The Rotters' Club (49 page)

how
it happened, if somebody really did screw up his chances in that exam, and the worst thing is we shall never know, for certain, we can never really know whether Culpepper slipped something into his drink that day, taking his revenge for all the times Steve had showed himself to be better than him, no, we shall never know the truth about that or so many other things, and yet somebody obviously thinks that Culpepper is to blame because one night last year his car was torched, somebody came round to his parents’ house in the middle of the night and smashed the car window and threw a petrol bomb inside, the whole thing was completely gutted, it brought a smile to everybody’s face when we heard that, it just seemed like the least he deserved, but again, nobody knows who did it, it seems that secrets simply beget more secrets, and everything just gets more and more unknowable, the disappearance of Claire’s sister is another case in point, I don’t believe Claire will ever get to the bottom of that, any more than I will ever know exactly what made Harding tick or whether I will ever see him again now that he’s gone to Germany for a year without even telling any of us which university place he has taken up, he is lost now, lost to us, bent on some strange solitary course of his own, but going back to Culpepper’s car, my personal suspicion is that Doug had something to do with it, by which I don’t mean that he went round there in the middle of the night and threw the bomb in himself, but maybe he knows some people who do that sort of thing and he told them the story, put them up to it, if you see what I mean, but I can’t know this for sure, can I, we can never know anything for sure, and every time I mention anything about it to Doug he just ignores me or changes the subject, he did this very noticeably on Sunday, for instance, yes, we saw Doug on Sunday as well, this has been a great week for reunions, he was up from London for the weekend with his new girlfriend, Marianne, and he was full of stories about the Southall riots, he was there, of course, right in the thick of it, I’m beginning to think it is Doug’s destiny always to be at the centre of things, just as it is my destiny always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs, always to wander away at the most important moment, drifting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds, he had written a piece about it and sent it to the
NME,
not really knowing if they would use it, they have used three or four of his reviews now but he is not what you would call a regular contributor, so he showed me the typescript on Sunday and today, I see, having bought the
NME
on my way here with Cicely, they have printed it, amazingly, in the
Thrills
section, not the full version I notice, they have cut out all the stuff about his father, which is a shame, that was the most moving part of the article, I thought, because his father was also attacked by a policeman on a demo, and he was also hit over the head with a truncheon and although it didn’t kill him like it killed Blair Peach, Doug thinks that his father has changed since then, his personality has changed, he can’t prove of course that this has anything to do with the injury, but not only does his father now get headaches, migraines, which he never used to do, and not only does he find it harder to read for long periods of time, but there is something worse than that, Doug thinks, he says that his father has lost what he calls the will to fight, because there are changes afoot at Longbridge, apparently, this new chairman called Michael Edwardes, who my father thinks is a hero sent by the gods to rescue the company from the evil union barons, and Doug seems to regard as the devil incarnate, he is closing down some of the factories and setting new productivity targets and Doug says that in the old days his father would have made sure everybody was out on strike by now but instead he just seems to be going along with it, and Doug thinks this is all to do with the crack on the head he got down in London eighteen months ago when he went to join the Grunwick picket line, but perhaps the people at the
NME
thought that was too speculative, or something, anyway, they cut it out, but it is still a good article, very powerful, even someone like me, someone who likes to think the best of the police, can see that there must have been something very wrong that day, it was the Special Patrol Group again, the same group that was involved in the Grunwick demonstration, Doug told me, they are the worst, the most violent and out of control, and the trouble started after the meeting in the town hall was already under way, the National Front were holding an election meeting there, in the heart of Southall, a provocative place to hold a meeting, it has a large Asian community, and thousands of demonstrators had arrived to protest about this, most of them peacefully, by all accounts, although an event like that is never entirely peaceful, and sure enough some fighting broke out and that was when the SPG vans started to arrive, and then Doug and Marianne decided to get out while the going was good, so they began to head off with a lot of the other protesters, looking for a way to get to the station, and there was just one road, one road which was not cordoned off and so they tried to get down there, there was a big crowd of people where it joined with the Broadway, mainly Asians, but they squeezed their way through and then walked on for a bit but then they heard people shouting behind them, so they looked back up to the top of the road and suddenly all these policemen were pouring out of the SPG vans, they had truncheons and riot shields, and they were piling into the crowd, laying into them, indiscriminately, black or white, it didn’t matter, and suddenly everybody was running, running down this street towards Doug and Marianne, and if they couldn’t get down the street itself they were jumping over walls and fences into people’s gardens, or trying to get through the alleys between the houses into the relative safety of the streets on either side, but the police were too quick for most of them, and Marianne says she saw this guy down on the floor, he was a white guy, and there were four policemen systematically kicking the shit out of him, he had his hands over his groin, and a woman went up to these policemen, a woman in her late twenties or thirties, and she said something like, Stop that, you ought to be helping him, and one of the policemen just ran up to her and whacked her in the face with his truncheon, felled her to the ground, and they both went to help her, they managed to carry her into somebody’s garden and lie her down and put a handkerchief to the wound, because she was bleeding quite badly, it is all in Doug’s article, all of these details, it is the best thing anyone has written about that riot, if there is any justice it will make him famous or at least mean that the
NME
will ask him to write more things for them, he is doing well, very well, it is only his first year as a student but Doug is going to succeed, I can see that, if any of us is going to succeed it will be him, and I was impressed with Marianne, too, it was a brave thing to do, to help that woman with her wound, in the midst of all that chaos and violence, they managed to stay with her until the ambulances began to arrive, and then they visited her in hospital the next day, she was all right, she survived, which is more than can be said for Blair Peach, poor guy, he was only thirty-three, a New Zealander, and he died from his head wounds in the early hours of the next morning, Doug is convinced that the policeman who did it will never be caught, an inquiry is being set up but he says it’s bound to be a whitewash, the state always looks after its own, that’s the kind of thing he says these days and Marianne smiles indulgently at him, I think she shares his beliefs but she has more of a sense of humour about them, and Doug told her on Sunday that this was to do with class, it’s always easier for upper-class people to see the funny side of things, he said, because nothing is ever really important to them, nothing is ever a matter of life and death, and I can see the truth of that but it hasn’t stopped him from going out with an upper-class woman, I notice, Marianne has this fabulously posh accent and her father apparently has an estate in Hertfordshire and another one in Scotland somewhere, they are an odd couple in some ways but they seem very happy together and it occurs to me, now, that Doug has always had a thing about posh women, there was that secretary he met in London the first time he went down there, he was always boasting about the night they spent together, you would think that nobody had ever had sex before or since, he made it sound like
Emmanuelle, Last Tango in Paris
and
The Kama Sutra
all rolled into one, well, perhaps it was, but I’ve never been envious of Doug and I’m certainly not now, because even he could see, even he could see on Sunday what is happening between me and Cicely, how much feeling there is between us, he said it was almost palpable, you could sense it just being in the same room as us, and he took me aside at one point and asked what on earth had happened when I went to visit her in Wales, and I told him that I didn’t know, it had just happened very quickly, perhaps it was something to do with that beautiful house, Plas Cadlan, or more likely all it needed, for me and Cicely to realize that we were meant to be together, was just to meet somewhere else for a while, somewhere away from school and all its associated crap and nonsense, and as soon as that happened we could just see, it was obvious, it was as if the waters had suddenly cleared, and I told him that it was a fantastic feeling, a weird feeling, actually, to be living your life at this level of happiness, I felt giddy with the excitement of it, I was having trouble sleeping at night, and I have butterflies in my stomach, too, now that she is back, there is a kind of urgency about life, suddenly, a sense that everything is at stake, now, do or die, make or break, everything is important, every moment, including this moment which to anybody watching me from the other side of the pub must seem totally mundane, just a young bloke in a suit raising a glass of Guinness to his mouth but no, this is one of the great moments of my life, I know that, which is why I am going to stretch it, stretch it until it snaps or bursts, and there was the same urgency about the way we made love this morning, after Cicely had climbed on top of me, and I had entered her, at last, at last!, I had found my way to Paradise Place, I looked at her face and what I saw there, it was fear, almost, it was a kind of excitement bordering on fear, fear of what?, I know, yes, I know now, because I was feeling it too, it was fear of the past, fear of how the past might have turned out, because we came within a whisker, Cicely and I, of missing each other altogether, we might never have found each other, if I had not decided to walk to Plas Cadlan in the middle of that storm last summer, and the thought of that, the thought that we might never have reached this point after all, oh, it was almost unbearable, insupportable, and it must have occurred to us both at the very same time, because she grabbed my hair and we lunged for each other, suddenly, all the tenderness was gone and we were biting into each other’s mouths so hard it was almost painful and then Cicely began to shake and to make these noises, I thought she was crying at first, it wouldn’t have surprised me, I felt like crying, in a way, but it wasn’t that, these were different noises, animal noises, as she began to rise and fall on top of me, rise and fall, her whole body drawn up into this pillar of flesh, and now she is moving faster, faster and faster, her teeth are clenched and I can see the veins, now, the blue veins standing out on her wrists as she clutches my arm, squeezing me until it hurts and we are nearly there now, so nearly, but there is one more thing I must think about before we get there, one more attempt to stretch this moment and it is something I have been putting off all this time, because I feel so guilty about it, but I can’t do that any more, I have to confess it, it is about Steve, and my job, because after I had been working at the bank for just a couple of months, the manager called me into his office and told me that they were moving me on, they were fast-tracking me, as he called it, and I was going to be moved to the regional office in Temple Row, as a Loans Officer, and I could hardly believe this, I had already been moving through the ranks much too fast, I’d only had to open the post for about three days and then I was put straight on to the counter, the other people working there couldn’t understand it, they couldn’t help but be resentful, even though they were a nice bunch of people, really, a very nice bunch, but it was all part of the bank’s scheme, apparently, to take bright young students like me and show us as much as possible of how things operated before we went to university, so that we became so fascinated, I suppose, that when we graduated we would come straight back to work for them, well, I have no intention of doing that, I can assure you, but it now seemed that the next stage in this process was to transfer me to the regional office and let me work as a Loans Officer and so that’s what I did, starting two days later, and now instead of coming to Smallbrook Queensway every morning I go to Temple Row instead, and I love it there, I have to say, it’s my favourite part of Birmingham, I love St Philip’s Cathedral, which we can see out of our office window, and the Grand Hotel beyond it in Colmore Row, and I love going to sit in the square at lunchtime with Martin and Gil, I love the solid dignity of all those banks and insurance buildings, what would Doug have to say about
that,
I wonder, I can hear it now, another one of those ten-minute lectures on selling out to the establishment, but I don’t care, it is good architecture, they are fine buildings (and so is St Philip’s itself, which Philip tells me was built in 1715 and is the first example of Italianate design in the city, it was designed by a man called Thomas Archer and it is the smallest cathedral in England, what a grand sight it must have been, back in the eighteenth century, standing proud on its ridge with long views down across Colmore Row, which was then called New Hall Lane, towards the great estate of New Hall itself, and it was then that the wealthy builders and manufacturers put up their houses around the new churchyard as well, and what is now called Temple Row began to take shape, only in those days it was known as Tory-Row – there you are, Doug, what a gift, run with it! – and on the opposite side of the square, just a few years later, they built the Blue Coat Charity School, to provide education for the city’s poorer children, yes, that building is handsome as well, it stands as a monument to the enlightened spirit of those who designed it, this city has been blessed, over the centuries, with good and enterprising and compassionate leaders, there is the Cadbury family, for instance, who built a whole village for their workforce at the turn of the century, Bournville, it is called, and they even made sure that everyone had a decent amount of land so that they could grow fruit trees and spend their leisure time gardening rather than going down to the pub, the Cadburys were teetotallers and there are still no pubs in the whole of Bournville, seventy years later, Philip tells me, but I am just trying to distract myself, now, it is time to forget all this local history and return to the unpleasant matter in hand), so then, after just a week or so’s training, it was announced that I had become a fully fledged Loans Officer, and instead of having to deal with members of the public over the counter I now sit in one corner of a bright, open-plan office, with Martin and Gil, my new colleagues and my new friends, which reminds me, I told Martin that I would be in at two o’clock, it’s almost time I was going, but Sam has gone to the bar again so it won’t do any harm to have another swift half, and every day we get applications from all over the city, small companies send us their business plans and ask us for loans, anything from one to fifty thousand pounds, to help them expand their operations or buy new equipment or premises, and it seems ridiculous, doesn’t it, that just because I have a place at Oxford the bank trusts me to make these decisions, I don’t even have A-level maths and I have never studied economics, but every day I sit in judgement on these people, I play God with their hopes and ambitions, and though I know I am trying to do the job fairly, the bank always wants me to be strict, they don’t want to lend money out unless they can be sure of a return, and we usually reject two out of three applications, and last week Gil handed me a big file from the Handsworth branch and said, Go on, Ben, you can do this one, and it was a fish and chip shop which wanted to put in a few tables and chairs to make a little restaurant area, for God’s sake they only needed a couple of thousand pounds but the figures didn’t really add up and it looked as though the business was struggling anyway and they’d exceeded their overdraft limit for the last eighteen months, so I said no, it was as simple as that, I just put a big red stamp on it and then I found out on Saturday afternoon that this was the place where Steve worked and if the scheme had gone ahead he would have got a pay-rise, it wouldn’t have been much I dare say but it would have meant something to him, so there you are, I’ve just managed to put yet another obstacle in his path, without even realizing it, oh shit shit shit, I’m a terrible terrible person, as Cicely would no doubt say, but she doesn’t say that any more, I’ve noticed, no, she is cured, cured of her insecurities, I have done that for her, I am going to allow myself to take full and wholehearted credit for that, so I have achieved something, something already in my short life, I have made another person happy and it turned out that it was the easiest thing to do in the world, all I had to do was follow my own strongest desires, my keenest instincts, and look where it led me in the end, to my little brother’s bedroom, my little brother’s bed, where Cicely and I made love this morning, and yes, we are there, now, there at last, my lovely naked Cicely is clinging on to me and I can feel myself gripped by those beautiful, subtle, supple muscles between her legs, rising and falling, rising and falling, and our mouths are locked together, tighter and tighter, until, yes, really, it happened today, Cicely and I looked for Paradise Place and we found it together and when we found it we discovered that it was a place full of laughter, not tears, when the moment came it was like a burst of light, a burst of white light as if I’d been staring too long at the sun, and then the sun came back into focus only it wasn’t the sun it was a yellow dot only it wasn’t a dot it was a yellow balloon, my yellow balloon, the one I lost all those years ago, my earliest memory, I could see it again, touch it again, it wasn’t lost at all, and then suddenly I remembered where I was, who I was with, and I looked at Cicely and we were still for a hot endless moment and then we fell together on to the bed and rolled in each other’s arms and then we laughed, oh, we laughed as though we would never stop, at last all the fear was gone, and the frustration was gone, and the longing was gone, and the missing each other was gone, and everything was funny, all of a sudden, everything seemed hilarious, like the fact that we had done it for the first time in my little brother’s bedroom, and that we had done it on election day, because, yes!, there is a general election today, the fate of my country hangs in the balance, and that is hilarious, too, and yes I refuse, from this moment onwards, to worry about anything any more, to take anything seriously any more, there has been too much of that, we have all been too sad for too long, and nothing is going to go wrong ever again, not for me or for Cicely or for Lois or for anybody, it’s all a joke, everything is a big wonderful joke, like that song which I have carried in my head for so many years –