Starter For Ten (4 page)

Finally, just by my pillow, I put up a picture of Dad, looking whippet-thin and vaguely menacing, like Pinky in Brighton Rock, but on Southend sea front, with a bottle of beer and a cigarette smouldering in the long fingers of one hand. He's got a black quiff, high, sharp cheek-bones, a long thin nose, and a sharp, slim-collared three-button suit, and though he's half-smiling at the camera, he still looks pretty intimidating. It was taken around 1962, four years before I was born, so he must have been the same age as I am now. I love this photograph, but I still have a nagging feeling that if my nineteen-year-old dad had met the nineteen-year-old me on Southend pier on a Saturday night, there's a pretty good chance he'd have tried to beat me up.

There's a knock on the door, and instinctively I hide the Blu-Tack behind my back. I assume it's Josh, asking me to fag for him or something, but instead in walks a huge blonde woman with Viking hair and a milky blonde moustache.

'How are you getting on? Alright?' says Josh in drag.

'Fine, fine.'

'Why's your mattress on the floor?'

'Oh, I thought I'd try it as a futon for a while.'

'A futon? Really?' says Josh, pursing his lipstick-ed mouth as if it's the most exotic thing he's ever heard in his life, which is pretty rich, coming from a man in drag. 'Marcus, come and have a look at Jackson's futon!' and Marcus, in a curly black nylon wig, hockey skirt and laddered stockings, sticks his nose into the room, snuffles, then disappears.

'Anyway, we're off now - are you coming along or what?'

'Sorry, coming ...?'

'Tarts and Vicars Party, Kenwood Manor. Should be a laugh.'

'Right, well, maybe. It's just I thought I might stay in and read . . .'

'Oh, don't be so wet . . .'

'But I don't have anything to wear . . .'

'You've got a dark shirt, haven't you?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Well, there you go then. Stick a bit of white cardboard under the collar and away you go. See you in five minutes. Oh, and don't forget that tenner for the home-brew, yeah? Love what you've done to the room, by the way . . .'

QUESTION: The interaction energy of two protons relates to the separation between them What are the forces between the protons when the separation between them is respectively a) small and b) intermediate?

ANSWER: Repulsive and attractive.

As a man of sophistication and experience, I know the value of 'lining your stomach' before an evening out, so for supper I buy a bag of chips and a battered sausage, and eat them on the way to the party. It starts to rain quite steadily, but I eat as many chips as I can before they get too cold and wet. Marcus and Josh stride self-confidently on ahead in their high heels, seemingly indifferent to the mirthless glances of passers-by. I suppose that posh-boys-in-drag must be one of the inevitable miseries of living in a university town. For soon it will be rag-week, the leaves will turn to bronze, the swallows will fly south, and the shopping arcade will be full of male medics dressed as sexy nurses.

On the way, Josh bombards me with questions.

'What are you studying, Brian?'

'English.'

'Poems eh? I'm Politics and Economics, Marcus is Law. Play any sports, Brian?'

'Only Scrabble,' I quip.

'Scrabble's not a sport,' sniffles Marcus.

'You haven't seen the way I play it!' I say, quick as a flash.

But he doesn't seem to find this funny, because he just scowls and says, 'Doesn't matter how you play it, it's still not a sport.'

'No, I know, I was just . . .'

'Are you soccer, cricket or rugby?' says Josh.

'Well, none of them really . . .'

'Not a sportsman, then?'

'Not at all.' I can't help feeling that I'm being assessed for admission into some un-named private club, and failing.

'How's your squash? I need a partner.'

'Not squash. Badminton occasionally.'

'Badminton's a girls' game,' says Marcus, adjusting the straps on his slingbacks.

'Take a year out?' asks Josh.

'No . . .'

'Go anywhere nice this summer?'

'No . . .'

'What do your parents do?'

'Well, Mum works on the tills in Woolworths. Dad sold double-glazing, but he's dead now.' Josh squeezes me on the arm and says, 'I'm so sorry,' though it's unclear whether he means Dad's death or Mum's job.

'How about yours?'

'Oh, Dad's Foreign Office, Mum's Department of Transport.' Oh my God, he's a Tory. Or at least I assume Josh is Tory if his parents are Tory, it does tend to run in families. As for Marcus I wouldn't be surprised to discover that he's in the Hitler Youth.

Finally we arrive at Kenwood Manor. I'd avoided the halls of residence as I'd been advised on the university open-day that they were dull and institutional and packed full of Christians. The reality is somewhere between a lunatic asylum and a minor public school - long echoing corridors, parquet floors, the smell of damp underwear drying on a luke-warm radiator, so and the sense that sumevvheie, something teiiible ib happening in a toilet.

The distant thud of Dexys Midnight Runners beckons us along a corridor to a large, wood-panelled room, with high windows and sparsely populated with students - about seven parts Tart to three parts Vicar, and with a roughly fifty-fifty split between female and male Tarts. It's not a pretty sight. Burly men and quite a few women, in artfully torn tights with sports socks stuffed in their bras, leaning against the walls like, well, Tarts, whilst patrician Edwardian vice-chancellors peer down from their portraits in despair.

'By the way, Bri, I don't suppose you've got that tenner ...?' says Josh, frowning '...for the home-brew?'

I can't really afford it of course, and it's the tenner that Mum pressed into my hand, but in the spirit of new friendship I hand over the money, and Josh and Marcus skip off like dogs on a beach, leaving me to make some more of these friendships that will last me a lifetime. I decide that, generally speaking, at this early stage of the evening it's best to go for a vicar, rather than a tart.

On the way to the makeshift bar, a trestle table selling Red Stripe for a very reasonable 50p a can, I put on my talk-to-me please face, a simple-minded close-mouthed grin accompanied by tentative nods and hopeful glances. Standing waiting to be served is a lanky hippie with a matching village-idiot grin to mine and, remarkably, an even worse complexion. He glances around the room, and in a high Brummie accent says, 'Absolutely looooony, isn't it!'

'Insane!' I say, and we both roll our eyes as if to say 'Teh, kids today!' His name's Chris, and it soon transpires that he's studying English too; 'Synchronicity!' exclaims Chris, and then proceeds to tell me the whole of his A-level syllabus, and the precise contents of his UCCA form, and the plot of every book he's ever read in his whole life, before embarking on a description of his summer spent travelling round India, in real time, and I pass the days and nights that follow by nodding, and drinking three cans of Red Stripe, and wondering whether his skin really is worse than mine, when all of a sudden I realise that he's saying ...

'...and d'you know what? I never used toilet paper once in all that time.'

'Really?'

'Nope. And I don't think I'll ever use it again either. It's much fresher this way, and much more environmentally friendly.'

'So what do you ...?'

'Oh, just my hand, and a bucket of water. This hand!' and he thrusts it under my nose. 'Trust me, it's loads more hygienic.'

'But I thought you said you kept getting dysentery?'

'Well, yes, but that's different. Everyone gets dysentery.'

I decide not to pursue the point, and say, 'Great! Well, well done you . . .' and we're off again, travelling on bare wooden benches by rickety bus from Hyderabad to Bangalore until, somewhere in the Erramala Hills, the Red Stripe does its work and I realise with joy that my bladder's full and that I'm really sorry but I have to go to the toilet - 'Don't go away, I'll be right back, stay right where you are' - and as I'm leaving he grabs me by the shoulder, holds his left hand up in front of my face and says, evangelically, 'And don't forget! No need for toilet paper!' I smile and head off briskly.

When I come back I realise with relief that he has gone away, so I go and sit on the edge of the wooden stage, next to a small, neat woman dressed neither as tart nor vicar, but as a member of the KGB Youth Wing - a heavy black coat, black tights, a short denim shirt, and a black soviet-style cap, pushed back behind an oily black quiff. I give her a 'mind-if-I-sit-here?' smile and she gives me a 'yes-go-away' smile, a tight little spasm, and there's a glimpse of tiny, sharp white teeth, all the same size, behind an incongruous smear of crimson lipstick should probably just go, of course, but the lager's made me fearless and over-friendly, and so I sit next to her, anyway. Even over the gurgling bass-line of 'Two Tribes', you can still hear the muscles in her face tightening.

After a while, I turn and glance at her. She's smoking a rollie in nervous little puffs, and staring doggedly out at the dance-floor. I have two choices, speak or leave. Maybe I'll try speaking. 'The ironic thing is, I actually am a vicar!'

No response.

The haven't seen this many prostitutes since my sixteenth birthday!'

No response. Maybe she didn't hear me. I offer her a swig of my can of Red Stripe.

'You're too kind. I'll pass though, thanks very much,' and she picks up the can by her side, and waggles it at me. Her voice precisely fits her face, hard and sharp; Scottish, Glaswegian I think.

'So! What did you come as?' I say brightly, nodding at her clothes.

'I came as a normal person,' she says, unsmilingly.

'You could at least have made an effort! Just put on a dog-collar or something!'

'Maybe. Except I'm Jewish.' She takes a swig from her own can. 'Funnily enough, fancy-dress has never really taken off amongst the Jewish Community.'

'You know, I sometimes wish I was Jewish,' I say. As a conversational gambit, I realise that this is pretty bold, and I'm not entirely sure why I say it; partly because I think it's important to be up-front about issues of race, gender and identity, and also because by this stage I'm pretty pissed.

She narrows her eyes, and looks at me for a moment, a spaghetti-western look, sucking on her rollie, deciding whether to take offence or not, then says quietly: 'Is that right?'

'I'm sorry, I'm not being racist, I just mean that a lot of my heroes are Jewish, so . . .'

'Well, I'm glad that my people meet with your approval. Who are these heroes, then?'

'Oh, you know, Einstein, Freud, Marx . . .'

'Karl or Groucho?'

'Both. Arthur Miller, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Philip Roth . . .'

'Jesus, of course'

'...Stanley Kubrick, Freud, J.D.Salinger . . .'

'Of course, strictly speaking Salinger's not Jewish.'

'Oh, he is.'

'Trust me, he's not.'

'Are you sure?'

'We know - we have a special sense.'

'But it's a Jewish name.'

'His father was Jewish, his mother was Catholic, so technically he's not. Jewishness passes through the female line.'

'I didn't know that.'

'Well there you go, the beginnings of your university education,' and she goes back to glowering at the dance-floor, now crammed with Tarts hobbling along to the music. It's a pretty grim sight, like a newly discovered circle of hell, and the girl watches with knowing contempt, as if waiting for the bomb she's planted to go off. 'Christ, will you take a look at this little lot,' she drawls wearily, as 'Two Tribes' segues into 'Relax'. 'Frankie Says "Ab-so-lute-ly Noooo Fucking Idea . . ."' Deciding that world-weary cynicism is definitely the way to go here, I make sure that I chuckle audibly at this, and she turns to me, half-smiling. 'You know the greatest achievement of the English boarding-school? Generations of floppy-haired boys who know the correct way to adjust a suspender belt. What's amazing is how many of you lot arrive at university with your women's clothing already packed.'

You lot?

'Actually, I went to a comprehensive school,' I say.

'Well, bully for you. You know, you're the sixth person to tell me that tonight. Is it some kind of weird left-wing chat-up line I wonder? What am I meant to be more impressed by? Our state school system? Or your heroic academic achievements?'

If I know anything, I know when I've been beaten, so I pick up my three-quarters-full can and wave it in the air like it's empty; 'I'm just going to the bar, can I get you something, urn ...?'

'Rebecca.'

'...Rebecca?'

'I'm fine.'

'Right. Well. See you around. I'm Brian, by the way.'

'Goodbye, Brian.'

'Bye, Rebecca.'

I'm about to go over to the bar, but notice Chris the hippie lying in wait, up to his elbow in a big bag of crisps, and so head out of the hall and decide to go for a walk.

I wander down the wood-panelled corridor, where the last batch of new students are saying goodbye to their parents to a soundtrack of Bob Marley's 'Legend'. One girl sobs in her sobbing mother's arms whilst her impatient dad stands stiffly by, a little roll of banknotes clutched in his hand. A lanky, embarrassed black-clad Goth with a prominent dental brace is almost physically pushing his parents out of the room, so that he can get on with the serious business of letting people know the dark and complex creature that lies behind all that metal and plastic. Other new arrivals are introducing themselves to their next-door neighbours, delivering little potted biographies: subject, place-of-birth, exam grades, favourite band, most traumatic childhood experience. It's a sort of polite, middle-class version of that scene in war movies, where the raw young recruits arrive in the barracks and show each other photos of the girl back home.

I stop at the Student Union notice-board, sip my lager and idly scan the posters - a drum-kit for sale, calls to boycott Barclays, an out-of-date meeting of the Revolutionary Communist Party in support of the miners, auditions for The Pirates OfPenzance -1 note that Self-inflicted and Meet Your Feet are playing at the Frog and Frigate next Tuesday.