— Handsworth — Winson Green — Bearwood —
They don’t know. They think the worst thing that happened was having spiders all over you, having to shove an insect down your throat. That wasn’t the worst. Hope you get VD. Alison was right. You deserve to be raped. You shouldn’t have looked. Can’t get rid of words like that. Twenty grand, for having shit like that poured all over you. Not worth it. Ten, anyway, after the Australian tax people took their bit. And by the time you paid off Visa, and the overdraft …
— Bearwood — Harborne — Selly Oak —
Still, you’re out of debt now. Look on the bright side. Out of debt, for the time being.
— Selly Oak — Cotteridge — Kings Heath —
Twenty grand. Not so bad. Not till you heard what Danielle was getting. Three hundred and fifty. Them and us. ‘We’re all in this together.’ I don’t think so. ‘You know so much, Val.’ ‘When we get out of here, I want to spend a lot more time with you.’ Yeah, right, you little bitch. Got my number, haven’t you? So how come you never returned a single call? Nor any of the others.
Truth is, you don’t belong with people like that. Stupid to think you ever did. This is where you belong. On the Number 11 bus. Look around you. Get real. These are your people. Ordinary people. Decent people.
— Kings Heath — Hall Green — Acocks Green —
Look at that old dear. Saw her yesterday, didn’t you? Somewhere or other. Did she come into the library? A lot of them do, to keep warm.
No, the food bank, that was it. She was on her way out when you went in. Held the door for her. Gave you a funny look, like you weren’t supposed to be there. Why not? You were only looking around. Bit of natural curiosity, that’s all. Wanted to see what kind of stuff they had there. Not going to start using it. Hasn’t come to that yet.
Look on the bright side.
Now why’s she staring at you?
Needs someone to help with the trolley.
— Acocks Green — Yardley —
‘Excuse me, shall I give you a hand with that?’
The woman’s gaze met hers. Her eyes were pale blue, veiny, watery. Her hands were shaking as they grasped the handle of her shopping trolley.
‘You’re a nasty piece of work,’ she said at last, as the bus came to a halt, the doors hissed open, and she eased herself down the step on to the pavement. ‘Why don’t you piss off back to the jungle where you belong?’
~ ~ ~
H. G. Wells, ‘The Door in the Wall’ (1911):
‘The fact is — it isn’t a case of ghosts or apparitions — but — it’s an odd thing to tell of, Redmond — I am haunted. I am haunted by something — that rather takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings …’
THE CRYSTAL GARDEN
~ ~ ~
At first, after he had left the room, Laura was too angry even to think. She stood at the sash window, watching him walk back across the quad in the direction of the Porter’s Lodge, and fumed silently. Projecting her own resentment on to his receding figure, she felt that she could discern arrogance in the very cut of his clothes and the angle of his body as he walked. She watched him disappear through the archway and then returned to her desk, where the first thing she saw was the cup of jasmine tea she had poured for him. It hadn’t been touched. She took it out into the little bathroom halfway up the staircase and emptied it down the sink.
She had already been having a difficult day. The journal’s editors had emailed her yet again asking when they could expect her submission, pointing out that she had missed the second deadline by more than a month. And once again she had spent three or four fruitless hours at her desk, going through her own chaotic notes, and her late husband’s even more chaotic notes, trying to find the single overriding theme, the unifying insight that would draw all of these seemingly disparate ideas together. But nothing emerged.
Tim had arrived promptly at two o’clock. He was a second-year student who had come straight to Oxford from a boarding school which boasted notoriously high fees and an undistinguished academic record. He had come to see Laura to make a complaint.
When did this become a thing, she wondered? As a student, she could remember deferring to her own tutor’s every word, listening in awe as little nuggets of wisdom dropped from his lips. Of course, it was healthy that students nowadays had a more spirited attitude; but still, some of them — Tim being a case in point — had gone to another extreme, regarding her as little more than a service provider, to be vigorously challenged when the service in question turned out not to meet their expectations.
‘Whoever wrote that poem,’ he had said to her, ‘is not a serious poet.’
‘His name was Edwin Morgan,’ said Laura, ‘and he was a very serious poet indeed. I just chose to make you study one of his lighter pieces.’
‘But it was complete gibberish,’ said Tim.
‘I thought we’d established that it wasn’t. That was the whole point of the discussion.’
Laura had got her twentieth-century group to read Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’, and thought she had managed to persuade them, by the end of the class, that there were fragments of sense to be plucked out of its apparently random assemblage of vowels and consonants.
‘Well, I mentioned it to my mum. She said she’s never heard of Edwin Morgan and she wanted to know why we hadn’t read any T. S. Eliot yet this year.’
Laura remembered, now, that Tim’s mother was an English graduate herself. These days she wrote historical romances, and presumably made a good living at it, as they were often to be seen at airport bookshops.
‘I’m not teaching your mum,’ she said. ‘Your parents may be paying the fees, but they don’t get to choose the syllabus.’
It was this reference to the tuition fees, she realized afterwards, that had really made Tim bridle. She had suspected, all along, that this was at the heart of his complaint. Increasingly, channelled through the students, she was aware of the vigilant, distantly controlling presence of concerned parents, looking at the money draining out of their bank accounts and wanting to make sure that they saw a good return on their investment. What had always, to Laura and her colleagues, been a solid but intangible thing — education, the elevation of the young mind to a higher level of knowledge and understanding — had now been redefined as a commodity, something to be bought in the expectation that it would one day yield a financial return.
She was still mulling over this annoying encounter in the pub later that afternoon, as she sat sipping a large Sauvignon Blanc and waiting for Danny to arrive. On the table in front of her was a sheet of A4, upon which she had been trying, once and for all, to list the main strands of this much-delayed paper and find a way of weaving them together. So far she had scribbled:
Paranoia
The numinous/supernatural
The Loch Ness Monster, in films/books/poetry
The Monster is nearly always a fake — often at the centre of some conspiracy to make money out of tourists/locals
What is being sold? What is being commodified?