Chapter 2D

Richard, Saturday 6th March, early evening
When I get through to Colin and suggest a beer or two at the Cobbler's Arms he says, “you're not out with your fancy girl then?” Not in a nasty way – he's not the sort of guy to say it in a nasty way – and I suppose he actually hasn't got any idea what's really going on between me and Zoë, so maybe it seemed a harmless enough thing to say.
I awkwardly explain that she's not really my “fancy girl” and we agree to meet at the pub. Was she ever my “fancy girl“? Who uses expressions like “fancy girl” these days anyway?
How I got from that first lecture, with Zoë gazing ambiguously at me out of hazel eyes framed by her fiery hair, to her sexual overtures in the small hours (by my standards) of yesterday morning, is a little hard to explain – too much of it consisted, as these things tend to, of multiple subliminal clues and little pieces of non-verbal communication. I'm slightly worried about my fascination with her tongue piercing (I needed to find out what it feels like to snog her) and its possible connection with the modified bodies in one of my weird dreams.
Mick is more openly enthusiastic about the pub, in his bouncy prosimian way, and suggests a few games of pool. Probably what I need to keep my mind off it all.
The pub is the traditional kind with horse-brasses and old photos on the walls. The walls themselves are a colour which suggests they haven't been repainted since the days when you were allowed to smoke here, unless they make special nicotine-coloured paint for pubs to use for nostalgic purposes – I wouldn't be all that surprised. It's fairly unpopular with the students, who for some reason seem to prefer the fake-American type of bars where everything costs a pound more and they only have two kinds of beer. That makes the Cobbler's an ideal place for a quiet drink – you're fairly safe from running into the rugby players who hang around some of the other pubs downing pints and dropping their trousers in unison at the orders of their alpha male, or any other such undesirable elements of the student body.
I sit down and wait for Colin. This was the same pub where I first spoke to Zoë. It had seemed perfectly normal to mention at the end of the lecture that I'd be down the pub if anyone wanted to “discuss any issues from the course further“, but Colin's reaction when I called him on his mobile and more or less begged him to come along was “are you completely insane?”, which seemed a little unfair. Maybe he read more into the situation than I did. Maybe he was right.
He turns up at last, and I feel strangely awkward again. He's one of my best mates, but I suddenly don't know what to talk to him about. I don't feel able to tell anyone about the business with the gun – one of the weirdest paradoxes of my situation is that nobody in their right mind would believe me if I told them the truth. I also don't really want to talk about Zoë, beyond a brief and evasive summary: “don't know if that's going to work out really.” Colin says, “probably just as well,” and leaves it at that.
Somehow, though, sitting in this pub reminds me too strongly of that night here after the first Mysteries lecture, with Zoë, Colin (who didn't in the end take too much persuading) and Zoë's classmate and flatmate Jasmine, and I keep drifting off into inward reminiscences again.
Zoë and Jasmine were the only two who turned up in the pub that time, and I was rather glad but at the same time a little scared. In a class that was indefinably different from my usual ones – were the students livelier or less focused, did they disrupt more or doze less? – Zoë somehow stood out, looking interesting and intelligent, with a sarcastic edge – sexy in an ever-so-slightly dangerous way. Her friend looked more like a kind of hippy revivalist, quietly beautiful with very dark hair and eyes and wearing a pretty, vaguely folky-looking dress.
They spent the evening in a slightly comical double-act – Jasmine was there as a keen student, to talk about the relationship between physics and philosophy, while Zoë wanted to talk about films, bands, festivals and so on, and a kind of tension began to grow between the two of them as they constantly interrupted each other.
I realise I'm away with the pixies again, vaguely aware that Colin is asking me something.
“Sorry, what?”
Colin can clearly sense that there's something amiss. He's weighing up whether to say “are you all right, mate?” and initiate the nearest thing to a heart-to-heart that we have in British blokeish culture, or whether I'd rather he let me keep quiet about it, when Mick turns up.
“All right fellers!” he says and goes to the bar for a round. I've already finished my second pint and I can see I'll be drinking too much and too fast tonight, and I don't really care.
Mick keeps my mind off things – I don't think he does heart-to-hearts, he just chatters on in his blithely blithering way, usually amusing if not always intentionally so. Tonight he's not in a comic mood, just a bit nutty – he witters on for a while about some electronics I asked him to try and get hold of discreetly: “those components you wanted, most of them are OK but there's a few issues interfacing with the GM tube, you need to be careful about keeping the high-voltage stuff away from the CMOS...” and then he stops all of a sudden and says, “anyone for a game of pool?”
Playing pool means you don't have to talk if you don't want to, which can be a good thing or a bad one. Right now it isn't taking my mind off things at all, and my thoughts keep drifting off on unhealthy tangents as I rack up the balls and as I lose ignominiously to Mick and then to Colin who has never beaten me before. The beer is going down at a hell of a rate and I can vaguely tell that Colin and Mick are a bit concerned about me, but I'm finally managing not to be so concerned about myself as I have been for the past few weeks.
Another way in which the Cobbler's adheres to tradition is in its closing time, which is probably just as well. The landlord rings a traditional bell at ten to eleven and hollers, “last orders at the bar!” in a traditional kind of voice, and Colin and Mick cover their glasses and say “not for me” in unison as I get up rather unsteadily to get a last pint in.
Colin offers to order me a taxi but I insist the walk will do me good and, when the bell rings out again and the landlord's traditionally gruff voice calls “time at the bar!” with a noticeable note of relief, I waddle off into the sodium-yellow-tinged darkness.
At some point on the way I realise that I'm not going home at all but to Zoë's. I already know, but drunkenly don't care, that this will turn out to be a mistake - it would probably have been a mistake to go and see her at all but getting rat-arsed beforehand clearly makes it a much bigger one. Not that my getting drunk had a great deal to do with Zoë, but my going to see Zoë has everything to do with being drunk.
I'm weaving my way along the street hoping to remember where she lives, and thinking again about my and Colin's first night in the pub with her and Jasmine, and their verbal tennis match, interrupting each other to yank the conversation back and forth between metaphysics and music, philosophy and fun – somehow in my drunken state of mind, what was said that night seems to take on a kind of disproportionate significance.
I nearly walk into a lamp-post, and lose my balance as I stop suddenly. Holding onto the lamp-post to prevent myself falling, I breathe deeply and look around. It's somewhere around here.
It's drizzling slightly and the night is very quiet in this backwater of town and I have one of those sudden moments of clarity, when you see yourself as if from a stranger's point of view and wonder what the hell you are actually up to. Or I do anyway. If I came from a different ideological background I'd probably call it a spiritual crisis.
Jasmine that night seemed abnormally interested in whether Colin and I believe in God – I suspect there was some kind of hidden agenda here, cans of worms best left untouched. I tried to summarise my point of view as quickly as possible and get back to Zoë's half of the conversation, which was about what's on at the local arthouse cinema: “I tend towards the opinion that the lack of proof that there aren't fairies at the bottom of the garden doesn't mean that there are,” I crowbarred it into one sentence, and Jasmine said, “Ah, Ockham's Razor,” in a tone of voice which seemed to be implying something but I couldn't begin to guess what.
Zoë wanted to know what films I liked , and if I was going to see any of the current season at the Playhouse – this arty cinema. I got the impression that she and Jasmine spent a fair amount of time at the Playhouse, though probably for different reasons – Jasmine is a bit pretentious, the sort I imagine sitting in cafés (not pubs) with heavy tomes of Russian literature, holding them at a carefully chosen angle so that everyone can see the titles. Zoë is just into the films, not the image that goes with them.
The current season is on the theme of cannibalism – they had Delicatessen, Soylent Green and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover coming up – and I'm not sure how well I'd have coped with that in view of the cannibal dream, a gory and confused one involving swarms of rats and screaming seagulls as well as the eating of human flesh... I only remember snatches of dialogue like No sir, I live off rice and beans sir, I only kill people for cat food sir, poor Pusskin needs his meat... No doubt that one will be back in its new hyper-real version as well.
I think I've found the right street, now it's just a question of finding the right building and the right floor. Something is nagging at my mind about that conversation with the girls, and I can't really concentrate on where I'm going until I've remembered what it is.
It's to do with the way Jasmine interrupted the film conversation, wanting to know if Colin and I believe in life after death. Colin stepped up to the challenge with an arrow-of-time explanation: most people don't have a problem coping with the idea that they didn't exist before they were born, do they? So just imagine you can take the process of first not existing and then existing, turn it around and run it backwards like a film. He's got backwards films on the brain.
What's been bugging me, I think, is nothing more than the mention of life and death, and the way that leads me inevitably back to more immediately pressing questions of life and death; also the discussion of criteria for believing in things reminds me of the various flaws in the conclusion that I'm immortal. Suddenly it seems important to spill the beans to Zoë as soon as I see her.
When I get to her flat she's there with Jasmine and Jasmine's boyfriend Charlie, who's rolling a gigantic spliff of some highly elaborate design with a kind of flower on the end. They're getting ready to go to a party and – while to their immense credit they don't make me feel unwelcome in any way (or I don't notice it) – it's clear that I'm not being invited to go with them. Some kind of spliffy dub track is blasting out of the stereo.
I explain drunkenly to Zoë that I need to talk to her and she says something like “yeah, another time maybe?” but I've got this alcoholic bee in my bonnet that now is the time to tell her everything.
Charlie has finished building his colossal baroque joint and is now twirling it in his fingers. “Is that a Camberwell Carrot,” I slur, and then wonder if that film's a bit too old for him to have seen, but it clearly isn't. He laughs darkly (or so it seems to me) and says it's a Brockley Broccoli. He's lighting it as he says this so the words come out between clenched teeth and for a moment I don't get what he's saying and think he's talking about glockenspiels.
He hands it to me and I foolishly take a big puff – I can't really handle the stuff at the best of times, especially not pissed, and this is very strong.
The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur – I talk very insistently to Zoë about the experiment, but it comes out as garbled nonsense (“no, I need you to understand, I have committed suicide, I blew my head off with a bloody great shotgun“) and she presumably thinks it's the beer and the weed talking. I remember Charlie whispering “it's purple-sprouting!” into my ear at one point and then bursting into mad guffaws.
And at some point I must have fallen asleep on the sofa.