ANTHONY KANE EVANS

Anthony Kane Evans (born Manchester, England, 1960) has had over ten short stories published in various UK magazines/anthologies. The first appeared in the anthology Signals 3 (London Magazine Editions; 2001). When not writing, he produces/directs documentary films on a freelance basis for Danish national television. He lives in Copenhagen.

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AN ABSURD CUT

We left the lecture hall as quickly as possible. It had been another dry session. I needed some air so I stepped out through the student common room's French windows and into the garden. Roger Longbottom's recital, for what else could I call it, every word filched from that badly written textbook we too should learn by heart before the end of the third year, rang badly, like tinnitus, in my inner ear.

Johnny was behind me somewhere. He wanted to continue a discussion about the German film maker Tykwer, a discussion we had begun last night, at midnight, stumbling out of the Tyneside Cinema after watching something called The Winter Sleepers.
"Mark, you will have to take a position on Tykwer, he is not going to go away. In fact he is making more films all the time. His previous film, I mean, the one before the one he has just finished, is opening next month ... I insist you see it with me ... you can't just ignore him ..."

I hadn't ignored him. I had just watched The Winter Sleepers, hadn't I? Or was that supposed to be some dark dream between last night and this morning? But I didn't want to answer Johnny and I wanted to wash Longbottom out of my head.

I walked onto the fan-shaped lawn and it felt as though I was suddenly enveloped in a mist of rain. Johnny's voice became distant. I looked back but couldn't quite make him out. Just about feel him back there.

An old man came over to me. He was dressed for cricket. Had a bat tucked under his arm. He explained that the fan-shaped lawn was to be considered as a memorial. A poet had written a poem on this exact spot. A composition telling of his failure in a certain delicate matter of love. Or, to be bloody and blunt about the matter: a haiku, or was it now a free verse thingamajig, the old man struggled to remember. No matter, the subject was this: how a red-headed woman had spurned a man, this poet.
"It simply wasn't cricket," the old man said, his voice sounding suddenly tight.

The poet had stabbed himself to death on this very spot.
"Using a fan to shield his act from the students over yonder," and the old man pointed with that absurd bat back to the French windows through which I had only just come.
I looked back, I could see the windows but I couldn't make out Johnny who was somewhere between here and there, though I heard him.
"You'll have to make up your mind about the guy, I'm telling you Mark, you cannot ignore him, cannot write him off after only seeing one film."
Who had said I was writing anybody off? Who had said I was limiting that particular German to that particular film?

"Today," said the old cricketer, "is the anniversary of the poet's death."
"You have to at least admit that it was an impressively mounted film," Johnny insisted.
And suddenly, there he was, Johnny, quite in focus, that earnest smirk on his face. And the old man, who had been on my left, just there, by the chrysanthemum bush, or was it over there, by the cherry tree, anyway, he had gone. Maybe walked silly mid-off or whatever it is they do.
And the tinnitus was back.

"I'm studying the wrong thing!" I shout at Johnny.
"You what?"
"The wrong bloody subject, you and that Longbottom are going to drive me stark raving bonkers! Why I do believe I would be better off in the Nautical Department."
"What are you talking about, why you love film ..."

But I was already moving off. If Longbottom put himself up as a demi-god on that preposterous stage of his and if Johnny saw himself as a prospective ruling intellectual, interviewing Tykwer in five years time for Cosmorama or Novo Cinema, then were did that leave me? There was only one mask left to take on, that used for the young lay priest. I looked at the mask; I didn't like the hair-style but sometimes, well, sometimes you just have to make do with an absurd cut.