‘Oh, Ritwik, why are all the nice, caring, sensitive and good-looking men gay?’ she cries out.
They look at each other with something approaching horror and, in that instant, far more than knowledge passes between them; it is understanding, even deep empathy, for Ritwik realizes that Sarah has been telling him about Richard as a reciprocal confiding. This is her way of making them fall together as equals again and she offers him the best she can — not damage, not abuse, but the impossibility of happiness in love. He swallows a few times to rid his throat of lumps then wills himself to spin off the conversation to a superficial chit-chat about the attraction of unattainable things.
‘Ah, you see, it’s what you can’t have,’ he says. ‘Why do you think nearly all gay men fancy straight boys?’ There, he has done it.
Sarah links her arm with his and says, ‘Well, we’re both a bit buggered then, aren’t we?’ She lets out a clear peal of laughter and then adds, ‘So you’ve decided to do Milton then? God, you are crazy. Shall we go and do some work in the library and then meet later for tea? We can compare notes on who’s the bigger bastard — Milton or Johnson.’
He feels so light walking to the library he is almost certain that had she not been there, physically linked to him, he might have blown away like a balloon.
In a few months’ time, finals loom like hulking shapes which scare and threaten a child when the lights are turned out. Most of the people he knows withdraw into frenzied revision. Everyone psyches each other out, and there is more than a whiff of tension, fear and rivalry in the air. Jenny Hellman, in the corridor upstairs, sticks unbendingly to her fourteen-hour a day revision schedule — she times her visits to the toilet with a stop watch, adds it all up, then adds that much extra time to the end of her fourteen-hour day. Jo Milne, her neighbour, has all her chemistry formulae, in extra large letters, glued to the ceiling so she can see them first thing every morning; she has grown up with the belief that what you learn in the early hours of waking sticks longest in the mind. She doesn’t bother drawing the curtains shut at night so that she can see her formulae in the morning light, first thing when she wakes up. In the college house across the car park, Paul Dunn and Matt Fellowes have discovered this little nugget and it fuels their masturbatory fantasies, which, in the run-up to finals, are a bit more fevered and frequent than usual. Others have taken more austere decisions. Ritwik never fails to be surprised by the sheer tenacity and longevity of the myth of the debilitating orgasm. Students he is intimate with have confided that they have either stopped having sex or given up jerking off, as if the increasing volume of semen in their testicles will directly nourish their brains when they’re faced with the question, ‘How far are Milton’s early works predictive of his later?’ Jenny’s given up penetrative sex; this from the woman who has had sex in every possible corner of the college — the laundry room, the showers in Staverton Road, the tennis court, the Master’s garden, the chapel, the library. There seems to be a secular Lent everywhere.
And then there is the steady rise of illnesses Ritwik’s never heard of — glandular fever and ME, chronic fatigue syndrome and RSI. God, these are the very people who take a dozen jabs before they go to India and carry a whole pharmacy with them! At least you get nothing more serious than diarrhoea or worms out there but here you get incurable, unheard of things such as BSE and CFS and ME, the acronyms themselves trying to hide the dreaded nature of the new-fangled confections.
Anti-depressants is the buzzword, stigmatizing in some circles, highly desirable and trendy in others. Mark Pawson decides to opt out of doing finals for the third time in his long stay in college because he can’t face it; he is on a record dose. Richard Keene throws himself off a cliff in Torquay, has to be heli-lifted and taken to hospital. Word has it that he is dealing very badly with trying to wean himself off Prozac and the added stress of finals has just pushed him over the edge. The whole college is spooked by it until it is discovered that the helicopter rescue was a creative addition and the only damage Richard seemed to have done was to break his leg when he fell off a boulder while drunk, listening to Nirvana on his personal stereo. The stereo, however, was shattered to bits.
A whole town going self-consciously, safely mad because it was expected of it.
Gavin is very busy. Ritwik has hardly seen him this term. He leaves notes outside Gavin’s door; a few days later he finds one Gavin has BluTacked on to his. It says how he has been working until two in the morning at the studio and returning there at eight in the morning: the final lap in putting together the degree show is consuming him. But they could meet for a quick tea in his rooms next Sunday afternoon? Yes, writes Ritwik, and sticks the note under the door. He feels both eagerness and apprehension about Sunday — he needs to ask Gavin a few things but he doesn’t hope for many answers. Gavin will probably divert it to being facetious and clever-clever.
The cottaging rages like a hectic in Ritwik’s blood. It is a habit, an addiction, and he is powerless to break out of its grip. But he hasn’t even tried. The pangs of guilt — I waste so much time down there, I could use it for revision, for plain sleeping, or cracking Vindication of the Rights of Women — are always mollified, suppressed, or dismissed. So far no one has justified the long waits. Ritwik is beginning to realize that this is the way it is going to be, that no one will come along to save him, but he has the clinical gambler’s dopamine-addicted brain, hooked to the tyranny of uncertain and random rewards.
On nights when the sound of footfalls becomes few and far between, sometimes dwindling to nothing for hours, he sits there and thinks of his mother and the lost innocence of the word ‘abuse’. The English he has grown up with in India is slightly different from England English; there is a touch of a phase-lag somewhere — they do not superimpose on each other perfectly. ‘Abuse’ for Ritwik has always meant the hurling of loud, angry, possibly filthy words at someone else — you can call someone a motherfucking bastard and that would be abuse. But to have it upgraded like this, in the casual snap of two fingers, to his entire childhood, to his relationship with a mother who is not there anymore to answer questions or even to listen to him — no, that can’t be right. And surely this has happened, more or less, to every child in India? He feels a sudden rush of irritation for this business of other cultures, other countries, renaming and recategorizing things, using their own yardsticks, for other people, as if their definitions were universal. But this fades away as swiftly as it has arrived with the question, ‘What if they’re right?’ The momentousness of the answer is always kept at bay by that classic reasoning: it happens to other people, not to me. He hasn’t got his head fully around the cognitive shift ‘abuse’ has undergone.
At other times he just sits away the hours in his cubicle thinking, ‘What would you think if you saw me now? This, this stench of urine and disinfectant and cock, this is what I am, not what you wanted me to be.’ And he punishes her more by staying on another extra hour when he knows there won’t be anyone else visiting the public toilets that night.
It could be any night, it is any night, because they are all the same, they all wind down the same way, but not this one. Four pints of Guinness in the college bar, followed by two pipes of hash in Chris Elwes’s room, have left Ritwik clouded and dizzy. He can’t sit still or lie down for more than a few seconds because everything starts becoming gently, dancingly unstuck and unfixed. The only hope is to keep walking. So he walks down a deserted Banbury Road, northwards, to his dorm on Staverton Road. At this time there are no cars, no people, no bicycles, just a long, well-lit stretch of road with trees on either side dropping blossom intermittently on to the tarmac. The traffic and pelican-crossing lights are desolate; they blink and change for no one at all to the rhythm of some soulless programme they are wired to.