Emotionally Weird (37 page)

Listening out for God was the only time her hands were idle; the rest of the time they were the busiest hands He ever fashioned. Mabel was particularly fond of knitting; sometimes she unravelled things on purpose just so that she would have something to knit back up again.

When I first met her, in the school summer holidays when I was nearly sixteen, Mabel had already been ensconced in the house for three months. The atmosphere in Woodhaven was quite changed. Everything was clean and orderly and, possibly for the first time ever in that household, everything was peaceful – but then Effie wasn’t there and peace and Effie never lived in the same room together.

Mabel was so kind to me, always asking, Was I all right? Was I warm enough? Did I need anything knitted? Would I like something to eat? To drink? Did I want to walk? Talk? Listen to the radio? It made me realize what a cold childhood I had had, how mean-spirited my mother had been, how distant my father, and last, but not least, how peculiar and perverse my siblings.

‘And?’

~And I’m going to bed. Goodnight.

I had to fight my way into the English department. The Tower extension was under siege from protesters, a motley crew now as it seemed anyone with any kind of grievance had begun to attach themselves to the uprising to demand a new world order – students wanting free condoms or the tied-book loan period extending, antivivisectionists, diggers and levellers, even a sprinkling of Christians – I spotted Janice Rand and her balding friend holding a hand-made sign that said ‘Overthrow sin – let Jesus into your life’. I doubted that there would be enough room.

There was no sign of Maggie Mackenzie in her room and Joan seemed unsure of her whereabouts. This was very disappointing. I had gone to great lengths to hand in George Eliot on time and now Maggie Mackenzie wasn’t even there to receive her.

The door to Dr Dick’s room was closed, of course. I knew only too well why he wasn’t behind it. (Had I had sex with him? And wouldn’t I be able to tell if I had?)

Watson Grant’s door, on the other hand, was open to reveal a group of bored students to whom he was dictating like an old-fashioned dominie. He was sitting on the wide windowsill surrounded on all sides by books, and frowned when he saw me.

The door to Archie’s room was also open and I could hear his voice drifting out into the corridor –

‘Kierkegaardian dread . . . The identity of essence and phenomenon “demanded” by truth is put into effect . . .’

I tried to tiptoe past unnoticed but Archie caught sight of me and shouted, ‘What are you doing skulking about out there? Come and sit down!’ My protestations went unheeded and he almost dragged me into his room and pushed me into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs.

‘What Heidegger might call “an empty squabble over words” . . .’

I could see why he needed me, the only other person present was Kevin – looking distressed, like an animal tracked and hunted down by Archie’s relentless verbosity. No Shug, no Andrea, no Olivia, no Terri (well on her way now, presumably, to Fresno or Sorrento).

‘The use of the fragmentary and contingent to express the dissonant . . . as Pierre Machery says . . . the line of the text can be traversed in more than one direction . . .’

Was it really a week since I had last endured this? Archie bored on:

‘. . . the line of its discourse is multiple . . . the beginning and the end are inextricably mingled . . .’

I felt hot and cold at the same time, there were bees (or maybe Bs) in my head and my brain seemed to be in spasm. Was it my imagination or had the fog outside started to creep inside the room?

I began to shiver. I stood up and the room tilted. The fog was everywhere, I pushed my way through it.

‘Wait!’ Archie shouted after me, but I really couldn’t. I ran past Watson Grant’s room and saw him struggling to open his window. To let the fog out, I supposed.

I hurried on and, as the lift was out of order, thanks to the
Culture and Anarchy
boy, I barged past Joan and stumbled down the stairs.

As I ran outside into the chilly air I nearly collided with Maggie Mackenzie – in the middle of berating a rather cowed-looking Professor Cousins over some perceived administrative oversight.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ I said weakly to her. ‘I’ve got the essay for you.’

‘What essay?’ she said, looking at me as if I had grown even more stupid than usual. I raked through my bag for the essay, finally retrieving the tattered pages of my George Eliot.

‘What is this?’ Maggie Mackenzie asked, holding up the proffered essay between the tips of two fingers as if it was contaminated. I regarded it with horror – the pages were torn and ragged, the front cover almost shredded. There were filthy marks all over the paper as well as stains and blotches, as though someone had cried all over it. I peered at it more closely – the filthy marks seemed to be paw prints and the stains produced by dog slobber.

‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled to Maggie Mackenzie. ‘I think a dog ate my essay.’

An alarm bell sounded shrilly. At first I thought it was in my head, so odd was I feeling, but then people began to stream out of the building.

‘Oh, my lord,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘I do believe the place is on fire.’ I could see the fog escaping from the windows of the extension and suddenly realized that it wasn’t fog at all – it was thick smoke that was pouring out of the building.

Above our heads the sound of muffled shouting and banging grew more insistent. I looked up and saw Grant Watson hammering on the window of his room, pushing and pulling at the handle as if he was trapped inside. Then the window flew open suddenly and in doing so it sent flying all the books that had been piled up on the sill. Watson Grant shouted a warning but it was too late – the books rained down slowly like books in a dream and I looked on with paralysed interest as first one volume of the
Shorter Oxford Dictionary
(
A to Markworthy
) and then the second (
Marl to Z
) fell like slabs of Old Testament stone onto Maggie Mackenzie’s head. A strange
Splat!
sound that could have belonged in a cartoon speech bubble was made by her body as it hit the ground.

When we got to the DRI we had to wait while she was seen and Professor Cousins suggested we go and visit Christopher Pike, former front-runner for head of department, ‘and perhaps Dr Dick’s still here?’ he mused to himself. I assured him that he wasn’t.

After some detective work, we eventually located Christopher Pike in a two-bed side bay of the men’s surgical ward. He was still trapped in his web of ropes and pulleys although now only recognizable by a name pinned up above his bed. The rest of him was swaddled in bandages from head to foot, like the Invisible Man, so that it could have been anyone pupating inside the crêpe-bandage chrysalis. Tubes came in and out of the bandages, all of them carrying liquids of a yellowish hue.

‘Poor old Pike,’ Professor Cousins said quietly to me. ‘I’m afraid he had another accident while he was in here.’

On Christopher Pike’s bedside locker there was a glass of sticky-looking orange squash and a bunch of yellow Muscat grapes, proving that somewhere else in the world there must be heat and light.

‘I don’t know,’ Professor Cousins said, making a great performance of chewing on a grape. ‘I may as well transfer the English department to the DRI.’ Christopher Pike gurgled something incomprehensible from inside his mummy suit.

‘You’ll soon be back on your feet, dear chap!’ Professor Cousins shouted at him.

‘He’s not deaf,’ the patient in the neighbouring bed remarked, without taking his eyes off the
Courier
he was reading. Christopher Pike made some more incomprehensible noises and his neighbour put down his newspaper and inclined his head towards him like a rather poor ventriloquist to translate the gurgling but then frowned and shrugged and said, ‘Poor bastard.’

The ward sister swept in ahead of a consultant who in turn was followed by a group of medical students like a gaggle of goslings. I recognized a couple of them from the Union bar.

‘Out,’ the sister said peremptorily to us.

‘I was concussed once,’ Professor Cousins said, but before he could embark on this familiar tale, a bell rang to signal the end of visiting-time – although for a moment Professor Cousins was under the impression that the hospital was on fire.

‘Well, goodbye,’ I said awkwardly to Maggie Mackenzie and, uncertain what was appropriate in the circumstances, I patted one of her washerwoman’s hands that lay atop the coverlet. Her skin felt like an amphibian’s.