Emotionally Weird (24 page)

‘I’ll just give the kitchen a wee going round,’ Mrs Macbeth said, reaching for the Ajax.

‘Careful what you read,’ I advised her, retreating down the hallway as Mrs McCue tried to hoover me up.

We paused for the parting of our ways opposite this scene, outside the undertakers.

‘If only they’d bring the same enthusiasm to philosophical logic,’ Philippa said, bending down absently to allow Maisie to plant a goodbye kiss on her cheek. ‘They’re late,’ Philippa said fondly as we watched Maisie and Lucy Lake meander along Park Place back to school.

At the back of the Tower, where there was usually a constant ebb and flow of students, a logjam of bodies had built up. Some students were trying to get into the building so they could attend tutorials and lectures, while other students were intent on preventing them. I could see Heather wielding a placard which read SAY NO TO FASCISM!

A burly rugby player, with whom Andrea had once spent a hectic night, shouldered his way through the narrow passage that linked the Students’ Union to the Tower and amid much scuffling and cries of ‘Scab!’ managed to gain access to the building and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, held open a passage for others.

‘Well, goodbye,’ Philippa said, giving me an encouraging pat on the back that nearly knocked me over. She mounted the bike and wobbled precariously for several yards before attaining a kind of equilibrium along Small’s Wynd and disappearing.

I hurried along the Red Sea passage before the waters closed over it again.

‘Thanks,’ I said hastily to the rugby player, just as Heather jumped on his back with a kind of Sioux warrior scream and started biting his ear.

‘The only way a woman can gain the respect or even the attention of the male protagonist is when she proves herself to be possessed of an absolute, childlike innocence . . .’ Maggie Mackenzie was striding up and down at the front of the lecture theatre like a restless zoo animal, her hair already living a life of its own. ‘. . . a regression which, as in the case of Clarissa, for example, takes the extreme form of death . . .’

‘What’s she talking about?’ Andrea whispered to me. I shrugged incomprehension. I’d been under the misapprehension that Maggie Mackenzie was going to be lecturing on
Middlemarch
, otherwise I would never have come.

‘I thought she was going to be talking about
Middlemarch
,’ Andrea hissed.

‘Maybe she
is
talking about it and we just can’t tell.’

Andrea was looking very prim in a Laura Ashley fantasy milkmaid ensemble that Marie Antoinette would have coveted. You couldn’t tell that she had been thrashing around in paroxysms of lust just a few hours previously. (‘Again?’ an amazed Bob said as we tried to sleep between our purple passion-free sheets.)

‘How is death a regression?’ Kevin whispered in my other ear. ‘I don’t understand.’ I was the meat in a Kevin and Andrea sandwich in the back row of the lecture theatre, where assorted loafers usually slept out the hour.

‘I don’t know.’

I reached in my pocket for a tissue. I definitely had a cold coming on, if not worse, but instead of a tissue I again found a crumpled-up piece of paper, which after some puzzling I recognized as yet another stray page of
The Expanding Prism of J
. How were they getting there? Was someone putting them in my pocket? Or maybe they were sticky, like flypaper.

J, I noticed, was still as paranoid as ever and seemed to have become entangled with some kind of angry mythical beast (a common enough occurrence, it was beginning to seem) –
Snorting, snorting, and dire snuffling of something ponderous and male, the beast of his imagination made manifest in muscle and sinew and arching frame, scaled like the sinful snake, the blood-lust of ages in the great thrust of the
–

I supposed the angry mythical beast was an allegory or a metaphor but who knows – perhaps it was real, in as much as fiction is real, which it must be because it exists, unless something can exist without being real. And even if it only exists in the form of words, words themselves must exist or we wouldn’t be able to use them and Wittgenstein himself—

‘Miss Andrews?’ Maggie Mackenzie was climbing up and down the stairs looking for bad behaviour. ‘I don’t think you can afford to daydream, do you?’

Terri sidled into the lecture theatre. She was dressed in black fingerless gloves and a disintegrating taffeta cape and looked as if she’d been recently exhumed. From the look on her face I guessed she had not saved the goat last night. She was abruptly directed by Maggie Mackenzie to sit on the front row, ‘So I can make sure you stay awake,’ obviously unaware that Terri could sleep with her eyes open. Olivia, a natural front-row student, lent Terri pen and paper (which was never used) before returning to her assiduous note-taking.

‘Roland Barthes,’ Maggie Mackenzie, ‘says—’

‘Not him again,’ Andrea sighed. A faint cry of distress went up from the heart of the student body, indicating the presence of Proteus. Kara was sitting on the far side of the lecture theatre, well away from the source of the cry. She was dressed in a rainbow-striped jumper that looked as if it had been crocheted for a gorilla by a gorilla.

‘—claims that the classical narrative is based on the male Oedipal drama . . .’

Andrea leant across me and asked, ‘Is that what Edrakonia’s based on, Kevin?’ presumably out of mischief rather than genuine curiosity.

Kevin rolled his eyes like a cow in an abattoir and said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ quite loudly, so that some people turned to stare, including Maggie Mackenzie, who tapped an impatient foot and said, in the words of teachers everywhere, ‘Do you have something you would like to share with us, Mr Riley?’ and then carried on without waiting for an answer –

‘As Althusser says, we are all “inside” ideology . . .’

‘What’s she
talking
about?’ Andrea muttered.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Stop asking me questions.’ I could feel the beginnings of a headache.

Janice Rand was sitting in front of us with her balding Christian friend. I had to suppress the desire to flick things at them. They occasionally passed notes to each other on tightly folded little pieces of paper.

‘Freud . . . believing that women were less powerful because they know themselves to be castrated . . .’

‘Come again?’ Andrea said, looking alarmed.

‘. . . and also possessed of a less developed superego.’

Janice and her friend were passing notes furiously to each other. I managed to read one that said. ‘What’s a superego?’ Written down, it looked very odd, like a sauce for spaghetti or a musical tempo mark –
spiritoso
,
sforzando
,
superego
. My headache was growing worse. I wished I had an Anadin (a rather poetic cry of pain). I was too tired to concentrate.

‘Of course,’ Kevin said, to no-one in particular, ‘research has shown that ten minutes is the absolute limit of anyone’s concentration span, so the last twenty-five minutes have been pointless.’

‘Mr Riley? Something to contribute?’ Maggie Mackenzie said harshly. Kevin slid down in his seat and tried to look as if he was deaf and dumb.

‘The passive heroine in the phallic-centred myth . . .’

I inadvertently started daydreaming about Ferdinand. I made a mental list of what I knew about him – he was kind to old ladies, he slept like the dead, he might have blue eyes (I still hadn’t caught a glimpse of them), he was a convicted criminal. I was having trouble forming a whole character from these bits and pieces.

Andrea was doodling strange magic symbols on her jotter – fylfots, Ing runes, caducei and so on. Perhaps it was homework her Forfar wizard had set her. Janice caught sight of the swastika-like fylfot and was so startled by it that she could remain mute no more and started chattering eagerly to her Christian friend about Andrea being ‘a Nazi’.

Kevin, surreptitiously eating a banana, turned to me and, nodding in Maggie’s direction, mumbled, ‘Is she actually going to talk about George Eliot, do you think?’

An exasperated Maggie Mackenzie threw the blackboard eraser in the general direction of the back of the lecture theatre. It caught Janice a glancing blow on the temple and she screamed in an outraged martyr way.

‘No, I don’t think she is.’

Janice’s scream set off Proteus, who embarked on a desperate kind of wailing as if he was about to fall over the edge of the world (well, who knows what babies think) and Kara had to make her way along a row of people like an annoying late theatregoer – ‘Sorry, excuse me, sorry’ – until she reached her infant. ‘Nappy,’ she announced to everyone.

‘I think I’m going to faint,’ Andrea murmured.

Kara wandered out of the lecture theatre. She smelt earthy as if she’d just been dug up. Her long lank hair was corralled in a headscarf and she was wearing black wellingtons and a cotton dirndl skirt and had a streak of mud – or worse – on her cheek. She had the musty, unappetizing scent of chicken feed and camomile flowers on her.

‘Don’t forget your baby,’ I reminded her, although you wouldn’t think you could, would you? Nor should you.

Terri caught up with me and said she was going to go and find Chick and ask him what he’d done with the yellow dog. She was followed out of the lecture theatre by Olivia, warily side-stepping Kevin with whom Andrea was still wrestling over the illogic of Edrakonia. ‘But if the dragons are immortal and Griddlebart isn’t, why don’t they just wait until he dies and then take over again?’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ Kevin said loudly as if Andrea was deaf, ‘it’s a matter of honour, not simple expediency. Honour amongst dragons is—’

‘Do you want a coffee?’ Olivia said to me. She was wearing a high-necked velvet dress that had little velvet-covered buttons that ran from throat to hem so that if you’d wanted to split her open you would have had a handy score mark to follow. She looked pale and otherworldly, like someone who usually lived in a ballad and was expecting to be accidentally locked in a kist on her wedding-day or abandon her goosefeather mattresses and run away with a band of gypsies—

‘Effie?’

‘Yeah, right, coffee—’ but we’d failed to notice the bulky advance of Maggie Mackenzie until it was too late. Terri said, ‘Got to see a man about a dog,’ and disappeared with commendable alacrity.

‘George Eliot?’ Maggie barked at me like a sergeant-major.

‘Nearly finished,’ I lied.

‘Don’t lie, Miss Andrews. Where is it?’ I gestured vaguely towards the world outside the walls of the English department, indicating that my George Eliot might have been working away in the library or playing table football in the Union.

‘Come with me,’ she said peremptorily and turned on her heel and raced off towards the lift so that I had to run to keep up with her.

‘Later,’ I gasped to Olivia. In the lift itself there was barely enough room for the two of us and I tried to shrink myself into a corner to avoid having to breathe in Maggie Mackenzie’s inky scent.

I followed her into her room, where she paraded up and down her crowded bookshelves, swiftly pulling out books here and there and handing them to me, a
Casebook
series on
Middlemarch
, a
Literature in Perspective
on George Eliot. ‘These are not difficult books,’ she said, ‘they won’t task your brain
too
much.’ She made a visible effort to be encouraging. ‘You have to try, you’re wasting your life.’

‘No, I’m not,’ I said without any conviction.

‘You haven’t produced a single piece of work all term,’ she said harshly. Maggie Mackenzie was one of those people who believe that there’s nothing in the world that can’t be done with the application of a little effort. (I suppose she was right.) I glanced down and noticed that the hem of my recycled-sari skirt was loose and torn, some of the little mirrors on it hanging by a thread. I was so clearly a girl who was never going to get her homework in on time.

‘You hardly ever show your face in tutorials,’ she continued. ‘It’s all very well enjoying yourself now, but in twenty years’ time—’

A ragged and uncoordinated chant had started up outside:

‘
What do we want?
’

‘
Peace!
’

‘
When do we want it?
’

‘
Now!
’

‘It’s beginning,’ Maggie said with some satisfaction.

‘What is?’

‘The end.’