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Rory gazes at me with interest. “What, that I’m in a relationship with an anarcho-communist, a Jesus freak, the girl I’m going to marry, and the former crown prince of Great Britain? I think I basically did… in a roundabout way.” My body fills with sudden warmth; this may be the first time Rory’s defined the union we share under the personal term ofrelationship. And as mad as it all is, it’s a testament to the gravity of Rory’s speaking voice that he can make something so crazy sound so normal. He pauses, swirling the small remainder of his drink. “Well. I’m not a bloody anarcho-communist, I suppose.”
“And I’m not a Jesus freak,” Danny adamantly declares.
In a sweet tone, Rory retorts, “No, but you are a freak.”
“Don’t,” I scold on Danny’s behalf.
“Helikesit, little saint,” Rory explains patiently. “This is how we are. I’ll give you a hundred quid that right now his hard-on’s getting even harder under the table.”
“Shut it,” Danny mutters, the spots of red on his cheeks only one more lewd comment away from glowing as bright as a neon traffic light.
One of the students from the other end of the table leans across to us. He has an immaculately groomed brown beard, tiny spectacles, and he’s wearing a beret at an angle that can only be described asjaunty. “Excuse me,” he says, his voice lightly tinged with something staccato and European, “did I mishear or were you discussing the theories of Marxism? Having studied Trotsky and Lenin extensively, I’d like to get your viewpoints on their work.”
“Yeah, they wrote some bangers,” I say with a serious nod, trying to sound as equally scholarly and important.
The man with the beret shoots me a polite but puzzled smile. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I.”
The man settles back to his end of the table, looking like he regrets his decision to engage with us. Rory and Danny are both trying to stifle giddy drunken laughter, and I find myself asking where Finlay — who could wax lyrical about the works of Trotsky and Lenin for days — is when you need him.
It’s that hazy, topsy-turvy time late at night when the world swims with sensations instead of words, emotion instead of logic. Nothing makes sense, and with this complete certainty that the world is an essentially senseless place, I find myself gathering a new, uninhibited state of courage, as Rory goes up for another round of drinks.
I eavesdrop avidly on the group of students across from us, all of whom are enthusiastically discussing things likeinternational postcolonialismandprotocultural historiography. I’m gawping at them so hard, wondering if they’re automatons programmed to spit parroted buzzwords instead of real people with genuine original thoughts in their heads, that Danny has to nudge me with the sharp point of his elbow to get me to stop. When the conversation turns to Antiro, as I knew like the swing of a pendulum that it would, my drunken self decides I’ve observed enough of the group’s behavior that I may as well become part of it.
“Sometimes the tactics are too much,” a blonde woman states, sounding upset. Her hair is in pigtails and she reminds me physically of Arabella, but that’s where the similarities end. “They go overboard to prove a point. You can’t say they don’t. That poor third year — what’s her name? The one with the tragic hair? Jonie? Yes. Her life is in shambles.”
The man beside her scowls. “She picked a side.”
“She picked a side in a political debate,” I remind them loudly, because the fact that all this divisiveness could be over something as banal aspoliticsis driving me mad.
Danny makes a soft noise of woe beside me.
The man raises his eyes to me, seemingly unsurprised by my interruption. “Some things are not up for debate. King James is one of them.”
“Are you, like, on his payroll or something?”
The man’s eyes blaze fiercely. “He has promised us so much. With him in charge, we are all kings.”
This sounds like a bunch of bullshit, but then this is what the true believers truly believe. That in the day of reckoning, they will be the ones exonerated and elevated to power. That power, somehow, will be meted out to Benji’s most fanatic supporters.
I make sure to frame Jonie as the main issue, before they go off on another wild fantasy. “So what happened to Jonie is fine?”
The man shrugs. “She stood in people’s way,” he says simply, which is an interesting turn of phrase to account for the bruises and scars that likely now pepper her face. “Look, students have the right to speak up. We have the right to complain if we have concerns about other’s rhetoric.”
“And can I ask — what exactly is this definition of ‘speaking up’?”
“Um,” the blonde woman squeaks, just as the man’s mouth widens to speak. “She’s a friend of a friend — well, she used to be a friend, I’m not anymore, I swear—”
“You don’t need to swear your allegiance to me.”
“But…” She glances carefully between the man and me. “I’ve heard she’s been threatened. The address of her family home has been leaked andthey’veallbeenthreatened.” Beside her, the man’s jaw tightens, as if he doesn’t approve of the woman sharing these details with me. “Uni management has been pestered to expel her. Some guy in a mask threw fireworks at her on the way to class. Someone called the police to report her for harassment. And I think she’s been told to do all her coursework online to keep the peace.”
I stare at the blonde woman, who grows slightly more confident with every example she cites. Clearly, sheknowsthis is all wrong. There’s a vestige of respect for Jonie in her whispered words, for the friend she apparently once had. But she’s a coward, like all the rest of them, and adopts an enemy mindset because she’s seemingly unable to think for herself.
“But you know she won’t,” the man adds sardonically, “because shelikesbeing the victim. So the uni’s going to shell out for personal security, if you can believe such a thing.”
“I’ve even heard that for Bonfire Night, they’re planning on using her as an effigy,” the woman adds, as if her friend hadn’t spoken.
