Emotionally Weird (17 page)

‘I’ve been to the pound,’ she said, looking more downcast than usual.

‘The pound?’

‘The lost dogs’ home. To look for the yellow dog. He wasn’t there though.’

Perhaps Chick had taken the yellow dog to his own home, decided to make a pet of it, but that seemed unlikely somehow. I couldn’t even imagine Chick having a home, much less keeping a dog in it.

We sat in the foyer discussing the dog’s whereabouts right through the two o’clock bell and the general hubbub of people going to lectures and only at ten minutes past the hour could we finally bring ourselves to make our way to Martha’s room.

We were delayed further by Dr Dick haranguing us in the English department corridor about unwritten work and unattended tutorials and only breaking off to declare himself ill. He did look rather sick – his skin as white and waxy as an arum lily – but no more than usual.

‘Do you have symptoms?’ I quizzed. ‘Sore throat? Headache? Swollen glands?’

‘Headache,’ he said hopefully.

‘Pounding, throbbing behind the eyes? Or dull ache at the back of the head?’

He looked unsure. ‘Well, a sort of sharp, piercing pain at the temple.’

‘Brain tumour, then,’ Terri said.

‘Go and lie down,’ I suggested gently, ‘and try not to think about marking essays.’ Luckily he took this advice and went off, clutching his forehead and moaning quietly to himself.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Professor Cousins said, leaping out of his room and doing a little jig in front of me. ‘I was hoping I would see you today,’ he said. ‘I was going to ask you about our mutual friend.’ There seemed no point in telling Professor Cousins that it was only an hour or so since he had last seen me since time, as we all know, is a subjective kind of thing.

‘Our mutual friend?’ I queried.

‘The dog of yesterday. And Chick, as well, of course,’ Professor Cousins said fondly. ‘Quite a wag, isn’t he?’

‘We have to go to Martha’s creative writing class now,’ I explained to him; ‘we’re already late.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Professor Cousins said. ‘I’ve always wanted to know what creative writing really is. And does it have an opposite?’ he laughed, manoeuvring himself between us and taking an arm of each as if we were about to do some complicated reel.

Martha always bade us move our terminally uncomfortable chairs into a circle, as if we were in therapy or about to play one of those getting-to-know-you games – ‘My name is Effie and if I was an animal I would be a . . .’ But what would I choose to be? Not a domestic pet, surely, forever at the whim and behest of someone who thought they owned you, and certainly not a beast of the field useful only for its milk and meat and skin. Some shy creature perhaps, hidden deep in the untamed forest?

There was the usual roll-call of names – Andrea, Kevin, Robin, Kara, Janice Rand, Davina. Davina was a keen mature student from Kirkcaldy, a divorcee and one of the few grown-ups at the university. Shug didn’t do the creative writing paper, saying that his mother’s weekly Willie Low shopping-list was a more creative piece of writing than anything produced at the university. Bob did do the creative writing paper, he just didn’t know it. For weeks, Martha had stood at the front of the class at the beginning of every hour and frowned at the class list in front of her, puzzling, ‘Robert Sharpe? Does anyone know a Robert Sharpe?’ I never spoke up, I didn’t really want to admit to knowing Bob.

I was sitting next to Terri – a black wolf prowling the night. Terri’s assignment for Martha was poetry. Terri’s poems came under the collective title
My Favourite Suicide
and you can probably imagine the content matter. Some of them (although undoubtedly derivative) were surprisingly cheerful –

milk you left on the

sour. thank you

‘I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,’ Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was. How tedious this all seemed. I wasn’t sure I could sit still for a whole hour.

‘Write me a paragraph,’ Martha enunciated clearly, ‘in just ten minutes, which incorporates these three words –
bracteate, trowel
and
vilifies
.’

‘That’s four words,’ objected Robin, sitting next to me in the circle. Robin was wearing a leather trench coat that had apparently once belonged to a member of the
Waffen SS
.

Martha gave him a considered look. ‘Not the and,’ she said finally.

‘
Not the and
,’ Professor Cousins chuckled, ‘a strange sentence if ever there was one; it could only possibly make sense in context, couldn’t it?’ Martha made a resigned kind of noise and busied herself with the insides of her briefcase.

Professor Cousins was sitting between Kara and Davina. Davina was writing an historical thing about Shakespeare’s mother, Wordsworth’s sister or Emily Brontë’s hitherto unmentioned illegitimate daughter – I could never quite remember which. Personally, I don’t think it right to make up things about real people – although I suppose there’s an argument for saying that once you’re dead you’re not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first class honours, or both).

Martha turned back to the class and said sternly, ‘A paragraph with structure to it, not abstract free-fall. No nonsense.’

I wrote down
bracteate
,
trowel
and
vilifies
and then sat staring at them. I seemed to remember doing this exercise in one of the many primary schools I had attended, although with more useful words (
sand
,
bucket
,
red
, or perhaps
porridge
,
bowl
,
hot
). I had no idea what
bracteate
meant. It sounded like a kind of seaweed. I doodled helplessly.

Professor Cousins meanwhile was labouring diligently over his work, making strange exploded diagrams with spidery connecting lines. He was too far away for me to copy anything from him; the light in Martha’s room was scanty. Kara, on his other side, leant over surreptitiously to try and see what he was writing but Professor Cousins put his arm protectively around his scribblings, like a small boy. The Moses basket that contained Proteus had been shoved more or less into the middle of the circle of chairs, as if he was going to be the centrepiece of a voodoo ritual.

Kara was writing a Lawrentian kind of novella about a woman who goes back to the land to discover her emotional and sexual roots, a journey which seemed to involve unnecessarily large amounts of dung and mud and seed of all kinds, but mainly male. Strangely, the genteel Martha seemed to relate to this. At some previous point in her life she chose to suddenly ‘share’ with us, she had run a smallholding in upstate New York with her first husband, a famous playwright whom she couldn’t believe none of us had heard of. Martha said she and this first husband had found ‘the continuous juxtaposition of the cerebral and the bestial in country life very stimulating’. As she ‘shared’ she fingered the bird claw at her neck, a faraway look in her eyes.

Anyway, she concluded with a somewhat rueful sigh, the outcome of all this had been a return to urban living accompanied by (sadly) a divorce on account of the playwright’s rampant adultery, but also (happily) Martha’s first collection of poetry,
Chicken Spirits
, ‘Critically acclaimed, but hardly a bestseller. But then which would you rather have, after all?’

‘A bestseller?’ Andrea suggested.

Martha was planning to break out of the ghetto of poetry. She had, she claimed, an unwritten novel, which seemed like a contradiction in terms to me (like the unspoken word). Martha’s novel was about a female author getting over her writer’s block by discovering that in a former life she had been Pliny the Elder – so probably not a bestseller.

‘They say everyone has a novel inside them, don’t they?’ Janice Rand suddenly piped up.

‘Not everyone can write it though, Janice,’ Martha admonished gravely.

There was some kind of commotion going on outside, every so often a shout of ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ went up and I wondered if the protesters knew he was dead, and if that made any difference. Martha glanced out of the window and frowned at what she saw.

I tried the words in a different order –
trowel
,
vilifies
,
bracteate
– but this didn’t result in any inspiration. Martha was always urging us to ‘Write what you know,’ (how boring books would be if everyone adhered to that principle!) but although
vilifies
was a word I felt comfortable with, my knowledge of
bracteates
and
trowels
was limited. Oh, for a good etymological dictionary to be carried on one’s person at all times.

~ Yes, but there’s so very much weather, Nora says.

Martha wandered over to the window and leant with her forehead on the glass as if she was trying to absorb daylight. (I was surprised we didn’t all have rickets.) Andrea used this opportunity to lean over and whisper to me that she thought a
bracteate
was a kind of animal, possibly a frog. Which sounded like wishful thinking to me. Nora, of course, believes that we all have a totem animal, a manifestation of our spiritual nature in the animal world. (‘Your mother sounds kind of cool,’ Andrea said. Misguidedly.)

Andrea whispered in my ear that she thought her spirit animal was a cat. How predictable. Why do girls always think of themselves as cats? I didn’t suppose Andrea would much enjoy ripping the insides out of tiny helpless mammals or licking her own nether regions or being chased by mad dogs or eating cat food without the help of cutlery.

Kevin’s glasses had slipped down his nose as he stared at
bracteate
,
trowel
and
vilifies
. If we were animals (which we are, I know), Kevin would be a sponge – a sea-cucumber perhaps or something rounder and squishier. But what I might be I did not know. ( I prefer monosyllables. They stick to the page better.)

‘Surely sponges aren’t animals?’ Andrea puzzled.

‘What do you think they are then?’

‘Vegetables?’ she hazarded.

This was a bit like playing ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ with Bob, or – worse – asking Bob general knowledge questions. (Question: ‘What is Formosa now called? Bob’s answer: ‘Cheese?’)

Andrea gave up and started colouring the words in instead.

‘Right,’ Martha said suddenly, ‘ten minutes are up.’ Only ten minutes had passed? What a nightmare. How long would it take before the hour was up? I calculated miserably – nearly three thousand words at this rate, more than ten pages. Time for some omission and reduction. Surely no-one would miss, for example, nine sentences on the theme of ‘The man
vilifies
the
bracteate trowel
.’ And so on.

‘I didn’t say a sentence,’ Martha reprimanded irritably, ‘I asked for a paragraph. I asked for
text
. Do you understand what
text
is?’ You could tell that she wanted to slip the word ‘morons’ into this sentence somewhere.

‘Well, according to Proust,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully, ‘it’s a web.’ Professor Cousins hadn’t even managed a sentence, despite all his diagrams.

‘Does this mean,’ he asked Martha plaintively, ‘that I should abandon all hope of becoming a writer?’

‘Yes,’ Martha said.

‘Thank goodness for that,’ Professor Cousins said.

‘Let’s turn to your assignments,’ Martha said tetchily.