There was no way to predict Rowland, no handy early warning. He’d just be there on your doorstep, usually leaning casually on the doorbell at some ungodly hour of the morning, wanting.
I’d begun to pay more attention to the literature than I ever had when I was at university — not to keep up to speed with the subject, but to try and detect Rowland’s enthusiasms, give myself a little lead-time on that early-morning doorbell. It never worked. You couldn’t guess what would attract his attention. The bell would ring, there would be a phone call or an email or — very rarely, when he didn’t think there was much urgency — a letter. Do this, do that, I need this, I need that.
There was just no way to say no. Rowland used neurolinguistic programming or something; he could talk anyone into doing anything. He had, of course, never learned how to drive. Why bother? He had an endless supply of former students who had fallen under his spell and were just waiting for him to turn up, “Oh, hello, Jim, I have to go out to the West Country today and I know you’re not busy right now…” Rowland wasn’t a force of nature; he was a curse, and sometimes I thought he was my own personal curse.
We ran into the rain somewhere around Andover. One moment we were driving towards that great wall of cloud, the next the view out of the windscreen was like looking into a stormy aquarium. The line of traffic slowed to a crawl, apart from one arsehole in a Jeep Grand Cherokee who decided he needed to overtake everyone else and whose rear lights rapidly vanished into the rainy dusk ahead of us.
“I imagine we’ll be seeing him again,” Rowland said smugly. “Probably in the back of a hearse.” Like almost every non-driver I had ever encountered, Rowland was a terrible passenger.
“Fuck this thing in particular,” I muttered, and a couple of minutes later when a sign that said ‘Services’ loomed up out of the watery half-dark, I pulled off the road.
I blamed the internet. In days gone by, Rowland would have had to subscribe to dozens of journals and newsletters, and the theories and rumours and suppositions would have come to him in an orderly progression hindered only by the Royal Mail. These days, wild stuff came to him direct down his broadband connection. All he had to do was type a couple of words into Google and the world flooded into his cramped and musty little flat behind Holborn. He spent hours and hours, usually long after midnight, sifting through it all, saving some stuff onto memory sticks he got cheap from a former student who worked at PC World, printing other stuff out and filing it in great stacks of A4, keeping some things on his hard drive so he could drag it into Word and cut and paste until it took on a pleasing configuration. Then he’d jam half a ream of paper into his ageing Hewlett-Packard printer and out would come this… stuff…
“What is this?”
“Beg pardon?”
“This.” Rowland was pointing at his plate, on which rested a fried plaice fillet in breadcrumbs, about two dozen shoestring fries, a wilted scrap of lettuce, half a tomato with its cut surface carved into uneven serrations, a small forest of mustard cress, and thumbnail-sized splots of tomato ketchup and tartare sauce.
“It’s fish and chips, Rowland,” I said.
He looked down at his meal. “Are you serious?”
“Yes,” I said. I pointed. “Look. Fish there, and chips there.”
He poked the fried plaice with his fork. “That’s not funny.”
“No, it isn’t. But it’s fish and chips.”
“And all this…?” Indicating the lettuce and stuff.
“Garnish. It’s garnish.” I saw the look on his face and put down my knife and fork. “Look, you didn’t pay for it, so I think it’s pretty fucking rude to complain about it, actually.”
Rowland sat back on the slippery plastic-upholstered banquette and lowered his chin. “I didn’t want to stop anyway,” he muttered into his chest like a sulky six-year-old.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake…” I rubbed my face and sat back and looked around the restaurant. The A-roads of Britain do not, as a rule, have the same dining facilities as the motorways. Travel on a motorway, and every half an hour or so there will be a service station where you can buy petrol and a weird and eclectic selection of newspapers, books, magazines, CDs, audio cassettes, soft toys, sweets, soft drinks, bunches of flowers and packets of crisps. These service stations will always have a restaurant. Back when I left school and spent a year, before going to university, working as a chef in a service station kitchen, they would have their own restaurants, with their own food. These days, they’ve mostly surrendered to the chains, and if you want something to eat you have a choice, depending on where you stop, of burgers or fried chicken or some obscure brand of pie.
On an A-road, on the other hand, the stops come at irregular intervals, if at all. There is usually petrol, but not often newspapers and magazines. And the restaurants are another thing altogether.
The one we had stopped at seemed to have been overlooked by the march of Civilisation, like the home of some undiscovered South American tribe. The orange carpet had the texture of a saucepan-scourer, the walls were panelled with vanishingly-thin strips of wood veneer, and the furniture looked like a 1970s low-budget film-maker’s idea of the seating on a passenger space vehicle. The food had been abused so much that it was barely food any longer, more an outdated ideal of food from the days when British situation comedies had found Afro-Caribbean accents amusing.
I was actually appalled that I had stopped here, but I needed large amounts of caffeine and sugar and I needed to be off the road while the storm was going on, two things this restaurant actually did very well. Rowland, on the other hand, had decided that he wanted lunch too. And then he had discovered that he had left home without his wallet.
I said, “I needed a break, Rowland.”
He didn’t bother to raise his head, but he did shrug.
“You can’t just turn up on someone’s doorstep at nine o’clock in the morning without any warning and expect them to be all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and waiting to drive you to the West Country,” I said.
Rowland looked at me from under his great badgery eyebrows. “You were lucky to get a degree at all, you know,” he said in a low voice.
“Oh, Rowland,” I groaned.
“The Faculty thought — quite accurately, I might add — that your coursework was of poor quality,” he went on, and as if gaining strength from his words he managed to spear a fry and pop it into his mouth. “I, of course, thought differently.” He chewed the fry and swallowed.
“Rowland,” I said. “Not now.”
“I went into Cunningham’s office and stood up for you, Jim,” he told me, and he magically managed to lift his head and sit up. “I told him I thought you had some worth.”
I drank some coffee.
By now his anger had enabled him to cut a small portion off his fried plaice. He swiped it through the ketchup and the tartare sauce. “I forced Cunningham to see that you had some promise.” He actually twinkled at me as he ate the piece of fish. “I got you that degree, Jim.”
I drank more coffee.
“And what did you do with that degree, Jim? Hm?” I watched his fork range around the oval platter his meal rested on, picking up fish, fries, a bit of lettuce, some cress. He put them all in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “What exactly did you do with that degree I put my career on the line for? Hm?”
“You didn’t put your career on the line for me, you mad old tosser,” I said. It was such a ludicrous concept that I almost laughed out loud. “You never put anybody else before yourself in your life.”
By now, he was industriously clearing his platter. “Whatever else you’ve managed to piss away up a wall in the meantime, I got you that degree,” he told me with enormous confidence. “You owe me, Jim.”