~ You could give it some plot, Nora says. God knows you need some. Something could happen.
‘Like?’
~ A plane could fall out of the sky, a woman could walk out of the water, a bomb could go off.
‘I’m not writing that kind of book.’
~ You could.
‘Right, I’m off,’ Philippa said, digging her bicycle out from the midden of junk which occupied the McCues’ hall. ‘I’ve got a second-year tutorial on the existence of God. Who’s coming down the road with me, maybe to the bus station?’ She looked hopefully at Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth.
‘Nae me,’ Mrs McCue said, switching on the vacuum cleaner to prevent any further discussion.
‘I’ll just give the kitchen a wee going round,’ Mrs Macbeth said, reaching for the Ajax.
‘Careful what you read,’ I advised her, retreating down the hallway as Mrs McCue tried to hoover me up.
Philippa scooted slowly down the Perth Road, one foot on her bike pedal and one on the pavement, while Maisie, Lucy Lake and I trotted smartly to keep up with her.
A swarm of people were buzzing around outside the Tower, most of them looking rather aimless. Someone had made a placard which they were waving aloft like a centurion and on which was written END AMERICAN IMPERIALISM NOW! although it seemed unlikely that this was something within the remit of the university senate.
We paused for the parting of our ways opposite this scene, outside the undertakers.
‘If only they’d bring the same enthusiasm to philosophical logic,’ Philippa said, bending down absently to allow Maisie to plant a goodbye kiss on her cheek. ‘They’re late,’ Philippa said fondly as we watched Maisie and Lucy Lake meander along Park Place back to school.
At the back of the Tower, where there was usually a constant ebb and flow of students, a logjam of bodies had built up. Some students were trying to get into the building so they could attend tutorials and lectures, while other students were intent on preventing them. I could see Heather wielding a placard which read SAY NO TO FASCISM!
A burly rugby player, with whom Andrea had once spent a hectic night, shouldered his way through the narrow passage that linked the Students’ union to the Tower and amid much scuffling and cries of ‘Scab!’ managed to gain access to the building and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, held open a passage for others.
‘Well, goodbye,’ Philippa said, giving me an encouraging pat on the back that nearly knocked me over. She mounted the bike and wobbled precariously for several yards before attaining a kind of equilibrium along Small’s Wynd and disappearing.
I hurried along the Red Sea passage before the waters closed over it again.
‘Thanks,’ I said hastily to the rugby player, just as Heather jumped on his back with a kind of Sioux warrior scream and started biting his ear.
‘The only way a woman can gain the respect or even the attention of the male protagonist is when she proves herself to be possessed of an absolute, childlike innocence . . .’ Maggie Mackenzie was striding up and down at the front of the lecture theatre like a restless zoo animal, her hair already living a life of its own. ‘. . . a regression which, as in the case of Clarissa, for example, takes the extreme form of death . . .’
‘What’s she talking about?’ Andrea whispered to me. I shrugged incomprehension. I’d been under the misapprehension that Maggie Mackenzie was going to be lecturing on Middlemarch , otherwise I would never have come.
‘I thought she was going to be talking about Middlemarch ,’ Andrea hissed.
‘Maybe she is talking about it and we just can’t tell.’
Andrea was looking very prim in a Laura Ashley fantasy milkmaid ensemble that Marie Antoinette would have coveted. You couldn’t tell that she had been thrashing around in paroxysms of lust just a few hours previously. (‘Again?’ an amazed Bob said as we tried to sleep between our purple passion-free sheets.)
‘How is death a regression?’ Kevin whispered in my other ear. ‘I don’t understand.’ I was the meat in a Kevin and Andrea sandwich in the back row of the lecture theatre, where assorted loafers usually slept out the hour.
‘I don’t know.’
I reached in my pocket for a tissue. I definitely had a cold coming on, if not worse, but instead of a tissue I again found a crumpled-up piece of paper, which after some puzzling I recognized as yet another stray page of The Expanding Prism of J . How were they getting there? Was someone putting them in my pocket? Or maybe they were sticky, like flypaper.
J, I noticed, was still as paranoid as ever and seemed to have become entangled with some kind of angry mythical beast (a common enough occurrence, it was beginning to seem) – Snorting, snorting, and dire snuffling of something ponderous and male, the beast of his imagination made manifest in muscle and sinew and arching frame, scaled like the sinful snake, the blood-lust of ages in the great thrust of the –