by Tim Jones
Well, I was eighteen now, too big and too fast to be hit, whatever my mother might say. He took me through to the parlour, reserved for receiving the priest, the landlord, and our Saviour should he chance to drop by. Lately, I'd been using it as a quiet place to study.
'Your mother had you marked out for the priesthood,' he began, 'and now you do this to us.'
This was feeble, and he knew it. 'The Lord has other plans for me,' I said.
'Why engineering, then? Nothing good ever came of it.'
'It was a noble profession once, Father. I want to make it noble again.'
'Noble, is it? Then how do you explain that terrible business with the nave of St Dominic's, or those harebrained gas lamps, or that Mr Deutschendorf and his 'suspension bridge'? And he was a professor at this very college you insist on attending!'
'Ah, but that's the point, Father. Those projects failed because they were designed for yesterday's conditions. When you were a boy, did things move around as much as they do now?'
'No,' he allowed, 'they generally stayed where they were.'
'Exactly! And that's because there weren't so many of us then, and we lived in villages, not in cities. As long as they didn't come under focused attack, even flimsy structures were perfectly safe. But now there's so many of us that any concentration of thoughts can send iron and stone and even wood breaking free and wandering away.' That Miss Quigley could do all this and more on her own, I kept to myself.
'Meaning I have to pay good money to you and your sisters to think our house into shape.'
I privately disputed his definition of 'good money', but now wasn't the time to argue the point. He was rising to my lure.
'That's right. So what are we going to do? Go back to living in thatch and wattle?'
He made a face at that.
'This is the old way, Dad' — I held up Mundine's Principles — 'and this is the new way' — Lyman and Parker's Engineering in the Age of Uncertainty. 'I want to make the new way work.'
'And how much do you suppose I'll have to pay for all this?'
'Not much at all!' I answered gaily. And then we got down to business.
I passed the final entrance test with a mark or two to spare, and between Father and Mother and Auntie Eileen, who'd always doted on me, my family came up with the money for the first year. 'You'll have to engineer yourself a job after that,' they said.
Inside those imposing walls, the college was unimpressive: a warren of low, flat, narrow-windowed buildings. 'It doesn't pay to build high around students,' I was told.
The first term was torture, a crash course in mathematics and physics and chemistry. Did I really need to know the melting point of sulphur or the value of the Dietrich coefficient? Well, the latter was used in the calculation of animate field flux in inorganic materials, so I guess I did at that.
In between my studies, my duties at home, and my occasional opportunities to escape for a pint and a chat with my fellow students, I tried to find Miss Quigley, which was still the only name I knew her by. She looked no older than me, so I expected to find her somewhere among the junior classes, but nobody knew anything of her. I glimpsed a couple of women with blonde hair, but both were Saxon exchange students who didn't spare me a second glance.
It was a week before the end of term, and I was struggling with Professor Carr's theories about magnetism, when I saw her: just a glimpse, hurrying out of one building and into another, with a couple of burly men by her side. I followed, and was met at the door by one of the men, who pointed to the sign that said NO ADMITTANCE.
'That girl went in,' I said.
'EXCEPT ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS,' he added.
There was plainly no budging him. An exhaustive study of the timetable showed there were no teaching rooms in that building, yet neither was it listed as a research facility. All the windows were locked, all the doors boarded over.
So what about the building she had come from? That was a bit more promising: it contained dormitories for women from country areas and foreign parts who were attending the college. I knew a man who boasted considerable knowledge of such women.
Dan Travis was as thin as a rake and acted accordingly. He claimed to be a magnet to the ladies, and if even half his stories were true, he was right. There had to be some explanation for how a man could eat so much and stay so thin. I bought him lunch and got him talking about the charms of girls from Saxony.
'By then I knew she wanted it, so . . .' Yes, yes, Dan. Spare me the detailed description and concentrate on the interesting bit: how you got into her room.
Oh. You didn't make it back to her room. There was an alleyway. How romantic.
But Dan wasn't done with this flaxen-haired goddess, and eventually his urges drove him to test the fearsome security of the women's dorms.
'And do you know, I just walked right in? And there she was, waiting for me, with her legs—'
'You just walked right in?'
'That's right! These are big girls, after all' — I leered on cue — 'and what they do after hours is their business.'
Let me make it clear at once that what happened next wasn't my fault. I was shaking like Mrs Ormond's railing at the prospect of actually going in there and looking for Miss Quigley, and even worse, talking to her if I found her, so I spent a couple of hours in the pub watching my classmates play silly games with the tables. By the time I lurched to my feet, squared my shoulders, and set off, I had thrown a skinful of bravado over the black pit of anxiety.
As Dan had said, getting into the dormitory involved nothing more than knocking on the door. I was taken straight to her room, but she wasn't there. Margrethe, one of her roommates, was.
'With a boyfriend no doubt Kate is outing,' she told me. God forbid Margrethe was any acquaintance of Dan's, for she looked me up and down and said I was a fine-looking fellow, and why didn't I tell her all my troublings? Which I did.
Now, dormitory wasn't really the word. The women slept four to a room, but they had an arrangement that ensured a gentleman caller could be entertained in private. And I was here to see Kate — a much sweeter sound than Miss Quigley — but she was out with her boyfriend, damn him for all eternity, and Margrethe was friendly, and warm, and sitting on her bed with her arm brushing mine.
And I found that when I leaned over and kissed her she put her arms around me, and we sank back on the bed, and her flesh was like cream, cool and deep. I came in seconds, then I came in minutes, then we both came in what felt like hours.
'Roommates coming back to roomen will,' she told me in her endearingly mangled English. I kissed her deeply, found something to wipe myself, pulled on my clothes — God, did I need a shower — kissed her again, and stumbled towards the door.
To be met by Kate Quigley, coming the other way, with no sign of the alleged boyfriend. She raised an eyebrow, smiled, and said, 'I see you've met Margrethe.'
'I . . . er . . .' I said, and fled down the hallway, pursued by the faint sound of laughter. I had a good idea what they were laughing about. It comes of having sisters.
Until I had my brain-wave, my three years of study had been a disillusioning experience. When I walked through the college gates for the first time, I had had two great desires: to find Kate, and to find a way to build the great, airy structures I saw in my mind's eye. I found Kate, or rather she found me; that was my fortune and misfortune both. And all my study had put paid to those idle dreams of construction.
Why are our cities built of wood, not stone? Because stone, never having been alive, has no resistance to the press of our thoughts, and one stone jogged out of place can cause a whole building to come tumbling down. Build in stone, and you need to employ a small army just to think your building firmly in place. Build in wood, and as long as you're not subjected to a concerted attack, or some freak of nature walking by, you will probably be all right. And yet our winters are cold, and the fire bell peals like the crack of doom across our cities.
There are other materials too, iron an
d that sludgy stuff they call concrete, and all of them equally vulnerable. Do you know that an optimistic son of the Rhineland has invented an engine that burns oil and can power a carriage without need of horses? Imagine what our cities would be like if they didn't stink of horse shit! We would go zipping about the place in Herr Kessler's invention, smelling the sweet, clean air.
But all it takes is one stray thought, and the whole complicated contraption falls apart, and the oil leaks out and collects in a little puddle on the ground. And the same goes for Mrs Magill and her electric light, and the unfortunate Mr Stephens and his speaking device. (Unfortunate for me, too — I could have used it to call my lovely Margrethe in Saxony and ask how she and her baron were getting along. It had broken my heart to see her go, and other parts of me were just as downcast.)
So we knew what we needed: something with the strength of iron but the stability of living wood. I thought of the answer five minutes from the end of Professor Sullivan's 9am lecture.
I was lucky to be there at all. At 1am, I'd been stumbling home after a hard night's drinking at the Flying Jug. My feet got confused as I walked beside the pond, and before I knew it I was covered in pond scum and fending off the attentions of a duck.
After a long wash and a short sleep, I got up early to avoid explaining the state of my clothing to Mother. In any case, I tried hard not to miss Professor Sullivan's lectures. She was always genuinely interested in what her students had to say, and I was always genuinely interested in talking.
Today's lecture topic was energy barriers to chemical reactions. As far as I'm concerned, chemistry is physics minus the excitement, and I listened with less than my usual attention.
'I can see by the glazed looks on your faces you've all been finding this deeply absorbing,' she announced with a few minutes to go, 'so instead I'll bore you with some of my current research. Professor Koch and I are about to announce in Chemical Review Letters that we've invented a new field of chemistry.'
'Do we need a new field of chemistry?' I called out.
She assumed a severe expression. 'Even you might find this interesting, Mr McCreedy. I recall you telling us about Herr Kessler and his carriage that burns oil. That never amounted to much, but we've discovered that oil has other properties of great interest.' She explained how she and Professor Koch had derived carbon compounds from oil and used them to make light, flexible materials with considerable resistance to directed thought. 'They'd be perfect for cups and plates, and even chairs and tables,' she went on, 'but they're not strong enough to build with. We're working on a way to make the stuff into fibres and cables, but we need to increase its resistance to thought as well.'
'I've got an idea,' I told Professor Sullivan as we left the lecture room. 'Have you got five minutes?'
Fifteen minutes later, I had been added to her research team. Almost a year after that, we were ready to put my brain-wave to the test.
A team of us gathered round a thin coil of material. On the outside was a kind of hardened, transparent resin, and on the inside was a thin filament of carbon (made by controlled pyrolysis of cellulose in an inert atmosphere, if you really want to know). One fibre couldn't take much load, but put a bundle of them together and you had something much lighter and far stronger than iron, ready to build bridges, and vessels, and cables. But, of course, little more immune to the college's Chief Materials Tester than a freestanding iron railing or an incautious policeman's baton. Which was where my idea came in: between the resin and the carbon was a thin film of water, and in that water thrived microscopic pond algae, which in their mindless aliveness would, so we hoped, turn away the most destructive of thoughts.
The Chief Materials Tester walked in. I didn't think she would hold anything back in the testing. Kate and I had exchanged polite conversation once or twice while I'd been waiting for Margrethe. Since Margrethe had departed for her ancestral halls, clutching her degree with one hand and giving me a final squeeze with the other, Kate and I had not exchanged a word.
'Straighten the coil out, please,' she said, and we did. She and her assistant attached instruments, one at each end, one in the middle, and then she stood back a few paces, frowned in concentration, and looked at our handiwork.
Looked at it hard. I could see the lines of strain on her face. It mirrored my face as I looked at her. Time stretched taut in the room.
And nothing happened. The fibre didn't budge, the needles didn't move. There was a poker in the grate. Kate turned her gaze on it, and it leapt from its place and flew up the chimney. For all I know, it's still climbing. Then she relaxed, stepped back, and said, 'You win.'
Big grins, slaps on the back, time to bundle up the material — we call it carbon fibre — and take it back to the lab. Professor Sullivan was talking to me about further work we needed to do: manufacturing techniques, the micro-pumping problem . . . but I excused myself and asked Kate if she would have dinner with me that night. She said she would.
Kate had moved out of the dormitory and was now boarding privately, and there was a suspicious old biddy standing behind her as she opened the door to me. 'Mind you don't stay out too late, now — I've seen his type before!' the old biddy cautioned. They do say age lends perspective.
Dinner was undoubtedly delicious, but it might have been boiled cardboard for all the attention I paid to it. I was too busy watching Kate. She was wearing something dark and flowing that set off her hair and her beautiful soft skin, and just before her dress got in the way there was a hint of the cleft between her breasts. I wanted so much to slip my finger in there and start undoing the buttons, but I didn't have the nerve. There was coffee, conversation, and dessert — she could pack the food away for such a slim thing, which my mother says is always a good sign. I excused myself to go to the toilet, and while I was sitting there I made up my mind.
'Would you like to come home with me?' I whispered as we stood together outside the restaurant door.
And she thought it over, and said yes, she would like that very much. Our first night was glorious, and our wedding night better still. Each morning we walk to the college together, and each evening we walk back to the room we share in my parents' house. I love my parents, but it's time Kate and I found a place of our own. There's times she and I set the whole house to shaking.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY,
WITH FRIES
By the time they got to the Finland Station, Lenin and his posse were famished.
'What'll it be, boss, Burger King or McDonald's?' asked Zinoviev.
Lenin rustled up the kopecks for a quarter-pounder and fries all round and they set to chowing down. By the time he finished, Lenin had had a better idea.
'I'm tired of this revolution business,' he said. 'Let's set up a chain of family restaurants instead.'
It took a while to convince the Mensheviks, Left SRs, and other petit-bourgeois elements. Nevertheless, Lenin's will prevailed, and Party cadres fanned out across the land in a sophisticated franchising operation. By the end of 1917, Moscow and Petrograd were under complete control, and Siberia was falling into line. Lenin's Bolshevik brand — 'the burger for the worker' — was taking command.
The big international chains didn't take this lying down. With an aggressive combination of discounting, free giveaways, and sheer intimidation, they muscled in on the Bolsheviks. For four years, the struggle went on. The starving inhabitants of Northern Russia woke up each morning not knowing whether the Golden Arches or the Hammer and Sickle would be standing atop their local fast food outlet.
It was a bad time all round, but at the end of it, the red flag with the yellow emblem reigned supreme across Russia. Crowds flocked to enjoy the cheery, efficient service and chomp their way through the basic Bolshevik burger or such additional menu choices as the Red Square (prime Polish beef in a square bun) and the Bronze Horseman (horse testicles on rye — an acquired taste). Fuelled by Bolshevik burgers, Russia was on the move. Tractor production went up twenty p
er cent. Electricity output doubled in five years.
After Lenin choked to death on a fishburger on 1924, new CEO Joseph Stalin launched a full-scale campaign of collectivisation and industrialisation. Horse testicles were out, borscht was in. These changes were far from universally popular, but, as the slogan went, 'You can't say no to Uncle Joe'. From Murmansk to Magadan, it was Joe's way or the highway.
The years 1939 to 1945 were bad ones for the Bolshevik brand. An ill-advised attempt at a strategic alliance with Schickelgruber's, an aggressive new German franchise, ended in disaster. The names Leningrad and Stalingrad will forever be remembered from that period as examples of poor service and unusual burger ingredients. But Schickelgruber's was finally seen off and the Bolshevik brand entered a new phase of expansion. It was time, said Uncle Joe, to export Lenin's legacy to the world.
This wasn't an unqualified success. What goes down well in Kharkov can cause indigestion in Kabul. The expansion policy did net Bolshevik the important Chinese market, but even there, Russian attempts to include cabbage in Chinese burgers were soon met by Chinese demands that all Bolshevik meals include a side-order of rice. Before long, there were two competing Bolshevik brands, and then three once the Albanians got in on the act.
It was the beginning of the end. Weakened by the massive costs of enforcing brand compliance in territories as diverse as Kazakhstan and Cuba, the Bolshevik empire collapsed in debts and squabbling. It was all over for one of the major franchises of the twentieth century.
For a nostalgic reminder of those days, take a trip to the Finland Station, where you can still see a statue of Lenin addressing the workers, burger in one hand, fries in the other.