‘When words no longer strive for mimesis they become dislocated and disconnected. They illustrate in themselves the exhaustion of forms. Writers who eschew mimesis, looking for new ways of approaching the fiction construct, are disruptivist – challenging what Robbe-Grillet refers to as the “intelligibility of the world”.’ Archie paused. ‘What do you think of that statement? Anyone?’ No-one answered. No-one ever had any idea what Archie was talking about.

Archie’s blimpish body strained to escape from his dark green polyester shirt, a shirt stained at the armpits with large damp triangles of sweat. He was also attired in brown trousers and a tan-coloured knitted tie that sported a different quality of stain – dried boiled egg-yolk, or custard.

He spun round in his tweedy, executive chair, so much more comfortable than the chairs assigned to his tutees – the little faux wood tables attached to our chairs seemed to be specifically designed to restrain us, like a cross between a baby’s high chair and an asylum straitjacket. The chairs were made from some artificial material – a hard grey plastic substance that the university seemed over fond of. It was only possible to be even remotely comfortable in these chairs for a maximum of ten minutes. An unfettered Archie, on the other hand, was free to birl and twirl around like a fairground ride on his Easy-glide castors.

‘The act of writing itself comes to occupy the centre of the stage as the author is no longer concerned to invoke some a priori meaning or truth. Jacques Derrida reinforces the point . . .’

Archie McCue was an argumentative Marxist who claimed to be the progeny of a Glaswegian shipbuilder, although, in fact, he had been brought up by his widowed mother who owned a sweetshop in Largs. This long-suffering woman was now ‘dottled’ according to Archie and had therefore recently been transported across the river to Newport-on-Tay and an old people’s home called The Anchorage with a ‘view of the water’.

‘Valéry claims that literature is, and can be nothing else than, a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language . . .’

Archie lived in a big house in Windsor Place with Philippa, his bossy English wife. I knew that because I was the most recent in a long line of McCue babysitters – Philippa and Archie, both nearing fifty now, had been breeding, at spaced-out intervals, since the end of the war. They had four grown-and-gone offspring – Crispin (‘Cambridge’), Orsino (‘Oxford’), Freya (‘year out in France’) and their eldest son, the mysterious Ferdinand (‘Saughton Prison, unfortunately’). Only one child, nine-year-old Maisie (‘a mistake’), was now left at home.

‘ . . . and in its multiplicity and plurality it cries out for a new hermeneutics . . .’

We were a shrinking tutorial group. At the moment there were four of us – myself, Terri, Andrea and Olivia. Andrea was a grammar-school girl from the middle echelons of North Yorkshire society. Today, reeking of patchouli, she was wearing a flouncy, flowery dress, all buttons and bows and intricate bodice seaming, that looked as if it had been made for an amateur dramatic production of Oklahoma!

Andrea had recently converted from the Church of Scotland to paganism and was studying to be a witch. To this end she had apprenticed herself to a warlock in Forfar. Few things were more worrying than the idea of Andrea with magic powers. Not that I have anything against witches, per se, of course – I am only too aware that my own mother is a wizardess of some kind – or wizardina, or wizardelle, for there appears to be no feminine form for the word. Perhaps I can just start making words up. Why not? How else do words come into being?

Andrea said that she wanted to be a famous writer and accordingly had done an evening shorthand-and-typing course run by a man in Union Street who turned out to be more interested in his female students’ sweatered chests than he was in their Pitman short forms. So far, all Andrea had written were flimsy stories about a girl called Anthea who came from Northallerton and was studying English literature at university. Andrea’s most interesting story to date was about a strange sexual encounter her alter ego Anthea had with a teacher at secretarial college. I thought that The Adventures of Anthea would be a good title for an English pornographic film – the kind that involves a lot of window cleaners and innuendo but not much actual sex.

Anthea was always having poignant moments sparked off by mundane experiences – going to lectures, finding spiders, buying A4 narrow-ruled with margins. Personally I think that reading the details of other people’s domesticity is almost as tiresome as listening to them recount their dreams – and then the fork-lift truck turned into a giant red squirrel that crushed my father’s head like a nut – fascinating to the dreamer, but tiresome for the indifferent listener.

Archie himself, of course, was famously writing a novel – an experimental and epic tome that had now reached seven hundred pages. It was, reportedly (for no-one had actually seen it), an Angst-ridden, labyrinthine fiction about the metaphysical Sturm und Drang of the self called The Expanding Prism of J.

‘ . . . a technique which might be considered emblematic of the essential arbitrariness of all linguistic signifiers . . .’

Olivia politely stifled a yawn. A fair, willowy girl, Olivia was a doctor’s daughter from Edinburgh, a St George’s girl and a clever, methodical student, the kind who write up their notes every night, underlining everything in three different-coloured inks. Olivia was clearly a student who belonged at St Andrews or Warwick, or even East Anglia, rather than Dundee but she’d had ‘some kind of a breakdown’ during her A-Levels and had ended up with Es instead of As.

For the last year, Olivia had been having an affair with a lecturer in the Politics department called Roger Lake (generally known as ‘Roger the Dodger’ naturally) who was always trying to be trendy and hang out with students. Roger had a wife called Sheila and a clutch of small, blond daughters (‘Just like Goebbels,’ Terri said), aged from almost nothing to nine years old.

Although sex between staff and students was rife at the university, it was nonetheless forbidden by the Dean who took ‘a dim view’ of it. Roger Lake worried constantly that he was going to be caught in a scandalous situation and insisted that he and Olivia behave in a cloak-and-dagger fashion, exiting buildings separately and ignoring each other in public (and sometimes in private, she reported). Having an affair with Roger Lake would have provided a good training for secret agents.

‘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 über-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 by 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—

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 breakfastless 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.

‘ . . . the autonomous work of art brings into question—’

‘But don’t you think, Archie,’ Professor Cousins said mildly, ‘that really all literature is about the search for identity?’ He made an expansive gesture, ‘From Oedipus Rex onwards it’s about the search of man –’ he reached out and patted my hand ‘– and the fairer sex, of course, for the true understanding of himself – or herself – and his – or her – place in the universe, in the whole scheme of things. The meaning of life. And God,’ he added, ‘does He – or She – exist and if so why does He – or She – leave us bereft in a cold and lonely world, spinning endlessly through the black infinity of space, whipped by the icy interstellar winds? And what happens when we reach the end of infinity? And what colour is it? That’s the question. What do we see when we stand on the terrace of infinity?’

Everyone sat in silence, staring at Professor Cousins. He smiled and shrugged and said, ‘Just a thought, do carry on, dear boy.’

Archie ignored him. ‘Not only the role of the creator of the fiction but also his relationship to the work itself—’

‘Excuse me,’ Kevin said to Professor Cousins, ‘did you mean “What is the colour of infinity”? Or did you mean “What is the colour of the end of infinity”?’

‘Is there a difference, do you think?’ Professor Cousins said eagerly. ‘How intriguing.’

‘End of infinity?’ Andrea puzzled.

‘Oh, everything has an end,’ Professor Cousins said reassuringly, ‘even infinity.’

Infinity, I happen to know, is the colour of sludge and dead seals, of sunken battleships and their crews, the dregs of Monday mornings and the lees of Saturday nights and of small harbours on the north-east coast in January. But I kept that knowledge to myself.

‘ . . . represents the distance between the world and phenomena, not to mention the—’

Archie was interrupted again, this time by a neat rapping at the door and Martha Sewell walked in without waiting for an answer. Martha was the recently appointed tutor in creative writing. After one year, Archie had declared the creative writing paper such a success that he had persuaded the department, for the sake of prestige, to appoint ‘a real writer’ to the post of tutor. Bostonian Martha, an Amherst type, was a poet in her forties whom no-one in the department had ever heard of. She wrote poetry with impenetrable syntax about a life where nothing ever happened. Her poems had titles like ‘Abstraction Or [#3]’ (and your hair, blurred with/rain makes me think/of the obliquity of existence) and had just published a new collection called Cherry-Picking in Vermont, which she carried around with her everywhere like a passport, as if she might be asked to prove who she was.

Martha was still in culture shock, having come to Dundee thinking that it was part of a Scotland that was built out of lochs and mountains and decorated with moorland and waterfalls, and every so often you could see a pained look cross her face when she had to negotiate a piece of shoddy modern architecture, a gas-lit close, or a hollow-eyed and abandoned jute mill. She was not convinced when Dundee’s many good points were pointed out to her – the glorious parks; the municipal observatory; the view from the Law; the beautiful bridges; the Tay; a radical and seditious history; the almost unnatural friendliness of Dundonians, their concomitant violence; the curiously Dundeecentric press; the inhabitants’ benign indifference to idiosyncratic behaviour (the way, for example, that you could walk down the street in nothing but a pair of baffies with a budgerigar on your head and no-one would think twice of it).

Tall and thin and as sensual as a cod, Martha had large beloafered feet that were designed for pounding the paths and trails of New England. She gave the impression of being extraordinarily clean and groomed, as though she curried herself thoroughly every morning. Her smooth hair, somewhere between blond and grey, a colourless colour, was worn in a tidy bob, kept in order by a black velvet Alice band.

Martha had been accompanied to Scotland by her husband, Jay – a professor at Ann Arbor and a Whitman specialist – who had taken a sabbatical to accompany his wife. The Sewells spent a lot of time – certainly more than the average Dundonian – visiting Edinburgh, where they purchased cashmere tartan travel rugs, Caithness crystal, and rare malt whiskies and daydreamed about renting a house in Ramsey Gardens.

Martha and Jay belonged to the class of people who run economies and design legislation, who arrive alive in the polar regions and survive in the equatorial, who invent chronometers and barometers, and mend clothes and darn stockings and never run out of milk or clean underwear. They led the kind of life I could never hope to, especially if I stayed with Bob.

Today Martha was wearing black courts, a grey flannel skirt and a rat-coloured woollen wrap that came down almost to her feet and was carrying a heavy, serious-minded, leather briefcase. Although not directly involved in the war of the departmental succession, Martha seemed to have become a trophy figure and the various candidates vied to have her on their side.

‘You’re busy,’ she said to Archie. Archie denied this self-evident fact, waving his hand dismissively at his students as if we were a figment of Martha’s imagination. Andrea made a gagging gesture as if she was about to throw up.

‘Are you looking for the toilet?’ I asked Martha kindly, but she had caught sight of Professor Cousins in the corner and a shadow of confusion passed across her granite-smooth forehead.

‘He’s sitting in,’ Archie said, making Professor Cousins sound like a student protester. Professor Cousins leant so far towards me that he nearly toppled over in the chair. He jabbed a finger in Martha’s direction. ‘Remind me who she is again,’ he said, in a loud whisper.

I shrugged. ‘Some woman.’

‘Ah,’ he said as if that made everything clear. He folded his hands over his old man’s soft belly and nodded benignly at Martha and said, ‘Sit down, sit down,’ gesturing towards a chair next to Terri. ‘You might learn something,’ he laughed. ‘I know I have.’ Martha looked to Archie for guidance but he just raised his eyebrows as if to say it was nothing to do with him and so Martha reluctantly folded up her awkward grasshopper limbs into the chair, all the while keeping a wary eye on Terri.

Seeing Martha was a blow, I was hoping to avoid her for some time. The creative writing assignment I owed her was another degree paper I was probably going to fail, and to make matters worse my assignment, The Hand of Fate, was a crime novel, the least reputable genre there was, according to Martha (‘Why? Why? Why?’) and I had to pretend to her that crimewriting was a postmodernist kind of thing these days, but I could tell that she wasn’t convinced. Things would have been going better with Martha if I’d had more words on the page, rather than in my head. (How much easier life would be for the poor writers if they didn’t actually have to write their books.) So far I’d got little further than a rudimentary character introduction and a hint of plot –

After several more cigarettes, and a rather prolonged toilette which included Madame Astarti’s constant struggle with one of the world’s eternal dilemmas – how to apply mascara when she couldn’t even see her face without her spectacles on – she was finally ready.

The telephone rang but when Madame Astarti answered it the line went dead with a purposeful click. ‘Went dead’ – that was a curious phrase, wasn’t it? she mused thoughtfully. Things that go dead, in their various tenses. Electricity, telephones, not people, they didn’t go dead they just were dead. Things that go dead in the night – no, that wasn’t right, was it? Sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t in the early stages of dementia. But how do you tell?

She locked up carefully behind her, reasoning it was better to be safe than sorry, even though Madame Astarti had lived most of her life according to the opposite philosophy. ‘Time to go,’ she said to no-one, although—

I wondered if Professor Cousins was as old as he looked. I was a kind of magnet to old people – at bus-stops and in shop queues they flocked around me, desperate to chat about bus timetables and weather. Andrea, who was frightened of old people (in case she became one, one day, I suppose), said that every time she looked at a baby she thought that one day that baby would be an old person. Personally, I prefer to look at an old person and remember they were once someone’s baby. Perhaps there are two personality types (a half-full, half-empty kind of thing), on the one hand the people who can discern traces of the baby in the senescent and, on the other hand, the depressives that look at the fresh baby and see the demented old crone.

~ Wise, Nora amends, wise old crone.

Archie was beginning to get a slightly mad look in his eye. The overheated room and the number of people in it were making him increasingly dishevelled – he had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar and the damp patches of sweat were spreading further and further across his chest like two oceans determined on confluence.

‘ . . . or as the transition from one existent to another, from a signifier to a signified . . .’

‘Excuse me, Archie,’ Professor Cousins was waving his hand around in the air to catch Archie’s eye.

‘Yes?’ Archie said stoically.

‘Could you just go back a bit,’ Professor Cousins said genially. ‘I seem to be losing the thread of all this. I’m afraid –’ he turned to Archie’s students with a conspiratorial smile – ‘I’m afraid I don’t have Dr McCue’s brilliant mind.’

Archie trundled his chair across the carpet, a mode of locomotion that made him resemble a particularly inept Dalek, but then stopped abruptly in front of the Professor and started doing strange breathing exercises, presumably to calm himself down, although he gave the impression of someone who was trying to inflate himself.

‘Realism,’ Martha intervened patiently on Archie’s behalf, speaking very loudly and slowly to Professor Cousins, ‘Dr McCue’s talking about realism.’

‘Ah,’ Professor Cousins smiled at Martha, ‘Trollope!’

Archie retreated back across the brown contract carpeting and snapped, ‘The mimetic form can no longer convince us of its validity in the post-industrial age, true or false? Someone? Anyone? Kevin?’

Kevin shook his head miserably at the wall.

‘Effie?’

‘Well, I suppose these days,’ I said, wriggling uncomfortably in my chair, ‘there’s an epistemological shift in fiction-writing, whereby second-order verisimilitude won’t suffice any more when trying to form a transcendentally coherent view of the world.’ I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, but Archie seemed to.

‘That seems to imply that achieving a transcendentally coherent view of the world might still be a good thing, doesn’t it? Anybody?’ There was another knock on the door.

‘It’s like Waterloo Station in here,’ Professor Cousins said cheerfully. ‘I don’t know when you get any teaching done, Archie.’ Archie gave him a doubtful look. Professor Cousins may be on his way out but he hadn’t gone yet and still had hiring and firing power. The knock on the door was repeated.

‘Come in,’ Archie said querulously. The candle wavered and flickered wildly.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said to—