THE OATH

There was never enough time, and when there was, it was the wrong time. Time that should have been used in some other way, time that was 'ear-marked' - (what a quaint, old-fashioned, literal-metaphorical farming-phrase to bring its smell of the dung-heap into committee-speak; when they said they'd 'take it on board' he always assumed the committee-members saw themselves on a thirty-two footer with a jaccuzzi and cable TV, plucking some hapless fellow from the waterlogged wreckage of a Dragonfly - his own image was of Ishmael and Ahab and dark shapes in a sea-mist; after a while, he realised that committee-people never thought about what the words meant, only about what the words did - and taking on board was just a way of saying 'shut up now, there's a good chap, we've heard quite enough of what you're going on about') - 'ear-marked' for some other purpose, the blood still running down the nick in the ear, and the flies buzzing round the open wound that might go septic, or might just scab and scar...

The words captured him and took him away - no, he went willingly, like the Lady with the raggle-taggle gypsies. He looked out of his office window at the distant downs and the distant island, and his mind was gone: treading the worn track on the chalk uplands, watching from the cliffs how the light darted across the wave-tops like a dragonfly. He was always more poetic in the summer. It might be the sunshine, or it might be the freedom - though that was illusory. Where he had studied - four months. Four months!! Here, where he worked while others 'studied', three months - nominal three months, like those wood-measurements in the DIY shops: nominal inch by inch and a half which is actually smaller than that, because that's what it was before they planed it, and then there are the parts you can't use because of the warping and the knot-holes and the splitting. And then there are the parts of the vacation you can't use because you're still writing the references for the students who've just left and then you're marking the dissertations of the ones who are coming back, and then you're going to graduation, and then you're being asked about admissions, and then you're sorting out next term's teaching and then you're actually doing it. Hey presto! How to make nothing out of something! Now you see it, now you don't!

Was it really better than working for a living? An image came into his mind (images were always coming into his mind - he would have loved to communicate them, but twenty years of committees and departmental meetings had taught him that other people don't think in images, only in tables and graphs and papers to be submitted and spoken to and drafted and re-drafted) of an animal on a very, very long tether, so long that it could actually start galloping and pick up speed, and just as it was going full tilt and lickety-spit the choke-chain closed around its neck and brought it up short, tumbling to its knees and fighting for breath, all its momentum and impetus (since energy is never wasted, only transformed) changed into a mighty blow to its self-esteem and its private parts. With a normal job, you walked to heel and if you got a little bit uppity then they mixed their metaphors and reined you in. Occasionally, you were even unleashed in that strange thing called a holiday, when you were responsible to no one and no one responsible to you, and you went off and did things which you never did (or presumably wanted to do) at other times. (If you'd really, honestly, desperately wanted to do them at other times, then no doubt you'd have done them - or else you'd have gone doo-lally with the wanting, and been locked up screaming in an Academic Registrar's office until you calmed down and begged to be allowed to timetable the exams like a good little boy). He could never make up his mind if he wanted to know more clearly the limits of his captivity. Certainly, with the years, they became more apparent. Coming events cast their shadows before (why did he always have the apt quotation? Or if he didn't have it, why did he find it necessary to search for one? Did all academics feel compelled to dress their thoughts in hand-me-downs from the Oxfam Dictionary of Quotations?) There is a certain kind of inexpertly pressed record (especially piano-music) where, if you turn up the volume, you can hear in the quiet bits the pre-echo of the next lot of noisy grooves. That was the summer vacation: like an express train going through a suburban station: you heard the rumble as it came towards you, the clatter as its brightly-lit windows flashed by, and then the rumble again, getting lower in pitch, as the speed with which it receded made the sound waves get longer and flatter and farther apart.

'I wasted time, and now doth time waste me': he didn't say it; he didn't just think it; he wrote it - with a real pen and real ink on a sheet of paper, with the new crest, beg its pardon, logo, ('there are no professors any more, only line managers', 'we must think like a business if we want to mean business, and we have to mean business to stay in business') and underneath all the pretty printing he wrote 'The University; two days after the Ides of August'. He knew it was pretentious; but he felt that made the difference: that he knew. That he knew that he was pretending - not pretending to anything, like a throne, but just plain pretending - playing pretend, playing at something. When people asked, 'What are you playing at?' or 'What's your game?' he always wanted to answer, 'Hide-and-seek' or 'Here we go round the mulberry-bush' or 'Catch-as-catch-can', only it never seemed quite appropriate.

Here, it was. It was a letter to someone he had known at university. They had shared a joke about the difficulties of the Roman calendar (they had shared other things as well, but this was the one that had stuck in the memory) and imagined Julius Caesar being told 'Beware the Ides of March' and trying to work out on his fingers which bloody day of the month it was, since, for some reason [known probably only to the Etruscans, who, as the older, more mysterious, conquered race with the impenetrable language, had worked out inviolable traditions designed to mess up all the Roman attempts at progress (like the ludicrous system of writing down numbers, which made life easy for stone-masons who only had to chip straight lines, but allowed the Arabs to invent algebra)] the Ides was the thirteenth day in most months, but the fifteenth in March.

He looked at what he had written and thought about it. To begin with, he thought how unlike any of his colleagues it was that he should actually think about what he had written. Do the edit, put on the spell-checker, print it out. Never mind if it's nonsense. Never mind if it's gibberish. 'We must have a discussion document.' Knowledge, he thought, exists to be used, exists to be passed on: it's like money, it has to be circulated to do any good to the system. On the other hand, there is such a thing as inflation and a devalued currency. You have to earn your knowledge, you have to work for it. And then you can play with it. You can swop it, like kids with marbles and bubble-gum cards. He leant back in his chair (so uncomfortable, so bad for the spine, he had often thought of taking the university to court for industrial injury compensation) and thought of those conversations he had had in his student days, where he and his fellow-students displayed their learning to each other, where you learnt by talking and not by being taught, where talk actually made things clearer and not more confused. Knowledge was the entry fee. Knowledge was the medium of communication, too. It was a kind of litany, like all those stale old jokes and terrible puns, and Goon Show voices, and Monty Python scripts, and catchphrases from here and there which you picked up in your youth and used consciously. With age, you got them from the committee minutes and used them automatically, to indicate which tribal group you belonged to; they also substituted for thought. But his little joke, on the other hand, meant a lot.

It meant the past. It meant a time when there was meaning in that kind of joke. It meant a time when he had had faith in knowledge as a way to wisdom. Had he really been so naive? Always. The insight of today is yesterday's illusion tomorrow. That seemed a snappy little phrase, but he couldn't decide if it was good-snappy or bad-snappy, so he wrote it down on a piece of scrap paper and threw it into the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, with all the other, similar aphorisms, and the discarded Faculty Board Minutes that he had plundered of their A4 envelopes and giant paper-clips. Every time he saw them, he resolved to scribble flawless verse all over the blank sides of their wasted photocopy paper, but the moment he shut the drawer again, he forgot them. The aphorisms he was leaving for a rainy day, or for a future researcher - or most likely for whoever cleared out his office and took the whole lot in black plastic bags to a landfill site. He pitied archaeologists faced with the heaps of rubbish from the twentieth century, compared with the ultra-conservative, all-recycling middens of earlier ages. What would they make of used condoms or TV dinner packs - did you put them in the back of the television to heat up?

The past. He knew all about the past. What did Umberto Eco say? 'The present I know about only from hearsay; for the Middle Ages, I have the source documents.' He found that he got more worked up about the past than he did the present, let alone the future. You could see the consequences of the foolish actions, the ill-advised decisions, the plainly unlucky guesswork. The villains and the saints showed up, and you didn't actually have to live with either of them. The colours were brighter. You chose from the shelf. You didn't have to dip in the bran-tub. You knew what you were getting. Of course, you couldn't change anything in reality, only in your own mind. But then, what was reality? Only the space between closing one book and opening the next. He wrote that down on a piece of scrap paper, too, and slung it in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.

He knew all about the past from Kafka - so popular as a first-year text among the teachers, because the language wasn't demanding, so feared among the students because they didn't have any excuse for not understanding it, except that it was indecipherable, because Kafka thought, and they didn't.

There was a Kafka story about dogs trying to answer the Ultimate Question, trying to bite the Ultimate Bone - and in it Franzl suggested that in the past the Answer had been nearer; not really, of course - it hadn't really been any more likely that the Answer would have been found - but it had seemed so; the world had appeared younger, fresher, more immediate, less sicklied o'er with the pale cast of whatyemacallit. That was the way it appeared from Now. He examined his memories of his early years of teaching: had the students been closer to him? More aware? More intellectually curious? Had he learnt from them? No doubt. But that was then, and this is now, and who says where the difference lies, in them or me? Why do I assume that I'm the same? How often do I slough my skin? If I were a snake I'd do it all at once and I could stand the spares up in the wardrobe to put on if the one I was wearing got too wet or dirty. As I'm a human being, it goes down the shower, or comes off on the towel, or floats around the room in those mysterious little motes that the sunbeams gild. And I never notice it going.

The other thing about Kafka (he thought) is that story where the young man is scared to compare himself Now with himself Then; he doesn't dare to write to the friend of his adolescence to say that he's made the step to adulthood, and got engaged. Mark you, that's bloody Kafka all over - can't take a single step in any direction because he thinks he'll fall over the minute he lifts one of his feet off the ground. The trick is just doing it, and that's all. The quickness of the leg deceives the mind. Least thought, soonest mended. (Not really good enough for his bottom drawer). Now, the conscientious researcher (and he knew he wasn't conscientious) would be able to paper the walls of a good-size house with the title pages alone of books on Kafka's existential Angst (and papering the walls of a good-size house was a project that produced its own existential Angst, he reflected; it had swallowed the past four summers with stripping and filling and smoothing and pasting and hanging and cobbling together like a jigsaw fanatic or a BM vase-restorer). He knew what Kafka was on about well enough: it was Zeno's arrow paradox, which denied movement; at any moment, the arrow must be somewhere; so where is it when it's between A and B? However close you might make A and B, there was never an answer. Where's the future? Just behind me. Here I am at the start of the summer, unwilling to begin things for future preparation, because I'll have forgotten what I did by the time I teach, and here I am at the end of the summer, with it all behind me - oh no, with it all still in front of me, because the time wasn't right, or I didn't have enough of it in one stretch, or this, or that, and the washing and the painting and the wall-papering and the garden to water and the lawn to mow and the goldfish to feed, and nothing to be thought about in isolation - except the distant past, when these things didn't happen. The time at university, when he wasn't exactly happy and he wasn't exactly sad, but somewhere in between...Curious? Expectant? Something like that. Maybe ignorant was the word he was looking for.

He wrote the letter to his friend out of the past, with all the old jokes. The friend's marriage was not going well. He wanted to get away for a while to sort himself out. There was a strong sense that he, too, had never managed to realise his ideals. Maybe they could commiserate with one another. He only seemed to have friends in the past. In the present they didn't seem worth making. They were people who sat on committees, who let their views be determined by what someone else had told them the likely view of another committee would be - as though the committees were not composed of individuals who could take individual decisions, but had to consult someone else's entrails (a kind of vicarious hara-kiri) before they knew how to vote: the self-fulfilling prophecy, which always entailed scrutinising your own navel, but never removing the fluff from it. 'Faculty Board would never allow', 'It won't get through B & D', 'Senate's been coming down against that kind of thing'...at root, he thought it was all tyranny by ventriloquism, masquerading as democracy. He gave in to the solipsistic view of the universe, and reckoned that he was the only person that actually had feelings. The rest were taken out of cupboards in the morning, wound up for the day and wrapped up in tissue paper again at night. Back into the basket, Andy and Teddy are saying goodbye, Vice-chancellor.

He licked the envelope and set it aside. How much more time to waste till the next landmark in the day? Did it help to work in the office and not at home amidst the mute reproaches of uncompleted tasks? (The only kind of house he could afford, really, when you thought about it...of course, with houses of this age, you must expect that kind of thing...ooh, look at that...well, in another few years you'll have to...really radical investigation...structural engineer...Next year (he said to himself, with resolve) next year, the roof!)

He opened the top drawer in his desk, and took out what he called his research. It was the text of an oath of friendship, a solemn thing between chieftains, a binding compact so that the tribes didn't actually slaughter each other when they were bored and there was nothing on the telly. Old High German (filthy language, he thought, but at least there's not too much secondary literature - now with Goethe you could use up your life examining the criteria for inclusion used by the people who produce the bibliographies of the bibliographies of the bibliographies of articles about him). Still, he'd always had a soft spot for the tongue since he had to read the fragment about the father killing his own son - once the battle started, there was nothing they could do; they were held in place, bound by their oaths to do their best for the opposing parties. Had either one reneged, he would have forfeited the respect of the other.

(Typical of men, he thought - a pair of women would just have told the armies to sod off, had a good cry and gone away hugging each other - but men have to make these rules and laws and oaths because they're scared of change, because they don't grow inside, they don't shed their old selves once a month, they don't feel they're part of living, self-renewing nature. He was realy quite fond of feminism. Post-modernism on the other hand only conjured up images of neo-Georgian multi-storey car-parks, while the deconstructionists and structuralists metamorphosed, in his mind, into the gangs of demolition-workers who knocked down the tatty old large houses in the road behind him, only to be followed by transistor-toting builders putting up featureless blocks of flats.)

He wanted to know what they meant by the oath - how seriously they took it. 'Till the skies fall, till the earth is parted, till the sun no longer rises and sets, till the moon no longer waxes and wanes, so long will I keep faith; till the ocean shall be dry and the dry land covered with waters; so long as I have a roof over my head, my friend shall be welcome at my hearthstone.' Interesting, he thought: is that hearth-stone a sign of a permanent dwelling? Can you get out of it if you live in a tent? Will you have to get out of it, because if you're in a tent, then you're on the move to find new land, new grazing, new territory because the Huns are after you, and that cancels all contracts... He hadn't really noticed that before; too preoccupied with the religious sense of the sky falling (he'd read a science fiction story once, where the US Government had sworn a similar oath to some Dakotan Indians, and broke it because they wanted their land for the oil under it. And the day they sent the drilling rigs in, the sun didn't rise; nor the next; nor the next...) and where they got the images of destruction from, and if they were envisaging real and possible events that could actually give them a let-out, or whether these were images of impossibility. Great on destruction, the Old High Germans - that tremendous account of the end of the world by fire, where even the sea and the mountains burn... like the Hamburg firestorm in 1943.

He wondered about it, sometimes: how he could feel closer to a mediaeval scribe than to people who lived in his own street - though they weren't as bad as the people in his department. What he found so hard to understand was that they didn't get worked up about what they were doing. They always said 'of course', they nodded, they smiled, they looked at him indulgently when he became excited. It was clear that they accepted what they did, they didn't have to justify it at every stage. He did. It wasn't like science, where even finding out that things didn't happen was worthwhile. Research in the Arts had to be - stimulating was the word - stimulating for the researcher. Did it matter that somebody else had said the same thing before, if you came at it from a new direction? Wasn't the actual thinking important? Was it really just a load of tired old tricks, or the application of a particular methodology which produced predictable results? Where was it going?

He felt he owed it to people to think about them: to mediaeval scribes - to Kafka - to writers dead and alive - to take them seriously, and to explore their thought; and by exploring their thought, to explore his own, and to see what human beings were capable of doing and thinking and being. His colleagues prepared structured analyses, water-tight arguments, feminist critiques, post-modernist paradigms, sheltering their emotional involvement behind a bulwark of terminology. They mowed their lawns, they raised their children, they wrote their books, they attended their conferences, without shedding a tear or batting an eyelash. They went through the motions - there was another word that produced an unconventional and unpleasant image for him. He luxuriated for a moment at the thought of them going through the motions of a great writer, looking for the key to his works, which he had swallowed to spite them.

The telephone shrilled at him. It was the secretary - someone was asking whether there was a member of staff around - they were undecided about whether to continue university studies - could he? would he?

He did. He always did. Gladly. When he talked about it, it all seemed so much more exciting and enticing than it actually was - it seemed to be the way he had always imagined it would be: this quest for the truth, this deep involvement, these undiscovered possibilities of the human psyche: fresh, new, hitherto undreamt of - pure deodorant advert. He even fell for the line himself. Hard work was needed, of course, you couldn't get something for nothing, but in the end, due rewards, limitless possibilities, personal development, never wasted...

The girl waiting to be spoken to in the office was young and pretty. Young? She was the usual age. He was older. He found that hard to remember; hard, always, to recall that he was not the junior member of any gathering. That he had status. That he deserved status. Inwardly, he felt that nobody deserved status. That it was only lent to them for each moment that they acted so as to earn it.

The girl seemed fresh and unspoiled. He experienced vicariously her anticipation, her apprehension, her excitement, as he explained the wonders of the course in particular and university study in general. To be like you, he thought - and then he realised he was echoing Thomas Mann; but he still thought it again. To be like you: without the complications and the insights and the extra knowledge and the worries and the deep sense that it's none of it worth it and I ought to grow up and be a real person instead.

She smiled at him, and he thought: not a bad smile to be looking at for the next three or four years. Not a bad mind to be talking to - but then they're always most curious and challenging before they arrive here; then the mob mentality takes over, and it's all about which hall bar has the cheapest prices to clear out the drink at the end of term, and which disco has the best light-show. Who cares about Kafka and the Talmud? Not even me.

He went back to his room, and watched the day slide by, the summer day. It's their endlessness, he thought, that final reluctant paleness before they're over - and still nothing accomplished. Give me autumn. Give me winter. Give me the dark.

It came. The department always got together with its students on the Saturday before the first Monday of the autumn term, to make sure that all was well with those returning, and to instruct the new arrivals - the freshers (how he had grown to loathe that term! it was Oxbridge slang, by Bertie Wooster out of Max Beerbohm; it smelt of Boat Race Night and the Varsity Match; it gave the new student a role to act out, when the whole point of being here was to discover that you didn't have to act a role - though the discovery most of them made was which role they wanted for the rest of their lives: accountancy - personnel - marketing).

The sixties architecture of the university (so very nice in a matchbox model, so very monstrous full-size) had produced a succession of subterranean lecture-rooms, windowless, airless, neon-lit, connected to an air-conditioning system which gave you no choice of hot or cold - you just had the flavour of the month blown over you, or you stifled. Dark, dark, dark, he wrote on the corner of his lecture schedule - they all go into the dark; and he wondered who would recognise his quotation from the Four Quartets ('Oh, no, we never did Eliot, well, the teacher said 'You seem depressed enough after the War Poets, poor lambs', so we did a special project on Georgette Heyer and her view of the Regency period compared with Jane Austen. I was one of the two that preferred Jane Austen.').

Nietzsche had given a test of whether you were living your life well (how long since he'd taught Nietzsche? how long since he'd read Nietzsche? What was the university system all about? Training a race-horse to run as fast as it could, then getting it to show a load of sprightly ponies how to pull milk-carts.) - you had to live so that you'd be prepared to repeat it eternally. Here he was, trapped in the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence. Every year he thought: if only I could just do it that little bit differently - if only I could take that little bit more care, make that little bit more effort, have that little bit of restraint - if I could hold back and let them think - or, alternatively, if I just let go and thought for myself and had a good time, and let them follow me or not, higgledy-piggledy, devil take the hindmost, separating the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the chaff - and every year the good intentions paved the usual zig-zag track of improvisation and compromise and recidivism. He was like an alcoholic who makes all these good resolutions, and then can't resist a sip of somebody else's, and one won't do any harm, and anyway if I don't tell them how to do it, somebody else will and they won't do it as well - and anyway - and anyway - He listened to his Professor laying down the law about what was and what was not so. How can he be so absolute? How can he speak with such authority? On such petty matters? Sharpen your pencils and bring your gym-kit? And a large box to take the cake home? Then he listened to his younger female colleague - and she, too, couldn't avoid the school-marm. And the kids colluded. They wanted to whisper. They wanted to throw paper darts. They wanted to be shooshed and told off. If university was adolescence in amber (and he wished the filing cabinet had been to hand), then they wanted to be back in the certainties of primary school (he didn't; he'd hated it; they'd bullied him and threatened him with a knife). Anything, so they didn't have to think for themselves.

The first years filed out. They were on their way. It was the same path. Every year. Different faces, diferent feet, but always the same road that they took. Why did it never change? Didn't they all mock the conservatism of the Middle Ages? And yet they still read their lectures to the students who wrote them down, as if printing had never been invented and a photocopier was the terrifying fantasy of a paranoid schizophrenic.

When the second years came in, he looked for signs that they were further advanced, that they remembered where they had been, that they recalled a similar scene in the same room the previous year. (Didn't Nietzsche define the sense of history as typical of humanity? The cow doesn't compare yesterday's grass with today's, and is therefore never discontented.) They seemed to sit there with the same uncritical absorbency. Reading is a solitary activity. Solitary activities are anti-social. Therefore reading is anti-social. Peer-pressure reduces standards. If s/he can get away with it, why can't I? Swot! Book-worm! Creep! Teacher's pet!

Well, they were almost trusties, they could be spared the discourse on how to study and what the tutor was for. Maybe they should have been told what study was for and how to look after their tutor. Especially when he was still in search of the Absolute, which his colleagues had long since given up looking for.

The Finalists were a much more independent lot - but that was nothing to do with education, which just increased dependence. They'd been out in the big wide world for a year, speaking foreign, no wonder they felt that they could cope with the little mad-house that had its own funny rules. He found himself starting a Platonic dialogue in his head:

'Now, is it likely that by painting a house white you will make it darker?'

'No, Socrates.'

'But you say that by teaching these students you make them stupider?'

'Yes, Socrates.'

'How can that be?'

'Why, Socrates, because our teaching makes them dependent on us, and yet what we are trying to teach them is to be independent. We want them to obey us by not doing what we say.'

'Then why don't you just leave them alone?'

'Great idea, Socrates! But then we'll be out of a job!?'

'Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?'

He almost missed his turn to speak about his courses. They were the same as usual. It made life simpler. He could cope with the extra secondary literature each year - starting from scratch would have been intolerable. He recalled having said when he was eighteen that he just wanted to carry on learning for ever, and that was why he wanted to become a university teacher. Now, he persuaded himself that he did learn something new each year - it just happened to be about the same old books. Certainly, when he was in full flow it really did feel fresh, exciting, re-vivifying - but maybe that was just his memory beginning to go. Others read from their notes: he improvised each time. He wondered if the students noticed, or just thought he was lacking in order. He always did his best to give the lectures and classes a form, even if it was only through a running gag.

He sat down, scarcely aware of what he had said. In a short while it was over. Too little time to to do this, too much time to do that. Fritter it away, that was the answer. Minute fritters, like minute steaks. He laughed aloud, remembering the joke that depended on how you pronounced the word. The Professor looked at him. Kids, he thought. Gardens. Compartments. Pigeonholes. Where's Goethe got to in your life? Did you look at his Theory of Colours to help you choose the bathroom wallpaper? He smiled back. 'Do they get stupider or do we get cleverer?' he asked out loud. 'Ah, good one - yes - ' was the reply.

Out into the grey daylight of early October: it stung his eyes for a moment, and he remembered when he'd been researching in Vienna, and come out of the library in the late afternoon, and looked towards the distant hills and found he couldn't see them as well as when he'd looked in the morning, before he went in - and he'd waited, and rubbed his eyes, and forced them to change their focal length. He wanted to see further than the end of his pencil. This time, he felt like a miner coming up out of the pit - very Lawrentian, that, except he couldn't take Lawrence's bowels and blood and darkness seriously: it sounded like a garbled account of a bad attack of piles. Not a miner, anyway: more like one of those canaries that falls over first if there's anything wrong with the air. Certainly not one of your big, bluff, gruff Lawrentian miners, who thinks it's cissy and bourgeois and inauthentic to pick a flower and take it home, but just enjoys it in its natural freedom, without possessiveness. Over-interpretation - 'I thought I'd catch you here.'

'And you have. Welcome. "Till the skies fall, till the earth is parted, till the sun no longer rises and sets, till the moon no longer waxes and wanes, so long will I keep faith; till the ocean shall be dry and the dry land covered with waters; so long as I have a roof over my head, my friend shall be welcome at my hearthstone."' He put out his hand, and it was grasped. Firmly. And he smelt the drink.

'Let's go for a quick one,' said the friend. That was what he'd always said. That was what they'd done - not always together - sometimes the friend had gone on his own - compelled - driven - but in the good times they'd gone together. The pub had been a culture of its own which wasn't part of convention, slightly disreputable (but not very, not dangerously, just not quite approved of), a sign that you didn't really conform, when of course you really did, and you certainly didn't just walk out of your exams without writing a word, simply to support the French rebels of '68, like that student of English - what was his name? Who knew? Who cared? Probably a record producer by now, or a used car salesman, or something in the BBC.

The pub gave you your structures to defy society: arcana (names of drinks, private jokes, private names for the various 'hostelries' or 'establishments' or 'watering-holes' (a little passé, that word), the names of the landlords - all hail-fellow-well-met with his friend) - a routine - the meal, the drink, the curry to sober up, the whisky or brandy or gin or vodka afterwards. All terribly grown-up. It all passed through his mind as he stretched his stride to keep up with his friend. His life had been solitary for several years now - and he found pubs no place to be alone, and no place to find friends. He began to reflect, as he raced along, that resisting society's boxing in only put you in a different set of boxes. There was still the open road - he'd walked it over moorland with his friend, twenty years before, - but it had started with a swift half at Haworth, and finished with a run to make last orders in the afternoon session at Hebden Bridge.

His friend was greeted by name by a whole row of drinkers at the bar. How had he managed to develop this little côterie since getting off the train? What was the magic? Perhaps he suffered fools gladly? Or maybe he took literally the symbolism of the drinking? The 'loving cup', the 'cup of kindness' - the sharing of the chalice as a kind of communion: who buys me a drink is my friend - they value my friendship more than their money. People who don't ask what you'll have deserve all they get. (There was another one for the filing cabinet.)

'What'll it be?' was the question. And the answer, he knew already, was 'Disastrous.' But he went ahead. He needed some oblivion, and it came cheapest in pint glasses. The beer they sold there was a malevolent and deceitful little brew: the first slid down a trifle sharply; but it anaesthetised the throat, so that the second followed. A third was a matter of course. The fourth began to display the sicklier elements of its flavour, so that resolve was stiffened. But the damage was done, and the small man with the hammer had begun attacking the seat of reason. The effects lasted for three or four hours, despite coffee and curries.

He sat on the loo in the Indian restaurant, trying to focus on the wall-paper, whose swirling pattern didn't help his stomach, and said out loud, 'Lord, that men put that within their mouths that takes away their reason!' but it didn't help - not because they weren't his own words, they were still true, after all, but because it was still only an hour and a half since they had left the pub and the torture had at least another two and a half to run.

He tried to treat it as a learning experience: not just that well-known 'never again!', but the subtler, truer: 'I'm too old for this' and, truest of all, 'I've outgrown it.' He just wished he knew what he'd grown into instead. He let his friend go out on his own in the evening. When he came home, they talked into the small hours. Nothing about the friend's marriage, of course, or what was going wrong. That was just an everyday detail, something transient, something sub-lunary, something you couldn't really do anything about, whereas trying to understand Shakespeare's sexual hang-ups on the basis of Prospero's words to Miranda in The Tempest and the the Duke's and Angelo's attitudes in Measure for Measure, to say nothing of the passages in King Lear - that was much more fruitful.

He'd never been any good at chess (something to do with his type of mind, he always told himself - he felt he was too creative, and not logical enough; the truth was that it took him a long while to envisage what sort of moves he'd like to make, and that he always left the other person's moves entirely out of account - a principle he followed unconsciously in life) - but he felt that the talk with his friend was, in a way, like chess - chess considered as a civilised substitute for war: the pieces didn't bleed, the king wasn't killed. Yet you manoeuvred with your feelings: you put them out into these characters, that were only words on a page when all was said and done, and moved them around, and felt the emotions - but when it was all over you put them back in the box, unchanged. Well, maybe the pieces you played with weren't unchanged, because you had a different view of them now - this one blacker, that one whiter - but the carry-over was always a problem. He remembered giving his students exercises on adjective endings, week after week, till they could do them perfectly; but only in the exercises - the moment they tried writing their own connected German, all hell broke loose, the feminine datives getting mixed up with the masculine accusatives whilst the poor old neuter genitives just stood looking helplessly on.

So they talked about poor old Shakespeare, and whether he had been seduced by wicked Anne Hathaway (the pun on her name was over four centuries old), and they didn't talk about his friend's urge to violence, or his need for love that he felt he didn't deserve, and couldn't cope with when it was offered because of the obligations it imposed, and how he transferred guilt and emotions like a lunatic in an old-fashioned telephone exchange connecting everything the wrong way, just as the mood took him. They didn't talk too much about the past: perhaps that was strange, but it didn't strike either of them that way, because the past wasn't in the past any more - it was comfortably lodged in the space between them, it was spreading all around them with every word that they spoke. They understood one another. Well, they understood one another's words. The extent to which they were in their words was another question. They understood what they were saying to one another (which was considerably more than most people manage), but they didn't understand why they were saying it. They played the game of chess, without acknowledging that it was war. (When he thought about it all later, much later, this was the conclusion he came to; he also concluded that his colleagues only thought of the game as a game, without being willing to see its emotional implications - but took it as 'seriously' as all those other games the adult has to learn to play: life insurance, house purchase, tax returns, pension schemes - which was silly, because it could only be 'serious' if you put your emotions into it. But only children and adolescents got so worked up about games.)

They talked, they talked. Sometimes his friend was drunker, sometimes less so. Sometimes they went out together, but rarely, and then he was very careful, and drank halves at well-spaced intervals, resentful of the way he was being forced into caution and circumspection by his friend's lack of consideration - by his friend's spontaneity and openness to the moment - by his friend's drink-problem.

They walked. Through muddy valleys clogged with autumn leaves, on high chalk hills with crisp blue air around them. There were views - further and clearer for the bareness of the trees. There was exhilaration, because of the achievement of the climb at last put behind them, because of the world spread out below them, which looked as though it might be under their control, or at least beneath their notice - they were free of it, and could see its sinuosities, its nerves, its veins, its hidden back gardens, and were masters of it through their superior knowledge. Only they always had to come back down again. Into the streets. Into the narrow winding ways to the rusty bus-stop or the coughing car. Dr Johnson, he knew, had once defined happiness as driving at speed with a pretty woman beside one - but going (that was the point) nowhere in particular. That was partly the trouble: he knew he was going nowhere in particular, and whilst that was fine for the middle of a walk, it wasn't too good for the middle of a life, even if you weren't in a dark wood like Dante. You could lose your way on a sixties campus, with the pretty mosaic crumbling off the outside of the buildings with the frost, and the rain coming in through the immaculately functional windows whose catches didn't keep them shut.

When his friend wasn't walking or talking or drinking, he wrote letters, fat, thumping, letter-box-bulging letters. He took that as a symptom of adolescence, but his friend didn't. His friend saw them as real communication. His friend hadn't read enough Kafka. 'Written kisses never reach their destination; they are drunk up by greedy ghosts on the way.'

He'd been there himself in the past: letters to women in distant lands that acted both parts in the dialogue. 'Verbal constructs' - one of the few personally valuable lessons he belatedly recognised he could have learned from his profession: 'poems are made of words, not feelings'. 'Don't come at me with this crap about the author's intention again - all you've got is the text - anything else is a back-projection from that.' 'If you say it's only the text, only the words on the page - then - a chimpanzee with a typewriter could write Hamlet - ' 'Given enough time, given enough typewriter ribbon, provided he doesn't get hooked on the smell of the Tippex - Anyway, I've certainly had essays about Hamlet that looked as though they'd been written by chimpanzees.'

Those letters - they foold you, you fooled yourself - such was the power of literature - all literature corrupts, and absolute literature corrupts absolutely. He found his friend's presence valuable; it gave him a set of markers to follow, like the wrecks either side of the only safe passage into harbour - if you wanted to get into that particular harbour.

Meanwhile, the term wore on and the initial momentum abated. The resolve to prepare disappeared under the first batch of essays for correction; 'House of Correction' had been a euphemism for a prison, he recalled, but couldn't decide if he was a warder or an inmate. The bright spot was the hour where the ones who had been abroad told the ones who were going abroad what a good time they had had and where and why and how. He always enjoyed this, even though he had been hearing the same kind of things for years: the pleasure and pride in achievement came bubbling up out of the students like water out of a spring that will never run dry. When he spoke to the ones who were going to go, and said, 'Make the best of it - it'll probably be the most enjoyable year of your lives,' he was more conscious than usual of how true that was. He watched the finalists regretting, turning back, trying to grasp what was already behind them, guarded by a cherub with a flaming sword; they went back at Easter, they went back in the summer - but by the autumn they had a job and circumscribed holidays, and new friends and new interests, and the old faiths were forgotten like the ashes of a campfire, kicked out and scattered in the wind, for the grass to grow there again and never a sign to be seen.

After they'd all gone out, he was left in that box of a room (box of a room, they were all boxes of rooms, box-rooms, all constructed of nine-foot-nine cubes by an architect who wasn't Inigo Jones by a long slide-rule) with the image that had filled his mind; and he wondered whether that was why he loved those earthen ramparts that broke the sky-line on the downs, why he wanted to hug the great barrows and say, 'I remember you, I honour you, I know you lived.' These little people with their little claims to immortality, their signed memos reproduced a thousand times and circulated, doubling their quantity every hour like bacteria in the half-filled filing cabinet, names, names, names, requisitions for this, requisitions for that, fill in a form to have a light bulb changed or a flood mopped up in the toilet, expenditure assigned to reporting department, leave it till the stain appears on the ceiling below, they've got a bigger recurrent grant - who did they think they were? The administration of the Roman Empire? The scribes leaving tablets in Linear B, so later ages could find out what word Minos, King of Crete, used when he wanted to say 'bullocks'? The folly of all this permanence - the canker of a semi-literate society, the junk-mail of a community of scholars - give him the split-stick tally of the shepherd, and the poems learned by heart for the bards to chant in the market-place - give him the memories that grew in the telling and supported you in your age, instead of dragging you down with the weight of a hundred snapshot albums.

And that was when he thought about the Christmas card list.

In his youth (as if it weren't still going on, just misplaced in time) he'd written a story (the usual, self-pitying, thinly disguised autobiographical kind) called The Tangential Man; because a tangent is a line that touches a circle at only one point. Those friends he had elsewhere, he'd got them on the list, to make sure they'd not be missed, but he had barely brushed their lives - a week here, a day there, a night on a journey to somewhere else; their lives were circles, their lives were wholeness, his was a line that was going to infinity without meeting anything else on the way.

He remembered the Ghost Train in the Prater: when you went past particular places on the ride, spectres of various kinds leapt out of the wall to block your path or brush your hair or drag cobwebs across your face - and then they snapped back into position for the next passenger. His European friends were a bit like that for him - when he took that route, there they were, a little dustier, a little older, but basically the same. He went by, and out they popped. But how did it look from their point of view? Late June, early July - here he comes! Wonder what he does the rest of the year? Perhaps he just gets put back in his box, while we go on living... And he had to admit that it felt like it.

So writing Christmas cards was another of those exercises in self-examination, in pseudo-communication, that you could automate: put it on a macro, do it with a couple of key-strokes, how're the wife / kiddies / dog/ cat/ alligator / job / weather.

His friend had left in mid-November. No communication. He wondered how it would all turn out. He thought: badly. A Northern Christmas. Too much to eat. Too much to drink. Too much to forgive. Too much beer under the bridge.

Christmas parties - those little gatherings where you played charades, spelling out the words 'interest' and 'concern' and 'friendship', and then you went on to the real party games of getting some duck pâté before it was all gone, and making sure someone else didn't swill all the rather decent claret you'd brought. But who did you talk to, if the person you had most in common with in the world was Michel de Montaigne?

He went in search of the waters of forgetfulness: but Lethe was off in the Staff Club bar - too near the end of term to order another barrel. So he went home and played Mahler very loudly. Mahler won.

A vacation is a funny time - neither fish, nor flesh nor fowl, but full of good red herrings to distract you from the true path - wherever you may imagine that to be leading. Meetings for that, meetings for this, references, enquiries; the administration (which really does only work nine to five, and doesn't find itself on Friday night with a five-hundred page novel to read, twenty proses and twelve essays to mark by ten on Monday morning) works happily through this period which the academic sees (in an ideal world) as a space for pure cogitation. The vastly more sensible (and considerably less sensitive) hedgehog just eats itself silly and curls up to sleep for several months.

Vacations (he had long ago decided, but always forgot again, like so many good resolutions) were better in the anticipation than the reality - like the day of judgement: won't it be fun when so-and-so gets their comeuppance? What's that, God? Surely you don't mean me? Well, I've just got this to do and that to do, and can't it wait a wee while, I mean, I've only just joined the tennis-club and it's a pity to waste the subscription, and my shoes were nearly new, and there's a whole load of New Society I hadn't got around to reading yet, and they were all piled up in the outside loo, just waiting for a spare moment, and--- The vacation promises relief, but it's only relief from a certain kind of task; in practice it imposes another kind.

When the students arrive, you tell them that they're here to learn how to be grown up, how to take responsibility for their own actions (you don't actually talk about safer sex - condoms - HIV - babies etc. - but it's partly in your mind; it may even be in the students' minds - but it's certainly not what they get to hear about). They're told that they have to plan their own work; that it's up to them to do their essays - it's not like school, where you see teacher every day and get constant reminders. And then you give them the list of compulsory dates, and a timetable as flexible as a whalebone corset, with gaps so badly placed as to make a mockery of private study and send them all to the coffee bar for the hour here and the hour there and the hour in between those two. The Department giveth and the Department taketh away with the other hand, because they can't just say, 'I'm sorry, I don't understand it yet, I'll write you the essay when I do', because if they do that, then they miss the batch of essays that all have to go into the marking shed together to ensure comparability of finish, and anyway you don't trust them to do it, because you've sussed out that they're only doing German because they had a good time ski-ing in Seefeld when they were fifteen, or because their dad met their mum on his National Service, and they need a degree of some sort to get into Marks and Spencer, and there's a book in their school library which we haven't got in the University Library which has got all the answers about Kafka, so that's the real reason why they want to leave doing the essay to the vacation.

So that's why you don't try applying the Summerhill principles to the university. (Summerhill? Don't you remember Summerhill? Where nobody made you do anything and you learnt things because it was too boring not to do so? Ah, but that was back in the days before videos and space invaders and mutant ninja turtles, dudes! That was way back when - in the sixties, flower power, peace, love, brown rice - before we knew for certain about JFK's affairs, and Martin Luther King's, before we had to justify increased numbers of university places in terms of increased productivity - back in the days when we thought more education meant better people. Shortly after the invention of the Wheel of Fortune, and before Mrs Thatcher started up Sale of the Century or the UFC took over The Price is Right.)

So the freedom to study and the freedom to teach and the freedom to research are all sacrfificed to the great god Tim-e-Table. We have a timetable-led curriculum, to use the jargon. And that's how we all run away from freedom: the students and the teachers.

And that, he thought, is why vacations are so unsettling; because the rest of the time you have to do it for this hour, you have to do it for that hour, and you tell the students how free they are, and it's a lie - it's just that they don't see the boundaries as clearly (a fine preparation for life, no doubt) so they think they can get away with more, but they can't.

Back in the days when he thought that thinking got you somewhere (and the worrying thing was that he kept on finding out that these days tended to be yesterday, which meant he really didn't want to learn anything) he had developed an elegant theory about three kinds of activity: number one, which you actually wanted to do because it pleased you (the thing itself); number two, which you enjoyed doing because it pleased somebody that you wanted to please, or because it was going to achieve an end that you wanted to achieve (potato-peeling, perhaps); and number three, the sort of thing you did because somebody said you had to, and in fact you really had to, because life would be too inconvenient if you didn't (work; putting out the rubbish on the right night, so it would actually be collected and not simply smell for another seven days). He refused to internalise number three actions and turn them into number ones - and he certainly couldn't see the students or his professor as the sort of people to fit into a number two action. So term-time was full of number three - and the vacation, which was nominally a time for number one, came as a severe shock. He found, more often than not, that he'd forgotten what it was that he liked doing - freedom, like an unused limb, atrophies. He tried to impose some kind of discipline, but he wasn't too good at fooling himself deliberately (though he managed it unconsciously all the time). So the re-imposition of the timetable came as a kind of relief from the strains of responsibility. Now you knew which holes and corners of the day you could still fill up with marking and administration and research, so that there was nowhere left for you to be yourself (if you could still remember how, or who you were).

There was a poem by Yeats, called The Wheel, which was all about how human beings were never content with whichever season it was - in the winter they wanted spring, in spring they were impatient for summer, when summer was there they longed for autumn, and in autumn looked forward to the winter: and they did not know that what disturbed their blood was just its longing for the tomb. He thought that was only a half-truth (though half a truth is better than none) and that really it was the inbred dissatisfaction of humankind - the thing Rilke talked about in the Fourth Duino Elegy (was there ever a poet of hope? Not that he'd read.) Human beings can never think of anything without reflecting on its opposite; they are dialectical creatures (well, Prague-born German speakers, and especially those who are dressed in girls' frocks till they're six and have Maria as their middle name, are dialectical creatures - to put it mildly). Birds (like Nietzsche's cow) just shut up and get on with it: so we're not in Siberia, so we're at Slimbridge, so let's just eat the grass and smile at the cameras and shit on the twitchers who've come two hundred miles to find the one red-breasted goose in the two thousand five hundred white-fronts (with another two thousand due in today if Air Traffic Control lets them take off from the tundra). 'Russian tarragon, though the hardier plant, is in fact vastly inferior in flavour to the French variety, which is much harder to grow.' Honk, honk, honk, get it down your neck, and don't think about pâté de foie gras, with or without truffles.

There was another phrase that haunted him, though he could never quite recall where he'd heard it: Dort, wo du nicht bist, ist das Glück - happiness is where you are not. So of course the human race spends its time wishing it had what it doesn't: it's the basis of tourism, which (he felt) would, in the future, be the only viable industry on the whole planet: 'they earned a precarious living by taking in one another's washing' seemed to sum it up - just keep the money going round, like a juggler, and don't ask where it ultimately comes from.

So he envied craftsmen their tangible and fruitful activity; and they envied him (he imagined) for his holidays, and the lack of physical demands his work made on him. And yet, how unhappy they'd have been if they changed places (if he'd had the skill, if he had dared to try). So he told himself. And the tales he told himself he often believed, unlike the tales other people told him.

When did he think these thoughts? Why, all the time! But especially in Departmental Meetings, those fine parodies of the democratic process, where the students made so little use of their representation you'd have thought they really were just stooges and capitalist lackeys and lickspittles; those meetings, always under-prepared or over-prepared, those devices for permanent postponement or premature decision-making, where the only motion carried nem con was the one to break for lunch. (How hard it was to challenge the forms of hegemony, even if you thought you had destroyed the spirit! He was reminded of an episode some years before, when a colleague, whose Incomprehensibility Rating among the students reached heights others were careful not to, by actually counting syllables before they opened their mouths and letting out nothing over three - when this colleague (who was another of those Dread Warnings for him, when he thought about just going his Own Sweet Way), simply refused to let The Meeting eat into his lunchtime any more and stomped out. They'd all laughed. Nervously. Because it made them all realise that meetings were made for man, and not man for meetings. And that gave them back the responsibility they were scared of and preferred playing pass the parcel with (he'd once visited a colleague's home, and found the small male offspring, nappyless (whether from design or chance was not clear), being passed round a circle of other colleagues; it was not a case of satanic ritual abuse, but, as far as he could see, a subconscious parlour game called 'Piss on the Department').

Meeting itself seemed such a magical word in university circles; it excused everything: 'I have a meeting', 'I've got to go to a meeting', 'We'll have a meeting about that', 'I'm afraid it'll have to go before the meeting'; the universal panacea was a meeting; aspirin, laxative, diuretic, kaolin and morph all rolled into one; it started things and it stopped things. Only among the Quakers did the word have a similar nimbus (at the university it was more like a cumulo-nimbus - cloudy and promising storms), but among the Quakers (he understood) one only spoke if one felt moved by the Spirit and therefore had something to say! He could not imagine the University applying this principle - it would be the end of life as he knew it! What is not in your heart, let that be in your mouth nonetheless.

But today, today - he had his excuse, like the letter that got you out of games on the day of the wet cross-country ('only three boys drowned in the mud last year, Headmaster, after all, it's not the Somme, you know'). 'I'm afraid I shall have to leave at half-past one. I have an appointment.' (It was almost as good as a meeting, especially if you didn't say who it was with, like the dentist, or the police, or even a student). The letter crinkled in his pocket. His friend seemed scared of telephones - surely they'd had them in the nineteen-sixties? Maybe it was the push-button variety that unsettled him. Things had got so bad that he was going to do a flit.

The daydream was of knight-errantry. The meeting was talking about installing a coffee-machine in the students’ seminar room. Not a white charger - a British Leyland Sherpa (you didn't need an HGV licence, nor did you need the oxygen, because you weren't going to Everest, but you would need the thermals because you were going to Yorkshire, and the Kendal Mint Cake (every Everest expedition since 1957) would no doubt come in handy to counteract the curry and take the alcohol off the breath). He'd roped in a student who'd drunk with his friend, and was also from Yorkshire, to help with the driving and the furniture removal.

Some were for cappucino and freshly ground filter - others felt that if it was all hot water and powder anyway, you might as well make your own with a kettle and a mug. But he was getting out of here, and didn't care. His mind was full of the mediaeval concept of âventiure - he considered that 'errant' meant wandering, and saw in a flash how attractive the ideal must have been: you just ramble about the highways and by-ways, stopping where you feel like it, until somebody asks for your help - no one will refuse to put you up, if you ask nicely (unless they're a real villain), so it shouldn't be too uncomfortable, even in winter. He was also tickled by the reversal: rescuing a man in distress. And by the notion that he was actually intervening in reality for once, to change something.

The journey had that hopefulness all journeys have, until you arrive in the back streets of Bradford. It was a spring day. The motorway-repairing season hadn't started. The cab was high. You could pretend you were going nowhere in particular. A knight-errant just erring. (Bloody etymology!) To be doing something that you approved of!

'Oh, this I have read, and this I have heard, and this was noised abroad - And this I have got from a Belgian book, on the word of a dead French lord ---'

'Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have seen - good lack! What is it that ye have done?'

Well, I drove up to the North Countree, to rescue my friend from a Fate Worse Than Marriage, and I didn't wait for The Meeting to end either, because I Asserted Myself and Made My Wants Known and Wasn't Subservient, and Acknowledged the Importance of My Own Needs, and didn't just Go Along With Things because The Institution Seemed More Important. So there!

And the Totally Authentic Ironmonger, in his greasy brown overall, seemed to join in with the game and lent them the whole string of fifty-seven mortice keys to try, because the friend's wife had changed the locks, and they got in with the fifty-fifth (net-curtains twitching up and down the road), and actually got loaded up and away before the neighbours who liked her could ring her up at work and get her home to sort things out (but that was only because she was doing relief work in Dewsbury, otherwise there'd have been hell to pay).

And they went and had one to celebrate (but only one, because of his friend's bladder and their licences) and they had a curry, and they drove home and they unloaded the van, and they saw that it was good, and their bums burnt from the curry for three days afterwards, because that's the way they make 'em in Bradford. And it was a very strange thing for him to see someone's whole little private world being taken down and stuffed into a van and brought out again, especially when it had college photographs in it, and Lord of the Rings posters (though come to think of it, one of the Masters of Trinity had looked very like Gollum), and a Sergeant Pepper cover, and Bridge Over Troubled Water, and all kinds of obsessional bric-à-brac that obviously meant something. His reactions worried him. It seemed that his friendship was not really all-accepting, because the intellectual snob had woken up and said, 'Not in my house! Not on my walls! Teenage crap!' And he wondered if he should be non-judgemental - or if that was just shirking his responsibility.

But wotthehell! toujours gai, archie, and it was spring! They'd got away with it! Who dares, wins! Who dares, drinks! Who dares, sins! Who drinks, pays!

And it really was spring. Spring Awakening! (Now there was a play the little dears never got on top of, oops, sorry, pardon, mind my innuendo! They all read it in English, and didn't understand the language or the sexual allusions - they just about managed the plot. Each year he taught the sexual side of it more aggressively, more openly, and each year he knew less and less what they made of it. Mincemeat, to judge by the essays).

Over the hill! The year was over the hill! Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yea, to the very end. Miserable Christina Rosetti! From now on it's all downhill! (Downhill all the way. Many years before, a student had drawn a little graph of his own life. The line rose steeply to a high point at the age of nine, and then sloped gently off towards death in the distance. He could never quite get that out of his head.) After this load of essays, only one more load of essays, after the end of this term, only one more term, and even then only four or five weeks of actual teaching, and God-given Bank Holidays to ruin the Monday timetable. Exams - of course there are exams - set in the middle of the courses on all the wrong premisses, and so far back that he couldn't remember what the questions were, quite unalterable now, argued over, picked over, numbered, re-numbered, weighed and divided by the number you first thought of - double quotes inside single quotes - capitals, underlining, italics (not on the daisywheel), - one year, somebody left a sheet under the cover of the photocopier by mistake and they had to re-do the paper. And always this terrible mystique, the Craftsman's Mystery of 'To what extent...' 'To what degree...' 'How far could one say that' 'Is it meaningful to...' - and he never knew of anyone who'd actually written down 'yes' or 'no' or 'sometimes' or 'it depends' and a full-stop, and a nice neat rulered line across the page, and on to the next. Of course, you were attempting to guard against Total Recall (Dump in computer-speak), but it never worked. It reminded him of those jars of bits and bobs he had in his garage. He'd never had enough sense of order to sort out the stuff before it went in (as Nietzsche said: The Will to the System is the Lack of Integrity), and you couldn't see properly from the outside, so you tipped out the contents all over a piece of newspaper, riffled through till you found what you wanted, made a funnel of the paper and tipped the rest back into the jar. The problem with essays like that was tipping them back in the jar afterwards. And The Magic Mountain wasn't a pretty sight with its constituent parts spread out all over a piece of Die Zeit.

And at home, upstairs, there was a timewarp. He wasn't smoking grass, thank goodness, and he'd never been one for the garlands of flowers and the little cow-bell round the neck (what he associated with the word bell was a brand of whisky), so it wasn't as bad as it might have been. But he was a rock, he was an island, and he didn't cry and he didn't feel pain, and you kept on expecting to hear England winning the World Cup (he still had to warn his students to avoid the subject in German bars). Rudi Dutschke was going to be shot again (though that didn't worry his friend, who, he now realised, had developed a strange kind of radical fascism based on the divine right of Yorkshire to rule the world by virtue of the quality of its public houses and Richard III's legitimate claim to the English throne - Richard himself, he assumed, was actually alive and well and living in Joshua Tetley's cellars in Leeds.

He was beginning to feel like the Sorcerer's Apprentice - what had he loosed on the unsuspecting Southron folk? What had he brought back with him from the lands of fable and magic that lay in his past? Some kind of destructive force, some dragon that must be laid? Or just a Northern piss-artist who'd pretty soon settle down into a Southern version of the same, with others of his kind?

He'd thought, when he started on the whole adventure (and it still seemed an adventure, compared with his life at the university - the internal adventures of the academic had never really been enough) that it was a matter of taking the trip in the time-machine back to the point where things began to go wrong; he knew there were dangers, he'd read his science fiction, you could tread on a butterfly and change everything - but here you didn't need to travel back - the time was all around you, just a little shove, and he'd take a different course, only the slightest nudge, and it wouldn't scream TILT TILT TILT at you in big red letters. Score invalid. He needed more than a little nudge. He needed a boot up the backside. He needed a clip on the ear. He needed a clout round the head. So he tried gentle persuasion.

First of all, a new job. Perhaps to do with wine? Fine, but they wanted him to go and do his management training in Paris. It wasn't losing caste if he crossed the Dark Water - it was some horror of the French language. He almost thought of impersonating his friend and taking up the job offer himself - but reflected that he had neither the head nor the palate for it. He tried to enthuse over applications and commiserate over rejections, and wondered more and more why his friend clung to the Uncivil Service that was treating him so badly - did he want that kind of treatment? Did he disapprove of himself to that extent? To what degree? How far may one say? In what respects was it meaningful? Discuss, with appropriate examples. Give a highly critical account.

It was clearly time to run away. He used his research as an excuse for some of it, his parents as an excuse for the rest. No research in the summer, only the roof. He saw those friends in Europe that he always saw, sipped their lives for a day or two, sat in the libraries and wondered who really cared about a sacred oath and what it meant, and whether that was a better subject for research. Nietzsche, as usual, had anticipated him: he'd noticed how criticisms in academic circles never elicited a reaction, but only a counter-critique - never a real response in reality, but only a relativising discussion on an academic level: an analysis which presented everything as an ism or an ology. He sat in the libraries, and fantasized about being a totally authentic German chieftain, with a totally authentic German tribe, and a totally authentic friend. And then he caught the plane back again, with its totally authentic stainless steel cutlery (nothing plastic about Lufthansa) into inauthentic Heathrow and authentic disaster.

When you think about the Good Life, and it's the image of the countryside that comes to you, you reflect on the quiet rhythm of the seasons, and you say to yourself: those poor people in towns, those poor people in offices, those poor people in the service industries and factories - they don't experience the slowly turning year, they don't watch the fields exude the first green mist of seedling corn, they don't see the clouds of apple blossom, they don't see the stalks grow tall and burnished by the sun, or mow the hay, or gather in the barley, or plough the stubble into the fine brown tilth that will accept the new seed.

But there's a rhythm everywhere, and it doesn't necessarily console you to know that you're part of a great impersonal process. It may make you feel less guilty sometimes about your impotence or inactivity, but it doesn't help you to fight it on those occasions where you could.

The University was exhaling. It was ebb-tide. Examination term. Down to the open sea at last. Everything began happening very fast, just now. Couples were created overnight - passionately, devotedly - only you knew from earlier years that they didn't stay together after graduation. Confidences were imparted - deep, injured secrets never told before; it was like the night before a battle, the last confessional. Parties, casual drinks in pubs, let's ask so and so - before, you'd waited till they'd gone before you suggested going for a bevvy, because they didn't really belong with your crowd - but now you found they did - for a time, anyway. Everyone in the same boat, and the boat being pushed out.

He found it invigorating and exciting. It had the feel of conferences and summer-courses, where you don't have to be cautious about who you make friends with, for fear you'll be stuck with them forever. He had memories of summer-courses from way back - never so good again, he thought, never so good again - so let's have the vicarious feel of it from the young; after all, what other benefits can they bring me, apart from this employment which I'm not even sure I want.

Everything was accelerated. It reminded him of acting in amateur dramatics, when you've got to devote your whole life for a few days to a single purpose, otherwise it won't come off. The only time you ever have that marvellous consciousness of actually serving an aim. War didn't do it - it lasted too long - there was too much boredom, too much waiting around, too little sense that it all depended on you. But plays - they were different; and exams, too. You offered revision classes, and they turned up because they wanted to, because they felt they needed to - not just to impress you, not just to be goody-goodies, not just so as to feel they were getting value for money, or giving value for money for their LEA grant, but because they'd tried doing the learning on their own and they found they wanted some help or some advice. And that was when the learning was worthwhile, and that was when the teaching was worthwhile, and that was when you wondered why you bothered with the rest of the year, or why the rest of the year couldn't somehow be the same.

Of course, it was artificial. Take away the exams and it would all be the same as before; and more and more the exams were being taken away: continuous assessment - write an essay here, write an essay there, they'll all be marked sometime. The pressure was spread, and the students could feel that all the work they did was worthwhile, because they could use it all; but that wasn't the point. The point was not the knowledge, the point was not the thoughts. The point was the ability to think - so it didn't matter that there wasn't a question on such and such, because the thinking you'd done for such-and-such had toned up your mind to deal with so-and-so (well, that was the theory - and the teachers had all got where they were through this system, so, whilst they were slowly trying to change it, they unfortunately still believed in it, and hadn't really experienced any other.)

And that probably explained the dismissive and offhand nature of their behaviour. At no other time was their intellectual snobbery quite so manifest. Now their suspicions were wholly proven. Fool, idiot, incompetent, cretin: that was their vocabulary now. They had the evidence. The students had managed to fool them in their essays, by dint of hard work and midniight oil; now the truth stood revealed in the weals of red ball-pen across their artless scripts. It was like one of those terribly violent primitive customs - killing the wren, for instance, or that business with the donkey in Spain - where the whole community joins in, with atavistic bloodlust that overcomes superficial civilisation and unites the classes, the educated and the uneducated, in primal hunting instinct and excitement. Two marks off here, and two marks off there, and here's a howler that I found, and I want to fail this whole paper, do you agree? Well, if the marks won't let me, we'll have to change the marks. They're stupid, they deserve to fail - they were lucky to find that question, I know, I taught them - just let me second-mark it, I'll bring it down.

Of all the ghastlinesses attributable to the Pre-Rapahelite Brotherhood, Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat must be the worst. Beside it, a hundred thousand tasteless church windows pale into stained insignificance. To think that he actually went to the Dead Sea to draw and paint those purple-headed mountains from the life! And the goat, quite obviously, from the death, because it has the same purple on it as the mountains, and a butcher's look in its large staring yellow eyes. Our horror at Victorian taste is no more than ourselves choosing a scapegoat for our horror at our own lack of taste. And the markers mark themselves when they sneer and scorn and condemn - because they are the ones who failed to teach the students who failed to learn who went to the seminars and smelled the rat that lay in the theory of the lecturer who taught in the nine-foot-nine cube that Basil Spence built. They whip themselves, and never know it. And praise the students that learn without needing the teaching they cannot give.

That, and depression about the pointlessness of the whole exercise. They run away from the notion that education should be vocational and limiting - and then they see that it hasn't been liberal either: it's got all the methods of the Craftsmen's Guilds, but the Craft isn't one worth learning, and can't be taught that way in any case. Caught up in contradictions, they decry the system they apply. And then they talk about 'Two one minds' and 'Two two minds' and 'Genuine borderlines'.

What depressed him most was the waste of time and the waste of effort. And when (as happened) a student did better than expected and got a first, and you thought you ought to persuade them to do research, he persuaded with the best (it authenticated himself, his decision of twenty years ago became valid again) - but he had this uncomfortable sense that he was being Marlowe's Mephistophilis, that he was a devil who wanted company in damnation, and good company at that. His happiness was to know others shared his misery.

He didn't reflect on it that much, though: the pace was too hot. Drinks. Parties. Last chance to see him. Last chance to see her. Last chance to see them. Last, last, last. He stood at the Finalists' Party, making the usual conversation like a careers interviewer, watching his Professor and the Reader talking to each other for an hour about committees and research grants and the nasty divorce of a mutual friend in Germany, while the students flitted round, and said goodbye, and he said, 'Have a nice life' and they were gone.

Gradually, the pace slowed. The clockwork was running down. He spent more time at home, and noticed how hollow-eyed and hunted his friend was looking. He didn't know how to talk to him. They went drinking, and he couldn't stand the pace. The conversation became fragmented. It was in a language he couldn't understand, with concepts that were totally private. It was full of revenge under a mantle of the past. His friend didn't talk about emotions, now; he didn't talk about philosophy (not even Nietzsche, and taking the whip to women); he talked about what he'd drunk and what he was going to drink, and who he was going to see in which pub. He still knew the details, both before and after, which was something.

One day, he came back home between meetings and found his friend asleep on the doorstep, having been too far gone to get his key into the door. He stepped over him, on the way in and on the way out. Another time, he found him asleep on the loo, with the door locked. He pissed in the garden and went back to the university. That night, he tried talking: how something had to be done, how it wasn't healthy, how he felt responsible for bringing him down here, and perhaps it hadn't been a good idea. I can take my drink, the friend said. I can take it. They can dish it out, and I can take it.

The friend began seeing a student, a Finalist (not one of his). They went drinking together. She seemed to be sorry for him. He hoped it would last. He knew it wouldn't. It was just an effect of acceleration.

One morning he woke up and thought someone was playing an enormous glockenspiel very slowly outside his house. One after another, metallic bell-like notes came to him. He heard his friend fling open the window and bellow, 'Fuck off, you noisy bastards!' with that flat Northern 'a'. Then he remembered: the scaffolding for the roof. They were putting it up while he had his breakfast, and his friend announced that he was going to go on a pub crawl, though he didn't quite know yet which pubs he'd be crawling around in.

It was the morning of the Faculty Board Exams Results Meeting. He'd been to the House of Lords once, with a school party (on the way back, the Head Boy had nearly knocked someone off a bicycle by throwing an unwanted sandwich out of the coach window) and had been appalled by the sight of democracy in action. Things that 'went through on the nod' obviously did so because the nodders were asleep; the ritual ran, in a sing-song voice, 'Those in favour say content, those against say not content, the contents have it' - but the commas are editorial, put in for the sake of clarity, and not in the original at all.

Faculty Board always reminded him of that experience. He also always felt he was taking part in a play where everyone else knew their part except him. Whenever he watched the performance, he wondered how they could take themselves so seriously. He had the analogy to hand: a madman who merely mimes banging his head on the cell-walls, because he fears it may be only his delusion that they're padded. That was why they always said 'Faculty' when they meant 'me' or 'my department' or 'any thinking person' or 'the whole world'. It was an exercise in the destruction of the individual. Mark you, he'd never been to Senate, but he'd learnt enough of Roman history to have images of the Gauls breaking in and pulling the dear old gentlemen about by the beards, or Caligula appointing his racehorse Professor of Aeronautical Engineering. It seemed strange that one was expected to take seriously a body with such a history bound up with its name. No wonder the Centre (God is a circle, whose Centre is everywhere and whose periphery is nowhere) had closed down Classics (and Theology, too, if you thought about the bit in brackets). Not ruthlessly, but inevitably; and the Faculty had 'regretted' and even 'censured', but couldn't do anything. Except, of course, wash each other's dirty exam scripts in public. Most of the meetings were pointless affairs, unless there was some mischief afoot (the Conspiracy Theory of History - History is always up to some conspiracy) and you had to turn up to vote against having your department abolished and the space turned into a car park. The exam results meeting was one of the manifestations of democracy and prurience simultaneously.

On the democratic side, it was designed to make sure that nobody fiddled anything without at least having prepared a good cover story (destroy the original notes - no electrostatic testing). Lost papers, misinformation, allowances made for good students, turning the screw on bad ones, it was all here, open and above board.

Also exposed were the petty wiles and deceits of the students themselves in their efforts to persuade the Pantheon of Academe to give them One More Chance. You know the kind of thing: my budgie died, my car broke down, I had the wrong shoes on, I've been very upset by the Welsh Rugby Tour (though there were some academics who'd have been very understanding on that one).

Whilst the Departments produced their Maxima culpas in turn, he sat writing notes for a grand story all about the university. It was to be called A View of the Park and set in one of those Civic Universities of the old style, with a grand City park in front of them; and a little boy grows up there, and plays in the park, and always wants to have a view of it, but his family's too poor to move into one of the fine houses that overlooks it; so he goes to the local university and studies something or other (but his department is on the wrong side) and then he goes away and goes into business, and then he comes back into the academic world, and then he visits his home town, and he sees that the university has bought all the houses that front on the park, and it's knocking them down to build a new administration block, with a fine view over the park, and then, by one back door and golf-club and another, he hears that the University wants rid of its VC, who's standing in the way of some grandiose scheme, and before you can say Jack Robinson he's on the blower presenting his credentials to whichever creep in the Admin is chairman of the Selection Committee (they wouldn't trust academics with really important matters like that), and agreeing, sight unseen, to whatever it is that he has to authorise, because he wants that office with the view over the park; and then he gets the job, and then he's installed, and for the whole of the summer he looks at the park, and then, come autumn, he notices these people putting in little white marker poles, and then they come with JCBs and start digging up the grass and rooting up the trees and cutting them into logs with chain-saws (only he's all right, because his office is the only one with double glazing) and it turns out the university needs the green space for car-parking, because it's become a European Centre of Excellence, and that was the scheme he okayed. And he moves his office to the other side of the building, where it faces a blank brick wall that got a Civic Guild Award in 1962 for the boldness of its conception.

He looked at his colleagues - he felt he ought to, once a year. Individually, not en masse. That was the way the students got treated, and it wasn't really right. How did you take them? As individuals, with families and mortgages? Blameless, no doubt. Better than average. But then, they should be. They had the insight, they had the enlightenment. As teachers, as researchers, as professionals? He found it hard to judge. They produced, most of them, but he never knew how much they cared about what they did. Were they secretly, like him, emotional cripples? Feeling they should do these things, but being far from passionately involved, except in the notion of doing research, in the principle of being free to waste your time and someone else's money? If you really wanted the money, how long did it take to put the paperwork together? And how much time did that leave to do the actual research?

At primary school, he had mimed to the recorder - he reckoned his asthma had not been helped by having to hold his breath so he didn't blow a wrong note. He wondered how many others in the group were miming - he thought he could tell in a couple of cases, but he wasn't sure. Of course, you were never open and honest about such things - it was all rather like pre-Wolfenden homosexuality. You might convey that you had your doubts about your proclivity to do research, at least 'of certain kinds', but the minute you said that you found it a waste of time they were down on you for selling the profession short, traitor to the cause, we'd be no better than the polys... And you couldn't be enthusiastic either; research was simply something that the well-bred English academic didn't talk about. Like sex, it was assumed that you did it, behind closed doors, in an appropriate way, with the usual results ('and this is your little article, is it? how nice!') and that was that. Any emotion was naive. And research was about being superior, not naive. Knowledge was power. And power was exclusive, not inclusive. Knowledge was designed to isolate, not to be shared. Except among the experts. The initiates. The members of the club. Woe to the popularisers! Yea, and to the writers of paperbacks!

He considered going through them, one by one, writing down what he knew about them, what he thought about them, what they looked like. It seemed, when he contemplated it, to be a pointless exercise. As individuals they could be avoided, explained, excused: as a whole class, they stood condemned. Besides, the meeting was over, the litany of students' names had been read, the Prize Committee formed. He shuffled into the light, head averted to avoid the questions about the summer and the research.

Outside his house there was a car he didn't know. The builders' lorry had disappeared with the builders in it. The scaffolding stood skeletally, like a dry run for the Beaubourg. Nothing had been done. In the hall there was a suitcase with which he was unfamiliar. The girl his friend had been drinking with flitted by, saying 'Hi'. She was in a dressing-gown. His friend was still being a rock and an island. He went back to his office for some peace.

Of course, he said, I should be happy for him. Of course, he said, I should be happy for me, because maybe he will now push off out of my house and out of my life, because we don't mean anything to each other any more except old obligations which are out of date like a packet of soggy biscuits, and it's crazy and romantic to imagine that there's anything else. And if I'd been a proper friend, I'd have tried to stop him drinking, except the drinking was always part of the friendship, and I've never had the courage to think I know better about anything at all except German grammar and there aren't too many emotional problems that have to do with irregular strong verbs. And why am I going to let him just move this girl in without saying anything? Because I am too wimpish to do otherwise and because I basically disapprove of authoritarianism and because I am scared of conflict and because I don't want people to think of me as a spoilsport, even if I am. And because I always suppress my own wishes in favour of other people's, because I see through myself and don't think other people see through themselves, so that they must be right and I must be wrong.

He sat in his office whilst the light lengthened, till he knew they must be out drinking again, and then he went home. This time he was lucky. The next night he was luckier still. He went to the ballet.

It was a Stravinsky triple bill. In the middle, The Rite of Spring, the Nureyev version, with that terrible Tiller girl section when the young men do entrechats and try and stamp their feet like brute males - only they're wearing ballet pumps, and it sounds like somebody trying to play a piano without opening the lid. He remembered how anguished he'd been by the music the first few times he heard it - and now - how blasé he'd become, how ready to criticise. The last ballet was Apollo: sublimity itself, the triumph of art and music over life, as the four dancers suggested all creation with their bodies, and the pure strings shaped the melodies around their elegance.

And yet it was Petrushka that made the strongest impact. The programme had an interview with a dancer, who made you feel what it was like to be in the middle of it all - to be that poor little puppet, who's hopelessly, gracelessly, sexually in love with the prim ballerina, who, in her turn, surrenders to the big bold Moor with the scimitar, who kills Petrushka - except that the puppet-master mocks the audience by showing them that Petrushka's only a puppet, who can't bleed and can't die - except again, that you see his ghost and hear his little wailing theme at the very end. The dancer described his first entry - hanging, like somebody crucified, in his little display box, ready for the start of the music and the jerky little exhausting dance the puppet master makes them all do - 'your stomach going like a tumble-drier' - and then, while the drum rolls, an instant change of scene to the inside of Petrushka's little box, and the giant hand of the puppet-master flings him ten feet across the stage to land in a heap by the audience. And as if that weren't enough, in his rage and his anguish he thrusts his fist through the black wall of the box - and what does he see? Actually, two sweating stage-hands, trying to hold the scenery together - but what Petrushka sees is nothing - nothingness - the darkness outside - and no escape - and then the tragedy that he plays out again and again starts once more.

You punch something in rage, and your fist goes right through - into the void, into the vacant, into the vacation. You want to get out of your situation, and there's nothing to get out into - there is no outside. He thought about it all the way home.

He heard her crying when he got inside the door. She was in the kitchen. Her face was puffy. She told him all about it. He went upstairs. There was a slit in one of the door panels where the point of the knife had come through, but the knife had been taken out again. All he could hear was loud, regular, stertorous breathing. He rattled the door-handle, but quietly, just for form's sake. Nothing moved. The breathing went on. He went downstairs. He walked her home - it seemed more human than getting a taxi. He kissed her goodnight.

He didn't speak to his friend about it. It was the rage. It was the drink. He didn't want to be a bridge over troubled water. Even though he knew he was laying himself down to be walked on. He made sure he was out early and back middling late. He bought ear-plugs. The girl gave him a very guilty kind of look when she reappeared a week later, one morning, in a dressing-gown. He rang the builders and asked what the hell - wondered if they could see their way clear to--- They fobbed him off as usual, but hoped that today...

Today was graduation. A mediaeval ceremony which indicated that learning was contagious rather than infectious, by letting the graduand place his or her hands between those of the Chancellor (who, as far as he could remember, had got a Third in the University of Life - which was not one of those new colleges in West Africa, pronounced Lifé) in order to acquire the letters after the name and the letters through the door from the alumni association. (He always assumed an alumnus was a robot made of aluminium, stamped Phi Beta Kappa on the bottom and Made in USA in its navel.) He put on his fancy dress (its one outing a year) and wondered if anyone would ever let him put his hood to its rightful purpose - for the head, to wrap himself up in it and sleep out the ceremony - especially the platitudes before the people were doctored for being very splendid people. Best value in that direction had been the Russian conductor; being a cultivated European, he assumed that the language of ceremonies would be Latin, and actually pronounced a lengthy speech in that tongue (decem minutae, as I live and breathe) that rather shook the assembled company since it was the same year they abolished Classics (Russian had gone much earlier).

He clapped religiously, basing the strength and length of the applause on how pretty the girls were - the Arts Faculty was mostly female, and some of them seemed to be giving the Chancellor their phone number in those whispered exchanges. He tried lip-reading, to see if they really were saying 'Ooh, you are awful - but I like you!', but their hair was mostly too long for him to see clearly.

Outside, he wandered towards the Departmental drinks, while the students posed with their parents in their mediaeval finery. He found it hard to take the gap between the symbol and the reality. What were they ever going to do with their gowns and their hoods and their mortar-boards? Costume a revival of Salad Days on the occasion of the Grand Reunion? Was his whole trouble to do with symbolism, and how it never meshed with reality? There was a little piece by Kafka - the sort of thing he wished he had in the bottom drawer of his own filing cabinet, but then, if you didn't have Kafka's father or Kafka's disease, maybe you weren't entitled to his literary genius - and in this piece (it was a dialogue) there was one person complaining about all this symbolic religious stuff where people say 'cross over' and 'go to the other side' and everything will be different, and he was saying this was all a load of tosh, because crossing a street or crossing a bridge didn't change anything, and that was all you could really do in the way of 'going to the other side', and the other person said, 'What you have to do is take it literally, and then you will become the symbol'. 'Big deal,' said the first one, 'I bet what you've just said is a symbol.' 'Too right. You've won your bet.' 'Oh yeah - but only symbolically.' 'Oh no. You've won your bet in reality - symbolically, you've lost.' He'd always felt Kafka would have been great at late-night alternative cabaret - a sort of Central European Lennie Bruce - and this one struck him as a show-stopper. He'd known it since he was sixteen, and never a year went by without him finding somewhere to slip it in when he was teaching. The truth was, that if you perceived the symbolism intellectually, instead of responding to it instinctively, then you were distanced from it and shut out from the magical effects of identification with it. But of course, just knowing that didn't help you to actually do it right. On the contrary. And that was why he thought of himself as the Caped Crusader when he put on his gown, and didn't object to being called Batman.

With the years, he found graduation an increasingly melancholy affair: the parents seemed less concerned to meet him, and he was less concerned to meet them. As the students graduated and went off to their new lives, he had the sense that they were using him as a human ladder, with his ribs as rungs, planting one foot in his mouth and another on the top of his head, so that they could climb free of the pit into which their constant pressure thrust him deeper and deeper, year after year, graduation after graduation.

At last, they all cleared off to their lunches, leaving the academics to sweep up the crisps and wash the glasses, the proper employment for people in higher education, teaches them what real life's all about (at the going rate he had once calculated that the glass-washing must have cost around a hundred and fifty quid, and that was without the washing-up liquid).

And then, he went home - via the shops. He was in the greengrocers when he heard a whisper behind him. It was the girl. Despite the warmth of the day, she had a scarf round her neck. He couldn't understand what she was saying. She put her mouth to his ear. 'He tried to strangle me.' He put the bananas down and took her arm and led her out of the shop. 'Let's go to the police,' he said. 'It's got to be stopped.' She explained: how they'd all been out drinking, and then gone back home, and there'd been a quarrel, with this terrible smashing noise all the time, and then his hands were round her throat, and then his friends from the pub were dragging him off. As she told him, they were walking towards the police station. He waited for her. It was a lengthy business - medical examination. They told her she was very lucky. She might have had retinal damage - maybe even brain damage. They advised her to proceed with charges - she said she only wanted to show him that she meant business - just have him in for interview, so he knew to leave her alone. They said, that was a matter for her. They'd be prepared to take him in for questioning. He took her back to her house; her friends were there, and they said they'd look after her. He went back to the police. They said they'd send a man along with him. He said he hoped he could get into the house.

It was late in the day by now. The drink from graduation had long since worn off. One of those endless summer days you get impatient with, because it refuses to end. He noticed there was a skip outside the house, and mess around his front door. His key turned in the lock and he went in, asking the plain-clothes policeman to wait outside. He climbed the stairs going cold all over. His respiration increased. His diaphragm stiffened. He could hear his friend snoring. He knocked on the door - loudly. The noise continued. He opened the door and went in, but didn't bother to turn on the light. He shook his friend until the eyes became visible in their pouches of flesh. Then he let him fall back into his chair, the eyes still open, wary, not comprehending, the tongue licking the dry and parted lips.

Without looking away from his friend, he slipped off his shoes and got up on the bed. It was unmade and rather rumpled, and he had to take care not to catch his feet in the bedclothes and trip. He balanced himself carefully, looked at where the light fitting was and made some calculations. He swung his fist once, and the plaster cracked. He swung it twice, and enough came away to show the laths. He put his fingers between them and pulled, swinging with his whole weight. A couple came away, and then a couple more. He put his other hand up and enlarged the hole. He could see the sky through it now, and what he thought must be the Evening Star. Find out about astronomy, he thought, this summer. Or next. He looked down at his friend.

'I have no roof over my head,' he said. 'Get out.'

Mike Rogers Milborne St Andrew 18/19 viii 91