‘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.