Emotionally Weird(19)

Kara was from Kent originally although she looked like a tinker, and was planning to do teacher-training after she graduated and be released into the world of primary school infants in the guise of ‘Miss Jones’. The baby, whose paternity was almost as vague as mine, was called Proteus and was lugged around everywhere by Kara, much to the annoyance of the university staff who had discovered, rather late in the day, that there were no rules about not bringing babies into lectures and tutorials.

Robin grew tired of pretending to read The Glass Bead Game and took out a pack of giant Rizlas and started rolling a joint under the table. Robin had recently decided to become a Buddhist, which made him even more boring.

‘What’s it all about? The meaning of Liff,’ Robin said, laughing in a stupid way that made his shoulders shake, like a cartoon dog. For some reason all Dundee students found this hilariously funny.

‘What goes around comes around, eh?’ Shug said, sliding into the seat next to Robin. Andrea smiled, rather pathetically, at him but Shug was more intent on eating his cold, round pie (or ‘peh’ in the Dundee patois). Nora has only ever given me two pieces of advice in my life, both of them on the station platform in Newcastle, when I boarded the train to come to Dundee for the first time:

1. Beware of people with blue eyes.

2. Don’t eat the pies.

I have tried my best to heed this maternal counsel – despite its having been given in a rather unsatisfactory rhyming couplet – as I am unlikely to receive any more.

‘So, I’ve decided to become a vegetarian,’ Robin said staring fascinated at the pale, fatty innards of Shug’s pie.

Proteus started to cry and Kara disentangled him from his makeshift pouch. He was still wound tightly in a grubby white Aircell blanket that made him look like a large maggot. His little fists waved angrily in the air until Kara fumbled inside her shirt for a breast and attached him to it. Kevin blushed in horror and stared fixedly at something fascinating on the ceiling until he noticed Olivia sitting at a neighbouring table and stared at her red boots instead.

Olivia was sitting with a group of social admin people, who were all ignoring her. She was reading Gormenghast , very slowly and deliberately in the way that lone diners in restaurants read. She put her hand to her cheek and revealed a slender wrist circled by a gold bracelet. Several months ago, in an unusual moment of intimacy in the cafeteria queue, Olivia told me that this bracelet had belonged to her mother.

‘Dead?’ I queried, in the rather off-hand manner of the semi-orphan (for my father, you will have noticed, is absent from my own story), and Olivia said, yes, dead and by her own hand, inconveniently gassing herself on Olivia’s tenth birthday.

Andrea suddenly ducked under the table to avoid Heather. Heather – the priggish, rather frightening girl who had hijacked the women’s liberation group – shared a flat with Andrea, one of those university places where no-one knows each other at the beginning of the year and no-one likes each other by the end. It was also one of those flats where everyone had their own provisions so that their rather small Hotpoint fridge contained, for example, five pints of individually labelled milk and there were constant arguments over purloined butter and pilfered cornflakes. Heather went so far as to mark the levels of her tomato sauce bottles and weigh her blocks of margarine.

Heather, making a beeline for the hapless Andrea, was wearing a skinny-rib, polo-necked sweater that made a feature of her small unrestrained breasts and surprisingly prominent nipples which bounced hypnotically as she walked.

‘She thinks I ate one of her Dairylea,’ Andrea sniffed, ‘as if. One triangle has a million calories.’ Luckily for Andrea, Heather was distracted by a drunken rugby player committing unspeakable practices and unnatural acts.

I noticed Olivia staring at Proteus, very intently, as if she was trying to work out a particularly knotty Logic problem. Like Bob, Olivia was doing a joint degree in English and Philosophy. Unlike Bob, she was set to get a first. Her preoccupation with Proteus allowed Kevin’s tormented gaze to creep up as far as her knees. He was clutching a bit of The Chronicles of Edrakonia , now entering its fourth volume, which was very much the same as the previous three volumes.

‘The Lady Agaruitha,’ he said in a low voice to me, because for some reason I had been singled out a long time ago as his audience, ‘has been imprisoned in a tower by—’

‘The lady who?’ Kara interrupted, looking up from a piece of dun-coloured fabric she had taken out and begun to smock, despite the hindrance of a suckling baby.

‘A-g-a-r-u-i-t-h-a,’ Kevin spelled out crossly, blushing because Agaruitha was based on Olivia, although I don’t suppose Olivia was the goddaughter of a dragon queen, but she did sometimes have the look of someone imprisoned in a tower by ‘the evil Lord Lebaron, known as Dragonscourge—’