Chapter I Martin #3
I tried to keep calm. I wanted to lunge across the room and throttle his scrawny neck but I held myself back.
I should have said ‘Japonisme’, I thought, kicking myself.
I was normally hyper-attuned to this kind of nuance.
Typical that the one time I slipped up, I did it in front of an individual so woke his name crossed several cultural intersections.
It was too late to apologise without admitting wrongdoing and running the risk of immediate dismissal by nervous university authorities.
The other week they’d been forced to return a sizeable financial donation after the business magnate who’d given it had been accused of assuming the British-Jamaican female Professor of Cultural Studies was a tea lady.
‘I am not racist,’ I protested.
‘You might not realise you’re racist,’ Jacob countered. It was only now that he had the audacity to remove his baseball cap. ‘But, unconsciously, you’re part of an institutionally racist system.’
Smug little bastard.
‘Alright, Prince Harry,’ someone murmured from the back row. More snickering.
Jacob packed up his laptop and his textbooks and slung his rucksack over one shoulder before sauntering, with excruciating casualness, to the door. He turned back and looked me straight in the eye.
‘Do better,’ he said, before walking out.
Better than what? I wanted to shout after him.
The door swung shut behind him. I returned to the class. They were staring at me in a collective gape of amazement. The blonde girl had the grace to slip her phone back into her jacket pocket.
‘Would anyone else like to leave?’ I asked, every word tightly controlled. No one moved. ‘Right then. Back to Manet.’
I had hoped that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t.
Jacob Malik-Edwards made an official complaint to the university chancellor and I was summoned to defend myself to my head of department, who spoke to me about the need for anti-racism training and reminded me of the necessary sensitivity to gender identification and the use of pronouns.
The footage filmed by the blonde girl – who I later learned was called Blossom (of course) – had been posted on Snapchat and picked up by the local newspaper and then by one of the left-leaning nationals under the headline ‘University Lecturer in Race Row’.
Jacob Malik-Edwards turned out to have a powerful barrister father who alluded to legal action.
The university suspended me without pay, launched an investigation and issued a public statement saying that it had a zero-tolerance policy on racist language and actions, and that I was attending a twelve-week therapy course to teach me how, in the words of Jacob himself, to ‘do better’.
That really rankled.
So that’s why I find myself here, on an IKEA two-seater sofa in front of Joanne Buster. Doing better. Unless I manage to convince her she has cured me of my unlikeable traits and made me into a functioning citizen and exemplar of cultural woke-ness, I will lose my job.
‘… as I say, it was ridiculous but I do understand that I chose the wrong word and, on reflection, I could have handled it better.’
Joanne’s earrings start to swing as she nods.
‘Good, Martin. That’s really great you’re able to see how you might have altered your behaviour to achieve a different outcome.’
Christ, I think. The gradual creep of business-speak into everyday parlance is a particularly grating modern tendency. The other day I saw a bin on the street with ‘a solutions-focused approach to litter’ written on the side.
‘Mm,’ I say.
‘What might you have done differently, if you could live that moment again?’
I’m still thinking of the bin. I wonder why it’s happened, this talking so insistently of ‘impacting’ and ‘circling back’, as if we’ve all become template computer documents?
Maybe it’s because of that awful television programme where cheap-suited, fake-tanned wannabes sit around a boardroom table and eviscerate each other’s moral character until one of them is elected President of the United States.
‘Martin?’
Joanne is looking at me expectantly. I drag her lumbering question from the depths of my recall.
Ah yes. There it is. Nestling in the coal-dark of my consciousness like a piece of shiny plastic.
What might I have done differently? Well, Joanne, I might never have been born, but I had no control over that.
Birth is a non-consensual act of aggression on the part of our parents, given the world of pain we are subsequently born into.
‘I wouldn’t have used the offending word,’ is what I actually say. ‘And if, for whatever reason I had, I would have apologised straight away rather than go on the defensive.’
I don’t mean any of it, of course, but I know what she needs to hear.
‘Great,’ Joanne says and she is radiating a disarming sort of maternal pride. ‘That’s really great, Martin. And why is it, do you think, that you felt so defensive?’
‘He reminded me of the boys at school.’
For a split second, I think I didn’t speak the words out loud. But Joanne Buster has picked up the scent. She is suddenly less Labrador, more bloodhound.
‘Interesting.’ She tilts her head, trying to keep the excitement from her voice. ‘Say more.’
Dammit.
‘I went to a mediocre public school on a scholarship and I never fitted in. All the other boys seemed to know the rules. I attached myself to the most popular boy in my year. His name was – is, I should say – Ben. I became slightly obsessed with him and his family. I think I wanted them to adopt me. Not literally, of course, but metaphorically.’
‘OK. And your feelings for Ben developed?’
I look at her sharply.
‘As they would for any close friend.’
‘So … nothing more?’
‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’
‘I’m sorry, Martin, I can see I’ve upset you. I want to remind you that this is a safe space with no judgement. I see many clients who struggle with feelings of repressed sexuality …’
‘Well, I’m not one of them.’
‘OK. I hear you.’
‘No. Well.’ I pause to try and marshal my thoughts, now slippery as fish. ‘As far as I know, we’re here to talk about a specific thing that happened and not my wider life and – and – or – feelings.’
I try to imbue the final word with as much contempt as I can muster.
Joanne is quiet for a long time. She just looks at me with a disconcerting gaze for the rest of the session and then says, ‘That’s us for today, Martin.’ She closes her notebook and stands, smoothing her brightly patterned skirt with her hands.
I am disappointed. I wanted something more, I realise.
I wanted her to react, to push, to be angry or upset or to contradict me.
I think of my ex-wife. Lucy was – is – a good person, but I find I don’t care about what I did to her.
Why not? Why can’t I? I have a blank space where there should be …
something. I suppose I’m jealous of those young students who can speak so freely about their identities and pronouns and fluidity.
But I’m also furious with them. I resent how blinkered they are to their own enormous good fortune.
They don’t know what it’s like to have no labels one can reach for to say, ‘This is me.’ Because I have never understood what I am.
Sometimes, when I’m on my own in the evening and staring at my reflection in the darkened glass of the kitchen window, I can’t see myself. And all of this is wrapped up in the person of Jacob Malik-Edwards and his Yankees baseball cap.
After therapy, I walk back home, convincing myself the fresh air will do me good.
But the streets are filled with slow-moving tourists and I find myself having to step off the kerb at several junctures to loop past them.
Cambridge has changed a lot since my day.
More chain restaurants. A confusing one-way traffic system which relies on sliding bollards emerging out of the road like superannuated Daleks any time an illegal vehicle attempts to pass.
The students look simultaneously younger and less carefree than Ben and I ever did.
The advent of tuition fees has made them approach their degrees with the seriousness of corporate CEOs.
The centre of Cambridge is now overshadowed by a huge John Lewis, which I always feel rather depressed by.
Today, the department store window is, as ever, the perfect display of the homogenisation of middle-class taste.
There’s a striped deckchair, a watering can painted to resemble an old orange-hued Penguin paperback, and some prissy fake flowers.
To one side, a female (admittedly, I don’t know her pronouns) mannequin has been dressed in cropped jeans, a T-shirt with ‘Bonjour!’ embroidered across the front and the same pair of espadrilles Joanne Buster was wearing.