Engleby by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online Page B

this communal feeling when the new term began in October.
    We’re now in the third week of it and final exams are still a long way away, next summer, but somehow people already seem preoccupied. I’ve been to Film Soc a couple of times, but not many of the Irish people have been there: Nick (without Hannah, who was in Uncle Vanya at the ADC), Amit and Holly are the only ones who’ve looked in so far. Stewart’s working with Dave on the edit. Apparently the rushes are promising.
    But it’s already cold outside, the leaves are wet on the pavements and it seems a long way from Tipperary.
    I have a new room this year, in Clock Court. It’s got its own pantry with a gas ring so I don’t bother to go to the dining hall any more. There’s no shower, but there’s a bathroom I share with only five other people and few of them seem to use it. So I work the bath over with a cloth and some Vim from a saucer that the bedmaker replenishes, rinse off, fill up and listen to The Archers on my small transistor radio. There’s a Northern Ireland barmaid called Norah who takes up too much story time, but I like the old man, Walter Somebody. He reminds me of the old men in the almshouse in the street where I was brought up. ‘Heh, heh, me old beauty, me old darlin’,’ he says. Or something like that. I don’t listen that carefully.
    I’ve changed my routines a bit. For a start, I’ve almost given up drugs. This is partly due to the fact that my supplier has disappeared. I used to buy pills from a man in the Kestrel called Alan Greening. He had an executive metal briefcase that looked as though it might hold the secret plans of a Ukrainian nuclear reactor. All it had in fact were bottles of pills. He’s been in and out of various hospitals and he’s signed on with three different GPs. He has a pharmaceutical directory and he looks up the drug he wants, then describes the symptoms it’s prescribed for. He goes to different chemists to have them made up and no one checks up on the others. Tricyclics, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, benzodiazepines, all sorts of stuff – they make an awful rattle in his bag and most of them don’t do anything at all for you. There’s one called Nardil, an MAOI, that you have to take for weeks for any effect and if you eat cheese or Marmite or broad-bean pods it can give you a brain haemorrhage. Where’s the fun in that? But Tuinal, Nembutal, Amytal, I quite like them; and Quaaludes go well with gin. It all depends. I’ve tried almost all the sleeping pills, even the banned ones, and they don’t even make me feel tired. On the other hand, I’m susceptible to a patent hay-fever cure you can buy over the counter at Boots, which goes to show.
    The only thing I wouldn’t do is amphetamines – or LSD. They synthesised that stuff in a lab twenty-five years ago when they were trying to induce human madness in guinea pigs. Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane? If you’d even glanced at neuroscience in Nat Sci Part One, then, believe me, you wouldn’t go near those things.
    The point is, I don’t need any of this stuff any more. (Apart from marijuana and alcohol, but they don’t really count, and anyway, I don’t need them, they’re just a habit, like cigarettes or going to the cinema.)
    I don’t need drugs because I can deal with reality as it is. Reality is no problem for me. Poor old Eliot thought humans couldn’t stand too much of it. But I can stand as much of it as you care to throw at me. As much as D.H. Lawrence anyway. I should have pointed that out to Dr Gerald Stanley in my original interview. (He looks at me sadly when I pass him in the cloister nowadays – though I greet him cordially enough. ‘Ah, Dr Stanley, I presume. How’s Jane Eyre? Married yet?’)
    I do keep some connection with Literature. I write poetry of my own in my room in Clock Court. With the proceeds of two of Glynn Powers’s tennis balls I bought a record player and some records – Mahler