Page 49 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
“You didn’t enjoy it?” she asks. “But you made some good friends here.”
Tristan just shrugs. He’s told Vivienne he’s been meeting up with his old university pals once a month for almost a year now. They’ve even been talking about embarking on a rail trip around Europe, as they’d done as teenagers. Tristan beamed when he told her about this, yet today his mood is dark.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I wasn’t exactly the most popular kid on campus,” he says, stuffing his hands in his pockets and marching ahead of her. It took some persuading to get him to come along today.
“He treated us all like idiots,” Tristan snapped when shesuggested attending the commemorative lecture.
“I know, but we saw him at his worst, and it sounds like he’d done some important work before all of this. It’s only right we go.”
Vivienne has another reason for attending the lecture but decided not to confide in Tristan about it.
Eventually, he agreed to go along with her. Vivienne has been wondering if his own number is playing on his mind. His fortieth birthday isn’t far away. After that, he has five short years.
As they approach the wide marble staircase at the front of the building, Vivienne sees Melvin reclining on the stairs, smoking a cigarette, apparently oblivious to the glares of several students who are forced to step around his large frame.
“Melvin, I didn’t know you smoked,” Vivienne says.
“A new habit I’ve taken up.” He stands and puts his cigarette out under his shoe. “So it looks like the great doctor’s formula didn’t quite work out for him.”
“At least he tried,” mutters Tristan, marching past Melvin and up the stairs.
Vivienne shrugs at Melvin and they follow Tristan inside.
Tristan
You can do it, you can do it…
Tristan looks down at his old, scuffed trainers and wills them to keep going, keep putting one in front of the other until he gets there. His head is bowed down, trying not to see the familiar curving staircase, the chipped pigeonholes and dusty portraitsof long-dead lecturers. But the smell of the place cannot be avoided, that mixture of teenage hormones, pencil shavings, and lemony wood polish. The last few weeks have been bad enough without having to come backhere, but once again, he’d given in to Vivienne’s nagging. He follows the paper signs taped to the walls for Dr. Gordon’s memorial lecture. Behind him, he can hear Vivienne and Melvin chatting amiably. He arrives at the lecture hall, where a young student hands him a piece of paper, instructing him to “Sit anywhere.” He chooses a spot three rows from the back, shuffles along to the end, and then slips off his denim jacket, places it on his knees, and ducks his head to read the piece of paper. He doesn’t look up but is aware of Vivienne and Melvin settling down next to him.
“OK, Tristan?” Vivienne asks, taking off her own jacket and placing it carefully over her knees. Had he copied that gesture from her, or vice versa? He couldn’t remember and tries to ignore the irritation that scuttles through him.
“Just didn’t want to be late,” he whispers, pretending to be absorbed in the leaflet.
As Vivienne turns to Melvin to ask about his upcoming retirement from the force, Tristan looks down into the well of the lecture hall, where an image of Dr. Gordon is projected onto the whiteboard. He is beaming into the camera, a patronizing expression on his smug face.
“Good thing we got here on time; the place is filling up,” Vivienne says, and Tristan finally looks up. She’s right, all the seats in the lecture hall are now filled, and there’s a line of studentsstanding at the back of the hall with more still streaming in. Tristan does a quick scan of the room and estimates there are five hundred students, around 73 percent are men, maybe 43 percent are wearing glasses, and the average age would be twenty-one.
“Who’d have thought he was this popular?” says Melvin, breathing whiskey fumes across Vivienne to Tristan, who wrinkles his nose and turns away.
“Maybe it’s more to do with his recent fame,” says Vivienne, making quote marks with her two forefingers, causing Tristan to think of a song his mother sang to him:“Peter Pointer, Peter Pointer, where are you? Here I am, here I am, how do you do?”
A quiet falls across the room as a large man with a blond quiff strolls onto the stage. His body moves as if through water, more like he is swimming than walking, with a fluidity and grace not usually seen on a man of his size. He places a small red notebook on the lectern, buttons his pin-striped jacket over the matching waistcoat, and takes in the body of people standing in front of him. Tristan would bet he’s never seen the room so full, and yet he seems totally unfazed.
“Good morning. I am Professor Linus Goodacre. Thank you all for coming today,” he says, with slow and deliberate enunciation.
Tristan closes his eyes, and suddenly it’s twenty years ago and he’s standing just where the professor is now, preparing to present to his fellow students. While studying his cue cards, he glances up to see Dave among the faces, giving him a double thumbs-up. Tristan had consistently been top of his class. He’d worked hard on his final-year project, knew it was something well above thecapabilities of his fellow students. Sure enough, the room falls silent once Tristan starts talking, as a result of them being either impressed—or simply confused. He’d trialed the project, which he calledMoralia,with the help of unsuspecting classmates. Following further development, he felt sure it had the ability to transform the modern workplace, to give employers unique insight into their staff. In fact, Tristan had already been approached by a handful of IT companies, after a keen lecturer had sent round samples of the work. A sparkling career lay ahead of him, even worldwide fame… Then he hears it. A chuckle from the back row. A chuckle of disdain. Instantly, he knows who the culprit is. Malcolm Hardy is his closest rival. He never scored as highly as Tristan, but he made up for it with his confidence during classes as well as his popularity among their peers. Tall, broad shouldered, rugby playing, with thick, wavy golden hair like a Romantic poet. In other words, he is everything Tristan is not. Any chance he gets, he tries to catch Tristan out, belittle him, make him question himself.
Taking a deep breath, Tristan counts,2, 3, 5, 7…Attempting to contain the heat rising through his body.11, 13, 17, 19. He resumes his presentation, but then he hears another laugh. This time, there is nothing he can do to contain the white-hot fury surging through him. Without conscious thought, he sprints up the stairs of the lecture hall, dashes along the back row, and grabs Malcolm by his rugby-shirt collar. Despite being much smaller than him, Tristan benefits from the element of surprise, and the taller man falls backward onto the stairs, tumbling down, landing in a heap at the bottom. Tristan sees that Malcolm’s ankle is twistedat an odd angle, blood pours from a cut on his eyebrow. As Tristan’s anger dissipates, so his apologies come. Malcolm will never play rugby again, and this incident marks the end of Tristan’s university life, just a few months before he should be graduating. But, more importantly, it marks the end of his job prospects too.
Suddenly, he feels a sharp nudge in his side, and he forces his eyes open. He is almost surprised to see the professor in full swing in front of the quiet, attentive audience.
“I thought you’d fallen asleep, then,” Vivienne says. “It’s just getting interesting.”
“Worked late last night,” Tristan mutters and tries to tune back in to the professor’s words.
“Dr. MacMillan had lately turned his attention to the topic of longevity. Now it is estimated that around 25 percent of an individual’s lifespan is determined by genetics. If your parents live into their eighties, the good news is that you probably will too,” he says. A little murmur travels around the room. To these smooth-skinned students, death is still an imagined outcome, something that happens to really old people; even their parents are probably still only in their forties themselves. Tristan’s parents are both in their sixties, and apart from his dad’s prostate cancer a while back, they are in very good health. And yet this fact doesn’t have any impact on Tristan’s own longevity, given that they’re not actually his parents.
Tristan’s mind flicks back to that day. Following the breakup with Ellie, he offered to leave their shared flat and ended up arriving at his childhood home bearing an old suitcase and two black trash bags. His mother opened the door and then her arms, tearsrolling down her cheeks as if she’d been the one cast aside by life (that old adage popped into his head, “A mother is only ever as happy as her least happy child,” which meant Tristan’s poor mum didn’t stand a chance). That night, as he lay in his old single bed, gazing up at the faded poster of Sonic the Hedgehog on the wall, he thought,Here I am again. He quickly regressed back to his teenage existence: sleeping in until nearly noon, when his mum pulled open the curtains; eating a plate of bacon and eggs as she fussed around him, then going back to his room to work until late. The weekdays passed like this quite easily, but weekends stretched out in all their barren misery. On Saturdays, he’d prolong his lie-in as far into the afternoon as his mother would allow, then had a leisurely lunch (couldn’t reasonably still call it a “brunch” at 3:00 p.m.), followed by a long soak in the bath. His mother would try to persuade him to “pop into town” with her, which he’d refuse to do, and the evenings would be spent falling asleep on the sofa in front of whatever terrible program his parents chose to pollute their minds with. Every Sunday, without fail, his mum would dress in heels and tights no matter what the weather, his father would be freshly shaved and smelling of Tristan’s childhood, and they’d head to church. Alone in the house, he took to exploring the nooks and crannies that had held his attention as a child.
