PENHALIGON ASKS, “SO where’s this mystery woman of yours, Olly?”
Olly Quinn frowns. “She said she’d be here by half seven.”
“Only ninety minutes late,” offers Cheeseman. “Doesn’t prove she’s dumped you for a gym rat with the face of Keanu Reeves, the anatomy of King Dong, and the charisma of moi. Not necessarily.”
“I’m driving her home to London tonight,” says Olly. “She lives in Greenwich—so she’s bound to be along by and by …”
“Confide in us, Olly,” says Cheeseman. “We’re your friends. Is she a real girlfriend, or have you … y’know … made her up?”
“I can vouch for her existence,” says Fitzsimmons, enigmatically.
“Oh?” I glower at Olly. “Since when did this cuckolding crim take precedence over your stairs neighbor?”
“Chance encounter.” Fitzsimmons tips his roasted-nut crumbs into his mouth. “I espied Olly-plus-companion at the drama section in Heffer’s.”
“And speaking as a reformed postfeminist new man,” I ask Fitzsimmons, “where would you position Queen Ness on the Scale?”
“She’s hot. I presume an escort agency is involved, Olly?”
“Screw you.” Olly smiles like the cat who got the cream. “Ness!” He jumps up as a girl squeezes through the crush of student bodies. “Talk of the devil! Glad you got here.”
“So sorry I’m late, Olly,” she says, and they kiss on the lips. “The bus took about eight hundred years to arrive.”
I know her, or knew her, but only in the biblical sense. Her surname escapes me, but other parts I remember very well. An afterparty in my first year, though she was “Vanessa” back then; potty-mouthed Cheltenham Ladies College, if memory serves; a big shared house down the arse-end of Trumpington Road. We necked a bottle of Chateau Latour ’76, which she’d nicked from the cellar in the pre-party house. We’ve sighted each other around town since and nodded to avoid the crassness of ignoring each other. She’s a craftier operator than Olly, but even as I wonder what’s in him for her, I recall a drunk-driving offense and a suspended license—and Olly’s warm, dry Astra. All’s fair in love and war, and although I’m many things, I’m not a hypocrite. Ness has seen me and a fifth of a second is enough to agree upon a policy of cordial amnesia.
“Have my seat,” Olly’s saying, removing her coat like a gentle-twat, “and I’ll … er, kneel. Fitz, you’ve met. And this is Richard.”
“Charmed.” Cheeseman offers her a four-fingered handshake. “I’m the malicious queer. Are you Nessie the Monster or Ness the Loch?”
“And I’m as charmed as you are.” I remember her voice, too: slumming-it posh. “My friends have no trouble with just ‘Ness’ but you can call me Vanessa.”
“I’m Jonny, Jonny Penhaligon.” Jonny jumps up to shake her hand. “A pleasure. Olly’s told us shedloads about you.”
“All of it good.” I hold up my palm to say hi. “Hugo.”
Ness misses no beat: “Hugo, Jonny, the malicious queer, and Fitz. Got it.” She turns to Olly. “And sorry—who are you again?”
Olly’s laugh is a notch too loud. His pupils have morphed into love-hearts and, for the nth time squared, I wonder what love feels like on the inside because externally it turns you into the King of Tit Mountain.
“Richard was about to buy a round,” says Fitzsimmons. “Right, Richard? Aerate your wallet?”
Cheeseman feigns confusion. “Isn’t it your turn, Penhaligon?”
“Nope. I bought the round before this one. Nice try.”
“But you own half of Cornwall!” says Cheeseman. “You should see Jonny’s manor, Ness—gardens, peacocks, deer, stables, portraits of three centuries’ worth of Captain Penhaligons up the main staircase.”
Penhaligon snorts. “Tredavoe House is why we’ve got no bloody money. The upkeep’s crippling. And the peacocks are utter bastards.”
“Oh, don’t be a Scrooge, Jonny, the poll tax must be saving you a king’s ransom. I’m going to have to pimp myself later just to get a National Express ticket home to my Leeds pigeon-loft.”
Cheeseman is a fine misdirector—he still has ten thousand pounds from the money his grandfather left him—but I want no ruffled feathers tonight. “I’ll get the next round in,” I volunteer. “Olly, you’ll need to stay sober if you’re driving, so how about a tomato juice with Tabasco to warm the heart of your cockles? Cheeseman’s on the Guinness; Fitz, fizzy Australian wee; and Ness, your poison is … what?”
“The house red isn’t bad.” Olly wants a drunk girlfriend.
“Then a glass of red would hit the spot, Hugo,” she tells me.
I recall that quirky lilt. “Wouldn’t risk it, unless you carry a spare trachea in your handbag. It’s hardly a Chateau Latour.”
“An Archers with ice, then,” says Ness. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Wise choice. Mr. Penhaligon, would you help me bring these six drinks back alive? The bar will not be pretty, I fear.”
THE BURIED BISHOP’S a gridlocked scrum, an all-you-can-eat of youth: “Stephen Hawking and the Dalai Lama, right; they posit a unified truth”; short denim skirts, Gap and Next shirts, Kurt Cobain cardigans, black Levi’s; “Did you see that oversexed pig by the loos, undressing me with his eyes?”; that song by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl booms in my diaphragm and knees; “Like, my only charity shop bargains were headlice, scabies, and fleas”; a fug of hairspray, sweat and Lynx, Chanel No. 5, and smoke; well-tended teeth with zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke—“Have you heard the news about Schr?dinger’s Cat? It died today; wait—it didn’t, did, didn’t, did …”; high-volume discourse on who’s the best Bond; on Gilmour and Waters and Syd; on hyperreality; dollar-pound parity; Sartre, Bart Simpson, Barthes’s myths; “Make mine a double”; George Michael’s stubble; “Like, music expired with the Smiths”; urbane and entitled, for the most part, my peers; their eyes, hopes, and futures all starry; fetal think-tankers, judges, and bankers in statu pupillari; they’re sprung from the loins of the global elite (or they damn well soon will be); power and money, like Pooh Bear and honey, stick fast—I don’t knock it, it’s me; and speaking of loins, “Has anyone told you you look like Demi Moore from Ghost?”; roses are red and violets are blue, I’ve a surplus of butter and Ness is warm toast.
“Hugo? You okay?” Penhaligon’s smile is uncertain.
We’re still logjammed two bodies back from the bar.
“Yeah,” I have to half shout. “Sorry, I was light-years away. While I have you to myself, Jonny, Toad asked me to invite you to his last all-nighter tomorrow, before we all jet off home. You, me, Eusebio, Bryce Clegg, Rinty, and one or two others. All cool.”
Penhaligon makes a not-sure face. “My mother’s half-expecting me back at Tredavoe tomorrow night …”
“No pressure. I’m just passing the invitation on. Toad says the ambience is classier when you’re there.”
Penhaligon sniffs the cheese. “Toad said that?”
“Yes, he said you’ve got gravitas. Rinty’s even christened you ‘the Pirate of Penzance’ because you always leave with the loot.”
Jonny Penhaligon grins. “You’ll be there too?”
“Me? God, yeah. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“You took quite a clobbering last week.”
“I never lose more than I can afford. ‘Scared money is lost money.’ You said that. Wise words for card players and economists.”
My partner in recreational gambling does not deny authorship of my freshly minted epigram. “I could drive home on Sunday …”
“Look, I won’t try to sway you one way or the other.”
He hums. “I could tell my parents I’ve a supervision …”
“Which would not be untrue—a supervision on probability theory, psychology, applied mathematics. All valid business skills, as your family will appreciate when you get the green light for the golf course at Tredavoe House. Toad’s proposing we raise the pot limit to a hundred pounds per game: a nice round figure, and quite a dollop of holiday nectar for you, sir, if your luck holds. Not that the Pirate of Penzance seems to need luck.”
Jonny Penhaligon admits: “I do seem to have a certain knack.”
I mirror his chuckle. Who’s a pretty turkey, then?
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER we’re bringing our drinks back to our nook to find that trouble has beaten us to it. Richard Cheeseman, The Piccadilly Review’s rising star, has been cornered by Come Up to the Lab, Cambridge’s premier Goth-metal trio, whose concert at the Cornmarket was acidly ridiculed in Varsity last month—by Richard Cheeseman. The bassist guy’s a Frankenstein, lipless and lumbering; but She-Goth One has mad-dog eyes, a sharky chin, and knuckles of spiky rings; She-Goth Two has a Clockwork Orange bowler hat, exploding fuchsia-pink hair, a fake diamond hatpin, and the same eyes as She-Goth One. Amphetamines, I do believe. “Never done anything yourself, have yer?” Number Two is prodding Cheeseman’s chest with jet-black fingernails to italicize key words. “Never performed live to a real audience, have yer?”
“Nor have I fucked a donkey, destabilized a Central American state, or played Dungeons & Dragons,” retorts Cheeseman, “but I reserve the right to hold opinions on those who do. Your show was a bobbing turd and I don’t take a word back.”
She-Goth One takes over: “Scribble scribble scribble with your faggoty pen in your faggoty notebook and snipe and bitch and slag off real artists, you hairy lump of dick cheese.”
“ ‘Dick Cheese,’ ” says Cheeseman, “from ‘Richard Cheeseman,’ yeah, that’s really clever. Original, too. Never once heard it.”
“What d’you expect,” She-Goth One snatches up Desiccated Embryos, “from a Crispin Hershey fan? He’s a prick, too.”
“Don’t pretend you read books.” Cheeseman gropes for his review copy in vain and I catch a distant glimpse of a tortured gay child having his satchel emptied off a sooty bridge over the Leeds–Bradford railway line. She-Goth Two rips the book down its spine and tosses the halves away. The male Goth goes gur-hur-hur.
Olly retrieves one half, Cheeseman the other. He’s riled now. “Crispin Hershey’s last crap has more artistic merit than your lifetime’s output. Your music’s derivative wank. It’s parasitic. It’s a hatpin through the eardrum, darling, and not in a good way.”
He was doing quite well until the last sentence, but if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one. By the time I’ve put the drinks on a handy shelf, She-Goth Two has indeed extracted her hatpin and flown at Monsieur Le Critic, who topples operatically; the table upends and glasses slide off; female spectators gasp and shriek and go, “Oh, my God!”; She-Goth Two pounces on the fallen one and stabs downwards; I grab the hatpin (glistening?) and Penhaligon pulls her off Cheeseman by her hair; the bassist’s fist misses Penhaligon’s nose by a whisker; Penhaligon staggers onto Olly and Ness; and She-Goth One’s screeching becomes audible to the human ear—“Get your hands off her!” Fitzsimmons is kneeling down, with Cheeseman’s head on his lap. Cheeseman looks like a guy in a comedy seeing stars and birdies, but the ear dribbling blood is more worrying; I examine it closely. Good: Only the lobe’s torn, but the attackers don’t need to know that. I arise and shout at Come Up to the Lab in a fisticuff-quelling roar: “A monsoon of piss and shit is headed straight at you for this.”
“The wanker was asking for it,” states She-Goth Two.
“He started it,” insists her friend. “He provoked us!”
“Multiple witnesses,” I indicate the scandal-hungry onlookers, “know exactly who was attacked by whom. If you think ‘verbal provocation’ is an admissible defense for grievous bodily harm, then you’re even stupider than you look. See that hatpin there?” She-Goth Two sees the blood on the tip and drops it; two seconds later it’s in my pocket. “Lethal weapon used with intent. Got your DNA all over it. Custodial term, four years. Yes, girls: four years. If you’ve punctured the ear canal, make it seven, and by the time I’ve finished in court, seven years will mean seven. So. Reckon I’m bluffing?”
“Who,” the bassist’s aggression is shaky, “the fuck are you?”
I perform my craziest L. Ron Hubbard laugh. “Postgrad in law, genius. What’s more interesting is who you are—an accomplice. Do you know what that means, in nice plain English? It means you get sentenced too.”
She-Goth Two’s braggadocio is wilting. “But I …”
The bassist’s pulling her by the arm. “C’mon, Andrea.”
“Run, Andrea!” I jeer. “Melt into the crowd—oh, but wait! You’ve glued posters of your mugshots all over Cambridge, haven’t you? Well, you are fucked. Well and truly.” Come Up to the Lab decide it’s time to vacate the building. I yell after them, “See you at the hearing! Bring phone cards for the detention wing—you’ll need them!”
Penhaligon rights the table and Olly gathers the glasses. Fitzsimmons hauls Cheeseman onto the bench, and I ask him how many fingers I’m holding up. He winces a bit, and wipes his mouth. “It was my ear she went for, not my sodding eye.”
A very pissed-off landlord appears. “What’s going on?”
I turn on him. “Our friend was just assaulted by three drunken sixth-formers and needs medical attention. As regulars, we’d hate to see your license revoked, so at A and E Richard and Olly here will imply the assault happened off your premises. Unless I’ve read the situation wrongly, and you’d prefer to involve the authorities?”
The landlord susses the state of play. “Nah. ’Preciated.”
“You’re welcome. Olly: Is the Magic Astra parked nearby?”
“In the car park at the college, yes, but Ness here—”
“Um, my car’s available too,” says helpful Penhaligon.
“Jonny, you’re over the limit and your father’s a magistrate.”
“The breathalyzers’ll be out tonight,” warns the landlord.
“You’re the only sober party, Olly. And if we phone for an ambulance from Addenbrookes, the cops will come along too, and—”
“Questions, statements, and all sorts of how’s-yer-father,” says the landlord, “and then your college’d get involved, too.”
Olly looks at Ness, like a boy who’s lost his finger of fudge.
“Go on,” Ness tells him. “I’d join you, but the sight of blood …” She makes a yuck face. “Help your friend.”
“I’m supposed to be driving you to Greenwich tonight.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get home by train—I’m a big girl, remember? Call me on Sunday and we’ll talk Christmas plans, okay? Go.”