‘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:
1. Beware of people with blue eyes.
2. Don’t eat the pies.
I have tried my best to heed this maternal counsel — despite its having been given in a rather unsatisfactory rhyming couplet — as I am unlikely to receive any more.
‘So, I’ve decided to become a vegetarian,’ Robin said staring fascinated at the pale, fatty innards of Shug’s pie.
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.