Black Chalk

Jolyon tore the sheet from the wall and checked the next bathroom where he found the same taped-up piece of paper. He went to the bathrooms on staircases seven and eight. And then he realised it was futile and hurried back to his room.

He wondered how he might avoid ever seeing Dorian again and pinched the bridge of his nose, there was such a knot of pain there. He tried to think about who else he had written about negatively in his diary. The pain flared as names flashed through Jolyon’s head. He curled onto his bed and pushed his forehead up against the coolness of the wall.

LX(iii) Jolyon stopped attending lectures the next day and started to leave his room only in the middle of the night. In the library at three in the morning, he would photocopy the cases and articles he had to read and then hurry back to his bed. And when he visited the bathroom at four in the morning, Jolyon found that, every day, another page had appeared.

Excerpts from the secret diary of Jolyon Johnson no. 2

Two of the most ludicrous characters at Pitt go by the names Jamie and Nick. Jamie is the son of a renowned Cambridge scholar but acts like one of the street urchins from Oliver Twist. His accent changes wildly according to the company he keeps. Conversing with any of us, he starts dropping and morphing his consonants, saying things like ‘it’s a bit fin on the ground, mate’ or ‘what do you fuckin fink?’ He’s good-looking, insecure and utterly insincere.

Nick, the sidekick, doesn’t hide his accent so carefully but he does conceal his name. On the room board he’s N. Risley. But on a tip-off from Jamie, I peeped at a letter in his pigeonhole. It was addressed to ‘The Hon. Nicholas Tower Wriothesley’. Apparently, Wriothesley is pronounced Risley, and he’s officially ‘the honourable’ because he’s the son of a baron. Meanwhile, the honourable Nick has had a string of girlfriends at least sixty or seventy points higher than him on the scale of attractiveness. Maybe they use Jamie as bait. Or perhaps everyone’s now heard tell of the £250 million family fortune the honourable Nick stands to inherit. The girlfriends never last more than a week. But I’m sure he treats them all honourably.

And what was Jolyon to do but hide? He thought about making a statement, pasting his own sheets to the walls, explaining that any diary was a place of secret thoughts. That his own diary was simply a way of purging these thoughts. He considered appealing to everyone’s secret self, don’t we all have dark thoughts from time to time? The only thing that matters is how we behave, how we act on those thoughts.

But Jolyon did nothing, only hid in his fog of pills and doubled the dose. As he lay on his bed he became very good at picturing everyone at Pitt. In his mind he could hear their accents and mimic their verbal habits, he could imagine their physical tics as they spoke. Jolyon was able to create puppets of everyone he knew inside his head. And he spent hours pulling their strings, acting out their hatred in intricate detail.

Sometimes he held the tooth clenched tight in his palm. And although he constantly fantasised about breaking down Mark’s door, taking back his diary, attacking Mark, punishing Mark, Jolyon knew that his body had no more strength to give.

The truth was that suffering in silence was no longer only a romantic notion. Suffering in silence was now Jolyon’s only remaining choice.

LXI

LXI(i) My hangover and the pain in my nose wake me at five in the morning, eight hours before I have agreed to meet Chad at JFK. I fall out of bed and stumble around looking for something to tell me what to do. But the sprawling mess of my apartment is like a thousand instructions yelling themselves at once.

My story, my pills, my whisky. These are the only voices that rise above the roar.

Just before I leave, I notice a distinct absence of clothes on my body. But there are clothes everywhere across the floor, how could I forget?

The few minutes it takes to dress give me enough time for one more whisky.

And now I must face him.

LXI(ii) I am watching the passengers emerge into the arrivals hall when there is a tap tap tap on my shoulder. I jump, a brief panic, and then I turn and see him. For a while I stare stupidly as if Chad’s is the last face I would have expected to see in this place.

He is still young-looking, his hair smooth, not receding. He offers his hand to shake but I am caught unawares and fail to respond. Chad laughs, a gentle laugh, not a scornful one. And then he speaks. Should we hug instead? Chad’s voice is softer than I remember, not English exactly but less acutely American.

I shake his hand quickly, my fingers limp in the firm grip of his palm.

You were late, he says. Or maybe I was early.

The arrivals board said you landed on time, I say.