Trouble
We were at the table by the window with the view
Casting shadows, the sun was pushing through
Spoke a lot of words, I don't know if I spoke the truth
Got so much to lose
Got so much to prove
God, don't let me lose my mind
Trouble on my left, trouble on my right
I've been facing trouble almost all my life
- Trouble by Cage The Elephant
“Kid, go home.”
Theo looked up at the Print shop owner, Mr. Johnathan. He was one of the only Black men in the area who owned a business. There were several other print shops that Theo tried working at for a few weeks each. Kind and patient, Jonathan was the only one Theo liked.
Theo stretched in his chair, “I have half an hour left.”
Mr. Johnathan shook his head, “I don’t know how you maintain your grades, son. Top grades with a job you work at three hours a day.”
Theo smiled feebly. He didn’t remember the last time he got more than five hours of sleep. He didn’t always strike gold with marks. He staggered through his GCSEs and A levels scraping passes in every subject except English and Politics. Go figure.
Mr. Johnathan clapped his back, “Go, rest and eat some good, warm dinner. Tell Granville I said hi and that the prints his mate requested for will be ready tomorrow.”
“Mate?”
“You know, the tall lad who looks like a bloody painting.”
Theo snorted. His neck was sore from working all day. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to go back to the cottage early, maybe get thirty more minutes of sleep than usual.
He collected his hourly wage, hopped on his cycle and slowly rode back to the cottage.
The sky was slowly darkening, the periwinkle blues and purples melting into the black. Clouds rolled past like wisps of smoke.
He didn’t have enough money for soap, toothpaste, a pair of gloves, and medicine for headache, he thought. He couldn’t choose between them. He should probably wait.
By the time he reached the cottage, it was pitch dark. It was a cold night.
The lights weren’t on.
He saw a note stuck to the fridge
“Theo, Jonathan rang to tell me he was planning on letting you leave earlier than usual tonight. I don’t know when you’ll be back from work. I went to buy some Indian food for dinner. It’s 6 PM now. I should be back in half an hour.”
Half an hour.
Theo checked the clock. It was already close to 8. Theo didn’t know which restaurant Granville went to, but there was no good reason for a two hour delay. He peered out of the window. The sky was black and Theo could hardly see any lights. He left his bag and wage in his room and started pacing around the room, ignoring the hungry growl of his stomach. He shoved a piece of bread and a slice of apple Granville probably abandoned into his mouth.
He wore Granville’s gloves and set out into the night. He got back on the cycle and started cycling towards Helm street, where most of the delis and restaurants were, next to the supermarket.
He cycled for fifteen minutes before he saw a figure- tall and strapping, in an outfit too expensive and posh for this side of town. He observed the man’s confident strides as he took a turn. Theo pedalled faster, growing closer in a burst of speed. The wheels skid against the street, bits of gravel bursting everywhere.
Under the warm glow of a streetlight, he caught a better look of the man’s side profile- the familiar jaw, and the thick black hair.
Benedict!
Theo could not imagine what on earth Benedict Bridgerton would be doing in an alley this late? Is this why Granville ran late, because of a rendezvous? Theo’s gut squirmed uncomfortably. He felt bad, snooping in his business. He shouldn’t follow Benedict. It was none of his business, but something didn’t feel right. Granville wouldn’t have promised to come in half an hour if he was planning this. Something must have been wrong. Maybe Benedict is involved in something that could put Granville in danger.
He followed from a distance, and saw the bloke enter a house- a cottage slightly bigger than Theo’s and Granville’s. Theo paused to look at the sign on the side.
“Accommodation belongs to the professors of the prestigious university, Mayfair Academy. Faculty of the Whistledown school of Literature, culture and communication, Greyhook school of Economics and finance and the Wilhelmina school of History and Social Sciences reside here. Faculty of the science, medicine and law departments reside on Florence street.”
In horror, he saw Benedict embrace a tall, beautiful woman while a large dog sat, wagging its tail and looking at the couple with what Theo was sure was a look of disapproval. She gave him a dazzling smile. He parked his bike and walked closer as the door closed, but he caught a glimpse of her through the window. It was Professor Kathani Sharma! The Economics professor was with Benedict.
Anger rushed through Theo’s head. Without thinking, he strode towards them. He had to confront Benedict.
Before he could stop himself, he knocked on the door. He will catch the bastard red-handed and—well he hadn’t thought of what to do after. His fury had cycled him all the way here.
“Oh just wait”, he heard the woman laugh, before she opened the door and gasped. Her coat and plait were undone. The dog’s bark resounded through the house.
“I’m sorry to bother you”, Theo lied, “I was looking for my flatmate and got lost. May I use your telephone. I am a student at your university.”
Kathani widened her eyes, “Oh, of course dear. Yes, you are in English, aren’t you?”
“Er, yes, I am Theo--”
He only caught a view of her face before his vision was suddenly obscured by a thick mass of fur, a wet sort of smell clouding his sense. A loud bark filled his ear.
“Down Newton!”, Kathani said alarmed, striding forward, “I am so sorry, Mr. Sharpe.”
The dog bounded off Theo. He didn’t quite mind dogs, and patted Newton’s head when it stuck his tongue out, as if eager to be out of the house.
“You know me?”
“Eloise Bridgerton told me she was working on a short story with you. She wanted some material from me the other day. Clever girl.”
"Is everything okay? Are you done?”, Benedict’s voice said. His voice was muffled but somehow clipped.
Theo bit back a response and waited for him to come out. He knew he wasn’t going to get violent. He was just deciding between “Ha! You cheater!” and “Aren’t you supposed to be elsewhere for your nighttime dwellings, Mr. Bridgerton?” when Benedict’s footsteps grew louder.
“Oh, wait we aren't done—“, Kathani started but as Benedict came into view, wearing nothing but a towel slung around his waist, Theo realized, with a nerve crushing jolt, the man was not Benedict at all.
The man’s jaw-which Theo noticed, like his hair was incredibly different from Benedict’s- dropped in horror when he saw Theo. He caught the towel around his waist and bolted, scrambling to put on a pair of pants. Theo’s face heated up.
“It’s fine”, he said, scuttling away, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no!”, Kathani called after him, “Please, don’t tell anyone!”
Theo remembered what happened to the French professor the previous year. He helped her wipe the slurs off the windows of her office once when she was crying.
“He’s not a student…or another employee right?”
“God, no!”
“Listen!”, the man said. He was fully clothed now, even though his shirt was on inside out, “Don’t tell my siblings I was here! They’ll be furious I didn’t visit.”
Theo remembered Benedict saying “Please, Mr. Bridgerton is my older brother.”
God, what was wrong with this stupid family?
“You’re a Bridgerton?”, Theo asked, all politeness forgotten.
The man pinched the bridge of his nose, “Good God, which one of my siblings did you meet to warrant that reaction- I apologize, on their behalf.”
“Uh— “,
“Oh forgive me”, the man strode forward. Theo couldn’t understand why he mistook him for Benedict. He didn’t have Benedict’s easy, warm smile. This man’s jaw was slimmer and his hair was shorter. He sported a slight stubble and there was a stiffness to his expression, as if he practiced his brooding expression in the mirror. His elegance had a more regal sort of sharpness, unlike Benedict who looked like he had rolled out of bed (or off a horse) and used a paintbrush to untangle his hair.
“I am Anthony Bridgerton, the oldest. Don’t worry young man, I washed my hands.”
Theo gingerly shook it, “Right, uhm, I’ll be on my way now.”
Ignoring Professor Kathani, Theo fled the scene and got on his cycle so fast he could hear the wind whip against his skin. He was still hot from embarrassment as he tore through the streets. He got the wrong guy. How could he jump to conclusions and act like that? He ruined a couple’s night. If he minded his own business instead of panicking—
He didn’t even realize he reached back home until he almost cycled past it. He burst in, his coat slipping off his shoulder. It was still empty. Granville was probably somewhere with Benedict, safe and sound.
Theo had just finished changing into pyjamas when Granville entered with a bag of food.
“Sorry I’m late, Theo”, Granville said, setting the food on the table, “the restaurant was closed. I caught up with some friends and they took me to another Indian restaurant. One of my mates, Ruman, knew the owner, Sanjay Patel. He was here for dinner last week, if you remember.”
“Right, right”, Theo said casually, “No problem.”
“I hope I didn’t worry you”, Granville said, removing his scarf. Theo looked away, determined to focus on anything but the mark on Granville’s collar bone.
“No, not at all!”, Theo said brightly, “I knew everything was fine. Let’s eat!”
“How’s your short story coming along?”, Granville asked, opening a box of naan. He took keen interest in Theo’s classes and assignments.
“Fine”, Theo said, taking out a bowl, “we figured out an idea. We will start planning tomorrow.”
“And your other assignments?”
“Really well”, Theo said, “I am almost done with two essays. We had to apply a Feminist analysis to Frankenstein, and a Marxist analysis to Paradise Lost for our Literary studies class. I have to read Rebecca and Madwoman in the attic by next week, though.”
“All Greek to me. Listen, I wanted to ask you”, Granville leaned forward, “After work, you don’t wander around anywhere, right? You come straight home?”
Theo paused midway through scooping more Kadai paneer from the box, “Yeah, of course.”
Granville looked like he was going to say something but pursed his lips and continued eating, only pausing to ask Theo to pass more naan. Theo suddenly considered confessing about following Anthony Bridgerton, mistaking him for Benedict. He felt as though if he got it out of him, he would feel less guilty, even though he knew he didn’t commit a crime.
When Granville reached for a glass of water, Theo’s eyes fell on his ring finger, on the dent left by his removed wedding band. Theo knew he didn’t just remove it to keep it clean. Theo’s stomach squirmed. The thought of Henry’s wife, roaming some wineyard or the other alone, thinking her husband is coming to an empty house on the other side of the continent was too much for him to bear.
“Have you called your dad?”, Granville asked.
Theo had called him the previous night, and once again thought about how much someone saying the truth would have helped his family all those years ago. Every time he spoke to his father, he could feel the truth of what happened—the real story about his mother—hover on the tip of his tongue.
In every conversation, the words would piece themselves together in his mind, like layers of wispy cotton candy winding around each other on a stick. However, every time he opened his mouth to say it, just like cotton candy, the words would dissolve in his tongue. Every letter would disappear, leaving behind the heavy, sickly aftertaste of silence. He would feel like a child again, grasping for the courage.
The memories of his mother were a red lollypop staining the corners of his mouth, leaving behind red sticky trails of moments he could never recreate and a sharp stick he could only pierce the ground with.
Grief was a stranger who knows the way to your house, and enters without knocking. Grief sits at the only empty chair, chews half the fruits on the dining table and leaves them to rot. Grief leaves every packet and cupboard door open for the gust of memory to blow all the warm candles out. Grief left footprints that can’t be scrubbed away, on the floor, on the walls, the ceilings, and the strange space in your lungs when you can’t breathe.
“Did you hear me?”, Granville waved his hand, “I asked you if you called your old man.”
“Did you call your wife?”, Theo wanted to ask.
Stop, he told himself firmly. Stay out of it.
He just nodded and spoke nothing about it for the rest of the night. He cleaned the dishes, finished his homework and went to bed. When Theo waddled to the kitchen for breakfast the next morning, he saw a second pair of shoes by the door, and as usual didn’t question it.
“Mornin’”
Benedict stumbled out of Granville’s bedroom in a thin grey t-shirt and joggers.
“Slept well?”, Theo asked. Must he add poor attempts at conversation to his resume?
“Yeah”, Benedict helped himself to a banana, “Say, Theo, do you have any uh, friends, you’d like to stay over at tonight?”
“Absolutely!”, Theo said. He didn’t need more details. He would gladly sleep on the streets.
Granville poked his head out of the room, “Theo, no funny business, you hear me? I will ring the bloody warden’s office every two hours if I have to.”
“Yes Henry.”
“Good.”
When Theo arrived late at his Modern Poetry class, most of it was full. He ignored Eloise’s eye roll and occupied his usual bench next to Dev, who was reading a small book that had a cartoon on the cover, called TINKLE, clearly not listening to the lecture.
“Where were you?”, Dev hissed as Theo slid into his seat, “I’ve been bloody miserable.”
“Ran late, sorry.”, Theo whispered, “Listen, can I stay in your dorm tonight?”
“Yeah, sure”, Dev’s eyes lit up, “Let me ask my roommate. If not, crash at Preston’s.”
Dev’s roommate was a senior who had come for a year abroad from Julliard.
“Where’s Preston?”
Dev shrugged, “He was on the phone with his Ma.”
Theo pulled out his notebook and the library’s battered copy of Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, “Is everything ok?”
“Can’t tell. He was talking rapidly in Patois. Must have been urgent.”
“Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Menon, if you’re done discussing, could you please tell us what the fog being described as a cat symbolizes?
“Daivame”, Dev muttered, “which poem?”
Theo saw “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”, scribbled on the board. He racked his brain. He had read this poem before. He could see up front, Bridgerton’s arm raised into the air.
“Uh”, Theo said, “well, the poem is a modern one.”
“How shocking”, Eloise drawled.
He went on, “it reflected the anxiety and uh, disillusionment after the war. On one level, maybe the poet is talking about the pollution in industrial life”, he flipped open his book to the poem and pushed it towards Dev, “ Maybe the fog represents an abstract, pervasive sort of unease, like the whole city is coloured by seediness and corruption.”
“Very good”, Professor Fairwater said, “why a cat?”
“Well, it’s rather creepy, isn’t it?”, Dev offered, glancing at Theo’s tiny annotations “characterizing that…atmosphere as a living orgas—”
“organism”, Theo hissed, pointing at his notes.
“organism, sorry- that rubs against and licks the windows. The confusion is hard to escape Everyone’s sense of reality lost stability after the war, and uh…I think the strange image reflects that.”
“Impressive”, Professor Fairwater said, “how do you think the speaker feels as a result of this disillusionment?”
“Alienated”, Eloise piped up, “The anxiety and alienation makes him feel disconnected, especially because the world around him seems so fast paced and emotionally deadening—”
“That’s what I said!”, Theo said, unable to help himself.
“Yeah, but I said it better”, Eloise said, and without missing a beat, continued, “ So he is stuck in a monotonous, cyclical sort of life and we see that in the way the poet uses repetition.”
She cleared her throat and read out from the poem,
“I have known them all, already known them all, have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
The professor grinned, “Precisely.”
She wrote the last line on the board, her chalk scraping against the blackboard.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
“The speaker is always stuck in a loop of anxiety, a sort of inferiority complex, and that pushes him into a state of inaction.”
She looked around, “now, give me an example of another famous literary character, way before modernity, who is quite similar.”
“Hamlet?”, a student suggested.
“There we go. Thank you, Ms. Vohra.”
The professor walked around, “Now, for your final. I want you to write a poem, from the point of view of the character Hamlet’s, about his situation, structured similarly to the poem we covered today. More importantly, I need a reflective essay, comparing the depiction of inaction in Hamlet and Prufrock, and how you used the analysis to write your poem. This is thirty percent of your grade. I need it in two weeks. The month after that, come prepared with Virginia Woolf’s Waves, Mrs. Dalloway and Room of one’s own. That will be part of your final exam.”
“She is insane”, Dev huffed as they walked out, “I have always thought she was an old bat. Can’t she just give us less work? I’ll be thirty by the time I am done.”
Theo didn’t respond. He quite liked Professor Fairwater. She was eccentric, but creative in a way that pushed them to think from perspectives they wouldn’t have otherwise. She was the first professor who actually appreciated him. Biased or not, he had a soft spot for her.
Dev was fiddling with his bag straps, “Everyone knows she wished she got Danbury’s job.”
That startled Theo, “As H.O.D?”
“Yeah, and she wanted to teach Creative writing. Fairwater’s close with some people on the board so she thought she’d get it, but Danbury’s publications and experience were more impressive—"
“Sharpe!”
Theo bit back a groan.
“Yes, Bridgerton?”
She had run behind him. Her face was flushed, her cheeks slightly pink. Penelope was next to her.
“Our next class got postponed to 4 PM. Mr. Kleezak’s train back got delayed. Do you want to work on our story now?”
Theo would rather start the morning doing just about anything else but agreed, walking with her to the library as she bid her friend goodbye.
“So, I wanted to show you something”, Eloise said, pulling out a chair.
She laid out documents in front of him. She had drawn tabular columns, and had in her messy scrawl, laid out a plan for the first few chapters of her story. He was surprised she took his approach seriously.
“A summary of every scene”, Eloise said triumphantly, with the same look on her face as she has when she scores more than him, a look he only sees fifty percent of the time, not that he keeps track, obviously.
“I like it”, he said, trying to keep the surprise out of his tone. She planned to open with a rehearsal, with one of the actors practicing his lines- a classic, “What could possibly go wrong?”, followed by a spectacular discovery of the dead body.
“I was thinking of dividing the story into acts—"
“Like a play”, Theo muttered, “Good idea, Bridgerton.”
“I also wrote the first chapter”, she said, sliding a few printed documents towards him.
Theo scanned the first page, and felt his stomach drop. Usually, a satisfying thrill would catch him by the scruff of his neck when Eloise didn’t do something right. He didn’t realize there would be an undercurrent of disappointment.
The first scene was dramatic, striking and perfectly timed, only to be followed by four paragraphs of a long winded internal monologue from the backstage worker, the main character. Sentences were loaded over each other, like an overfrosted cake, describing how frustrated she was with being undermined, only injected with a few interested details.
“You don’t like it”, Eloise mumbled.
“The first scene is good, but Bridgerton…what did I say about the woe is me internal monologue?”
Eloise threw her hands up, “How else am I supposed to give an insight?”
Theo shrugged, “you could, you know, show instead of tell--?”
“Show instead of tell?”, she repeated with a scoff, “You think I’m new to this, Sharpe?”
“I think you could unravel it by showing bits of the main character throughout the book by putting him—”
“Her.”
“her in different situations and interactions. The readers are going to be with her for the whole ride as she is suspected of murder and tries to solve it. Don’t throw them off this early. Instead, put her on the spot.”
“Give me an example.”
Great, now she was putting him on the spot. Theo chewed his lip,
“Give me a name.”
“Evelyn.”
“Evelyn’s everyday schedule was simple:…..being suspected for murder was not one of them.
He would have enjoyed the surprise on her face if she didn’t look like she want him to be the victim in the book.
“Fine”, she muttered, scribbling something down, “I’ll show the people around her undermining her through dialogue...and include stuff about the setting.”
“Good idea.”
She shot him a scowl.
He grinned at her.