Noughties by Ben Masters Read Free Book Online Page B

marched me up a high staircase to a chair outside a door. A chair outside a door on a high staircase.
    “Just wait harr until you are called for.”
    “Okay. Thanks.”
    I was to be interviewed by the college’s two English tutors, Dr. Dylan Fletcher (Senior Fellow) and Dr. Polly Snow (Research Fellow). I had looked them both up on the English faculty and college websites: Dr. Fletcher had written some groundbreaking study about eighteenth-century poets that I’d never heard of (
The Eighteenth-Century Poets
); a revolutionary monograph on representations of fruit in Milton and Marvell, explored—of course—through the lens of sociocultural Marxism (
The Ambiguous Apple: Towards a Poetics of Fruit in the Writings of Milton and Marvell
); a life-changing, radical postmodern account of early modern prose narratives (
The Unfortunate Signifier: Derrida and Elizabethan Fiction
); and
the
definitive account of Wordsworth’s something or other (
Wordsworth: Poet
). Dr. Snow was younger and less experienced, having only recently completed her doctorate at Cambridge, and was in her second year of teaching as a Research Fellow at Hollywell. I assumed that they were both inside Dr. Fletcher’sroom, devising death traps and finalizing underhand tactics: carefully positioning my chair so I’d be blinded by the sun; raising their own so that they could look down on me from a height. The pleasure of the chase and Brandy Knox’s arse were the recurring themes of my famished brain, every second a minute in the silence of that chill stairwell.
    Just as I began to wonder if they had forgotten about me (all day long I had been haunted by a strange feeling that I didn’t exist … perhaps they had already chosen the students they wanted … or maybe they were just watching me fidget and sweat on CCTV), I heard footsteps reverberating from below, winding around corners, growing progressively louder, hunting me down. I sat up rigid. Tense and formal. A girl appeared, decked out in a blue dress that ended just above the knee, a multicolored pastel scarf studded with sequins, and a pair of heels that boldly solidified her calves. Her hair was astonishingly straight (a light brown flirting with blonde) and her face came close to conventionally desirable, though some unidentifiable feature just offset it from being so (was it the nose? the chin? the mouth?… impossible to tell). She carried a skinny latte and a black Americano. A reassuring smile peeled from ear to ear.
    Phew, just some postgrad, I thought. Ignoring her I slouched back down in the chair, reacquainting my mind with Knox’s toosh and giving my nose an experimental poke. I lodged the greased-up digit into my gob for some interview sustenance. The girl had stopped and was watching me.
    “Hiya,” she beamed. “Sorry—desperate need for a caffeine boost! Just let us settle back down and we’ll call you in a minute.”
    A noise that I can only describe as a thirteen-year-old’s voice breaking in slow motion shoulder-barged its way from my throat; a stuck sound clogged with alarm and farce: “O~k~a~y.” These two syllables wobbled and clanged like a hand-chime. She disappeared into Dr. Fletcher’s room and I could hear much giggling and bustling about.
    Fuckety fuckety fuck, I squirmed to myself. What a dick. Supreme start, Eliot, supreme start, mate.
    With little time to compose myself, I was asked to enter.
    “Sorry about the wait,” said Dr. Snow, sincerely but lighthearted, as she tiptoed amongst the piles of books that were flung about the floor like land mines, back toward her armchair. “It’s been a long day.”
    The room was a dream come true, lined wall to wall with ceiling-high bookshelves. Auden, Wilde, Hardy, Eliot, Atwood, Dickens, Austen, Pinter, Yeats, Heaney: the names leapt at me in a flurry of ecstasy, all brandishing intimidating promise. In the center was a low coffee table, surrounded by a sofa on one side and matching armchairs on the