Emotionally Weird(45)

‘How long has she been in the water, do you think?’ Jack Gannet asked Henry Machin.

‘Hard to tell,’ the pathologist said. ‘At this time of year the water’s warm; decomposition sets in quickly. She looks a bit of a mess.’

‘So do I first thing in the morning,’ Jack Gannet said wearily. ‘Five days maybe?’ He kept his voice respectfully low when he was talking about the dead for sometimes he had this eerie feeling that they could hear him, that they hadn’t quite . . . gone.

He knew this was no accident, he could feel it like a vibration, like an angry aura of wasps. Henry Machin slipped the scalpel into the dead mermaid flesh like a hot knife in butter and Constable Collins fainted quietly so as not to disturb anyone.

The morning post clattered through the letterbox. It contained a rather threatening note, signed by Joan, the departmental secretary, reminding me that my essay for Professor Cousins ( ‘Tragedy plus Time equals Comedy’ Discuss ) was several weeks overdue. I wondered if it worked the other way round – Comedy plus Time equals Tragedy ? Perhaps not.

The brusque, almost callous, tone of the note indicated that it had been penned by someone other than Professor Cousins, who, even if he remembered omissions and absences, never cared enough to reprimand people for them.

I decided that, rather than speak to him, I would leave him a letter, beseeching leniency, and plead a dying grandmother in mitigation. Is my grandmother dead? Or grandmothers in the plural, for surely there must have been two of them unless autogenesis runs in the family?

~ Dead, Nora says.

‘And your grandmothers, what about them?’

~ Very dead, and I only had one.

But you can’t have only one grandmother, that’s illogical. Everyone has two. Don’t they?





Reductio ad Absurdum





I HADN’T ACTUALLY EXPECTED TO FIND PROFESSOR COUSINS IN his room as he was supposed to be giving a lecture on revenge tragedy at that time of day. Instead he was rifling through the drawers of his filing-cabinet. He seemed to be even more skittish than usual, laughing away to himself as he pulled out, and then discarded on the floor, an endless cache of photocopied timetables and study guides. I reminded him that he was supposed to be giving a lecture and he looked at me in astonishment and said, ‘Really?’ as if he’d never given one before in his life.

I offered to help him find whatever it was he was looking for but this seemed to cause him even more amusement. ‘I can’t remember what I’m looking for,’ he said, ‘but, don’t worry, I will when I find it.’ He gave me a curious glance. ‘Can I help you with something, did you want to see me?’

I told Professor Cousins that I’d come to write a note to him and he gestured wildly in the direction of his desk and said, ‘On you go, my dear, on you go then.’ It seemed the easiest thing to do somehow, so I slipped behind his desk and got out a pad of paper and started writing.

Professor Cousins’ desk was very untidy, scattered with little bits of paper on which he had scrawled messages to himself in his spiky italic hand – ‘Buy fish!’ ‘Find glove!’ ‘Send letter!’

‘ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore ,’ he exclaimed suddenly, just as Martha Sewell passed his open door. She gave him an unreadable look. Professor Cousins waved to her. ‘That’s what I’m supposed to be teaching, isn’t it?’ he said to me.

‘Yes.’

He sighed, looking very downcast.

‘I’m not in the lecture theatre either,’ I said in a feeble effort to comfort him. He made a helpless gesture and returned to the filing-cabinet, muttering something to himself on the lines of ‘Mummery flummery, mimsy whimsy, blah, blah, blah,’ before wandering out into the corridor, bleating Joan’s name in the ridiculous helpless tone he adopted in the belief that it endeared him to Joan, when in fact it drove her up the wall. When he’d gone I propped up my note for him between ‘Go to Draffens!’ and ‘Joan’s birthday!’ and discreetly pocketed the one that said ‘Mark Honours essays!’

Seeing Martha had been a blow as I had been hoping to avoid her two o’clock creative writing tutorial, but now that she’d seen me I supposed I was going to have to put in an appearance in her class. I looked up and was startled to see Watson Grant lowering in the doorway.

‘Goodness, what happened to you?’ I said to him, for his head was bandaged up and he was sporting a black eye that made him look more manly than he really was.

‘Mugged,’ he said miserably. ‘I was concussed, I’m lucky I’m not dead.’