Page 35 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
A quiet falls across the room as a large man with a blond quiff strolls onto the stage.
His body moves as if through water, more like he is swimming than walking, with a fluidity and grace not usually seen on a man of his size.
He places a small red notebook on the lectern, buttons his pin-striped jacket over the matching waistcoat, and takes in the body of people standing in front of him.
Tristan would bet he’s never seen the room so full, and yet he seems totally unfazed.
“Good morning. I am Professor Linus Goodacre. Thank you all for coming today,” he says, with slow and deliberate enunciation.
Tristan closes his eyes, and suddenly it’s twenty years ago and he’s standing just where the professor is now, preparing to present to his fellow students.
While studying his cue cards, he glances up to see Dave among the faces, giving him a double thumbs-up.
Tristan had consistently been top of his class.
He’d worked hard on his final-year project, knew it was something well above the capabilities of his fellow students.
Sure enough, the room falls silent once Tristan starts talking, as a result of them being either impressed—or simply confused.
He’d trialed the project, which he called Moralia, with the help of unsuspecting classmates.
Following further development, he felt sure it had the ability to transform the modern workplace, to give employers unique insight into their staff.
In fact, Tristan had already been approached by a handful of IT companies, after a keen lecturer had sent round samples of the work.
A sparkling career lay ahead of him, even worldwide fame…
Then he hears it. A chuckle from the back row.
A chuckle of disdain. Instantly, he knows who the culprit is.
Malcolm Hardy is his closest rival. He never scored as highly as Tristan, but he made up for it with his confidence during classes as well as his popularity among their peers.
Tall, broad shouldered, rugby playing, with thick, wavy golden hair like a Romantic poet.
In other words, he is everything Tristan is not.
Any chance he gets, he tries to catch Tristan out, belittle him, make him question himself.
Taking a deep breath, Tristan counts, 2, 3, 5, 7…
Attempting to contain the heat rising through his body.
11, 13, 17, 19 . He resumes his presentation, but then he hears another laugh.
This time, there is nothing he can do to contain the white-hot fury surging through him.
Without conscious thought, he sprints up the stairs of the lecture hall, dashes along the back row, and grabs Malcolm by his rugby-shirt collar.
Despite being much smaller than him, Tristan benefits from the element of surprise, and the taller man falls backward onto the stairs, tumbling down, landing in a heap at the bottom.
Tristan sees that Malcolm’s ankle is twisted at an odd angle, blood pours from a cut on his eyebrow.
As Tristan’s anger dissipates, so his apologies come.
Malcolm will never play rugby again, and this incident marks the end of Tristan’s university life, just a few months before he should be graduating.
But, more importantly, it marks the end of his job prospects too.
Suddenly, he feels a sharp nudge in his side, and he forces his eyes open. He is almost surprised to see the professor in full swing in front of the quiet, attentive audience.
“I thought you’d fallen asleep, then,” Vivienne says. “It’s just getting interesting.”
“Worked late last night,” Tristan mutters and tries to tune back in to the professor’s words.
“Dr. MacMillan had lately turned his attention to the topic of longevity. Now it is estimated that around 25 percent of an individual’s lifespan is determined by genetics.
If your parents live into their eighties, the good news is that you probably will too,” he says.
A little murmur travels around the room.
To these smooth-skinned students, death is still an imagined outcome, something that happens to really old people; even their parents are probably still only in their forties themselves.
Tristan’s parents are both in their sixties, and apart from his dad’s prostate cancer a while back, they are in very good health.
And yet this fact doesn’t have any impact on Tristan’s own longevity, given that they’re not actually his parents.
Tristan’s mind flicks back to that day. Following the breakup with Ellie, he offered to leave their shared flat and ended up arriving at his childhood home bearing an old suitcase and two black trash bags.
His mother opened the door and then her arms, tears rolling down her cheeks as if she’d been the one cast aside by life (that old adage popped into his head, “A mother is only ever as happy as her least happy child,” which meant Tristan’s poor mum didn’t stand a chance).
That night, as he lay in his old single bed, gazing up at the faded poster of Sonic the Hedgehog on the wall, he thought, Here I am again .
He quickly regressed back to his teenage existence: sleeping in until nearly noon, when his mum pulled open the curtains; eating a plate of bacon and eggs as she fussed around him, then going back to his room to work until late.
The weekdays passed like this quite easily, but weekends stretched out in all their barren misery.
On Saturdays, he’d prolong his lie-in as far into the afternoon as his mother would allow, then had a leisurely lunch (couldn’t reasonably still call it a “brunch” at 3:00 p.m.), followed by a long soak in the bath.
His mother would try to persuade him to “pop into town” with her, which he’d refuse to do, and the evenings would be spent falling asleep on the sofa in front of whatever terrible program his parents chose to pollute their minds with.
Every Sunday, without fail, his mum would dress in heels and tights no matter what the weather, his father would be freshly shaved and smelling of Tristan’s childhood, and they’d head to church.
Alone in the house, he took to exploring the nooks and crannies that had held his attention as a child.
One day, he crawled under his parents’ bed and pulled out an old shoebox.
Easing the lid off, he found a series of photos of himself he’d never seen before.
For some reason they hadn’t made it into the dozens of photo albums on the bookshelf.
Tiny Tristan lying on an ugly orange bedspread, naked apart from a cloth diaper; another shot of his mum proudly cradling him as she sat in the old rocking chair; then both parents standing together wearing their Sunday best as his father awkwardly held him in both hands.
As Tristan lifted out the photos one by one to place them carefully on the carpet, a piece of paper was suddenly revealed.
The words had been typed on an old typewriter, the letters not quite aligned, the s and the t not properly formed.
It was clearly one page of a longer document, but the content was clear: hereby relinquish full custody of the child and agree to no further contact.
Adoption papers. Tristan’s adoption papers.
He dropped the letter and searched through the rest of the box, but there were no other papers like it.
Then he looked again at the baby pictures.
His mother’s tummy was surprisingly flat in her yellow twinset, given the fact she’d recently had a baby.
His father’s hold on him was unnatural, as if he was not a baby but an unexpected parcel he’d just discovered on the doorstep, a gift from someone…
Tristan grits his teeth and repeats his mantra.
You can do it, you can do it.
“The second factor that affects one’s longevity is the environment in which they live.
By that, I mean access to clean water and sufficient food, good health care and living conditions.
I’d like to think we all benefit equally from these things in 2017.
” Professor Goodacre nods amiably at the hundreds of eager faces smiling back at him.
“Dr. MacMillan had turned his attentions to this environmental factor, specifically nutrition and exercise,” says the professor.
Then Tristan had spotted a handwritten letter among the photos.
It was addressed to his father, in confident looping script.
In places, the words were blurred and smeared, but Tristan was able to make out most of it.
A woman had written to his dad to say she was pregnant with his baby.
The date was February 1974, two years after his parents had married. The year Tristan was born.
“Dr. MacMillan had presented me with his research. Some of it, to my traditionalist eyes, was indeed rather unconventional, but he certainly raised some interesting questions. What roles do calorie intake, exercise, and social interaction play in longevity? I’m sure that my accomplished colleague would have gone on to publish his findings.
Tragically, his research was unexpectedly curtailed… ”