Black Chalk

‘Everyone fucked everyone,’ Mark called out from the floor. ‘He likes to make the ins and outs sound more complicated than they were, he thinks it sounds more exotic. But essentially what Jack’s saying is everyone fucked everyone in every way possible, apart from his two dads. And if you get him drunk enough, he’ll admit he even has his suspicions about that.’ Mark tilted his drink to his mouth. ‘And this is how one ends up with the emotional wrecking ball we all know and love as Jack Thomson, no P in Thomson.’

‘Parents are too easy to blame,’ said Cassie. ‘And four parents might be called modest by some standards.’ The room fell silent as Cassie, looking down, turned the tip of her cigarette slowly against the edge of the ashtray. Its ash now in a neat cone, she resumed smoking again.

Chad felt bad for Cassie but also a little jealous. He had fantasised often about being an orphan, adopted as a baby. Not the pig farmer’s son but the secret child of an intellectual, a philandering writer, or a scientist who had died in an experiment gone wrong. It wasn’t unknown riches that had been concealed from him in Chad’s fantasies. He just wanted an explanation for why he was so different from his own family. At the very least he dreamed that one day his mother might tell him she had had an affair, the pig farmer wasn’t really his father, their obvious physical resemblance was nothing but wild coincidence. Anything but that man’s son.

Everyone else in the room was the product of divorced parents and Chad felt envious even of this. The exoticism of their broken homes, their splintered pasts. They had reasons to be interesting while he had excuses to be dull.

And then Cassie lifted her eyes, a cunning look spreading over her face. ‘They say if you blow smoke in a man’s face it means you fancy him,’ she said. She sucked on the turquoise cigarette and sent its smoke in a line of quick quivering rings toward Jack’s face. ‘Do you think that’s true, Jackie-oh?’ she said.

Jack affected a cough and waved his hand to break up the smoke. ‘Then if you shit in his hair it must be true love,’ he said. ‘So anyway, how’s the latest grand opus of Pitt’s most bohemian poetess coming along?’

‘Like pistons,’ said Cassie. ‘Fast as wild rutting stallions.’

‘And how many little verses are you up to now?’

‘Who’s counting?’

Jack now played his startled look. ‘Well, you are apparently, Cassie. Or so I’ve been reliably informed. Unless you’ve been telling lies to make yourself sound more interesting?’

Cassie wrinkled her nose, a thin nose and freckled. ‘I’m not interested in interesting,’ she said.

‘So is it true,’ said Jack, ‘that when you’ve written five hundred poems, you’re going to kill yourself?’

‘If I said yes, would it give you a big old hard-on?’

‘I’m just trying to separate the truth from the student bullshit. There’s so much of it round here you have to watch where you step. But then you are studying English Lit, so it pretty much goes with the territory.’ Jack waited to be challenged on this point but no challenge was issued. ‘So about this suicide pact with the Muses . . .’

‘Just go right ahead and erect yourself, Jackie-oh,’ said Cassie. She tried to sound indifferent but there was a trace of defeat in her voice.

‘I’ll take that as a yes then. And taking the Roman numerals into consideration, we came up a special nickname for you. We’re going to call you Dee. Dee for five hundred, Dee for death.’

Chad shrank inside. He didn’t want this girl to think he had been part of a group talking in secret about her, discussing rumours, concocting names.

‘I love it,’ said Dee, clapping. ‘Yes, Dee it is, you have my absolute approval. And meanwhile I’m going to call you Jackie-oh, Jackie-oh. Like Jackie Onassis. You’ve got her far-apart eyes and also that whiff of bringing tragedy to all those round you. And when I get back to my room I’m going to write a poem all about you, Jackie-oh, my first ever limerick.’

Jack stared at the ceiling. ‘Nothing rhymes with Jackie-oh,’ he said.

‘Ralph Macchio,’ Mark called out from the floor. ‘The kid from Karate Kid.’

‘No, no,’ said Dee. She twisted her fingers creatively in front of her. ‘The first line would read something like . . . A boy who was surly and blunt.’

Jolyon rapped his knuckles on his bedside table. ‘Well, I for one could listen to this all night long. And I know Jack could keep going possibly forever. But right now we need to talk about the Game,’ he said.

XXI

XXI Early on in my morning routine I find a cup on my breakfast plate and a matchstick inside the cup. It takes me a few minutes but then I decipher the new mnemonic.

Cup: tea. Matchstick: fire: fire escape!

And so in the morning I eat breakfast perched on the giddying slats of my fire escape. I feel like a tourist enjoying a fine vacation breakfast, a rare meal eaten with a warm sigh and unhurried eagerness for the day.