‘You couldn’t just magic up an essay for me, could you?’ I asked her.
‘Magic isn’t to be used for selfish purposes or personal gain,’ she intoned solemnly as if she was reading from a necromancer’s primer.
I still felt queasy from Martha’s tutorial. Perhaps there was a bug going around. It was extraordinarily cold in the flat, even though both bars of the electric fire were burning. The fire was giving off an unpleasant smell of molten dust and melting fuses.
‘Damart,’ Andrea said enigmatically when I queried the wisdom of wearing broderie-anglaise in this weather.
The Court of the Crimson King
was playing very loudly on the stereo and every time I tried to turn it down Bob wandered back over to it and innocently turned it up again. He was eating Marmite straight from the jar and looking perplexed.
Bob had recently begun to make incoherent attempts at study and he was surrounded now by a chaotic sea of textbooks and essays. The textbooks – Descartes’
Discourse on Method
, Woozley’s
Theory of Knowledge
, Ayer’s
Foundation of Empirical Knowledge
– were mostly stolen – Bob didn’t think that stealing books was actually a crime (‘Thought’s free, isn’t it?’) – and remained steadfastly unopened, as if he was hoping to absorb their contents by osmosis.
The guddle of essays had all been salvaged from people I’d never heard of – ‘
Could scientific advance show that we are never really free
?’ by an unlikely-sounding Wendy Darling Brandy; ‘
Is there a Cartesian Circle
?’ by someone called Gary Seven and ‘
What has Hume shown about our belief in miracles
?’ by an Audrey Baxter.
Bob frowned at a list of English essays. ‘You haven’t got an essay on George Eliot, have you?’ he asked me.
Bob’s methodology for writing essays was straightforward: he simply cut up other people’s essays and stuck them together again in a random way. Of course, we’re all plagiarists and forgers of one kind or another, if only in our minds, and Bob’s cut-up technique, although occasionally resulting in gibberish, generally passed muster with the somewhat dazed and confused members of staff.
Bob had a list of ‘Senior Honours Essays, Session 1971–72’ in his hand and read aloud in his monotone, ‘
Whenever Hume is aware of himself in any degree, he is aware of a perception, and when he is not aware of any perceptions he has no conception of himself. Discuss.
’ He poked his ear in bewilderment. ‘I mean what’s that all about when it’s at home?’
‘It’s life, Bob,’ I said, ‘but not as you know it.’ He picked up Kant’s
Impossibility of an Ontological Proof
and showed the cover to us as if it was something we might never have seen before.
‘It’s a book,’ Andrea told Bob.
‘I know,’ Bob said, shaking his head wearily. ‘
Is the self just a bundle of perceptions?
’ he read mournfully from a Philosophy past paper. ‘
If so, does anything hold the bundle together? Discuss.
’ Bob ruminated on his Marmite. ‘Who are you supposed to discuss it with? Yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are going to travel a long way,’ Andrea said to him indifferently, turning over a fan of Tarot cards, ‘meet with much failure and die a horrible death.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Bob said.
Andrea wanted to go and see a matinée of
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
(which Bob had slept the whole way through), while Shug wanted to go to the film society to see
W. R. – Mysteries of the Organism
. Robin skinned up a joint and started reading aloud from the
Dandy
. Would I spend the rest of my life with these people?
James believes that
Middlemarch
lacks an overall unity, that it is a mere string of disparate incidents which lack any true dramatic purpose . . .
The doorbell rang and Andrea let Terri in. She was in an unusual state of agitation. ‘I’ve seen him,’ she said breathlessly to me.
‘Seen who?’ I asked.
‘The dog, the yellow dog. He was following that weird girl, the medic that lives at Balniddrie.’
‘Miranda,’ Robin said.
‘Robin,’ Terri said, noticing him for the first time. She sat down next to him on the sofa and did something strange with her face. It took me a while to work out that she was trying to smile at him. He shrank away from her in fear. ‘How are you, Robin?’ Terri asked.
He stared at her like a panicked rabbit and stuttered, ‘What do you want?’
‘Well,’ she said cajolingly, ‘are you thinking of going home soon?’
‘Yeah, why?’ he said, shrinking even further away. ‘You want to come home with me?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She just wants a lift,’ I explained to him because he looked as if he was going to throw up or pass out.
‘A trip to the country?’ Shug said. ‘That would be cool.’
‘Listen to this,’ Bob said, reading aloud, ‘
Symbolize the following argument in the symbolism of Compound-Proposition Logic, and show it valid by any means (construction of a formal derivation, complete truth table, or indirect truth-table method): If I exist, I exist as a sentient being; if I exist and don’t know it, I don’t exist as a sentient being. Now if I know I exist, I’m certain of that fact and I can prove it; but, although I can prove I exist, I still feel doubtful about it. So I don’t exist. (“E”, “S”, “K”, “C”, “P”)
’
Luckily, at that moment, Bob’s brain exploded.
‘Is not necessary in this post-modern day and age,’ I tell her firmly.
As I squeezed myself reluctantly into the wreath-space at one side of Bob’s prone carcass I suddenly thought of Senga, cabined in her coffin in the Catholic church and now, presumably, locked away for ever underground. Andrea and Shug crammed themselves in opposite me so that we might have been at an Irish wake, but with no drink and a corpse that occasionally said to itself things like, ‘Can you repair the ship’s engines in time, Mr Scott?’
Driving a hearse didn’t worry him, Robin explained (although nobody had asked him to), because being a Buddhist he was phlegmatic about death, ‘Because I know I’ll come back.’
‘What as?’ Terri asked. ‘A protozoa?’
‘I think you’ll find,’ Robin said, ‘that protozoa is a plural form, it would have to be protozo
on
.’ Perhaps Robin was on such a tedious karmic journey that he would just come back as himself. I’m sure it was no coincidence that his name was almost an anagram of ‘boring’.
‘Reincarnation,’ Shug said hoarsely. ‘What goes around, comes around, eh?’ He lit up a joint that immediately filled the all-too-small space with a fug of acrid smoke. If we crashed how would the circumstances of my death ever be explained to my mother? (Or, rather, the woman who has masqueraded as my mother for the last twenty-one years.) Perhaps it would be some comfort that I had eliminated the middle-man and saved her the undertaker’s fees.
‘If you can say what it is, then that is not it,’ Robin said sententiously and apropos of nothing as far as I could see. Terri twirled her moth-eaten parasol menacingly in his direction.
‘Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other,’ a gnomic Bob contributed.
‘Pythagoras?’ Robin puzzled.
‘James T. Kirk.’
Robin manoeuvred the hearse away from the kerb and Bob shouted happily, ‘Warp speed, Mr Sulu.’ What a simple creature he was. If only my needs were as lacking in emotional complexity as Bob’s.
‘Eastern stuff,’ Robin said bobbishly, ‘it’s like so much more in touch with what’s really real. Stripped of materialism and intellectual bullshit. Look at the haiku.’ Robin thumped the steering-wheel of the hearse enthusiastically. ‘Compare that to the moribund structures of English poetry.’
‘What’s a haiku?’ Andrea asked.
‘It’s a three-line poem of five, seven and five syllables,’ Robin said, ‘so simple, so essential. The plural of haiku is haikai,’ Robin said, warming to his subject, ‘or at least that refers to a related series of haiku. The haiku was originally—’
‘The enormous dog stuck in a beautiful vase of white peonies,’ Bob said.
‘What?’ Robin gave Bob a worried look in the rear-view mirror of the hearse.
Bob lifted his shaggy head off the veneer and metal of the bier and declared, in a ponderously poetic way:
‘And meditation,’ Bob said, staring at the ceiling of the hearse, ‘that ought to be easy, it’s just thinking about nothing, isn’t it? But when you try to think about nothing . . .’ Bob lapsed into a mystified silence, aided by the Curly-Wurly he’d just found in his greatcoat pocket.
We were accelerating along the Perth Road at a speed much faster than is normally associated with exequies and therefore causing considerable consternation amongst our fellow motorists, especially when we overtook them. A sedate Wolseley sedan containing an elderly couple mounted the pavement in distress and a rogue nun along Riverside crossed herself in horror. To make matters worse, we were in convoy with another of Balniddrie’s inhabitants, a fey former Harrovian called Gilbert who was driving an old ambulance – so it seemed as though we were hurrying to the aftermath of some dreadful disaster, rather than going for a simple trip to the country – although Bob, for some reason, seemed to be under the impression that we were on a starfleet expedition to collect the element zienite.
‘God,’ he said, once the Curly-Wurly allowed him to speak again, ‘do Buddhists believe in God? And what is God anyway? I mean, who’s to say I’m not God?’
‘There are standing stones at Balniddrie, you know,’ Andrea said, ignoring this metaphysical prattle. ‘They’re supposed to be seven sisters who were dancing on top of this hill and were turned to stone by an angry wizard.’
‘Why was he angry?’ Shug asked.
‘Oh, they always are,’ she said glumly.
Considering they lived at Balniddrie, Robin and Gilbert seemed woefully lacking in any understanding of how to get there so that we crossed and re-crossed our own path several times, even finding ourselves at one point driving through the flatlands of the Carse of Gowrie (or the boundaries of the Romulan Neutral zone, depending on who you were). The occupants of the hearse were no help with navigation as it appeared that none of us had a sense of direction. Bob had once famously caught the circular bus and been trapped on it for hours and I, of course, have been lost all my life.
‘Wow,’ Bob said, peering like a curious cadaver through the window of the hearse, ‘cows.’
Andrea frowned at him and said to me, ‘He doesn’t get out much, does he?’
Robin executed a death-defying U-turn at the Errol turn-off. Not long after that it began to hail, huge mothballs of ice clattering against the windscreen. The hailstones began to accumulate, obscuring the view of the road because the windscreen wipers of the hearse had long since given up the ghost, as it were.
The purpose of two lengths of hitherto mysterious string was now revealed by Robin. One of the pieces of string came in through the driver’s window of the hearse, the other through the passenger window. Robin tugged at his piece of string and one of the windscreen wipers jerked towards him.
‘See?’ Robin said hopefully to Terri. ‘Your turn now.’ Her reply was succinct and negative.