Jack and the medieval mystics Chapter 3
Nice one
When I got to the seminar room, the others were already there and waiting, all except Tom but then he hadn’t turned up in class for a while. Something to do with his mental health, I guess. I saw faded cut marks on his arms once in the summer.
Ed said hi as I took the seat next to him. He had made an effort; his jeans looked clean and he had a proper shirt on. Ed was OK, for someone who had been to private school. Bright too, there was no denying it. Sometimes, when one of the others asked a stupid question, he and I would exchange this sort of self-congratulatory look, as if to say ‘What the fuck?’ When marks went up on the departmental board, we were always the top two. Ed usually in the 70s and me close behind, sometimes level.
I felt Ed stiffen with interest as Sunita walked in at last, at five past eleven. She was a bit older than some of the post-grad tutors — maybe 25 — and she was wearing this longish dress that somehow managed to be more sexy than a short skirt that showed her legs. Ed flashed his best posh boy smile. He was really into Sunita — hence the shirt and jeans. She wasn’t my type but I could see the appeal. Sunita was frighteningly clever and didn’t suffer fools. Ambitious too. I could see her getting a post in the department once she’d got her PhD.
‘OK,’ she was saying, passing around handouts. ‘Today I’m going to introduce you to Fanon and Memmi on the psychology of colonization. They’re old now but you need to get to grips with the seminal works before you start looking at the current research.’
Sunita’s thing was post-colonial psychology. And judging by his face as he followed her round the room with his eyes, Ed was going to discover an intense interest in the subject. I was more keen to get to the end of the hour and see how she’d marked my last essay.
The buzzer went for the end of the seminar and everyone started closing up their laptops. ‘Excuse me!’ said Sunita. ‘Anyone would think you were still in school. Do me the courtesy of waiting till I’ve finished my sentence.’
She was always saying things like that — ‘do me the courtesy’ — as if she was someone my Nan’s age, but somehow when she said them they sounded cool.
She started passing round individualized feedback on our essays. Like I said, she enjoyed being old school and used to print out comments for each of us on paper instead of online. When she came to me, she stopped a minute.
‘Congratulations, Jack,’ she said, loud enough for the others to hear. ‘I haven’t read such an accomplished undergraduate piece for a long time.’
She moved on and I looked down at the sheet of paper: 75%. That was good first class degree territory and the highest mark I’d ever received.
Ed was looking at me and his eyebrows were almost up to his hair. ‘Nice one,’ he said in the end.
He started reading the comments she’d made on his work and all the time I was trying to see what mark he’d got and trying not to look as if I was trying. He laughed and showed me the page: 70%.
I was tucking into a panini in the café when I saw Kipper come in. The icing on the cake: someone to tell about my triumph.
‘You’ll never guess what,’ I said, as he unzipped his leather jacket. He was heavily built and a cut above most of us with his Kawasaki, which had cost him more than a car. He was always into his image, but then he was doing Corporate Law and planned to be a multi-millionaire by the time he was 30.
‘What? Have you discovered how to rewire the human brain?’ Kipper always put on this amused incredulity that anyone would choose to study psychology.
‘Pretty much,’ I replied. ‘I got 75% from the fearsome Sunita. And Ed — you know Ed — he only got 70.’
‘Fuck me, Jack, you bloody Einstein.’ Kipper was genuinely impressed. You could always rely on him to be impressed by success. I felt even better than I had done before.
We got talking about other stuff then and we were about to go when my alarm went off.
‘What’s that for?’ Kipper asked.
‘Oh, just something I’m doing — an experiment.’ There was no way I was going to tell him about Blessed Angela.
‘You coming?’ he asked.
‘You go. I’m staying for a bit.’
The glow I felt about getting five more marks than Ed was still with me and I found I didn’t have much appetite for the medieval mystics. But an experiment’s an experiment; you have to keep on to the end even if the data don’t look promising.
Reading through Julian’s spiel on my phone this time, what stuck out was the part about God ‘never allowing us to be hurt.’ That was it. The dark spot that had been threatening to spoil the glow all along. Now it came into full consciousness, a nagging sense that it was mean, somehow, to enjoy demolishing Ed quite so much as I was enjoying it. I kept remembering the look on his face and that ‘Nice one,’ he came out with. That was the killer.
I snapped my phone shut and left, angry with this Julian who could reach down through the centuries and spoil my triumph. By the time I was back on the bike, I was seeing it more clearly and had stopped giving away my power. It was I who had chosen to read this stuff after all, though I was beginning to think I might check out, experiment or no experiment.
Thank you for reading. You can find Chapter 4 here
Links to all chapters are here
