Black Chalk

‘Jack, tell me, who came up with this whole thing?’

‘I’m just saying,’ said Jack. ‘It’s a joke, OK?’

Mark toked hard on the joint and puffed his cheeks as he held the smoke deep. After each exhalation he tried calling out a different name, another candidate for the last spot.

But none of them were right. Too rich or too full of themselves. Too pretentious, too smug. Jolyon’s lips tightened with every rejection. ‘Well, I can’t think of anyone else,’ he said.

Emilia looked around the room. ‘We definitely need one more woman,’ she said. ‘Whoever the last spot goes to, she has to be female.’

‘Agreed,’ said Jolyon. ‘Absolutely.’

‘Then how about Cassie?’ said Emilia. ‘She lives next door to me.’

‘Who the fuck is Cassie?’ said Jack.

‘Oh, you know who she is,’ said Mark. ‘Cassandra Addison. It’s just that you know her better as Dee.’

‘Oh, fuck me, not Dee,’ said Jack. ‘My first day here I arrived the same time she did and I nearly told my dad to drive me straight home. I got out of the car and she walked past carrying a stuffed rabbit. And I don’t mean a toy, I mean a once-living once-carrot-munching wascally wabbit. And she was wearing some tatty old second-hand wedding dress. It looked like it must have been fifty years old.’

Jolyon pointed excitedly. ‘You mean Havisham,’ he said. ‘Chad and I always call her Havisham. Big Dave – you know the Scottish guy with all the hair – he asked her out for a drink and she turned up at the Churchill in a wedding dress. He said he’s going to need years of intensive therapy before he can even ask another woman so much as her name.’ Jolyon picked up his list and his pen.

‘Jack, why do you call her Dee?’ said Chad.

Jack put down the book on which his joint-rolling assembly line was arranged. ‘She’s into writing poetry,’ he began. ‘I mean, I know half the people here think they’re poets. But Dee’s different. Dee Addison’s on a mission. She says that when she’s written five hundred poems – you’re going to love this – as soon as she inks the final line of the five hundredth verse,’ his legs bounced excitedly, ‘she’s going to kill herself.’

Mark blew the smoke out of him as fast as he could. ‘Shit! No way,’ he said. ‘Mind you, if you ever catch me writing five hundred poems, you have my permission to shoot me.’

Emilia sighed. ‘That’s just not true,’ she said. ‘God, you can all be so tiresome.’

‘It’s absolutely one hundred per cent true,’ said Jack, slapping his thighs as he spoke. ‘Rory told us and he’s her Beowulf tutorial partner. He went to her room to go over some notes and she was working on one of her poems. So he asked her what she was doing.’

‘Why should we believe Rory?’ said Jolyon.

‘Look, no one could make all this stuff up,’ said Jack. ‘There’s a whole lot more.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘She uses red ink and she has this big book with special parchment pages. Also she numbers each poem with large Roman numerals before the title. And that’s why Rory calls her Dee. You know, Roman numeral for five hundred. And maybe she chose five hundred as her suicide target precisely because it’s a D, right? D for death. I’m telling you, she’s a proper fruitcake.’

Jolyon wrote Dee/Havisham on his piece of paper. ‘And what number do we think she’s up to now?’ he said.

‘I don’t know for sure. But Rory said there were at least a couple of Cs at the beginning, maybe three. Who knows how fast she churns this crap out. But wouldn’t it be great to have another suicide in college?’

Emilia struck too quickly for Jack this time. Her boot sole caught him at the same point of his shin as earlier in the night and twice as hard. ‘That’s a really horrible thing to say, Jack.’ She wound up her body to slap him but Jack scooted away with his good leg. ‘How can you even think such a thing let alone say it out loud?’

Jack grabbed his leg, lowered his sock and pointed to his shin. The red bud of his bruise would bloom purple tomorrow. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Look what you did to me.’

‘What do you mean, another suicide?’ said Mark.

‘Five years ago?’ said Jack. Mark shrugged. ‘Christ, don’t you ever read the newspapers or turn on the television, Mark, you ignoramus?’

Mark flinched. ‘Sorry, guess I was too busy trying to understand the hidden nature of the entire universe,’ he said.

‘Well, excuse me, Dilbert Einstein,’ said Jack. ‘I mean, it was only the biggest news story for a month. Oxford student kills herself after bad mark. Do elite universities push too hard? Did drugs play a role in death of attractive brainbox Christina Balfour? No? She was studying Classics, failed her Mods, couldn’t handle the pressure and jumped.’ Mark shrugged and returned to his joint. ‘I’m just saying,’ Jack continued, ‘we get friendly with some wrist-slitting type, and if we can just keep them alive until a week before Finals, I bet we’d all get granted sympathy firsts.’

Emilia jumped to her feet.