Emotionally Weird(49)

Martha always bade us move our terminally uncomfortable chairs into a circle, as if we were in therapy or about to play one of those getting-to-know-you games – ‘My name is Effie and if I was an animal I would be a . . .’ But what would I choose to be? Not a domestic pet, surely, forever at the whim and behest of someone who thought they owned you, and certainly not a beast of the field useful only for its milk and meat and skin. Some shy creature perhaps, hidden deep in the untamed forest?

There was the usual roll-call of names – Andrea, Kevin, Robin, Kara, Janice Rand, Davina. Davina was a keen mature student from Kirkcaldy, a divorcee and one of the few grown-ups at the university. Shug didn’t do the creative writing paper, saying that his mother’s weekly Willie Low shopping-list was a more creative piece of writing than anything produced at the university. Bob did do the creative writing paper, he just didn’t know it. For weeks, Martha had stood at the front of the class at the beginning of every hour and frowned at the class list in front of her, puzzling, ‘Robert Sharpe? Does anyone know a Robert Sharpe?’ I never spoke up, I didn’t really want to admit to knowing Bob.

I was sitting next to Terri – a black wolf prowling the night. Terri’s assignment for Martha was poetry. Terri’s poems came under the collective title My Favourite Suicide and you can probably imagine the content matter. Some of them (although undoubtedly derivative) were surprisingly cheerful –

I drank the glass of

milk you left on the

bedside table. it was

sour. thank you

Martha was wearing a long cashmere plaid woven from the dull colours of infinity, that she had fixed, toga-style, with a brooch made – disturbingly – from the claw of some game bird, a grouse or a ptarmigan maybe, set with a purple amethyst.

Andrea was making a great show of sharpening her pencils and laying everything out on her little table while Kevin was staring at the space Olivia’s feet would have occupied if she had been there.

‘I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,’ Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was. How tedious this all seemed. I wasn’t sure I could sit still for a whole hour.

‘Write me a paragraph,’ Martha enunciated clearly, ‘in just ten minutes, which incorporates these three words – bracteate, trowel and vilifies .’

‘That’s four words,’ objected Robin, sitting next to me in the circle. Robin was wearing a leather trench coat that had apparently once belonged to a member of the Waffen SS .

Martha gave him a considered look. ‘Not the and,’ she said finally.

‘ Not the and ,’ Professor Cousins chuckled, ‘a strange sentence if ever there was one; it could only possibly make sense in context, couldn’t it?’ Martha made a resigned kind of noise and busied herself with the insides of her briefcase.

Professor Cousins was sitting between Kara and Davina. Davina was writing an historical thing about Shakespeare’s mother, Wordsworth’s sister or Emily Brontë’s hitherto unmentioned illegitimate daughter – I could never quite remember which. Personally, I don’t think it right to make up things about real people – although I suppose there’s an argument for saying that once you’re dead you’re not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first class honours, or both).

Martha turned back to the class and said sternly, ‘A paragraph with structure to it, not abstract free-fall. No nonsense.’

I wrote down bracteate , trowel and vilifies and then sat staring at them. I seemed to remember doing this exercise in one of the many primary schools I had attended, although with more useful words ( sand , bucket , red , or perhaps porridge , bowl , hot ). I had no idea what bracteate meant. It sounded like a kind of seaweed. I doodled helplessly.

Professor Cousins meanwhile was labouring diligently over his work, making strange exploded diagrams with spidery connecting lines. He was too far away for me to copy anything from him; the light in Martha’s room was scanty. Kara, on his other side, leant over surreptitiously to try and see what he was writing but Professor Cousins put his arm protectively around his scribblings, like a small boy. The Moses basket that contained Proteus had been shoved more or less into the middle of the circle of chairs, as if he was going to be the centrepiece of a voodoo ritual.

Kara was writing a Lawrentian kind of novella about a woman who goes back to the land to discover her emotional and sexual roots, a journey which seemed to involve unnecessarily large amounts of dung and mud and seed of all kinds, but mainly male. Strangely, the genteel Martha seemed to relate to this. At some previous point in her life she chose to suddenly ‘share’ with us, she had run a smallholding in upstate New York with her first husband, a famous playwright whom she couldn’t believe none of us had heard of. Martha said she and this first husband had found ‘the continuous juxtaposition of the cerebral and the bestial in country life very stimulating’. As she ‘shared’ she fingered the bird claw at her neck, a faraway look in her eyes.