THE WALL IS NOT COMING DOWN HERE. KILLAGRAD 85

You could hardly blame any kid who grew up in Cambridge for redesigning himself as a class warrior. Imagine being surrounded your whole life through by all those floppy-haired Fabians and baseball-capped Brians with money and complexions and money and height and money and looks and money and books and money and money. Wankers.

Wank-us! The class warriors shouted at you in football crowd chorus. Wank-uss! With accompanying hand gestures.

Killagrad 85. The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology should restore that faded lettering and treasure it as their most prized acquisition, an alfresco exhibit saying more than all their collections of plinthed Celtic amulets, spotlit Incan jars and Borneo nose bones.

A colleague in Oxford (how wonderful to be a graduate, a Junior Bye Fellow and to be able to use words like 'colleague') a colleague, yes a colleague, a Fellow Historian, told me about a photograph he saw on show in a gallery there. It was really two photographs, side by side, of two different bottle-banks, for the recycling of glass. The picture on the left was taken in Cowley, on the outskirts of the town, near the car factory. This bottle-bank was, as most are I guess, built in three sections, colour-coded to represent the three varieties of glass destined for each bin. There was a section painted white for clear glass, a green section for green and, three times the width of the other two, a brown section. The photograph next to it, which at first glance you thought was identical, showed another bottle-bank, but taken this time in the centre of Oxford, the university quarter. After a puzzled look, the difference hit you. A white

section, a brown section and, get this, three times the width of the other two, a green section. What else do you need to know about the world? They should screen that photograph of those two bottle-banks at closedown while the national anthem plays.

Not that I'm from a generation that gets angry at social injustice, everyone knows our lot don't care. I mean bloody hell, it's get-a-job city here and the devil take the wimp-most. Besides, I'm a historian. A historian, me. An historian if you please.

I sat up, folded my arms and freewheeled past the University Press humming an Oily-Moily number.

I'll never be a woman I'll never he you

I must have lost count of how many bicycles I'd been through in the last seven years. This model, as it happened, was balanced enough to allow me to take my hands from the handlebars, which is a waycool thing I like to do.

Bicycle theft at Cambridge is like car-radio theft in London or handbag snatching in Florence: which is to say en-bloody-demic. Every bike has a number elegantly and uselessly painted on its rear mudguard. There was even a time, which ought to have been humiliating for the town, when they tried a Scheme. God save us from all Schemes, yeah? The town fathers bought thousands of bicycles, sprayed them green and left them in little bike-parks all over the city. The idea was that you hopped on one, got to where you wanted to be and then left it on the street for the next user. Such a cute idea, so William Morris, so Utopian, so dumb.

Reader, you will be amazed to hear, astonished you will be, thunderstruck to learn, that within a week all the green bicycles had disappeared. Every single one. There was something so cute and trusting and hopeful and noble and aaaah! in the Scheme that the city ended up prouder, not humbler, for the deal. We giggled. And, when the council announced a new improved Scheme, we rolled over on the ground howling with laughter, begging them between gasps to stop.

Trouble is, you can't blade in Cambridge, too many cobbles. There's a sad little In-Line Skating Soc and a Quad Soc which tries to pretend that Midsummer Common is Central Park, but it won't wash, kids. Bikes it has to be and mountain bikes - in the flattest region of Britain, where a dog-turd excites the attentions of the Mountaineering Soc - they won't wash either.

Cambridge councillors love the word 'park'. It is the one thing you can't actually do in the town, so they use the word everywhere. Cambridge was just about the first place ever to offer Park 'n' Ride buses. It boasts a Science Park, Business Parks and of course the late lamented Bike Parks. I shouldn't wonder if by the turn of the century we have Sex Parks and Internet Parks and Shop Parks and perhaps, as a wild throw, Park Parks with swings and slides.

You can't park in Cambridge for a number of reasons. It is a small medieval town, whose street widths are delimited by the lines of colleges facing each other, resolute and immovable as a chain of mountains. It becomes, in vacation months, stuffed with tourists, foreign students and conventioneers. Above all, it is the capital city of the Fens, the only serious shopping centre for hundreds of thousands from Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire,

Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Norfolk, poor sods. In May however, in May, Cambridge belongs to the undergraduacy, to all the young dudes in their little scrubby goatees and neat sideburns. The colleges close their gates and one word rises above the centre of town, and swells to bursting like a huge water-filled balloon.

Revision.

Cambridge m May is Revision Park. The river and lawns, libraries, courts and corridors bloom with colourful young buds busting their brains over books. Panic, real panic, of a kind they never knew until the 1980s, washes over the third years like a tide. Examinations matter. The class of degree counts.

Unless, like me, you did your final exams years ago, swotted like a specky, got a First, have completed your doctoral thesis and are now free.

Free! I shouted to myself.

Fur-reee! answered the coasting bike and the buildings whip-panning by.

God, I loved myself that day.

Enjoy the itch and bruise of your feet on the pedals. What the heckety have you got to be down about? How many, like you, can stand up and call themselves free?

Free of Jane too. Still not quite sure what I felt about that. I mean, I have to admit she was, as it happens, my first ever real girlfriend. I was never like, one of the great and groovy studmuffins of the world as a student because ... well, there's no getting round it ... I'm shy. I find it hard to meet people's eyes. As my mother used to say of me (and in front of me) 'he blushes in company you know'. That helped, obviously.

I was only seventeen when I started at Uni, and being baby-faced and blushy and not confident with anybody, let alone girls, I kind of kept myself to myself. I didn't have school friends already there because I went to a state school that had never sent anyone to Cambridge before and I was crap at sports and journalism and acting and all the things that get you noticed. Crap at them because they get you noticed, I suppose. No, let's be honest, crap at them because I was crap at them. So Jane was ... well, she was my life.

But now, way-hey! If I could complete a doctorate in four years and personally recaffeinate Safeway's natural decaff, I didn't need anyone.

Every Fiona and Frances frowning over her Flaubert looked different to the new, free me as I freewheeled and freely dismounted at the gates of St Matthew's and wheeled the freely ticking 4857M into the lodge, feeling free.

Making News

We Germans

Alois pushed his bicycle through the gates and into the lodge.

'Grufi Gott!'

Klingermann's cheeriness on these inspection visits always irritated him. The man was supposed to be nervous.

'Gott,' he mumbled, somewhere between a greeting and an oath.

'All quiet this morning. Herr Sammer sent a message on the telephone machine to say he couldn't come in today. A summer cold.'

'Well, it wouldn't be a winter cold in July, would it, boy?'

'No, sir!' twinkled Klingermann, taking this to be a good joke, which irritated Alois more. And this fear of the telephone, calling it Das Telefon Ding, as though it were not the Future, but some demonic apparatus sent to perplex. Peasant attitude. Peasant attitudes were what held this country back.

Alois walked coldly past Klingermann, sat at the desk, took a newspaper and a bottle of schnapps from his knapsack and settled down to read.

'I beg pardon, sir?' said Klingermann.

Alois ignored him and threw the paper aside. He had only barked the one word scheijid He took a good pull of schnapps and gazed out of the window across the border poles and into Bavaria, into Germany, he begged its fucking pardon. Germany, where in Mannheim even now they were perfecting horseless transportation. Where they were building telephone networks to stretch across the nation and where that swine Bismarck was going to get what was coming to him.

'We Germans fear God and nothing else in the world,' the Old Pig had blustered in the Reichstag, expecting the Russians and French to pee in their pants at the might of his fancy Triple Alliance. 'We Germans!' What the hell was that supposed to mean? Conniving bastard, with his Danish wars and his you-can't-join-in tongue stuck out at Austria. 'We Germans' were only what the Old Pig decided. Prussians. Shit-faced junkers. They decided. Westphalians could be Germans, oh yes. Hessians, Hamburgers, Thuringians and Saxons could be Germans. Even fucking Bavarians could be Germans. But not Austrians. Oh no. They could slum it with the Czechs and the Slavs and the Magyars and the Serbs. I mean, wasn't it obvious, obvious even to an Arschloch like Bismarck, that the Austrians and the Germans had ... oh, what was the use? It didn't matter now, the Old Pig was going to get his.

Piss-faced Wilhelm had been dead for weeks now, the mourning was over and Friedrich-Wilhelm was on the throne. Friedrich-Wilhelm and Bismarck detested each other, ha-ha! Goodbye Iron Chancellor! Good shitting riddance, Old Pig. Your days are numbered.

A cart was moving towards them. Alois rose and straightened his tunic. He hoped it was a Bavarian and not a returning Austrian. A German. Whenever he came out to inspect a frontier post he loved to give Germans a hard time.

Making Ready

The pigeon-hole

Bill the Porter looked up from his window as I struggled in with the bike. I had suspected for a long time that he disapproved of me.

'Morning, Mr Young.'

'Not for long, Bill.'

He looked puzzled. 'Forecast's good.'

'Not "Mister" for long,' I said with a small blushing smile and held up the briefcase that housed the Meisterwerk. 'I've finished my thesis!'

'Ho,' said Bill and looked back down at his desk.

Too much to expect him to take pleasure in my triumph. Who will ever penetrate the embarrassment of the late twentieth-century servant-master relationship? Even to call it a servant-master relationship is going a bit far. The porters had their Sirs, Ma'ams and bowler hats and we had the foolish, hearty and sycophantic grins that tried to make up for it all. We would never know what they called us behind our backs. They, presumably, would never know what we actually got up to all day. Perhaps it was the porters' sons and daughters who wrote KiUqgrad 83 up on walls. Bill knew that some students stayed on, wrote doctoral theses and became fellows of the college, just as he knew that others flunked or went into the world to become rich, famous or

forgotten. Maybe he cared, maybe he didn't. Still, a bit more of Denholm Elliott in Trading Places and a bit less of Judith Anderson in Rebecca would have been welcome. I mean, you know? Yeah? Exactly.

'Of course,' I said weighing the briefcase in my hands with what I hoped was rueful modesty, 'it has to be examined first ..."

A grunt was all I got out of that, so I turned to see what the post had brought me. A thick yellow parcel was poking from my pigeon-hole. Cool! I pulled it out tenderly.

Printed on the address label was the logo of a German publishing house that specialised in history and academic texts. Seligmanns Verlag. I knew their name well from research, but how the hey could they know my name? I'd never written to them. It seemed very odd. I certainly hadn't ordered any books from them ... unless of course, somehow, by reputation they had heard of me and were writing to ask if I would consent to their publishing my Meisterwerk. Coo-oool!

For my thesis to be published was naturally the greatest, deepest, dearest, closest wish of my entire bosom. Seligmanns Verlag, woah, this was going to be a peach of a day.

Whole dreams, visions and imaginative constructions of the future were building inside my head like time-lapsed film of skyscraper construction; timbers and king-posts, girders and joists winking into place to a cheeky xylophone track. I was already there, in the fully furnished and fully let Michael Young Tower, accepting awards and professorships and signing elegantly produced Seligmanns Verlag copies of my thesis (I could even see the colour of the book, the typeface, the jacket illustration and the dignified

author photo and blurb) in the infinitesimal fraction of time between first seeing their label on the parcel and subsequently registering, with a squeal of brakes, a screeching of tyres and a billowing of airbags, the name of the actual addressee. Bit of a metaphorical shit heap there, but you know what I mean.

'Professor L H Zuckermann', it said. 'St Matthew's College, Cambridge. CB3 9BX.'

Oh. Not Michael Young MA, then.

I looked at the pigeon-hole immediately beneath mine. It was crammed to overflowing with letters, flyers and notes. Alphabetically the last, below even 'Young, Mr M D' came 'Zuckermann, Prof. I stared at the dymo label, hot with disappointment.

'Damn,' I said, trying to wedge the package into its proper home.

'Sir?'

'Oh, nothing. It's just that there's this thing in my pigeon-hole for Professor Zuckermann and his pigeonhole's full.'

'If you'll give it to me, sir, I'll see that he gets it.'

'It's all right, I'll take it to him. He might be able to help me with ... with an introduction to some publishers. Where's he hang out?'

'Hawthorn Tree Court, sir. 2A.'

'Who is he, in fact?' I asked, sliding the package into my briefcase. 'Never come across him.'

'He is Professor Zuckermann,' was the prim reply.

Officialdom. Teh.

Making Trouble

Diabolo

'But I am a German!'

'No, you are nothing. These papers tell me you are nothing. Nothing at all. You do not exist.'

'One day! They are out of date by one day, that is all.' 'Sir, this gentleman comes through all the time,' Klingermann gave Alois an uncomfortable look. 'He is ... he is well known to me. I can. vouch for him.'

'Oh, you can vouch for him, can you Klingermann? And why do you think the Imperial Government in Vienna spends a fortune every month on papers, stamps, passports and vouchers, then? For fun? What do you think a voucher is? It is a stamped piece of paper to be carried around at all times, legitimising the bearer. Or does this non-existent citizen of nowhere imagine that he will carry you around as his voucher?'

'But as a German, I am allowed free passage into Austria!'

'But you are not a German. You may have been, from these papers, a German yesterday. But today, today you are no one and nothing.'

'I have a living to make, a family to support!' 'I have a living to make, a family to support ... ?' 'I have a living to make, a family to support, sir.'

'So have Austrian carpenters a living to make and families to support, sir! For every one of these tawdry pieces of German crap that is bought here, bread is taken from the mouth of an Austrian carpenter.'

'Sir, with respect, they are not pieces of crap, they are toys, handmade with love and with care and, so far as I am aware, no one in Austria makes them at all, so I can hardly be said to be taking bread from the mouths of anybody.'

'But the money that is spent by poor, respectable Austrian parents on these corrupting German trinkets would otherwise be spent on healthy food grown by Austrian farmers. I see no reason why I, as the Emperor's accredited agent, should allow such a state of affairs. Do you?'

'Corrupting? Sir, they are the most innocent ...'

'What are they called? Hm? Tell me that. What are they called?'

'Sir?'

'What is their name?

'Diabolos, Sir. You must have seen them before ..."

'Diabolos, precisely. Diabolo is the Italian for devil. Satan. The Corrupter. And you call them innocent.1'

'But, Herr Zollbeamter, they are only called diabolo because they are ... they are fiendishly difficult. To master. A challenge, a test of co-ordination and balance. Fun!'

'Fun, Herr Tischlermeisteri You think it Jun that the youth of Austria should waste time that would otherwise be profitably spent in study or manly exercise on some satanic German toy?'

'Sir, perhaps ... perhaps you would like to try one

yourself? Here ... a gift. I think you will find them harmless and amusing.'

'Oh dear,' Alois licked his lips. 'Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. A bribe. How unfortunate. A bribe. Dear me. Klingermann! Form ki 171, plenty of sealing wax and an Imperial Stamp!'

Making Friends

The History Muse

Diabolical Thought Number One occurred to me on my way to Zuckermann's rooms.

I had passed through the Porter's Lodge and was walking around Old Court towards the archway that led to Hawthorn Tree. I might legitimately have been able to short cut across, not around the court, but I wasn't exactly sure that I was entitled to walk on the grass. The sign said 'Fellows Only' and I had never plucked up the nerve to ask if this included Junior Bye Fellows. I mean, it sounds so feeble to put the question. You know, as if you've just been made a prefect at school and you want to find out if that means you can wear trainers or call the teachers by their Christian names. Wet, or what?

Assert yourself, Michael, that's the thing. I mean, how much more has to happen to you before you'll believe that you've got as much right as anyone to inhabit the earth? A new attitude is needed: some dignity, some gravitas, something consonant with our new position in life ...

These amiable thoughts were interrupted by a rumbling, a tumbling and a squawking as I passed the open stone doorway of F staircase in the corner of the courtyard. A figure rushed out in a squeaking blur and

stamped across the lawn. He was carrying a pile of CDs, a plaster bust, three velvet cushions and a rolled-up poster. I knew him for Edward Edwards, Double Eddie, someone with even less right than me to walk across the grass. He shared rooms and a life with another second year, James McDonell. They enjoyed embarrassing me by cat-calling me and shouting, 'get that tush? or 'ker-yoot!' and other such shit when I walked past. A very sweet pair really, but prone to enacting hysterical scenes and bruiting abroad the supposedly superior virtues of their sexuality.

Double Eddie was shedding CDs at a great rate across the lawn.

'Woah!' I called after him. 'You've dropped these.'

Double Eddie didn't turn round or stop walking. His angry back turned to me, he just said, 'Don't care!' and sniffed.

Oh dear, I thought. Another row. I followed him, treading the grass gingerly, like a responsible father testing the ice to see if it will bear the weight of his children.

Behind us a voice shrieked out clear and high, echoing off the stonework and windows of the court. I looked round to see James framed in F staircase doorway, eyes flashing and arms akimbo.

'Simply come back!' he screamed.

Still Double Eddie strode on. 'Never!' he said, without a backward glance. 'Never, never, never, never,

never.

'OH'

Now Bill the Porter had emerged grimly from his lodge. 'Off the grass, gents, if you please.'

Since Double Eddie had already reached the other side of the lawn and Bill had used an unambiguous plural, there now was the answer to my question about Junior Bye Fellows and lawns. Verboten.

As Double Eddie stalked through the lodge trying, without success, to whistle jauntily, I started to pick up the fallen CDs, blushing furiously under the porter's eye.

'Sorry!' I mumbled. 'I'll just get these and ...'

Bill nodded grimly and watched my too much haste and not enough speed fumblings. 'Festina lente. Eile mit Weile,' I babbled to myself. When you're an academic and under pressure, you blather in Latin tags and foreign languages to remind yourself of your superiority. It never works.

I clumsily collected together Cabaret, Gypsy, Carousel, Sweeney Todd and the rest and tripped quickly back to James, who leaned against the doorway, his eyes wet with tears.

'Urn, here you are then.'

His hand fended them away. 'I don't want the horrid things! You can burn them for all I care.'

I put a hand to his heaving shoulder. I'll keep them for you then. Listen, I'm really sorry,' I said. 'I mean, it's a bummer. Being jilted.' He said nothing, so I continued, this time offering him all the benefit of my recent experience. 'I should know, man. I've been ditched too, you know?'

He stared at me as though I were mad. I thought perhaps he was going to tell me that in my case it wasn't the same thing at all. Instead he wailed that it simply wasn't fair. Then he turned away and stomped up the stairs, leaving me with the CDs.

No, it isn't, I thought as I miserably trailed my laces through the archway and cut into the car-park, it simply isn't fair at all. To be left is indeed the bummeriest bummer of all. How to separate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected. I had already been playing with the idea of persuading Jane back so that I could be the one to do the jilting, just to even things up.

And in the car-park thar she blew: four thousand quidswotth of Renault Clio. My Killer Loops on the dash, I noticed. Bloody having them. I dropped the briefcase on the ground by the car, scrabbled out my set of keys, opened the door and put them on. Does one assert one's self more or less when wearing dark glasses? You're hiding your eyes, which ought to count as timorous and weak, but then you're looking cool and way inscrutable. There again, you can't see so well in a car. I could make out a tube of mints in the floor-well, they were mine for sure. Remembered buying them at a service station. Come to think of it, half those tapes belonged to me too. I grabbed as many as I could hold. General mixture: bit, of Pulp, Portishead, Kinks, Verdi, Tchaik, Blur, the Morricone and Alfred Newman collections and of course all my beloved Oily-Moily. She could keep the Mariah Carey, the k. d. lang, the Wagner and the Bach, I reckoned. Severed childless relationships in this age revolve around the custody of record collections, so it's essential to get your claim in first.

That was when Diabolical Thought Number One actually hit. I leaned further into the car and yanked the

college parking permit from the inside of the windscreen and tore it up into tiny little shreds. Hee-hee.

Diabolical Thought Number Two struck as the tapes joined Double Eddie's opera CDs in my briefcase and I came upon that little bottle of Liquid Paper.

For a man of the keyboard generation I have to confess I do have top hand-writing. My godmother gave me an Osmiroid Calligraphy Set for Christmas when I was about fourteen and I really got into it for a while. You know, forming the letters properly, two strokes for an 'o', the dinky upward italic serifs on the descenders and ascenders, thick thin, thick thin, all nicely proportioned, the whole ball of wax. Should have seen my thank-you letters that year. Storming.

I leaned over the bonnet of the Renault like a suspect assuming the position for a US Highway Patrolman, poked my tongue out of one side of the mouth and got to work. It struck me as likely that the solvents in Liquid Paper would do something fabulously corrosive to the paintwork making my little message of love extremely difficult to remove without a whole boring, time-consuming and highly expensive respray. Cool. This, surely then, was the assertive Michael Young we had been looking for. My heart went thump-a-thump-a-thump as I stood back to get the full effect. Never really done anything like this before. Felt like shoplifting or buying pornography.

The lettering was not as large as I would have liked, but a small bottle of Liquid Paper won't go far, even on the compact bonnet of a Clio. Nonetheless, the effect of white on Dubonnet Red was striking, and the wording, I reckoned, more or less on the money.

I Have Been Stolen By A Mad Bitch

I stood admiring this for a little while, wondering whether or not I should also have a go at removing that pathetic, absolutely pathetic, sticker on the rear window, GENETICISTS DO IT IN VITRO hardi-fucking-har, when I realised it must be nearing eleven. I still had to deliver Zuckermann's bloody parcel, drop off the Meisterwerk in Fraser-Stuart's rooms and get to my own where a first year would be awaiting a supervision. If I remembered rightly she was late with a Castlereagh and Canning essay, on whose delivery I had sweetly granted two extensions already. She could expect the shortest of short short shrifts from me if she was late again. I, who had completed a two hundred thousand word thesis of closely reasoned, intensely researched, innovatively presented, elegantly phrased historical argument was not going to have any truck with lazy, shiftless undergraduates, however good my mood. No more Mr Nice Guy. Meet Dr Nasty.

I stooped to pick up the briefcase when IT happened. The most dreadful thing that could have happened did happen. A really shitty thing on its own, but which set in train what was possibly the shittiest event (or non-event) in the history of humanity. Of course, I couldn't have known that at the time. At the time, the personal disaster represented by this shitty happening was all that consumed me; believe me it was bad enough in its own right, without knowing that the destinies of millions hung on the event, without having even the vaguest idea that I was setting in train the explosion of everything I knew.

What happened was this. As I picked up my

briefcase by its handle, the clasp, worn' from years of handling and toting and tugging and hefting and lugging and kicking and dropping and schlepping, chose this moment to give way. Maybe it was the unaccustomed burden of Double Eddie's CDs, my music tapes, the Meisterwerk and that incorrectly pigeon-holed package from Seligmanns Verlag. Whatever. The brass three-tiered plaque that received the tongue of the clasp broke free from its rotten stapled moorings, pulling open the perished mouth of the briefcase and sending four hundred unbound pages of closely reasoned, intensely researched, innovatively presented, elegantly phrased historical argument into the eddying tornadoes of mid-May breeze that swirled around the car-park.

'Oh not I howled.

'Please no.' No, no, no, no, no, no!' as I chased from corner to corner snatching at the flurry of flying pages like a kitten swatting snowflakes.

There's a TV programme where celebrities do this with money. A thousand currency notes are sent into the air by a wind machine and the sleb has to get hold of as many as possible. 'Grab A Grand' it's called. Presented by that guy who looks like Kenneth Branagh in bearded Shakespearean mode. Edmunds, Noel Edmunds. Or possibly Edmonds.

Most of the table of contents had landed under the wheels of my/Jane's Renault in a safe bunch. The rest, the mighty body of the noble work, including appendices, tables, bibliography, index and acknowledgements, flew free.

Bending double to hold the rescued pages against my chest, I staggered from one whirl of paper to the

next, clutching and clawing like a herring gull. Yes, all right, I can't have been like a kitten swatting snowflakes and a herring gull.

'God in helling pants, no! Come here, you bastards!' I screamed. 'Please!'

But I was not alone.

'Dear, dear! This is unfortunate.' I turned to see an old man walking slowly through the car-park, calmly picking up page after page.

It seemed to me, in my fever and frenzy and grateful though I was for assistance, that it was all right for him, for everywhere he went the currents of air seemed to be stilled and the pages just fluttered lifelessly to the ground, content for him to pick them up. That couldn't be happening. But I stopped and stared and saw that it was happening. It really was. Really. Wherever he walked, the wind dropped before him. Like the wizard calming the brooms and dishes in the Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence in Fantasia. Which cast me, of course, as Mickey Mouse.

The old man turned to me. 'It is better if you approach from windward,' he said, germanically pronouncing the Ws as Vs, 'your body will shelter the papers.'

'Oh,' I said. 'Thanks. Yeah. Thank you.'

'And you should maybe do up your laces?'

There's always some wise-arse, isn't there? Someone who can make it look like you have absolutely no common sense. My father was like that until he learned better than to try to teach me the most rudimentary elements of carpentry or sailing. Then he died before I could repay him by showing any interest at all. This wise-arse was bearded, favouring the Tolstoy model over the Branagh-Shakespearean, and continued to step serenely through the car-park picking up the loose pages that lay down and played dead at his bidding.

The Vindvood' technique kind of worked for me too and we both shuttled back and forth between the fallen pages and that landed fish of a dead, gasping briefcase.

Once all the visible paper had been gathered, I checked under each car and got myself as good and filthy and bleeding and torn on the outside as I was feeling on the m. The last page to be found was lying face down on the bonnet of the Clio, stuck to the drying Liquid Paper. I peeled it gently off.

This disaster only put me a day behind, of course. I mean, everything was there on hard disk back at our house in the village of Newnham but it wasn't, you know, it just wasn't a good omen. It meant buying another five hundred sheets of laserprinter paper and ... well, somehow it scraped the gilt off the gingerbread, that's what I felt. The celebrations last night, the Ј62.00 Chateauneuf du Pape, that feeling of freedom as I had bicycled into town ... all premature.

A cloud went over the sun and I shivered. The Old Man was standing absolutely still and staring at one of the pages of the Meisterwerk.

'Thanks so much,' I panted pinkly. 'Stupidest thing. Must get a new briefcase.'

He looked up at me and something there was in that look, something that even then I could plainly recognise as monumental. A thing absolutely eternal and unutterable.

He returned the piece of paper he had been reading with a stiff bow. I saw that it was Page 49, from the first section of Das Meisterwerk, the part that covered the legitimisation of Alois right up to the marriage with Klara Polzl.

'What is this, please?' he asked.

'It's, uh, my doctoral thesis,' I said.

'You are a graduate?'

I was accustomed to the surprise in his voice. I looked too young to be a graduate. Frankly, I looked too young to be an undergraduate sometimes. Maybe I would have to start trying to grow a beard again. If I had the testosterone that is. I had tried last year and the flak had nearly driven me to self-slaughter. I pinkened more and nodded.

'Why?' he asked, nodding down at the paper in his hand.

'I'm sorry?'

'Why that subject? Why?'

'Why?'

'Yes. Why?'

Well ...'

I mean, everyone knows how you choose a subject for a doctoral thesis in history. You go round the libraries in a fever, looking for a subject that no one else has covered, or at least a subject that hasn't been covered for, say, twenty years and then you bag it. You stake your claim for that one seam. Everyone knows that. But the look the old man was giving me was of such imponderable gravity that I didn't know how to begin to answer him, so I gave a helpless shrug and smiled stupidly at the ground. Jane was always giving me grief for this feeble tactic, but I just couldn't ever help it.

'What is your name?' he asked, not harshly as one who has a good mind to report you to the authorities, but in a kind of bewilderment, with a high upward inflection, as if astonished and slightly frightened that he had not been told it long before.

'Michael Young.'

'Michael Young,' he repeated, again with puzzlement. 'And you are a graduate? Here? At this college?' I nodded and he looked up at the clouds covering the sun behind me. 'I can't see your face properly,' he said.

'Oh,' I said. 'I'm sorry.' I moved round so that he could get a better look.

Absolutely surreal. What was he, a plastic surgeon? A portrait painter? What had my face got to do with anything?

'No, no. The sunglasses.' With emphasis on the second syllable, 'sun-glasses', definitely German, perhaps a little east or south.

I whipped off the Killer Loops, which made me even shyer and we stood there looking at each other. Well, he was looking, I was stealing quick glances from under my lashes like the young Lady Di.

He was bearded and old, as I have said. A lined face and a worn one, but hard to date exactly. Academics age in ways different from most people. Some remain unnaturally smooth and youthful well into their seventies, the boyish, sandy-haired Alan Bennetty type, which is how I supposed I would ripen. Others senesce prematurely and will begin to peer and blink and hunch like little library moles well before forty. This man

reminded me of that photograph of ... Chief Joseph is it? Or Geronimo? One of those figures. W H Auden in his sixties anyway. That in turn made me think of what David Hockney said, on first catching sight of the elderly Auden: 'Blimey, if that's his face, what can his scrotum look like?' This old man, judging from the crags and trenches on his forehead must have had something like a savoy cabbage swinging in his trousers. The beard was white at the roots and it gradated, if that's a word, into a mid-grey at the raggedy wiry ends.

I'm not sure what he saw as he looked back at me: twenty-four, all my hair, none of it facial, and, yes all right damn you, a baseball cap. Whatever he did see was enough, at any rate, to bring out his right hand to shake mine.

'Leo Zuckermann,' he said.

'Professor Zuckermann?' Get out of here. The man himself.

'I am a Professor, yes.'

'Oh. Well. I've got something for you, actually.' The parcel from Seligmanns Verlag was lying face down on the ground. I brushed some crud away and handed it over. 'It was in my pigeon-hole, which is above yours. Yours was full, so I ...'

'Ah yes. Xenakis, Young, Zuckermann. X,Y,Z.' He preferred 'zee' to 'zed', which fitted the slightly Americanised swing to his accent. 'I'm so sorry. I am sadly neglectful of clearing my pigeon-holes.'

'No worries. Fine.'

'Not your only copy, I hope?' he said, gesturing at the shambles in my suitcase. 'AH backed up on computer, I am sure?'

'No. But it's still a pain.'

'God's punishment.'

'I'm sorry?'

'For taking rejection with such ill-grace.' He pointed, smilingly, towards the bonnet of the Clio and its message of love.

'Yeah,' I said. 'Childish.'

He looked at me intently. 'You, I should say, are a coffee man.'

'A coffee man?'

'From the way you skip and jump in the air when excited. A coffee man. I am a hot chocolate man. Would you be pleased to come and visit my rooms some time soon? For coffee?'

'Coffee? Right. Mm. Yeah. Why not? Sure. Thanks. Absolutely. Great.' Managing to avoid only 'cheers' and 'lovely' in the meaningless litany of polite British English.

'What day? What time? I am free all this afternoon.'

'Er ... oh, this afternoon? Today? Sure! Yeah. Lovely. That be great. I'm ... I've got to get this all printed out again but

'So what we say? Half past four-ish?'

'Sounds great to me, thanks. And thanks for helping with the ... you know. Thanks.'

'I think probably you have thanked me enough.'

'What? Oh. Yes. Sorry.'

'Tshish!' he said.

Well it sounded like 'tshish' anyway, and was meant, I suppose, to indicate foreign amusement at the English disease of being unable, once started, to stop thanking and apologising.

We walked backwards away from each other as academics do.

'Half past four then,' I said.

'Hawthorn Tree Court,' he said, '2A.'

'Right,' I said. 'Thanks. I mean sorry. Cheers. Cool.'

Making Love

Feathers and claws and fur

Klara lay underneath him and thought of daisies. Daisies, cowbells, milk-yokes, hay, the Mondsee choir at Easter Mass, anything, anything but the stink and weight and grunt of the Bastard wallowing above her.

His previous two wives must have been able to bear it, just as they had been able to bear him babies that lived. Perhaps this will be the one, she thought. This time. Not like poor Frieda Braun who had miscarried just that afternoon after pumping the water from the cistern and smelling that awful stench and seeing a torrent of maggots stream into her pail. Poor Frieda. And now the cistern was emptied and they must borrow water from the people across the street, like peasants. Poor Frieda. She too had so wanted a child.

A little girl, Klara prayed. A sweet little girl, Lilli, whom she would teach secretly to love the mountains and the fields and to despise the hateful stuffy towns; The Bastard had said this evening that he wanted to move the family soon to Linz. Linz which was huge compared to Brunau. Linz, which made Klara think of feathers and claws and fur. The feathers in women's hats, the bright blue ostrich feathers in vases in the coloured tile hallways, the feathers fanned in stained-

glass above the front doors and the feathers of the stuffed birds in clear domes on the black oak sideboards in the dining-rooms. Feathers and claws and fur. Deer claws with jewels set in them for brooches. Fox fur around the necks of the dowager-humped women; not just fox fur but the whole fox, the complete animal: feet, head, eyes, teeth, the V-shaped jaw bared in a grin, the entire beast flattened and dried like salted cod, like paper that can't be torn.

They bring the country into the town, she thought. They kill the animals to wear them or to keep them in glass domes or they skin them into shiny town-shoes and tan luggage. The horses they make pull buses through the towns all their lives before they boil them into glue or flay them into sofa stuffing and violin bows. The trees are thrown into furnaces to drive the machines and overheat the houses or they are carved into oak-leaf clusters, with acorns and nuts and briar, then stained all dark and brooding and dead. The flowers are dried and dyed and set in sprays on the pianos on squares of fringed silk. The whole wide, light countryside itself is oiled onto canvas as dark thundering mountains, misty booming ravines and tumultuous heavy clouds and then hung on the walls of gloomy passageways lit by dull hissing gas-mantles to frighten children into a permanent terror of the world outside the city. How can anybody bear the town? Blood and iron and gas. Daisies. Think of daisies. But daisies are goose-flowers. Goose-flowers, goose-flesh. Flesh that crawls and prickles under his wet touch.

She had known this would be a love-night, as he called them. Liebesnacht. She had known, because he had

not beaten her or looked like beating her, even after she had spilled soup into his lap at dinner. Not a glance towards Pnina on the wall, just a ghastly smile and a playful slap on the hand accompanied by the word 'naughty!', mockingly, in the falsetto of a governess. Such a vile smirk, as if he knew that his love was infinitely more terrible to her than his brutal fists.

How long he took about it! Klara remembered her sister joking of her husband Hermann and his impossible and wholly unsatisfactory speed.

'Out before he was in!'

Then Hermann was a country boy who only drank on saint's days and holidays, not a man of fifty - heavens! Fifty-one. Alois was fifty-one last month - whose joke was that he only drank on Wednesdays or days with a letter G in them. Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag, Sontag.

Klara arched back her neck and gazed with longing at the Virgin on the wall above the headboard. Alois, after slithering out seven or eight times and swearing like a carter, seemed, at long last, to be getting there. She recognised the more frantic rhythms and waited for the final animal plunges.

Sky, she thought. Sky, lakes, forests, rabbits and eagles. Yes, a huge eagle to swoop down from his lair in the mountains and snatch away this squealing pig. A great soaring, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-conquering eagle with piercing eyes and mighty wings and talons that dripped with the blood of the pig!

Making Up

Little orange pills

Red fluid dripped into one of those spiralling, screw-like doo-dads they so love and I stared at it fascinated. Jane's work was a dark mystery to me, which was the way she liked it, but there was no denying the pleasing prettiness of the paraphernalia it employed. Metres and metres of retort stands and capillaries and clear plastic tubing that went round and round, up and down, in and out, clockwise and anticlockwise, zigwise and zagwise. And centrifuges there were, sexy beyond anything. I had often watched her take a tiny stained dot of something bright and gloopy and fire a syringe gun with a delicate plip into little test-tubes arranged in a tight round drum like hungry nestlings. When all the glass mouths had been fed the drum would be set spinning. The chrome precision and low hum of it all were just bitching. So much more solidly built than a dishwasher or tumble-dryer. No vibration at all, just solid, smooth and scientific, like Jane herself. And on another bench I liked to look at coloured slides of gel with elegant marblings of another colour running down the middle, like something in a confectioner's pantry or maybe like the wavy threads of blood you find in the yolk of an egg. Jane called her lab The Kitchen; the coming together of

stainless steel and glass with coloured organic goo and bright liquids brought out the little boy in me, the helpful, heel-kicking son who liked to watch his mother beating the batter and rolling the dough.

Big business of course, genespottmg. You pretend to the world that you are working on a grand scheme called the Human Genome Project, which is worthy and noble - Nobel, in fact - Good Science, Human Achievement, Frontiers of Knowledge, all of that, but really you are trying to find a new gene and copyright the pants out of it before anyone else stumbles across it too. There were dozens of commercial 'biotechnical' companies in Cambridge alone. God knows what kind of bribery and badness they got up to. Not that Jane was corruptible of course. Never.

Sometimes I called her on the nature of her work.

What would you do if you discovered that there really was a gay gene? Or that black people have less verbal intelligence than white? Or that Asians are better at numbers than Caucasians? Or that Jews are congeni-tally mean? Or that women are dumber than men? Or men dumber than women? Or that religion is a genetic disposition? Or that this very gene determined criminal tendencies and that very gene determined Alzheimer's? You know, the insurance ramifications, the ammo it would hand to the racists. All that?

She would say that she would cross that bridge when she came to it and that, besides, her work was in a different field. Anyway, if you, as a historian, discovered that Churchill was screwing the Queen all through the war, would that be your problem? You report the facts. Shared humanity has the job of interpreting them. Same

with science. It wasn't Darwin's problem that God didn't create Adam and Eve, it was the bishops' problem. Don't blame the messenger, she'd say calmly, grow up and look to yourself instead.

I flicked the side of the dripping tube with my fingernail. Donald, Jane's research assistant, had scuffed awkwardly off to find her ten minutes earlier. I heard a door bang down the corridor and straightened up. She did not like things to be touched.

'Well, bugger me. It's actually here. It's actually got the face to stand here and confront us.'

'Hi, baby ...'

'What have you touched? Show mother what you've fiddled with and fucked with, so we don't have to find out later.'

'Nothing! I haven't touched anything ... well, I did just tap that tube there. The liquid was getting stuck so I helped it through. That's all.'

Jane stared at me in horror. 'That's all? That's all)' She shrieked at the door, 'Donald! DonaW! Get in here! We'll have to start again. Ten weeks work down the fucking plughole. Christ1.'

Donald came hurrying through. 'What? What is it? What's he done? What's he done?'

'Jane, it was the gentlest tap, I swear

'The stupid dick only jogged the methyl orange reagent through the tartration pipe.'

'Bloody hell, Jane,' I wailed, 'it can't have made that much difference surely?'

Donald stared at the pipework. 'Oh Jesus,' he said. 'No! No!' He fell against the workbench and buried his face in his hands.

I breathed a sigh of relief and turned to face Jane. 'That was a bloody cruel trick, actually. If Donald weren't such a pathetic liar I'd've been really upset.'

Jane's eyebrows flew up. 'Oh,' she said, 'that was a cruel trick, was it? I see. You would have been upset.'

'Look, I know what you're going to say

'Defacing my car, getting it towed from college for illegal parking. These were not cruel upsetting tricks, were they? These were the sweet reflexes of a loving, tortured soul. They were romantic games born in a beautiful, complex mind. Not childish, but mature. An ironic commentary on love and exchange. A most wonderful compliment. I should be grateful.'

I just hate it when she gets like that. And Donald giggling as if he knew what she was on about.

'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' I said, throwing up a hand. 'Cool.'

'Leave us, Donald,' said Jane, settling herself on a stool. 'I need to have a conversation with this piece of work.'

Donald, like me a ready flusher, backed dorkily from the room. 'Ho. Yes. Right, for sure. I'll ... yes. K.'

I waited for the flapping of the doors to subside before daring to look up into that mocking gaze.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

The words fell with a thud into an achingly long silence.

It wasn't really a mocking gaze. I could have attached any property to it. I could have described it as a cool gaze, an ironical gaze. Or an appraising gaze. It was Jane's gaze and to anyone else it might have appeared a) friendly, b) sweet, c) amused, d) provocative, e) sexy,

f) forbidding, g) sceptical, h) admiring, i) passionate, j) whorish, k) dull, 1) intellectual, m) contemptuous, n) embarrassed, o) afraid, p) insincere, q) desperate, r) bored, s) contented, t) hopeful, u) enquiring, v) steely, w) angry, v) expectant, x) disappointed, y) penetrating, or z) relieved.

It was all of these things. I mean, it was a pair of human eyes, the mirror of the soul. Not the mirror of her soul, but of mine. I looked into them feeling like ten types of tit and so, naturally, a mocking gaze was what I got in return.

Suddenly, to my surprise, she smiled, leaned forward and stroked the back of my head.

'Oh, Pup,' she said. 'What am I going to do with you?'

A word about the Pup business.

People call me Pup.

It's, like this.

You're due to clock in at a big university wearing a jacket, tie and chinos, as bought by Mummy specially for the occasion. Your name is Michael. You're younger than anyone else by two years and this is virtually the first time you've been away from home. What do you do? Your train journey from Winchester to Cambridge means you have to cross London to get from one station to the other. So, you hit the West End, returning with a serious haircut, way baggy trousers, a T-shirt saying 'Suck My Soul', a khaki parka and the name Puck. You reboard the next train to Cambridge reborn as a dude with attitude. It was more or less okay to say 'dude' and 'with attitude' eight years ago. Nowadays of course, only advertisers and journalists talk like that. What they say for real on the street today I've less

than no idea. I dropped out of that race early on after I'd been lapped twice and told to get out of the fucking way.

I chose Puck because I'd played him in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and I thought it kind of suited me. Spike, Yash, Blast, Spit, Fizzer, Jog, Streak, Flick, Boiler, Zug, Klute, Growler - I'd considered them all. Puck seemed to be cool without being too aggressive. Unfortunately, at my first dinner in Hall there had been a mix-up.

'Hi,' said this totally uncool bloke in jacket and tie sitting himself beside me. Tm Mark Taylor. You must be a fresher, yeah?'

I gave him my cool new name, but my mouth was full of food and somehow he got it into his specky head that I had introduced myself as Puppy Young.

'Puppy? Yeah, I see that. Puppy. Right.'

No amount of spluttering denial led to anything and Puppy or Pup I became. It wasn't a blow that I ever really recovered from in terms of the kind of homeboy, down by law, yo motherfuckah, sound, bitching, slamming, street, phat, gangsta, waycool cool that I had reckoned on achieving. Maybe Snoop Doggy Dog of South Central, Los Angeles, California could have got away with calling himself Snoop Puppy Pup, but Michael Young of East Dene, Andover, Hampshire didn't have a fucking prayer.

Jane loved it of course. Loved calling me Pup, Pups and Puppy. Which explained in part the little outbreak that led to me graffiting the bonnet of her Renault.

Her Renault? I meant our Renault. See? She was winning already.

That's to say - yes, I liked going out with an older

woman. Two years apart maybe doesn't really count as Older Woman, but I still got a kick out of just that small difference. Yes, I liked being mothered a bit. Yes, I quite enjoyed the salty slap of her gentle mocking, but NO I am not a eunuch or a masochist. Part of me likes just once in a while to be a Man. And I felt, frankly I felt ...

'I know what you felt last night,' she said. 'You thought I was jealous. You thought I didn't like the idea of your thesis being finished. We'd both be Doctors then, and we'd both be equal. You thought that irritated me.'

'That couldn't be further from the truth!' I said, which couldn't have been further from the truth.

'And perhaps you thought that I didn't take History very seriously compared with my work.'

'Absolutely notl' I lied again.

'Oh/ Jane lifted her eyebrows in genuine surprise. 'Really? Because I was thinking that. All those things. It did annoy me that you were about to get a doctorate. And having to watch you strut about the place like a bantam. I mean face it dear, a lesser woman would have thrown up.'

1 was happy, that's all.'

'And I did think to myself, what's a history doctorate? Anyone with half a brain can eat the fruits of a library for a few months and then crap out a long glistening thesis. It doesn't involve thought, or calculation or work. Not real work. Just pretentious dilettante posturing.'

'Oh, thanks! Thanks a heap.'

'I know, Puppy, I know. It was only for a while. I was jealous. I was resentful.'

'Oh:

'I'm sorry. I'm pleased you've finished your thesis now. I'm proud of you.'

Absolute genius for feinting and sidestepping and slithering, has Jane. She'll make all the points against herself before you get the chance and then apologise for them sweetly and bravely, leaving good grace as the only option.

'About the car,' I said, looking down, 'it was childish of me.'

'Oh fuck the car. Who gives a shit about the car? It's a car, not a kitten or a declaration of human rights. Fuck it twice. And, at the risk of rousing your manly ire once more, you have to admit that it was one of the few brave, amusing and independent things you've ever done. Besides, I lied about it being towed away, and as it happens the graffiti disappeared with one wipe of Freon, so what harm was done?'

'So that means ... er ... we're still together again?'

'Come here you,' she said and pulled my head towards hers.

We kissed long and hard and, coming up for air, I babbled my thanks. Inside ... well, maybe I wasn't so sure. I had been getting used to the idea of feeling let down, betrayed and spat out. There was a kind of comfort in the bruises of hurt and misuse. But then you see I loved her. I really loved her. I still get a thrill When you ter-ter-ter-touch me. It was true. Oily-Moily were never wrong. Every time her flesh contacted mine I got a rush. So, what the hey, we kissed and I told freedom goodbye.

She's taller than me: that doesn't mean much, most people are taller than me. She's dark where I'm light. A lot of people take her for an Italian or a Spaniard. I call

her my raven-haired gypsy temptress, at which she groans good-naturedly. She's very clean. That sounds strange but is true. Not just nearly clean, as the TV commercials say, but really clean. Her hands are always fresh and neat and her lab coat and clothes never wrinkle or sag. There is just this sweet endearing clumsiness, an awkward stiff suggestion of uncoordination; as with Ingrid Bergman's hint-of-a-squint, it's the tiny, almost imperceptible flaw that magnifies the beauty.

'Tell you what,' I said. 'I'll go to Sainsbury's and tonight we'll cook a really good dinner. Get it right this time. How's that?'

She looked down at me. 'You know Pup,' she said, 'if you were any more cute I would have to pickle you in formaldehyde.'

'Shucks,' I went, and picked up a little perspex dish of bright orange pills from the bench, shaking them in an embarrassed South American rhythm. 'Hm,' I said, picking one of them up and holding it between forefinger and thumb. 'What kind of a high do these offer then?'

'Shit, will you put that down? She made a grab for the dish, suddenly wild with anger, and missed, sending pills all over the worktop and the floor.

I'd never seen her like that. A frenzy, a real frenzy.

'Hey!' I cried in protest, as she roughly pushed me away from the bench.

'Why will you never learn to leave aloneY

She threw herself off the stool and began to gather the scattered pills cursing herself and me and life and God as she did so.

This was beyond real. I joined her on the ground truffling for orange pills.

'Look, babe, I just ...'

'Shut up and keep looking for them. I'm not talking to you.'

For the third time in as many hours I was picking stuff up off the ground. CDs, pieces of paper, and now pills. You get days like that. Themed days.

When all the pills were back in the dish and safely out of the reach of childish hands, she turned to me, bosom, I have to report, heaving with indignation.

'Christ, Pup, what r's it with you?'

'With me? With me? All I bloody did was pick up a pill ...'

'Do you know what these are? Have you any idea what these are? No, of course you haven't. They might contain anthrax or polio or God knows what. They might be absorbable through the skin. They might have been cyanide, for all you knew.'

'Well, what are they then?'

'What they are is a contraceptive.'

'Yeah?' I looked at them, interested.

'A male contraceptive.'

'A male pill. Coolness.'

'No, not a male pill, the male pill.'

'But not dangerous?'

'It depends, shit-wit, on what you mean by dangerous. They are untested on humans, for one thing.'

'Hey, well, I can be your guinea-pig then, can't I?'

'No you can not be my fucking guinea-pig!' she snarled. 'Their effect is irreversible.'

'Come

again?

'Come again is exactly what you won't be able to do, not in any fruitful sense at least. They sterilise permanently.'

I gulped. 'Oh.'

'Yes. Oh.'

'Narrow squeak then.'

'Not that your gene pool is one that a rational world would ever wish to see propagated.'

'You should keep them locked up.'

'I should keep you locked up. Let's make a rule, Puppy. You don't interfere with my work and I don't interfere with yours. That way we can avoid catastrophe, all right?'

'Yeah, well,' I said, moving away. 'I'm sorry. Listen, I've got to like blow, 'kay?'

She looked at me, a smile widening on her face. 'Do you think there might be a chance that once your thesis has been read you'll start talking proper English?'

'D'you mean?'

'All this "cool" and "slamming" and "woah" ... what's it all about? You'll probably be a fellow of the college next year. Do you think Trevor Roper used to go around the place saying "woah, man ... like, cool1." I mean, darling, it's so strange. So decidedly odd.'

'Well,' I said, sitting down again. 'Thing is, History, you know, there's an image problem.' This was a pet theory of mine that I'd never explained to her before. I smoothed the surface of the workbench with my palms, as if separating out two heaps of salt. 'There's two types of historian, yeah? Over here you've got A, your young fogey - the Hayek, Peterhouse, Cowling, Spectator-rending, Thatcher-was-a-goddess, want-to-be-PPS-to-a-

Tory-MP type, right? And then, on this side, there's B, your seriously heavy Christopher Hill, Althusser, E P Thompson, post-structuralist, in-your-face, fuck-the-mdividual, up-the-arse-of-history type.'

'And which are you, Pup?'

Tm neither.'

'Neither. Mm. Then my scientific training leads me to propose that there must therefore be more than two types. There is type C

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very clever. What I mean is, given this image thing, what do you do? See, the fogeyish type belong stylistically to the forties and fifties, the heavy type to the sixties and seventies. So they're both, like outdated, and History is no longer a happening vibe. My theory, right, is that a historian should belong to his own time more completely than anyone else. How can you historify a past age if you don't identify completely with your own, yeah? You've got to come from your own time. So me, I belong to now.'

'I belong to now?' said Jane. 'I belong to now? I can't believe you just said that. And historifyY

'Yeah, well, obviously the jargon takes a bit of getting used to.'

'Mm. So what you've done is invent a third type, C, The History Surfer. Hanging Five on the pointbreak of the past, tubing it through the rollers of yesterday. Dr Keanu Young, PhDude.'

'Yeah. Sad, isn't it?'

'Just a little, dear. Just a little. But so long as you know it, it isn't too bad. There are plenty of fading hippies in the faculties and senior common rooms of the

world so I suppose there's no reason why there shouldn't be fading surfies too.'

'Yo, way to go, bitch.'

We kissed again and I tripped out of the lab before I could get her in a bad mood with me again.

On the way to the bike-shed I made a small diversion. Yep, there it was. Our little Clio. Not a mark on the bonnet to show for my calligraphic pains. Bloody scientists. What the hell was Freon anyway? I stooped down to do up my laces. All day they had been undone and - you know how it is with boat-shoes - the sides get so soft and floppy that the ends of the laces can get in and under the soles of your feet, giving you a permanent princess and the pea irritation.

Hello! The laces of the right shoe were on the outside, neither end snaking under. Must have picked up a piece of gravel then, 'cause sure as shooting there was something nagging my sole.

Way-heyl One of Jane's orange pills. Germaine's Revenge. I ought to go back and ...

Sod it. I tucked the little tablet into my wallet. Maybe slip it into next door's rabbit hutch. Snigger.

Tightly laced now, I ride along the Madingley Road making lists in my mind. Food, wine, real coffee, laserpaper, back home, print out the Meisterwerk again, back into town to leave a clean copy with Fraser-Stuart and then, oh yeah, drop in on this Zuckermann guy, this Zuckermann dude ...

Making Free

The eagle has landed

'Push, woman! Push! Her fourth you say?'

Alois nodded and looked down with disgust.

'Listen to me Klara ... listen to me!'

Klara could not listen.

'Klara!' Alois leaned over her and spoke in his sternest voice.

But she was miles from that place. Swooping from the hills, soaring over the lakes and the villages, perching on the church tops, clasping for a moment the bright gold onion domes in her claws before launching herself into the wind again, climbing ever higher and higher.

The doctor came alongside Alois. 'If she has laboured three times before there should not be this pain, even without such a copious dosage of laudanum.'

That remark did penetrate Klara's opiate clouded mind. Pain? There is no pain, she laughed to herself. There is no pain, there is only ecstasy! Joy! Pure free flying joy.

Another huge contraction sent her spinning higher even than the highest mountain. All Europe lay below her. Without customs posts, without borders or frontiers: all the animals running free. High up as she was, the movement of the smallest vole or butterfly was clear

to her, she could hear the scrabble of earth as a rabbit left its burrow twelve miles beneath, focus on a single drop of dew trembling on one tiny blade of grass. Master of time and space, lord of all. She let out a high shrill cry of joy, as she wheeled from east to west, from north to south, the lands racing beneath her vast wings in pure, unbounded freedom.

'My God, Schenck, the blood! She never bled like this before! What's wrong?'

'Nothing, sir. Nothing, I assure you. The head is large, a little tearing of the hymeneal muscle, no more.'

The beak of the eaglet pecking with fierce will at the walls of its egg. This one will live! I can feel her strength. The iron of her will. My daughter eagle, whom I will raise to set me free.

'Klara! For heaven's sake! Such noise! Are you sure you gave her enough?'

'It was a huge dose to begin with. Any more, sir, and she would be knocked out. Ah, here it comes. Yes, here it comes! One more push, Klara.'

She is free! She is in the world! Free! Listen to her lusty cries! The strength! The will! The lifewill, the lifelust. She will live strong and I will love her more than ever daughter was loved by any living thing.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1952