House of Windows Page 6

Dr Davis rubbed at his eyes. ‘I don’t want to be discouraging, Nick, but no one’s the best all the time.’

  Nick shrugged. ‘But that’s exactly when I need to know, so I can just keep working until I get there. Or as close as I’m capable of getting.’

  Dr Davis shook his head. ‘Well, I can’t knock your work ethic. Just try to enjoy it too, OK? It’s about learning, not just marks.’

  Nick frowned. ‘Yeah, but it can be about both. How do you know you’ve learnt anything otherwise?’

  ‘Let’s revisit that question at the end of term,’ said Dr Davis. ‘See you next time.’

  Nick wandered away, kicking irritably at a loose stone. He stood for a while in Front Court, looking about for inspiration. He peered into the buttery, then the dining hall, but didn’t see anyone he recognised. There were a few faces that seemed familiar, but he couldn’t think of anything to start a conversation.

  Just like school, only with more interesting work.

  He set off home before he could dwell on it. No point walking endlessly around College, hoping for someone to catch his eye and make an overture of friendship.

  As he walked up Senate House Passage, he tried calling Michael, only to get his voicemail. He didn’t bother to leave a message: his father was due home in a few hours anyway to oversee a tree surgeon coming to sort out a dying ash that was threatening the neighbour’s conservatory. But when he let himself in the front door, it was to find the Replacement sprawled across the sofa with his feet up on the coffee table.

  ‘Did my dad say when he might make it back?’ Nick asked by way of a greeting.

  The Replacement pulled a face, turning the TV off and tossing the controls aside. ‘He’s kinda … in New York.’

  Nick felt his eyes go wide in horror. ‘How long are you staying?’

  The Replacement laughed. ‘Don’t freak out, kid. Your dad’s calling your godfather to stay this weekend. I’ll hang out until after they’re done with the tree, but I’m afraid I can’t stay the night. You’ll be OK, though, right? Got some local friends now to call if you need anything?’

  The arrival of the tree surgeon saved them from having to find something to talk about. It was sorted within a few hours and half an hour after that the Replacement made his excuses. As soon as the door closed behind him, Nick started turning on the lights, even though the sun was still gilding the top of the fence. He added the sound of the TV to the mix before retreating to the window seat to read, curled up on the oversized cushions he’d bought in the market. For a while, he was content, warm in the low-slanting sun.

  The landline rang promptly at eleven. ‘Hey, Dad.’

  ‘I could have been Bill,’ said Michael.

  ‘It’s eleven here. Bill would expect me to be in bed.’

  Michael snorted. ‘That man would have made someone an excellent mother.’

  ‘Sexist, Dad.’

  ‘Really? Why is that sexist?’

  Nick sighed. So did Michael. ‘I had my first supervision today.’

  ‘Oh? Already? So what grade did you get for that first assignment?’

  ‘An alpha.’

  ‘What the hell is an alpha? When did Cambridge start marking in Greek? We’re usually more about badly conjugated Latin. Don’t they do normal classifications any more?’

  ‘I think it’s sort of like an A. It’s like seventy-five and a beta is fifty.’

  Michael made a noise of disgust. ‘But then everyone’s got one of two grades. How on earth can you tell where you are in the class?’

  ‘Well, the other two in my supervision got betas so—’

  ‘Good for you, Nick! See, I told Bill that you’d be fine with the work.’

  Nick drew his feet up to poke at a hole in his sock, rearranging the fraying fabric over his toes. ‘It’s harder than school, but in a fun sort of way – so far, at least. Mostly you just chip away at it: if one approach doesn’t work, you try another. There’s a bit about the underlying theory and that’s pretty tough, but mostly I just need to be able to get the right answer out of an equation.’

  ‘Well, that sounds promising: exactly what we were hoping for, isn’t it, a bit of complexity? But this alpha/beta stuff is ridiculous. Did you ask what exam grade you would have got?’

  ‘I tried to, Dad, but my supervisor says I shouldn’t be so competitive.’ He gave up on the sock, tore it off and threw it towards the bin in the corner, watching it crumple to the carpet only a few feet away.

  ‘More of that touchy-feely mustn’t-let-the-cretins-feel-inadequate bollocks, huh? That attitude won’t get anyone far in the real world. Anyway, have to dash. Just wanted to check in. Bill’s coming down tomorrow.’ A pause. ‘I sort of suggested that I wasn’t flying out until the morning. You know how he worries, so …’

  ‘Got it, Dad,’ Nick said. ‘Hope the trip goes well.’

  ‘Just don’t throw any of those rave parties advertised on the internet, OK?’

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing, right, Dad?’ Nick told the phone as the dial tone blared from the receiver. He sighed. Why is it never easy for us?

  There seemed to be a lot of giggling happening on the other side of the door. Nick took a deep breath, let it out, then knocked. This prompted a fresh wave of giggles from the room beyond. The door opened.

  ‘Is this the Children’s Book Club Squash?’ he asked before he realised what he was seeing.

  The girl who had answered the door was wearing very pink pyjamas, her hair sticking up in a series of little bunches. She had a large sparkly pink teddy bear under one arm.

  ‘A boy!’ the girl squeaked.

  ‘A boy!’ came an echo from behind her. The room was full of girls in pyjamas, each with a stuffed animal in her lap.

  The girl opened the door wide. ‘Welcome, Boy!’

  Nick reached forward and slowly tugged the door closed. He walked quickly to the end of the corridor, aware that the door was opening again behind him, and then pelted down the staircase, not stopping when he reached the bottom. He raced across the grass of the courtyard outside (to much shouting from various porters and fellows) and out through the Corpus p’lodge into the street beyond.

  ‘Hey, Nick, you OK?’

  Susie was reclining elegantly against a lamp post, looking at him with amusement.

  He raised his hands to smooth his hair down, trying to calm his breathing. ‘Fi-ne,’ he panted. ‘Just came from … one of these “welcome to our club” squashes, only it was …’ He shuddered.

  Susie grinned. ‘Yeah, I went to a few of those as well. I’ve also managed to get chucked out of a society.’

  ‘It’s still only Week 2.’

  Susie shrugged. ‘Yes, aren’t I efficient?’ She sighed, turning to lean her back against the lamp post so she didn’t have to crane sideways to look at him. ‘I overheard some of the society officers talking about their accounts, so of course I went over to have a little look, and then I spent a little while explaining the many things they were doing wrong and why they should appoint me secretary on the spot … and then they asked me to leave. So, really, their loss. If they hadn’t made me secretary I wouldn’t have stayed anyway.’

  Nick opened his mouth, closed it.

  ‘Well?’ Susie demanded, crossing her arms. ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘I’m not going to say anything. At least about you being secretary. I am trying to be more easy-going.’

  Susie snorted. ‘Not to be discouraging, Nick, but I don’t think that’s likely to work out for you. You might as well start as you mean to go on.’

  ‘So you love my charming personality?’

  Susie grinned. ‘Touché. To be fair, until you stop being the best in every supervision you’re kind of on my blacklist. I’m not much enjoying my fall from being top of the class at school. But give me a few weeks and we’ll see.’

  With over an hour left before dinner with his ‘College Parents’, there was just time to try the other literary society squash of the day. By t
he time he arrived at Pembroke and found the right room, the meeting had already kicked off, but the door was ajar so he slipped in almost unnoticed. Someone offered him a wine glass filled with something surely too yellow to be wine and a plastic cup of something surely too orange to be potable. He accepted the orange drink, grimaced a smile of thanks and slid into a seat at the back of the room.

  ‘But the problem, of course, is that this essentialises the Other as atavistic and unchanging without a concurrent appreciation of the socially constructed nature of this framing device. It also implies that patriarchy belongs to the Global South, failing to address its primacy in all forms of hegemonic masculinity,’ said the person standing at the front of the room, waving a book bristling with page-markers.

  ‘But don’t you think that the carnivalesque mode of the intertextual references problematises the binary oppositions implied by the Orientalist discourses the author appears to be prioritising?’ someone else called out.

  ‘Yes, but doesn’t Derran’s notion of Zylonation explain both those objections?’ Nick interrupted.

  For a moment the room was silent. Several people nodded. A few murmured in assent.

  ‘Good point,’ said the man at the front of the room. ‘Would you care to expand further for us?’

  ‘Not particularly. I’m not sure I’m up for weekly meetings of talking rubbish, just with really clever-sounding words. I think I’ll go and Zylonate elsewhere,’ he said, getting to his feet.

  A heated debate broke out behind him as he slipped away.

  Nick arrived back in College in time to find Tim hurrying across Front Court, a redhead in pursuit, screaming incoherently at his back.

  ‘Oi! ’Nuff of that!’ shouted a porter, leaning out of the p’lodge. ‘Ange,’ he called, gesturing to someone passing through the gateway behind Nick. ‘You’ll go sort that for me, won’t you, love?’

  ‘Sort what?’ asked a short figure so muffled between a huge trenchcoat and a furry black Russian hat that almost nothing of her face was visible. She tilted the hat back and peered ahead. ‘Oh, that,’ she said, and heaved a sigh. ‘You’ll owe me a hug,’ she told the porter. ‘A really big one.’

  Nick saw Tim’s face do something very odd when he spotted the small figure in his path, his expression half relief and half guilt. He darted around her and sprinted out through the gateway while the redhead gave one last scream of fury and frustration as she slowed to a stop. The girl in the Russian hat stepped forwards and put an arm about her. The porter ducked quickly back into the p’lodge while Nick hurried on, eyes averted from the crying and shushing.

  Susie was leaning against the wall in the narrow tunnel into North Court, waiting outside the Senior Tutor’s office with a form. ‘You look like your day’s not improving,’ she told him.

  ‘I obviously followed a white rabbit with a pocket watch this morning and have since suffered traumatic amnesia about that fact.’

  She shook her head. ‘Cambridge is mostly like this. Trust me. I grew up here.’

  ‘Explains some things,’ Nick said. With a sigh, he headed past into North Court and then up to the A staircase set where his College Parents had asked their ‘children’ to gather.

  His College Parents turned out to be a Laurel and Hardy couple who had decorated their sitting room with photos of Harrow-on-the-Hill and class portraits of boys in a variety of startlingly coloured blazers.

  ‘Perfect,’ said the tall one, when Nick sank on to the corner of the sofa. ‘Our little family is complete. Now, you should just think of us as your gay Cambridge dads.’

  ‘Only we’re not actually gay and, like, incest with your College Parents is totally the done thing, so don’t be shy, girl-children,’ said the short one.

  The tall one laughed into the stricken silence. ‘So this is just a little “get to know you” gathering, but of course our role in your lives is to provide support and info and the low-down on all things Cambridge, like where to get the cheapest booze and how to get the best grades with the least work. Lots of fun ahead. First up, Pot Noodles for all. Tallest Child,’ he said, pointing to a boy folded uncomfortably into a low armchair, ‘can you bring cutlery while we dish up? Oh, before I forget, I’ve got a present for the baby of our family.’

  The short one reached into a drawer, scuffled around in it and then raised his hand aloft in triumph, brandishing a dummy and a bib. ‘Haha!’ he said.

  On his way down A staircase a minute later, Nick stopped to glare at a poster advertising ‘Linkline: Listening and support for students by students’. At the moment, I shudder to think.

  He turned away from the sound of laughter echoing from the JCR and hunched into his jacket. In the p’lodge, he pulled the Friday SuperHall sign-up list towards him, only for a porter to pull it away. ‘Why can’t I put my name down?’ he snapped.

  ‘Sorry, Nick. You’re fine at regular Formal Hall next Thursday if you’ve got an adult with you, but there’s no visitors at SuperHall so it’s a non-starter, that.’

  ‘What if I got one of my friends to be my responsible adult?’

  The porter shook his head. ‘The day they make a responsible Fresher is the day I grow my hair out and dye it green. Don’t take on, OK? SuperHall’s no great shakes. It’s a dinner of rubbish foreign-themed food and a load of rowdy drinking games—’

  Nick shoved away from the counter and stormed out of the street door while the man was still speaking.

  Senate House Passage was damp and grey, a fine mizzle turning the world distant and untrustworthy.

  So much for never being miserable here.

  At nine o’clock, with no message from Michael that he’d get home at all, Nick set off, head down into the blustering rain, for the post-SuperHall ‘Viva’ disco. The sound of the cars on the wet roads, the water cast over his feet by their tyres, turned the pavement into a storm-soaked sea promenade. He barely looked up until he reached the p’lodge. In Front Court, the buildings glowed eerily through the rain, the stone a fleshy white-gold. The glass in the windows throbbed dully with the bass beat of music from the JCR, humming in his bones and making his fingertips tingle.

  Up the stairs between Latham Building and the Old Library, he found students sitting in listing clusters, eyes blindly reflecting the light. Over-bright liquids shone poisonously through the flimsy white plastic of disposable cups. One had spilled, a tiny aquamarine cataract flowing down the steps. A boy puked into the stone birdbath in the corner. The flashing lights, strobing like emergency vehicles, made the scene look like the aftermath of a disaster.

  Nick wound his way up the steps, unable to shake the sense that the laughter was shrieks, the shouts horror rather than delight. He slipped into the line of people waiting to enter the JCR behind a girl wearing little more than gold straps, her lips purple-blue, perhaps from make-up, perhaps from the cold.

  ‘Students only,’ said a porter, holding a hand across the door when Nick tried to step through.

  ‘I’m Nick Derran. I matriculated this year.’ He fished his ID out of his pocket.

  The porter glared down at it. ‘Oh, the genius kid,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not …’ He broke off with a sigh, taking his ID back. ‘Can I go in now?’

  The porter shook his head. ‘Sorry. Over-eighteens only.’

  ‘Some of the others are definitely seventeen still.’

  ‘Maybe. You’re definitely not.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘What’s the hold-up?’ someone shouted behind them.

  ‘Let’s not argue, Nick,’ said the porter. ‘It’s not going to happen. Your parents can talk to the College if they want, but I’m pretty sure the word’ll stay the same. Either way, it’s a no for tonight. Off you go now.’ He gently tugged Nick to the side to clear the doorway.

  Nick flung the porter’s hand off and shoved his way back down the steps, nearly toppling over the shoulder of a girl who suddenly leaned sideways into his path, vomiting on to the stone. At the bottom of the stairs, he t
urned and glared up at the party above.

  ‘About the only fun you’ll have watching from here is seeing who ends up bundering in the bushes,’ someone said.

  Nick spun to find Tim standing behind him.

  ‘You might want to turn that frown upside down before you head up to the bop,’ Tim said. ‘But, hey, you get points for turning up to be sociable.’

  Nick heaved a sigh and looked away to the river.

  ‘You haven’t been hovering out here all evening, have you?’

  ‘I thought we weren’t doing the whole “asking questions, getting to know each other” thing?’ Nick snapped.

  ‘Just go on up, Nick. It won’t be so bad. You do a bit of the Amazing Pointy Dance,’ Tim stuck a finger in the air then pointed it downwards to his opposite knee, ‘and you sway a bit from side to side, and there you have every step you ever need to know for College bops.’

  ‘How drunk do you have to be to want to do that for five hours at a stretch?’

  ‘Pretty drunk, but just go with the flow. Trust me, no one will think you look stupid: for a start, no one can even see straight by this point.’

  ‘So why are you standing around talking to me? Why don’t you go and get pointy dancing already?’

  ‘Seriously?’ Tim shuddered. ‘Do I look like I want to hang out with a bunch of lacquered undergrads?’

  ‘Then why are you so dead set on sending me up there?’

  ‘Because this is your first Trinity Hall Viva! It’s a rite of passage. Go thou forth, little Fresher, and … OK, so no drinking till you puke for you … but you could go and snog a bunch of inappropriate people.’

  ‘Oh yeah, because eighteen-year-olds love snogging short fifteen-year-olds. And then there’s the whole possibility of going to jail—’

  ‘I said go and get your snog on, not go and sleep with anyone. There will be plenty of people up there so drunk they’d snog the Master if he gave them half a chance. And, OK, you’re a bit on the short side, but you’re taller than some of the girls … and I’m sure there are plenty of boys who like short guys if you’re more that way inclined.’