Emotionally Weird(77)

‘The street? I thought we were protesting about the war? Or is it the government?’

Olivia shrugged indifferently and then – in an exemplary non sequitur – said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ Her skin was like milk.

‘I’m sorry.’ I hesitated. ‘Or congratulations? Whichever.’

‘Yeah,’ she said ambivalently.

Roger shouted something that seemed to agitate his cohorts and Olivia said, ‘I was wondering if I could talk to you?’

‘Me?’ But at that moment Robin bounded up, wearing red corduroy dungarees and a blue and white striped long-sleeved T-shirt, as if he was about to present Playschool . He had pinned a small shield-shaped badge onto one of his dungaree straps. The badge said ‘School Prefect’.

‘It’s an ironic comment on the nature of power,’ he said when I asked him if he actually had been a school prefect.

‘Catch you later,’ Olivia said to me and disappeared into the throng.

‘This is real,’ Robin exclaimed heatedly; ‘this is important stuff.’

‘I didn’t know Buddhists were into politics,’ I said.

‘Buddhists?’

‘You were a Buddhist yesterday,’ I pointed out to him.

‘Yeah, well maybe I’m a Maoist today. You know nothing,’ he added. Which was true.

I spotted Shug and Bob strolling through the mêlée of bodies.

‘Anarchy rules,’ Shug said laconically. Bob had a brown paper poke in his hand from which he was eating magic mushrooms as if they were lemon drops. He offered one to Robin.

‘Your sort doesn’t have any kind of commitment to anything, do you?’ Robin said, cramming a handful of psilocybin into his mouth. ‘You’re just lazy hedonists, all you care about is your own little lives.’

‘He’s been politicized,’ I explained to Bob and Shug.

‘Wow,’ Bob said, ‘did it hurt?’

Heather appeared at Robin’s side. ‘Direct action,’ she said, nipples joggling feverishly, ‘it’s the only way we can make anything change.’

‘Too right,’ Robin said.

‘You’re so full of shite,’ Shug said, rather concisely, I thought.

‘Come the revolution,’ Heather spat, ‘you and your kind will be first against the wall.’ Robespierre, Stalin, Heather – the line of descent was clear. She embarked on a polemical rant about how students were going to run the world and something I didn’t quite grasp about the local Timex and Sunblest workers taking over the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (which might be a good thing).

‘I thought this was about Vietnam? Or the miners?’ I puzzled.

Robin sighed at my lack of enlightenment. ‘It’s about everything .’

‘Everything? That’s a lot of stuff.’

‘You sound like your boyfriend,’ Robin said petulantly.

Bob gave me a perplexed look.

‘That’s you,’ I explained.

‘We’re having an uprising ,’ Robin said. ‘We don’t need frivolous people like you lot.’

‘Nor fifth columnists,’ Heather added, looking at me menacingly.

None of this was doing my headache any good. Added to which, my limbs had begun to ache and my tonsils felt as if someone had sandpapered them.

Bob and Shug declared they were going to ‘hang out’ and see what happened, but I fought my way through the flux and spill and out into the corridor, hoping that I wouldn’t encounter Maggie Mackenzie.

As if the very thought of her very name had conjured her up, I suddenly heard her strident tones and dodged into the female toilets.

Where I found Terri. She was sitting on the ledge in front of the mirrors in the company of a surprise new dog. Silky-sleek and very elegant, it was clearly a pedigree of some kind and was an infinitely more sophisticated representative of dogdom than the elusive yellow dog Chick had run over. The new dog was sharing a packet of dog chocolate drops with Terri – one for the dog, one for Terri, and so on. The dog took the chocolate drops from Terri’s upturned palm like a fastidious horse.

‘Meet Hank,’ Terri said proudly, as if she’d just given birth. ‘I found him,’ she said, rubbing the dog’s wet nose with her own slightly dryer one. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ The dog regarded me, rather mournfully, with a pair of beautiful sea-green eyes. A horrible thought occurred to me. ‘What breed do you call that?’ I asked her.

‘Jesus, you’re ignorant – it’s a Weimaraner, of course.’

‘I had a feeling it might be.’ Somehow I couldn’t quite bring myself to spoil her new-found happiness by telling her about Hank’s suspect provenance, for who else could this be if not Buddy? Terri had tied a piece of clothes-line around the dog’s neck and now stood up and gave it a gentle tug. ‘We’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘We need to get stuff.’