Emotionally Weird(11)

‘You never know, you might learn something,’ Professor Cousins said, smiling encouragingly at Shug and then, to no-one in particular, ‘Dr McCue knows all kinds of things that no-one else does.’

Shug was older than everyone else in the tutorial group. He had already been thrown out of Duncan of Jordanstone Art College (something that was previously thought to be impossible) and had worked on several real jobs in between times – as a road mender, a bus conductor, even in a chicken factory (‘Where the chickens are made,’ Terri told Bob who believed her for all of a minute). Shug had also ‘taken off’ to India and all points east to ‘find himself’, not that I could imagine Shug being particularly lost to begin with. If only Bob would go away and find himself. What would he find? Essence of Bob, perhaps.

Andrea came over all moon and whimsy at the sight of Shug. (A girl in love is a frightening sight.) Since leaving behind the decorous ways of the Church of Scotland, Andrea had, like many before her, developed a crush on Shug and seemed to be under the delusion that she was the woman for whom he would change his ways. If she was hoping to tidy him up and settle him down she was going to be sorely disappointed.

I myself had once had an unexpected, but not unwelcome, burst of sexual activity with Shug, down in the carrels in the basement of the library, next to the periodicals section. We had got as far as some enthusiastic kissing when I was shaken out of my Shug-induced reverie by his voice saying ruefully, ‘You know I cannae shag you, hen, Bob’s ma pal.’ Still, it was an experience I remembered fondly every time I went in search of the Shakespeare Quarterly or Atlantic Monthly .

‘ With reference to Proust, ’ Archie said, pressing on heroically, ‘ Walter Benjamin reminds us that the Latin word textum means web; he further suggests . . . ’

The room sank into a state of settled ennui. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, I felt as if I was suffocating in a warm fug of words. I tried to stay awake because it was important to keep in Archie’s good books as I was several weeks late handing in my dissertation to him. My dissertation ( Henry James – Man or Maze? ) was a degree paper and was supposed to be twenty thousand words long. So far I had fifty-one of them – A great part of the struggle for James is caused by his desire both to master his subject matter through a rigorous process of fictionalization, and at the same time offer the appearance of reality. The author must never be apparent because his intrusion into the text destroys the carefully wrought—

The hum of Archie’s words carried on in the background of my brain but it could no longer make any sense of them ‘. . . by enregistering speech, blah, inscription has its essential object, blah, and indeed, takes this fatal risk, blah, blah, the emancipation of meaning . . . as concerns any actual field of perception, blah, from the natural disposition of a contingent situation, blah, blah, blah . . . ’

I tried to keep myself awake by thinking about Bob. More specifically, by thinking about leaving Bob. It was more than three years now since I had woken up that first morning in a tangle of his toast-filled sheets. I had been puzzled as to how to proceed. Bob’s general passivity and iguana-like demeanour didn’t give me any clues, or even encouragement. He grunted when I asked him if he wanted me to stay and grunted when I asked him if he wanted me to go. In the end, I decided to compromise and go, but come back later. I slipped out from beneath his sheets, dyed a streaky purple, wincing quietly at the ache in my plaster-of-Paris wrist, and went breakfastless back to women-only Chalmers Hall and fell asleep in my cell-like single bed.

When I returned at six o’clock, Bob was exactly where I had left him – the bicycling Bob had given me a misleading impression of activity, Bob was merely borrowing the bike from someone else so he could stuff the saddlebags with home-grown grass and transport them across town.

I shrugged my clothes off and got back between the sheets. Bob rolled over, opened his eyes and said, ‘Wow – who are you?’

For reasons which I didn’t quite understand, my first night with Bob had been enough to leave me strangely attached to him. Later, I wondered if I had lost free will, as if in some strange way I’d merged with Bob’s own (limited) persona. (‘Like a mind-meld?’ Bob mused, quite animated for once by this idea.)

After the bicycle incident, I had moved in stealthily, book by book, shoe by shoe, so that by the time he noticed that I didn’t go home any more, he had got used to the idea of me and I was no longer a surprise when he woke up. I wondered if I could move out the same way. Remove myself bit by bit until there was nothing left to dismember and only the more intangible and enigmatic components remained (the smile, for example, and even that would fade eventually). Finally, nothing would be left but a space where I used to be. How much kinder that would be than walking out the door suddenly and all in one piece. Or dying abruptly.