The Truants Read online

  THE TRUANTS

  For Dad, who read to us, night after night.

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  It’s hard to say who I fell in love with first. Because it was love, I think you’ll agree, when I’ve finished telling you.

  It was Alec I longed to kiss; Alec whose face I studied when no one was looking. As if there was a clue there, in the sharp dip of his upper lip, or the loose comma of hair he tucked behind one ear. Those stories he told us, while driving somewhere in his preposterous car; Georgie in the passenger seat, bare feet propped up on the dashboard, one hand chasing shapes out the open window; Nick and me in the back, sharing a bottle of beer, his shoulder warm against mine as we leaned forward to catch every word. Then, later, the four of us lying stretched out under a killing blue sky, far from some lecture hall where we were supposed to be. The scent of damp earth and pine strong in my nostrils. My fingers itching to touch Alec’s, a few forbidden inches from mine.

  But there was longing, too, in the way I looked at Lorna. An obsessional interest, not just in her mind, which I would readily have swapped for my own, or her voice, low and vibrating at the edges with laughter. But in the form of her, the clothes she wore: long skirts over scuffed cowboy boots, and the crumpled blouses that looked like they had been pulled out of the tumble dryer last moment, so that along with her bare, freckled face she presented the rarest type of beauty, the kind that isn’t strained for.

  Yes, I coveted her too, right down to the old-fashioned bicycle she rode about campus, whose basket always held some oddity: a bag of quinces, a staple gun or part of a garden hose – objects that always led you, in some obscure way, to want to protect her.

  I’ve virtually all her lectures recorded on my phone. The one I listen to most is the talk she gave before the puppet show. As though buried in those twelve minutes of that gravelly voice is the answer to all the questions that, six years later, still hang over me. If I had listened and watched more carefully, if I had picked up the signs that lay scattered all around, could I have changed the ending?

  I can tell you the exact moment in the recording when Lorna walks on stage. There was no heating, I remember – or perhaps it was broken – so everyone was wearing hats and gloves inside and grouching about the cold. I can hear Nick offering me his coat, Georgie noisily opening a bag of sweets. Then, about twenty seconds in, the rustling ceases, the silence becomes deeper, more intent. And I know why. We are all watching the figure walk into the spotlight, run a hand through her hair, smile down at us as if she’s surprised to find it’s a full house.

  ‘We’re all here today because of one woman.’ A pause. She must have raised a copy of the book above her head to show us. ‘If you haven’t read her then I’d strongly recommend you bugger off now and get warm somewhere else.’

  An amused hum from us, her audience, a little release of tension, a settling back into seats, into the palm of her hand. This is the campus star, we’re going to get our money’s worth. And then she’s off – and this time she strikes a different note. Brisk and purposeful: if you can’t keep up with me, then it’s not you I’m talking to.

  ‘Who,’ Lorna asks, her voice suddenly a challenge, ‘should we call the criminal? The person who commits a crime, or the one who tricks another into doing so? Is it ever valid to take justice into one’s own hands in order to prevent other, more dreadful crimes from happening? Could you, if the right sort of pressure was applied, kill someone?’

  At this point, if I whack up the volume, to the point just before the sound quality begins to break, I think I can hear it: Alec’s steady breathing beside me. In, out. In, out. If I close my eyes, I can feel the pressure of his thigh as he shifts forward in his seat, drawn as we all are to the figure on the stage. Then he leans into my side, his face a few inches from mine, and whispers something. ‘Can’t hear you,’ I whisper back. He leans even closer, his warm breath chasing down my back. ‘I said…’ And then he must have put his lips right up to my ear because the speaker doesn’t pick up anything at all.

  Lorna’s voice continues – I know the words by rote – and yet I don’t hear them anymore. Because although I don’t remember what it was he said, I am back there – back on those unforgiving seats, amidst the strong smell of eucalyptus as someone nearby sucks a cough sweet, with Alec’s smile in the dark and my heart banging with one repeated question: ‘Do you feel it, do you feel it?’ And I stay there, well after the applause dies and there is just the scratchy sound of my phone as I fumble to switch it off in my pocket.

  Back there, back then – a place I want to be, dancing along a line of heady, taboo possibilities. Rather than here, now, sitting amidst the rubble and debris of the whole awful thing.

  I press rewind on the file and start listening again.

  1

  Dear Dr Clay,

  Having been ill for most of Freshers’ Week, I have only just made it down to the English faculty to open my mail. I was due to start your course ‘The Devil Has the Best Lines’ next Tuesday, but a note from the administration office informs me that due to ‘oversubscription’ my place has been deferred to ‘a future date as yet unknown’.

  I am writing to tell you just how crushed I am by this news. Since I first read your masterpiece The Truants I have considered your scorching and irreverent commentary something of a manifesto for life. I applied to this university purely so that I could be taught by you, and on receiving a place immediately requested to study in either of the modules that you offer this term. Since my place on ‘The Devil Has the Best Lines’ was confirmed at the beginning of the summer I have completed the reading list, including a full immersion in the gin-soaked minds of Hunter S. Thompson, Zelda Fitzgerald and John Cheever.

  I did this mainly in the back room of a pet shop in Reigate where I took a job this summer, cleaning shit out of budgerigar and hamster cages so that I could finance my studies. All of which was made bearable by the idea of being taught by you.

  So this news is a blow indeed. Considering we have not yet met I can’t understand what I have done…

  Someone knocked on the door. I ignored it and carried on typing furiously.

  …that makes me suddenly less desirable or eligible than another student…

  More knocking.

  It feels, to paraphrase a famous poem, like someone is treading all over my dreams. I am writing this letter as a last-ditch attempt, an appeal to your humanity…

  The door banged open. A blond guy with lazy, knowing eyes in a handsome face. Mark, or maybe Max. Second year. Historian. Let’s say Max.

  For a moment he stared at me in confusion. Then his gaze moved from where I was
sitting cross-legged on the bed and roved suspiciously over the contents of the room: bare, Blu-Tack-scarred walls, narrow single bed, small hanging wardrobe, my half-unpacked suitcase.

  ‘Sorry, wrong room.’ He had already turned to go when he twisted round, hand on the doorframe. ‘Hey … didn’t we meet in the bar last night?’

  I nodded, biting back a sarcastic comment. I have lots of very curly, long dark hair, a wide mouth and quite a slight figure: Boys notice me briefly, I think, then look elsewhere. Max had patently introduced himself – walking towards me, smiling straight into my eyes – in the hope of chatting up Georgie. A moment of deference towards the friend of the target… I knew the score. It had already happened a couple of times that night, enough to make me suspect that my new friend was one of those girls that men find irresistible. Something about her almost too-curvy body, her boyishly cropped blonde hair, her sloping, sleepy eyes, made everyone – even me – think about sex.

  ‘So, Georgie’s a good friend of yours?’ Max said, sitting down on the end of my bed and pushing back a fringe of newly washed hair.

  ‘Kind of.’ If it hadn’t been for the letter I’d just been writing I might have been amused by being used so transparently. Tapping out the end of my sentence, I signed off with a digital flourish: Yours, ever-hopeful, Jessica Walker.

  ‘You weren’t at school together or anything?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just wondering. Girls are so tight with girls they’ve met at school. You seemed kind of into each other.’ He was one of those guys who was a lot less handsome when he smiled. More of a smirk really, showing too many teeth cluttered in his jaw.

  ‘We met last week.’

  ‘But you’re best friends already.’ He nodded knowingly. ‘Do you know where she is? She said she’d come for a coffee with me but I’m sure she said she was in room sixteen B. This is sixteen B, isn’t it?’

  I nearly laughed. Thanks for that, Georgie. ‘She’s gone home for a few days.’

  ‘Oh?’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘To see her boyfriend?’

  I shrugged. ‘I haven’t checked her diary.’

  He raised his hands defensively. ‘Right.’ He looked at me again, as if being forced to read instructions on a manual that he’d hoped he could bypass. ‘Remind me your name?’

  I looked at the weak, handsome face, his shirt belted into pressed jeans. Minor public school, I hazarded. Father’s a chauvinist. Lazy world-view.

  ‘The answer is, “I don’t know”.’

  ‘You don’t know what?’

  ‘I don’t know whether Georgie has a boyfriend.’

  The lobes of his ears went pink but he managed to pull himself together in time to laugh it off. ‘I’m sure she has. Just tell her Max stopped by, will you?’

  After he left, I reread the email a couple of times, the cursor hovering over the ‘send’ icon. It was a stupid letter, a childish, petulant letter, written on the back of four days of stomach flu and a wobbly trip to the bar that Georgie had talked me into ‘because there’s only so much Ava Gardner you can get away with before you become Howard Hughes’. I had written it for myself really, not actually to send. It was only because it was a Sunday and the administration office was closed, leaving me no place to vent my disappointment, that I had even thought of hunting through the university website to get Dr Lorna Clay’s email address. Then I looked over at my copy of The Truants alone on the shelf above the built-in desk – its pages so well-thumbed that it wouldn’t close properly – and thought, Fuck it, what have I got to lose? And with a sudden rush of adrenalin, clicked the mouse.

  As soon as I snapped shut my laptop, regret settled over me like an itchy blanket.

  And then the itch sank deeper into my bones as I felt myself being dragged backwards in time. Back to Boxing Day at home nine months before, with my sister scowling on the sofa as my father made bad jokes about her boyfriend (Dan Pike: plenty more fish in the sea) not understanding that being dumped over Christmas when you’re twenty-one doesn’t call for a punchline, much less a pun – my dad who painted fantastical figures in the shed at the end of our garden but left his imagination locked up there; and my older brother smirking as he stroked the knobbly spine of our chocolate Lab, Gladstone, by the fire, and the twins not giving a shit, and my mother not really listening, much less caring, so that in the end I had stood up and walked out.

  And the thing I happened to have in my hand as I walked into the kitchen, a book we had been given at Christmas by Uncle Toto, of all people. That feeling when I read the first few pages of The Truants, my bum warm against the Aga and the smell of mince pies like hot tar in the air – a book that should have been cleverly irrelevant at best, a book about some drunk, dead writers. Literary criticism – when the hell did that change anyone’s life, for God’s sake? Except it did, mine. And I knew it would, almost from the first paragraph, because Lorna’s voice pulled me in and down, like a rip tide carrying you underwater and far out to sea so that when, about page five, I flipped to the author picture on the back and saw her clever, beautiful face and read the sentence about where she taught, I thought: Here she is at last. The person who will take me out of this small, airless world before the banality chokes me.

  The rooms in Halls all had narrow floor-to-ceiling windows. I stood up to open mine, then remembered you couldn’t. To discourage suicides, I thought, looking at the grey paving slabs below.

  Under a flat morning sky, a stream of people was walking away from the zigzag-shaped residence halls, across the scrubby grass towards the grey breezeblocks that made up the back of the canteen. Without the glowing prospect of Lorna’s teaching, I was confronted by the drab reality of where I would be living for the next three years: a concrete shithole in the middle of flat, windswept Norfolk on what – if you looked at a map – was actually the bulging arse of the UK.

  Worse, I would now be shoved into some other, unknown module, most likely with Dr Porter, who wore skinny black jeans and one earring and had pegged me as a Lorna groupie when I’d come for my interview. No doubt he would be teaching something pretentious and incomprehensible, like ‘The Phonetics of Postmodernism’ or one of those other courses that made me sympathise for a moment with my mother’s views on studying English Lit.

  Spots appeared on the window, multiplying rapidly.

  It had started to rain.

  I waited until I saw Max and his carefully coiffed hair emerge down below and strike off towards the canteen in search of a consolatory bacon and egg roll. Then I pulled on some clothes and walked two doors down the corridor. Checking my watch, I knocked loudly and stepped in.

  It was dark and slightly stuffy in Georgie’s room. She jackknifed up in the bed, one hand pushing her eye mask into her blonde hair and the other pulling out one of her earplugs and scrabbling for the bedside lamp. When she saw it was me, she sagged back against her pillow with a groan.

  ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’

  ‘Sorry. But it is midday. And I’m having a crisis.’

  Georgie pulled out the other earplug. The mask sat across her forehead at a drunken angle, one puffy eye squinting at me. ‘Oh, hon. Not sick again?’

  ‘Worse,’ I said. ‘Heartsick. Been dumped by Lorna.’

  My first week at university had been a catastrophe in social terms. Barely an hour after my mother had dropped me off with my suitcases, a peck on the cheek and a brisk look around the room – ‘Seems clean at least!’ – the cramping had begun. Followed by three days of shivering and sweating out a stomach flu in my room, looking glumly through my window at the clump of students that formed and reformed around the bar; scribbling self-pitying notes in my journal whenever I could summon the energy.

  On the third day, temperature still raging, a fuzz at the edges of my vision, I dragged myself down to the introductory English faculty drinks. Which was when Georgie, wearing tight, faded jeans and silver trainers, her bleached hair cropped high to the hairline on her long, fine neck, had sid
led over to me. ‘Ugly bunch, aren’t they, English students?’ she muttered, talking out of the side of her mouth like a gangster as the white-haired Dean of Studies gave a turgid welcome speech. ‘Can you believe Lorna didn’t show at her own party? A living legend, that woman. Rumour has it she’s seeing my supervisor, Professor Steadman.’ She pointed to a tall, bespectacled man with grey hair. ‘But that can’t be right, surely…’ Georgie paused, looking at me more closely. ‘Hey, do you know your teeth are chattering?’

  Next day, to my delight, she turned up at my door with armfuls of chocolates and sweets that she announced, loudly, were ‘munchies’ (‘There’s a rumour going around that you’ve been smoking weed in your room all week, this will fan the flames nicely’); two different kinds of prescription painkiller (‘Tuck in, plenty more where they came from’); and a magazine jammed full of photos of horsey-looking aristocrats at parties (‘Don’t knock it. I’m related to half of them and have kissed most of the rest. Look at this guy, Tristan Burton-Hill. He’s so posh he can’t actually close his mouth…’).

  For the next couple of days, to my surprise, she kept popping by: one day sitting at the end of my bed with a wheel of hard cheese, which she hacked at with a teaspoon until it bent; the next bringing a handful of wild flowers that looked like dirty daisies, which she had picked by the lake on campus. ‘They’re called Sneezewort, for your dribbly nose. I went through a stage of pressing wild flowers as a kid. I learned the whole wild flower encyclopaedia, which is kind of weird, looking back at it. Amazing what an only child will do to pass the time. Then I got into pottery and made endless shit bowls. I mean, endless. Got away with about five years of never buying a single Christmas present. Shall I put them in your tooth-mug? How are you feeling today? Still got the shits both ends?’

  That was the thing about Georgie. She changed tone so fast that your head whirled. Mostly she was like a slot machine, flashing all its lights in constant jackpot, but there was kindness there and, in amidst the glib, smart chatter, beguiling glimpses of something more tender.