Transparencies

Transparencies

August 1966

Cagliari

‘T O CONCLUDE, THE

finding we have about gestural metaphor,’ the young woman says, slipping a new acetate on to the overhead projector, ‘is that the source domain

can exist in the gesture, while the target domain

exists in the speech.’

Eddie is up next. He’s going to present his doctoral thesis. If she came just for Eddie, it would be suspicious, so Bridie has been sitting in conference room B all morning, the only room with windows that do not open. There will be tentacles for the buffet lunch again, set out in the blazing sun. The thought turns her stomach.

There’s a glamorous professor sitting in the row in front of Bridie, fanning herself with one of those hand-painted wooden fans that are sold in all the little tourist shops, and the movement of fanning herself is making all the dainty gold bracelets she is wearing clink against her gold wristwatch. She looks so cool and composed. Whereas Bridie can feel the back of her thighs sticking to the chair. Her locket is slimy

with the sweat from her collarbone as she absent-mindedly twists it forwards and back. Bridie resolves she will go to the shops this evening, when the night has cooled from the ovenous temperatures of the day and she will become this glamorous woman. Of course, Bridie can never be her, but it is fun to imagine that she might emerge from a boutique, dressed in black and suddenly chic, gold trinkets at her wrist. She will buy a fan, at the very least.

There’s a ripple of applause, and Bridie realizes the nervous young woman has finished her paper and joins in clapping. There’s a shuffle of people on the dais and the chair says, ‘Next up we have Eddie Winston, doctoral candidate from the University of Birmingham.’ Delegates start standing up, leaving the room to attend a talk in one of the other parallel sessions. Bridie finds that she is holding her breath for Eddie, hoping people will stay. ‘Papers are being distributed,’ the chair adds, and stacks of paper make their way from the front, passed from academic to academic as though the delegates are children in primary school once again.

Once the majority of people in the room have left, a scattering of people enter, here just to see Eddie. She hopes it makes him feel proud. If you’re not against a big name at a conference, it is all about the title, and Eddie’s is a good one: ‘Sealed with a kiss: fictional representations of love’.

And then there he is, bow tie askew and making him look like a young man dressed up as his own grandfather. His face is a straight line of concentration as he turns on the overhead projector and the first slide is illuminated on the wall. It says on the acetate, simply and in his own handwriting, ‘Eddie Winston’. The room looks up at this. ‘There’s more,’

he says, and there’s a ripple of laughter. And with that, Eddie Winston smiles his lopsided smile and says, ‘This paper is going to examine the literature of the kiss …’

He’s made the audience laugh more in his fifteen minutes than the entire line-up has all morning. He’s at ease in front of people. They’re at ease with him. He is going to make a fantastic lecturer when he passes his PhD, she is sure of it. Much more approachable, less cocky, than Alistair. More vulnerable too, she thinks, and as if the universe can hear her, a question is raised that is asked by kindly academics of novice speakers: ‘What inspired you to do this research?’

Eddie was expecting this one. ‘In my teenage years, I began researching kisses because I had not yet had my own first kiss,’ he says. ‘I wanted to know what Shakespeare and Bront? and Austen had to say about the matter, so that I might be better prepared.’

It is an unflappably honest answer.

There’s a pause and then a hand is raised and a brusque man who is someone important from somewhere far away asks, ‘And we assume that you are no longer in need of such guidance?’

‘ Well

,’ Eddie says, and there’s another ripple of laughter as the chair claps his hands and says, ‘And let’s call it a day there, I believe a delicious lunch is being prepared out in the courtyard. Let us once again thank Mr Winston and all of today’s speakers.’ Everyone rushes to collect their things and get down to lunch before there are only tentacles left. And Eddie catches sight of the overhead projector and realizes that he never changed the transparency, so throughout his

presentation he’s had his own name projected beside him like the headliner of a West End show. He laughs, folding himself over. And that’s the thing about Eddie Winston.