On the Underside of Maths
By Aidan Monks
Oliver C. has lost control of his hands…
Oliver C. had only realised this on his quick-step descent down the sedimentary spiral staircase to the lowest and foulest Student Gents on the underside of the Maths Dep.[1] These stairs are old and could break with any thud. It was a brutal, Balinese dance downward. Catching blood from the supposedly useful holes in his face, both his mouth and nostrils (the latter being plural for now, he thinks, until his septum inevitably breaks...), his fingers had begun to go rigid and quiver in an unnatural parkinsonian state; if it were someone else, Oliver C. would be laughing, but today he has found himself unsurprisingly panicked with noted emphasis on his trembling and vulnerable features as the red gew kisses him cheek to chin. The fit of his fingers was extraordinary, convulsive: his ten supposedly useful digits, right and left, are suddenly now limp and hanging, dipped and fishing greedily for further blood from his gradual and ruby-red facial flow: downward, downward cohesively: all his legs can do is accelerate quickly south to the lowest recesses of his school, away, away from everything up there. From the watchtowers of Natural Sciences and panopticon Geography classrooms as well as Bursary/HM[2] Office glares of morbid loathing, along with the ugly gargoyle figments of tall, slick-back teachers positioned here and there in decorative three-pieces between the fervently (and typically) alone north quad and the dismal J.S. Bach belching across the historical and privileged high school grounds from the teeth of the chapel organ at work. Teachers are castles on a chess board only Oliver C. can make out, or so he would tell you: ‘They are picking off pawns one at a time’ he would tell you. The school quads have always been the primary nesting grounds for CCF parade, or, as cynics like Oliver C. would put it, ‘Our weekly dress-up’ - the place where children are religiously lectured in proper sense and their father’s orderliness, and obviously his decorum, goodness, not to mention his decorum; they become lamblike projects to be brooded by intense ritual and the ‘because I say so’ branch of reasoning. They, batons in hand, get children in the open air where corruption and banality are harder to see.
There is about as much order in the decade-old shit stains along this cubicle’s antique door as is going on up there, he thinks, ruminating on the quick-march technique he could never get right, nose and mouth still slathered rouge from where Gabriel B.’s fist had been. The door is violently graffitied in some dirty protest, a swastika here and a cock-and-balls there, one particular member generously endowed with twelve tauntingly tumescent shafts, perhaps even worse than the toilet bowl itself which could rightly do with a spray to reveal the shaded Kohler inscription. Although, flushing the stains away, as if anything (even the strongest Dettol) could possibly sort this putrid place out, isn’t an option - too much noise and no doubt an ascending echo, and his usual assailants are still on the prowl, listening foxlike for the movements of this 13 y/o rodent, this pussy, this little cocksucker, trapped on the underside of Maths - with hands that no longer work - as afternoon lessons commence.
‘Parade!!’ (a hundred feet of various sizes unwittingly drum to a halt, up on the outside of this stench).
Oliver C. has locked himself in the filthiest toilet of his prestigious school. This is a toilet known to few and ventured by fewer, most with the intent to smoke or masturbate. The cigarette and cigarillo stubs on the nape of the window pane, obscured by a thin wedge of oak, and the chalked-in black shooting-star streaks along the once-white and intensely cobwebbed surface, where they have been dragged and stubbed, are testament to the intoxicatedly childish and carefree sensations induced by only the most repulsive places.
Oliver C. washes his face.
…
His usual nerves and anxieties have always showcased themselves in a demonstrable tick on his left hand, each finger pressing on the air like some invisible keyboard, like a ritual of the imagination. This has occasionally impressed some passers-by who in that easy-to-misapprehend way of strangers assume he is so into his music that his hands continue to play the piano until he returns to the musical chair, compulsive and as obsessed with absence as addiction: ‘He must be that talented, and there are worse addictions than music of the classical genre!’ Situations of this sort have brought him joy more than once. But joy is a joke, and his hands have now numbed and drooped depressively by his sides - doltish gloves awaiting an adrift puppet master - and they are no longer spasming in that epileptic way, just still. Still as Gabriel B. had made them, using his own blundering Franz Liszt handspan to coil around Oliver C.’s wrists in a pythonesque way, tight as barbed wire, and hold his mass against the featherweight of a littler boy, spit in his face and command him to break free from his grip. Oliver C. shivers like an animated character before the jump; it is preposterous; he does this and whimpers in that morose, self-pitying way, fleetingly considering what just transpired; deliberately burrowed beneath the acidic gargling of post-cardio breaths; he knows he is a coward.
Oddly the immediate memory serves itself to Oliver as someone else’s: in conflict with a trend, Oliver is not at the exact centre of this instance of his life. The recollection plays back without Gabriel B.’s bloodshot eyes and curling lips in close up, or Gabriel and his cackling friends’ own lip scars from their fathers’ rings, but rather an elaborate high wide shot of the scene, bird’s eye perspective, with himself at the centre of focus and teeny-tiny in an expanded aspect ratio.
Only here does Oliver, pacing in the cell-like cubicle like a well-struck ping pong ball, realise that his excessive canine panting is a symptom of panic, of self-image and the ensuing nihilistic angst and other annoyingly abstract maladies, as opposed to the circulation of oxygen after a hefty shift on the running front - downward, downward.
Breathe.
‘Stand… FAST!’
One, two, three; one, two three goes the waltz of respiration.
There is no faraway movement of steps outside; no unintentional, catchy rhythm in the weekly dress-up’s deceleration of boots. A muffled baritone telling off. The singular crack of the pace stick on someone’s knee. The resounding prepubescent boy’s helpless moan (in soprano pitch), and his wilt-to-collapse into the epidermis of gravel at his feet - an unfortunate mattress to make contact with, no doubt.
…
A sudden symphony of words: Oliver C. is startled by: ‘What in the bloody hell are you doing down here? Nose bleed, is it? Jolly bad. I’ve only had a few in my time. It’s a right mess, isn’t it? Goodness, you’ve got it down your shirt: Clumsy! What am I doing here? Ah, well, the usual. Some herbal refreshment, if I may be so bold, ha ha! Bought it yesterday; a couple of grams; the lad seemed a tad shady but what the hell, am I right! You could do us a favour, old chap, and come back in an hour or an hour-and-a-half: you find me in a state of disrepair, you know frothing like so at the mouth or whatever, go call someone for some help as this devil’s lettuce will be a bit of a bad batch, if you know what I mean…’
From his indifferent, though perhaps more so underwhelmed, response to the spontaneous entrance of Lazarus D., Oliver allows the older boy[3] to speak freely in his muddled and thick dialect, oblivious to most things that do not possess the ability to razor through his own inherited stream of refined vocabulary. As is usually the case, it takes Lazarus D. (whose personality is a power in itself) approx. five minutes of concentrated commentary (often self-referential and meta) about the bombsite state of his academia, the god awful charcoal uniforms he (and every other student, for that matter) is forced into each morning, and not to mention the harrowing torture of his 7.45 A.M. alarm, wracking him within an inch of his life on the daily he emphatically attests, or the one drop-dead gorgeous Parisian girl with the full-frame glasses who won’t give him the time of day (etc. etc.); it takes this much for him to see that Oliver C. has become the butt of a recently-administered beating.
Lazarus cuts his soliloquy short:
‘Good Christ, well if you look at that! Those marks are going to get swollen, my friend… Who was it then? No, let me guess! - Declan, was it? No-no. Gabriel? Yes, of course it was. Fucking Gabriel! He’s a top lad but he has a side to him, if you know what I mean! Bad beating, was it? Looks like it. What did you get up to deserve that, ha ha! Well, everyone gets one at some point. I suppose I didn’t, but I know a heck of a lot who have, and do to be honest. This place. No one would know. The teajors,[4] all of them, standing guard and shit and no one sees anything; they’re like CCTVs that spend 50% of their battery blinking really, really slowly - if you know what I mean!’
This antiquarian toilet is Oliver’s.
Lazarus D. lights up.
Oliver has claimed this toilet on the underside of Maths in that irrational, territorial, and wanting way. Snap - crackle - phewww. The smoke alarm has been dead for as long as Oliver has attended his prestigious school (so nothing to worry about there). ‘I know a boy, Calvin I think he’s called, used to come here, left two years ago. Bloody shambles if you ask me. It’s a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. They put him in a boarding house with the wrong types, real ‘wrongens’, so it goes. Bloody shambles…’ Phewww.
Lazarus D. exhales coolly on an uncharacteristically sombre note. There is some generic recognition of even the most privileged person’s potential for damage between him and Oliver C., the younger boy, who is still yet to speak. What the Deputy Head has routinely called ‘a bit of ruddy humanity’ can transform your perception of someone otherwise superbly irritating; the most aggravating aspect of Lazarus being, obviously, that if one were to point out any of his wildly invading idiosyncrasies, he would pay approximately no heed to the criticism. ‘Sure thing,’ he would bray in that tucked-up, nasal groan of his, and carry on chuffing obnoxiously, caressing his grease-smitten curtains back into place. And still Oliver C., whose fingers are starting to suffer into a bowing position, not of his will, is somewhat content with Lazarus’ presence in the damp musk of his toilet.
There is no one opinion at work in Oliver.
What does he feel? An adolescent question. His mindset is unplaceable in condition, as he finds it regularly is, tiptoeing the fragile centimetres between agony and glad.
And still he’s silent…
Phewww.
… until, like an intoxicant-stimulated level up, like the spiritual highs contracted by younger boys from hanging out next to older boys who occasionally smoke weed, Oliver C. has a thing or two to say, all of a sudden:
‘Can I have some?’
Silence is a cold, dense, igneous slab for shy boys; sturdy and stable as anything until, suddenly, one afternoon on the underside of Maths, it goes for your legs:
‘Can I have a drag? Please…?’
Phewww.
Phewww.
Phewww!
Phewww-phewww-phewwwwwww…
‘No: like this. Not like that, like this. In… and out, if you know what I mean. In and out!’
Gugh!
‘Good. Cough. That means you’re doing it right, mate, exhaaaaaale,’ Lazarus D. finishes with broad, flapping, angelic gestures so his subject understands the full extent of his wisdom. Oliver C. has regressed to babyhood. But, that is fine by him.
Phewww. Phewwwwwwww. The smoke alarm will never ring.
If Oliver C. was not in the midst of losing his recreational virginity, he would have been startled by a second surreptitious entry:
‘POUTAIN! MERDE!!’ protests Jacques L-T. (JLT) on entering from his equally quick-step descent, nursing his jabbed-at and mushrooming kneecap to no avail, raising his singular exposed leg to his waist in an occasional disco-dance manoeuvre, one arm for sling support, the other flailing like mad. ‘Have you any idea what kind of pig-dogs are training cadets? Look what he did to my fucking knee!!’ Observing his friend’s condition, Oliver decides that JLT had traversed some distance in such a state to get to this place, and he too must be one of the few ‘regulars’ of this toilet’s stench. It could be his diarrhea over the Kohler inscription, his ironic ‘#FreeIreland’ in red permanent marker on one of the whiter wall tiles to the left, or even his sodden, tattered book collection - some torn enough to be totally cheated of a binder - stashed like prospector’s booty on the underside of the sink’s tender piping: Beyond Good and Evil and White Teeth and The World of S.J. Perelman. Books with a nostalgic pulse which might belong to any French 14 y/o immigrant, pining from the English rustic of an independent school to be played by his native breeze; a belly built for soupe à l'oignon and other stereotypes, with his mother’s arms enveloping him like a rose flower before the bloom. Books of sentimental value no doubt, caged below, out of sight, away, away from them and the usual assailants and reminding Oliver C., who is undergoing an uncanny moment of empathy in his marijuana high, that outside the bone and tissue planet on his shoulders that all things orbit, there are shy boys like himself who come to this toilet neither to smoke or masturbate, but for apoplectic recess from the bells and bustle of everyday things, and read Zadie Smith in the quiet.
‘I need an ice pack. I need like an ice pack or something. I need an ice pack, man.’ JLT goes on like this for some time, now that he has slid to a right angle against the wall, tainted with multi-shafted penises, skulls and vulvas, and the like, with the majority of his weight churning upon one gluteus maximus as he runs his medium-sized hands up and down his withering leg. Perhaps more testing than the pain of making contact with his kneecap, as delicate and medically proper as it may be, is actually reaching his leg in the cocoon-like and, so far, badge-less CCF shirt he has been encased in, groin to neck. Oliver assesses him.
Amidst JLT’s English complaints/demands for attention and French cursing, Lazarus D., less so at 90° now than 20-30°, torso almost folded forward like a melted cheese and skull as close to the floor as a fishing line teasing the open water in anticipation of a good killing, makes the occasional close-eyed remark as if unintentionally heisting his own dreamscape:
‘That French girl guys…’
‘Boys, do you know where I can get ice for my knee?’
‘What was her name?’
‘The fuck has he been smoking?!’
‘Celine. Yes! Celine. Fetching Celine…’
‘Do you boys know at all? Excuse-moi but this is my first week, I do not know…’
‘Have you been to schools in other countries before?’
‘No, this is my, uh, my first time…’
‘She won’t give me the time of day, boys!’
‘Hey what the hell happened to your face?’
‘Punched.’
‘How long? It is, look, it’s still bleeding my guy!’
‘Crap.’
‘You should wash it.’
‘I have. I’m down here, aren’t I?’
‘Why come all the way down here? There is a toilet up in the classrooms area.’
‘It’s more comfortable.’
‘It’s disgusting!’
‘Stinks…’
‘It smells like corpses.’
‘Well why on earth are you here?’
‘I like shitting in the STAFF toilets.’
‘It’s not like this place is used regularly though, is it…’
‘Makes no difference to me, does it.’
‘Beautiful eyes… and neck… like a swan!’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Jacques Louis-Trintignant. Et toi?'
‘Erotic physique...’
‘Oliver C. Well: Ollie.’
‘I think I might love her.’
‘What’s wrong with your hands?’
‘Do you want some weed? He has way too much on his person.’
‘Not if that’s what it does to you!’
‘Do you think she loves me? Do you?’
‘I have to get out of here, you know. I’ve been here three weeks and I have to go. I have to go.’
‘It does smell down here…’
‘What’s wrong with your hands? Why are they like that?’
‘Did you know this toilet is haunted?’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Ooooooooooh!’
‘No, seriously. Haunted. Haunted as Mrs. Gibson’s sex dungeons…’
‘I flew on my own from New York. I still have jet lag, my god!’
‘She’s so beautiful…’ ‘I’ve seen ghosts on my way down here. Sometimes.’
‘New York is a shitheap of a city. It’s no Paris.’
‘I want her. Dudes, you don’t understand. I want her.’
‘You’re from Paris?’
‘Toulon.’
‘Do you miss it?’
‘Constantly, man. The school food is soooo bad, ah!’
‘Look at us…’
‘At us?’
‘We’re a strange group, the three of us, huh?’
‘Weeeeeeeeeird…’
‘And you don’t want to smoke?’
‘NO. I WANT HER.’
‘Okay, this boy is not okay.’
‘What was your name again?’
‘Jacques.’
‘Nice to make your acquaintance, Jack. I’m Oliver.’
‘Je sais que.’
‘Do you think we should sit him up?’
‘Is your face alright though? Maybe you should come for some ice with me?’
‘Sitting him up is probably a good idea, right?’
‘Can anything be perfect? Isn’t something perfect incapable of imperfection? Which means nothing is perfect in the world? And we’re all just chasing water vapour…’
‘Um, what?’
‘Do you think we have a duty to ourselves?’
‘Sit him up… here you go…’
‘I don’t think I could have a duty to anybody…’
‘Okay, he’s up!’
‘Do you guys think I would suit a tattoo? Like right here? Might give me some more character?’
‘What of?’
‘You ought to like yourself the way you are!’
‘Hah!!’
‘Just the words “Existence precedes essence” ten inches across my pectorals? How about that, huh?’
‘I think he’s asleep…’
‘I’m not lying. This place is haunted. That’s why I’m here.’
‘Shall we go?’
‘Go? What do you mean ‘go’?’
‘I still need an ice pack from that fucker’s stick. It’s really swollen. Jesus, look at it!’
‘You go to the san; the med centre. Do you have a friend to take you? It’s just across the quad there: you’ll have to go past ‘that fucker’ if the parade's still going on though. You still want to go?’
‘You don’t want to get out of here?’
‘Not really, no. I’m sorry. Do you?’
‘No. No.’
…
Oliver C.’s eyes are bashfully down for the millisecond preceding what can only be a bestial groan belching from behind the sheathed window. Rational sense is submerged in adrenaline and emptying sweat glands. There is a convulsive domino effect between Oliver and JLT, both palpitating vivaciously and disconcertedly from a noise foreign enough to challenge the solidity of reason and unquestionably supernatural-less reality.
‘What is it?’
Ineluctable madness.
Nothing. Nothing. It is impossible to exist with rational sense fully intact when you spend so much time on the underside of Maths.
The chapel bells blare in the heavens, stirring the boys from their teenage terror.
Blong!
Nothing.
With the resounding silence plastered to the downstairs toilet space, with no subsequent groan or animalistic movement, no predatory scent, Oliver C. is in doubt: Oliver C. doubts whether any such noise oscillated from the isolated window pane in the first place; doubts whether his lie about the toilet being haunted was truly a lie at all.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’
Having unconsciously risen and erected himself on both feet from his squatting position, Oliver C., now facing the horrors of sobriety, he thinks, tugs and fingers the back of his hair in observable embarrassment. His scratching motion instinctively, in as graceful and nuanced a way as he can, mutates into a patting-down motion, so as to avoid giving off the impression of uncleanness, with emphasis on hair lice amidst the sebum.
‘Oh, nothing is wrong with your hands. They looked broken only a minute ago!’
Running his fingers over each other, pins and needles lacquering them with a moist agitation, Oliver C. can hardly disagree.
Oliver C. has regained control of his hands for now; he thinks; he paws them together dumbly in a rebellious clap like a rite of passage. ‘No, nothing,’ he repeats, affirmatively, only noticing then how petite JLT actually is. In the sweet 5’6”-5’7” bracket; mouselike in profile; Mediterranean complexion and unarguable babyface make you want to go: ‘aww!’ The childlike way the slightly older French boy caresses his chin upon his left shoulder and peers introvertedly down, the cuteness and lamblike innocence of the act, seems to Oliver confrontational about the ridiculousness of his daily visitations to this shitheap of a lavatory. Why is he, with hands that work for now, tucked away like this during afternoon lessons? Tell him how ridiculous he is! With hands that work, Oliver C. clasps confidently for a non-existent toilet roll to collect the nosebleed which has started to pitter-patter once again. Nothing. Hah! What an idiot, whose fateful gaze has only come back to his own mucky self-image, the self-examining youth, one glance away, open nerves, how narcissistic, hah, closing in with his eyes and closing all the further like an implanted retinal zoom lens in place and implanted, up there, a headset, a judicial set of spectacles pointed at the tilted mirror screen portal in sepia, in monochrome, the vascular portal, the usual shame practiced as prayer, is that me, am I that image, that image up there, over there, down here, this place, this foulness, this death stench, in search of ideas about longing on the obsequious underside of Maths again, again, again. Blong!
Oliver C. is finished down here.
He thinks.
Nothing.
He thinks his loitering is over.
Quiet before noise. At last. An erupting ocean of fortissimo, rising with the day, threatening to drag down normative structure with its eventual, enunciated coda.
Is it sanity?
‘Would you like to get out of here, Oliver? Oliver?’
Yes I would. Of course I would. Yes.
[1] Maths shares a two-hundred y/o tower with some astrophysics, psychology and, naturally, analytic philosophy classrooms but students and teachers alike have found it more convenient, to the despair of present minority subjects, to simply refer to the aged place as “Maths”.
[2] Headmaster.
[3] 15 y/o, often characterised as a level-ten-status ‘jock’; moves the classroom desk towards him to avoid having to shift himself/his chair from where he has perpetually planted himself.
[4] The term “teajor” has come to replace “teacher” to most disgruntled students, having been extracted from a popular online meme template mocking the profession; a school child's way to empowerment maybe?
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