Emotionally Weird (16 page)

I decided that, rather than speak to him, I would leave him a letter, beseeching leniency, and plead a dying grandmother in mitigation. Is my grandmother dead? Or grandmothers in the plural, for surely there must have been two of them unless autogenesis runs in the family?

‘And your grandmothers, what about them?’

~ Very dead, and I only had one.

I told Professor Cousins that I’d come to write a note to him and he gestured wildly in the direction of his desk and said, ‘On you go, my dear, on you go then.’ It seemed the easiest thing to do somehow, so I slipped behind his desk and got out a pad of paper and started writing.

Professor Cousins’ desk was very untidy, scattered with little bits of paper on which he had scrawled messages to himself in his spiky italic hand – ‘Buy fish!’ ‘Find glove!’ ‘Send letter!’

‘
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
,’ he exclaimed suddenly, just as Martha Sewell passed his open door. She gave him an unreadable look. Professor Cousins waved to her. ‘That’s what I’m supposed to be teaching, isn’t it?’ he said to me.

‘Yes.’

He sighed, looking very downcast.

‘I’m not in the lecture theatre either,’ I said in a feeble effort to comfort him. He made a helpless gesture and returned to the filing-cabinet, muttering something to himself on the lines of ‘Mummery flummery, mimsy whimsy, blah, blah, blah,’ before wandering out into the corridor, bleating Joan’s name in the ridiculous helpless tone he adopted in the belief that it endeared him to Joan, when in fact it drove her up the wall. When he’d gone I propped up my note for him between ‘Go to Draffens!’ and ‘Joan’s birthday!’ and discreetly pocketed the one that said ‘Mark Honours essays!’

Seeing Martha had been a blow as I had been hoping to avoid her two o’clock creative writing tutorial, but now that she’d seen me I supposed I was going to have to put in an appearance in her class. I looked up and was startled to see Watson Grant lowering in the doorway.

‘Goodness, what happened to you?’ I said to him, for his head was bandaged up and he was sporting a black eye that made him look more manly than he really was.

‘Mugged,’ he said miserably. ‘I was concussed, I’m lucky I’m not dead.’

Professor Cousins came back at that moment, bearing aloft a cup of Joan-made tea. ‘Good God, man,’ he cried when he saw Grant Watson, ‘what on earth happened to you?’ When Watson Grant explained, Professor Cousins said, ‘Laid low by some anonymous stranger in the dark, eh?’ He proffered a Nuttall’s Minto but Grant Watson declined. ‘Concussion,’ Professor Cousins reminisced dreamily, ‘I was concussed once – during the war, or
a
war, certainly. Unconscious for the best part of an hour. When I came round I couldn’t remember anything, had no idea who I was. I rather liked it, looking back,’ he sighed regretfully; ‘a
tabula rasa
, a blank sheet of paper. A fresh start.’

‘And do you know who you are now?’ Watson Grant asked him with a little more asperity than usual. Professor Cousins looked thoughtful. ‘Well, I know who I
think
I am.’

Me, I am Euphemia Stuart-Murray. I am the last of my line. My mother is not my mother.

‘Did you steal me? Did you find me?’

~ It wasn’t quite like that.

‘Well what is it like, for heaven’s sake?’ My mother stares into the empty hearth. Not my actual, factual mother, of course, for she – apparently – is dead. It turns out that I have been wrong all along – I am not a semi-orphan, I am a complete orphan, whole and entire. I belong to no-one.

‘I’ve been to a philosophy tutorial,’ Bob said, the unfamiliar word sitting uncomfortably on his tongue. Bob had no idea how he’d ended up taking five of his eight degree papers in philosophy and presumed it must be due to an administrative error somewhere. And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords. In Bob’s ideal world, Bob’s girl would be, not me, but Lieutenant Uhura or Honeybunch Kaminski. Or – better still – Shug.

Bob frowned at a photocopied sheet he must have been given in the tutorial and started catechizing me. ‘Have you ever heard of Secondary Rules of Inference?’

‘No.’

‘The Law of the Excluded Middle?’

‘Sounds like something from Gilbert and Sullivan.’

‘Is that a no?’

‘Yes.’

He looked at me doubtfully. ‘Monadic predicates?’

‘No.’

‘Hypothetical Syllogisms?’

‘Not really.’

‘Not really?’ Bob said. ‘What kind of an answer is that?’

‘OK – no, then.’

‘The Law of Identity?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Yes or no?’

‘No,’ I said irritably, ‘this is boring.’

‘You’re telling me. Reductio ad Absurdum?’

‘Endlessly.’

Bob waved a sheaf of past exam papers in my face and said, ‘This stuff’s unbelievable. Listen.’ (‘Stuff’ was Bob’s all-purpose word for everything.) He proceeded to read a question, in a ponderous tone, from the exam paper –

(a) Cupar is north of Edinburgh.

(b) Dundee is north of Edinburgh.

(c) Cupar is not north of Dundee.

(d) Cupar is between Edinburgh and Dundee.

(e) There are places between Edinburgh and Dundee.

(f) If one place is south of a second place, then the second is north of the first.

(g) If one place is between two others, and is north of the first, it is south of the second.

(‘Nxy’ is ‘x is north of y’; ‘sxy’ is ‘x is south of y’; ‘bxyz’ is ‘x is between y and z’; ‘c’ is Cupar’; ‘d’ is ‘Dundee’; ‘e’ is ‘Edinburgh’; universe of discourse: places). Show by formal derivation that (a), (d), (f) and (g) together imply (b). You may need to supply a further premise expressing one of the properties of ‘is north of’ referred to above.)

Heather had recently declared that separatism was the way forward for women and the logical conclusion of this, she explained, was that we must all become lesbians. Heather was having some trouble finding anyone willing to take her up on this theory, let alone the praxis, although Philippa had volunteered (‘Well, I’m willing to give it a go,’) as if we were talking about playing a new rule in lacrosse.

Heather glared at me and then continued zealously, ‘The subordination and oppression of women within capitalism is the real issue. We all know that male hegemony leads to the oppression and subjugation of women.’ Kara nodded in vigorous agreement, without taking her eyes off the piece of petit-point she was absorbed in stitching.

‘You were asleep.’

Olivia smelt of Miss Dior while Sheila was wearing babyscent, which is a perfume made from Milton fluid, curds and vomit. The newest little Lake was outside in the corridor in a handed-down Silver Cross pram built like a tank.

‘Engels says that the emancipation of women remains impossible as long as women are excluded from socially productive work . . .’ This was just like being in one of Archie’s tutorials, except I could tell Heather to shut up when she got too overbearing.

‘So you don’t think being a housewife is socially productive work?’ Sheila snapped at Heather. Proteus turned his head and gave her a surprised look.

‘Well, Sheila,’ Heather said carefully, ‘in a society defined by the white, western, ruling-class male—’

‘Exactly,’ Kara said. Philippa barged into the room at that moment, lugging a mountain of student essays and a bag of hamster bedding and apologizing loudly for her lateness. ‘I was doing the Cartesian Circle with first-years,’ she said, making it sound like an exotic eastern European folk dance or a forgotten play by Brecht.

‘We were talking about the sexual imperialism of housework,’ Heather said.

‘
You
were,’ Sheila said tartly.

In my opinion, these meetings would have been much improved by the presence of a few men. Seeing Philippa reminded me of Ferdinand – I wondered if he was awake by now and if I could find the time to visit the McCue house today and come upon him as if by chance.

I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather’s nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you round the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately.

‘Some of us have to stay home and rear the children,’ Sheila spat at Heather. ‘If it was left up to you, the human race would die out.’

‘It won’t be long before men are relegated to a biological footnote anyway,’ Philippa said breezily and then, apropos of nothing, ‘We’re having a party tonight, by the way, everyone’s welcome.’ In my experience, a party is simply an invitation to disaster but everyone in the room nodded and murmured enthusiastically. Everyone except Sheila who reared up like a cobra in front of Heather and said, ‘You think that screwing anyone that takes your fancy is a gender equality issue.’

‘Well, Sheila,’ Heather said querulously, ‘if you want to be the private property of some man, that’s up to you.’

‘Better to be private property than to be a public whore,’ Sheila hissed triumphantly. Heather suddenly grabbed a chair and prodded it at Sheila like a lion tamer (this is how accidents happen) and screamed, ‘At least I’ve worked out how to use birth control.’

I decided discretion was the better part of valour and made my apologies: ‘I’ve got an essay to do.’ Olivia followed me out, handing Proteus back to Kara who gestured vaguely at the Moses basket at her feet. Olivia replaced him in the basket and pushed it under Kara’s chair as far out of harm’s way as it would go.

The last thing I heard as she closed the door was a high-pitched wail as if someone had jabbed a baby with a pin.

‘I don’t know why people bring children into the world,’ Olivia said. ‘They don’t seem to love them and the world’s so awful anyway.’

‘Have you got an essay on George Eliot, Olivia?’ I asked (rather callously, I can see now).

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t choose that one. I’ve got a Charlotte Brontë if that’s any good to you?’ She was going to say something else but then she started to look uncomfortable and fled towards the toilets. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

I followed her and held her lovely blond hair out of the way for her.

‘Thank you,’ she said politely.

‘Do you want that coffee now?’ I asked, but she shook her head and said she was going home. Olivia lived in a civilized flat on the Perth Road that she shared with three other girls. All four of them knew how to cook and use a sewing-machine and they held ‘dinner parties’ and shared Immac and Stergene and did each other’s hair and cleaned up each other’s vomit when necessary. Olivia had a pleasant room painted dark green, full of nice things like oil-lamps and healthy plants and old embroidered linen from Dens Road market. Olivia sat in her pleasant room and listened to Bach and Pachelbel and worked hard, waiting for Roger Lake to squeeze her into his timetable.