Emotionally Weird(18)

‘Well, well,’ Professor Cousins said, finally meandering to a halt at the door of his room. ‘I think I’ll have a little nap now. How about you?’

I was unsure as to whether he was asking me to join him in a nap or just generally enquiring about my plans; either way, I shook my head sadly and said, ‘I’ve got to go home and do some work.’

‘Give my regards to that boyfriend of yours.’

‘Bob?’

‘If that’s his name.’

Professor Cousins caught sight of Joan, the departmental secretary, a middle-aged, big-breasted woman fond of mohair so that I always had to stifle an instinct to go to sleep on her furry bosom. Professor Cousins made an elaborate pantomime of drinking a cup of tea and with a long-suffering sigh Joan went into the cupboard where she kept her kettle. For times of emergency – such as we were in – she had set up a little camping gas stove as well (which is probably how dreadful accidents happen).

‘Got to keep my strength up,’ Professor Cousins laughed. ‘Someone’s trying to kill me, you know.’

‘I’m sorry?’ I said, thinking I must have mis-heard, but he had shut the door of his room, although I could still hear him chuckling to himself on the other side of the flushed wooden door.



In the basement that served as the Students’ union   all kinds of health and safety laws were being flouted. It was unusually crowded, the air thick with condensation and the flickering candles on the tables giving the place an air of subterranean gloom, especially when they illuminated the Breughel-like paintings which for some reason adorned the walls.

If you can imagine a place somewhere between a stone-age cave and a wartime air-raid shelter then you have imagined the Students’ union  . A new union   was currently under construction – all plate glass and open spaces – but I suspected that it wouldn’t be occupied for long before it had acquired the same rank atmosphere, its new carpets marinated in beer and cigarette ash.

The union   was divided into two areas, a kind of self-service café and a bar, in which currently a group of rugby players, almost certainly an unholy alliance of medical and engineering students, were having a noisy lunchtime pint or ten. They were behaving as though it was Friday night rather than Monday lunchtime, downing pints of heavy in one draught and singing simplistic songs about bizarre sexual acts that they had almost certainly never indulged in and probably didn’t even understand.

I found Terri cornered at a table, smoking intensely and trying to ignore Robin, who was breaching the perimeter fence of her personal space. Terri’s personal space occupied an area roughly the size of Mull and therefore required vigorous defences.

Robin looked like Roy Wood from Wizzard with a touch of Rasputin in his last days, if Rasputin had worn burgundy-coloured loons and a rainbow tie-dyed T-shirt. He was ostentatiously reading The Glass Bead Game . Robin had the capacity to be extraordinarily tedious. His creative writing paper for Martha was a one-act play called Life Sentence (‘post-Beckettian’) in which disaffected young men sat around on packing cases and talked in unfinished sentences about how boring everything was and, in my opinion, was too true to life to be art.

Andrea was delicately eating a Golden Delicious – peeling it and cutting it up into careful segments – and frowning with distaste at the sight of Kevin opposite her who was stuffing a huge Forfar bridie into his mouth, greasy flakes of pastry adhering to his puffy lips. He sighed miserably when he finished chewing the last mouthful and said, ‘Two’s never enough, is it?’ Kevin was feeling disgruntled because the cafeteria was only serving cold food.

A big girl called Kara was making a great performance out of sitting down at the table. Kara was laden with a tray of food, a heavy rucksack, a woven Greek shoulder-bag and, finally, a fat, pneumatic baby, strapped to her back with a shawl.

Kara lived with other students – Robin was one of them – in an old farmhouse called Wester Balniddrie out in the wilds of rural Angus. They kept goats and chickens and pretended to be self-sufficient but they were not really the kind of people to hang out with in the aftermath of a disaster; they needed all the accoutrements of civilization to survive. Anything that involved a tool, for example, sent them into a panic. If the inhabitants of Balniddrie had been in charge of man’s technical evolution, people would still be storing things in hammocks slung from trees.

Kara finally managed to get settled and started wolfing a large bridge roll that was fraying at the seams with grated cheese and cress. Kara’s main fashion influence was peasantry. Today she was wearing an Indian cotton skirt, a pair of big workman’s boots, a huge, hairy sweater that looked as if it had been knitted on tent poles and some kind of cloth wrapped round her head, Russian serf-style. Her skin looked as if it had been rubbed with walnut juice.