was a freckly boy who cracked first. “It’s like, it doesn’t really matter, you know ?”
“Really?” said Macveigh, distracted from the world outside.
“It’s like, kind of basic and old fashioned? Like it’s stuck in all this worldly… you know? It’s like we’re all talking capitalism and communism, and none of that matters, none of that’s... Is it? Like Buddhism, you know?”
The older student leant forward. “So are you saying Marxism’s an inherently homogenous doctrine? A modernist metanarrative grounded in Enlightenment epistemological certainties and incompatible with a pluralistic world?”
“No. I’m saying, it’s like… I spent my gap year in Nepal, right—”
“Woah-kay. Thank you,” said Melvyn Macveigh.
The heating changed gears.
“You can get this book from Waterstone’s,” said the plump girl, exhibiting her Beginners Guide, “but I still can’t see how this is relevant to the modern world? Like, which employer’s going to care whether you understand ‘Historical Materialism’?” She mouthed the phrase as though there was a chance the words would give way and plummet her into a valley of ridicule. “Besides,” she continued, “there are definitely easier topics for the exam; I mean, it’s in the same unit as the transformation of the Labour Party, isn’t it?”
Melvyn Macveigh was trying to fix something on his watch.
“And it’s never going to happen again, is it?” said the boy in the rugby shirt.
“Oh no. Not here at least,” said Macveigh. “The climate’s too inclement for marching and demonstrating and all that.” As if to prove his point, a gust of wind shook the pre-fabricated tower, triggering an avalanche of plaster.
“I still think his ideas are important to discuss,” said the mature student, stroking his chin. “I mean Marxism, more than anything else in the philosophical canon, sort of shapes contemporary discourse, doesn’t it? It’s like Derrida says: ‘We are all heirs of Marx.’”
This began a pattern which lasted throughout the academic year: every week, the mature student was distinguished from his classmates, the tutor, and the creaking post-war tower, in that he looked like he wanted to be there. As the only person who had done the reading, or had any interest in discussing the topic, the mature student was often driven to internal debate: he would raise a question, listen to the silence for two minutes, and eventually answer himself. On other occasions, provoked by boredom, perhaps, Macveigh would pick on the person who was trying hardest to avoid eye contact. “Mr. Foster, do you wish to contribute to this vibrant debate?”
“...”
“Prospects for Marxism in the twenty-first century?”
“Well… pretty shabby, I suppose.”
“‘Pretty shabby, I suppose.’ Cadit quaestio. I shall endeavour to include this erudite contribution in the year exam paper: ‘Prospects for Marxism in the twenty-first century are pretty shabby, I suppose. Discuss.’”
It seemed that people got very emotional about this Marx guy. Melvyn Macveigh appeared to consider my disinterest unforgivably rude, as though Marx was in the room and I was refusing to pass him the cashew nuts. On one occasion, in Benny’s staff room, I overheard Lucy and Spocky discussing Marx as if he was an intimate friend who might at any moment arrive with their ice cream sundaes. What was the big deal?
At five o’clock, I was due to meet Lucy in the Student Union (she said she had “news”), which gave me three hours for research. In the University Library, I found the first book on Melvyn Macveigh’s reading list: Capital: Volume One. It was a bit slow to start with, certainly not a page-turner. I persevered but there was no discernible plot and there were too many formulae. This Marx guy was no John Grisham. Disillusioned, I put it back. What I needed was some perspective, a human angle; who was this guy? I returned to the catalogue and entered Marx as a title. This time it suggested Karl Marx: A Biography.
This was more like it. It turned out that Marx was a total chancer. Famous for theorising the emancipation of the working class, Marx spent all day drinking port at the expense of some Engels bloke who had inherited a factory. It seemed to me that Marx must have been sleeping with the Engels guy, because why else would Engels give him all that money? And get this: Marx had his bread buttered on both sides—he married Jenny von Westphalen, whose dad was a baron or something. One of the best bits in the book was when they could no longer afford their middleclass lifestyle and Marx sent his wife to scrounge off her parents. While she was away, he knocked up the servant.
At five o’clock, I explained all this to Lucy’s chest. Fortunately, Lucy didn’t notice that I spoke to her chest any more than she noticed that barmen always served her first, or that men walked backwards after they passed her in the street, or that women swore at their husbands and hissed “Marry her then!” as if she’d jump at the chance to bed down with their hairy-backed, baldheaded mates. “It’s quite a sad story,” I said. “All the children from his marriage died tragically.”
“Yeah, I heard that.”
“You wouldn’t believe it: Jennychen got cancer and died just before her dad. Laura Marx, she went and married this Paul Lafargue guy and they committed suicide together in 1911. The wee boy Edgar died of tuberculosis when he was just eight. Another two died as babies, a third before it could even be named, and get this: Eleanor Marx, she shacked up with this Edward Aveling guy—”
“Is this the suicide pact that wasn’t a suicide pact?”
“Aye,” I said, a bit pissed off to have my story spoiled. “I guess brains aren’t genetic. I mean, surely it’s the first rule of suicide pacts: if he hands you the prussic acid and insists you go first, don’t do it.”
Lucy laughed, lips red from the blackcurrant cordial in her snakebite. “Do you know about Marx’s bastard child? Not Lenin, I mean the one he had with the servant?” Lucy was originally from the North West and she spoke with a Gaelic lull that sort of lingered, so that my replies always seemed delayed, as if we were talking on a satellite link.
“Aye, I read that too.”
“How is the arm?” she asked, her expression changing as she watched me struggle to get a fag out with one hand.
“Alright. I’m supposed to get the stitches out tomorrow.”
She shook her head and touched my knee as three students cheered, The Simpsons tune jingled, lights fizzed and sparked, and coins rattled out of a fruit machine.
4
The stabbing? Okay.
A canal runs through Dundule. There’s no lighting—not many people would choose to walk there on a November night—but in 1998, I always went home that way. I liked its cavernous stone cul-de-sacs and the rusty rings on its overgrown mooring plinths. I used to think, what an effort, what labour, to have built all this only for it to be replaced by the railway.
