'Humanities' - as published in Gutter Magazine Issue 19

Issue 19: now available at www.guttermag.co.uk 

The Tinder app chirrups gaily in my pocket like a little digital blackbird. I have matched with Seb, 27. Seb is a PhD student at Durham University, visiting Glasgow for reasons unspecified. He is handsome, but in one of his pictures he is wearing one of those T-Shirts that lists famously associated names in hip vertical text (John & Paul & George & Ringo, etc), except his says

Derrida &

Baudrillard &

Foucault &

Žižek.

This immediately bursts the delicate bubble of denial I prefer to keep suspended for as long as possible when it comes to the fit ones: he is clearly, on some level - on every level, perhaps - a cock. Dithering, I zoom in on a couple of the other photos. He has jagged, daintily fragile white teeth and a chiselled jawline – chiselled enough that I could probably forget the dire implications of the T-Shirt if a coital scenario were to present itself.

Reluctant to participate in the inevitable and vastly unsexy fellow-students-of-literature-circle-jerk opening dance, my fingers work deftly to take my degree details off my profile. Too late. Another chirrup, slightly different in tonal quality this time - a chaffinch, perhaps - heralds a message:

Cathy! I would have guessed you were a fellow lit student. Us humanities folk can sniff one another out like wolves.

In my mind I circle the words I take exception to (‘lit,’ ‘humanities,’ ‘folk,') in some sort of Star-Trekky digital red pen, and send the message back to him. I consider and reject a string of hollow, enabling replies, some if not all incorporating Wuthering-Heights references I have used several times in the past, when I’ve found myself complicit in other such dismal exchanges.

Eventually, I go back into profile settings and delete my main display photo (me in a slightly insipid double-skirted floral dress, long red hair falling in waves to my waist), and replace it with a more recent image. In it my lips are drenched in gloss and parted in an overt display of sex-doll sexuality, and I’m wearing a top I ordered on ASOS that is really, technically, underwear. I put my phone back in my pocket and make myself a hot chocolate. Ostentatious peacocking is a good acid test, I find. It separates the talkers from the ones with hard-ons they actually want to do something about. After about ten minutes my phone pings again.

Blimey.

☾⋆

We meet at The Old Hairdressers – his suggestion – there’s something on later that he wants to see. I decide not to Google the event in case the prospect of whatever it is depresses me too much to turn up. My agenda – the vampiric consumption of his jawline - must remain clear and unsullied.

Seb greets me charmingly outside and puts a light hand on my shoulder as we go up to the bar, where he pays for two beers. He seems nice, actually. Bit earnest, but nice. He asks me about myself, and is attractively vague and modest about his own circumstances. It’s still not entirely clear why he is visiting Glasgow, but he seems happy to be here. He likes the people, he says. They are less ‘repressed.’

The bar staff are lively, messing around with a playlist of watered-down indie disco music from our teenage years – The Kooks, Razorlight, The Wombats (!). I start to feel pleasantly drunk and nostalgic. I wait for him to slag off the music, to make it very clear that he Never Liked The Kooks, Remember Luke Pritchard, What a Cunt, It Was So Good When Simon Amstell Slagged Him Off On Popworld, but he doesn’t go there, and I like that he doesn’t. I imagine him when he was fourteen, in a sunny English suburban bedroom, putting on ‘She Moves In Her Own Way’ for a pretty blonde girl with a snub-nose and rosebud lips. I giggle to myself: it’s nice. I don’t resent him. I like that he came from a different world, a world I’ve seen on Channel 4 teen shows and Gurinder Chadha films, but never inhabited myself. I chide myself for my earlier cynicism, my intolerance, and as the beers go down, I am really looking forward to sleeping with him.

At 10pm, the bar area starts to clear a bit – people our age and a bit younger are heading up the fairy-lit staircase to the ‘mezzanine’.

‘Do you want to go through?’ asks Seb, eyes shining.

‘Yes! If you like. What’s on?’

‘It’s a spoken word event – some incredible voices – I’ve seen quite a bit of their stuff online. There’s one girl who’s just… absolutely brilliant.’

I look back at the crowd flowing up the stairs. Bringing up the rear is Rose Keller, an obnoxious and unfriendly girl I remember from my university tutorials. She is speaking loudly to a wan-looking friend in brothel creepers and black lipstick. The word ‘gender’ drifts down to me several times as ‘Golden Touch’ fades out over the bar speakers. I take a deep breath.

Spoken fucking word.

☾⋆

When we enter the room there are lots of people sitting cross-legged on bedraggled, grubby cushions on the floor. The first thing I notice is that none of them have bought any booze. I gulp nervously at my beer, wishing I’d bought another two as back-up. There aren’t many cushions left for Seb and I. Instinctively, I know I’d feel safer standing in the doorway, but he has other plans.

‘Do you want to go in the middle there,’ he says, ‘and I’ll, sort of, hover near the front?’

I notice that Rose Keller is also, sort of, hovering near the front.

Seb doesn’t wait for a response, so I wind my way awkwardly through the mass of angular limbs and politically correct tote bags, eventually finding a spot between two middle-aged women, one of whom I recognise. Joanna Silversmith. She was one of my tutors at Glasgow. My heart gives a little leap of relief – a familiar face! O joy! Here I am, my budding mind once honed by her and others of her kind. I tap her shoulder and smile.

‘Hello. Do you mind if I squeeze in?’

She looks me up and down nastily.

‘ Squeeze? You’re a rake darling, sure, but morbidly obese I ain’t.’

Her companion, a blue-haired, slack-mouthed creature, lets out a Hallowe’en cackle. I sink onto my cushion, feeling the heat radiating from my cheeks. Two tiny pin-pricks tickle my eyes - the threat of tears - but there is a flurry of activity from the front of the room, and they don’t come.

Rose Keller sways up to the microphone, her salmon-pink dress floating around her as though her bottom half has been submerged in a tank of crystalline water. I glance over at Seb, who is staring at her with the glaikit expression of one recently fellated by Christina Hendricks; a Christina Hendricks who’d just read a Cosmo article about the importance of perineum work.

‘Hi, everyone,’ says Rose too loudly, in her best ‘take-my-picture-by-the-pool-cos-I’m-the-next-big-thing’ voice.

‘So, uh, yeah! When I first came to Glasgow I thought – fuck – sure, it’ll be an experience, but in terms of the poetry scene, I’m a Bristol girl, so, you know…’

She trails off coquettishly. A ripple of knowing, indulgent laughter spreads across the room.

‘So, uh, yeah! I just thought, let’s bring a voice to this city! We have some fantastic artists here tonight - so, without further…whatever (we all hate a cliché in here!), let me introduce the gorgeous Guy Banks.’

Guy Banks is from Reading. He has things to say about the gentrification of Finnieston, where he moved two months ago. He stands too close to the microphone, so I can hear the spit clicking about in his mouth as he speaks.

Being not a poet myself, I'm conscious that I am somewhat ill-equipped to criticise Guy-Banks-from-Reading. Instinctively, though, I feel that poetry should flow - it should have a natural pace that compliments its meaning, so that it permeates the listener, seeps in, nourishes, lingers. But Guy has adopted that unfortunate trend of delivering his lines with a monotonous, contrived rhythm that does nothing for me whatsoever – the hairs on the back of my neck remain unruffled, my heart still, my soul unmoved. It's a trend growing more popular by the second – there are teens with posters of Kate Tempest on their ceilings, Nationwide are using spoken-word performers to narrate their cutting-edge ad campaigns about the grafters toiling to keep our economy afloat(!). On paper, of course, it’s all ‘good’. Liberal messages communicated in new, imaginative ways. I’m down for that, in theory. In practice, though, usually I find it irritating, insincere and downright boring.

I look around me, at Guy’s wide-eyed audience, and wonder whether what he’s saying actually means something to them – whether I’m the one in the minority here, I’m the robot - or whether they know that to be part of this… ‘scene,’ motion, whatever the fuck it is, they have simply had to learn to look as though it resonates.

Next, Yvonne Harper from Leeds shouts very loudly for twenty minutes about tampons.

It’s over for my beer. The happy, warm nostalgia I felt down at the bar has long since drained from my bones, and I feel scared. I’m scared that when I finally get home, the thought of these people will make me sharpen my kitchen knife and plunge it into the soft part of my cuticles until the blood seeps over my hands and up my arms.

Rose Keller is last to read. She swooshes up to the stage, fully aware that she is commanding a room full of people to whom she is the ultimate prize. This time, when she speaks, it’s in a softer, ethereal, barely-there voice. She knows know what she’s doing. I find myself glancing around at the mens’ crotches for signs of movement.

Rose’s poem is an aggrieved account of being cat-called in the street (why the fuck do men think they have the right to indulge in such behaviour, it’s 2018, we are not sirloins, etc, etc). Again, in principle, of course I agree. But I cannot help but suspect that Rose has fabricated this incident in her mind, not as a way of positively countering the lascivious and intimidating behaviour of men, but in fact, as a way of telling her audience one thing, and one thing alone: ‘I’m a beautiful young woman and men want me.’

Rose knows she can’t just say that outright, so instead, she has created a story vilifying a fictitious man and dressed it up as being an ethical and socially cleansing piece of work. This girl is clearly a straight-up narcissist, and she’s turned a roomful of her generation into an Oxytocin factory.

She finishes. There is a short silence followed by rapturous applause and stricken, ‘I’m-so-sorry-that-happened-to-you’ expressions.

Breathless and flushed, Rose speaks once more.

‘We have five more minutes, so let’s open up the floor.’

Thing is, If I were to go up there, get up to that microphone and say what I believe to be the crux of Rose’s agenda, I would be shot down in flames. I know that the majority of people who have come here wouldn’t understand what I was getting at – they would have me down as anti-feminist, on the wrong side, ‘part of the problem.’ But… isn’t that a bit, well, fucking thick of them? Yes, I am appalled by any man who takes advantage of his physical or social superiority over any woman. Yes, it should be fought against. And yet, I have also noticed a burgeoning trend of women themselves taking advantage of their own perceived inferiority, and using it against men in a multitude of manipulative and extremely dangerous ways. I think that’s exactly what Rose just did. That’s what’s inspired the creative petites morts in so many of Glasgow’s bright young things. And it scares the shit out of me.

Joanna Silversmith practically volts over the huddled cushion-dwellers so she can bellow on about Virginia Woolf’s vagina until the venue owners come in and, effectively, tell everyone to get the fuck out. I smile at them gratefully.

Seb finds me in the throng as we’re leaving.

‘Fantastic, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, yes. Lovely,’ I murmur, fishing about in my pocket for my cigarettes.

We push outside, where everyone is lighting up and wanking each other off, figuratively and literally, probably. I offer him a cigarette and he takes one absent-mindedly, his eyes darting and bright. A flash of hatred seizes me. The strength of it takes me by surprise.

‘Why did you move here? To Glasgow I mean,’ I ask him.

His eyes meet mine, but he’s stopped seeing me.

‘My parents are a bit Tory. I thought it would piss them off.’

I dig my nails into my palms. I look up and down the cobbled alley outside the pub – this dark place in the city I love. Someone has overheard Seb’s last comment and guffaws towards us.

‘Me too, mate. And I did Lit, to top it off. They’re like, Humanities degree? Sort of, what are you going to do with that? Teach?’

Seb laughs. ‘I know. But, I mean, after seeing something like that, you just think, like, God, us Humanities folk have such a lot of heart.’

I could lose it, really go for it; 'WHY THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE TO SAY 'HUMANITIES'? WHY CAN'T YOU JUST SAY YOU STUDIED FUCKING ENGLISH, OR FUCKING SOCIOLOGY, OR WHATEVER THE FUCK? DON’T YOU REALISE HOW MUCH OF A COMPLETE KNOB YOU ARE? DON’T YOU REALISE HOW ALIENATING AND MEANINGLESS THAT SOUNDS? OR – OR – ARE YOU PUTTING US ALL IN THE SAME BRACKET DELIBERATELY, BECAUSE YOU HAVE A MASSIVE CHIP ON YOUR SHOULDER? BECAUSE YOU KNOW OUR CHANCES OF MAKING ANY FUCKING MONEY WHATSOEVER ARE CONSIDERABLY SLIMMER THAN THEY ARE FOR PEOPLE WHO CHOSE, SAY, ACCOUNTANCY OR... I DON'T KNOW, FUCKING... FUCKING... ORTHODONTICS? IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT TO FEEL? OH YES, US 'HUMANITIES FOLK' ARE ALL IN IT TOGETHER. MAYBE WE WON'T GET A JOB OUT OF IT, BUT WE'RE STILL MORE ENLIGHTENED THAN EVERYONE ELSE, AND MORE UNIQUE IN EVERY WAY. REBELLING FROM OUR ‘A BIT TORY’ PARENTS. YEAH, WELL. APPLES. TREES. DON’T FALL FAR FROM. I HATE TO TELL YOU, MATE, BUT THAT SHIT IS IN YOUR BLOOD WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. AND THERE-IN-LIES-THE-RUB.’

Needless to say, I don't go there. I see him clock Rose in her swishing gown, take my cue, and slip off into the night.

When I get home, instead of slitting my wrists (it’s a close call), I put on ‘Local Hero.’ I didn’t know this, but Mark Knopfler did the soundtrack. There’s one called ‘The Ceilidh and the Northern Lights,’ which is played over a montage of a ceilidh… and the Northern Lights. A young Denis Lawson swings his wife around a windswept Aberdeenshire hall. People drink whisky, sing into microphones, snog. Laugh. Outside the village hall, apart from the churning sea, there is peace. I fall asleep trying my best to think about that beach, that sublime Northern sky. I fall asleep trying not to lose hope.