Emotionally Weird(107)

‘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.



Things weren’t quite as bad as they seemed. Everyone escaped the building and the fire brigade doused the flames (feeding on the university’s abundant supply of flammable grey plastic) before they could do any real harm.

Professor Cousins and I rode (reluctantly) with Maggie Mackenzie in the ambulance. The ambulanceman who had ferried Dr Dick to hospital smiled at me and said, ‘You again.’ Unfortunately, Maggie Mackenzie wasn’t unconscious and, if anything, rather garrulous, as if being hit on the head by so many words had stimulated the vocabulary department of her brain.

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.