Making History

MAKING UP

Little orange pills

Red fluid dripped into one of those spiralling, screw-like doo-dads they so love and I stared at it fascinated. Jane’s work was a dark mystery to me, which was the way she liked it, but there was no denying the pleasing prettiness of the paraphernalia it employed. Metres and metres of retort stands and capillaries and clear plastic tubing that went round and round, up and down, in and out, clockwise and anticlockwise, zigwise and zagwise. And centrifuges there were, sexy beyond anything. I had often watched her take a tiny stained dot of something bright and gloopy and fire a syringe gun with a delicate plip into little test-tubes arranged in a tight round drum like hungry nestlings. When all the glass mouths had been fed the drum would be set spinning. The chrome precision and low hum of it all were just bitching. So much more solidly built than a dishwasher or tumble-dryer. No vibration at all, just solid, smooth and scientific, like Jane herself. And on another bench I liked to look at coloured slides of gel with elegant marblings of another colour running down the middle, like something in a confectioner’s pantry or maybe like the wavy threads of blood you find in the yolk of an egg. Jane called her lab The Kitchen; the coming together of stainless steel and glass with coloured organic goo and bright liquids brought out the little boy in me, the helpful, heel-kicking son who liked to watch his mother beating the batter and rolling the dough.

Big business of course, genespotting. You pretend to the world that you are working on a grand scheme called the Human Genome Project, which is worthy and noble — Nobel, in fact — Good Science, Human Achievement, Frontiers of Knowledge, all of that, but really you are trying to find a new gene and copyright the pants out of it before anyone else stumbles across it too. There were dozens of commercial ‘biotechnical’ companies in Cambridge alone. God knows what kind of bribery and badness they got up to. Not that Jane was corruptible of course. Never.

Sometimes I called her on the nature of her work.

What would you do if you discovered that there really was a gay gene? Or that black people have less verbal intelligence than white? Or that Asians are better at numbers than Caucasians? Or that Jews are congenitally mean? Or that women are dumber than men? Or men dumber than women? Or that religion is a genetic disposition? Or that this very gene determined criminal tendencies and that very gene determined Alzheimer’s? You know, the insurance ramifications, the ammo it would hand to the racists. All that?

She would say that she would cross that bridge when she came to it and that, besides, her work was in a different field. Anyway, if you, as a historian, discovered that Churchill was screwing the Queen all through the war, would that be your problem? You report the facts. Shared humanity has the job of interpreting them. Same with science. It wasn’t Darwin’s problem that God didn’t create Adam and Eve, it was the bishops’ problem. Don’t blame the messenger, she’d say calmly, grow up and look to yourself instead.

I flicked the side of the dripping tube with my fingernail. Donald, Jane’s research assistant, had scuffed awkwardly off to find her ten minutes earlier. I heard a door bang down the corridor and straightened up. She did not like things to be touched.

‘Well, bugger me. It’s actually here. It’s actually got the face to stand here and confront us.’

‘Hi, baby…’

‘What have you touched? Show mother what you’ve fiddled with and fucked with, so we don’t have to find out later.’

‘Nothing! I haven’t touched anything…well, I did just tap that tube there. The liquid was getting stuck so I helped it through. That’s all.’

Jane stared at me in horror. ‘That’s all? That’s all?’ She shrieked at the door, ‘Donald! Donald! Get in here! We’ll have to start again. Ten weeks work down the fucking plughole. Christ.’

Donald came hurrying through. ‘What? What is it? What’s he done? What’s he done?’

‘Jane, it was the gentlest tap, I swear.’

‘The stupid dick only jogged the methyl orange reagent through the tartration pipe.’

‘Bloody hell, Jane,’ I wailed, ‘it can’t have made that much difference surely?’

Donald stared at the pipework. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said. ‘No! No!’ He fell against the workbench and buried his face in his hands.

I breathed a sigh of relief and turned to face Jane. ‘That was a bloody cruel trick, actually. If Donald weren’t such a pathetic liar I’d’ve been really upset.’

Jane’s eyebrows flew up. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that was a cruel trick, was it? I see. You would have been upset.’

‘Look, I know what you’re going to say.’

‘Defacing my car, getting it towed from college for illegal parking. These were not cruel upsetting tricks, were they? These were the sweet reflexes of a loving, tortured soul. They were romantic games born in a beautiful, complex mind. Not childish, but mature. An ironic commentary on love and exchange. A most wonderful compliment. I should be grateful.’

I just hate it when she gets like that. And Donald giggling as if he knew what she was on about.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said, throwing up a hand. ‘Cool.’

‘Leave us, Donald,’ said Jane, settling herself on a stool. ‘I need to have a conversation with this piece of work.’

Donald, like me a ready flusher, backed dorkily from the room. ‘Ho. Yes. Right, for sure. I’ll…yes. K.’

I waited for the flapping of the doors to subside before daring to look up into that mocking gaze.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

The words fell with a thud into an achingly long silence.

It wasn’t really a mocking gaze. I could have attached any property to it. I could have described it as a cool gaze, an ironical gaze. Or an appraising gaze. It was Jane’s gaze and to anyone else it might have appeared:

a) friendly

b) sweet

c) amused

d) provocative

e) sexy

f) forbidding

g) sceptical

h) admiring

i) passionate

j) whorish

k) dull

l) intellectual

m) contemptuous

n) embarrassed

o) afraid

p) insincere

q) desperate

r) bored

s) contented

t) hopeful

u) enquiring

v) steely

w) angry

v) expectant

x) disappointed

y) penetrating

or

z) relieved.

It was all of these things. I mean, it was a pair of human eyes, the mirror of the soul. Not the mirror of her soul, but of mine. I looked into them feeling like ten types of tit and so, naturally, a mocking gaze was what I got in return.

Suddenly, to my surprise, she smiled, leaned forward and stroked the back of my head.

‘Oh, Pup,’ she said. ‘What am I going to do with you?’

A word about the Pup business.

People call me Pup.

It’s, like this.

You’re due to clock in at a big university wearing a jacket, tie and chinos, as bought by Mummy specially for the occasion. Your name is Michael. You’re younger than anyone else by two years and this is virtually the first time you’ve been away from home. What do you do? Your train journey from Winchester to Cambridge means you have to cross London to get from one station to the other. So, you hit the West End, returning with a serious haircut, way baggy trousers, a T-shirt saying ‘Suck My Soul’, a khaki parka and the name Puck. You reboard the next train to Cambridge reborn as a dude with attitude. It was more or less okay to say ‘dude’ and ‘with attitude’ eight years ago. Nowadays of course, only advertisers and journalists talk like that. What they say for real on the street today I’ve less than no idea. I dropped out of that race early on after I’d been lapped twice and told to get out of the fucking way.

I chose Puck because I’d played him in a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I thought it kind of suited me. Spike, Yash, Blast, Spit, Fizzer, Jog, Streak, Flick, Boiler, Zug, Klute, Growler — I’d considered them all. Puck seemed to be cool without being too aggressive. Unfortunately, at my first dinner in Hall there had been a mix-up.

‘Hi,’ said this totally uncool bloke in jacket and tie sitting himself beside me. Tm Mark Taylor. You must be a fresher, yeah?’

I gave him my cool new name, but my mouth was full of food and somehow he got it into his specky head that I had introduced myself as Puppy Young.

‘Puppy? Yeah, I see that. Puppy. Right.’

No amount of spluttering denial led to anything and Puppy or Pup I became. It wasn’t a blow that I ever really recovered from in terms of the kind of homeboy, down by law, yo motherfuckah, sound, bitching, slamming, street, phat, gangsta, waycool cool that I had reckoned on achieving. Maybe Snoop Doggy Dog of South Central, Los Angeles, California could have got away with calling himself Snoop Puppy Pup, but Michael Young of East Dene, Andover, Hampshire didn’t have a fucking prayer.

Jane loved it of course. Loved calling me Pup, Pups and Puppy. Which explained in part the little outbreak that led to me graffiting the bonnet of her Renault.

Her Renault? I meant our Renault. See? She was winning already.

That’s to say — yes, I liked going out with an older woman. Two years apart maybe doesn’t really count as Older Woman, but I still got a kick out of just that small difference. Yes, I liked being mothered a bit. Yes, I quite enjoyed the salty slap of her gentle mocking, but NO I am not a eunuch or a masochist. Part of me likes just once in a while to be a Man. And I felt, frankly I felt…

‘I know what you felt last night,’ she said. ‘You thought I was jealous. You thought I didn’t like the idea of your thesis being finished. We’d both be Doctors then, and we’d both be equal. You thought that irritated me.’

‘That couldn’t be further from the truth!’ I said, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.

‘And perhaps you thought that I didn’t take History very seriously compared with my work.’

‘Absolutely not.’ I lied again.

‘Oh/ Jane lifted her eyebrows in genuine surprise. ‘Really? Because I was thinking that. All those things. It did annoy me that you were about to get a doctorate. And having to watch you strut about the place like a bantam. I mean face it dear, a lesser woman would have thrown up.’

‘I was happy, that’s all.’

‘And I did think to myself, what’s a history doctorate? Anyone with half a brain can eat the fruits of a library for a few months and then crap out a long glistening thesis. It doesn’t involve thought, or calculation or work. Not real work. Just pretentious dilettante posturing.’

‘Oh, thanks! Thanks a heap.’

‘I know, Puppy, I know. It was only for a while. I was jealous. I was resentful.’

‘Oh: ‘I’m sorry. I’m pleased you’ve finished your thesis now. I’m proud of you.’

Absolute genius for feinting and sidestepping and slithering, has Jane. She’ll make all the points against herself before you get the chance and then apologise for them sweetly and bravely, leaving good grace as the only option.

‘About the car,’ I said, looking down, ‘it was childish of me.’

‘Oh fuck the car. Who gives a shit about the car? It’s a car, not a kitten or a declaration of human rights. Fuck it twice. And, at the risk of rousing your manly ire once more, you have to admit that it was one of the few brave, amusing and independent things you’ve ever done. Besides, I lied about it being towed away, and as it happens the graffiti disappeared with one wipe of Freon, so what harm was done?’

‘So that means…err…we’re still together again?’

‘Come here you,’ she said and pulled my head towards hers.

We kissed long and hard and, coming up for air, I babbled my thanks. Inside…well, maybe I wasn’t so sure. I had been getting used to the idea of feeling let down, betrayed and spat out. There was a kind of comfort in the bruises of hurt and misuse. But then you see I loved her. I really loved her. I still get a thrill When you ter-ter-ter-touch me. It was true. Oily-Moily were never wrong. Every time her flesh contacted mine I got a rush. So, what the hey, we kissed and I told freedom goodbye.

She’s taller than me: that doesn’t mean much, most people are taller than me. She’s dark where I’m light. A lot of people take her for an Italian or a Spaniard. I call her my raven-haired gypsy temptress, at which she groans good-naturedly. She’s very clean. That sounds strange but is true. Not just nearly clean, as the TV commercials say, but really clean. Her hands are always fresh and neat and her lab coat and clothes never wrinkle or sag. There is just this sweet endearing clumsiness, an awkward stiff suggestion of uncoordination; as with Ingrid Bergman’s hint-of-a-squint, it’s the tiny, almost imperceptible flaw that magnifies the beauty.

‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to Sainsbury’s and tonight we’ll cook a really good dinner. Get it right this time. How’s that?’

She looked down at me. ‘You know Pup,’ she said, ‘if you were any more cute I would have to pickle you in formaldehyde.’

‘Shucks,’ I went, and picked up a little perspex dish of bright orange pills from the bench, shaking them in an embarrassed South American rhythm. ‘Hm,’ I said, picking one of them up and holding it between forefinger and thumb. ‘What kind of a high do these offer then?’

‘Shit, will you put that down? She made a grab for the dish, suddenly wild with anger, and missed, sending pills all over the worktop and the floor.

I’d never seen her like that. A frenzy, a real frenzy.

‘Hey!’ I cried in protest, as she roughly pushed me away from the bench.

‘Why will you never learn to leave alone?’

She threw herself off the stool and began to gather the scattered pills cursing herself and me and life and God as she did so.

This was beyond real. I joined her on the ground truffling for orange pills.

‘Look, babe, I just…’

‘Shut up and keep looking for them. I’m not talking to you.’

For the third time in as many hours I was picking stuff up off the ground. CDs, pieces of paper, and now pills. You get days like that. Themed days.

When all the pills were back in the dish and safely out of the reach of childish hands, she turned to me, bosom, I have to report, heaving with indignation.

‘Christ, Pup, what is it with you?’

‘With me? With me? All I bloody did was pick up a pill…’

‘Do you know what these are? Have you any idea what these are? No, of course you haven’t. They might contain anthrax or polio or God knows what. They might be absorbable through the skin. They might have been cyanide, for all you knew.’

‘Well, what are they then?’

‘What they are is a contraceptive.’

‘Yeah?’ I looked at them, interested.

‘A male contraceptive.’

‘A male pill. Coolness.’

‘No, not a male pill, the male pill.’

‘But not dangerous?’

‘It depends, shit-wit, on what you mean by dangerous. They are untested on humans, for one thing.’

‘Hey, well, I can be your guinea-pig then, can’t I?’

‘No you can not be my fucking guinea-pig!’ she snarled. ‘Their effect is irreversible.’

‘Come again?

‘Come again is exactly what you won’t be able to do, not in any fruitful sense at least. They sterilise permanently.’

I gulped. ‘Oh.’

‘Yes. Oh.’

‘Narrow squeak then.’

‘Not that your gene pool is one that a rational world would ever wish to see propagated.’

‘You should keep them locked up.’

‘I should keep you locked up. Let’s make a rule, Puppy. You don’t interfere with my work and I don’t interfere with yours. That way we can avoid catastrophe, all right?’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said, moving away. ‘I’m sorry. Listen, I’ve got to like blow, ‘Kay?’

She looked at me, a smile widening on her face. ‘Do you think there might be a chance that once your thesis has been read you’ll start talking proper English?’

‘D’you mean?’

‘All this “cool” and “slamming” and “woah”…what’s it all about? You’ll probably be a fellow of the college next year. Do you think Trevor Roper used to go around the place saying “woah, man…like, cool.” I mean, darling, it’s so strange. So decidedly odd.’

‘Well,’ I said, sitting down again. ‘Thing is, History, you know, there’s an image problem.’ This was a pet theory of mine that I’d never explained to her before. I smoothed the surface of the workbench with my palms, as if separating out two heaps of salt. ‘There’s two types of historian, yeah? Over here you’ve got A, your young fogey — the Hayek, Porterhouse, Cowling, Spectator-rending, Thatcher-was-a-goddess, want-to-be-PPS-to-a-Tory-MP type, right? And then, on this side, there’s B, your seriously heavy Christopher Hill, Alehouse, E P Thompson, post-structuralism, in-your-face, fuck-the-individual, up-the-arse-of-history type.’

‘And which are you, Pup?’

Tm neither.’

‘Neither. Mm. Then my scientific training leads me to propose that there must therefore be more than two types. There is type C

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very clever. What I mean is, given this image thing, what do you do? See, the fogeyish type belong stylistically to the forties and fifties, the heavy type to the sixties and seventies. So they’re both, like outdated, and History is no longer a happening vibe. My theory, right, is that a historian should belong to his own time more completely than anyone else. How can you history a past age if you don’t identify completely with your own, yeah? You’ve got to come from your own time. So me, I belong to now.’

‘I belong to now?’ said Jane. ‘I belong to now? I can’t believe you just said that. And historify.’

‘Yeah, well, obviously the jargon takes a bit of getting used to.’

‘Mm. So what you’ve done is invent a third type, C, The History Surfer. Hanging Five on the pointbreak of the past, tubing it through the rollers of yesterday. Dr Keanu Young, Ph-Dude.’

‘Yeah. Sad, isn’t it?’

‘Just a little, dear. Just a little. But so long as you know it, it isn’t too bad. There are plenty of fading hippies in the faculties and senior common rooms of the world so I suppose there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be fading surfies too.’

‘Yo, way to go, bitch.’

We kissed again and I tripped out of the lab before I could get her in a bad mood with me again.

On the way to the bike-shed I made a small diversion. Yep, there it was. Our little Clio. Not a mark on the bonnet to show for my calligraphic pains. Bloody scientists. What the hell was Freon anyway? I stooped down to do up my laces. All day they had been undone and — you know how it is with boat-shoes — the sides get so soft and floppy that the ends of the laces can get in and under the soles of your feet, giving you a permanent princess and the pea irritation.

Hello! The laces of the right shoe were on the outside, neither end snaking under. Must have picked up a piece of gravel then, ‘cause sure as shooting there was something nagging my sole.

Way-hey! One of Jane’s orange pills. Germaine’s Revenge. I ought to go back and…

Sod it. I tucked the little tablet into my wallet. Maybe slip it into next door’s rabbit hutch. Snigger.

Tightly laced now, I ride along the Madingley Road making lists in my mind. Food, wine, real coffee, laserpaper, back home, print out the Meisterwerk again, back into town to leave a clean copy with Fraser-Stuart and then, oh yeah, drop in on this Zuckermann guy, this Zuckermann dude…