I supposed the angry mythical beast was an allegory or a metaphor but who knows – perhaps it was real, in as much as fiction is real, which it must be because it exists, unless something can exist without being real. And even if it only exists in the form of words, words themselves must exist or we wouldn’t be able to use them and Wittgenstein himself—
‘Miss Andrews?’ Maggie Mackenzie was climbing up and down the stairs looking for bad behaviour. ‘I don’t think you can afford to daydream, do you?’
Terri sidled into the lecture theatre. She was dressed in black fingerless gloves and a disintegrating taffeta cape and looked as if she’d been recently exhumed. From the look on her face I guessed she had not saved the goat last night. She was abruptly directed by Maggie Mackenzie to sit on the front row, ‘So I can make sure you stay awake,’ obviously unaware that Terri could sleep with her eyes open. Olivia, a natural front-row student, lent Terri pen and paper (which was never used) before returning to her assiduous note-taking.
‘Roland Barthes,’ Maggie Mackenzie, ‘says—’
‘Not him again,’ Andrea sighed. A faint cry of distress went up from the heart of the student body, indicating the presence of Proteus. Kara was sitting on the far side of the lecture theatre, well away from the source of the cry. She was dressed in a rainbow-striped jumper that looked as if it had been crocheted for a gorilla by a gorilla.
‘—claims that the classical narrative is based on the male Oedipal drama . . .’
Andrea leant across me and asked, ‘Is that what Edrakonia’s based on, Kevin?’ presumably out of mischief rather than genuine curiosity.
Kevin rolled his eyes like a cow in an abattoir and said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ quite loudly, so that some people turned to stare, including Maggie Mackenzie, who tapped an impatient foot and said, in the words of teachers everywhere, ‘Do you have something you would like to share with us, Mr Riley?’ and then carried on without waiting for an answer –
‘As Althusser says, we are all “inside” ideology . . .’
‘What’s she talking about?’ Andrea muttered.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Stop asking me questions.’ I could feel the beginnings of a headache.
Janice Rand was sitting in front of us with her balding Christian friend. I had to suppress the desire to flick things at them. They occasionally passed notes to each other on tightly folded little pieces of paper.
‘Freud . . . believing that women were less powerful because they know themselves to be castrated . . .’
‘Come again?’ Andrea said, looking alarmed.
‘. . . and also possessed of a less developed superego.’
Janice and her friend were passing notes furiously to each other. I managed to read one that said. ‘What’s a superego?’ Written down, it looked very odd, like a sauce for spaghetti or a musical tempo mark – spiritoso , sforzando , superego . My headache was growing worse. I wished I had an Anadin (a rather poetic cry of pain). I was too tired to concentrate.
‘Of course,’ Kevin said, to no-one in particular, ‘research has shown that ten minutes is the absolute limit of anyone’s concentration span, so the last twenty-five minutes have been pointless.’
‘Mr Riley? Something to contribute?’ Maggie Mackenzie said harshly. Kevin slid down in his seat and tried to look as if he was deaf and dumb.
‘The passive heroine in the phallic-centred myth . . .’
I inadvertently started daydreaming about Ferdinand. I made a mental list of what I knew about him – he was kind to old ladies, he slept like the dead, he might have blue eyes (I still hadn’t caught a glimpse of them), he was a convicted criminal. I was having trouble forming a whole character from these bits and pieces.
Andrea was doodling strange magic symbols on her jotter – fylfots, Ing runes, caducei and so on. Perhaps it was homework her Forfar wizard had set her. Janice caught sight of the swastika-like fylfot and was so startled by it that she could remain mute no more and started chattering eagerly to her Christian friend about Andrea being ‘a Nazi’.
Kevin, surreptitiously eating a banana, turned to me and, nodding in Maggie’s direction, mumbled, ‘Is she actually going to talk about George Eliot, do you think?’
An exasperated Maggie Mackenzie threw the blackboard eraser in the general direction of the back of the lecture theatre. It caught Janice a glancing blow on the temple and she screamed in an outraged martyr way.
‘No, I don’t think she is.’
Janice’s scream set off Proteus, who embarked on a desperate kind of wailing as if he was about to fall over the edge of the world (well, who knows what babies think) and Kara had to make her way along a row of people like an annoying late theatregoer – ‘Sorry, excuse me, sorry’ – until she reached her infant. ‘Nappy,’ she announced to everyone.