‘You found it,’ Terri murmured, without apparently opening her mouth, or even waking up.
Professor Cousins was English – an affable, rather eccentric person who had recently taken his first tottering steps into dotage. Sometimes Professor Cousins was lucid, sometimes he wasn’t, and, as with anyone in the department, it wasn’t always easy to distinguish between the two states. The university’s strict laws of tenure dictated that he had to be dead at least three months before he could be removed from behind his desk. The crown may still have been perched precariously on the incumbent cranium of Professor Cousins, but the various faculty members were already deep in the throes of a momentous power struggle over the imminent possession of it. The sixties’ breeze-block walls echoed with machination and intrigue, plot and counterplot, as pretenders and contenders jostled for position.
Unnatural selection had already taken care of the main challenger for the post. The members of the English department were a notoriously accident-prone lot and the favourite – a statesmanlike Canadian called Christopher Pike – had eliminated himself by mysteriously falling down a flight of stairs in the Tower. Now that he was strung up in complex traction on the men’s orthopaedic ward of the DRI, the English department had witnessed a sharp escalation in hostilities between Archie and his two main rivals – Dr Dick and Maggie Mackenzie.
‘Well,’ Professor Cousins said, scratching his nose and hitching up his spectacles, ‘well, well.’ His almost bald head was covered in age spots; only a pale fringe of hair remained, like a friar’s tonsure or a ghostly atoll. He reminded me of an old animal – a sagging carthorse or an arthritic Great Dane, and I had an impulse to reach out and stroke his bald freckled pate and search in my pocket for an apple or a dog biscuit.
Suddenly, spying the empty chair next to me, he teetered over and sat down, squeezing his bag of bones behind the little wooden table from where he smiled benignly at us, raising his hand in a papal kind of gesture. ‘Do go on,’ he said amiably to Archie. ‘I’ll be out of the way here.’
Archie, after visibly struggling over how to deal with this bewildering behaviour, finally seemed to decide to simply ignore it and set off again. ‘ By asserting itself as a piece of fiction, the non-mimetic novel is in a position to negate both Sontag’s vision of an aesthetics of silence and John Barth’s prescription for formal regeneration. What do you think? Someone?’
‘Well, it’s got me flummoxed, Archie,’ Professor Cousins laughed. Archie glared at him. Professor Cousins was an old-fashioned Shakespearean by trade and somewhat baffled by Archie’s approach to literature. As we all were.
The new question was batted silently around the room, a room that was growing increasingly hot and airless. We all found different ways of distracting ourselves – I looked out of the third-floor window as if I’d just seen something interesting (which I had actually, but I’ll come to that later) while Kevin stared at Olivia’s feet and made little goldfish moues of distress with his fat blown-rose mouth and Olivia herself inspected her fingernails, one by one, very carefully. At first I thought Andrea was incanting a spell to ward off Archie but then I realized she was quietly humming a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, which probably had much the same effect. Terri, meanwhile, as enigmatic as an egg, maintained an eerie silence, apparently occupying some mental space denied to the rest of us.
The door opened and Shug strolled into the room, carrying a purple velvet shoulder-bag embroidered with tiny mirrors and eclectically dressed in a pair of jeans which were composed almost entirely of patches, a black and white Palestinian shawl round his neck and an Afghan coat. Shug – who was our vertical neighbour in Paton’s Lane – claimed to have bought this coat, which was considerably superior to the dirty, matted fleeces possessed by most students, in the ‘Amir Kabir’ in downtown Tehran.
Shug, lithe and lanky amongst a stunted population, liked to think he was the epitome of cool. He was one of the few native Dundonians at a university awash with English drop-outs. The first time I encountered Shug he was walking along the Nethergate, with Bob bob bobbing along beside him, holding a haddock in his hand like a lollipop – ‘Arbroath Smokie,’ he explained in his own kippered voice. I thought he was talking about some kind of hashish – although many people, of course, consider it to be a kind of red herring.
He sat in his usual place – on the floor with his back against the wall, facing Archie. Archie looked at his watch and said, ‘Why bother, Mr Scobie?’ and Shug raised an eyebrow and said gruffly, ‘You tell me, Archie.’ An enigmatic sort of an encounter but nonetheless containing the emotional charge of two rutting stags clacking antlers.