S ~ Crowded room

Hen and Manley lie outside on picnic rugs, on the Waveney lawn, in
the sun, in shorts, with Joe Hell and the harpies, scanning bits of
paper, their feet rocking back and forth in the air. Empty milkshake
bottles lie drying beside them.

In the week leading up to the exams, Si?n came back from Abergele to
visit them, and two of Hen's old allies stayed in Waveney for a few
nights. Hen's just waved goodbye to them from outside Chancellor's
Drive.

These two - Ryan and K - are like the pieces that had come away in
Hen's hands as he slid away from the past, into his private new epoch.
Their coming round was like the figures on a fresco coming to life,
like K had driven his blue and white VW beetle through a film reel that
turned out to be nothing more than drum skin covering a skylight. Like
the mud coffee at the bottom of the mug, unravelling over the grey of
the main stuff when Hen tips it up. Like Lyle's syrup running into the
sink and becoming topaz lace in sauced washing water. That's what it
was like.
The Hen who had climbed atop a Bloody Dangerous Thing in the rugby
fields with Ryan and K had much shorter hair, a wax jacket, and was a
full-time half-assed Christian. That Hen had planned on becoming a
loner and social recluse. This other Hen was lapsed, a most-time
atheist in his raincoat with rolled up sleeves, his hat and reels of
hair, with hot Si?n at the end of one hand, roving Manley in tow, a
whole corridor of them behind him - who was he in relation to these
bristle men in their second hand car?

"Manley and Si?n - Ryan and K. Good journey?"

K removed his driving sunglasses.

"Let's just say that Ryan's mapping left a lot to be desired."

Ryan heaved his bags from the back seats.

"K nearly crashed the car - he drives like a lunatic!"

Ryan is trim and clean-shaven like old Trimtin, after a year working
out in Ameircar, which he hates, in ways, same as Varghese. He is a
trunklike figure, with limbs like sanded wooden blocks, warm and
sawdusty, and features like fat, breasty gnarls - penknife carved eyes
and eyebrows, and an old scar of a boy's smile. Hen has a snapshot on
his wall of Ryan pretending to eat barbed wire - it was taken a week
before he set off for Ameircar. The plan was to tell the Ameircarns he
was enjoying an English pretzel.

K is as tall and slight as Manley, with a raptor nose. His hair is
cropped short and shallow in a widow's peak, so that his forehead rises
in bull horns and he seems, from some angles, to be going bald. He is a
wit - the lips thin as two grass blades, the eyebrows arched windhover
wings.

They're both masterless writers - modern day ronin vagabonds, who
fought with Hen through their teens and loved it. Their writing
projects are ongoing - watch out soon!

On the night of their arrival Hen took them to the retro night at the
LCR, largely because Ryan loves retro music - aural cheese - more than
anyone the three of them know. Manley, Si?n, Helen and Mary came with
them, while Cole, Cliff and Kettle went to the Waterfront. K was
practically a nephalist. Old Ryan wasn't, but had never been drunk
before, and claimed it couldn't happen.

"At one party I went to, I was given the job of handing out vodka
jellies. Well, for every one I served, I ate one myself, and I didn't
get even slightly blurry. Then there was James' liquor cabinet - all
afternoon and no effect! I tell you, Hen, I'm invulnerable to the
effects of alcohol."

So Hen, perhaps being a little too devious, offered up some of his
revision brandy. He and Ryan slugged it down for the fifteen minutes
before the party set off. At the backbar, the prelude to the LCR, Hen
bought a round of French beer. Spotting Cole's pint of snakebite and
black, an aghast Ryan said he'd have some of that. He did, and followed
it with a double whisky and coke. K worked his way through three French
beers, and soon they were both teetering, Ryan raucously, thanking Hen
profusely for the experience, and K more morosely, confessing in his
baritone song that he too had never been quite so soaked. They had a
row of double vodkas at the retro night, and ran into Trimtin himself -
Ryan fell in love with his power puff girls' lycra top, and the
conversation, brief, slurred and drowned out by cheese, never got round
to the issue of writing.

Back in Hen's room that night they arranged themselves clunkingly -
Si?n and Hen in Hen's bed, K on Joe Hell's spare mattress, and Ryan
giggling maniacally to himself on Hen's blue deckchair. Hen exited for
a while to look for Mary, who had gone missing in the course of the
night, but she was drunk with a man called Tom from E block, so he came
back and went to bed, promising stuttering Ryan that the following
night he would have Cole's spare mattress to sleep on, and they'd all
be snug.

"I don't mind, Hen! I like the chair."

In the morning, Hen woke up to find Ryan quietly playing cards with
himself.

"You don't have a headache?"

"Yes, I have a headache. And I feel sick."

"Oh dear, Ry."

Hen straightened himself out and got K up - they went to move the
beetle from the University's car park, where it had been illegitimately
parked all night. After breakfast and moans, and reminiscing, Hen and
his three visitors rounded up Manley for a round on the local pitch and
putt course, where Ryan, happily recovered, blasted the balls from the
tee-off point, over the holes and over hills into the distance. His
relatives in Ameircar are golfing regulars, he told the others.

"I'm rubbish at it though."

K swiped, missed, cursed and wiped his vast, sparkling brow. Manley
and Hen hacked their way out of bunkers and Si?n scuffed her ball along
in the rough. They poked fun at each other, took snapshots and searched
for missing balls in straw and wood, scared birds out of trees, hit
litter bins and damaged the green.

"Look at that!" Ryan, the victor, said to Hen.

They were walking back, keeping off the road by walking right next to
a hedge and tramping through long, wet grass. K and Manley were up in
front, talking to each other. As instructed, Hen looked at them.

"They're exactly the same!" Ryan hissed. "Same build, same kind of
clothes, same haircuts, both looking at the ground while they talk,
both probably mumbling."

"I told you, didn't I?" said Hen, who'd waxed hell-fucking lyrical to
Ryan in phonecalls about how much his new ally Manley resembled their
friend K. "And you and me are the short-ass crazy ones, and Si?n?well,
she's the epicentre of us all. How about that, eh?"

"It's magical. I'm glad we came - I'm having such a fun time."

The day after that, the three of them - Ryan, Hen and K - got lost
taking themselves and Nicole back from Norwich city centre - the road
took them round in circles until they found the right turning. When
they arrived back, Hen found one of the literary events of the year
pinned on his noticeboard: a reminder from Manley that he'd left
without retrieving his clothes from the dryer in the
launderettes.

"Hen, I have your clothes. If you ever want to see them again?just
ask."

Well they laughed, and reread it repeatedly. Manley is without doubt
one of England's foremost writers - subtle, sumptuous and swinging
around on the knife edge of numbing vacancy, never putting his words
into anything as clumsy and crude as a novel or poem. Instead, they're
blown high on impact, moving just beyond the reader's reach like a kite
that has torn itself free.

Hen feels like mentioning this as they study their scraps of paper
together, lying out on the picnic rug. He jars Manley's bowed head with
a wheeling foot.

"You're savage and compassionate, Manley. You tap into the raw reality
of humanity without blinking."

"You're certainly not the first to realise that, Hen," he replies.
"Stop kicking me in the head."

Hen stops nudging him, takes a glance at the panels of blurry
golden-white staggered out in front of him - some of his notes, torn
off the ceiling and door - and trails off in search of something else.
Hot-Shitrock Sparshott's standing by the open kitchen window in
sunglasses, eating something out of a bowl. Lianne and Mary are face
down in their revision beside him. Joe Hell, Varghese and James are all
barefoot and kicking a football around in the V of the lawn. Paul and
his girlfriend go by on the path outside H block, heading in to the
shade.

"That's Paul. With Natalie next to him."

"I'll tell you who that wasn't, Hen," says Manley, holding up his
decisive finger, "and that wasn't Hitler."

"No? You sure?"

Hen rolls over onto his back and closes his eyes.

"I'm positive. That's one thing you couldn't make me believe in a
million years. That was certainly not Hitler."

"Well, if I were to take a picture of Hitler?"

Hen leaves the supposition there, expecting a reply. After an interval
of grunts and shouts from the football players, Manley says,
"Yeah?"

"?right then. Just now. Of them. A picture of Hitler and it was taken
while they were walking past us."

"I wouldn't believe you. I'd say you faked it."

"What if your eyes had deceived you?"

Another chorus from the football players follows. "Pass it here,
Bruce," says James. "Legend!" says Joe, sliding the ball between
Varghese's legs.

"What, you mean if you told me that my eyes had deceived me?" says
Manley.

"Well, suppose Paul and Natalie walked right past now, proving that it
wasn't them earlier?"

"Well, obviously, then I'd believe you. I mean, if that happened then
it must have been Hitler. After all, he's not anywhere else."

"He's not buried."

"I don't see him anywhere."

"Me neither. Not out here."

"Where are you, Hitler? Come out of hiding right now."

Hen sits up and shoves Lianne in the shoulder.

"Have you seen Hitler?"

Lianne feigns distress, and looks Hen in the eye. She's more maltloaf
than olive in the summer light, more tomahawk-wild, daled and
hilly.

"Na-ho! What on earth are you talking about? Should I have seen
Hitler?"

"Why are you always talking about Hitler, Hen?" Mary pipes up. Her
freckles are made more round, more orange and more plentiful by the
sun. Ryan had said in particular how much he liked Mary.

"So we never forget," Manley reminded them, laying on the sincere tone
as thickly as he ever will.

"S'right," says Hen. "So, who's winning, Lianne and Mary - you or the
work?"