Colvenhoof: Satan's Shorts (Clovenhoof Anthology) Read online

  “I don’t need their stinking classes,” he said. “I could just sit here and wait for universal wisdom to descend on me.”

  He looked at the fat brown reticulated python in the glass tank beneath the mural.

  “How’s the wisdom business, o subtlest and craftiest of beasts?”

  The serpent was silent.

  “Wisest thing I’ve heard all day,” said Clovenhoof.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, he removed the tank lid and lifted the snake out. He rested its fat, smooth coils across his shoulders. The python languidly tightened its grip around his arms. He smiled at the comforting weight and pressure.

  “You know, I spent some time as a serpent,” said Clovenhoof. “Long time ago now. I was happy then. For a while.”

  He absent-mindedly caressed the snake’s skin.

  “Not a big fan of crawling on your belly in the dust, mind. Legs are good things. I’d recommend legs.”

  He paused. There seemed to be some raised voices coming from a classroom across the way and, unless he was mistaken, he recognised one of them.

  “Excuse me,” he said, quickly but carefully returning the snake to its tank, and crossed the corridor to the noisy classroom.

  Nerys, who, for some reason that would no doubt become clear, stood in front of a class of balding and sagging pupils, one of whom seemed terribly upset with her board work. On the board were the words, cogito ergo sum.

  “I just want to know how to conjugate the verb to be?” said the annoyed little man.

  “Why would you want to conjugate it?” said Nerys.

  “Is it an irregular verb?”

  Nerys looked at the board.

  “Does it look irregular to you?”

  “I don’t know,” said the man, his spectacles vibrating with irritation. “You tell me.”

  “Can we perhaps tell by context?”

  “No, Professor Thomas, we can’t.”

  “Professor Thomas?” said Clovenhoof.

  Nerys saw him for the first time and an expression of panic mixed with embarrassment flooded her face.

  “Oh, hi. Do you know any Latin, by any chance?”

  “I dabble,” said Clovenhoof. “Una lingua numquam satis est.”

  “Indeed,” said Nerys. “Doctor Clovenhoof, I was just explaining to Adrian here that we don’t need to get too hung up on the technical details. We must walk before we can run. QED. That’s Latin, that is.”

  “I just wanted to know the conjugation of the verb,” said Adrian in a petulant staccato.

  Clovenhoof cleared his throat.

  “Sum, I am. Es, you are, singular. Est, he or she is. Sumus, we are. Estis, you are, plural. Sunt, they are.”

  “Ah-hah. See, Adrian?” said Nerys. “Easy. Surprised you didn’t know that. As they say in Rome… er… dôs adra i farw i'r gath gael bwyd.”

  “That sounded Welsh to me,” said a woman at the back.

  “Ha ha!” laughed Nerys. “As if. Perhaps you’d like to take over from here, Dr Clovenhoof.”

  Clovenhoof gave her a broad grin.

  “Recedite, plebes,” he said, taking centre stage. “Let the education begin.”

  Ben stood in the refectory, sipping an uninspiring cup of vending machine coffee and reading health and safety notices on the wall as he waited for Nerys and Clovenhoof to appear. Nerys had failed to return to the art room after going off in a huff and there was no sign of Clovenhoof in the meditation class. The instructor had given Ben a filthy look when he mentioned Clovenhoof’s name and he beat a swift retreat. Now, with all the classes over and the caretakers locking doors and turning off the lights, Ben was left alone with his coffee sludge, information on how best to tackle asbestos in the workplace and the unshakeable child-like fear that he had somehow been abandoned.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice behind him, “do you know w-”

  Ben turned and all but impaled himself on the young woman’s umbrella. His hand went instinctively to his speared ribs, flung coffee all down his front and then, in the ensuing sweary chaos, dropped his art folder and almost head-butted the health and safety notice board.

  “Oh, God. I’m sorry,” said the woman, casting her umbrella aside and crouching to pick up Ben’s scattered artwork. The woman’s long multi-coloured scarf – which either indicated an aren’t-I-kooky-and-bohemian personality or an unhealthy obsession with Tom Baker’s Doctor Who – pooled on the floor at her feet.

  Ben opened his mouth to speak, coughed at the pain in his side and waved his hand to generally indicate his thanks and that she should continue picking up papers.

  “These are good,” she said, standing up.

  “No,” said Ben, who was horrified that someone should be looking at his artwork, particularly the enthusiastic little sketches he had done between signing up for the art course and this first lesson.

  “They are,” she said, smiling as she put the papers back in the art folder. Her smile was wide, unreserved and entirely natural. Ben didn’t get treated to many smiles like that.

  “I particularly like this one,” she said and tapped her finger on the topmost paper, a pencil sketch Ben had made of one of his wargaming miniatures.

  “Really?” he said.

  “Alexandrine isn’t it?”

  “Close,” said Ben, impressed. “Seleucid actually. A chalkaspides.”

  “Oh, I don’t know so much about them. Early Hellenic history is really my thing. But I love that kind of historical setting. There’s something honest about it, not simple but somehow…real. Back in the days when men were real men and bestrode the world like colossi.”

  Her fingers touched the Seleucidian warrior’s muscles, the honed body that Ben himself had meticulously drawn. He found himself viewing the picture anew and felt a bizarre and almost uncontrollable desire to shout, “I’m not gay!”

  Instead he thrust his hand out at her.

  “I’m Ben,” he said.

  “Felicity,” she replied, shaking his hand and treating him to another beautiful smile. Ben thought he could get used to a smile like that.

  “So you’re a bit of an ancient history buff?” he said.

  “Ancient history student,” said Felicity. “Doing my masters in Birmingham. I also work part time at the museum and art gallery.”

  “That sounds like a dream job to me.”

  “Ah, it doesn’t pay much. I have to find extra ways to make ends meet. Speaking of which… I was going to ask you if you knew where the art rooms were. I’m looking for a teacher called Patty.”

  “She’s my teacher,” said Ben. “The rooms are down that way although I’m not sure if Patty is still here.”

  “Thanks.”

  Felicity adjusted her impractical scarf, picked up her umbrella and made for the door.

  “Felicity…” said Ben instinctively as she moved away from him.

  She looked back and he could tell she understood his expression perfectly.

  “I’ll see you in her class next week, yes?” she said.

  “Of course,” said Ben. “It’s rare to meet someone with a similar interest in history.”

  “Something to discuss over coffee?” she suggested.

  He looked down at his still-soaked jumper.

  “I’ll leave the brolly at home,” she said. “Oh. Look.”

  She bent down and rescued a rectangle of card from under a refectory seat. It was the apple sketch he had made earlier that evening. Felicity passed it to him.

  “It’s good. Really good,” she said and was gone.

  Ben lingered over putting the drawing in his folder. He was still alone in the refectory, no sign of Nerys or Clovenhoof, but he no longer cared. He rummaged in his pocket for coins to buy another coffee.

  On the way to the adult education centre the following week, Nerys tried to convince Clovenhoof not to take the Classics class again.

  “It’s not like you’re being paid to do it,” she said.

  “Then I’ll do it for the love,
” replied Clovenhoof.

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “You’re an imposter.”

  “Oh, really, Professor Thomas?”

  Nerys grumbled wordlessly.

  “Anyway,” she said, “where did you learn Latin?”

  “Rome,” said Clovenhoof as though it was the most obvious of things.

  Nerys looked at Ben in the rear view mirror.

  “Tell him, Ben. Tell him he can’t do it.”

  Ben had a weird and dreamy look on his face. He had been a bit odd all week and had seemed unusually keen to get to night school that evening. He had even put on a clean T-shirt, a sure sign that strange things were afoot.

  “Can’t do what?” said Ben.

  “Haven’t you been listening?”

  “No,” he said happily.

  Nerys scowled.

  “What is wrong with you, Ben?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” said Clovenhoof. “No style. Dead end job. That ugly rash under his-”

  “I do not have a dead end job,” said Ben. “There’s nothing wrong with me. In fact, the complete opposite. I’m just looking forward to tonight’s class.”

  “Yay,” said Nerys sarcastically. “More cactuses.”

  “Cacti,” said Clovenhoof.

  “Shut up, Latin-boy.”

  Ben and Nerys sat down in art class. Ben kept the space next to him free, driving away anyone who tried to take it with excuses and bald-faced rudeness.

  Felicity had said she’d be coming. She had to be coming. He had spent many an idle moment over the past week thinking of that smile and those eyes, picturing her standing before him in that long, loopy scarf (and in some of his reveries, not much more), conversation and laughter flowing like a river between them.

  As the clock’s hands raced to the top of the hour, his eyes fixed on the open doorway with greater ferocity and urgency.

  Nerys appeared not to notice, managing to keep up a one-sided conversation about Clovenhoof and his wicked insistence on teaching without pay or qualifications.

  “I don’t think he actually knows any Latin at all,” she said. “I think he just makes it up as he goes along.”

  The art teacher, Patty, drifted over to the classroom door and, despite Ben’s silent prayers and imprecations, closed it. Ben let out an audible whimper.

  “Yes, I think he’s going to get into a lot of trouble,” said Nerys in response.

  Patty launched into a gushing description of the class’s efforts from last lesson, the evocations of fruit and flora that they had managed to commit to paper. She went on to explain that it was time to take it a step further with a real challenge. Patty gestured to a red leather armchair that she had positioned at the front of the room.

  “I thought this was drawing from life,” said Ben.

  “Well, it used to be a cow,” said Nerys. “Maybe next week we’ll be drawing a plate of sausages.”

  “Or some nice chops,” suggested Ben.

  They both shook their heads, each disappointed in their own way.

  The door at the front of the classroom opened and Felicity walked in, wrapped in a white dressing gown.

  “Oh!” said Nerys in sudden comprehension.

  Ben frowned. He didn’t get it. Why had Felicity come like that? Had she forgotten to dress after showering that morning? Did she have one of those psychiatric disorders when people forget the most obvious of things and mistake their wives for hats and whatnot?

  That might explain why she had shown an unusual level of interest in him, Ben thought with an almost comforting clarity. Of course the only women interested him would be the mentally ill.

  Felicity stepped to the front of the class. She looked round the class, a faint smile of greeting to all. She paused as her gaze met Ben’s and her eye twitched in a not-quite wink.

  “I don’t understand,” Ben murmured.

  Felicity untied her cord belt, let the dressing gown fall to the floor at her feet and sat back in the armchair. Ben dropped his pencil. It clattered loudly on the floor. He bent to pick it up and considered staying down there, hiding behind the table forever.

  Patty was speaking but Ben couldn’t hear her over the blood pounding in his ears. He wasn’t comfortable with nakedness at the best of times, not even his own. A naked model in the drawing from life class ranked high on his all-time list of embarrassing things to avoid. That the life model was someone he knew, even slightly, made matters worse. That he had entertained some saucy thoughts regarding Felicity made this moment unbearably confusing.

  Reasoning that he couldn’t justify hiding on the floor forever (beside which his calves were already beginning to ache from crouching), he rose slowly. He found that judiciously distancing his face from his sketching board, he could neatly cover Felicity’s nakedness, leaving only her head poking above the top of the frame, her small bare feet appearing at the bottom and one hand, on the chair arm to the side.

  It was a redundant exercise because, like a man emerging from a dungeon after years of imprisonment and being blinded by the sun, Felicity’s body had imprinted itself indelibly on Ben’s retina. It was only with an extreme effort of will that he managed to hold his pencil straight.

  An hour later, he had drawn something. A hand, two feet and a face. He’d worked on the half-smile diligently and, despite his horror at the overall situation, was not displeased with the results.

  Nonetheless, when Patty called a halt to the session and Felicity had covered herself and departed the way she had come in, Ben almost vomited with relief. He packed his materials away hurriedly. For the first time, he looked at Nerys’s artistic efforts. Nerys had attacked the paper with dark thick lines, creating something angular, not without interest but somehow cold and loveless.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “It’s good,” he said hurriedly. “Let’s go.”

  “I really struggled to concentrate.”

  “Mmmm,” he agreed. “Let’s go.”

  “Did you notice her nipples pointed in different directions?”

  “I really need some fresh air.”

  “It’s like they were cross-eyed. I don’t think I could trust a woman with cross-eyed breasts.”

  Ignoring the gibberish Nerys was spouting, Ben gathered his things and left.

  He went to stand on the steps overlooking the car park and found Clovenhoof already there.

  “How was Classics?” said Ben without any true enthusiasm or interest.

  “Navis volitans mihi anguillis plena est.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Really? And art class?”

  “Oh, don’t ask,” said Ben, shaking his head. “It was…”

  “Hey!” called a friendly voice behind them.

  Ben turned.

  “Oh, er, hi Felicity,” he said.

  “I thought I’d missed you in there.”

  “Yes, er…”

  Felicity was fully clothed again but Ben found his gaze unavoidably drawn down, until he was staring at two brass buttons on her double-breasted winter coat.

  “I hope I didn’t surprise you,” she smiled.

  “Surprised?” he said in a ridiculously over-nonchalant tone. “Of course not. No, they were lovely. I mean it was lovely. The session.”

  Her smile took on a faintly embarrassed quality.

  “And are we still on for a coffee?”

  “Coffee?” said Ben. “Yes. Er, now? Or not now? I’ve got…”

  He gestured over his shoulder to indicate the abstract concept of things that needed doing.

  “You have?” said Felicity. “That’s fine.”

  “Another time though?” said Ben who, despite the horrors of the evening, wasn’t quite prepared to let that rarest of things, an available woman, slip through his fingers. “When I’ve not got things… you know.”

  “Sure. Maybe I’ll swing by at the end of next week’s class.”

  Ben nodded, not sure or happy about what he was agreeing to.<
br />
  “That would be…”

  “Lovely,” said Felicity.

  “Lovely indeed.”

  She gave him a flick of a wave and headed off into the night.

  Clovenhoof was sitting in front of the television at home when there came a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” he bellowed. “It’s open.”

  Ben entered the flat.

  “Jeremy, can I ask you for your advice?” he said and then stopped. “What are you doing?”

  Clovenhoof didn’t look up.

  “Do you mean what am I doing or what is Nerys doing?” he asked.

  Nerys squatted on a pouffe next to the television, an easel before her and a palette of paints in her hand. She had a broad smear of red paint across her forehead.

  “I’m doing Jeremy’s portrait,” she said.

  “And I’m watching Eastenders,” said Clovenhoof, “and translating it into Latin. Relinquite Ricky, nequam est.”

  “I think I’ll come back later.”

  “Hey, I thought you wanted my advice.”

  Clovenhoof watched Ben dither and then stay where he was.

  “It’s about Felicity.”

  “Felicity?”

  “The girl who asked me out at night school.”

  “Someone asked you out?” said Nerys, incredulous.

  “It was the woman who was our life model in class,” explained Ben.

  “The naked one?”

  “Well, she wasn’t naked when she asked me out.”

  Clovenhoof leaned forward in his chair and looked at Ben.

  “You’ve seen her naked?”

  “And that’s the problem.”

  “I have no problem with naked women, Ben. I think chicks should be allowed to get naked whenever they want. I’m no sexist. Shame on you.”

  “It’s just that…” Ben struggled to find the words.

  “She has a hideous deformity?” suggested Clovenhoof. “An unsightly mole in the shape of Wales?”

  “No,” said Ben. “She’s beautiful.”

  Nerys snorted.

  “She’s got cross-eyed tits.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Ben insisted.

  “Huh. I don’t see what she’s got that I haven’t.”

  Clovenhoof shrugged.

  “Take your kit off and we’ll check.”