Belinda McKeon - Solace

‘And, what, in your fever you accidentally destroyed all the work you’ve done over the last six months?’

Mark wanted to sit down. No, he wanted to stand. Did he? What did he want to do? He wanted to escape. McCarthy hadn’t invited him to come into the office, to sit, to come closer. He was still standing at the door. And to McCarthy’s question he had no answer. How could he not have worked out an answer to that question? He had known it was coming.

‘You’ve been working on this chapter since Christmas,’ McCarthy said, pointing finally to a chair opposite his desk. ‘Are you telling me that a few days of puking fish has made all the difference?’

Mark had to move a couple of copies of English Studies off the chair in order to sit. McCarthy had told him to submit something to English Studies the year before, he remembered, with a pang of guilt; he had meant to get around to it, but he had never seemed to have enough time. ‘It’s just not ready,’ he said now, and McCarthy snorted.

‘It’s never ready with you, Mark,’ he said, putting both hands behind his head. When McCarthy did that pose — the one that made him look like he was trying to sunbathe under the fluorescent lights, tilting the two front legs of his chair up off the floor — you knew you were fucked. He was getting into withering dismissal mode. He was gearing up to tell you you might as well forget the whole thing.

‘I’ve these. .’ Mark said, opening his rucksack hurriedly. He took the pages from the manila folder. ‘I mean, it’s just a draft, but if you want to see what I’ve been doing?’

McCarthy stared down his nose at the pages. For one awful moment, it looked like he was about to reach over and take them. That would not be good. That would be a disaster. They were appalling. There were actual doodles on them. Mark had written his name in the margins at points. His edits consisted of scribbled, furious messages to himself, often containing expletives, telling himself what a fucking idiot he was to have written this paragraph, to have started this argument, to have started this thesis.

McCarthy looked at Mark for a long moment, and he seemed to decide something. Slowly, he took his hands from behind his head and sat up straight at his desk again. He sighed. ‘Look, Mark,’ he said. ‘You need to meet me halfway here. I have to write to the board to argue your case before the end of this month. What am I meant to say to them, when you haven’t given me anything? What am I meant to put on the form?’

He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You were doing so well with this thing up to now,’ he said, and his tone was different; it was quieter. It was, Mark realized with something of a jolt, sincere. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mark said. He hadn’t thought it was possible to feel any more disgusted with himself than he’d felt an hour previously, letting himself out of Joanne’s front door, but he’d been wrong. McCarthy was right. What the hell had gone wrong?

‘Is there something else going on for you, do you mind me asking?’

Mark stared. ‘Something else?’

McCarthy looked out the window. ‘Family stuff, personal stuff, whatever.’ He turned back to Mark. ‘Is there some bigger reason why you can’t get on top of things?’

‘No,’ Mark said, and now when McCarthy looked at him he found it hard to look back. ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

‘Well,’ McCarthy said, ‘I’m glad to hear that, I suppose. But this block of yours. .’ He shook his head. ‘I mean, it seems to me to be a problem with your subject.’

‘With Edgeworth?’

‘Well, with this whole idea you’re trying to elaborate about Edgeworth. The one you set out in your introduction. You’re arguing something about Edgeworth being wrongly perceived as a realist writer, isn’t that it?’

‘Yes,’ Mark said, but when McCarthy nodded at him to go on, his mind went blank. ‘I mean, I think she’s been fundamentally misread,’ he was finally able to say. ‘I think she was more of an experimentalist, in her way, than has ever been understood.’ He swallowed. ‘I mean, I’d like to. .’

‘Oh, yes,’ McCarthy said, his hands reaching back into the sunbathing pose. ‘Now I remember. Outshandying Tristram Shandy since seventeen-whatever-it-is.’ He coughed. Or he snorted, and he turned it into a cough. ‘Well, it’s different. I’ll give you that.’

Fuck you, Mark thought. ‘Well, I mean, she’s obviously pretty different to Sterne,’ he began, but McCarthy was waving his hands in the air now, and it seemed he wanted Mark just to stop.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right.’ He sat back into the desk and let his head drop low, as though he was tired. ‘You know, Mark, this time tomorrow, I’ll be in my car with the windows open and the kids watching their DVDs in the back and the wife staying quiet for once because we’re finally getting out of Dublin and back down to Clonakilty.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘It is good.’ McCarthy rubbed his hands together. ‘It’s a great spot. I can read a bloody book without visualizing a hall full of students staring up at me as I try to explain it. Do you know what I read when I’m on my holidays?’

‘No.’

‘As little as possible. Maybe a bit of crime. Maybe the papers.’

‘Right,’ said Mark, uncertainly.

‘Do you know what I don’t want to read on my holidays?’

Mark paused. He was conscious of having to give the right answer here. ‘Edgeworth?’ he eventually said.

‘Close,’ said McCarthy. ‘Your bloody chapter on Edgeworth and her experiments. Or, worse still, your bloody notes towards your chapter on her experiments.’

‘OK.’

‘No offence.’

Mark shrugged. ‘None taken.’

‘Now, it’s not as though I’m exactly going to be jumping out of my skin to read about Edgeworth the experimentalist when I get back from Cork in August, but I will. And I’ll expect to read it.’

‘OK,’ Mark said slowly.

‘It’ll want to be more than OK,’ McCarthy said. ‘It’ll want to be magnificent. And on the presumption that it will — on the presumption that you’ll get out of here now and go straight to wherever you left your mojo and start working again, like you were working last year, I’ll fill in this form, and I’ll say I’ve read your latest, and I’ll say you’re sufficiently on track to have your funding renewed, and I’ll send it to the board. All right?’

All right,’ said Mark, weakly. Then the wave of sheer relief that washed over him was met with the sensation of his skin detaching from his body and crawling right away from it as he thanked McCarthy effusively not once, not twice, but three times. ‘I promise I won’t disappoint, Maurice,’ he heard himself say, the pièce de résistance, and he thought, If I had a pen in my hand right now I would use it to stab myself in the eye.

‘Damn right you won’t disappoint me,’ McCarthy said, and he stood. ‘But, Mark?’

‘Yes?’ Mark said, standing too, and his voice sounded very small. He should have said, ‘Yeah?’ not ‘Yes?’ he thought; it might have sounded less like he was lying on the ground under McCarthy’s boot. ‘Yeah?’ he said then, before he could stop himself, and he heard the ridiculousness of it echoing around the room.

‘Don’t pull this shit on me again,’ McCarthy said, as he walked him to the door. ‘You’re in your fourth year. You’re not in a position to mess around. Do you understand?’

‘I do,’ Mark said, and he said goodbye. Then he spotted his bag where he had left it, under the chair he had been sitting on, and, making noises of apology to McCarthy, he had to duck back and get it, and apologize again, and say goodbye again, all while McCarthy looked at him with perfect indifference and, as he turned around to say a last — stop it! — goodbye, closed the door in his face with what definitely qualified as a bang.