Black Chalk

Jolyon stood up and decided he could limp well enough. Tallest tried to take his arm but Jolyon pushed him away. ‘Why don’t you all get back to the game?’ he said, looking across at the stadium. ‘I was really enjoying it but things took a turn for the worse. And I think I should leave now.’ He started to limp away but then turned, looking thoughtful, and added, ‘Oh, Dee, you know I just realised something.’ Dee wiped her eyes and Jolyon gave her a grim smile. ‘You’re the only one who can stop this,’ he said. ‘It’s really all up to you now, Dee.’ He put his hand in his pocket as he turned again and left.

LVIII(v) In front of the mirror in his room, Jolyon decided he wouldn’t go to the dentist. The tooth was one of the lower molars and you could barely notice its absence, not unless he opened his mouth very wide.

He placed the tooth inside the mug with his pills and his toothbrush, the fork and the photos. And then Jolyon drew his curtains, lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. Tomorrow was the first day of Trinity, Chad’s final term.

LIX

LIX(i) I lost Dee today. Chad arrives tomorrow. A fine symmetry.

LIX(ii) And where was routine when I needed it? Dee’s book, the most important thing of all and I failed to find a place for it in my life. And now routine has abandoned me.

Did I take it on my walk? I don’t remember.

Where did I walk today? I don’t remember.

If I took the book out with me then it is lost. It must still be inside this apartment, it must be. It has to be.

Feebly I cast around my apartment as if the same old looking in the same old places might not have the selfsame result. But all I find is the destruction of my daily bread. Mnemonics scattered, life overturned. The only things I fish out from the stew are a whisky bottle and pills, prompted to find them by an itching beneath my skin. And laughably, amid all the wreckage, my evening routine ice-cube tray has held on to my pills as if cupped in a mother’s outstretched palm. Four pink pills, three yellow, three blue. I swallow them with swigs of whisky straight from the bottle. I have only my cravings to remind me how to live now.

This apartment, this miserable machine of my life, its laughable ticky-tacky parts discarded and strewn.

Curtains closed, blinds lowered. The hermit returns. Long live the hermit.

LX

LX(i) Third term began with an act of generosity. They pushed a note under Jolyon’s door to inform him a vote had been taken, the Game was in hiatus, they would skip a round. And perhaps the extra time would give him a chance to reconsider his position.

Jolyon screwed up the piece of paper, returned to his bed and with a sudden gasp began to cry. Warm tears of relief flowed down his bruised cheeks, over his swollen lips.

And so, temporarily, the battle could be fought on only one front. A new term and Mark had promised a new phase. But the start of Trinity term didn’t lead to the abandonment of his sleep-deprivation tactics, although there was no longer much sleep to deprive. The doctor’s pills could send Jolyon only into fogs, sleeplike hazes but not sleep itself, and the tappings and roarings became mere annoyances. Soon Jolyon began to regard them only as distance markers in the slow race for the night to be over.

In the daytime Jolyon sometimes thought about stoicism, facing hardship like a man, like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. And because manliness was a notion that appealed to him, he clung to the thought of not surrendering until he didn’t know whether his refusal to surrender was genuine determination or merely a literary reference.

On the fourth day of term, Jolyon returned to the college doctor. Yes, there were indeed further options, old chap. Simply a case of finding the right combination apropos the particular patient – he began to scribble excitedly on his prescription pad – and they could bump up the doses, of course. Not to worry, the ship would right itself in time. No need to wave the white flag quite yet, old chap.

LX(ii) The first act of phase four was played out the next day. When Jolyon went to the bathrooms at the bottom of staircase six in the morning, there were two sheets taped to the wall. The Pitt Pendulum, as usual, but also a photocopied page from Jolyon’s diary. It was a copy of an entry he had made two weeks after arriving at Pitt. Mark, helpfully, had provided a title.

Excerpts from the secret diary of Jolyon Johnson no. 1

Met a guy called Dorian today. Clearly an Etonian. He tries to convince himself and everyone else he’s clever, as opposed to well trained, by learning answers to a quiz machine in the Churchill. Like a parrot. And with a parrot’s capacity for understanding the information being blandly recited. I think they actually teach them charm at Eton and some of them wear it well. But on others it sits uneasily. Dorian is in the second camp.