Page 1 of Love and Other Paradoxes

Chapter One

Joe stood in the hush of the Wren Library, looking up into the marble eyes of the poet.

The poet was lounging on the ruins of an ancient Greek temple, foot drawn up to rest on a broken pillar. One elegant hand pointed a pencil to his chin; the other held a finished book of poems. The poet’s handsome brow was furrowed, his eyes fixed on the middle distance. Joe found himself unconsciously mimicking the pose: raising one hand, setting his jaw, staring across the black-and-white tiles of the library floor. A girl sitting in an alcove looked up and met his eyes. Thinking he was looking at her, she smiled. He was about to smile back, then remembered he was supposed to be looking intense and poetic. He frowned, shifting his gaze to the stained-glass window. When he glanced surreptitiously at the girl, she had gone back to reading.

“Lord Byron,” said someone behind him. “He was a student here, you know.”

Joe flinched in surprise, then fell back into his usual apologetic slump. The speaker was one of the black-uniformed men who were an everyday feature of Cambridge life. They were called things likeporterorproctororpraelector, and seemed to appearfrom nowhere. He had a theory that they seeped spontaneously out of the marble whenever you stood still for too long.

“I know,” he replied. That was why he was here: to remind himself that Byron had once stood where he stood, which meant that achieving his own destiny as a great poet was not completely out of reach. Byron, of course, had not been looking up at a statue of himself, unless, alongside writing poetry and having sex with a lot of people, he had also invented time travel.

“Kept a bear in his room,” said the black-uniformed man. “Legendary lover, of course,” he added.

Joe felt a laugh creep up inside him. “The bear?”

The man was looking at him with a mixture of pity and disappointment. “Are you a member of the college?”

He tensed, confronting the spectre of not-belonging that had haunted him for the past two years. “No. I mean, I’m a student, just—not at Trinity.”

The man patted him heavily on the shoulder. “Then I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

Outside, the autumn sun glinted off the dew-damp grass. A chill October wind blew up from the river, cutting through his cheap coat. He hurried through the insane, stage-set grandeur of the college, so different from the squat fishermen’s cottages he had known for the first eighteen years of his life. Now, at the beginning of his third year as a student, he had almost stopped noticing it. It only came clear to him at moments like this, when he confronted the reality that in eight short months, he would be graduating. He would be cast out, like an orphan stumbling from Narnia back into wartime England—or in his case, rural Scotland, back to his job at the village pub, with no proof that his time here in the other world had been anything but a dream. Unless hecould find a way to prove that he had always belonged here, among the historymakers; that letting him in had not been a terrible, embarrassing mistake.

As he left Trinity through the vaulted archway of the Great Gate, he was so lost in thought that he walked straight into someone.

“Sorry,” he blurted, looking at the person he’d almost knocked over. A girl, pale-faced, with unusual light green eyes. She had swept her dark hair to one side, in the way all the posh girls here did, as if they were in a strong wind no one else could feel. Something about her was familiar. He couldn’t understand why until he saw what was printed on her hoodie.Macbeth 2004. He had seen that show, last year at the ADC Theatre. She had played Lady Macbeth. He remembered her being blazingly, shockingly good, outshining the other actors like candles to her sun.

She raised an elegant eyebrow. He sensed the chance to say something, to change the future of this moment, but he couldn’t think of anything clever enough. The girl threw him a disdainful look and walked on.

He folded into himself, grimacing. “Byron wouldn’t’ve just stood there like a numpty,” he muttered. “Byron would’ve said something.” Out on Trinity Street, the late-morning light slanted down, turning the fallen leaves to splashes of gold. The back of his brain filed the details away to use later, even as the front of his brain brooded over the fact that he hadn’t finished a poem since he’d started his degree.

By Great St. Mary’s church, the usual tour groups were craning to look up at the tower. He was edging his way past when he saw with alarm that one of the groups was staring straight at him.

He stared back. Most of them looked away. One met his eyes and stepped forward. A girl with a strange, asymmetric haircut,dressed in the thousand-pocketed combat trousers that had been fashionable about five years ago. She was gazing at him in slack-jawed disbelief. He immediately worried that he had toothpaste around his mouth. As he went to scrub it off, someone pulled the girl away—an olive-skinned woman in her late twenties, brown hair tied back in a ponytail, wearing a tabard that marked her out as the tour guide.

“Time’s up.” She corralled the group together and ushered them away. He watched them dwindle down King’s Parade, the girl in the combats casting surreptitious glances over her shoulder. He made a mental note to look in a mirror as soon as he got back to his room.

Inside the stone walls of his own college, no one gave him a second glance. Reassured, he went by the post room to check his pigeonhole. Usually, it would have contained nothing but free condoms and flyers from the Christian Union, but lately, he had been finding it full of strange gifts. A single white rose; a fountain pen; a keyring with a quote from a poem that, when he looked it up, didn’t appear to exist. Today, there was a scribbled note that said simply,Thank you. With growing unease, he crumpled it into the recycling bin and headed up the stairs.

College had a strict rule that shared sets of rooms were for friends, not couples, on the grounds that student romances were too unstable to last the nine months of the lease. Joe couldn’t fault their logic. He and Rob had been friends since first year, outliving his longest relationship to date by a factor of nine.

He climbed the staircase two steps at a time: after a summer on his feet serving endless pints to seaside tourists, he could reach the top without getting out of breath. He unlocked the door, blinking in the sun that spilled through the high windows. He lovedhis and Rob’s rooms, fiercely and completely. He loved the living room, with its sagging sofa and its blocked-off fireplace stacked with bottles of cheap wine; he loved his bedroom, with the window that opened onto a tiny stretch of battlements, the closest he would ever get to living in a castle. By inching along a narrow ledge and scaling a drainpipe, you could supposedly get to a secret terrace with a view of King’s College, but he had never tried: he was haunted by visions of falling, to be memorialised only by a snippet in the local paper lamenting his wasted potential.

Rob was technically studying physics, but his true passion was the mock-combat game known as Assassins. As Joe came in, he was fashioning a trebuchet out of old copies of the student newspaper, pink with concentration, sandy hair flopping over his face. “Morning, Greeney,” he said without looking up.

Joe muttered in nonresponse and went straight through to his bedroom. Flinging open his desk drawer, he threw out the toy Highland cow his Scottish mum had got him so he wouldn’t forget his roots, the toy London bus his English dad had got him in retaliation, and the toy penguin his sister Kirsty had got him because “it reminded me of you.” Hidden underneath was a pile of notebooks scrawled with poems. He combed through them, searching for something he already knew he wouldn’t find. None of them—the epics he’d feverishly scribbled as a teenager, the fragments he’d forced out word by tortured word since coming to Cambridge—were remotely good enough. There was a fire in his brain, white-hot and unrelenting, but not a single spark had made it onto the page.

He groaned, burying his face in his hands.

“What are you moaning tragically about?” Rob called from the living room.

He staggered out of his bedroom and collapsed face down onto the sofa. “I’ll never be a great poet,” he said into the cushions. “I might as well just sit in a bin and wait to die.”

“Surely there’s some middle ground between ‘great poet’ and ‘dead in a bin.’ What about a nice job in the civil service?”

“I’d rather be dead in a bin. Anyway, you need a good degree to get a job in the civil service, and according to Dr. Lewis, I’m not getting one of those.” He winced, anticipating what his Director of Studies would say tomorrow morning when they met for their weekly supervision. Failing out of his degree was a real and ever-growing possibility. He had nightmares about it sometimes: going home to face his parents’ poorly hidden disappointment, the smug vindication of everyone who’d thought he was an idiot for even applying.

“This is a radical suggestion, Greeney, but—why not take her advice? This is the only year that counts towards your final mark. Maybe it’s time to drop the poetry and focus on what you’re here for.”

---