‘Come in, why don’t you,’ Archie said, ‘everyone else has.’

Watson Grant was one of the no-hope challengers for the departmental crown. His speciality was Scottish Studies, a strangely old-fashioned subject which occupied a country somewhere between Brigadoon and the White Heather Club, a landscape of burns and banks and braes where people danced strathspeys and reels while Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar sang duets in the background. Martha Sewell would have understood this version of Scotland.

Grant Watson always wore a Harris tweed jacket and came from somewhere remote that either began with ‘Inver’ or ended in ‘ness’ and was strangely asexual, like a mole, although he did have a wife and two children tucked away in Fife somewhere. He was a keen hill-walker, sometimes even turning up to teach in his clumpy leather walking-boots, still caked in Monro mud, as if there was something virtuous about climbing a hill when you didn’t need to.

Professor Cousins contributed to Watson Grant’s usual air of nervousness by shooing him away with a good-natured smile and an absurd attempt at a Scottish accent, ‘Ochhhh,’ he said, as if trying to cough up a gobbet of phlegm, ‘awa’ ye gae, ma guid man.’ Grant Watson hovered uncertainly on the threshold of Archie’s room, not wanting to stay but not wanting to go either – in case Professor Cousins’ presence there signalled an inclination towards bequeathing Archie his regalia. His little jog of indecisiveness was halted abruptly by Archie saying, ‘The toilet’s down the other end of the corridor.’ He was saved from finding a reply by the bell which rang to signal the end of the hour.

Archie ignored the bell and continued talking but everyone stopped listening and started worming their way free of the hard plastic chairs. For a deluded second I thought I saw the flimsy form of The Boy With No Name spiralling like smoke out of his chair. I blinked and there was nothing there but the greasy soot of the guttering candle at the window.

Archie suddenly loomed over me, his bloated Zeppelin figure blocking out what little light there was. I thought for sure he was going to say something about the whereabouts of my dissertation but he just frowned vaguely at the garbled notes I’d been taking and said, ‘Can you babysit for us tonight?’ I agreed in a half-hearted kind of way; the non-existent Man or Maze put me in a difficult position vis-à-vis Archie. I just hoped he wouldn’t start wanting to barter sexual favours instead of babysitting ones.

I helped Professor Cousins extricate himself from his chair. Everyone was slightly stir-crazy by this time and heading for the door like passengers evacuating an aircraft on fire. I had to reach out and grab at the worn brown corduroy of Professor Cousins’ jacket to prevent him being swept away by the stream of students leaving the room in full spate.

Working his way upstream I spotted Martha’s husband, Jay Sewell. He was a tall man with a big jaw and a shock of silver hair which Martha thought ‘leonine’ but which no lion in its right mind would envy. Jay had the manners and demeanour of a southern plantation owner and did indeed originate in the deep south, a fact that Martha seemed to find both politically challenging and sexually attractive.

Jay Sewell greeted Professor Cousins but ignored the students as if they were a lesser life form. He greeted Martha with a cool kiss on the cheek and said that he had Buddy in the car and that he’d been sick all morning.

‘Oh, poor baby,’ Martha said. I was eager to hear more about Buddy (A dog? A child? A friend? A dead rock and roll legend?), but Jay closed the door and Professor Cousins and I were shut out in the murky corridor.

‘Where now?’ he asked me cheerfully.

‘Well, I have to go and write an essay about George Eliot,’ I said, the very idea making me feel as weary as an inhabitant of Hades, ‘but you don’t. You’re not a student,’ I reminded him. ‘You can do what you want.’

Professor Cousins frowned and said, ‘Well, only within certain social, physical and ethical parameters,’ a surprisingly coherent statement, only slightly undermined by a sudden lunatic outbreak of tap dancing from his feet. ‘I dreamt of going on the stage once,’ he said, looking crestfallen.

‘It’s never too late,’ I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late.

We navigated the Stygian gloom of the corridor arm in arm like a quaint, old-fashioned couple. Professor Cousins was very polite, always scurrying to get on the outside of women on pavements (in case they were knocked flying into the road by a hansom-cab presumably), proffering seats and opening doors and generally treating the female sex as if we were very delicate and made of glass, or something equally fragile and breakable, which, of course, we are, for we are made of bones and flesh.

His gentlemanly presence was rather reassuring especially as the doghairs on the back of my neck were standing to attention. Perhaps it was The Boy With No Name, lurking around his old haunts.

‘Oh, we’re all being watched,’ Professor Cousins said blithely. ‘We just don’t know it.’

Archie, of course, had long held the conviction that Special Branch were watching him, although he never elucidated why that should be so. (‘Perhaps because he’s special,’ Andrea said in one of her less intelligent moments.)

‘Oh yes, but Archie’s mad,’ Professor Cousins said cheerfully. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’

‘How do you know I’m mad?’

‘You must be,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’

Professor Cousins’ room was at the other end of the English department corridor – always a perilous place fraught with danger but infinitely more so these days as the struggle for succession hotted up. Getting from one end of the corridor to the other was rather like being on a Ghost Train, ducking the spooks and spectres as they jumped out unexpectedly trying to frighten you.

Today, however, they all seemed to be absent. Dr Dick’s door was firmly closed, while Maggie Mackenzie’s was wide open as if to show she had nothing to be ashamed of although she herself was missing. Watson Grant seemed to have left the building. I was held captive by Professor Cousins’ ancient mariner anecdotage as he embarked on a rambling story about his days as a spry young doctoral student at Cambridge and some girl he had seduced at a May Ball long ago, so that we didn’t notice Maggie Mackenzie storming through the Murk, as thrawn as a Fury, until she was almost upon us.

Her shapeless, funebral garments billowed and her kirby grips scattered as she progressed. Maggie Mackenzie’s long iron-grey hair began each day anchored or plaited or rolled in a variety of vaguely Victorian styles but by lunchtime it had begun to work its way free of restraints and encumbrances and by mid-afternoon she had the appearance of someone leading a tribe of ancient Britons into battle, a gnarled warrior queen bearing grudges.

‘Dr Mackenzie, Maggie.’ Professor Cousins nodded pleasantly at her. She glared back at him. Maggie Mackenzie, who taught the nineteenth-century novel (Why Women Write) harboured a bitter resentment against the male of the species, resentment precipitated by her ex-husband, also a Dr Mackenzie, for reasons which she never spoke about because ‘some things went beyond language’.

‘I believe you owe me an essay?’ she said to me tersely by way of greeting, and added, ‘Where is your George Eliot?’ in a way that suggested there might be several George Eliots wandering the world and that I was the owner of one of them.

‘I left it at home,’ (or perhaps ‘I left her at home’), I said with a helpless shrug at the way life was an entity apparently beyond my control.

Dr Dick opened the door of his room suddenly as if he was trying to catch someone out. He frowned when he saw the three of us and gave the impression that he would have liked to give us lines for loitering near his territory. Dr Dick, whose speciality was the eighteenth century (1709–1821 – Rhyme or Reason?), believed he should be made head of department because he was the only person in it who could construct a timetable properly. He was probably right.

Beardless and rather weedy, Dr Dick was a tall, anaemic-looking man who gave the impression of someone who had outgrown his strength. He was a peculiar Anglo-Scots hybrid. His father had apparently come from the same strain as the great veterinary Dicks but his mother was from a less pedigree brand of Kentish haberdashers, and when the marriage failed she returned to the bosom of her family taking young Dr Dick with her, so although Edinburgh born, he was Canterbury bred. This cross-border fertilization had not, however, produced a more robust species.

At times, in fact, Dr Dick seemed more English than an Englishman. He had attended a minor Home Counties public school before progressing to Oxford, where he had helped to found a real ale society. He could recite, in his fruity accent, every member of the English cricket team since time began. (‘What a wanker,’ was Bob’s laconic verdict.)

Maggie Mackenzie and Dr Dick looked as if they were squaring up for a fight. I supposed that would be one way of deciding who should be head of department.

‘Hand-to-hand combat,’ Professor Cousins murmured in my ear. ‘It would save a lot of time, you know.’

Dr Dick backed down and turned his aggression on me. ‘Your essay’s late,’ he said curtly. ‘I want it immediately.’

Dr Dick was a man who revelled in his hypochondria, although he wanted to be head of department so much that it did seem to be making him sick. He forgot about me now, distracted by a sudden need to feel his pulse. ‘I think I’d better sit down for a while,’ he said limply and retreated to his room again.

‘The man’s perfectly idiotic,’ Maggie Mackenzie said and then turned to me and said irascibly, ‘Tomorrow will do for me. I want your George Eliot on my desk by five o’clock,’ she beetled her brows threateningly, ‘or else,’ and stomped off abruptly down the corridor.

‘Such a frightening woman,’ Professor Cousins said when she was out of hearing.

I was surprised that the university women’s liberation group hadn’t co-opted Maggie Mackenzie now that it had entered a new militant phase. Hitherto a peaceful refuge for students who wanted to drink coffee and moan about their boyfriends, the group had been hijacked recently by a girl called Heather, a junior honours politics student with a round face and owlish spectacles who was determined to teach us the finer points of dialectical materialism before she died, which was probably going to be sooner than she expected.

‘Well, well,’ Professor Cousins said, finally meandering to a halt at the door of his room. ‘I think I’ll have a little nap now. How about you?’

I was unsure as to whether he was asking me to join him in a nap or just generally enquiring about my plans; either way, I shook my head sadly and said, ‘I’ve got to go home and do some work.’

‘Give my regards to that boyfriend of yours.’

‘Bob?’

‘If that’s his name.’

Professor Cousins caught sight of Joan, the departmental secretary, a middle-aged, big-breasted woman fond of mohair so that I always had to stifle an instinct to go to sleep on her furry bosom. Professor Cousins made an elaborate pantomime of drinking a cup of tea and with a long-suffering sigh Joan went into the cupboard where she kept her kettle. For times of emergency – such as we were in – she had set up a little camping gas stove as well (which is probably how dreadful accidents happen).

‘Got to keep my strength up,’ Professor Cousins laughed. ‘Someone’s trying to kill me, you know.’

‘I’m sorry?’ I said, thinking I must have mis-heard, but he had shut the door of his room, although I could still hear him chuckling to himself on the other side of the flushed wooden door.

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.