Emotionally Weird (7 page)

The Union was divided into two areas, a kind of self-service café and a bar, in which currently a group of rugby players, almost certainly an unholy alliance of medical and engineering students, were having a noisy lunchtime pint or ten. They were behaving as though it was Friday night rather than Monday lunchtime, downing pints of heavy in one draught and singing simplistic songs about bizarre sexual acts that they had almost certainly never indulged in and probably didn’t even understand.

I found Terri cornered at a table, smoking intensely and trying to ignore Robin, who was breaching the perimeter fence of her personal space. Terri’s personal space occupied an area roughly the size of Mull and therefore required vigorous defences.

Robin looked like Roy Wood from Wizzard with a touch of Rasputin in his last days, if Rasputin had worn burgundy-coloured loons and a rainbow tie-dyed T-shirt. He was ostentatiously reading
The Glass Bead Game
. Robin had the capacity to be extraordinarily tedious. His creative writing paper for Martha was a one-act play called
Life Sentence
(‘post-Beckettian’) in which disaffected young men sat around on packing cases and talked in unfinished sentences about how boring everything was and, in my opinion, was too true to life to be art.

Andrea was delicately eating a Golden Delicious – peeling it and cutting it up into careful segments – and frowning with distaste at the sight of Kevin opposite her who was stuffing a huge Forfar bridie into his mouth, greasy flakes of pastry adhering to his puffy lips. He sighed miserably when he finished chewing the last mouthful and said, ‘Two’s never enough, is it?’ Kevin was feeling disgruntled because the cafeteria was only serving cold food.

A big girl called Kara was making a great performance out of sitting down at the table. Kara was laden with a tray of food, a heavy rucksack, a woven Greek shoulder-bag and, finally, a fat, pneumatic baby, strapped to her back with a shawl.

Kara lived with other students – Robin was one of them – in an old farmhouse called Wester Balniddrie out in the wilds of rural Angus. They kept goats and chickens and pretended to be self-sufficient but they were not really the kind of people to hang out with in the aftermath of a disaster; they needed all the accoutrements of civilization to survive. Anything that involved a tool, for example, sent them into a panic. If the inhabitants of Balniddrie had been in charge of man’s technical evolution, people would still be storing things in hammocks slung from trees.

Kara finally managed to get settled and started wolfing a large bridge roll that was fraying at the seams with grated cheese and cress. Kara’s main fashion influence was peasantry. Today she was wearing an Indian cotton skirt, a pair of big workman’s boots, a huge, hairy sweater that looked as if it had been knitted on tent poles and some kind of cloth wrapped round her head, Russian serf-style. Her skin looked as if it had been rubbed with walnut juice.

Kara was from Kent originally although she looked like a tinker, and was planning to do teacher-training after she graduated and be released into the world of primary school infants in the guise of ‘Miss Jones’. The baby, whose paternity was almost as vague as mine, was called Proteus and was lugged around everywhere by Kara, much to the annoyance of the university staff who had discovered, rather late in the day, that there were no rules about not bringing babies into lectures and tutorials.

Robin grew tired of pretending to read
The Glass Bead Game
and took out a pack of giant Rizlas and started rolling a joint under the table. Robin had recently decided to become a Buddhist, which made him even more boring.

‘What’s it all about? The meaning of Liff,’ Robin said, laughing in a stupid way that made his shoulders shake, like a cartoon dog. For some reason all Dundee students found this hilariously funny.

‘What goes around comes around, eh?’ Shug said, sliding into the seat next to Robin. Andrea smiled, rather pathetically, at him but Shug was more intent on eating his cold, round pie (or ‘peh’ in the Dundee patois). Nora has only ever given me two pieces of advice in my life, both of them on the station platform in Newcastle, when I boarded the train to come to Dundee for the first time:

Proteus started to cry and Kara disentangled him from his makeshift pouch. He was still wound tightly in a grubby white Aircell blanket that made him look like a large maggot. His little fists waved angrily in the air until Kara fumbled inside her shirt for a breast and attached him to it. Kevin blushed in horror and stared fixedly at something fascinating on the ceiling until he noticed Olivia sitting at a neighbouring table and stared at her red boots instead.

Olivia was sitting with a group of social admin people, who were all ignoring her. She was reading
Gormenghast
, very slowly and deliberately in the way that lone diners in restaurants read. She put her hand to her cheek and revealed a slender wrist circled by a gold bracelet. Several months ago, in an unusual moment of intimacy in the cafeteria queue, Olivia told me that this bracelet had belonged to her mother.

‘Dead?’ I queried, in the rather off-hand manner of the semi-orphan (for my father, you will have noticed, is absent from my own story), and Olivia said, yes, dead and by her own hand, inconveniently gassing herself on Olivia’s tenth birthday.

Andrea suddenly ducked under the table to avoid Heather. Heather – the priggish, rather frightening girl who had hijacked the women’s liberation group – shared a flat with Andrea, one of those university places where no-one knows each other at the beginning of the year and no-one likes each other by the end. It was also one of those flats where everyone had their own provisions so that their rather small Hotpoint fridge contained, for example, five pints of individually labelled milk and there were constant arguments over purloined butter and pilfered cornflakes. Heather went so far as to mark the levels of her tomato sauce bottles and weigh her blocks of margarine.

Heather, making a beeline for the hapless Andrea, was wearing a skinny-rib, polo-necked sweater that made a feature of her small unrestrained breasts and surprisingly prominent nipples which bounced hypnotically as she walked.

‘She thinks I ate one of her Dairylea,’ Andrea sniffed, ‘as if. One triangle has a million calories.’ Luckily for Andrea, Heather was distracted by a drunken rugby player committing unspeakable practices and unnatural acts.

I noticed Olivia staring at Proteus, very intently, as if she was trying to work out a particularly knotty Logic problem. Like Bob, Olivia was doing a joint degree in English and Philosophy. Unlike Bob, she was set to get a first. Her preoccupation with Proteus allowed Kevin’s tormented gaze to creep up as far as her knees. He was clutching a bit of
The Chronicles of Edrakonia
, now entering its fourth volume, which was very much the same as the previous three volumes.

‘The Lady Agaruitha,’ he said in a low voice to me, because for some reason I had been singled out a long time ago as his audience, ‘has been imprisoned in a tower by—’

‘The lady who?’ Kara interrupted, looking up from a piece of dun-coloured fabric she had taken out and begun to smock, despite the hindrance of a suckling baby.

‘A-g-a-r-u-i-t-h-a,’ Kevin spelled out crossly, blushing because Agaruitha was based on Olivia, although I don’t suppose Olivia was the goddaughter of a dragon queen, but she did sometimes have the look of someone imprisoned in a tower by ‘the evil Lord Lebaron, known as Dragonscourge—’

Proteus unplugged himself from Kara’s breast with a popping noise and looked abstractedly at the ceiling as if he was trying to remember something. Kara took the opportunity to root once more in her rucksack and this time produce some mis-shapen candles in dull plasticine colours. Some of them had been set with what were supposed to be decorations – beans and lentils, little pebbles and the odd leaf. Most of them looked as if they had been moulded in empty cat food tins. The candles were Balniddrie’s response to the current state of emergency.

‘We’ve had to put the price up,’ Kara said, ‘because of demand.’

‘Capitalist profiteer,’ Shug said.

I bought a candle out of necessity. It was very heavy, you could easily have bashed someone’s skull in with it.

‘And then burnt the evidence,’ Kevin said, ‘that’s brilliant.’

Olivia hadn’t noticed Roger Lake lurking in the doorway trying to make surreptitious gestures to attract her attention without attracting any to himself.

There was a sudden surge of renewed raucousness from the rugby players at the bar, one of whom was standing on a table doing a slow, unattractive striptease. Then the power came back on causing a lot of people to flinch and cower like nocturnal animals suddenly caught in the beam of a headlight. The engineers rushed to the jukebox to put on ‘Maggie May’ and the noise level in the basement was cranked up a further notch.

When Olivia finally noticed Roger a little frown disturbed her perfection. But then she smiled at him and slipped away quickly, following him at a discreet distance.

The rugby players had used up most of the oxygen by now and I thought it was probably a good time to leave before people started dying.

‘I’m going,’ I said to Terri.

She followed me out, saying she was going to the Howff for a while. The Howff was Terri’s favourite graveyard, although any cemetery would do when she was in the right mood, which was always. Where other students might knit or read or hillwalk, Terri’s hobby was studying graveyards, exploring the topography of the cities of the dead – the Howff, Balgay, the Eastern Necropolis. Death was never going to have to worry about Terri not stopping for him.

At the entrance to the Union we passed a short, bland girl called Janice Rand. Janice was in Martha’s creative writing class and wrote short, bland poetry that resembled vapid Anglican hymns. Janice had set up a table containing a handful of blue, badly printed leaflets and on which a hand-made banner was tacked, proclaiming quietly, ‘Don’t forget old people’.

Janice smelt of piety and coal tar soap. She had recently become a Christian, a neophyte of a student Christian fellowship whose members roamed the corridors of Airlie, Belmont and Chalmers Halls looking for likely converts (the afraid, the alone, the abandoned) and those who needed to use the Bible to fill in the spaces where their personalities should have been.

The student Christians ran some kind of volunteer service, visiting the elderly and the housebound. Janice was trying to sign up more volunteers.

‘Don’t forget old people what?’ I asked, drawn by curiosity. ‘That they fought in the war, that they know more than you do? That they feel afraid and alone and abandoned?’

Janice made a face. ‘Not
what
,’ she replied scornfully, ‘just don’t forget them. In general.’

We turned to go and Janice shouted after us, ‘Jesus can save you!’ She looked rather doubtful as if He might draw the line at us. ‘Jesus is the Son of God,’ she added, in case we didn’t know. ‘He came once to save us,’ she said, rather stroppily, ‘and He’ll come again. He might even be here now.’

A blast of cold air swung the front door open with a loud crash and we all jumped, but especially Janice who looked as if – just for a fraction of a second – she believed that Jesus had walked into Dundee University’s Student Union. She should warn Him about the lack of hot food. It wasn’t Jesus, unless He had chosen to return as a scruffy student from the Socialist Society, carrying a box of newly printed leaflets – small pink ones as opposed to Janice’s small blue ones.

‘Because blue is the colour of heaven?’ I asked her but she just scowled at me. The boy from the Socialist Society pushed one of his leaflets into my hand. It said, ‘Stop the War Now’. He tried to give one to Janice but she wouldn’t take it unless he in turn took one of her leaflets and when we hurried out of the door they were still having a stand-off, thrusting leaflets aggressively at each other.