Chapter 3: Strawberry Wine and a Shotgun
Zoë, Saturday 6th – Sunday 7th March
I'm trying to have a quiet weekend and get my head together but people keep interrupting. Well OK, there are actually only two, but by the time the second one turns up it seems like a continuous stream of them. They've been appointed to “make sure I'm all right“, or more precisely to persuade me to sign up for various counselling services, which I don't think is the same thing at all.
About 7 o'clock on Saturday evening it's a woman from the Students' Union called Alethia. She's serious, eager and slightly ridiculous, with a severe-looking haircut which for some reason makes me associate her with the political organisations who hang out earnestly selling extremely boring newspapers outside the Union building and which hold a kind of morbid fascination for Charlie, who's made a slightly obsessive hobby of studying how to piss off the members of each individual organisation. It's like those nature documentaries where they play recordings of animal alarm calls in a jungle and each noise sets off a different species – for one faction you have to say “I think Lenin was wrong,” for another it's “the border isn't the main issue in Ireland” and so on, and they go mental. Charlie has actually demonstrated this to me, more times that I really wanted to see it.
I try to imitate Charlie's trick and guess the magic words to irritate Alethia – after a few attempts they turn out to be “surely I have a right not to have counselling,” which instantly throws her into a state of confusion, wondering if she's somehow doing the wrong thing. Then I get a fit of the giggles and Alethia hurries away while I consider whether I might actually need a shrink after all. I do seem to have had a lot of random inappropriate fits of the giggles over the last couple of days.
The woman appointed by the university turns up on the doorstep at nine o'clock on Sunday morning – of all times! – and is a bit more persistent, or else my patience is running lower. She's there with Jane Roberts, who quickly introduces her and then runs off leaving us alone together.
Her name is Vanessa Robinson and she's in her late forties, dressed in a serious dress and wearing serious glasses. She has a pseudo-reassuring, eyelessly false smile and an artificially calm voice which grates on my nerves with its annoyingly bland tone until I lose control of my sense of sarcasm and start trying to convince Ms. Robinson that I think she's on drugs.
She looks a bit shocked (really you'd expect someone from a counselling service to be a little more resilient), but I can't stop myself. “I do recognise the symptoms, you know, the so-called tell-tale signs.” – wiggling my fingers for speech marks – “That space cadet glow. I can get you help if you need it.”
Ms. Robinson turns a funny colour as she tries to make her professional blandness override the fit of rage I can sense boiling just beneath the surface. Maybe I touched a nerve there. Her mouth contracts into an anus-like pucker and there's an air of old-fashioned headmistress about her as she tells me she really doesn't think that's very funny.
She hands me a business card (“in case you want to talk about this any more“), and says goodbye, the artificially calm voice carefully back in place.
I feel wonderfully pleased with myself, and I'm tempted to cause a little bit more mayhem – maybe go and find the vice-chancellor and yell obscenities at him, just for the hell of it.
Havoc-wreaking moods like this keep alternating with tearful ones. I'm relatively OK, though, really, finding a gorily dead body doesn't seem to be such a big deal as I thought it would be. Not that I'd thought about it much before Friday, of course.
I do feel vaguely upset quite a lot of the time mind you. The worst thing is a sneaking feeling that Richard's death might have something to do with me. I know in the rational part of my mind, and Jasmine and Charlie keep telling me, that I'm being silly. But... well it's a funny coincidence, isn't it? On Tuesday you snog someone and on Friday you find him dead.
With his head all... No, never mind what his head was like.
How serious is it for a lecturer if he gets found out shagging a student? I know it's frowned on, but surely it isn't that bad nowadays – we're all grown-ups after all. Not a reason to kill yourself anyway. Certainly not before you've even started with the shagging bit. I cast about for other possible reasons.
What about Tom, that idiot from the ridiculously-named new student magazine? It's called CampusTastic!, which has to be spelt with the exclamation mark and the right capital letters otherwise they get comically annoyed. He seemed to be hanging around Richard a lot, and Richard wasn't keen for him to see us together. And he was on the scene very promptly when Richard... when I... you know, on Friday. Could he have something to do with it?
I'm probably being paranoid. The theory that Tom might have been blackmailing Richard over his illicit relationships with students seems even sillier than anything else I've come up with.
Jasmine and Charlie help a lot with keeping my feet on the ground as well as general moral support. Jasmine's generally a good person to have around, however much she might wind me up sometimes – she gets these attacks of guilt and anxiety about abandoning the religion she was brought up in, and generally the whole God business takes up far too much of her mental energy. But you can't help your upbringing – she's from some wildly complicated family background that involves Ireland, Poland and a Christian community in Kerala in India, and it's all a bit heavy on God. Irritating as that can be she's one of my best friends, the nearest thing to a soul-mate you can have if you've got to avoid the word “soul“.
On Sunday evening Charlie comes round with several bottles of his homebrew strawberry wine, a large bag of weed and his extensive collection of roots reggae, and we talk about everything possible apart from Richard's death. There's a strange kind of awkwardness to start with and Jasmine's trying too hard not to mention The Unmentionable, so she comes out with inane comments like “your hair looks nice” – my hair looks exactly the same as the last time she saw me a few hours earlier, only slightly messier.
“Yeah, I've dyed it blood colour so people are too embarrassed to ask what it's like to find your date with his brains splattered all over the wall.” Shit – that sarcasm thing getting out of hand again.
“Sorry.”
“No, I'm sorry,” and I am. “I just keep... lashing out at the wrong people. I'm really grateful you're here.” She lives here, you fool, I tell myself.
Jasmine hugs me, and then gets Charlie to join in too. Hugging done, we sat back down in a slightly embarrassed silence again.
Charlie starts grinning mischievously and fishing around in his pockets, laying out various bits and pieces on the table until he finds a packet of Rizla. Charlie is also a good person to have around.
“What did you think of Glen's band on Tuesday?” he asked as he rolls a spliff, and then grimaces as he realises what a faux pas it might be to mention that. He lights the spliff, passes it to me and opens the strawberry wine.
“They were shite,” I say decisively and take a large toke. I think getting completely off my head would probably really help right now. Charlie giggles knowingly.
The wine is very nice. Although I know from previous experience what it'll do to my head tomorrow, it makes a nice warm feeling in my belly to go with the nice warm feeling of having my friends around me, and I begin to cheer up.
I mention Alethia to Charlie, and what I said to her and her reaction, and he laughs and then nods sagely and says, “ah, one of those Third Way Social Market Right-On Tossers.” He has his own terms for various political categories into which he sorts the human race – particularly the newspaper-sellers he despises on the grounds that they “couldn't organise a revolution in a spin dryer” – the Silly Trots, the Raving Tankies, the New Revisionist Bastards and so on. They sound like strange tribes that populate his personal world – this new one has probably the longest name he's come up with so far.
In an odd way I'm impressed with his arcane knowledge about these political groups, even if I can't really say I see the point. Just from the title of the papers the guys outside the Students' Union sell he can identify the various organisations – to me it all sounds a bit like the Judean People's Liberation Front and the People's Liberation Front of Judea from the Life of Brian – and find the correct formula to wind each one up.
I try to ask Charlie why it's so fascinating but he's in one of his stoned oratorical moods and has already started on a speech about why we need to stick together and look after each other. It's quite an impressive speech and I say, “you should be a politician.”
“Fuck off!”
“No, I just mean you'd be really good at making speeches.”
“You mean I should have been in the International Brigades.”
“Did they make a lot of speeches?” ...and then we're off into some kind of confusing political rant from Charlie and giggles from me and Jasmine. The International Brigades seem to have been something in the Spanish Civil War, and Charlie is very insistent about how they didn't hang around selling newspapers.
Charlie's right about looking after each other of course, and I suddenly feel incredibly grateful for having such good friends. I try to tell Charlie how grateful I am but it somehow turns into laughing about Charlie yelling at the policewoman and then trying to hug her, and then Charlie somehow follows a tangent from there to politics again and Jasmine has to promise to read a lot of heavy books by authors like Bakunin and Kropotkin before he'll agree to shut up.
Eccentric as he may be, Charlie is much nicer and a lot more fun than Glen, the guy with the shit jazz band that Jasmine was seeing until an incident a few weeks ago which Glen referred to (when anybody was prepared to listen to him) as “the time God got into the bedroom”. Charlie makes Jasmine laugh and forget about the rather prim-and-proper intellectual pretension she hides behind so much of the time – it's very good for her.
When the wine eventually runs out they decide it's bedtime and I get the feeling God will not be finding a way into the bedroom tonight, try as He might. I sit in an armchair staring out of the window into the night and trying to arrange my thoughts – I need to make sense of this whole Richard business somehow – and fall fast asleep.
