Archive of Our Own ^beta

They meet for the first time in the corridor, on moving in day. Initially Jacob doesn’t realise that the man with whom he’s accidentally made nervous eye contact is a fellow fresher. He doesn’t look new or scared or lonely or lost. He doesn’t look like he’s ever been any of those things, perhaps not even as a newborn. Surely he must be someone’s older brother helping out, or something.

But it quickly becomes apparent that the stranger, despite his tie and receding hairline and weirdly adult air of confidence, is eighteen. Just like Jacob. Except he’s not like Jacob at all, really, is he.

He shakes Jacob’s hand and beams at him, gives his name as Nigel, says how jolly it will be to be neighbours.

Jacob holds Nigel’s gaze and forces a smile. He tries to be friendly without giving away too much about himself. Since before he got here, he has had the terrifying feeling that the moment anybody actually gets to know him, they will conclude that he doesn’t really deserve his place, that there must have been some kind of administrative error.

He gets away with it, this time. Nigel smiles and squints at him and shakes his hand again before disappearing into his own room.

Jacob cradles his right hand in his left. It’s still warm, and there’s a slightly painful afterglow from the squeeze. Nobody’s shaken his hand like he’s a grown-up before.

Everything seems to come easily to Nigel. He simply does things, without any apparent fear of humiliating failure. Jacob is still hesitant to raise his hand in lectures, even when he knows the answers, because what if he’s wrong? What if he opens his mouth and no sound comes out? What if they laugh and laugh and laugh and send him packing?

While Jacob is battling his way through that, Nigel is blithely setting up a crossword club. There’s already about half a dozen of them, all boys, mostly Nigel’s friends from classics. They meet in the pub on Monday afternoon — when it’s quieter — and collaboratively work their way through the puzzle in the Times.

When Jacob agreed to come along, he was picturing clues like Current President of the USA (6) and Hit movie, The Color of _ (5). He thought he might have something to offer, an outsider’s perspective, a slightly different frame of reference that might make him valuable and exciting amidst the homogeneity of Nigel’s circle. Maybe there’d even be a question about marine biology, if he was lucky.

It’s not that, though. Of course it’s not. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it. Fucking hell.

Jacob’s seat is a big leather armchair that’s already too much for him, and he can feel himself sinking deeper and deeper into it with every moment that passes. He sits there, nursing his pint in humiliating silence, while the other boys froth about reversals and insertion indicators. There is something faintly sexual about it all, not least the feeling that he’s turned up to an intellectual circle jerk with nothing to jerk.

Jacob’s disdain for Nigel and the gaggle of Nigel-alikes is matched only by his intense, heartaching desire to be liked by them.

After the puzzle is solved, they all stay in the pub to continue drinking.

At one point, Nigel puts a hand on Jacob’s shoulder and stage-whispers that filly in the corner has her eye on you. When Jacob refuses to approach or even look at her, his admonishment is to get some balls, man.

Jacob stares down into his pint. He wouldn’t mind falling into it, cold amber, muffling the chaos of mammalian noise out here. He says, in a voice that barely rises above the din and sounds slightly otherworldly even to his own ears: “The mangrove rivulus — doesn’t have balls, but — it produces gametes internally. Both sperm and ova. It fertilises itself.”

Nigel raises his eyebrows. “That doesn’t sound much fun.”

“It’s called selfing. I think — I-I think that life would be a lot easier if humans could do that. Or spawning, like salmon — releasing our gametes to sort it all out for themselves, and we wouldn’t have to bother with all the…” Jacob drums his fingers on the glass. “All the unpleasantness.”

“The more unpleasant, the better, I say.” Smirking, Nigel adds, “Just remember how thin our walls are. I’d better not overhear you fertilising yourself in the middle of the night.”

On the way back to their rooms, Nigel puts an arm around Jacob’s shoulders. They’re both a little drunk, and Jacob can smell it on the larger boy’s breath, feel it in the way he leans his considerable weight across the back of Jacob’s neck.

Nigel says: “Sorry about the crossword. I didn’t mean for you to be embarrassed.”

“It’s fine,” Jacob lies, and his voice cracks a bit. “It was fun.”

“I could teach you, if you’d like. I’d be very happy to teach you.”

Jacob swallows. He can hardly bear the thought of it. “No. Thank you. I think we’d both better focus on our courses.”

Outside his bedroom door, Nigel asks Jacob if he’d like to come inside. Jacob shakes his head without a word and scurries into his own bedroom, like a mangrove rivulus pursued by a shark.

For the rest of his life, Jacob never knows what would have happened if he’d said yes. Nigel never makes the offer again.

The next day, Jacob plucks up the courage to talk to a librarian, who finds for him a book on cryptic crosswords. He hides it in his satchel and trots away as fast as he can, just in case Nigel is about to emerge from behind a bookshelf and catch him in the act.

Jacob spends the week shut in his room, racing through his assigned reading in order to spend the bulk of his time with the crossword book. Sometimes it makes him want to tear out his hair, but sometimes there’s a glimmer of something, a word that clicks perfectly into place, a riddle that resolves itself into an answer. In those moments, he feels a burst of phenomenal self-satisfaction. In those moments, he understands why Nigel is so smug all the time.

One night, through the thin wall that separates their bedrooms, he hears a muffled thudding sound. Jacob stands and presses his ear to the wall. Someone is whimpering, whining in a high-pitched voice.

Oh… oh, fuck… oh, fuck me…

Jacob’s face flushes hot. He presses a hand to his mouth and keeps listening. Between the girl’s moans, he can hear the low rumble of Nigel’s voice, too quiet to make out the words — no matter how much he tries.

Jacob wants to know what he’s saying. He wants to see.

His dick stirs, but he ignores it.

One Monday morning, after more than a month of study, Jacob rises early. It’s still dark as he creeps out, and it’s still dark when he creeps back in with a copy of the Times tucked into his satchel.

He spends the morning bent over the paper, a notebook and pencil on his lap, brow furrowed, working his way through the puzzle. None of the clues come easy. Some don’t come at all, but with the checked letters and definitions, he manages to reverse-engineer the solutions.

When he’s finally filled in every square, he looks at his watch and realises he’s already half an hour late.

He springs up, drags on his battered leather jacket, and books it down to the pub.

“Jacob!” Nigel, unsuspecting, gives him a smile. “We were beginning to think you wouldn’t be joining us!”

“Lecture overran,” Jacob pants, swiping his sweaty fringe back from his forehead, before sinking into a chair.

The club meeting that follows is less like a circle jerk and more like Jacob jerking himself off while the other members watch in increasingly uncomfortable silence. To every clue, he rattles off the answer before anyone else has a chance to pitch in. In less than half the time it usually takes, it’s over.

Jacob knows that he’s made things awkward, but he doesn’t care. He knows that his little stunt hasn’t made him one of them, but that was never really on the cards to begin with. What matters is that he’s beaten them at their own game, he’s proven his superiority — at least, his equality — and now he doesn’t need to ache for their approval ever again.

The others stay to continue drinking, while Jacob excuses himself. He treats himself to a pie for dinner and then retreats to his room once more.

Late that night, he hears sounds out in the corridor. Unable to contain his curiosity, he tiptoes over to the door and cracks it open.

Nigel is there, struggling one-handed with his keys while his other arm is supporting the limp body of a girl. She’s not dressed for the autumn weather — a short denim skirt, ankle boots, no jacket. Jacob wonders if she’s a student or a local. Her head is drooped down to her chest so that he can’t see her face.

“What are you doing?” Jacob whispers.

“What does it look like?” Nigel hisses back. “Here.” And he shoves the girl into Jacob’s arms.

She’s a dead weight: either passed out, or so drunk that she might as well be. She smells of beer and smoke and vomit. Jacob gags but holds her obediently while Nigel quickly unlocks his own bedroom door.

“Thank you, my dear,” says Nigel, taking the girl back. He throws Jacob a wink before dragging her body into his room and kicking the door shut.

Jacob stands there, ice trickling down his spine while he tries to think of what he should have said.

He goes into his bedroom and presses his ear to the wall.

That’s not the last time. Over the next few years, when they go out drinking together, Jacob sees it happening with his own eyes: Nigel zeroing in on the easy targets. He describes them like military opponents, lands to be conquered, enemy castles with damage to their defensive walls. He seems to have a sense for them. He can read them in a way that they cannot — or do not — read him in return. And they pay the price for that discrepancy, every time.

Sometimes Jacob glimpses them leaving in the morning — quiet and sullen — or crying — sometimes with bruises on their necks and faces. None of them are ever heard from again, at least as far as Jacob knows.

Jacob still thinks of a shark. The girls are fishes, like Jacob was, that one time.

Once or twice, Jacob gets himself blackout drunk, just to see what will happen. When he checks himself over in the morning, he finds that Nigel has merely put him to bed, like any good friend would. Jacob can’t account for the disappointment that niggles in the back of his mind, so he relabels it disapproval.

Disapproval, yes. What Nigel does is terribly unethical, that much is clear. At first, Jacob doesn’t say anything. Nigel is his best friend, after all, and he doesn’t have many other friends to turn to if their relationship goes sour.

When Jacob eventually does raise it (“perhaps not completely appropriate,” something woolly like that), it doesn’t get the defensive reaction that he feared.

It barely gets a reaction at all, in fact. Nigel just smirks and says, “Jealous?”

Jacob feels himself turning pink. “Why should I be jealous? I’ve got Monica.”

Nigel just licks his thin lips and goes back to his crossword. By now he’s moved on to setting his own clues.

Unable to point me the right way, having lost ball (8)

Jacob only gets them about half the time. Monica is better. She giggles when she figures them out, and Nigel calls her a clever girl, which is ridiculously patronising because she’s a grown woman and an accomplished physicist, but she doesn’t seem to care, in fact she seems to like it, and Jacob never says anything but he catches them both looking at him in a way that makes the hairs on his neck prickle — like they're enjoying a secret joke at his expense.

Coming home after dinner at Nigel’s, Monica slams Jacob against the wall and kisses him, hard.

Stiffly, Jacob puts his hands on her hips. “I’m not in the mood,” he mutters.

She kisses up his throat, her eyes closed, her knee between his thighs. “I am,” she pants.

“I know.” He pushes her away, goes into his study, and shuts the door.

When people ask Jacob what happened to the twins’ mother, he tells them she was eaten by a shark. Their open-mouthed reactions are always amusing.

When word finally reaches him of her actual death, he wonders how he’s supposed to feel about it.

They meet for the last time in Nigel’s rooms. It was Charlotte’s idea to begin with, but Jacob has sent her out of town, taken upon himself the full burden of what must be done.

He’s given Nigel no warning, no indication of anything amiss. Just two old friends, a divorcee (or should it be divorcé?) and a widower, reminiscing about old times. Jacob slips the venom into Nigel’s cup and then waits, allowing the egotistical old fool to talk and talk and talk until his words are gasps and his bloated body goes limp in its chair.

Jacob sinks to his knees. He unties the cord of Nigel’s dressing gown and pushes it open. He tugs Nigel’s blue pyjama bottoms down to his ankles, and then for a while he simply stares at it — the source of so much misfortune in his life.

For something so troublesome, it’s actually rather pitifully small. Jacob smiles faintly to himself. Then he looks up at Nigel, who is staring down at him with tears in his round, helpless eyes.

Jacob says, “You once told me to get some balls, Nigel. Do you remember that?”

From the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, Jacob withdraws a leather-wrapped scalpel.