The Last Weekend Read Online Free PDF Page B

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I met Ollie in my second term at university. At school, French, maths and history had been my A-level subjects, and I would have been happy to take any of them as a degree, but my dad said they wouldn’t ‘lead to anything'. Neither he nor anyone else in the family had been to university (Uncle Jimmy was the nearest, with his Higher Certificate from Salford Tech). But ignorance never stopped my dad from having an opinion. And though I almost talked him round to letting me choose maths – with all his betting, he respected numeracy – in the end I succumbed and applied to do law. ‘It’s a proper career and you’ll earn a good whack,’ he said. ‘I can just see you in a wig,’ my mother added. I was offered a place but from the start I hated law. The courses were mechanical, the lecturers unimaginative, the books indigestible. There’d been a lot to memorise at A level, but French verbs and the dates of battles seemed to sink in, unlike tort law. I tried to change subjects after six weeks but the university discouraged it, telling me I’d have to repeat the first year. My parents were no help, either. ‘You’re a bright lad, just give it time,’ my mother said, while my dad read my unhappiness as slacking. ‘Them that can’t stick owt don’t get nowt,’ he said, with his usual half-baked logic.
Law was not the only reason for being miserable. Eager to make friends, I tried to look cool. But smoking Gauloises and reading French novels had no cachet in the law department. And though there were a couple of girls in my tutorial group, neither seemed to notice me. The one consolation was Ollie.
To begin with, the two of us moved in different circles: I didn’t really have a circle — my circle was me. But I was aware of him sitting in lectures: with that brooding intensity, and those sooty Spanish features, you couldn’t miss him. Not that he was literally dark-skinned, but in the absence of black or Asian students he looked exotic. (In the eighteenth century, he once told me, the Moore family had been involved in the slave trade: ‘I’m probably descended from a half-breed.') He stood out for another reason — wearing sports jackets, cord trousers and collared shirts while the rest of us had jeans and T-shirts. When he wasn’t carrying a briefcase, you’d see him with some boot, ball, club or racket bag, the different shapes of which suggested an awesome range of sporting activities. I knew from school that the old cliché about boffins versus jocks is rubbish: the boffins are the jocks, and the ones who get the girls too. Ollie proved the point. He was smart, sporty, funny, handsome and popular — the antithesis of me.
It was sport, ironically enough, that broke the ice between us. One February night in the foyer of the library, he hauled himself across to me on crutches and we got talking, not least about the plaster cast on his left leg, which was there because he’d snapped his Achilles tendon.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.
‘Only when I think of all I’m missing. The rest of the rugby season. And cricket next term. Basically I’m fucked till September.’
‘Then take up something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. One-arm wrestling. Hopscotch. Kick-boxing.’
‘Kick-boxing?’
‘No one will challenge you with that on your leg. You’ll be world champion in no time.’
He looked at me suspiciously, as if I was taunting him,then laughed and suggested a drink in the union bar. He cut a sorry figure as we made our way there — Pegleg Ollie, with his crutches – but once we sat down he cheered up and insisted on paying for several rounds.
‘Were you at the ethics lecture?’
‘I slept in,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t till two.’
‘Even so.’
‘You missed a treat. It made me realise why I’m studying law.’
‘I wish I knew.’
‘Lawyers are the agents of morality. Their job’s to establish the truth.’
‘Their job’s to represent their client,’ I said. ‘Truth