A painting of St Michael, weighing souls in his scales. Of St Christopher, crossing a great river with the infant Christ on his shoulder.
Titmuss’s phone goes off (who else would have a Govinda Jaya Jaya ringtone?). He fumbles through his pockets.
Come, let’s go, Wittgenstein says. We shouldn’t wake the church. The church is dreaming. The church is falling through the centuries. The church doesn’t want to be woken up. It doesn’t want us here.
Trumpington Street. A sudden shower. Rain, falling heavily. We shelter in the museum porch, watching the water splash from the gutters.
TITMUSS: It’s like an Indian monsoon. The weather’s gone weird.
EDE: The world’s ending.
MULBERRY: And Cambridge will be the first to go under. Cambridge and Cambridgeshire and East Anglia … The North Sea will reclaim it all.
EDE: You seem pleased.
MULBERRY: Oh, I can’t wait for the world to end!
Rain pours from the mouths of the gargoyles. Chained monkeys … A drowning monk … A faceless figure with a snake in its mouth …
WITTGENSTEIN: Do you know why God sent the Flood? Men spilled their seed on trees and stones. They copulated with beasts. And the greater beasts copulated with lesser beasts — the dog, with the rat; the cock, with the peahen. (A pause.) So God reversed the act of creation, unleashing the sea he had once sealed up, allowing the waters of the deep to sweep over the land.
TITMUSS (quietly): Far out, man.
MULBERRY (quieter still): You’re a fucking hippie, Titmuss.
• • •
Inside the Fitzwilliam, sheltering from the rain.
His brother thought of himself as a kind of Noah, Wittgenstein says, as we wander among the exhibits.
Logic is what guards against the Flood, his brother said. Against the annulment of order. Against the destruction of goodness.
Noah sought a sanctuary on the face of the abyss, his brother wrote in his notebooks. And isn’t that what I am seeking: a sanctuary on the face of the abyss?
As love is stronger than death, so is logic stronger than chaos, his brother wrote in his notebooks. In the storm of the world, the ark of my thought will anchor on the mountain of certainty.
Guy Fawkes’. Midnight, after the pubs close. Mulberry’s annual derangement of the senses house party.
Coats in the front room. DJ in the living room. Dealer in the dining room, showing his wares: MDMA, ‘Miaow Miaow’, and a mystery powder he can’t identify. An amusebouche, he says — a free snort for anyone who buys …
The kitchen. Dozens of cans of beer, wine. A jam-tub full of punch, with floating cherries and slices of banana. Stacks of plastic cups wrapped in cellophane.
The first bedroom upstairs. Very grand, with sanded floorboards and tall sash windows looking out onto the street. The marijuana zone. Posters: Che in his beret, Bob Marley in Rasta colours. We join the smoking circle.
Conversation is dopey, making Ede impatient. Where are the Clare College girls Mulberry promised? Ede needs girls!
EDE: Have you ever been in love, Peters? I mean really in love?
Ede speaks of his romance with a Master’s daughter. Her summer dress and flip-flops … A lily pond … A raft … Skinny-dipping … A bottle of champagne chilling in the water …
Great love will be the making of him, he’s sure of it, Ede says. Only romance will teach him what to do with his life.
The bathroom. Guthrie’s in the tub, reenacting the death of Seneca under Doyle’s direction.
GUTHRIE/SENECA: As long as you live, keep learning how to live; and this is as true for me, today, as it is for any of you. Expectation is the greatest impediment to living; running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today. The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity …
How noble Guthrie seems! How profound!
GUTHRIE/SENECA: Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
Guthrie sniffs cocaine from a mirror. Ede rubs some on his gums (it acts more quickly this way, he says). Mulberry, trousers down, applies his cocaine rectally (it’s even quicker this way, he says).
The second bedroom (set aside for ketamine, Mulberry tells us). It’s dark inside. The music thumps up from downstairs, bass magnified through the floorboards. Slumped individuals, among them Scroggins … Is it Scroggins? Yes: there he is, lost in a K-hole.
The third bedroom, Mulberry’s, up a second flight of stairs. Posters. Mapplethorpe’s men fisting. A large drawing of a headless man, with a labyrinth for viscera and a death’s head for genitals, holding a knife in one hand and a bleeding heart in another. A glassed-in roof terrace, full of straggly marijuana plants.
Mulberry laces a spliff with codeine and passes it round. We have to lie down, it’s so strong.
The roofs of Cambridge! We’re on top of the world! The sky above us. The sky: an abyss. The night: a great cave. What a night to lose our minds!
Benwell is letting off fireworks in the garden. Bursts of colour. Cerise. Vermillion. A Catherine wheel spinning. A smouldering fire, spitting out sparks. Ede says he can feel the fireworks. Mulberry says he can taste the pink ones.
Three AM. The girls are here. We lie on our bellies, watching them from the terrace. Girls in Barbour jackets, in vintage fur.
How beautiful the girls are! How beautiful, the fireworks! And we’re beautiful, too. All the young are beautiful.
Wittgenstein’s brother took his life at twenty, we muse. He knew he was all washed up at twenty. At our age! And we haven’t even begun to live! We haven’t done anything. We haven’t failed at anything. Our lives lie ahead of us. Wittgenstein says we haven’t been tested yet, Mulberry reminds us.
To kill yourself at twenty! To have finished with life at twenty! To have run out of options at twenty! Twenty: and for your life to have run its course. To be twenty is surely to be stood at the brink of life! To be twenty is yet to have turned the page!
Perhaps that’s what it means to be brilliant, really brilliant, we speculate: to have already seen past the limits of life. To have seen all the way to the end.
Is that what brilliance means: understanding the whole of life, seeing the whole? Is it that we’re not clever enough to kill ourselves? We don’t want to die — not now, not today: is this a sign of our shallowness?
The girls are playing with sparklers. The girls are cooing with delight about their sparklers. How beautiful they are, the girls with their sparklers, making loops in the air …
They can’t help their beauty, we agree. It has nothing to do with them. It has nothing to do with any of us. We are young, so young. But what does our youth mean?
A cry from downstairs. Scroggins!
Down we go, forcing our way through the crowds on the staircase. A glimpse of a glassy-eyed Chakrabarti, with a beer backpack and a suction tube. Of Guthrie, snoring on the floor. Both Kirwins in sweaty snogs with Clare College girls.
Then Scroggins, like Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now. Muttering obscurely. Running his hand over his face. We can’t understand what he’s saying … The overturning of nonsense … Half words, non-words, speech thickening and wandering and failing …