CHAPTER 3
I left my mother’s house the next morning for the University, wearing my Dennis the Menace (the real and original UK one) cycle shirt, the one I am told gives me a dangerous, devil-may-care, appearance.

I don’t see that; it is bright, visible for some distance off, and unusual enough that drivers respond to my presence on the road hopefully before they drive into me rather than afterwards. Above all, it is comfortable, which is an attribute I have always prized.

I had no idea how to deal with the Jane situation. To be honest, she had suited me for various reasons, and the running had been done by her rather than me. There has never been what has passed for passion in my life; I didn’t even feel much when my father died, but to be honest I can’t remember much back then. I was a sickly child, spending stints in hospital, and such things blur together. He died when I was nine, of complications caused by diabetes, but I remember rumours at school that he had a hand in his own demise, something about insulin.

I don’t have much truck with medical things, as I have enough trouble trying to follow human mental processes without adding in endocrinology and other biological processes. It’s like listening to Mahler; the music would be wonderful without all those attempts to ‘talk’ about adulterous wives (how apt) or dead children. I usually avoided that as much as possible, taking a favourite book with me to work on over lunch, Hofstadter’s “Gá¶del, Escher, Bach”, and today I would be immersed in two lectures on intertextuality, with emphasis on Genette’s five subtypes…exactly my sort of day. I had, of course, plenty of marking to do, and then this afternoon, before the second lecture, another meeting with my doctor.

I had, I suppose, already written Jane off. My mother had been right, as usual, and the priority was to find a reasonable solicitor and salvage what I could.

“Get on the fucking cycle path you fucking cunt!”

Ah. I must be near St Denys, in my reverie having lost my sense of time. The van skimmed me, with a suggestion find gainful employment from the passenger and the passage of a half-eaten apple close to my head. Patterns continue.

I clattered along the hall to my office, running into Dave Forbes as I did so.

“John, glad I caught you! How are you for tomorrow?”

“What do you seek, Dave?”

“Well, I have a freshers’ lecture on Formalism at ten, but I rather want to go out on the piss tonight at the club after training, and might not be at my sharpest for the dear young things.”

There are times people speak to me. It is when something is wanted. Before I could answer, there was a cough, and a very quiet “Excuse me, Dr Evans”

Abigail Thorpe, one of my third years, was standing waiting to speak. She is a plump little girl, and I wish she would use a proper bra-fitting service. Hers are clearly too small, making her bulge out in a very inelegant manner, and she had obviously realised this because she kept fiddling with the top button of her blouse, which seemed to be coming undone. The colour was wrong for her, anyway.

“Have you marked my essay yet, Doctor? It’s just, I may not have explained all my argument properly, and there might be a couple of things you need me to make clearer for you”

“I think that is something you should have done in the essay itself, Abigail, but I will bear that in mind. Thank you”

I turned my attention back to Dave, and caught him staring at my crotch.

“Amazing”, he sad, “You really have absolutely no idea at all. Not a flicker. Tell you what, I’ll mark her paper for you if you want.”

It took me the rest of the day to work that one out. I only did so because Dave told me.

I could share my lecture notes with you, but I suspect that a surfeit of Genette and Lévi-Strauss would stun you into somnolence. I will never, ever understand how such exciting concepts can be seen as ‘boring’, but apparently many people seem to feel that way. I am reasonably certain I caught the hint of a snore in the second lecture.

I worked further through my book over lunch, engrossed in Hofstadter’s argument about the cognitive process. I already knew Bach, of course, and was familiar with Escher’s work, and as visual art it was unusual in the way it spoke to me.

Things moved in circles. His figures observed impossible water flows, or walked endlessly around flights of self-swallowing stairs that ate their tail, like Ourobouros. Patterns repeated themselves, changing from one thing to another across the canvas, only to reveal that they had always been both one and the other. Yin was indeed the other side of yang, even if it was a case of fish and fowl.

Patterns, cycles.

The meeting with the doctor was a surprise. She hit me with her usual vague attempts to get me to categorise myself into one of her little boxes, and I stayed outside them, until

Until she picked up a bundle of documents that were very obviously my consolidated medical records. I remembered the usual disclosure stuff when we first started, but was unaware that she had actually accessed them.

“John, what happened in 1985?”

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The second lecture, as I have already intimated, may have found me at my least interesting, even for such delights as Genette, and when I emerged Dave was awaiting me.
“So, are you up for it tomorrow?”

“Yes, and I will ask a favour in return”

“Does it involve marking that girl’s assets in any way?”

“No, I can do that. Why are you shaking your head like that? What I meant was to ask if you will be in your estate car tomorrow. I need to pick my things up from home”

“Ah. You finally cracked. We’ve been wondering how long you would last”

Once more, it was apparent to me that everyone else on the planet seemed to have known something I was in ignorance of.

“Oh, come on, John, that copper, he’s been porking her for nearly a year now! She’s even been down to the pub with me and Sharon when he just ‘happened’ to drop by!”

I must have looked a little lost. Dave was a lot gentler in his tone.

“Make a list of the essentials, otherwise you will forget something important and never get it back. Trust me on this one, I’ve been there. Where are you staying?”

“My mother’s”

“Oh shit, the black widow…sorry, John, but can I make a really important suggestion? Find somewhere of your own or you will, never, ever leave until she is dead.”

I just stared at him. Still gentle in his tone, he continued.

“John, you are an odd fish, but you are very good at what you do. I think the two are related, and there is no harm in you. You just don’t see things that are right in front of you.

“Tell me, what was that girl after earlier?”

“She wanted to fine tune her paper with my assistance, which is not really the proper way to do things”

“No, John, she was pushing her tits in your face and offering you a fuck or a BJ for a mark”

I could feel myself blush. Dave laughed, not in a nasty way.

“You really, really didn’t, don’t get it, do you?”

He actually reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. I am not one for physical contact, but didn’t move away.

“John, I don’t know what it is with you. You are either just very strangely wired, or you have had a life sheltered beyond belief, or your parents were barking. Tell you what…if you don’t want to stay with your mother, Sharon and I can squeeze you in for a while. What do you think?”

“That is very kind of you, but I am already at my mother’s and it’s simpler all round. It matches the normal schema, after all. I will find a place, though, I promise”

Why exactly was I so concerned to make a promise to this individual? I supposed it must be because, like my psychiatrist, he seemed to have genuine curiosity about me, unlike Jane. My mind went back to the psychiatrist’s question. I knew the answer, or some of it.

What happened in 1985? I was nine. I ended up in hospital again, but I can’t remember why, exactly, though I do remember some surgery. Something nagged at me about repetition, patterns.

And my father died.