chapter five

Life Orgasm

Elephants stampeded across my stomach as I walked around before the lecture started, leaving four-page handouts on the desks. To say I was nervous was like saying Madonna is a bit of a pop star. Things hadn’t got better in the time that had elapsed between Jess leaving last night and this morning. If anything, I’d got worse. I’d started to have wild nightmare-like fantasies and vivid visions about what would go wrong. Which was one of the reasons I was putting handouts on the desks before the lecture.

Most lecturers dispense handouts as the lecture progresses, but I’d already seen the potential pitfalls. Literally.

Scenario One: I pick up the pile of handouts, ready to give it to one student for them to pass on, I trip, I fall and find myself lying face down in a pool of paper.

Scenario Two: I ask the students to come up and get them, there’s a stampede, someone knocks over my drink – necessary so my tongue doesn’t Velcro itself to the roof of my mouth – and all my overhead projections are ruined.

Scenario Three—Anyway, there were quite a few scenarios. I’d actually forgotten how vivid my imagination was. I’d begun to think it’d been blunted over time, taken up as it was with visualising Cupid sorting it out so me and Angel could end up together. But no, when I was in need of truly nightmarish scenarios, there was a rich vein of horror just waiting to be let.

I was putting out handouts in a room that was situated at the top of a building right in the middle of the All Souls campus. This block was an octagonal with a paved over quad at its centre where students lurked and lunched. The room I was to teach in wasn’t huge, not as huge as I’d expect after yesterday’s foray into the land of the giants. Light streamed in from the arched-top windows, leaving pools of light around the room. The ceiling was quite low, surprising considering the windows. The floor was still parquet, scuffed slightly, obviously well-trodden ground with bits more scuffed than others.

The forty or so chairs with little desks attached to one side were set out in a kind of arc. Behind me hung a white board which I had to bring my own non-permanent markers for. Above and behind the chairs was a wall to wall two-way mirror because this room doubled as a psychology lab and next door was an observation room. Thankfully, there was a heavyweight blue curtain that could be drawn across the mirror so I wouldn’t have to worry about looking at myself for two hours or there being someone else observing me lecture for two hours.

I sat on the edge of my desk. Just stopped. For a second, stopped. Took time to breathe. To breathe and think about what I was doing. What was to come.

And it happened. Total peace descended upon me. At the very core of my soul, a celestial being touched me and I felt peace. I was peace. Pure peace. Suddenly I was flooded with power and joy and happiness. All I’d yearned for when I’d accepted this job. I was complete. Whole. This was it. I was there, on the brink of it. On the brink of a life orgasm. I’d only ever felt this sense of pureness when I’d orgasmed. Right in the middle of an orgasm, you are nothing but pure emotion. Nothing else exists except that one moment of sheer, unadulterated bliss; when your body and mind give themselves up to immaculate pleasure. That’s what I’d been chasing when I gave up my life in London. For that moment, sat on the desk, I felt it. How life was meant to be. How life could be if I carried on with this.

The first student arrived five minutes before the lecture was due to start. Tall, malnourished thin, long greasy hair, wearing a baggy jumper. He was the type of guy you’d expect to come in last to the lecture, but no, he came wandering in, nodded a hello at me then sat himself at the back of the class.

Next came a girl who was very money. Chatting on a chrome phone, dark brown hair cut with very expensive scissors, the kind of clothes I used to see all the time on the pages of the pricier magazines I worked for. She smiled at me, but wasn’t going to finish her conversation until the lecture started. A chunky lad came next, Scouse, again with long hair, surrounded by a gaggle of good-looking women, all of them laughing at something he’d obviously just said. He grinned at me as he walked over to the far corner of the room, sat himself under the large window, and the women sat at other seats around the room.

More of them poured through the open gash of the door: a blonde with a tight perm; an older woman with short blonde hair and petite body; an older man who had ‘pervert’ scrawled across his scraggly beard; another older man who had ‘narrowminded Thatcher lover’ written in his eyes; a woman with black plaits right down to her bum; a man who put me in mind of a Wham-era George Michael, more and more until the room was full with about forty students.

I put on a charming, welcoming smile for them all. Hoping I looked confident, a natural, as if I’d been doing this for millennia.

OH SHITE! my brain screeched.

I’d lectured before, but that had been on the understanding I wouldn’t see those people again. I’d be like hundreds of guest lecturers they’d encounter in their lives: transitional, flibbertigibbety. Nothing more than the sum of notes on the page, a voice on a tape recorder, a name in a handbook. It was like a one-night stand. You tried to enjoy it while you were there, but you could be someone else, flamboyant, tarty, even dominant because you’d never see them again. It didn’t matter how you behaved because it was only ever going to be for a few hours. Whereas I’d be expected to bond with this lot. I had to leave my phone number, answer their calls, reveal more and more of who I was. Form some kind of lasting relationship with them over the coming year.

I was about to be found out as the fraud I was. I didn’t know jack about anything and I’d sure as anything couldn’t impart it, ensure it entered other people’s minds and stayed there long enough for them to write about it in essays and exams. I was going to be publicly ridiculed. Laughed and pointed at in the street. Tarred and feathered, branded a liar and cheat then sent packing through the streets of Leeds with my rucksack on my back.

OK D’Altroy, back away from that panic. Calm down. If you don’t calm down you’ll start getting sweat patches all over your lovely white top and then it’ll be see-through. They’ll all be able to see your bra . . .

OH MY GOD, WHAT THE HELL HAVE I DONE!

I should be sat in London, reading about make-up, I thought. This thought was swiftly followed by Run away! Very fast. Just leave everything where it is and leg it.

I smiled at each and every one of them, waiting until almost all the seats were occupied. Most of them talked with each other until a natural hush, then a silence fell upon the room.

Ms Money flipped shut her phone.

OH MY GOOD GOD.

All right, smile. Smile, goddamn you. Now open your mouth, say: ‘Hi.’

Expectant faces gazed upon me as though I was about to impart the meaning of life, the universe and everything. That I was going to explain it wasn’t, in fact, forty-two, but ninety-eight – and I had proof. Or maybe they thought I was going to give them next week’s lottery numbers. Whatever it was, each face was so expectant my voice dried up as I croaked, ‘I’m Ceri. Ceri D’Altroy. It’s written on th—’

The door slammed open, and ‘I’m sooooo sorry,’ a voice cried out from nowhere, as a woman hurried in. ‘I’m so sorry I’m late. The bus didn’t turn up. I ran all the way here from the bus stop.’

She rushed off to her seat across the room, no one blinked, she obviously did this all the time. I, meanwhile, having leapt in shock, leant with one hand on the desk, the other hand clutching my chest, and breathed like I’d been running.

The class weren’t sure whether to laugh or be scared.

I laughed. Couldn’t help myself when I’d tried so hard to get the lecturer look right and it all fell apart when someone made me jump. The room erupted into uneasy laughter with me, until we all relaxed into normal laughter.

OK, this is better. I can work with laughter. Didn’t they always say you should start a presentation or speech with a joke? And you don’t get much funnier than old lecturer lady having a coronary cos someone comes late. ‘All right,’ I said, feeling my body relax a fraction, ‘as I was saying, I’m Ceri. Ceri D’Altroy. I’m taking over Eva’s teaching for the rest of the year. I’ll be teaching you the history of psychology as well as taking tutorials and doing all the other things that Eva did and I don’t know about yet.

‘On the sheets in front of you, I’ve written out a brief rundown of the modules as I see it. Before we get into a more detailed discussion about what you should have done as told to me by Gwen and what you’ve actually done, I wanted to get something clear.’

I took a deep breath. ‘I’m here to help you learn. If you don’t want to do the reading or prepare stuff for tutorials, that’s fine with me. I’m not your parent or God, I can’t make you do it. But, what you do or don’t do will be reflected in your marks. And, to be very honest, I’ve got my degrees so feel free to piss about, make excuses, not do your work. I’m not open to bribes so it’ll only hurt you in the end. I really hope, though, that you get into the learning stuff and if not enjoy it then at least understand the History of Psychology.’

This all sounded very cool and very laid-back, I’d fancied myself as a cross between Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society and Miss Jean Brodie in her prime. Experienced, but ‘down with the people’; friendly, but worthy of respect. Which was clearly why I delivered my speech with sweat trickling down my back, making the white v-neck top cling to me.

Thankfully, I’d stopped short of writing it down before prattling it off – prat probably being the operative part of that word – because I’d be triply sad if I had to read my cool and laid-back attitude to the class. An audience of faces gazed back at me. It was still to be seen if my speech had worked, but for now, no one looked as though they were about to leave. Which, when it came down to it, was the important thing.