Emotionally Weird Read online

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  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  These autistically boyish pursuits had now been replaced by writing – the true solipsistic disease.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…’

  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 uber-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.’

  ‘You found it,’ Terri murmured, without apparently opening her mouth, or even waking up.

  Professor Cousins was English – an affable, rather eccentric person who had recently taken his first tottering steps into dotage. Sometimes Professor Cousins was lucid, sometimes he wasn’t, and, as with anyone in the department, it wasn’t always easy to distinguish between the two states. The university’s strict laws of tenure dictated that he had to be dead at least three months before he could be removed from behind his desk. The crown may still have been perched precariously on the incumbent cranium of Professor Cousins, but the various faculty members were already deep in the throes of a momentous power struggle over the imminent possession of it. The sixties’ breeze-block walls echoed with machination and intrigue, plot and counterplot, as pretenders and contenders jostled for position.

  Unnatural selection had already taken care of the main challenger for the post. The members of the English department were a notoriously accident-prone lot and the favourite – a statesmanlike Canadian called Christopher Pike – had eliminated himself by mysteriously falling down a flight of stairs in the Tower. Now that he was strung up in complex traction on the men’s orthopaedic ward of the DRI, the English department had witnessed a sharp escalation in hostilities between Archie and his two main rivals – Dr Dick and Maggie Mackenzie.

  ‘Well,’ Professor Cousins said, scratching his nose and hitching up his spectacles, ‘well, well.’ His almost bald head was covered in age spots; only a pale fringe of hair remained, like a friar’s tonsure or a ghostly atoll. He reminded me of an old animal – a sagging carthorse or an arthritic Great Dane, and I had an impulse to reach out and stroke his bald freckled pate and search in my pocket for an apple or a dog biscuit.

  Suddenly, spying the empty chair next to me, he teetered over and sat down, squeezing his bag of bones behind the little wooden table from where he smiled benignly at us, raising his hand in a papal kind of gesture. ‘Do go on,’ he said amiably to Archie. ‘I’ll be out of the way here.’

  Archie, after visibly struggling over how to deal with this bewildering behaviour, finally seemed to decide to simply ignore it and set off again. ‘By asserting itself as a piece of fiction, the non-mimetic novel is in a position to negate both Sontag’s vision of an aesthetics of silence and John Barth’s prescription for formal regeneration. What do you think? Someone?’

  ‘Well, it’s got me flummoxed, Archie,’ Professor Cousins laughed. Archie glared at him. Professor Cousins was an old-fashioned Shakespearean to trade and somewhat baffled by Archie’s approach to literature. As we all were.

  The new question was batted silently around the room, a room that was growing increasingly hot and airless. We all found different ways of distracting ourselves – I looked out of the third-floor window as if I’d just seen something interesting (which I had actually, but I’ll come to that later) while Kevin stared at Olivia’s feet and made little goldfish moues of distress with his fat blown-rose mouth and Olivia herself inspected her fingernails, one by one, very carefully. At first I thought Andrea was incanting a spell to ward off Archie but then I realized she was quietly humming a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, which probably had much the same effect. Terri, meanwhile, as enigmatic as an egg, maintained an eerie silence, apparently occupying some mental space denied to the rest of us.

  The door opened and Shug strolled into the room, carrying a purple velvet shoulder-bag embroidered with tiny mirrors and eclectically dressed in a pair of jeans which were composed almost entirely of patches, a black and white Palestinian shawl round his neck and an Afghan coat. Shug – who was our vertical neighbour in Paton’s Lane – claimed to have bought this coat, which was considerably superior to the dirty, matted fleeces possessed by most students, in the ‘Amir Kabir’ in downtown Tehran.

  Shug, lithe and lanky amongst a stunted population, liked to think he was the epitome of cool. He was one of the few native Dundonians at a university awash with English drop-outs. The first time I encountered Shug he was walking along the Nethergate, with Bob bob bobbing along beside him, holding a haddock in his hand like a lollipop – ‘Arbroath Smokie,’ he explained in his own kippered voice. I thought he was talking about some kind of hashish – although many people, of course, consider it to be a kind of red herring.

  He sat in his usual place – on the floor with his back against the wall, facing Archie. Archie looked at his watch and said, ‘Why bother, Mr Scobie?’ and Shug raised an eyebrow and said gruffly, ‘You tell me, Archie.’ An enigmatic sort of an encounter but nonetheless containing the emotional charge of two rutting stags clacking antlers.

  ‘You never know, you might learn something,’ Professor Cousins said, smiling encouragingly at Shug and then, to no-one in particular, ‘Dr McCue knows all kinds of things that no-one else does.’

  Shug was older than everyone else in the tutorial group. He had already been thrown out of Duncan of Jordanstone Art College (something that was previously thought to be impossible) and had worked on several real jobs in between times – as a road mender, a bus conductor, even in a chicken factory (‘Where the chickens are made,’ Terri told Bob who believed her for all of a minute). Shug had also ‘taken off’ to India and all points east to ‘find himself’, not that I could imagine Shug being particularly lost to begin with. If only Bob would go away and find himself. What would he find? Essence of Bob, perhaps.

  Andrea came over all moon and whimsy at the sight of Shug. (A girl in love is a frightening sight.) Since leaving behind the decorous ways of the Church of Scotland, Andrea had, like many before her, developed a crush on Shug and seemed to be under the delusion that she was the woman for whom he would change his ways. If she was hoping to tidy him up and settle him down she was going to be sorely disappointed.

  I myself had once had an unexpected, but not unwelcome, burst of sexual activity with Shug, down in the carrels in the basement of the library, next to the periodicals section. We had got as far as some enthusiastic kissing when I was shaken out of my Shug-induced reverie by his voice saying ruefully, ‘You know I cannae shag you, hen, Bob’s ma pal.’ Still, it was an experience I remembered fondly every time I went in search of the Shakespeare Quarterly or Atlantic Monthly.

  ‘With reference to Proust,’ Archie said, pressing on heroically, ‘Walter Benjamin reminds us that the Latin word textum means web; he further suggests…’

  The room sank into a state of settled ennui. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, I felt as if I was suffocating in a warm fug of words. I tried to stay awake because it was important to keep in Archie’s good books as I was several weeks late handing in my dissertation to him. My dissertation (Henry James – Man or Maze?) was a degree paper and was supposed to be twenty thousand words long. So far I had fifty-one of them – A great part of the struggle for James is caused by his desire both to master his subject matter through a rigorous process of fictionalization, and at the same time offer the appearance of reality. The author must never be apparent because his intrusion into the text destroys the carefully wrought—

&
nbsp; The hum of Archie’s words carried on in the background of my brain but it could no longer make any sense of them ‘… by enregistering speech, blah, inscription has its essential object, blah, and indeed, takes this fatal risk, blah, blah, the emancipation of meaning … as concerns any actual field of perception, blah, from the natural disposition of a contingent situation, blah, blah, blah…’

  I tried to keep myself awake by thinking about Bob. More specifically, by thinking about leaving Bob. It was more than three years now since I had woken up that first morning in a tangle of his toast-filled sheets. I had been puzzled as to how to proceed. Bob’s general passivity and iguana-like demeanour didn’t give me any clues, or even encouragement. He grunted when I asked him if he wanted me to stay and grunted when I asked him if he wanted me to go. In the end, I decided to compromise and go, but come back later. I slipped out from beneath his sheets, dyed a streaky purple, wincing quietly at the ache in my plaster-of-Paris wrist, and went breakfast-less back to women-only Chalmers Hall and fell asleep in my cell-like single bed.

  When I returned at six o’clock, Bob was exactly where I had left him – the bicycling Bob had given me a misleading impression of activity, Bob was merely borrowing the bike from someone else so he could stuff the saddlebags with home-grown grass and transport them across town.

  I shrugged my clothes off and got back between the sheets. Bob rolled over, opened his eyes and said, ‘Wow – who are you?’

  For reasons which I didn’t quite understand, my first night with Bob had been enough to leave me strangely attached to him. Later, I wondered if I had lost free will, as if in some strange way I’d merged with Bob’s own (limited) persona. (‘Like a mind-meld?’ Bob mused, quite animated for once by this idea.)

  After the bicycle incident, I had moved in stealthily, book by book, shoe by shoe, so that by the time he noticed that I didn’t go home any more, he had got used to the idea of me and I was no longer a surprise when he woke up. I wondered if I could move out the same way. Remove myself bit by bit until there was nothing left to dismember and only the more intangible and enigmatic components remained (the smile, for example, and even that would fade eventually). Finally, nothing would be left but a space where I used to be. How much kinder that would be than walking out the door suddenly and all in one piece. Or dying abruptly.