Like me, Bob was a student at Dundee University but said that if he had been in charge of the university he would have thrown himself out. He seldom handed in an essay and considered it a point of honour never to go to a lecture and instead lived the slow life of a nocturnal sloth, smoking dope, watching television and listening to Led Zeppelin on his headphones.
Bob had recently discovered that he was in his final year of university, he had already repeated second year twice – a university record – and for a long time had presumed that somehow he would remain a student for ever, a misconception that had only recently been cleared up. He was supposed to be studying for a joint degree in English and Philosophy. If people asked him what his degree was in he always said ‘Joints,’ which he thought was a brilliant joke. Bob’s sense of humour, such as it was, had been developed by the Goons and honed by The Monkees. Bob’s screen hero was Mickey Dolenz, right back to Mickey’s early days as Corky in Circus Boy.
Bob was an unreconstructed kind of person, his other hero was Fritz the Cat and he had a complete lack of interest in anything that involved a sustained attention span. Nor was he political in any way, despite the three unopened volumes of Das Kapital on his bookshelf – which he never could explain, although he had a vague memory of joining a radical Marxist splinter group after seeing If at the cinema. He was prone to the usual obsessions and delusions of boys his age – the Klingons, for example, were as real for Bob as the French or the Germans, more real certainly than, say, Luxemburgers.
The doorbell rang again, less insistently this time, and when I opened the door Terri was still there. ‘Let me in,’ she said weakly. ‘I think I’ve got frostbite.’
* * *
Terri was a little mid-western princess, a cheerleader gone bad. She may have once had corn-fed kin back in the heartland (although it was easier to imagine her being hatched in the nest of a prehistoric bird) but in time they had all either died or abandoned her. Her father, an executive with Ford, had enrolled her in an English Quaker boarding-school during a brief secondment to Britain and had carelessly left her there on his return to Michigan.
Terri liked to keep her ethnic origins chameleon, sometimes hinting at Italian, sometimes pogrom-fleeing Russian, a touch of the Orient, a hint of the Hebrew. Only I knew the dull mongrel mix of Irish navvies, Dutch dairymen and Belgian coalminers who by mere genetic chance had given her the appearance of an exotic houri or a handmaiden of Poe. We were the best of friends, we were the worst of friends. We were the sisters we’d never had. I felt sorry for someone so at odds with the mainstream of humanity. Sometimes I wondered if my role in Terri’s life wasn’t to mediate between her and the living, like a vampire’s assistant.
Although she hated staying in it, Terri did have her own ruffled lair in Cleghorn Street – an unappealing cold-water flat that wasn’t good for much other than storing her coffin of earth. In a rare fit of activity she had painted it purple throughout, a colour-scheme that did nothing to alleviate her own darkness. At least Terri, unlike myself, had worked out her future destiny – she was going to marry a very old, very rich man and then ‘screw him to death’. She wouldn’t be the first, but I doubted whether she would find a suitable candidate in Dundee.
I fumbled around in the dark for a candle. We were in the midst of a discontented winter of strikes and three-day weeks which meant there was no electricity this morning. If I had been capable of forethought, which I feared I never would be, I would have bought a torch by now. I would also have managed to acquire a Thermos flask. And a hot-water bottle. And batteries. I wondered how many three-day weeks it would take before civilization began to break down. Sooner for some than others, I supposed.
From the window I could see that across the water in Fife they had electricity. The houses of Newport and Wormit were studded with cheerful lights as more purposeful people than us embarked on their day. If it had been daylight we would have had a magnificent view of the rail bridge and its freight of trains, the black iron lacework curving lazily across a Tay that was sometimes silvery, often not, and which in today’s dark dawnlight was like a ribbon of tar running past the city.
In the bedroom, Bob was still fast asleep. In these night-like days of hibernation his waking hours were even more severely curtailed than usual.
‘The butterfly’s got the cornflakes,’ a sleepfaring Bob warned us in a loud voice.
‘I don’t know what you see in him,’ Terri said.
‘Neither do I,’ I said gloomily.
It couldn’t have been his looks that attracted me, as Bob looked much like everyone else did – the Zapata moustache, the gold hoop earring, the greasy Royalist locks curling over badly deported shoulders. He looked, if anything, like a tramp – an impression reinforced by the second-hand army boots and the oversized air-force greatcoat he habitually wore.
Bob had recently discovered the meaning of life, a discovery that seemed to have made no difference whatsoever to his everyday existence.
I met Bob the first week I was at university. I was already eighteen years old and thought that I could discern a certain librarian caste to my features and was afraid I would end up a lonely figure, forever wandering a spinster wasteland, and it was mere chance that Bob was the first person to cross my path the morning I decided to lose my virginity.
I met him when he ran me over. Bob was on a bicycle and I was on a pavement, which perhaps gives an indication of whose fault the accident was. I broke my wrist (or rather, Bob broke my wrist), and the exciting combination of circumstances – drama, blood and a brown-eyed man – all served to make me think that destiny had spoken and therefore I should listen.
Bob hit me because he swerved to miss a dog. The man who would sooner run over a woman than a dog introduced himself by bending over me where I lay on the pavement, staring at me in amazement, as if he’d never seen a woman before, and saying, ‘Wow, what a bummer.’
The dog came out of the accident unscathed, if a little surprised, and was returned to its tearful owner. Bob rode to the Dundee Royal Infirmary in the ambulance with me and had to be physically stopped from inhaling the gas and air.
* * *
Terri had finally taken her sunglasses off after tripping over Bob’s boots left carelessly in the middle of the floor. There were many drawbacks to living with Bob, not the least of which was the way he created a mysterious amount of self-replicating debris that constantly threatened to engulf him.
With no power and the cupboard bare, we had to imagine breakfast. Hot chocolate and cinnamon toast for Terri, while I preferred Braithwaites’ ‘Household’ blend tea with one of Cuthbert’s well-fired white rolls, its outside crisp and blackened, its inside filled with doughy white air. We remained hungry, however, for you cannot really eat your own words.
‘Well, at least being up at this hour means we’ll make it to Archie’s tutorial on time for once,’ I said, without any great enthusiasm, but when I looked at Terri closely I realized she had fallen asleep. She should take more care, she had just the kind of sluggish metabolism that gets people buried alive in family crypts and glass coffins. In some ways (but not in others) Terri would have made the perfect wife for Bob – they could have simply slept their way through married life. Rip van Winkle and Duchess Anaesthesia, the lost, sleepy daughter of the Romanovs.
I gave her a little pinch and said, ‘You know you shouldn’t—’ but then I came under the sleep spell as well.
Sometimes I wondered if we weren’t all unwittingly taking part in drug trials being conducted covertly by a pharmaceutical company, perhaps for a drug with the opposite effects of speed. They could just call it Slow when it hit the market. Perhaps that was who was watching me – an undercover research assistant observing the effects of Slow on his unsuspecting guinea-pig. Because I was sure someone was watching me. (‘Well, you know what they say,’ Bob said, in what I think was a misguided effort to comfort me, ‘just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’)
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br /> For several days now I had been aware of the unseen eyes on me, of the inaudible feet dogging my every footstep. I hoped it was merely the projection of a heated imagination rather than the beginnings of some paranoid delusional breakdown that would end on a locked ward in Liff, the village where the local mental hospital was located. (‘Take more drugs,’ was the advice of Bob’s best friend, Shug.)
I woke up with a jolt. My head had been pillowed uncomfortably on the edge of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the book had left a painful gouge in my cheek. Terri was making little whimpering noises, dreaming about chasing rabbits again.
I shook her awake, ‘Come on, we’re going to be late.’
* * *
My new resolution, rather late in my final year I realized, was to attend all the lectures, tutorials and seminars that I was supposed to. This was in a vain bid to curry favour with as many of the English department staff as possible because I was now so behind with my work that it was becoming increasingly unlikely that I would even be able to sit my degree, let alone pass it. I didn’t understand how I’d got so behind with everything, especially when I was trying so hard to keep up.
Terri was even more behind than I was, if that was possible. The George Eliot essay (‘Middlemarch is a treasure house of detail, but an indifferent whole.’ Can Middlemarch be defended against this criticism by Henry James?) was just one of the many pieces of work that we hadn’t managed to do.
I dressed as if for a polar expedition in as many clothes as I could find – woollen tights, a long needlecord pinafore dress, several reject men’s golfing sweaters that had been acquired in a St Andrews Woollen Mill sale, scarf, gloves, knitted hat, and, lastly, an old beaver coat, bought for ten shillings in the pawn shop at the West Port, a coat that still had a comforting old lady smell of camphor and violet cachous about it.
‘Ontological proof,’ Bob shouted mysteriously in his sleep – a concept he wouldn’t even know the meaning of if he was awake.
Terri grimaced and replaced her sunglasses and pulled on a black beret so that now she looked like a deranged governess engaged in guerrilla warfare. A Weathergirl.
‘Let’s do it,’ she said, and we slipped out into the shock of a morning that crackled with cold so that every time we spoke our breath came out in cold white clouds like the speech bubbles in the Beano. We trudged up Paton’s Lane and as we turned onto the Perth Road, the invisible, ever-watchful pair of eyes monitored our progress.
‘Maybe it’s the eye of God,’ Terri said. I was sure God, if he existed at all, which was highly unlikely, would have better things to do with his time than watch me.
‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ Terri said. ‘Maybe he’s like a really … trivial guy. Who knows?’ Who indeed.
The Art of Structuralist Criticism
‘Blah, Blah, Blah,’ Archie said. (or something like that.) Ten minutes after eleven in Archie McCue’s room on the third floor of the extension to Robert Matthews’ soaring sixties Tower – the Queen’s Tower, although no queen was ever likely to live in it. The gloomy atmosphere was made gloomier by the absence of electricity. A candle, stuck in an empty Blue Nun bottle, burned at the window like a signal. The university was still managing to run its heating although no-one knew how – perhaps they were burning books, or (more likely) students. The room was hot and airless and I had to peel off my layers of reject golfing sweaters, one by one.
Archie was talking. Nothing will stop Archie talking, not even death probably, he will rumble on from the inside of his large coffin until the worms get fed up with the noise and eat his tongue –
‘When words no longer strive for mimesis they become dislocated and disconnected. They illustrate in themselves the exhaustion of forms. Writers who eschew mimesis, looking for new ways of approaching the fiction construct, are disruptivist – challenging what Robbe-Grillet refers to as the “intelligibility of the world”.’ Archie paused. ‘What do you think of that statement? Anyone?’ No-one answered. No-one ever had any idea what Archie was talking about.
Archie’s blimpish body strained to escape from his dark green polyester shirt, a shirt stained at the armpits with large damp triangles of sweat. He was also attired in brown trousers and a tan-coloured knitted tie that sported a different quality of stain – dried boiled egg-yolk, or custard.
He spun round in his tweedy, executive chair, so much more comfortable than the chairs assigned to his tutees – the little faux wood tables attached to our chairs seemed to be specifically designed to restrain us, like a cross between a baby’s high chair and an asylum straitjacket. The chairs were made from some artificial material – a hard grey plastic substance that the university seemed over fond of. It was only possible to be even remotely comfortable in these chairs for a maximum of ten minutes. An unfettered Archie, on the other hand, was free to birl and twirl around like a fairground ride on his Easy-glide castors.
‘The act of writing itself comes to occupy the centre of the stage as the author is no longer concerned to invoke some a priori meaning or truth. Jacques Derrida reinforces the point…’
Archie McCue was an argumentative Marxist who claimed to be the progeny of a Glaswegian shipbuilder, although, in fact, he had been brought up by his widowed mother who owned a sweetshop in Largs. This long-suffering woman was now ‘dottled’ according to Archie and had therefore recently been transported across the river to Newport-on-Tay and an old people’s home called The Anchorage with a ‘view of the water’.
‘Valéry claims that literature is, and can be nothing else than, a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language…’
Archie lived in a big house in Windsor Place with Philippa, his bossy English wife. I knew that because I was the most recent in a long line of McCue babysitters – Philippa and Archie, both nearing fifty now, had been breeding, at spaced-out intervals, since the end of the war. They had four grown-and-gone offspring – Crispin (‘Cambridge’), Orsino (‘Oxford’), Freya (‘year out in France’) and their eldest son, the mysterious Ferdinand (‘Saughton Prison, unfortunately’). Only one child, nine-year-old Maisie (‘a mistake’), was now left at home.
‘… and in its multiplicity and plurality it cries out for a new hermeneutics…’
We were a shrinking tutorial group. At the moment there were four of us – myself, Terri, Andrea and Olivia. Andrea was a grammar-school girl from the middle echelons of North Yorkshire society. Today, reeking of patchouli, she was wearing a flouncy, flowery dress, all buttons and bows and intricate bodice seaming, that looked as if it had been made for an amateur dramatic production of Oklahoma!
Andrea had recently converted from the Church of Scotland to paganism and was studying to be a witch. To this end she had apprenticed herself to a warlock in Forfar. Few things were more worrying than the idea of Andrea with magic powers. Not that I have anything against witches, per se, of course – I am only too aware that my own mother is a wizardess of some kind – or wizardina, or wizardelle, for there appears to be no feminine form for the word. Perhaps I can just start making words up. Why not? How else do words come into being?
Andrea said that she wanted to be a famous writer and accordingly had done an evening shorthand-and-typing course run by a man in Union Street who turned out to be more interested in his female students’ sweatered chests than he was in their Pitman short forms. So far, all Andrea had written were flimsy stories about a girl called Anthea who came from Northallerton and was studying English literature at university. Andrea’s most interesting story to date was about a strange sexual encounter her alter ego Anthea had with a teacher at secretarial college. I thought that The Adventures of Anthea would be a good title for an English pornographic film – the kind that involves a lot of window cleaners and innuendo but not much actual sex.
Anthea was always having poignant moments sparked off by mundane experiences – going to lectures, finding spiders, buying A4 narrow-ruled with margins. Personally I think that reading the details of other people�
��s domesticity is almost as tiresome as listening to them recount their dreams – and then the fork-lift truck turned into a giant red squirrel that crushed my father’s head like a nut – fascinating to the dreamer, but tiresome for the indifferent listener.
Archie himself, of course, was famously writing a novel – an experimental and epic tome that had now reached seven hundred pages. It was, reportedly (for no-one had actually seen it), an Angst-ridden, labyrinthine fiction about the metaphysical Sturm und Drang of the self called The Expanding Prism of J.
‘… a technique which might be considered emblematic of the essential arbitrariness of all linguistic signifiers…’
Olivia politely stifled a yawn. A fair, willowy girl, Olivia was a doctor’s daughter from Edinburgh, a St George’s girl and a clever, methodical student, the kind who write up their notes every night, underlining everything in three different-coloured inks. Olivia was clearly a student who belonged at St Andrews or Warwick, or even East Anglia, rather than Dundee but she’d had ‘some kind of a breakdown’ during her A-Levels and had ended up with Es instead of As.
For the last year, Olivia had been having an affair with a lecturer in the Politics department called Roger Lake (generally known as ‘Roger the Dodger’ naturally) who was always trying to be trendy and hang out with students. Roger had a wife called Sheila and a clutch of small, blond daughters (‘Just like Goebbels,’ Terri said), aged from almost nothing to nine years old.
Although sex between staff and students was rife at the university, it was nonetheless forbidden by the Dean who took ‘a dim view’ of it. Roger Lake worried constantly that he was going to be caught in a scandalous situation and insisted that he and Olivia behave in a cloak-and-dagger fashion, exiting buildings separately and ignoring each other in public (and sometimes in private, she reported). Having an affair with Roger Lake would have provided a good training for secret agents.
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