FOUR Gus
September1997
It’s difficult to look cool with your mother trailing behind you carrying armfuls of items she’s purchased for your student life, like pillows, a first-aid kit, a desk tidy and a toilet brush in a ceramic holder.
When my possessions were finally heaped in the center of the room, the three of us stood for a moment, at a loss for anything to say. It was just a room, with a single bed, a built-in wardrobe and a desk, the last but one along a corridor of similar rooms, all with open doors awaiting their new occupants. It was on the second of four floors, so didn’t have as much of a view as the showroom in the prospectus, but it was at the back of the building, away from the road. My father and I stood looking out of the window, staring at the branches of two large trees whose leaves were just beginning to turn brown.
“At least you’re not on the ground floor,” my mother said. “Let’s get this lot put away, shall we?”
My father and I exchanged a rare moment of understanding.
“I expect Angus wants to arrange things his own way,” he said, with a gentle but determined shove of my mother’s arm.
“Oh!” Her eyes were suddenly watery as she realized the time had come, sooner than she’d anticipated, to say goodbye. “Shouldn’t we at least buy him lunch?”
The finishing line kept moving away. My heart sank at the prospect of trawling around the locality peering at menus, with my father taking out his glasses and reading the dishes out loud. But I said nothing. Another hour or two of embarrassment was preferable to parting with the lingering guilt of not behaving properly.
My father checked his watch. “We’ve only got another twenty minutes’ free parking.” The car was parked underneath Sainsbury’s.
“Well then.” My mother stood on tiptoe to peck my cheek, holding me at arm’s length for a moment, as if making an assessment. As usual, I felt I had been judged slightly inadequate.
Over her shoulder, I noticed a girl with pink hair and a backpack stop outside my door, look at me, then at the number on the door, then at the piece of paper in her hand, before moving on.
I was expecting my father to shake my hand like one of his golf-club cronies, when, out of nowhere, he produced an orange plastic shopping bag. “You have to spend a fiver to get the free parking...”
I pulled out a bottle of champagne.
“But that’s—” Much more than a fiver, I was about to say. Of course it was. “Very generous!”
“Don’t drink it all at once!”
Seeing him beaming with the success of his surprise, I remembered that he was once a person who was capable of having fun.
We all went down to the front hall together.
“Got your keys?”
“Yes!”
“It’s the start of a new future for you,” my mother began, then trailed off, and I knew she was actually thinking about Ross’s future, which had been taken away.
“Work hard!” said my father.
“I don’t think I’ll have a choice about that!” I replied, which seemed to please him.
I stared at their backs as they strode away, her camel coat and his blazer marking out their class and provenance against the backdrop of urban graffiti. Then I went back up to the room, feeling strangely empty. Freed from the suffocation of my family’s grief, I’d been hoping to create a new identity for myself, but strangely, it felt as if there was nothing at all inside me.
The girl with pink hair was taping a piece of paper to her door that said Nash’s Room in large, bold handwriting.
“Bit institutional, isn’t it?” she said, throwing open the door to show me her room, which had an extra window because it was on the corner of the building. She’d already hung up a mobile type of thing, with mirrory bits that caught the weak rays of autumn sunshine and made a fluttering pattern of lights across the grubby beige carpet.
“I’ve lucked out, right?” she said. “Didn’t even have a room yesterday but someone dropped out at the last minute. Nash, by the way. Short for Natasha.”
I nodded at the notice on her door.
“Duh!” She tossed back her pink hair in a dramatic way that made me wonder if I was supposed to remark on it.
“Angus,” I said.
“Seriously?”
Was it such an amusing name?
“It sounds Scottish,” she said, explaining, I suppose, that she hadn’t detected a Scottish accent.
“My father’s originally Scottish.”
“So what shall I call you?”
Clearly Angus wouldn’t do.
At school we knew each other by our surnames. I was Macdonald, so people shortened it to Mac, or sometimes Farmer. I wasn’t going to tell her that.
“How about Gus?” she suggested. Nobody had ever called me Gus. I quite liked it. My new identity had a name.
“Gus, absolutely,” I said quickly, offering my hand to seal the deal.
“How tall are you?”
People think it’s OK to ask that question even though they’d never dream of asking how much a fat person weighs, or even how short a short person is.
“Six foot four.” I couldn’t think of a question to ask her.
“I would offer you coffee,” she said. “If I had any coffee.”
“Do you drink champagne?” I heard myself asking.
“What a ridiculous question!”
My father would be horrified at the idea of me opening the bottle before six, and drinking it warm from china mugs off the wooden cup tree my mother had supplied, but that made it taste even better.
“Divinely decadent, darling!” said Nash.
She was a bit like Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Not that she looked like Liza Minnelli, in her baggy black parachute suit and plimsolls without laces, but there was something of the same self-conscious eccentricity. It crossed my mind that she might see me as the innocent, possibly gay, Michael York character just arrived in the big city.
“What are you studying?” I asked, wincing at the prosaic quality of my conversation.
“Guess!” she said, lying back on her bed, which she’d already made up with black sheets and a red duvet cover. There was a poster of Che Guevara just behind her head.
“Politics?”
She looked surprised.
“English and drama, actually.” She peered at me intently. “Psychology?”
I was flattered if that was how I appeared to her. I liked the idea of looking like a “psychology” sort of person. “Medicine.”
“Oh. You must be clever.”
“Not especially.”
“I’m going to be an actor,” she announced.
Perhaps wanting to appear a little mysterious, I said, “I’m not sure what I want to be.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“You’re going to be a doctor, obviously!”
Hearing it from someone I’d only just met, at the beginning of my new identity, the inevitability depressed me.
I poured out the rest of the champagne, knocking it back like lemonade.
“Do you think we ought to get something to eat?” Nash said, suddenly the less drunk, sensible one.
The nearest restaurant was Greek. It wasn’t serving food until six, but the waiter said we could sit and have a drink. Nash, who had been to Greece, said we should order retsina. The sour pine taste was like the air in the school shower room after the cleaners had been in.
Nash was very direct. “How did you vote?”
Born in 1979, we were Thatcher’s generation. We had known nothing but Conservative government, but this May, change had swept across the country.
“I’m not very political.” I tried to duck the question because I hadn’t actually voted.
“You’re a Tory then,” said Nash. “If you’re not prepared to challenge the status quo...”
I’d never thought about it like that. I’d been brought up to think it rude to ask about someone’s politics.
“Football or rugby?” she demanded.
“Football and running.”
“So you’re a minor private-school boy who didn’t quite fit in,” she deduced, with a flap of her napkin and a wave in the direction of the waiter, who was setting up a big table.
I winced at the accuracy of her summation.
“I bet your dad’s a doctor.”
“He’s a dentist.”
“A failed doctor then. Even worse!”
It had never occurred to me that maybe Dad’s desire for both his sons to become doctors had in fact been about his own ambition. Had he not quite made the grade himself? Was Nash very perceptive, or just very rude?
“What shall we have?” she asked, browsing through the menu. “I’m vegetarian, by the way.” Her statements came out like challenges, as if she was expecting me to argue with her.
Apart from a dish called moussaka, which was pretty much indistinguishable from all the other sloshy trays of mince they’d served us at school, I’d never eaten Greek food before so I let her order. The waiters brought us little plates of oily dips, slabs of fried rubbery cheese, and baskets full of warm pitta bread that sank comfortingly to my stomach, soaking up the pine aftertaste, and allowing me to agree that a carafe of house red would be a good idea.
My memory of the evening is hazy. There was sparring, and laughter, and crying too. Nash’s parents were divorced, her father twice remarried, her mother now living with another woman. She seemed to have a lot of half-brothers and half-sisters in various countries around the world. Nash referred to her father as a bastard, but clearly longed for his affection. A sense of relief washed over me when I realized that this woman, who came across as so sophisticated, was also insecure.
“So what about your family?” she asked me.
“Nothing to tell.”
“Very mysterious!”
“Or very ordinary?”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
A second elapsed.
I saw Ross’s face glancing back at me through the thickly falling snow, his teeth white, his eyes hidden behind ski goggles.
“No,” I said.
It’s not really a lie, Ross.
“Look,” I added quickly. “I’m not interested in being defined by where I come from or who my parents are. I’ve always felt like an outsider in my family and at my school. Now I’m free to be who I really am.”
“So, who’s the real you?” she asked.
“Haven’t a clue.”
Nash mistook my answer for wit.
I woke up the following morning fully clothed, but feeling fine, almost sparklingly alert, until I went to get up and discovered that my skull had been replaced by a rigid steel box that bashed against the tissue of my brain with every slight movement. I weighed the alternatives of ducking back under the duvet, or running off the remains of the alcohol.
Among the still-unpacked possessions lying on the floor, I located my sports bag and pulled on shorts and running shoes. After a panicky search for my key, I saw that I had sensibly left it in the door when I locked it, although I couldn’t remember doing so. I couldn’t actually remember returning to the room, although, as I stepped out into the rain and splashed along at a slow jog, a mental video of the previous evening began to spool through my mind, freezing randomly on single frames of searing embarrassment. Had my hair really become entangled in the plastic vine that decorated the Greek restaurant ceiling when I stood up to go to the toilet? Had we really smashed plates and danced in a frantic circle with the wedding party?
The city pavements were slippery with a dirt soup that splashed my legs and soaked into the mesh of my white running shoes, but the rain felt cool and cleansing, flattening my hair, cascading down my face when I tilted back my head.
The streets were fairly empty, with only an occasional bus sloshing past. I had no idea where I was running to, but decided to turn left when I reached a major crossroads, into a more well-to-do area with estate agents, a pub with tables outside and baskets of bruised red geraniums swinging in the damp breeze, and a newsagent which was just opening up. Flipping through an A–Z, I saw that I’d come three quarters of the way around a squarish circle. My hall of residence was less than a mile away. I bought a pint of milk. The rain was beginning to ease as I pounded back, and my hangover was gone.
In the male shower room, a big, bluff kind of guy was toweling down ostentatiously just like the rugby players did at school to make sure you clocked the size of their muscles and their dicks.
He stared at my mud-bespattered legs.
“Got wrecked last night. Been out to run it off,” I said, and saw I’d gone up in his estimation.
Back in my room, I found a brand-new kettle in a box marked Kitchen along with a big jar of premium-quality instant coffee, a canister of Coffee Mate creamer and some tins of baked beans. My mother had thought of everything and I now regretted my reluctance to let her help me unpack and tidy everything away as she would have liked.
With two mugs of coffee in my hands, I was about to give Nash’s door a sharp kick, when I had another flashback.
Did we kiss? We did. Right there outside her door. A peck, then a Frenchie and then, looking at me with heavy-lidded eyes, she’d asked if I wanted to come in, and it was clear that we could have had sex, but I’d muttered something about it not being a good idea.
Nash wasn’t really my type. I hadn’t even known I had a type until then.
I drank both cups of coffee, then set off to the introductory talk.
There was an almost tangible buzz of nerves among the crowd of strangers congregating outside the lecture hall and a ripple of laughter when the student who was standing nearest the big wooden door tried the handle and discovered that it was open.
“Your first step on the way to becoming independent learners,” the professor remarked acidly from the lectern as we filed into the tiers of seats, casting surreptitious glances around to see if others were taking off jackets, or taking out notepads.
Along the rows, I recognized a couple of faces from the interview day. A boy with glasses soberly acknowledged my nod of recognition; a girl wearing a headscarf looked away shyly.
“Which one of us is going to faint, do you reckon? There’s always one, apparently, at our first sight of a cadaver...,” the guy next to me whispered.
I unfurled a forefinger to point at the shiny blonde bob of a girl sitting right in front of us, who suddenly turned, as if she’d detected the slight movement in her direction. She was classically pretty in an appley, English kind of way. Her eyes held mine for a moment and I could feel the color spreading over my face.
Her name was Lucy, my neighbor discovered when we broke for coffee and ended up sharing a table in the cafe. His was Toby.
If I’d been a moment later arriving outside the lecture theatre, or squeezed onto the end of a row of seats instead of starting a new one, I would probably have spent my training with different people. Or doesn’t it work like that? Were Lucy and I always destined to meet and have coffee together? If I’d sat next to Jonathan, the guy with glasses, would I have passed my university years playing chess, and would I, too, have gone on to be a renowned oncologist? We think we choose our friends, but perhaps it’s always just a matter of chance.
They took us into the anatomy lab during the first week. I suppose the idea was to confront it straight away. In the corridor outside, everyone was talking loudly, but silence descended as we trooped in. The air was thick with chemicals.
I had tried to prepare myself by imagining all sorts of different people when the bag was opened up, but the faces I had envisaged were old. This was a young man, the side of his face disfigured where his head had hit the pavement as a truck turned left into his bike.
Next to me, Toby fainted. I helped carry him out of the lab, laying him on the floor with his legs up on a chair, and sat with him, pretending to be the calm one, until he thought he was up to going back inside. By that time, the other students at our table had been allowed to touch the body, and shown how the organs would be accessed in a surgical procedure. Anatomy teaching would not start in earnest until the second term, our tutor reassured us, by which stage we’d have had several opportunities to get used to the experience.
“Are you OK?” Lucy asked me as we stood in the queue for lunch afterwards.
The concern on her face made me wonder if she’d observed my own struggle in the lab. She was so sweet and so pretty that for a moment, in a cynical attempt to make her like me more than Toby, I was tempted to tell her about Ross. But I held back because I couldn’t bear the idea of my new friends being all sympathetic or limiting their vocabulary around me.
I’ve spent my whole life in your shadow, Ross. I’m not doing that any more.