Professor Everywhere (Proverse Prize Publications), page 1
Professor Everywhere
Nicholas Binge
Proverse Hong Kong
21 April 2020
Supported by
Hong Kong Arts Development Council fully supports freedom of artistic expression. The views and opinions expressed in this project do not represent the stand of the Council.
Chloe Chan is just about to give up on finding any real scholars at University when she starts to hear the rumours about Professor Roland Crannus. Spoken about in the whispers of conspiracy, the enigmatic Professor is idolised by students as the pinnacle of modern intellectualism – more myth than man.
Drawn in by the mystery, and desperate to know more, Chloe follows the Professor into an academic labyrinth of clandestine mysteries and untold possibilities. But as her obsession with the Professor grows, she finds that someone, or something, hunts her through this maze. Plunged into an otherworldly chess game of linguistics, anthropology and quantum theory, Chloe is quickly forced to question everything that she once thought true.
Ten years on since the tragedy in London, Professor Crannus is now a household name. His discoveries and actions litter the pages of our newspapers and our history books, but much of what he did is still shrouded in cover-up and conspiracy. For the first time since the catastrophe that shook the world, Chloe Chan chooses to share her story.
NICHOLAS BINGE is an author and educator currently living in Hong Kong. Born to British parents in Singapore, he has always had a close affinity with Asia.
Most of his younger years were spent on the outskirts of Geneva in Switzerland, a country as different from Singapore as you could imagine. It was here that his love of literature really started, hiding under duvets late at night with a torch, enraptured by books that demanded not to be put down.
After leaving school, he attended the University of Warwick for both undergraduate and postgraduate studies and soon found himself teaching English in the Midlands. After a couple of years teaching in the UK, he moved to Hong Kong in search of new opportunities and new challenges.
He now lives in Hong Kong with his wife and child. He reads and writes every morning, even if many of those pages never see the light of day. He spends his days hoping to engender the same love of literature in his students that has burned in him ever since he was young. He is still never happier than when he is with a book.
PROFESSOR
EVERYWHERE
Nicholas Binge
Professor Everywhere
by Nicholas Binge
Ebook edition published in Hong Kong
by Proverse Hong Kong
ISBN-13: 978-988-8491-86-5
First edition published in paperback in Hong Kong
by Proverse Hong Kong
under sole and exclusive licence, 21 April 2020.
ISBN-13: 978-988-8491-84-1
Alternate First Edition published in paperback in Hong Kong
by Proverse Hong Kong
under sole and exclusive licence, April 2020.
ISBN-13: 978-988-8491-85-8
Copyright © Nicholas Binge, April 2020.
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P.O. Box 259, Tung Chung Post Office,
Lantau, NT, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Email: proverse@netvigator.com; Web: www.proversepublishing.com
The right of Nicholas Binge to be identified
as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover design by Liam Relph.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or publisher and author. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent owner or purchaser. Please contact Proverse Hong Kong in writing, to request any and all permissions (including but not restricted to republishing, inclusion in anthologies, translation, reading, performance and use as set pieces in examinations and festivals).
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record is available
from the British Library
Professor Everywhere: A Memoir
Chloe Chan
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
—Philip Larkin, from, ‘An Arundel Tomb’
(courtesy of Faber & Faber)
I
If you take a left out of the L-Block of Rootes Residences, through the shade of the green alders and the narrow brick corridor between the arts centre and the University library, you’ll arrive at the Social Studies building. Inside it, you’ll find a labyrinthian maze of entrances and exits seemingly planned without regard for human navigation. If you then manage to circle your way up the correct staircase and work your way through the stochastically numbered doors to room 302b, you’ll eventually find the office of Professor Roland Crannus.
It’s not some error of fate that Professor Crannus was so difficult to find. Even ten years ago, he was rarely ever seen. And despite the erudite reputation he managed to garner for himself, both at the University of Warwick and in academia worldwide, he taught no classes. He delivered no lectures. He published no papers. In fact, as an excited first-year told me on the fifth week of term, it was widely speculated that he did not even eat.[1]
Nonetheless, you wouldn’t have managed a week on the campus back then without someone making reference to ‘the Da Vinci up in 302b’ or ‘the Victor Frankenstein of the uni’. How he managed to cultivate such an aura of mad brilliance amongst the student body, despite barely speaking to a single one of them, remains to me a puzzle that I have been unable to solve to this day.
I have no doubt that you already know the name of Roland Crannus. You have certainly already formed an opinion of him. You may well have read the sensationalist memoir, A Man Out of Place,[2] or perhaps seen one of the many documentaries covering the period between 2007-2009.[3] It’s also likely that you will have heard my name – ‘Chloe Chan’ – associated with the Pimlico incident. If so, you’ll be aware that despite some brief interviews I gave shortly after Pimlico, I chose not to contribute to the public record. Many of my words were being taken out of context, woven into a variety of inaccurate narratives.
Perhaps, if you have read some of the papers and books published in the last ten years, you will also have formed an opinion of me. I am not asking that you revise that, or even that you forgive me. That is not the purpose of this memoir. I’m merely offering what aims to be an objective reckoning of facts.
I can’t claim that it was by accident that I became embroiled in the enigma of the Professor. In fact, my decision to take up his internship was driven, to some degree, by my desire to be the one to uncover his mystery. The secrecy that surrounded him at that time bordered on hero worship and it bothered me that this was afforded to someone with so seemingly few achievements.
I’d been sure he was just another privileged old white man, surviving on a false mythos of mad renaissance intellectualism. There certainly appeared to be little with which I could credit his fame. And, though I was only an undergraduate at the time, the cynic within me was keen to pull back the curtains and shine a light on him, to dispel the bubble of obscurity and expose him as a fraud.[4]
Suffice to say, I did not do that. The irony occurred to me today, as I was guiding a group of prospective students across the piazza, that I was in fact instrumental in doing the complete opposite.
“His office was in here, you know?” one student whispered to another, as I led them past the brick walls of the Social Studies building. “They say the door’s locked and no one can get in.”
“That’s ridiculous. Surely they can kick it down or something?”
“No. It won’t budge. It’s like a part of the wall itself. They say no one can open it but him.”
“Do you think he’s still in there?”
“He’s dead.”
“No way he died,” another student chimed in. “I heard the government have him, locked away somewhere doing…”
“The government? Don’t be an idiot. What government?”[5]
I usually ignore these speculations. It’s no surprise that years after Pimlico, though I thought the dust had settled and the world was ready to move on, the secret rustles of conspiracy were still blooming. But their words do conjure in me that same sense of mystery I felt on the day that the Professor and I first met, and all the frustration I fought with in those early months.
It was October 2007, about a month into my university career. I was only beginning to come to terms with my disappointment at the state of affairs. When I left Hong Kong in the summer it had been with a deep and resolute sense that I would never return. Despite the fact that I harboured a close connection to the city that I was raised in, it had become clau
The prospect of starting afresh enticed me and I was thrilled that I was going to an English university. As I sat on my flight, packed in amongst a throng of Chinese tourists and British expats returning home, it was difficult not to picture the long libraries with wooden tables of students working deep into the night, pushing themselves to the betterment of their mind and of humankind. I could already smell the woody scent of desks and bookshelves lining professorial offices, while intellectuals sat in armchairs by a fireplace, debating the minutiae of academia. It was all I had ever wanted and I hoped that I would find it – a place like I had read about in novels, in poetry. A place where I could finally fit in.
Such romantic notions were quickly dispelled.
The first week I was there – ‘freshers’ week’, as they called it – was an absolute circus of drunkenness and embarrassment.[6] Instead of being surrounded by likeminded folk, I quickly found that other students were actively pressing me to skip classes, ignore readings and spend the entirety of my first month’s money on alcohol and clubbing. It seemed with each refusal, they became more determined to deter me from my path. As such, I avoided the majority. After just two occasions of my attending the university library during the evening for my own research purposes, I gained the alliterative nickname of “Quiet Chloe”. To be honest, it was a welcome replacement for the less favourable “Chinese Chloe” that I had been given when they saw my skin colour on the first day.
I left Hong Kong to leave the false pretences, where so much of the culture around me existed for show, mere lip-service to a dead colonial past and an impending Chinese future. I had no interest in becoming a doctor, or a lawyer, or a businesswoman. My tastes had always been the bookish isolation of academia – the thrill of acquiring new knowledge purely for knowledge’s sake, not for any ego-driven capitalistic gain. In Hong Kong, this was anathema and I was all but an outcast. As such, I was desperate for an authentic taste of the past, of that rare culture that produced Shelley, Byron and Coleridge.[7]
I’d come to study linguistics, and it seemed to me that England, with one of the most versatile and universal languages, was the perfect place to be. But I soon discovered that every British accent I heard was spoken through unintelligible slang or slurred mumbling. Every thought was accompanied with the stench of stale beer or last night’s vodka Red-Bull. Every discussion started and ended with mockery and ‘banter’, a word seemingly invented to glorify idiocy.
The residences that I’d chosen had somewhat of a reputation. Coming from abroad, I’d been guided towards International House, a place where the collection of foreign students could be safely contained in a single block. But despite its pretentious name, the accommodation was still part of Rootes Residences, the cheapest and smallest on campus. The walls still had mould on them and the windows had bars. I often found myself stepping over passed-out bodies of other drunken students when I came back to my room at night.
The lectures were not as I’d imagined them, either. Rather than the romantic halls of knowledge that I had pictured, they were instead delivered by tired postgraduates or frustrated professors, relying on powerpoint slides and quotes from textbooks to get them through the dullest of content. The seminars were hardly better, filled with many of the same students I had previously been stepping over, but now hungover and swimming in a haze of their own confusion. It was only in the weekly office hours with the professors that I would really gain any solace or hope for a stimulating education.
I attended lectures anyway, partly out of spite for my flatmates who seemed to take skipping lectures with some degree of rebellious pride, but I often left them feeling less enlightened than I had when I arrived.
I was young, and quick to assume that my own situation applied to everyone, everywhere in the world. As such, it was not long before I had decided that not only was my university experience a sham, but that the tertiary education system as a whole was little more than a money-making system and that my lofty visions of academia existed nowhere but in the fantasies of my brain.
I don’t think that I’m wrong in saying that it was probably my disillusionment in the university, and in education as a whole, that led to my unhealthy obsession with the Professor. I was, after all, having a particularly bad day the first time I heard about him.
I woke up early to take advantage of the library when it was quiet and peaceful. I planned to get ahead of the content and make some notes on Umberto Eco’s work,[8] when I bumped into Sarah coming out of the shower.
“Oh my God,” she groaned, towel wrapped around her head. “I am hanging so badly, you have no idea.”
“I actually don’t,” I replied.
She laughed, her tired face brightening up with its creases. “You really are a bit of an odd one, aren’t you?”
Or at least, I believe she said something along those lines. It’s hard to remember exactly through the fog of time. At the very least, she certainly highlighted that I was different from the others.
“I really need to get to the library.”
“Alright, alright.” She put her hands up in mock defence. I gave her a smile and stepped back to let her pass. She moved to do so, but then stopped and rubbed her face. “Hey, you still looking for a job, right? God, let me know if you find something. A month in and I’m already broke. I think I’d do anything for some extra cash.”
“How did you know I was looking?”
“You were asking around the other day. You’re cute, I pay attention.”
I blinked. “I’ve found a job, actually.”
She shrugged, gave me another smile, and stepped past me into her room.
I’m not sure what it was that made me lie to her. I did still need a job to fund myself through the week. My parents had done what it would take to get me out of the country – tuition and accommodation – but it did little to cover my daily expenses.
Still, there was something about the way Sarah had called me odd that had unsettled me. And, the fact that I was unsettled bothered me even further. It seemed to me that being different from the other louts in the flat was exactly what I wanted, but somehow the words lay heavy on me like some form of accusation. I spent the day unable to shake it.
I ended up getting no real work done that morning, and instead took myself for a long walk around the edges of the university campus. It was autumn – the lines of trees were just beginning to turn golden brown and the wind had taken on a surprising chill for so early in the year. In Hong Kong, the autumn is stunning. The humidity drops, but the warmth of the summer remains – cloudless and idyllic. In England, the season brought with it a sombre tone, depressing, as if nature itself were grieving the loss of the summer sun.
It seemed to me to be another disappointment. I was looking forward to Keats’s ‘autumn’, filled to the brim with plump apples and ripe hues, but walking under the grey British sky I couldn’t help but feel that it too was a misrepresentation. Once again, I found the reality of the place I had come to far removed from the romantic presentation exported by its people.
When I returned, there was a party. There was always a party.
I intended to make myself a quick bowl of noodles and retire to my room, but the entire communal kitchen area had been commandeered and that now appeared to be impossible. I knew I would soon be forced either to take part in the revelry or repeatedly explain why I had no intention to, much to the mockery of my flatmates.
Maybe it was because I wanted some kind of escape from my disappointing walk, or maybe it was Sarah’s comment that morning that still bothered me, but I didn’t leave immediately that night.
I noticed Sarah on the other side of the room. Her hair was down and she looked a lot more lively than she had earlier. She wore a white blouse and some tight black jeans and was the centre of attention for a number of leering guys, all vying for her interest. They were pressing her to play some kind of drinking game and she, in an experienced set of exchanges, pretended bashfully to agree. I considered, for a moment, going over and joining her, but the prospect of being forced to drink heavily was already causing a bout of nausea in my stomach.
