Emotionally Weird(8)

Although sex between staff and students was rife at the university, it was nonetheless forbidden by the Dean who took ‘a dim view’ of it. Roger Lake worried constantly that he was going to be caught in a scandalous situation and insisted that he and Olivia behave in a cloak-and-dagger fashion, exiting buildings separately and ignoring each other in public (and sometimes in private, she reported). Having an affair with Roger Lake would have provided a good training for secret agents.

Terri was trapped in the chair next to me. She was already in a state of suspended animation – NASA could have used Terri for space exploration, they could have sent her beyond the final frontier, on long journeys that lasted for decades, and she would probably have arrived as fresh as when she was launched. Although an alien civilization might get the wrong idea about us if Terri was Earth’s envoy.

‘ Derrida says, and here I quote, ’ Archie droned on, ‘“ it is when that which is written is deceased as a sign-signal that it is born as language. ” Anyone?’ The question hung invisibly in the stale air before fluttering around the room looking for somewhere to land. Kevin, reluctantly coming through the door at that moment, ducked to avoid it.

‘Good of you to join us,’ Archie said, and Kevin blushed and mumbled something indecipherable in his thick West Country accent, an accent which made everything he said sound either vaguely lewd or rather stupid. Like many of us at Dundee, in the so-called Arts and Social Sciences faculty, Kevin Riley had arrived, not through achieving good exam grades, but via the medium of the UCCA clearing-house, for, sadly, we were the students no-one else wanted.

Kevin was a plump, whey-faced boy, with a great frizz of bird’s nest hair, a kind of Englishboy’s Afro, and a pair of small penny rounders wedged on his nose. He had a rash of pimples on his chin which he’d misguidedly daubed with peachy-coloured Rimmel concealer. Kevin, shunned by the more robust members of his sex, had obviously spent a solitary childhood playing with Meccano and train sets, arranging and rearranging the postage stamps of the world and standing at the end of a draughty station platform with a flask and a small, ruled notebook.

These autistically boyish pursuits had now been replaced by writing – the true solipsistic disease. At some point in his drawn-out adolescence Kevin had created an alternative universe for himself – a lower-middle earth otherworld called Edrakonia, a fantastic kingdom from which the dragon queen Feurillia (who for some reason reminded me of Nora) had been exiled and the plot of which could probably be summed up in a sentence: ( And the Murk will fall on the land. And the Beast Griddlebart will roam the land and the dragons will flee. )

Kevin crammed his big bumble-bee body into a chair, leftover flesh spilling out as he attempted to get comfortable. To cheer himself up, he took out a crumpled paper bag of lemon bon-bons and offered them round the class. Andrea recoiled in horror, she was one of those girls who wasn’t entirely convinced that food was necessary for survival – anything more robust than a strawberry yoghurt made her anxious.

The question, which had been hovering indecisively all this time, finally made up its mind and decided to ignore Kevin, for it had spotted the slim charms of Andrea, on whom it alighted like an unwanted insect.

‘Andrea?’ Archie asked encouragingly. ‘Derrida? [Not a rhyme you’ll find in many rhyming dictionaries.] Any thoughts?’

None, apparently, for, chewing suggestively on the end of her Biro, Andrea hitched up her pioneer-woman skirt and slowly crossed her legs. Andrea had her life all plotted out – she was going to graduate, get married, buy nothing on hire purchase, rear children, have a successful career as a famous writer, retire and die. She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn’t as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses – the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle.

Archie, still spellbound by the sight of Andrea’s knees – and heaven knows what else she was covertly flaunting – seemed to have momentarily lost his train of thought. We all waited for him to re-board. It was one of those tutorial groups where no-one really had an opinion about anything, except for Archie, who had an opinion about everything. We were all relieved when he started up again and absolved us from the trachle of having to think for ourselves –

‘ . . . made by several structuralist critics that it is only at the moment that the written word in literature ceases to refer to external “objective” data, that is, to referents in the “real” world, that it can begin to exist as language within the text . . . ’