“Go, Chris,” echoed Carole.
“And if I don’t?”
“Don’t be even stupider than you have already,” said Rachel.
“Send for the police, why don’t you? Your friend the fascist can come roaring up on his charger and practice a bit of that well-known police brutality. That’s what turns you on these days, is it? Handcuffs and truncheons in the back of a blue van.”
Rachel wrenched the door back from Carole’s hands and slammed it forward again with all her weight and anger behind it. If Chris Phillips hadn’t jumped back in time, he would have lost a couple of fingers at least. As it was, one of the panels of glass splintered across from corner to corner and the whole door reverberated in its frame for several seconds.
Deftly, Carole slipped the bolt into place, followed by the chain; lastly, she turned the key in the second, mortice, lock.
“Leave him,” she said.
They sat in the kitchen at the back of the house, Carole drinking tea, Rachel gin. Each time there was an unexplained sound they thought it was Chris, moving around outside the house, but neither of them referred to it. Rachel told her friend about the Chinese meal in specific detail, not missing a flavor or a dish. On several occasions during her narrative she considered going to the phone and calling Resnick, but she always stopped herself.
At half-past midnight, Carole went upstairs and, without switching on any of the lights, looked out. Chris Phillips was standing much where he had been the best part of an hour before, hunched in the middle of the path. She went quietly back down and poured Rachel another drink.
When next she went to look it was a few minutes short of one o’clock and both the path and the street were empty.
Twenty-Nine
If there was one thing worse to read than computer print-out, it was microfiche. Patel had been moving between the two for hours already, alternating between the main catalogs on the ground floor and the more specialized information that was kept up on the second floor. Annotations spiraled over his notebook: publications, articles, conferences, papers. All against the constant hum of the central heating and, below, the criss-cross of students between the issue counter and short loan, the photocopying machines and the coffee bar.
Patel realized that when he had gone to university, he had been so overjoyed at simply being there, buoyed up by the pride and enthusiasm of his family, that he had never been able to put the experience into any context. The first to arrive at lectures, one of the few to stay behind for the obligatory and bored, “If there are any questions afterwards, of course I’d be very happy…,” Patel had filled block after block of loose-leaf paper without his imagination ever truly becoming engaged. Revising, panicking, he had been unable to read most of his frantic scrawling, had difficulty in remembering the sense of what he could. Fortunately, for his family the degree was enough-he had needed to bribe no fewer than five fellow graduates to obtain sufficient tickets for the ceremony-the grade immaterial.
The police recruitment officer had paid almost as little attention. “One of them bright little buggers, eh?”
“Yes, sir. I mean, no, not really, sir.”
Patel still flushed at the memory.
He stood in a short, animated queue and tried not to listen to the argument, detailed and specific, the couple in front were having about the relationship between alcohol and orgasms. Sitting with his styrofoam cup of instant coffee and his Kit-Kat, he hoped for a chance remark about Professor Doria, but was unrewarded. A student with blond hair sleek as a swimming cap took her place in the queue, smack in Patel’s eyeline. A university scarf was wrapped several times around the top of her short blue duffle coat; there appeared to be nothing below the thigh-length hem but long legs and yellow and white running-shoes. Chocolate melted over Patel’s fingers as he hurried away, back to the stacks.
“I was wondering, sir, well, about a transfer…” Naylor stood back from Resnick’s desk, feet together, fingers fidgeting with the notebook held against his stomach.
“Best give Graham Souness a ring,” Resnick said, not looking up. “He’s buying anything that moves for Rangers these days.”
Naylor blinked. The last thing he’d expected or wanted had been a joke-that had been a joke, hadn’t it?
“It’s Debbie, sir. You see, now that she’s…now that the baby’s…well, it’s a matter of where’s the best place for it to grow up and…”
Resnick contained a sigh and set aside his pen. Sleep was something he hadn’t had a lot of, his working hours seemed to be yielding less and less time, the superintendent was ever more disinclined to let him go his own way.
“It’s a backwater, Charlie,” Skelton had said. “That’s my worry.”
“Up the creek again without a bloody paddle!” Colin Rich had laughed.
Now this.
“I don’t want you to think I’m not happy here,” Naylor was stumbling on. “I am, and I’ve learnt a lot, from you, I mean, and if it was up to me…”
“Kevin, Kevin,” Resnick waved him into silence. “A minute. All right?”
“Yes, sir.” Naylor was looking at the far wall, the words he hadn’t been able to get out continuing to steeplechase around his head.
“First off, if it’s a matter of loyalties, you owe more to this kid of yours than to me. Clear?”
Naylor nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Second, there’s a specific transfer procedure and, while it’s good manners to inform me, I’m not the person you should be talking to at this stage.”
“Sir.”
“And, thirdly, and for what it’s worth, what you and Debbie might give some thought to is this-maybe the where of bringing kids up is less important than the how.”
“Yes, sir.” Naylor’s toes were wriggling inside his shoes. What had he been doing, coming into the inspector’s office and starting all of this?
“Now,” Resnick said, matter-of-factly, “how’ve you been getting on with that list of Doria’s assignations?”
Lynn Kellogg had found a pair of bottle-green dungarees near the bottom of her wardrobe; a bulky sweater that, when you held it to the face, still carried the smell of poultry; a soft black beret; worn-down ankle boots and a pair of striped leg warmers. All right, it wasn’t what this year’s students were wearing, not exactly, but it had that magpie quality which told of jumble sales and hand-me-downs. After which, the first students she got into conversation with all had hooray voices, sports cars their daddies had bought them as eighteenth-birthday presents, and were actually terribly disappointed not to be at Girton.
A couple of days of drifting along corridors and about the campus, sitting in the canteen over pie, chips and beans, and apricot crumble, browsing the shelves in the bookshop, hadn’t yielded much more than a sense of frustration. She heard Professor Doria’s name directly once, loitering by the Linguistics section. The student, tall with bad breath, responded to the first of her smiled questions, then bolted midway through the second, leaving an unpaid-for pile of books in his wake.
Linguistics and the After-Text. New York and London. Oxford University Press, 1975.
“A New Look at Poetry and Repression.” Critical Inquiry, v (1979).
“Coming out of the Unconscious.” Modern Language Notes, xcv (1980).
Nietzsche and Woman: Provocation and Closure. Chicago, III, and London. University of Chicago Press, 1983.
“(You said all you wanted was) A Sign, My Love. Deconstruction and Popular Culture.” University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1984.
Deconstruction and Defacement. New York and London. Methuen, 1986.
Patel took a break from Doria’s list of publications and rested his head in his arms. The words were beginning to jump and blur. Until now he’d been the only one of his family not to need glasses. He wondered about taking a break; the rain had eased off and he could walk between the trees and down the hill to the Sports Center, take a shower. He ought to do something before two-fifteen. Doria was lecturing to the combined second- and third-year groups of his course and Patel had every intention of being there. He had been into the student shop and bought a new A4 pad for the occasion.