Emotionally Weird(9)

Olivia chewed a strand of her long blond hair and looked thoughtful, although it seemed unlikely that she was thinking about anything Archie was saying. Kevin, who was in painful thrall to Olivia, stared aggressively at her feet, which were about the only part of her anatomy that he could look at without blushing. Olivia tended to dress like a down-at-heel medieval princess and today she was clad in a crushed velvet jacket over a secondhand satin nightdress and a pair of knee-high red leather boots that were a fetishist’s dream.

Olivia had once mildly voiced the opinion to Archie that it was wrong to dissect books as if they were cadavers because you could never put them back together in the same way. ‘Split the lark and so on,’ she murmured, but Archie grew contemptuous and said that the next person to quote Emily Dickinson in his tutorial would be taken out to the Geddes Quadrangle and publicly flogged. (‘Harsh but fair,’ was Andrea’s judgement.)

‘ What the new fiction reminds us, ’ Archie yakked on, ‘ is that signs need only refer to imaginary constructs – that perhaps that is all they do refer to, for perhaps it’s not the job of fiction to make sense of the world . . . ’

We were a hedonistic and self-absorbed group – vague, lop-sided people, not fleshed out with definite beliefs and opinions, for whom the greatest achievement was probably getting out of bed in the morning. We had lost one of our original members – The Boy With No Name, a frail, pallid youth from Wester Ross, so called by the rest of the group because no matter how hard we might (or might not) try, none of us could ever remember his name. Of course, he didn’t help matters much by habitually introducing himself by saying, ‘Hello, I’m nobody, who are you?’

I was sure his name was something fairly ordinary – a Peter or a Paul – but I could never come up with anything more certain. It was almost as if he was under some kind of strange, existential hex, as though somebody – a tenderfoot witch, for example – had been practising from The Book of Spells (‘a guid cantrip for disappearing’). What happened, I wondered, to someone who couldn’t be named? Did they lose their identity? Did they forget who they were?

At first it had been a mere glimmering around the edges, a certain lack of definition, but before long he was almost completely erased and was no more than a breath on the air. Very occasionally, there was a certain slant of light that revealed his ectoplasmic form, like half-cooked, poached egg-whites. Perhaps if we could remember his name we could conjure him back.

‘Maybe he just got pissed off and went home to Wester Ross?’ Andrea speculated when he finally disappeared.

The Boy With No Name had been constantly working on a laboriously hand-written, heavily corrected manuscript that proved to be a far-fetched tale of alien invasion, the plot of which revolved around the imposition on Earth dwellers by aliens from the planet Tara-Zanthia (or something similarly debutante-like) of an economy based on domestic cats and dogs. It was a simple fiscal equation – the more cats and dogs you possessed the wealthier you were. Pedigree breeds became a kind of über -currency and puppy farms grew to be the backbone of the black economy.

Much of this writing fever (for it is an illness) had been precipitated by the inauguration of a degree paper in creative writing the previous year. Archie had lobbied strongly for the paper, because he thought it would give the English department the avant-garde edge that it so obviously lacked. A great many students had enthusiastically signed up for the course, not because they were necessarily interested in writing, but because the creative writing paper didn’t involve an exam. ∗

Archie, still tutoring the class in those days before the advent of Martha Sewell, dismissed the Tara-Zanthian tale as ‘pathetic shite’ and, mortified, The Boy With No Name had fled the room. He had always had some difficulty occupying all three dimensions at once, but it was from that day onwards he began to fade.

Archie, scooting around the room in his chair like the glass on a Ouija board, came to a sudden stop in front of Kevin. He looked at him vaguely as if he thought he recognized him from somewhere and then asked him an impenetrable question about Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Kevin squirmed in his chair but still couldn’t take his eyes off Olivia’s seven-league boots. He had begun to sweat in the clammy atmosphere and the concealer on his chin had taken on a strange consistency so that it looked as if his skin was melting.

Kevin was saved from Gramsci by Professor Cousins, who wandered into the room at that moment. He caught sight of Archie and seemed confused.

‘Looking for something?’ Archie asked, rather impolitely, and under his breath muttered, ‘like your brain perhaps?’ Professor Cousins appeared to be even more puzzled. ‘I don’t know how I ended up here,’ he laughed. ‘I was looking for the toilet.’