Read Online The Past and Other Lies by Maggie Joel - Free Book Online
Authors: Maggie Joel
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university notepad. Beside Tom, Bert Humphries, the department’s senior lecturer, sat with a weary air about him, emerging from his stupor just long enough to challenge the assertion made by the Professor of Politics that a second colour in a hood lining must go to five centimetres by citing a little-known Australian university that used two and a half centimetres as its hood-lining measurement. The comment had been met with derision and raised eyebrows of the ‘What can you expect from an Australian university?’ kind and Bert had relapsed into silence.
Dr Ashley Lempriere was there too, tapping a pencil with loud impatience. Charlotte watched her through narrowed eyes. What was she doing here? There was no way a Canadian exchange professor was the least bit interested in academic dress, except perhaps her own academic dress when collecting some honorary degree from somewhere. Charlotte’s eyes scanned the room. There were a lot of professors and department heads around the table and Lempriere’s contract ended in June. Was she preparing the way for an extension? Tenure? A takeover?
She tightened her grip on her pen and took a calming breath. There was less than fifteen minutes of the meeting left. She squeezed her eyes shut. Concentrate. She must concentrate.
TEENAGE SUICIDE IS EVERYONE’S PROBLEM!
The problem was she still felt guilty about Darren McKenzie.
She didn’t like the fact that she still felt guilty more than twenty years later. That she felt guilty despite having done more than enough over the years (some of it pretty morally dubious—lying to save her sister’s marriage being one glaring example) to make up for it. And she couldn’t understand why the bad things she had done over the years (borrowing people’s cars without asking them, moving out of houses when the rent was due, lying on her CV on two occasions, pretending to be ill to avoid family Christmases) caused her no pangs of remorse whatsoever, not a shred of regret, and yet she still felt guilty about Darren McKenzie.
Of course, none of those other things had ended up with someone trying to kill themselves.
Except that it hadn’t ended. Nothing ever ended—something happened and then something else happened and so it went on. And the most recent thing that had happened was that Jennifer had gone on national television and said all that.
It couldn’t possibly be because of Darren McKenzie, could it?
She tried to remember. Jennifer hadn’t cried for long. A couple of nights. Maybe three. By the end of that summer she’d been seeing someone else. Hadn’t she? Or was that the following summer? At any rate, she’d got over Darren.
The clock above Professor Kendall’s head inched forward to nine forty-nine. If she could just think of something to say. Of course, the obvious thing to say, the one thing that every single person seated around the table was thinking but hadn’t said, was: Isn’t this the most absurd waste of all our time and who the hell really gives a flying fuck what colours the Media Studies people choose to graduate in and why can’t we all just pack up and go home right now?
The clock moved on to nine fifty and Charlotte twisted her pen around and around in her hands.
As far as she could recall, the main thing about Darren McKenzie was that he came from the north and wore a red-and-white-striped football scarf, which was the colours of Stoke City Football Club, when every other boy at Henry Morton Secondary had worn blue and white QPR or Chelsea scarves or the navy and white of Spurs who, that year, had won the Cup. This, and the way he said ‘bath’ so that it rhymed with ‘maths’, made Darren distinctive. Other than these scintillating differences, Darren McKenzie had been average-looking with acne and sticking-out ears and the usual Saturday job at Your Price Records.
Were our lives so dull, Charlotte wondered, that the arrival of a boy from Stoke seemed exciting?
Jennifer had started going out
Dr Ashley Lempriere was there too, tapping a pencil with loud impatience. Charlotte watched her through narrowed eyes. What was she doing here? There was no way a Canadian exchange professor was the least bit interested in academic dress, except perhaps her own academic dress when collecting some honorary degree from somewhere. Charlotte’s eyes scanned the room. There were a lot of professors and department heads around the table and Lempriere’s contract ended in June. Was she preparing the way for an extension? Tenure? A takeover?
She tightened her grip on her pen and took a calming breath. There was less than fifteen minutes of the meeting left. She squeezed her eyes shut. Concentrate. She must concentrate.
TEENAGE SUICIDE IS EVERYONE’S PROBLEM!
The problem was she still felt guilty about Darren McKenzie.
She didn’t like the fact that she still felt guilty more than twenty years later. That she felt guilty despite having done more than enough over the years (some of it pretty morally dubious—lying to save her sister’s marriage being one glaring example) to make up for it. And she couldn’t understand why the bad things she had done over the years (borrowing people’s cars without asking them, moving out of houses when the rent was due, lying on her CV on two occasions, pretending to be ill to avoid family Christmases) caused her no pangs of remorse whatsoever, not a shred of regret, and yet she still felt guilty about Darren McKenzie.
Of course, none of those other things had ended up with someone trying to kill themselves.
Except that it hadn’t ended. Nothing ever ended—something happened and then something else happened and so it went on. And the most recent thing that had happened was that Jennifer had gone on national television and said all that.
It couldn’t possibly be because of Darren McKenzie, could it?
She tried to remember. Jennifer hadn’t cried for long. A couple of nights. Maybe three. By the end of that summer she’d been seeing someone else. Hadn’t she? Or was that the following summer? At any rate, she’d got over Darren.
The clock above Professor Kendall’s head inched forward to nine forty-nine. If she could just think of something to say. Of course, the obvious thing to say, the one thing that every single person seated around the table was thinking but hadn’t said, was: Isn’t this the most absurd waste of all our time and who the hell really gives a flying fuck what colours the Media Studies people choose to graduate in and why can’t we all just pack up and go home right now?
The clock moved on to nine fifty and Charlotte twisted her pen around and around in her hands.
As far as she could recall, the main thing about Darren McKenzie was that he came from the north and wore a red-and-white-striped football scarf, which was the colours of Stoke City Football Club, when every other boy at Henry Morton Secondary had worn blue and white QPR or Chelsea scarves or the navy and white of Spurs who, that year, had won the Cup. This, and the way he said ‘bath’ so that it rhymed with ‘maths’, made Darren distinctive. Other than these scintillating differences, Darren McKenzie had been average-looking with acne and sticking-out ears and the usual Saturday job at Your Price Records.
Were our lives so dull, Charlotte wondered, that the arrival of a boy from Stoke seemed exciting?
Jennifer had started going out
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