually made the effort to attach the button to the wall of the lift, just so that we can feel like we have some control over when the doors open? This bothers me. I know that Jack likes to share these facts with me when he visits - he does enjoy learning and such. But sometimes I wish he would just keep his mouth shut.

17th April: In the lift today, I counted the time between me walking in and the doors closing. It was seven seconds. I pressed the button, of course, because that’s what people do in lifts. Why would I not press the button? If it’s there, I’m going to press it. I don’t think I should be seen as some kind of fool for doing that. When I came back with the shopping, I was alone in the lift like I had been when I left. So this time, I didn’t press the button. Not even once. The doors took seven seconds to close. It appears that Jack was correct. I am distraught.

18th April: The button is just an accessory on an elaborate mechanical system, a pretty addition to convince us that we have influence over this dystopian contraption we live within. We do not. When I was in the lift today, I didn’t press the button again. It made no difference. Seven seconds. Just like always. I have drunk some of my whiskey.

19th April: I was thinking about the lifts all night long. This morning, when I woke up, I decided that I was quite glad that our lifts run themselves, and do not depend on any manual prompts. This is a big building. Lots of people live here. Lots of people with complicated lives who need to move around the building and, who knows, maybe even leave more than once a day to get the shopping. This lifestyle is alien to me, but I am aware of its popularity. Maybe the lifts being automated - running on sensors or radar or however the hell they know when to close, is a good thing. It makes this building efficient. This, in turn, helps people with their hectic lives. Yes. On reflection, I am okay with the button being a pathetic, redundant irrelevance.

20th April: I have changed my mind. This business about the button makes me thoroughly depressed. For a while now, I have suspected that none of us have any real control over our lives. That we simply tick from moment to moment in this cold, soulless contraption which we call the world. The lifts seem to be the final proof. Jack visited. I told him my interpretation of his button fact. He didn’t seem very interested - he has moved on. His ‘interesting fact’ this time was that Manhattan was traded by the Dutch to the British in the sixteen-hundreds in exchange for a small Indonesian island, because this island had a lot of nutmeg trees back then. But I am still thinking about the button.

21st April: I am a cog in the machine, just like everyone and everything. The button is an attempt to deceive us into forgetting this.

23rd April: I have begun to press the button anyway, when I want the doors to close. I thought that it might make me feel better. It does not.

27th April: I have made a breakthrough. I discovered today that if I put my arm outside the lift, and then bring it back in quickly, it makes the lift doors close sooner. I do not know why. Maybe it confuses the radar. I asked Jack whether this was possible. He said I clearly don’t understand radar. Or lifts. So I suppose that I do not. But however it works, I have found a way to exercise control over the lifts in this building, without the use of the button. I have taken my life back. I have rediscovered autonomy. I am delighted. Through use of this method, the lift sometimes (provided I am alone in there) closes a whole four or five seconds before it otherwise would. Four or five seconds, snatched from the jaws of the beast. Four or five seconds shaved from my journey to the shops. I called Jack simply to tell him about it.

28th April: I was in the lift with a man today. A young man. He looked about Jack’s age, which would make him twenty seven and two months. But that is irrelevant information. He was impatient. Perhaps he was in a rush. Perhaps his seven seconds were almost over when I walked into the lift and started the seven seconds all over again because I triggered the radar. Or whatever is the right way of saying it. We stood there, in silence, and the doors stayed open, giving us a full view of the corridor outside. He was angry, so he started pressing the button. Over and over again. He was really hammering it into the wall. Press, press, press, press. I just watched him, and I thought: 'We are all like that.’ When things do not go our way, all we can think of to do is to repeatedly press the button. We continue to do the things we believe give us power, even if we can see full well that they do not change anything. After three seconds, I put my hand on the man’s shoulder, and he looked around like he was scared of me. Without saying a word, in what I hoped was a majestic and enigmatic silence, I put my arm outside the lift, and then pulled it back in again. The lift doors closed, and we were on our way. I think he probably thought that I was the Master of the Universe.

29th April: Most people on my floor now know about the arm trick. I am truly a great teacher of men.

3rd May: Something strange happened today. I was in the lift, and it was crowded - so crowded that when the doors were taking ages to shut, I could not reach them to put my arm outside. I was stuck, and apparently, none of the people stuck with me were any of my recent converts. I was about to say something - a last resort when dealing with the people in my building (I don’t believe I have communicated verbally with any of my neighbours for several years.) But then, I became aware of some things. The last person to enter the lift was a woman who wore a headscarf decorated with beads which caught the electric light of the corridor and glistened like raindrops on leaves on a sunny day. In the first second after her entrance, I heard a teenage boy on his phone behind me, laughing in a way which made the metal walls of the lift ring. In the second second, I smelled the body odour of a fat man directly in front of me and remembered P.E. lessons at school and the stench of the woman who used to sit at the till next to mine at the supermarket. In the third second, I noticed a woman’s handbag. It was a shade of purple which made me think of the portraits of royalty in the gallery Jack likes to take me to sometimes. I always try and escape those trips. Two women joined hands in front of me, and I swear I could almost see energy leaping from skin to skin. In the fourth second, the lift creaked ominously with the sheer mass of humanity it contained within its six sides, and I smelled fried chicken. In the fifth second, I saw a young woman holding her children close to her with what must have been superhuman strength, as they strived to pull away from her as if standing still for a minute was great torture, as if she was keeping them from freedom itself. In the sixth second, I looked at my neighbours’ shoes. I saw scuffed boots and neat scarlet slip-ons and stained slippers and bobbly socks beneath dust-coloured sandals. I saw miniature versions of adult shoes, for children, slipping off of tiny feet - hanging precariously in the gulf between a pushchair and the ground. In the seventh second, I felt the hot, stale atmosphere on the bare skin of my cheeks, my ankles, my crawling forearms. The lift door closed, sealing off this bright and busy microcosm and sending it plummeting downwards. Perhaps I will let the seven seconds pass in future. Jack visited. He told me that the universe will end in seven point five billion years time. This is a lot of seconds.

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Post 5 | 31.01.15

Because Someone said People at Oxford University don’t Watch the Football

Sam

I sit in a naked classroom, and listen. There’s no nightlife there, is there? It’s all academia. I bet everyone’s just really boring. They’re the kind of people who…

I want to say: the kind of people who what? The kind of people who play cultural theorist top-trumps? The kind of people who get every question of the University Challenge classical music round correct, and won’t talk to people who don’t? Who alter the workings of their televisions (if they even have one) so that ITV isn’t available? But I don’t.

I want to say: What kind of person am I? With my two-car family. With my if-not-champagne-then-elderflower socialism and my railwayman great-grandfather and my South-West-small-town boredom. With an old state-school tie somewhere in the back of my wardrobe and a new state-school anger brewing firmly at the front of my mind. Lodged just between the Homer and The Simpsons. Between Blake and fake IDs; between confusion about Virginia Woolf and confusion about Take Me Out. With my ex-servant’s quarters room in my one-time-victorian house and my September-2015 destination of the place where Christopher Wren was eighteen. When I was fourteen, I was told by my friends that Facebook was ‘not for essays’. They had been reacting to an anti-X-factor thesis I had posted, late at night. I remember.

I never held the letter - I waited for a text instead. But I know that it was on paper, not parchment, and there was no wax seal. It did not arrive by Owl. Sorry. As I held my phone, two types of me materialised, fashioned from throwaway comments and photographs and anecdotes. Stereotype for sinew and each organ a truth. Their bones the certainties I know to calcify in friends’ minds whenever this all comes up.

One: Tall. Strong. Arrogant. Robes cockily draped from his shoulders. He used the First Folio of Shakespeare as a cricket bat.

The other: Bearded. Proud. Furious. A hypocritical wrath wrapped tight around his torso. Encrusted with excessive political button-badges which shone like trophies and shouted like liars.

One swung the Folio, the other ducked and launched into desperate polemic, drowned out by sordid stories of Prince Harry from his opponent. Bludgeoned with a protest placard, that opponent spat blue blood and drew a musket which belonged to Pitt the Younger, soon to be snatched from his hands and broken over his head, sending him spinning to the ground. He was saved because his assailant stopped to explain to Tumblr that the violence was ironic. He rose to his fox-skin-booted feet and whistled for coke-dusted future Prime Ministers, who encircled the other, seemingly undeterred by increasingly hysterical demands that they check their privilege. Luckily, he managed to summon a collection of dreadlocked white people, but they forgot to fight back and recommended some excellent marxist literary criticism instead. The ensuing existential crisis created a forcefield around their leader so strong that it reminded the drinking society that several restaurants were lamentably un-smashed-up, and they left to attend to their duties. In frustration, one of the types of me ran at the other like an aristocratic bull, scattering his petition-wielding bodyguards. He punched him squarely in the face, the leather of his riding gloves slapping against skin as round glasses shattered, and drew blood.

I held the phone, and blinked away these visions, replacing them with fantasies of blank slates; unwritten futures. Because apparently, I have chosen confusion. I have chosen contradiction. I have chosen what I want.

Because my friend had referred to a college there as 'his family’s college’: 'My family just always go to that one.’ The first of my descendants to go to university were my parents.

Because six months earlier, I had sat in an overheated basement room, beneath quads and porter’s lodges and adrenaline-laced possibility. Beneath mazes of sunlit cotswold stone. Because the man giving the talk had asked Who’s worried about Student Finances and honesty and assumptions of a forest of raised arms had drawn up my hand, because that’s what students are worried about, right? Because I had been alone, an island of doubt in a wasteland of comfort.

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Another threepeopledostuff piece

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POST 1 | 01.01.15

A New Year

Sam

Photo credit: Khanh Hmoong

He had never believed in a ‘New’ Year; had always maintained that it was an entirely nonsensical concept. He had sat at his mother’s feet, uncountable ‘New’ Years’ Eves ago, and had asked what exactly the difference would be between that moment and the other side of midnight. She hadn’t been able to answer him. She had just laughed. ‘New’ Year after ‘New’ Year after ‘New’ Year, each in the same house he sat in now: the same view kissing the window, the same number on the door. Because it was the same house. Walkens would come and go. The house remained. Old. Old city, old cold on one side of the wall, old warmth on the other. ‘New’ Year? There was no such thing. Time can’t be new. Talking about a ‘New’ Year was just a cop out. As he had explained to his children, his grandchildren.

They had rolled their eyes.

Why divide our time by orbits of a star, he had asked. My years start when Arsenal win the league and end when BBC News gets a new weather-girl. They begin on the first day of Wimbledon and end when the grass on Suilven begins to look golden against the pink sky. Suilven? It’s a mountain in the North-West Highlands.

They had rolled their eyes further.

My New Year begins, he had growled, when Walken leaves these houses alone. When Walken puts the rent back to normal. When Tracey Yarmouth can heat her home again. She’s been struggling for months now. Ever since June, when they hiked everything up through the bloody ceiling. I smile at her every day, on my way home from the shop in the morning. She never smiles back. Never. And I don’t blame her. And at the campaign meetings, she’s the angriest, and most organised, and most determined of the lot of us.

They had told him that the New Year could be a New Start, if he made it one. But the death of his mother had been a New Start. The Birth of his children. His dull-but-glorious last day at work, his emergence into the pale, free, uncharted sunlight. His New Starts came with the relentless and organic progression of his life, he had said. No-one was going to dictate them for him.

Naturally, then, he was surprised when he woke up on New Year’s day and his old bed was facing a new direction. He looked at the old clock and the numbers went in a new direction around it. From his window, he could see Suilven. It’s in the North-West highlands. Or used to be. He blinked. His old carpet was a new colour, and clung to the ceiling. His old fish tank held a new fish. And a seahorse. His old city waited.

He wrapped himself in the new dressing gown hanging on the back of his old wardrobe door - he had never owned one before - and stepped outdoors, into the warm. It should be cold, he thought. Maybe it would have been, in the old year. He shook his head. This is the old year. No difference. No such thing as ‘New’ Year. But as he shuffled along the narrow road that used to be wide, he was gradually forced to admit that the world had rearranged almost entirely at midnight. Tropical plants sprouted from new cracks in the old grey pavement.

Old people left old houses in new clothes. Quiet Mr Gregson wore a drooping, felt hat and tight, shining trousers. He lifted a nail-varnished hand in ecstatic greeting. John Keegan took the tram to work, clad in an angular suit, each morning. Today he wore a greasy T-Shirt and yellowing socks. He laughed at the sky. Sandra McArthur wore a pirate costume. Twenty middle-aged men and women jogged past, looking absurd but exuding confidence, fulfilling New Years’ resolutions with every shaking step.

Rain began to fall from the concrete underfoot into the open sky. Sucked upwards from the surface of his slippers. His slippers: some of the only old things in this New Year, apparently. His daughter had got him them for his seventy-fifth. She had wrapped them terribly, but then again, it is hard to wrap slippers, as he had observed at the time. Her new partner had nervously scratched his nose. She had explained that her father wasn’t being rude, he just liked to explain the obvious. Like how there’s no such thing as ‘New’ Year.

Formerly peeling billboards which had shouted slogans for new films and news channels now framed glinting images; of Neil Armstrong, stepping onto a new landscape; of Nikola Tesla, watching sparks jump before him, illuminating his darkened room with a shock of white light; of a tall man gazing across the ancient blue of the Red Sea from one side, rather than the other, for the first time. Of the first glittering firework to reflect in a human’s eye. O my America, my newfoundland. O brave new world, that has such people in’t. A bus passes, inside-out. In it, the first Tempest, on loop. And Hip-hop, Homer, Harvey Milk, Monet. Laika, Luther King. Colour, and fire, and disapproving mutters. Reform acts and revolutions and newborns. Utterly fresh, each time. Rapture after rapture in the rosy-fingered dawn. He pushed down into the pockets of his dressing gown and treaded into the new. He hoped his children were okay.

He went to the shop. There was no name above it, in the New Year. He didn’t pay the bored man for the cereal and bannanas, either, but felt he should leave something. One of his slippers. That will do. His newly bare foot informed him on the way home that pavement is soft, now. This year. As he placed his key in his door, backwards, he eyed Suilven. Its grass had begun turning golden. Just before he opened it, he saw Tracy Yarmouth leave her house. He smiled. Later, when he was back in his old house and didn’t own a dressing gown once again; when the billboards had returned to advertising hoovers and the Planet of the Apes, he would explain about the moment he knew that he had been right about ‘New’ Year all along:

I smiled at Tracy, he would say, and she smiled back. And I did a double take, looked around at this strange world I, or God, or someone, had dreamed up. So I asked her about Walken, and she asked me who. She asked me who Walken were. The company who own our homes. Who control our lives. Who have been keeping her from smiling back for thirty-something years. Who? Walken, Tracy, Walken. Happy New Year, she said back to me. And then I knew. This was a lie. Not necessarily a dream, but a story. A fiction. Because in no new world, in no New Year, would Tracey Yarmouth forget about Walken. The year is not new unless we make it new.

His family would roll their eyes again.

He would make some New Years resolutions.

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A piece I wrote in January as part of a joint blog with my friends Evie (averageblueraincoat) and Zoë.

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