Les Noyades

1: Childe Harold

Everything was upside-down when Rumi first encountered Yves. Quite literally— he had leaned himself back over the kitchen table until his head began to swell from the concurrent rush of blood to his skull. He was so engaged in his dog-eared copy of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage that he hardly noticed his father entering their dilapidated little home. The Department of Home Affairs, as his father called it; one which he returned to after lecturing daylong at the Department for English. Today, he had returned with a companion.

  "Rumi, right yourself and say hello," Declan instructed his son in his wheezing, nasal tone that hardly suited a man whose job was to talk at length to uninterested students.

Rumi heaved himself up with a grunt and, as he began to make sense of a no longer inverted world, expected to see a shuffling old soon-to-be-skeleton wasting away next to his father. A business associate or some antiquated essayist of old. Instead there was a young man of student age wearing not the cobwebbed corduroys of a professor but a sleepy blue turtleneck and grey slacks. Rumi sat up straight.

This celestial seraphim looked him over dismissively— this, Rumi was accustomed to. Nobody ever cared for the sons of brilliant men; the only time anybody ever paid them any attention was to ask if they would be becoming brilliant men also. Rumi had decided already that he had no wish to be brilliant, and somehow the world's occupants could see that, leading to a frequency of dismissive lookings-over. Nevertheless, he did not startle away from this visitor's disinterest.

"Good afternoon," he said politely. "Rumi Barrett."

He thrust forward a scrawled-on, skinny hand, which was shaken frankly.

"This is Yves Luscombe, one of my undergrads. He's helping me to compile a series of essays discussing the..."

Rumi quickly disengaged from his father's crawling way of speaking and instead gave Yves a thorough inspection. His father did not often bring students to the Department of Home Affairs (the Doha, as they called it between themselves) and Rumi did not often interact with the students of the grounds on which he lived. He preferred to observe— always had preferred to watch the world rather than join it. What blissful hours could be spent gazing out from his gritty window at rags of people carting about heavy books to lectures, seminars, study sessions. And later, when everybody wanted to forget that they were learning anything at all, they would pack into the bars and pubs and Rumi would hear their joy from his room. This vicarious joy was enough for him.

Even to have Yves in a room with him was a pleasure; he wondered if he had watched this young man. No, he thought it improbable that he would not have noticed this tall and elegant figure. Yves was exactly the sort that he would enjoy to watch. He looked athletic beneath his clothes, and Rumi had already devised his entire life. With those tree-ring brown eyes and dishwasher-blond hair, it was easy. He was exceedingly well-liked and trailed around a heartbreak of girls, and he was good enough at sport to be asked to join plenty of informal teams, and he worked hard for his degree but missed morning lectures sometimes to sleep. Inventing these stories gave Rumi an immense sense of well-being, primarily because he could never be proved wrong as he never discovered people's true lives, and how he hated to be proved wrong.

"Make us some tea, eh?" Declan asked his son without quite meeting his eyes— they never seemed to meet each other's eyes. They were too similar in that they were both gauche in the company of others.

"How do you take it?" Rumi looked to Yves.

  "Milk only," Yves said. Unlike Declan, Yves had no excuse to ignore Rumi as intently as he was doing.

Rumi sniffed and slouched off to the kitchen with his hands slung by the thumbs through his belt loops. He streamed water into the tinny old kettle, the sort one put on the stove to heat up. As he waited for the telltale whistle he set to work restacking papers that had piled up on the stove on the counter so that they would not burn. He leafed with disinterest through a few of them and found that they were critical essays on The Wasteland. Whether or not they were his father's words, they were dull as ever.