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Extended Work
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| Prince of Camden | |
| By Eren | ||||||||
| 23 April 2006 | ||||||||
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Hi there. This is the first chapter of my novel. It needs some work I know, and I'd welcome any advice you can offer on how I might improve it. Any feedback will be much appreciated  A few years back I went abroad on holiday with some friends, and to avoid wasting precious holiday time we postponed our hangovers by making sure that we didn’t sober up at all for the entire two weeks. We were lying on the beach drinking bottled beer one afternoon when someone suggested a swim. I shouted ‘yeah’ and ran with them down towards the sea. Or that’s what I thought I was doing. In reality, much to the others amusement, I was lying on my back, eyes closed, flapping my legs in the sand. I mention this as an example of the way imagination can play tricks on you. It can happen when you’re sober too, especially where men are concerned. It starts like this: You meet a man through work or friends and something about him sticks in your mind. Next you start daydreaming about him, even though you have almost nothing to work on as you barely know him. After a week or so you’ve filled in all the gaps in your knowledge with qualities you want him to have and you have a full blown crush – hardly surprising as you practically invented him with your deepest desires in mind. It’s a disastrous habit, as in real life the poor sod resembles your imaginary man in appearance only, and should you get it together he’s doomed to disappoint from the very start. This was a pet theory of mine, and I was just expounding on it when my best friend Karen let me know, via the medium of facial expression, that she’d heard it before. That was true, but since she’d just gone and done it again – spectacularly – I felt it was a good time to repeat it. Besides, I had that especially clever feeling that you get after a bottle or so of wine – I had to pass on what I knew. If only I could go back in time 10 years and give my younger self the benefit of my experience. Then again, I’m not sure I’d welcome advice from a pissed time-travelling know-all, so that wouldn’t work. ‘Yes, yes I admit it’, sighed Karen ‘I’ve been having sex with an imaginary man – again.’ ‘You know what I mean’ I said, clonking the neck of the wine bottle onto the rim of her glass for pouring accuracy ‘They are real, but they’re not the men we think they are.’ There was a loud theatrical cough from the hall, and my flatmate Steve came in. ‘Evening ladies, don’t mind me.’ He helped himself to a glass of wine, and gestured towards a bottle on the sideboard. ‘Try that malt if you like.’ ‘Oooh, no thanks, I can’t drink whisky’, said Karen, ‘it gives me grass stains all over my clothes’. We both snorted with laughter, remembering the weekend in Dublin she was referring to. Steve shot me a puzzled look, then winked at Karen before disappearing into the kitchen. Karen was immune to his charms, in fact she was off men all together, having just dumped David, her boyfriend of three months. They’d met at a party and swapped numbers, Karen knowing only that David was some sort of journalist, and during the week that followed before he called her she had decided the following: He was gifted and driven – a loner in need of an extraordinary woman (her). He had a mind like a switchblade, and they would stay up late into the night, talking knowledgeably about world affairs. He was an animal in bed. As it turned out, he was a whining mummy’s boy who talked non-stop about himself and made witty asides to an invisible third person. He’d laugh heartily at his own jokes, gazing into the distance with glazed eyes, then sigh contentedly and bite his lip before returning to whatever conversation they were having. Disillusion had been setting in, but Karen wouldn’t have worked up to ditching him for months if it hadn’t been for the phone call. Earlier that day David had phoned her and started talking about an article he was writing, then added that he’d passed a ‘very comfortable stool’ that afternoon. She replied that she never wanted to see or hear from him again. Harsh but fair, I thought, under the circumstances. ‘Why do I always do it?’ she wailed ‘Build them up then smash them down. Why can’t I settle for a nice ordinary bloke instead of kissing princes and turning them into frogs?’ ‘That’s what I like about Charlie’, I said, ‘no illusions, what you see is what you get.’ ‘Yeah, a pompous prick’ muttered Karen, with a sly smile. She had never taken to my boyfriend Charlie, and wasn’t shy about saying so. If you ask Karen whether your bum looks fat in the jeans you’re trying on you’ll get the plain unvarnished truth, which is rare and can be quite alarming. But once you get over the shock it’s nice having someone around to give an honest opinion – not that I needed telling that Charlie had a few flaws. He’s a doctor and we met while he was doing MD research in the human genetics lab down the corridor from the plant genetics unit where I was working. He’s sort of Nordic looking - tall and fair haired with bright blue eyes, and every woman in the department clocked him when he first arrived. It wasn’t long before they also noticed that he looked straight through people he wasn’t interested in, which was almost everyone. I was standing by the buffet at the works Christmas party with a mouth full of sausage roll when he came over and asked me to have dinner with him the following day. I say asked, but it’d be more accurate to say he let me know about the arrangement, in the same way as you might inform someone that they’d won a large sum of money. Either way, he certainly wasn’t expecting me to refuse, and I didn’t. There’s something very attractive about confidence like that and I was flattered that he’d singled me out. That was almost a year ago and we’d been seeing each other ever since in a detached sort of way. Our dates always had clearly defined boundaries, like a series of one night stands, except they never lasted all night. He always walked me home, which I thought was quite chivalrous – Karen just thought he was a control freak. ‘He suits me fine’, I said, ‘we’re both professionals with lives of our own. It’s an ideal relationship. Your fantasy men are, well, you said it yourself…’ ‘Look Kate, it’s one thing deciding to pull your head out of the clouds, but you’ve just given up trying – and you hardly ever see him.’ ‘Oh Karen, be fair, he’s working all hours at the hospital, he hardly gets enough time to come home, let alone..’ ‘How long since you saw him?’ ‘A few days’ (it was more than a week, but I didn’t want to fuel the fire). Karen sighed through her nose and shook her head ‘He lives five minutes away Kate, and if he was worth bothering with he’d make the time to see you.’ Karen was right, I had given up trying. Dating, looking for love, call it what you will – it’s the most humiliating of the spectator sports. I mean how many times can you come crashing back to reality, then dust yourself off and leap into the unknown again? I did miss the highs - the crush and the anticipation of the first kiss, but it was always downhill from there. I thought I was well off out of it. It wasn’t so much the disappointment I couldn’t stand, it was the déjà vu. Charlie was the sensible solution to all that. He wasn’t perfect, but he was real. I always walked to work. London is at its best early in the morning, while the air is still clear. My route took me through Camden, past Mornington Crescent station and Euston into Bloomsbury. There was a quicker way via Kings Cross, but I’d stopped using that route so much since the mechanics at the garage in one of the railway arches took to whistling and hooting as I went past. They were taking the piss, obviously (I was wearing jeans and a duffel coat – hardly provocative stuff), still, I preferred to go unnoticed, so I took the scenic route most days. It was a throat raspingly cold morning, and Kentish Town looked uncharacteristically clean under a covering of frost. As I reached Camden things were thawing. A donkey jacketed man tapped politely on the door of the off licence, a can of beer held close at chest level, and there was a clattering noise as a small dark haired man rolled back the shutters of the new restaurant next door. I avoided the main high street – too many people to dodge past, even at this time of day – and followed the back streets through Camden and Euston to the main Euston road, the boundary between the sex shops and Indian restaurants to the north and the leafy garden squares of Bloomsbury to the south. The air thickened up with exhaust fumes as I crossed into Bloomsbury and headed toward the lab. The acrid smell got progressively stronger, and as I passed Russell Square tube station a fire engine crawled past, stuck in traffic. The fireman in the passenger side of the cab had his feet up on the dashboard which seemed oddly casual, and when he noticed me looking he winked and grabbed his crotch, turning his head to watch my reaction. The word ‘hose’ popped into my head unbidden, and I turned off down the side road that lead to our building, a seventies carbuncle spoiling an otherwise elegant Georgian street. There was a river of water running along the gutter from somewhere, and as the bright red of another fire engine caught my eye I realised with a jolt that it was parked outside the smouldering remains of our laboratory building. Thankfully nobody had been inside when the fire started. They couldn’t say for certain how it had happened but it looked like there had been a gas explosion in one of the basement rooms. A sign was put up for the workforce, asking us to assemble in the neighbouring hospital’s lecture theatre at 10 am. I went to buy a coffee and sat down on a bench across the street from where the firemen were packing away their gear and writing on clipboards. Karen had come to meet me at work once, and remarked that the lab looked like the inside of a TV. There were hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment in there, custom made sensors, computers, microscopes, seedling incubators we’d imported from the US and dozens of other machines. They could all be replaced but it’d be months before we could pick up where we left off. My boss Antal didn’t arrive till 12. He’d heard the news by phone and seemed to have spent the intervening hours arguing the toss with various other parties. ‘Where is Mr MacShane?’ he barked when he saw me. He meant O’Shane, Jim O’Shane the other research fellow in our group. Jim’s broad Glaswegian accent did merit a more Scottish name, and Antal was the man to give it to him. In a similar incident he had inadvertently re-christened five foot tall research fellow Simon Hall as ‘Dr Small.’ ‘He’s over there’, I said, ‘Oi! Jock McSporran! Over here!’ Antal gave me a dirty look as Jim came over to join us, and it occurred to me that I ought to be upset about what had happened. Antal and Jim certainly were. I looked at their ashen faces as they discussed replacing the equipment and whether there were back up copies of our data - and I felt like a fraud. Ours was a plant genetics lab – one of the best in the country, and my results had formed the backbone of our last two research papers. I’d been invited to speak at the annual conference in the States – we were really going places, so why did I have the nagging feeling that my heart wasn’t really in it? I put the hours in - seven days a week, and I was always the first in and the last to leave. Problem was, now that I was forced to stop and reflect I could see that it was the routine I was attached to. I shoved this unsettling thought to the back of my mind as Antal started to talk about what was going to happen. I barely listened as he assured us that our jobs were safe and talked about new equipment and building work. Then I heard the words ‘three months paid leave’ and snapped back into consciousness. What on earth was I going to do? If I wasn’t Kate Bean, Scientist, then who was I? It wasn’t just a job, my whole identity was centred around it – my all purpose excuse. There was also the issue of wasted time, the idea that the last seven years could have been a false start. I felt like a lost driver who starts to suspect that they may have come rather a long way down the wrong road, but is buggered if they are going to turn back. I spent the rest of the afternoon in displacement activity – photocopying journal articles from the library while the revelation that I was a fake biologist nagged away like a low level toothache. When I got outside it was dark. I looked at my watch, Steve would be home and it was his turn to cook, so I set off into the darkness to fetch a bottle of wine. There was a faint smell of charred meat in the air, coming from the new restaurant next to the off licence, and a street light sparkled from a puddle on the dirty pavement, the reflection seeming more brilliant than the lamp itself. A small flashing light moved across the surface of the water, the reflection of a plane, surrounded by a surprising number of stars. I was just looking at it, thinking uncharacteristically existential thoughts when a couple of teenage boys came sprinting round the corner and sent me reeling backwards into a moped parked on the pavement. I fell over it in what felt like slow motion, as an Indian man, cricket bat in hand, raced past in pursuit of the boys.
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