Madame Astarti did not even have to glance in the barman’s direction – a melancholic man called Les (or Les Miserables, as the locals called him behind his back) – for him to put out a glass and start filling it with a large measure of gin and a token splash of tonic.
‘I,’ Brian said cheerfully, ‘have been to hell and back.’
‘Don’t exaggerate, you’ve been shopping in Scarborough with Sandra,’ Madame Astarti said, heaving herself onto a bar stool next to Brian. ‘Where is she anyway?’
‘On her way,’ Brian said, plunging his face as far as he could into his glass and inhaling beer fumes. A little spasm of pain crossed his face and he said, ‘Left my ruddy arch supports out.’ Madame Astarti commiserated with him. ‘Ah, Rita,’ Brian said, ‘why didn’t I marry you instead?’
‘Because I wouldn’t have you,’ Madame Astarti said and gave him a sharp rap on his knuckles with her–
‘If Alice comes,’ Bob said earnestly to me, ‘and either Bernard or Charles comes, Dotty will show up. Bernard and Edward will either both come, or both stay away, and Alice will put in an appearance if and only if Charles and Edward are both going to be there. So Dotty won’t be there if Alice isn’t.’
‘Bob, what are you talking about?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he said, ‘given the premises of the above –
b) In what circumstance will Alice come?
c) Whose absence will be sufficient to ensure the absence of Bernard?
d) Is it possible for Bernard to come without either Alice or Edward coming?’
I was asleep by then, of course.
‘What is it exactly you don’t understand, my darling?’ Brian asked Sandra, ‘the word “white”, the word “slave” or the word “trade”?’
Sandra’s neck and cleavage had grown scrawny over the years so that parts of her now resembled a chicken. She crossed one artificially tanned leg over the other and waved a gold strappy-sandalled foot around. ‘Coming to see the show this season, Rita?’
‘As if I would miss it,’ Madame Astarti replied. Brian and Sandra weren’t just Brian and Sandra, they were also ‘The Great Pandini and his Lovely Assistant, Sabrina’ – staple fodder for summer shows and holiday-camp seasons across the land. Every evening, Brian abandoned his British Home Stores pullover and polyester slacks and was transformed into a vampirish figure courtesy of a top-hat and a swirling black cape lined with scarlet satin ‘from Remnant Kings at seventy-five pence a metre – that’s fifteen shillings a yard to you and me,’ Sandra said to Madame Astarti. Sandra herself donned fishnets and black satin and prepared herself for being sawn in half and vanished.
‘Dickie Henderson,’ Sandra said, ‘now there was a great performer.’
‘Is he dead?’ Brian asked.
‘Could be,’ Madame Astarti said gloomily. The heat and the noise in The Crab and Bucket were beginning to make her feel quite ill.
‘Another one?’ Brian asked cheerfully, more to himself than anyone else.
‘You’ve had too much already,’ Sandra said. ‘I’ll have a port and lemon, you’ll have a half, no more. Rita?’
‘Don’t mind if I do.’
‘Fag?’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Did you hear about that woman?’ Sandra asked, her face looming in and out of focus, ‘the one in the sea. Dreadful thing.’
‘Do they know who she is yet?’ Brian asked, downing his half and then staring hopefully into the bottom of the glass as if he was expecting it to come back.
‘
Was
, Brian, was,’ Sandra corrected him. ‘She
is
no more. Her name, I believe, was Anne-Marie Devine.’
‘Was what?’ Madame Astarti said, spilling her drink all over herself.
‘Anne-Marie Devine,’ Sandra repeated, ‘a lady of the night. Rita, are you all right?’
‘A lady of the night?’ Brian said.
Sandra took another cigarette out of the packet. ‘Give us a light,’ she said to Brian.
Oh no, Madame Astarti thought, they were beginning to –
‘Poor cow,’ Brian said. ‘I wonder what she looked like?’
‘About my height,’ Sandra said, ‘not very bright.’
‘I bet she’s a sight.’
‘Give you a fright.’
Madame Astarti moaned, the room was beginning to spin, she must get out of this nightmare.
I caught sight of Olivia, standing aside from the crowd. She looked oddly disengaged as if she had been hypnotized. Someone waved a placard behind Roger Lake’s head that declared firmly INSURRECTION IS AN ART AND LIKE ALL ARTS IT HAS LAWS which I thought had probably been dreamt up by Heather, but Olivia said, ‘No, Trotsky, actually.’
‘What’s going on?’ I asked her.
‘I think Roger’s advocating overthrowing the establishment,’ she said, looking rather weary, ‘and setting up a “University of the Street” or something in its place.’
‘The street? I thought we were protesting about the war? Or is it the government?’
Olivia shrugged indifferently and then – in an exemplary
non sequitur
– said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ Her skin was like milk.
‘I’m sorry.’ I hesitated. ‘Or congratulations? Whichever.’
‘Yeah,’ she said ambivalently.
Roger shouted something that seemed to agitate his cohorts and Olivia said, ‘I was wondering if I could talk to you?’
‘Me?’ But at that moment Robin bounded up, wearing red corduroy dungarees and a blue and white striped long-sleeved T-shirt, as if he was about to present
Playschool
. He had pinned a small shield-shaped badge onto one of his dungaree straps. The badge said ‘School Prefect’.
‘It’s an ironic comment on the nature of power,’ he said when I asked him if he actually had been a school prefect.
‘Catch you later,’ Olivia said to me and disappeared into the throng.
‘This is real,’ Robin exclaimed heatedly; ‘this is important stuff.’
‘I didn’t know Buddhists were into politics,’ I said.
‘Buddhists?’
‘You were a Buddhist yesterday,’ I pointed out to him.
‘Yeah, well maybe I’m a Maoist today. You know nothing,’ he added. Which was true.
I spotted Shug and Bob strolling through the mêlée of bodies.
‘Anarchy rules,’ Shug said laconically. Bob had a brown paper poke in his hand from which he was eating magic mushrooms as if they were lemon drops. He offered one to Robin.
‘Your sort doesn’t have any kind of commitment to anything, do you?’ Robin said, cramming a handful of psilocybin into his mouth. ‘You’re just lazy hedonists, all you care about is your own little lives.’
‘He’s been politicized,’ I explained to Bob and Shug.
‘Wow,’ Bob said, ‘did it hurt?’
Heather appeared at Robin’s side. ‘Direct action,’ she said, nipples joggling feverishly, ‘it’s the only way we can make anything change.’
‘Too right,’ Robin said.
‘You’re so full of shite,’ Shug said, rather concisely, I thought.
‘Come the revolution,’ Heather spat, ‘you and your kind will be first against the wall.’ Robespierre, Stalin, Heather – the line of descent was clear. She embarked on a polemical rant about how students were going to run the world and something I didn’t quite grasp about the local Timex and Sunblest workers taking over the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (which might be a good thing).
‘I thought this was about Vietnam? Or the miners?’ I puzzled.
Robin sighed at my lack of enlightenment. ‘It’s about
everything
.’
‘Everything? That’s a lot of stuff.’
‘You sound like your boyfriend,’ Robin said petulantly.
Bob gave me a perplexed look.
‘That’s you,’ I explained.
‘We’re having an
uprising
,’ Robin said. ‘We don’t need frivolous people like you lot.’
‘Nor fifth columnists,’ Heather added, looking at me menacingly.
None of this was doing my headache any good. Added to which, my limbs had begun to ache and my tonsils felt as if someone had sandpapered them.
Bob and Shug declared they were going to ‘hang out’ and see what happened, but I fought my way through the flux and spill and out into the corridor, hoping that I wouldn’t encounter Maggie Mackenzie.
As if the very thought of her very name had conjured her up, I suddenly heard her strident tones and dodged into the female toilets.
Where I found Terri. She was sitting on the ledge in front of the mirrors in the company of a surprise new dog. Silky-sleek and very elegant, it was clearly a pedigree of some kind and was an infinitely more sophisticated representative of dogdom than the elusive yellow dog Chick had run over. The new dog was sharing a packet of dog chocolate drops with Terri – one for the dog, one for Terri, and so on. The dog took the chocolate drops from Terri’s upturned palm like a fastidious horse.
‘Meet Hank,’ Terri said proudly, as if she’d just given birth. ‘I found him,’ she said, rubbing the dog’s wet nose with her own slightly dryer one. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ The dog regarded me, rather mournfully, with a pair of beautiful sea-green eyes. A horrible thought occurred to me. ‘What breed do you call that?’ I asked her.
‘Jesus, you’re ignorant – it’s a Weimaraner, of course.’
‘I had a feeling it might be.’ Somehow I couldn’t quite bring myself to spoil her new-found happiness by telling her about Hank’s suspect provenance, for who else could this be if not Buddy? Terri had tied a piece of clothes-line around the dog’s neck and now stood up and gave it a gentle tug. ‘We’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘We need to get stuff.’
‘Stuff?’
‘Yeah – dog stuff.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘No, it’s OK.’ Terri jumped down from the ledge, the dog following her like a shadow, and set off purposefully, an adverb I had never seen her utilize before. She’d even removed her Ray-Bans. Perhaps there was still an all-American girl lurking under that Lamian carapace, a cheerful, resourceful college kid (a babysitting, prom-queen type). One who didn’t seem to need me any more.
Could I really be replaced so easily, I wondered as I left the toilets and wandered out into the corridor. And by a dog at that? Perhaps that was the answer to my problem with Bob – I could get him a dog as a substitute for me. And a dog would surely treat him better than I did. It might not cook, but it wouldn’t judge.
I was so caught up in this idea – I’d got as far as picturing Bob in the company of a cheerful Border terrier that could do simple household tasks – that I failed to notice Maggie Mackenzie barrelling along through the Murk again and collided with her full on. I was winded but she appeared unmoved.
‘Miss Andrews,’ she said stiffly, ‘I will extend my deadline for you as you are so incompetent. You have until ten o’clock on the day after tomorrow.’
My brain felt so addled that I could barely work out what that meant.
‘If your George Eliot essay doesn’t appear at the allotted time I shall have to inform the Dean that you are no longer eligible to sit your degree.’