‘I think I’m going to faint,’ Andrea murmured.
The lecture theatre disgorged its students. Kevin came trotting purposefully after Andrea and, tagging her by her milking sleeve, said breathlessly, ‘I ought to clear something up, the dragons don’t have psychological complexes, Oedipal or Electrical or any of that stupid stuff. The dragons are all female, you see.’
‘How do they breed, then?’
Kara wandered out of the lecture theatre. She smelt earthy as if she’d just been dug up. Her long lank hair was corralled in a headscarf and she was wearing black wellingtons and a cotton dirndl skirt and had a streak of mud – or worse – on her cheek. She had the musty, unappetizing scent of chicken feed and camomile flowers on her.
‘Don’t forget your baby,’ I reminded her, although you wouldn’t think you could, would you? Nor should you.
Terri caught up with me and said she was going to go and find Chick and ask him what he’d done with the yellow dog. She was followed out of the lecture theatre by Olivia, warily side-stepping Kevin with whom Andrea was still wrestling over the illogic of Edrakonia. ‘But if the dragons are immortal and Griddlebart isn’t, why don’t they just wait until he dies and then take over again?’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ Kevin said loudly as if Andrea was deaf, ‘it’s a matter of honour, not simple expediency. Honour amongst dragons is—’
‘Do you want a coffee?’ Olivia said to me. She was wearing a high-necked velvet dress that had little velvet-covered buttons that ran from throat to hem so that if you’d wanted to split her open you would have had a handy score mark to follow. She looked pale and otherworldly, like someone who usually lived in a ballad and was expecting to be accidentally locked in a kist on her wedding-day or abandon her goosefeather mattresses and run away with a band of gypsies—
‘Effie?’
‘Yeah, right, coffee—’ but we’d failed to notice the bulky advance of Maggie Mackenzie until it was too late. Terri said, ‘Got to see a man about a dog,’ and disappeared with commendable alacrity.
‘George Eliot?’ Maggie barked at me like a sergeant-major.
‘Nearly finished,’ I lied.
‘Don’t lie, Miss Andrews. Where is it?’ I gestured vaguely towards the world outside the walls of the English department, indicating that my George Eliot might have been working away in the library or playing table football in the union .
‘Come with me,’ she said peremptorily and turned on her heel and raced off towards the lift so that I had to run to keep up with her.
‘Later,’ I gasped to Olivia. In the lift itself there was barely enough room for the two of us and I tried to shrink myself into a corner to avoid having to breathe in Maggie Mackenzie’s inky scent.
I followed her into her room, where she paraded up and down her crowded bookshelves, swiftly pulling out books here and there and handing them to me, a Casebook series on Middlemarch , a Literature in Perspective on George Eliot. ‘These are not difficult books,’ she said, ‘they won’t task your brain too much.’ She made a visible effort to be encouraging. ‘You have to try, you’re wasting your life.’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said without any conviction.
‘You haven’t produced a single piece of work all term,’ she said harshly. Maggie Mackenzie was one of those people who believe that there’s nothing in the world that can’t be done with the application of a little effort. (I suppose she was right.) I glanced down and noticed that the hem of my recycled-sari skirt was loose and torn, some of the little mirrors on it hanging by a thread. I was so clearly a girl who was never going to get her homework in on time.
‘You hardly ever show your face in tutorials,’ she continued. ‘It’s all very well enjoying yourself now, but in twenty years’ time—’
A ragged and uncoordinated chant had started up outside:
‘ What do we want? ’
‘ Peace! ’
‘ When do we want it? ’
‘ Now! ’
‘It’s beginning,’ Maggie said with some satisfaction.
‘What is?’
‘The end.’
~ Not yet, surely? Nora says. Nothing’s happened yet.
‘Well, I must get this essay finished,’ I said, making a surreptitious move to leave the room, and Maggie Mackenzie startled me by suddenly shouting, ‘For God’s sake, pull yourself together, girl – before it’s too late! What do you think’s going to happen to you?’
I expected I was going to grow old and die, or, if I was unlucky, just die, but I didn’t say that to her because it wasn’t what she wanted to hear and instead I mumbled something inarticulate and she grabbed the nearest missile she could lay her hands on – a copy of Cranford , although I don’t think the choice of book was significant – and threw it across the room at me. Her aim was, as usual, poor, the throw executed more in exasperation than aggression, and Cranford hit the back wall of her room, dislodging a rather frightening Frida Kahlo print. If it had been Philippa McCue throwing she would have hit me smack between the eyes and then caught the rebound off Frida.