‘Let me tell you a story,’ Sage says. He sits, perched, on the edge of a table, still wrapped in his blanket. He has been waiting for me to wake, but I have no idea how long he has been sitting there or what the time is. Streaks of grey light angle through the grimy windows to show the lines and sags of his face. He doesn’t give me the opportunity to stumble over an apology, launching straight into his story before I’ve even had time to flush red at the memory of last night.
‘My research, at university, was all about the writers buried in Bunhill Fields cemetery up in London: John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake. They were all classed as Nonconformists, you see, either because they didn’t follow the teachings of the Church of England or because they advocated religious liberty.’
He glances at me, to check that I’m listening.
I nod.
‘The idea was to investigate this form of social activism – of dissent – and how it came across in their writings. So, I was seen as the go-to guy in the department for any discussion of literature that could be called political. I was only a doctoral student, but the undergraduates came to me if they were having trouble understanding Orwell or if they wanted a bit more Marxist theory. And there was one Masters student, maybe five or so years older than most, who came to see me for dissertation advice.’
Sage clears his throat, the sound crackles through the silent pub like static. His purplish tongue pokes out from his mouth and moistens his lips and the lower fringes of his beard. I don’t hurry him, or make any sound beyond my shallow breathing. This is going to be a confession – perhaps even a coming out – and I don’t want to so much as unsettle the air between us.
‘Emma Scribbens,’ he says, as if carefully pronouncing the name of a disease whose potency should be both feared and admired. ‘Emma, that was her name. This bright young woman doing research on political theatre, on verbatim theatre specifically – have you heard of it?’
I shake my head, but I’m not sure whether Sage notices, or is interested. He stares intently at the far wall.
‘Verbatim theatre is interesting, worthy of study. You take interviews and found material – newspaper articles and television pieces, maybe – and you structure it all into a play. It’s like a documentary, but the staging and the presentation of events is all-important. It’s a really interesting concept, as I say, and Emma… Emma was fascinating.’
Sage closes his eyes and goes silent. For several long moments he holds his breath, before letting it out as a sigh. When he speaks again, his words are weighty, spoken slowly and softly as though dredged from his memory.
‘She had this long red hair. Proper fiery red, so that it caught the gleam of sunlight. And her eyes were pale grey, but they had a glint as well when she spoke of the theatre. So, looking at her, there was something… something… elemental about her.
‘We spoke for hours about the power of the theatre, and about all the plays that were being put on at the time – that summer – about the financial crisis and the London riots – how it was the theatre that was able to give an immediate response. And there, in my office, with the dead debris of my research around us – books and articles and drafts of useless chapters – it felt as if we were discussing something vital, something that could change the world, or at least a corner of it.
‘Suddenly my own work – Blake, mostly – seemed archaic, hopelessly out-of-date and out-of-touch. Here we were in central London, with the Occupy protesters setting up camp just round the corner from the dissenters’ graveyard, and I’m looking at those who’re dead and buried rather than those actually participating. Students were talking to me about tuition fees rising and I was answering by quoting poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. It all seemed like studying the atom rather than the splitting of it…’
He pauses, shakes his head, draws in a breath.
‘Maybe that analogy doesn’t work, but it seemed laughable to look at these long-dead writers when there was history happening outside the office window. And Emma, she was my connection to all that. She was so engaged with it, Rab. Not because she was a ringleader or because she’d chain herself to railings or lie down across the street in the way of traffic, but because she knew the arguments and understood. She’d been on the anti-cuts marches, had campaigned for that financial transaction tax on the banks – the one they called the “Robin Hood” tax – had supported the strikes and the student protests.
‘Every teacher has crushes, you know, just as every student has crushes. And I was infatuated with Emma, entirely. All through that term, as she worked towards completing her dissertation, I devoted myself to our discussions, to finding her obscure sources in the British Library and helping her transcribe the interviews she’d conducted at the Occupy camp. Then, when she handed it in, I felt this hollow anti-climax, this numbness at realising that I didn’t want her to hand it in, that I wanted her to keep working, keep researching, keep visiting, and…’
Sage sags forward, his elbows against his knees and his head propped up by his hands. I draw my feet up towards my chest, to leave some of the bench empty. Without looking at me, he levers himself down on to the cushions and leans back until his head rests against the wood. He stares, unseeing, at the ceiling.
‘That evening,’ he says, ‘she showed up at the office, offering to buy me a drink by way of thanks. Of course – of course – I said yes, and we got the Tube to a pub near her house and shared a bottle of wine. Only it wasn’t the same as the chats we’d shared in the office, because there was no urgency to our words. And, when I walked her home afterwards, I had this dread, this horrible anticipation, about what would happen next.
‘So, we reached her door and she grasped for my hand. And she thanked me for all my help, you know, and her grip on my hand got tighter and… and then her left hand started plucking at my shirt until I bowed my head down towards hers. And, all the while, her eyes are on mine. These grey eyes that are electric with imagination and intelligence…’
He pauses. I am fully upright, fully awake, waiting for him to finish.
‘And I told her “no”. Just that one word,’ he says.
‘But why?’ I ask, breaking my silence.
‘Because…’ His eyes are on me now, an intense gaze. It is the first time he’s done more than glance at me in all the time he has been speaking. ‘Because it would have been selfish of me. She was too beautiful and brilliant, too young, and too ready to believe that I knew more than I did, that I held more answers than I did. She was trying to recapture the intimacy of those months in the only way she knew.’
‘How much younger was she?’
‘Than me?’ Sage shrugs. ‘Maybe ten years, no more than that.’
‘And did you explain it to her?’
He shakes his head. ‘Not really, no.’
‘You just refused her?’
‘For her sake,’ he says, still staring directly at me, ‘as well as for my own. I didn’t want to tarnish what we had shared, didn’t want the meeting of minds to be no more than foreplay or for our friendship to be based on less than it was, so that there would always be the question – always – of whether it was all just building, or built, towards that point… We’re all too eager to mistake intimacy, any intimacy, for sexual feeling.’
Sage’s eyes hold an electricity of their own. It takes me a moment to work up the courage to meet his gaze, to hold it. There is pain there, and also this desperate need – as if the question he is about to ask is the most difficult, most vital question of his life.
‘Do you understand, Rab?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I think I do.’
Several hours pass before we speak again. In the meantime, I’ve dozed on the bench and Sage has ventured out with the last of our money to get provisions. As the grey early-morning light turns golden, he stands at the bar and rattle-boils water on the stove.
‘Tea?’ he asks, holding up a tin can.
‘What’s that?’
‘I raided next door’s recycling. This one was beans; the other was soup.’
‘Tea would be nice, thanks.’
He nods and sets about pouring. His movements are hunched and hurried, with the wild wisps of his newly clean beard and the trailing cuffs of his once-white shirt giving him the look of a mad scientist at work. The concoction he hands me, though, is definitely tea – hot, milky and sweetened by sugar.
‘Now,’ he says, ‘how about some breakfast?’
It’s my stomach that answers, with a rising groan that sounds like a question.
‘Porridge,’ Sage replies. ‘The food of your forefathers, Rab. It’s cheap, it’s nutritious and, with a bit of milk and sugar added, it’s just about bearable.’
‘OK.’ I smile as a memory comes back to me from childhood. I’m unsure how to bring it up; it’s only rarely that I volunteer information about the past. ‘Let me…’ I start. ‘My granny… she lived up in St Margaret’s Hope, on the Orkney Islands… and she used to have a drawer, in a wooden chest of drawers, that was lined with greaseproof paper and then filled with porridge oats. Cooked, covered with treacle. When we visited, she would open the drawer and cut me a slice. And once the drawer was empty she’d just refill it and leave it to set.’
‘Like flapjack,’ Sage says.
‘And my mum always tells the story that, after one of our trips north to see her, I came back and pulled the clothes out of all the closets, wardrobes and drawers in my parents’ room because I was looking for – ’
‘ – the flapjack,’ Sage finishes the sentence.
‘Exactly.’ I nod. ‘So this brings back some memories for me.’
Sage looks at me over the ice-bucket, through the steam, and smiles. He is using the broken hand-whisk from beneath the bar to stir the oats. From time to time he adds a splash of milk from the carton beside him.
‘Sage?’ I say, softly.
‘Yes?’
‘Is she the reason you left the university?’
‘Who?’
‘Emma Scribbles.’
‘Scribbens,’ he corrects me. He sets down the whisk and lets out a sigh. The steam disperses and I see his face clearly as he shakes his head. His eyebrows hang low, shadowing his eyes. ‘It wasn’t her, no. I just ran out of funding, pure and simple. At the end of my three years, I ran out of money.’
‘Did you not have a contract, though?’
‘I had a three-year contract,’ he says. ‘But it was based on me finishing my research within the three years and… well, I didn’t, and they didn’t offer me anything or help me out in any way… so I had no way, really, to continue.’
‘So what about all the work you’d done over the three years?’
He shakes his head. ‘I had drafts and bits and pieces completed, but… well, basically, they found out that I was sleeping in the office, that I was washing in the staff toilet, that I was sneaking sandwiches from the catering trolleys left in the hallways, and…’
‘Could you not finish now, then?’ I ask. ‘Do you still have the research? Could you not find a computer in the library and do some work on it?’
‘Stir this,’ Sage holds out the whisk.
I rise, in boxers and blanket, and shuffle over to the bar. The porridge looks done; it is thick, and it rises and falls as if breathing. Every couple of seconds the surface breaks into a glugging bubble. Quietly, as Sage roots through his rucksack, I lift the pan from the heat and turn the gas off.
‘This,’ Sage says, ‘is the culmination of three years of research. This is all of it.’
He hands me a CD. It has no case and the surface of it is scratched and worn. A single word – THESIS – is inked across the front of it in red. At best, it is damaged; at worst, unrecoverable. I decide not to tell him that.
‘Would you like to work on it again?’ I ask, instead.
He considers. ‘I’d like to rework it, Rab. I’d like to take all of the research I did on Blake, and all of the research that I did for Emma, and join the dots between them. I’d like to use the past to shed light on the present, maybe.’
‘Well, why don’t you?’
‘To tell the truth, what I’d most like to do is to read again. For pleasure.’
‘I thought you loved teaching as well?’
‘I do.’ He smiles, gently. ‘But nothing I have to say is worth what the students are being asked to pay for it. My wages, as a teaching assistant, were only a grand more than a year’s tuition. For one student. And I was teaching fifteen or twenty of them per tutorial, seven or eight tutorials a week. Universities are businesses, pure and simple, and those who’re successful within them are businessmen and businesswomen. Let me tell you a story – ’
‘Why not do what you suggested, then?’ I interrupt.
‘What was that?’
‘Open this place up for some lectures – free ones.’
Sage nods. ‘It would be nice to have some conversation. Just people sitting around and chatting about things. That’s all I need, Rab, to keep me going.’
‘We could invite Luke, maybe,’ I say. ‘And Flick.’
Sage takes my tea tin from me and pours the dregs down the drain. Then, using the broken whisk, he scoops some porridge into the tin. There is no spoon, so I tip it towards my mouth and use my fingers.
The porridge is hot and sweet. I have to force myself not to gulp and slurp at it. To slow down and savour the fact that we have time to spend over meals now.
‘Well, now that we’ve spent the night,’ I say, ‘don’t you reckon we should give the place a name? A pub deserves that.’
‘Absolutely,’ Sage beams. He has porridge clumped, like a skin condition, in his moustache. ‘What was it called before?’
‘Don’t know. They’ve taken the sign down.’
‘What were you thinking, then?’
‘Sage and Onion, maybe.’
‘You being the onion?’
‘Aye.’ I smile. ‘Because I smell like a field.’
‘And you bring tears to many an eye.’
‘That’ll be the smell, too.’
He chuckles, then raises his porridge tin again. His fingers dislodge most of the moustache-meal as well.
‘In my student days,’ he says, ‘my undergraduate days, that is, I would have named it something horribly, horrifically Marxist. Something properly left-wing, you know? The Trotsky, or On the Side of the Engels, or something…’
‘Aren’t you still a Marxist?’ I ask.
He shrugs. ‘Is anyone? It’s too complicated, maybe, with the way the world’s changed, to call yourself a Marxist and not find yourself handed all the baggage of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. But the central idea… it still resonates: “from each according to his ability, to each…”’
‘What else could you have called it?’
‘“… according to his need”,’ he says softly, then, ‘What’s that, Rab?’
‘What other names could you have called your Marxist pub?’
‘I don’t know,’ he considers. ‘The Hammer and Sickle, maybe, something like that. Keep it nice and simple.’
‘Maybe we could call it The Sick Little Hammer, then?’ I suggest. ‘Since you’re not a Marxist any more.’
‘That’s good, that,’ he says. ‘A fitting pub for modern-day Britain, maybe.’
‘To The Sick Little Hammer,’ I raise my tin.
‘And her swift recovery,’ Sage hits my tin with his own, producing a dull clank that doesn’t ring or echo.