7 Ridiculous Journeys (2)

 II (1980)

At Oxford, as elsewhere, he dodged the spires and did the best he could with a name like Ambrose and a mildly dysfunctional personality. Part of this making-do involved skulking around Catholicism's back alley and overflowing bins, pretending not to be an atheist in the rain, pretending not to see through (and be seen through by) the whole sin-sodden racket. Having been raised a Catholic, he reasoned, you might as well leverage it, make knowing the Credo count for something; plus, the advantage of there being heavily draped supernatural quasi-people up there, more than offsetting their discreet non-existence, is that you can actually talk to them. And where most thy bins o'erflowed, O Lord, and peacefully ponged, was the Oxford Chaplaincy, which regularly laid on a party for unwary freshers, with free beer of monastic exuberance, and crisp young men standing around emitting paragraphs into the frosty air. That's where all the trouble started.

Looking at her across a crowded chapel foyer, beer in hand, he saw immediately that the lost puppy he had mourned as a boy had been found, revived, cloned, sedated, and for some reason stuffed severally up the front of her Aran sweater. She eyed him. He shuffled forth in delirious encounter, almost spilling froth on the tiles.

"You (...)?" It was an exotic, astringent word: he couldn't yet tell if he liked the taste or not. It was what people said to inadvertent puppy bearers. It got you places other words wouldn't. Light slanted mystically from a high window, bathing her in a virginal aura.

"Me? Connie!! Irish, Kilburn (ish), Large, complicated family. Theology. Actual fresher (unlike thou, thou beery opportunist). Have made some friends already. Would consider singing in a choir; may reward inventive mendacity. Oh, Bensons, offer’st thou? Marlboro me. But yeah thanks."

She was County Mayo, but talked in a slow, wheedling, elocutionary RP, disconcertingly reminiscent of Maggie Thatcher, a bit quieter and Dubliner. (This was 1980, so she would have had to make a special effort not to sound like Maggie, and didn’t.) Big-boned, with an Alpine wardrobe that rounded out the chunkiness. Lips sticky with lipstick. Aquiline nose. Straight, dark-sheened, convent-school hair, twinned with a solid skirt of schoolish propriety. He noted that like all panicked freshers, she affected manners that kept you guessing how posh she was, and was a lot better at this than he was, in his shabby make-do prog-rock charity-shop rags.

He didn’t trust himself to talk to her long. Cobbled from matinee movies and eighteenth century fiction over the course of an aphasic adolescence, his conversational repertoire was threadbare. He was the sort of young dog who inwardly congratulated himself upon managing to launch a grammatical sentence, not a bark, into the unforgiving sociosphere. The "nice meeting you" part of his hastily improvised valedictory, and the "maybe another day?", came out a touch more pleading than intended. Picking a quick exit towards the wide door (don't want to spoil good impression) he wondered if he had been successful there, for a second or two. He habitually leaned on being unassuming, otherworldly, inoffensive, hopefully intriguing. There was nothing else in his knapsack.

She came round to his concrete College-allocated cell the next day, with a story about couriering a guitar score passed on by a friend, a tale only a naive, gullible idiot would have believed. He believed it. Minutes later, he was sitting uncomfortably on the bed, cradling her resting head in his lap, dutifully massaging it through secretly straggly hair. Apparently this was something Irish families did. The implication that he had been elevated to a cadet branch of her extended family was a mental object he rotated this way and that, trying to see what reflected off it. Nothing, but it glowed a bit.

"Don't you groom each other in your family?"

"Course not. I'm English. If anyone in my family ever touched each other deliberately, the universe would be bumped off its spools and clatter to the floor, unwinding as it went."

Having a girl's head in your lap gawping up at a misty amalgam of your eyes and the ceiling was a rum do. Tectonics might take place. Dangerous words like "female" had to be barred entrance to his mind. Keeping everything limp was the single priority. She must not be allowed, through the smallest movement, the merest throb, to divine what her head was millimetres east of. His mind was quickly turning into a thicket of Do Not Enter signs. Her body stretched away, to arm's length and beyond, big and heavy and contoured, like the vast intimidating cockpit of something he'd never learned to fly. Beyond it, outside: tea-coloured walls, spires, bicycles, cypresses, a watercolour calendar decor calculated to impart spurious moment to every fidget. For a moment, they were a Dutch painting gone all wrong.

"Tea?"

Being English, he’d learned to play the tea card tactically, in real emergencies. This, this trusting head atop a volcanic lap, was such an emergency. He played it, and managed to slide out from under her without issue when she said Fine. The kettle, which lived on the floor, went on.

He was still young, a student, and still thought that life contained possibilities and important choices, and that not all game-show doors concealed, for him, goats. Right now, in his college room, he thought there was such a choice, there, stretched out on his bed. If he did and said the right things in the right order, there would be puppies. She would see to it that he would have puppies, and his whole life (and hers) would be bumped up a level, would become theological at last – the sort of life in which it was possible to do Mortal Sins, or be interpreted by Dostoevsky. In order for this to happen, he supposed he would have to inspire “love”, that mysterious fever celebrated in trashy pop and autopsied in the marriage register. He did not know how to do this. There was no set way of doing this, since his crippledom was unique, and had never been faced before in the history of the world, except by the sort of people who weren’t written about in books and so weren’t much help. Unlovely: getting himself loved would obviously require some sleight of hand. But what exactly?

"Music, maestro?"

He'd been dreading this. His record collection consisted exclusively of things he'd found he liked, without regard for coherence or cachet. He tried: "You?"

"Chieftains. But will lower myself to Sinatra: am broad-minded."

He'd never heard of the Chieftains. It occurred to him that she'd made a mistake, and that the bloke she wanted, the one she assumed she was with, was actually waiting two doors down, checking his watch. The one who knew who the Chieftains were, and belonged to polite society. In a minute she'd realise who he was, or wasn't, and he'd have to apologise and grovel at the door as she sailed out. "Er, Supertramp?"

Surprisingly, that worked. A couple of songs in, there was some tentative breach of personal space sans lunettes: lip fencing, and suddenly, there you go, your first real snog.

He’d read something about the tongue being involved, and her lips didn’t seem to want to stay closed, so he sort of wandered into her mouth, mentally preparing an apology in case that was the wrong place to go. There didn’t seem to be much to do in there so his tongue cautiously withdrew, and then it was her turn. This went on for a while. Soon enough he realised that the movies lied: there was nothing climactic about kissing, per se. Beaks were locking, but no actual worms were being regurgitated from his crop or hers. It was presumably meant simply to foreshadow what was programmed to happen lower down in due course: a marker, a ritual, a coming of age, a portal. Her face looked different at that microscopic proximity: scrubbed, hairless, vaguely porous, with a faint bloom on it and a pallor beneath: marine, cuttlefish-like, and achingly blind.