The Liar (3 page)

Adrian had managed to coax Cartwright into an amusing half-hour in the House lavs two terms previously, but he had never doubted he could get the trousers down: that wasn’t it. He wanted something more from him than the few spasms of pleasure that the limited activities of rubbing and licking and heaving and pushing could offer.

He wasn’t sure what the thing was that he yearned for, but one thing he did know. It was less acceptable to love, to ache for eternal companionship, than it was to bounce and slurp and gasp behind the fives courts. Love was Adrian’s guilty secret, sex his public pride.

*

He closed the changing-room door and fanned himself with the lavender gloves. It had been a close thing. Too close. The greater the lengths he went to to be liked, the more enemies he gathered on the way. If he fell, Bennett-Jones and others would be there to kick him. One thing was for certain, the Queer Pose was running dry and a new one was going to have to be dreamt up or there would be Trouble.

A gang of fags was mobbing about by the notice-boards. They fell silent as he approached. He patted one of them on the head.

‘Pretty children,’ he sighed, digging into his waistcoat pocket and pulling out a handful of change. ‘Tonight you shall eat.’

Scattering the coins at their feet, he moved on.

Mad, he said to himself as he approached his study door. I think I must be mad.

Tom was there, in a yoga position, biting his toenails and listening to
Aqualung
. Adrian sank into a chair and removed his hat.

‘Tom,’ he said, ‘you are looking at a crushed violet, a spent egg, a squeezed tube.’

‘I’m looking at a git,’ said Tom. ‘What’s with the coat?’

‘You’re right,’ said Adrian, ‘I
am
stupid today. And every day. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Horrid, horrid, horrid. Morbid, morbid, morbid. Torrid, torpid, turbid. Everything in my life ends in id. Get it?’

‘Get what?’

‘Id. It’s Freud. You know.’

‘Oh. Right. Yeah. Id.’

‘Idealistic idiot, idiosyncratic idler. Everything
begins
in id as well.’

‘Everything begins with “I”, you mean. Which is ego,’ said Tom, placing an ankle behind his ear, ‘not id.’

‘Well of course it’s very easy to be clever. If you could just help me out of this coat, I’m beginning to sweat.’

‘Sorry,’ said Tom. ‘I’m stuck.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘No.’

Adrian fought his way out of his costume and into his uniform while Tom reverted to a half-lotus and recounted his day.

‘Went into town and bought a couple of LPs this afternoon.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Adrian, ‘let me guess …
Parsifal
and
Lark Ascending?
’

‘
Atom Heart Mother
and
Salty Dog
.’

‘Close.’

Tom lit a cigarette.

‘You know what pisses me off about this place?’

‘The cuisine? The distressingly plain uniforms?’

‘I bumped into Rosengard in the High Street and he asked me why I wasn’t watching the match. I mean what?’

‘You should’ve asked him why
he
wasn’t.’

‘I said I was just on my way.’

‘Rebel.’

‘I like to keep my nose clean.’

‘Well, “I’m just on my way” isn’t a very stylish handkerchief, is it? You could have said that the match was too exciting and that your nervous system simply couldn’t bear any more suspense.’

‘Well I didn’t. I came back here, had a wank and finished that book.’

‘
The Naked Lunch?
’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did you reckon?’

‘Crap.’

‘You’re just saying that because you didn’t understand it,’ said Adrian.

‘I’m just saying that because I did understand it,’ said Tom. ‘Any road up, we’d better start making some toast. I invited Bullock and Sampson over.’

‘Oh,
what?
’

‘We owe them a study tea.’

‘You know I hate intellectuals.’

‘You mean you hate people who are cleverer than you are.’

‘Yes. I suppose that’s why I like you so much, Tom.’

Tom gave him a pained, constipated stare.

‘I’ll boil the kettle,’ he said.

*

Cartwright looked up from the Chambers Encyclopaedia and mouthed, ‘Otto Von Bismarck born in … in 1815, the year of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. Founder of modern Germany …’

In his line of sight were hundreds of books, the only one of which he could remember reading was
To Kill a Mockingbird
in the company of the rest of his fifth form at prep school. Such a great many books and yet this was still only the House library. The School library had thousands and thousands more and university libraries … Time was so short and his memory so feeble. What was it Healey had said? Memory is the mother of the Muses.

Cartwright levered Malthus to Nantucket from off the shelf and looked up Muses. There were nine of them and they were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. If Healey was right then Mnemosyne must mean memory.

Of course! The English word ‘mnemonic’, something that reminds you of something. Mnemonic must be derived from Mnemosyne. Or the other way around. Cartwright made a note in his rough-book.

According to the encyclopaedia, most of what was known of the Muses came down from the writings of Hesiod, particularly this Theogony. That must have been the poet Healey was referring to, Hesiod. But how did Healey
know
all that? He never seemed to be reading, at least no more than anyone else. Cartwright would never catch up with him. It just wasn’t bloody fair.

He wrote down the names of the Muses and returned with a sigh to Bismarck. One day he would get right to the end, to zythum. Not that he needed to. He had peeped ahead and seen that it was a kind of ancient Egyptian beer, much recommended by Diodorus Siculus – whoever he was.

*

Everyone had been rather surprised the day Adrian announced that he was going to share a study with Tom.

‘Thompson?’ Heydon-Bayley had shrieked. ‘But he’s a complete dildo, surely?’

‘I like him,’ said Adrian, ‘he’s unusual.’

‘Graceless, you mean. Wooden.’

Certainly there was nothing obviously appetising about Tom’s appearance or manner, and he remained one of the few boys of his year with whom Adrian had never made the beast with two backs, or rather with whom he had never made the beast with one back and an interestingly shaped middle, but over the last year, more people had come to see that there was something arresting about Tom. He wasn’t clever, but he worked hard and had set himself to read a great deal, in order, Adrian assumed, to acquire some of Adrian’s dash and sparkle. Tom always went his own way with his own ideas. He managed to get away with the longest hair in the House and the most public nicotine habit in the school, somehow without ever drawing attention to himself. It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

Freda, the German undermatron, once discovered him sunbathing nude in the spinney.

‘Thompson,’ she had cried in outrage, ‘you cannot be lying about naked!’

‘Sorry, Matron, you’re right,’ Tom murmured, and he had reached out a hand and put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses. ‘Don’t know what I was thinking of.’

Adrian felt that it was he who had brought Tom into notice and popularity, that Tom was his own special creation. The silent spotty gink of the first year had been transformed into someone admired and imitated and Adrian wasn’t sure how much he liked it.

He liked Tom all right. He was the only person he had ever spoken to about his love for Cartwright and Tom had the decency not to be interested or sympathetic enough to quench the pure holy flame of Adrian’s passion with sympathy or advice. Sampson and Bullock he could do without, however. Especially Sampson, who was too much of a grammar-school-type swot ever to be quite the thing. Not an ideal tea-companion at all.

Tea was a very special institution, revolving as it did around the ceremony and worship of Toast. In a place where alcohol, tobacco and drugs were forbidden, it was essential that something should take their place as a powerful and public totem of virility and cool. Toast, for reasons lost in time, was the substance chosen. Its name was dropped on every possible occasion, usually pronounced, in awful public school accents, ‘taste’.

‘I was just having some toast, when Burton and Hopwood came round …’

‘Harman’s not a bad fag actually. He makes really majorly good toast …’

‘Yeah, you should come round to my study, maybe, we’ll get some toast going …’

‘God, I can hardly move. I’ve just completely overdone it on the toast …’

Adrian had been looking forward to toasting up with Tom in private and talking about Cartwright.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, clearing a space on his desk for the teapot. ‘Oh, Christly Christ.’

‘Problem?’

‘I shall know no peace other than being kissed by him,’ moaned Adrian.

‘That a fact?’

‘It is a fact, and I’ll tell you what else is a fact. It’s a fact that he is wearing his blue Shetland turtle-neck today. Even as we speak his body is moving inside it. Warm and quick. It’s more than flesh and blood can stand.’

‘Have a cold shower, then,’ said Tom.

Adrian banged down the teapot and grabbed Tom by the shoulder.

‘Cold shower?’ he shouted. ‘Jessica Christ, man, I’m talking about love! You know what it does to me? It shrinks my stomach, doesn’t it, Tom? It pickles my guts, yeah. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I’m above the ordinary. I’m competent, supremely competent. I’m walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I’m one of the great ones. I’m Michelangelo, moulding the beard of Moses. I’m Van Gogh, painting pure sunlight. I’m Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I’m John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat. I’m Jesse James and his two brothers – all three of them. I’m W. Shakespeare. And out there it’s not the school any longer – it’s the Nile, Tom, the Nile – and down it floats the barge of Cleopatra.’

‘Not bad,’ said Tom, ‘not bad at all. Your own?’

‘Ray Milland in
The Lost Weekend
. But he could have been talking about Cartwright.’

‘But he was talking about alcohol,’ said Tom, ‘which should tell you a lot.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning shut up and get buttering.’

‘I shall put the
Liebestod
on the stereo, that’s what I shall do, you horrid beastly man,’ said Adrian, ‘and still my beating heart with concord of sweet sounds. But quick, man! – I hear a hansom drawing up outside! And here, Watson, unless I am very much mistaken, is our client now upon the stair. Come in!’

Sampson appeared at the doorway, blinking through his spectacles, followed by Bullock who tossed a jar at Tom.

‘Hi. I brought some lemon curd.’

‘Lemon curd!’ said Adrian. ‘And what was I saying only this minute, Tom?’ “If only we had some lemon curd for our guests.” You’re a mind-reader, Bollocks.’

‘Some toast over there,’ said Tom.

‘Thanks, Thompson,’ said Sampson, helping himself. ‘Gooderson tells me you were not unadjacent to mobbing up R.B.-J. and Sargent in the changing-rooms, Healey.’

‘Dame Rumour outstrides me yet again.’

Not unadjacent?
Jesus …

Bullock slapped Tom on the back.

‘Hey, Tommo!’ he said. ‘I see you’ve got
Atom Heart Mother
at last. What do you reckon? Far outsville or far insville?’

While Tom and Bullock talked about Pink Floyd, Sampson told Adrian why he thought Mahler was in actual fact wilder, in the sense of more controlled, than any rock group.

‘That’s an interesting point,’ said Adrian, ‘in the sense of not being interesting at all.’

When the tea and toast were finished, Bullock stood up and cleared his throat.

‘I think I should announce my plan now, Sam.’

‘Definitely,’ said Sampson.

‘What ho!’ said Adrian, getting up to shut the door. ‘Treasons, stratagems and spoils.’

‘It’s like this,’ said Bullock. ‘My brother, I don’t know if you know, is at Radley, on account of my parents thinking it a bad idea to have us both at the same school.’

‘On account of your being twins?’ said Adrian.

‘Right, on account of my mother OD-ing on fertility drugs. Any old way, he wrote to me last week telling me about an incredible bitch of a row blazing there on account of someone having been and gone and produced an unofficial magazine called
Raddled
, full of obscene libellous Oz-like filth. And what I thought, what Sammy and I thought, was – why not?’

‘Why not what?’ said Tom.

‘Why not do the same thing here?’

‘You mean an underground magazine?’

‘Yup.’

Tom opened and shut his mouth. Sampson smirked.

‘Jesus suffering fuck,’ said Adrian. ‘It’s not half a thought.’

‘Face it, it’s a wow.’

‘These guys,’ said Tom, ‘the ones who put out this magazine at Radley. What happened to them?’

Sampson polished his spectacles with the end of his tie.

‘Ah, now this is why we must proceed with great circumspection. They were both, hum, “put out” themselves. “Booted out” I believe is the technical phrase.’

‘That means it’s got to be a secret,’ said Bullock. ‘We write it in the holidays. You send me the material, typed onto stencils. I get it duplicated on my dad’s office Gestetner, bring it back at the beginning of next term, we find a way of distributing it secretly round all the Houses.’

‘All a bit Colditz, isn’t it?’ said Tom.

‘No, no!’ said Adrian. ‘Don’t you listen to Thompson, he’s an old cynicky-boots. I’m in, Bollocks. I’m in for definite. What sort of material do you want?’

‘Oh you know,’ said Bullock, ‘seditious, anti-public school. That kind of thing. Something to shake them up a bit.’

‘I’m planning a sort of
fabliau
comparing this place with a fascist state,’ said Sampson, ‘sort of
Animal Farm
meets
Arturo Ui
…’

‘Stop it, Sammy, I’m wet at the very thought,’ said Adrian.