Proteus unplugged himself from Kara’s breast with a popping noise and looked abstractedly at the ceiling as if he was trying to remember something. Kara took the opportunity to root once more in her rucksack and this time produce some mis-shapen candles in dull plasticine colours. Some of them had been set with what were supposed to be decorations – beans and lentils, little pebbles and the odd leaf. Most of them looked as if they had been moulded in empty cat food tins. The candles were Balniddrie’s response to the current state of emergency.
‘We’ve had to put the price up,’ Kara said, ‘because of demand.’
‘Capitalist profiteer,’ Shug said.
I bought a candle out of necessity. It was very heavy, you could easily have bashed someone’s skull in with it.
‘And then burnt the evidence,’ Kevin said, ‘that’s brilliant.’
Olivia hadn’t noticed Roger Lake lurking in the doorway trying to make surreptitious gestures to attract her attention without attracting any to himself.
There was a sudden surge of renewed raucousness from the rugby players at the bar, one of whom was standing on a table doing a slow, unattractive striptease. Then the power came back on causing a lot of people to flinch and cower like nocturnal animals suddenly caught in the beam of a headlight. The engineers rushed to the jukebox to put on ‘Maggie May’ and the noise level in the basement was cranked up a further notch.
When Olivia finally noticed Roger a little frown disturbed her perfection. But then she smiled at him and slipped away quickly, following him at a discreet distance.
The rugby players had used up most of the oxygen by now and I thought it was probably a good time to leave before people started dying.
‘I’m going,’ I said to Terri.
She followed me out, saying she was going to the Howff for a while. The Howff was Terri’s favourite graveyard, although any cemetery would do when she was in the right mood, which was always. Where other students might knit or read or hillwalk, Terri’s hobby was studying graveyards, exploring the topography of the cities of the dead – the Howff, Balgay, the Eastern Necropolis. Death was never going to have to worry about Terri not stopping for him.
At the entrance to the union we passed a short, bland girl called Janice Rand. Janice was in Martha’s creative writing class and wrote short, bland poetry that resembled vapid Anglican hymns. Janice had set up a table containing a handful of blue, badly printed leaflets and on which a hand-made banner was tacked, proclaiming quietly, ‘Don’t forget old people’.
Janice smelt of piety and coal tar soap. She had recently become a Christian, a neophyte of a student Christian fellowship whose members roamed the corridors of Airlie, Belmont and Chalmers Halls looking for likely converts (the afraid, the alone, the abandoned) and those who needed to use the Bible to fill in the spaces where their personalities should have been.
The student Christians ran some kind of volunteer service, visiting the elderly and the housebound. Janice was trying to sign up more volunteers.
‘Don’t forget old people what?’ I asked, drawn by curiosity. ‘That they fought in the war, that they know more than you do? That they feel afraid and alone and abandoned?’
Janice made a face. ‘Not what ,’ she replied scornfully, ‘just don’t forget them. In general.’
We turned to go and Janice shouted after us, ‘Jesus can save you!’ She looked rather doubtful as if He might draw the line at us. ‘Jesus is the Son of God,’ she added, in case we didn’t know. ‘He came once to save us,’ she said, rather stroppily, ‘and He’ll come again. He might even be here now.’
A blast of cold air swung the front door open with a loud crash and we all jumped, but especially Janice who looked as if – just for a fraction of a second – she believed that Jesus had walked into Dundee University’s Student union . She should warn Him about the lack of hot food. It wasn’t Jesus, unless He had chosen to return as a scruffy student from the Socialist Society, carrying a box of newly printed leaflets – small pink ones as opposed to Janice’s small blue ones.
‘Because blue is the colour of heaven?’ I asked her but she just scowled at me. The boy from the Socialist Society pushed one of his leaflets into my hand. It said, ‘Stop the War Now’. He tried to give one to Janice but she wouldn’t take it unless he in turn took one of her leaflets and when we hurried out of the door they were still having a stand-off, thrusting leaflets aggressively at each other.
Nora, who has been snoring gently by the cold ashes of the kitchen grate, wakes up and yawns.