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Authors: Wendy Holden
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accurately captured the view his then girlfriend’s father had of him. Olly had not realised until now that, if he stood in a completely dark corner, the words ‘I Am The Antichrist’ would appear to hang in midair.
Claudia, the girlfriend, a North London princess and brilliantly clever, was clearly intended for greater things than a failed student actor entertaining dim hopes of local journalism. They had parted amicably enough and Olly wondered what she was doing now. Not standing outside Branston College in the intensifying cold and shifting from foot to foot, that was for sure. He decided he might as well go.
But not without venturing into the college interior first and inquiring after her. A great Muscle Mary of a porter flatly refused to let him in and seemed to take particular pleasure in confirming that no, no message had been left.
In a violent spasm of embarrassment and self-disgust, Olly retreated. Isabel was not interested – no doubt thought him a pretty pathetic specimen. In a nasty suit. She was the Antichrist, not him. She was rude and ungrateful. How could he have been so mistaken? He was losing the ability to judge people along with the rest of his faculties. He resolved to dismiss her from his thoughts, but she bounced back immediately, with her long smile and brilliant red hair.
The path back to the road was through shaggy rhododendron bushes, lit by futuristic, triffid-shaped streetlamps that were presumably part of the Gesamtkunstwerk . They didn’t seem to Olly to work all that well; it was oddly hard to see.
He walked slowly, musing on the immediate future. He would return to the small terraced house where he had rented a room all summer. It was a hideous room, cold and draughty, and with some other student upstairs who banged his huge feet on the floor in time to the start of EastEnders . Leaving it would not be a wrench. But leaving town altogether would.
There had been more riding on Isabel than she could ever have imagined, than he himself had realised, perhaps. The thought of their date, of perhaps striking up a relationship, was all that remained to tether Olly to the town where he had spent the last three years. He had no money. There was no prospect of a job. The lease on his room was at an end. All that lay before him was the train back home. It was a ghastly thought, made all the ghastlier by the suspicion that his parents were dreading his return every bit as much as he.
Mooching along, staring at the ground, his hands plunged into his jeans, Olly now cannoned straight into someone else not looking where they were going either. It was a thin man with a wispy beard and a baggy hound’s-tooth jacket that had clearly seen better days.
‘Ooof!’ exclaimed Dr David Stringer, deputy head of the Branston English department, as his books and papers exploded all around him. To his incalculable relief Stringer saw that the person he had collided with was a student and not, as he had feared, the terrifying Professor Green, his boss.
Gillian Green was in a state of panic at the moment and lashing out at all her subordinates. The arrival of the new Master had spread terror like a contagion throughout the college. And yet Richard Black seemed to David to be at pains to avoid his colleagues, rather than launch inquiries into their departments as Gillian seemed to fear. She was, he knew, about to haul him over the coals for ‘inappropriate internet representation’, but that was largely her fault. It had been she who insisted, when the American Master was first mooted, that David get himself a Facebook page in an effort to seem more ‘with it’. And now someone – he had no idea who – had put neon devil horns on all the photos of him and there were hairy bottoms on his personal wall.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Olly said, guiltily peeling close-typed sheets of A4 from the dirty tarmac. ‘These are all muddy now.’
‘They were muddy anyway,’ David said scathingly. ‘In terms of
Claudia, the girlfriend, a North London princess and brilliantly clever, was clearly intended for greater things than a failed student actor entertaining dim hopes of local journalism. They had parted amicably enough and Olly wondered what she was doing now. Not standing outside Branston College in the intensifying cold and shifting from foot to foot, that was for sure. He decided he might as well go.
But not without venturing into the college interior first and inquiring after her. A great Muscle Mary of a porter flatly refused to let him in and seemed to take particular pleasure in confirming that no, no message had been left.
In a violent spasm of embarrassment and self-disgust, Olly retreated. Isabel was not interested – no doubt thought him a pretty pathetic specimen. In a nasty suit. She was the Antichrist, not him. She was rude and ungrateful. How could he have been so mistaken? He was losing the ability to judge people along with the rest of his faculties. He resolved to dismiss her from his thoughts, but she bounced back immediately, with her long smile and brilliant red hair.
The path back to the road was through shaggy rhododendron bushes, lit by futuristic, triffid-shaped streetlamps that were presumably part of the Gesamtkunstwerk . They didn’t seem to Olly to work all that well; it was oddly hard to see.
He walked slowly, musing on the immediate future. He would return to the small terraced house where he had rented a room all summer. It was a hideous room, cold and draughty, and with some other student upstairs who banged his huge feet on the floor in time to the start of EastEnders . Leaving it would not be a wrench. But leaving town altogether would.
There had been more riding on Isabel than she could ever have imagined, than he himself had realised, perhaps. The thought of their date, of perhaps striking up a relationship, was all that remained to tether Olly to the town where he had spent the last three years. He had no money. There was no prospect of a job. The lease on his room was at an end. All that lay before him was the train back home. It was a ghastly thought, made all the ghastlier by the suspicion that his parents were dreading his return every bit as much as he.
Mooching along, staring at the ground, his hands plunged into his jeans, Olly now cannoned straight into someone else not looking where they were going either. It was a thin man with a wispy beard and a baggy hound’s-tooth jacket that had clearly seen better days.
‘Ooof!’ exclaimed Dr David Stringer, deputy head of the Branston English department, as his books and papers exploded all around him. To his incalculable relief Stringer saw that the person he had collided with was a student and not, as he had feared, the terrifying Professor Green, his boss.
Gillian Green was in a state of panic at the moment and lashing out at all her subordinates. The arrival of the new Master had spread terror like a contagion throughout the college. And yet Richard Black seemed to David to be at pains to avoid his colleagues, rather than launch inquiries into their departments as Gillian seemed to fear. She was, he knew, about to haul him over the coals for ‘inappropriate internet representation’, but that was largely her fault. It had been she who insisted, when the American Master was first mooted, that David get himself a Facebook page in an effort to seem more ‘with it’. And now someone – he had no idea who – had put neon devil horns on all the photos of him and there were hairy bottoms on his personal wall.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Olly said, guiltily peeling close-typed sheets of A4 from the dirty tarmac. ‘These are all muddy now.’
‘They were muddy anyway,’ David said scathingly. ‘In terms of
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