Disclaimer: I don't own Bart or the narrator of the story. They are the property of Mr Peter Carey. Please don't sure me.
Note: this is a sort of prequel to the story War Crimes. Ever since I read it I wondered how the two main characters met and formed an alliance.
Kismet
We almost never know the changing points in our lives. Never recognise them until it's too late. Never know that a fork in the road's been passed and we've unwittingly embraced delight or disaster. Then sometimes we know them all too well. My first happened on a Wednesday morning in the main lecture theatre of a venerable university during my first semester there. And I still don't know whether I bless or curse it.
I was sitting at the back of the hall, sullen and incommunicative, full of raw disillusionment. I was a month into my new life and now realising it wasn't much better than my old one. That morning I was unusually uncomfortable, stiff and itchy in a second hand suit that was a size too big for my poorly-fed bones. I felt exposed with a too short haircut and clean shaved face. I felt exposed in the midst of these middle class students with their irritating earnestness and easy confidences. No matter how good my camouflage, I was sure they could tell I made of irrevocably different stuff.
I wasn't listening to the lecturer, as I knew this material already. For as long as I could remember I was aware that college was my one and only chance to get out, to make a halfway bearable life for myself. Not like my peers for whom college didn't really matter, whose parents knew people who'd get them jobs, who spent the night before tests in parties. I spent the night before tests studying conscientiously in air-less libraries. Always irrationally scared someone was going to tell me that I didn't belong here, that my scholarship had been a mistake. I hated myself for this self-fulfilling paranoia. But I did it anyway.
So I was abstractly doodling when the late arrival came noisily through the door. He was nothing more than a passing irritation, a fly buzzing at the window of my unexpressed rage. Another pretty, spoilt kid in a place that was drowning in them.
"This is Macro Economics, right?" the young man said to no one in particular. Bart never asked questions that he didn't already know the answer to. But it was his voice that got my attention: that flat, nasal, provincial accent.
An accent very like mine.
I took another look and cursed my hasty judgement of people. I'd been wrong about this one. He stood there in this old lecture theatre full of the haute-bourgeois wearing ugly, cheap clothes. And real trash not the fake, bohemian look favoured by many of my classmates. I knew the mark of thrift shop clothes all too well. But Bart wore his class inferiority like a king. He made a mockery of those rich kids who'd never had to strive for a thing. He made a mockery of my desire to be accepted by them.
Describing him I can only resort to clichés: tousled, raven hair; high, almost eastern cheekbones; sensual lips; a rock star's slouchy posture. In another world he could have been a perfect pinup. But there was something else, an undercurrent of violence that wasn't usually part of the mix. It was embryonic then, hidden under teenage softness but it was there all right. I'd done enough desperate, awful things in my short life to always see that potential, to know it the way an animal senses another of its kind. And for a second I saw something I almost recognised.
Is it possible that I didn't want something from him? Is it possible that the mean calculator of my mind wasn't already working an equation? Doubtful, for even then I was nothing if cunning. Especially when it came to my utter loneliness and those I thought would alleviate it. And yet now I only remember that I thought we could be friends.
I grinned involuntarily watching him, looking cool and clever and hopelessly out of place. He embodied everything I aspired to but never had the courage to practice. At this stage I was still playing the game by the old rules. But I silently cheered Bart's disregard of them, cheered his lateness, his bad clothes, his long hair, his carelessly hidden intelligence. I was a coward but I was there with him in spirit.
When I got to know Bart better I realised he must have regarded morning lectures as something of a personal insult. Bart never got up before mid afternoon and went to bed before early morning, either drunk, stoned or both. His body clock was totally incompatible with the requirements of higher education or the corporate world we being groomed to join. But he didn't give a fuck about that though.
But not because of any juvenile attempts at rebellion though. Bart was simply innocent of society's expectations on too-smart boys from the sticks. It would never have occurred to him that he was supposed to pretend to respect his elders and betters' petty rules if he wanted to get on. Secure in his own genius, anything as pointless time-keeping slid right off his Teflon-coated brilliance.
Barto was obviously under the influence even then. He just oozed across that lecture hall. I'd smoked enough marijuana to know the symptoms of a dedicated pot head. But no drug could hide the genuine elegance of his movements or the hidden strength in his slim body. I thought of the large cats, of a panther sunning itself on African grasslands- its beauty and grace matched only by its lethal danger
I suppose I fell for him then and there.
Not that I wanted to jump him, you understand. I was firmly heterosexual, in theory if not practice. My nocturnal fantasies were clearly of the female shaped variety. I was certain I wanted him as a friend not as a lover. But Bartholomew just had something that transcended gender. You had to be blind or dead not to realise that he was more or less hopelessly appealing.
In such moments the course of one's life changes forever. Call it hindsight but I knew I was doomed then. I knew Bart would ruin me for the rest of the world because no one else would ever match up to him. I knew I'd do anything for him if he'd only recognise that the hard, burning intelligence inside me was the same as his. I knew my new life had finally arrived- it was spread out for me like an exotic, foreign country. I was exhilarated expectant and more than slightly scared.
And I never thought for a second that I'd be the one who'd destroy him.
But that morning, unknowing of what I'd do to him in ten years time, Bart fell into the seat next to me. He would have never anticipated a thing as he unfolded his limbs slowly and put his books on the table. There were the inevitable heavy business textbooks, also a book about Beatles and a copy of Satre's Nausea in French. He had a notepad covered in intricate equations of some sort- all drawn with a terrifying degree of concentration.
I stole a sideways glance, looking up into his big, dark eyes. You could lose yourself forever in there. I saw my own reflection, mirrored there in those inscrutable eyes. I saw myself as he would see me. And what I saw there was my own potential: my capacity for corruption, for evil. And I was captivated. Maybe I really knew Bart then. Or maybe, for the first time, I really knew myself.
Bart must have felt me looking at him. He turned to face me fully and smiled the first of thousands of beautiful smiles he would grace me with. "Hi, I'm Bart", he said. "Who are you?"