6

Two weeks later Fenton stood at a urinal on the top floor of the University Library. He was alone. His policy with respect to urinals was as follows. He used them only if they were unattended. The sight of an incumbent urinator invariably sent him swerving for the nearest cubicle. He didn’t like pissing with a complete stranger standing beside him, and he didn’t like standing with a complete stranger pissing beside him. Still less did he relish sharing a trough with someone he knew. If he was prepared to step up – as now – to a vacant urinal, this was only because he judged the slight risk that he would be joined there by a second urinator to be more acceptable, on balance, than the near certainty that he would see something abominable in the stall.

Right now, however, he was having an unprecedented problem. He was utterly failing to urinate. It was now some two or three minutes since he’d first addressed the steel, and still it remained undrenched. What was going on down there? Had his dick now ceased to function as a urinary tract as well? Was a piss now asking too much of it? He wondered at what point, in cases like this, one was supposed simply to zip up and walk away, writing off the whole venture as a mistake. Certainly he didn’t feel ready to make such a radical concession just yet. And so he stayed grimly in position, with the arrival of witnesses getting ever more likely as each minute passed.

Almost certainly the malfunction was due to mental stress. Gus had scheduled an extraordinary meeting of the Maoists for two o’clock the following morning. Repeat: two o’clock in the morning. This meeting, Gus had indicated, would be about becoming terrorists. At it, the Maoists would decide what particular branch of terrorist activity they were going to become involved in, and at what person or institution these activities would be aimed. One part of Fenton – a part that liked sleeping and disliked conspiring to commit violent crime – yearned to give this meeting a wide berth. But the pragmatist in him knew that he would have to be there, for several overwhelmingly good reasons. For one thing, his career as a simulated Maoist was still very much in its infancy. It would be folly, at this delicate stage, to give the others any reason to doubt his revolutionary zeal. Furthermore, out of concern for the welfare of the general public, coupled with a reluctance to spend the rest of his life in jail, he felt compelled to keep a close eye on this nascent little conspiracy, and make sure that it never got out of hand. As things stood, he felt reasonably confident that Gus, while undoubtedly warped, was nevertheless far too much of a buffoon to present a genuine threat to anyone. There was no call to panic yet, Fenton believed, and definitely no call to even think about involving the police. But the situation was worth keeping an eye on, just the same. Finally, there was the question of Charmaine. It seemed a safe bet that her boyfriend’s secret commitment to terrorism would lower her opinion of him, if she ever found out about it. Fenton was therefore determined that she would find out about it, one way or another. If no more subtle method occurred to him, he would simply have to come straight out and tell her about it. But in order to tell her about it in any detail he first had to know about it in detail himself, and in order to know about it in detail he had to go to the meeting. Whichever way you looked at it, he had no real choice but to attend.

Another thing playing havoc with his mental equilibrium was the large piece of graffiti that occupied almost all of the toilet wall to his right. It said, in black letters that were immense to begin with, but shrank markedly as they approached the floor:

There was no mistaking the belligerent handwriting. It was Pamela Scratch’s. It was a multi-media affair, this graffito of hers. For that gargantuan first word she had employed spraypaint. Then, no doubt having perceived that the space remaining to her was seriously limited, she had switched to some kind of jumbo marker. Finally, in deep trouble down near the floor, struggling to preserve the dwindling acronym on the left-hand side, she had been obliged to squeeze in those diminutive final words with a regular felt-tipped pen. Had she brought all of these writing implements along in the first place, or had she composed the slogan in three separate sessions? More to the point, when and how had she infiltrated the male toilets? And “Yuletide” – what the hell, apart from the fact that it started with a Y, made Yuletide an appropriate deadline for Aggot’s release? That festive season was only a few months away – an optimistically brief time-frame, if you asked Fenton, in which to turn around public opinion on freeing a confessed multiple thrill-killer. Or maybe she meant the Yuletide after next.

Either way, the development made Fenton feel uneasy. The inescapable fact was that it was he who had brought up Aggot’s name in the first place. He could only hope that Pamela was too nuts to remember that – or, failing that, too nuts to see that it was something that sane people might hold against him. His key role in the campaign’s inception haunted him. He had terrible visions of being confronted, and denounced, by weeping members of the extended Baker family; or being illiterately contacted, in a wickedly stained prison letter, by Neville Claude Aggot himself.

And then, speaking of atrocities, there was Fenton’s beard. It weighed heavily on his mind, his beard. He wished it weighed heavily on his face, but that was still a long way from happening. Even though it itched like a highwayman’s, it still looked from the outside no lusher than the fuzz on a tennis ball. It was a three-day growth that had taken twelve days to get there. To call it a “beard,” indeed, was to drain that word of nearly all its commonly understood meaning. But what other term for it was there? Even the word “it” was somewhat out of place, since what had so far materialised on his face wasn’t really a single entity at all, but several independent whisker colonies separated by these large and mysterious buffer zones of virgin skin. High on his left cheek was a rectangular field or stripe that was neither one thing nor the other: there were whiskers there, but they were appreciably shorter than all the surrounding ones. This facial cricket pitch marked the place where, two or three mornings after becoming a Maoist, Fenton had absent-mindedly begun to shave. He was one long swipe of his razor into it when he had recalled, with horror, that he was meant to be growing a beard. In hindsight, the wise move would have been to complete the shave and restart the whole beard from scratch. Instead he had panicked and reshelved his razor, feeling that the error would probably iron itself out over time. But two weeks later the evidence was still glaringly there, like a cattle brand, and the chances that it would vanish between now and tonight’s meeting seemed slim. In an ideal world, of course, he would have been able to shave the whole thing off right now, and let it grow gradually back in an unbutchered format. No: in an ideal world he’d have been able to shave the whole thing off right now, dispatch the cuttings to hell, and then resume shaving once a day for the rest of his life. But in the current world he had to answer to Gus, who had made his position on the beard thing violently clear. Fenton saw the irony in all of this, even if he found it deeply unamusing. In order to get near her, he had to pretend to be a Maoist. But in order to pretend to be a Maoist, he had to let his face display a growth so farcical that she could on no account be allowed to see it, at least not in the short term. Thank Christ she hadn’t been invited to this meeting.

A sound: the outer door of the toilets swinging open. Incoming footsteps echoed on the tiles. Fenton remained frozen at the trough, transfixed by their sound, willing them to stop coming, to slow and veer off into one of the cubicles. But they didn’t. They came all the way up behind him; seemed to hesitate there for a moment; then stepped up next to him with a sigh. There was the sound of a descending zip: and then the following words, uttered with a distinct lack of enthusiasm:

“Hello Bland.”

Only one person called him Bland. Fenton glanced sideways: and the nightmare was confirmed. It was Robert Browning. “Oh hi Robert!” he heard himself reply, with the kind of forced delight he generally reserved for hailing elderly relatives. Hadn’t Browning left, departed, been kicked out? What was he still doing here?

A gruelling silence descended. Fenton nervously fixed his gaze on the tiled wall in front of his face. He did this partly in observance of urinal etiquette, which obliged one to establish, early on, one’s total lack of interest in one’s neighbour’s cock. But in the present case there was added cause for discomfort. Browning’s hello had been brutally cold – there was no denying it. Did that mean that Fenton’s deepest fears were right? Had his own sleazy withdrawal from Browning’s course been the withdrawal that triggered the course’s collapse, and did Browning somehow know that? Fenton’s preference was to zip up and flee before this question could be answered. But that would be madness: if Browning saw that he’d left the trough bone dry, he would know at once that the departure was premature, contrived, illegitimate. And then all bets would be off, and there was no telling what the embittered humanist might shout at his exiting back.

Over on Browning’s side a hearty thrum of waste on steel started up. Fenton ransacked his mind for something to say, anything, just as long as it papered over this excruciating void.

But he was too slow. Browning got in first.

“Relax, Bland,” he said. “I know it was you.”

“Oh,” Fenton said.

“If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else. I’m an anachronism, Bland. I accept my fate.”

His voice sounded as it always had: soft, precise, serenely confident of the rightness of what it was saying. Fenton looked intently downward, as though something in the trough demanded his undivided scrutiny. But all he saw down there was Browning’s urine on its slow way past him to the drain, carrying a sodden cigarette butt bent in fetal position. Anachronism or no, the man was still capable of a producing a damn fine stream of piss. Remarkably yellow it was too.

“Anyway, it’ll all be over soon,” Browning said. “Reading books. Literacy. The brief – legacy – of – Gutenberg,” his speech getting slower and more deliberate here as he shook himself. Zipping up, he moved across to the sinks. “It doesn’t matter to me. You’re the ones who’ll never read a decent book again, not me. And they still have to keep paying me, you realise that?” Running some water, he dipped his hands briefly into the stream. “Yes. Thanks to principles formulated in an age far less barbaric than ours, I can’t be sacked for my political opinions. No matter how disreputable they may be.” He slapped on a hand-dryer. “Not,” he half-shouted over its hot blast, “that I’ve ever regarded it as a political opinion to think that good books are worth reading and bad ones aren’t. But the point is this. Lego can’t get rid of me, not properly. He can steal my students, he can defame me from the lectern. But he’s yet to find a way of getting me off the payroll.” The drier had cut out now. Browning moderated his volume. “So: I still get paid, I still have a library card, and I’ve still got an office. Oh not over there, of course,” waving a contemptuous hand in the rough direction of the socioliterology building.

“Oh you’ve moved then?” Fenton asked, keen to place his concern for Browning’s welfare firmly on the record. He wondered how much longer Browning was going to linger there by the dryers. His business here was done now. Shouldn’t he be going? If he stayed around much longer he would surely start to wonder about the curious duration of Fenton’s stint at the trough. And yet he seemed, worryingly, to be in no hurry to depart. On the contrary: he looked to be digging in over there, like a man who still had a few things left to say.

“Yes. My office requirements, they tell me, have been ‘reprioritized.’ Who ‘they’ are I’m not certain. But they sent me a letter ‘advising’ – which is what the prose of people like this does: it advises – that my ‘workspace entitlements’ have been reassessed, to reflect recent ‘adjustments’ in my teaching load. They seem to think if they say it nicely enough I won’t notice I’ve been evicted. Anyway, they’ve given me a nice little ‘space’ down there in the former Chancellery. With a window that overlooks the drying laundry of the squatters who live in the other rooms. There’s no electricity, of course – this is the University’s non-violent way of trying to flush the squatters out. So anything I leave in my room overnight tends to get burnt for heat by my neighbours. One of these days they’re going to burn the whole place down. I hope a few of them are still inside it when they do. I left a cardigan in there once. The next day one of them was carrying round a baby that was swaddled in it. But far be it from me to ‘judge’ their lifestyle, Bland. Or to question their right to steal and burn other people’s stuff whenever the need arises. Perish the thought! Let copulation thrive! And I suppose as neighbours go, they’re still a cut above Lego and his witless lackeys. I’ll give them that. I feel like Nero down there. No: like Seneca. While their fires rage around me, and their endless screaming matches with their ‘partners,’ I sit at my desk and read the greats. The books that you people for some reason find less engaging than the would-be intellectual fireworks of Ivan Lego, that serial rapist of the English language. And I polish the great works of my own that nobody wants to publish. The other day,” he recalled with a fond chuckle, “I got rejected by a female publisher who wrote that she was ‘not in a position’ to publish one of my poems. Not in a position? The woman owns and edits a magazine exclusively devoted to publishing poetry! Who could be in a better position to publish me? But of course what she’s really saying, in her bureaucratic way, is that she doesn’t want to publish me. And why not? Because I’m no good? Heaven forbid! These bureaucrats of the ‘Arts,’ these people who talk about ‘being in positions’ – do you think they care about questions of quality? Do you think they even want there to be a difference between good writing and bad? Of course not. All they believe in is what they can see: fashion. Is this poem up-to-the-minute or not? What’s hot this summer? Not me, that’s clear enough. Because my poems have form, you see. Some of them even rhyme. And form’s out, Bland. It’s been done. Like chivalry, like the hula hoop. Like music that sounds good. Art is supposed to reflect the ‘chaos of our time’ now, see. This is what our councils and committees seem to want from it. So we get the sculptor exhibiting his heap of fouled hypodermics. The ‘rapper’ with the Uzi in the boot of his Mercedes. Which rules me out, of course. Me with my senile belief that art’s meant to impose some sort of shape on things. Like playing tennis with the net down, that’s what Robert Frost said about free verse. In other words, what’s the fucking point of it? What’s the good of it? Why would anybody possibly want to read it?” He was on a roll now, close to recapturing some of the evangelical heat that had once sustained his lectures, back when he’d had lectures to give. But suddenly he caught himself, and put on the brakes with an ironic smile. “Anyway, there’s already been a poet called Robert Browning, hasn’t there?” he mildly concluded. “What were the odds that there’d ever be another one? They were never very good, were they? Not very good at all. I’ll be seeing you, Bland.”

And he went.

A minute or two later, Fenton emerged from the lavatory. It was now a little before 2pm. So now he had a Lego Studies lecture to get to, and a girl there to look at, and think about, and hide his beard from.

There was, however, something not quite straightforward about his stride. He moved with a certain lopsidedness, a certain woodenness of gait. Following Browning’s departure, he had finally succeeded in relieving himself. But that small victory had immediately turned sour. For he had proceeded to put away his cock too early – disastrously, unforgivably early. And now, in consequence, his underpants contained about a thimble’s worth of molten piss. He was still trying to think of a way in which this act of idiocy might be blamed on someone other than himself – on Browning, for instance, for putting him off his game. On Pamela Scratch, for writing that distracting graffiti about Neville Aggot. On Gus. But ultimately it was nobody’s fault but his own, and the deplorable upshot was this soggy disaster area down in his underpants, this scrotum-scorching archipelago of humid cloth that was going to make Lego’s lecture even more of a living hell than it had already been going to be, a fifty-minute nightmare of writhing jiving adjustments in the back row …

Fortunately, he still a few spare minutes in which to do some salvage work. While descending from the library’s third floor to its second, he thrust his right hand deep into his right pocket. From there he launched a series of exploratory prods and delvings aimed at shifting his genitals to drier ground, but carefully crafted to strike passers-by as an innocent – if admittedly quite thorough – search for a well-buried handkerchief or coin. But these peripheral rummagings did more harm than good. Clearly the situation demanded a more holistic remedy, a really massive intervention. He had to get his whole hand down there.

Very well, then: having arrived on the second floor, he left the stairwell and made for the shelves. Ceiling-high, book-packed, shadowy, they provided ideal cover for anyone looking to ram a hand fully down his jeans. He slipped down an empty alley that seemed narrower than the others, darker. He was midway along it, and just about to do the deed, when he sensed that somebody else had just come in behind him. Fuck! Putting the operation on hold, he started scanning the passing book spines with quasi-scholarly intent, as if zeroing in on a particular call number. Behind him, the interloper kept coming. Fenton therefore came to a complete halt, grabbed a book at random, opened it, and pressed himself forward so as to let this eager bastard get by. But instead of squeezing past him, the person stopped right at his side. Fenton looked up. It was Charmaine.

“Nice beard!” she said.

Her hand playfully touched his elbow as she said it. Her eyes were aimed without mercy straight at his. They were so brown you couldn’t make out the pupils.

“Hey,”she said. “Guess what?”

The problem in Fenton’s jeans no longer concerned him. Suddenly his only aim or interest was to keep himself upright, to resist his body’s huge craving to melt to the floor. It wanted to become a small puddle down there, a single-celled organism, some dew under a loose heap of clothing. She looked infinitely better than he wanted her to. And she made him feel far worse, up this close, than he’d allowed himself to believe was going to be possible.

“Come on,” she scolded, “ you’re supposed to say ‘what.’ So, guess what?”

“What?” he said. Her eyes. Her teeth. Her nostrils. Her right bra strap flagging down her brown upper arm, ripe for rectification.

“I’m under strict instructions not to talk to you.” Smiling broadly, as though she found this information vastly entertaining.

“Who from?” Fenton tried to say, but the words caught on some large and moist obstruction in his throat. He swallowed, and said it again properly. “ From who?”

“From Gus of course.”

“Oh,” Fenton said. Of course. From Gus. He should have seen that coming. And he should, ideally, have replied to it with something more incisive than ‘oh.’ But his composure had taken its leave. It had slipped out of his body and was sprinting cravenly down the stairs. He felt like a cylinder of dry ash dangling from the end of some absent-minded person’s cigarette.

“But don’t worry,” she said with a grin. “I don’t believe him or anything.”

“Believe what?”

“Believe what he said about you.”

“What,” Fenton said, “did he say about me?” How strange it was, how very strange, to reflect that he was standing – right now, right at this very second – at her side. Standing, that is to say, in the one place in the world where, in theory, he most passionately wanted to stand. He had dreams about this. He spent days on end thinking about nothing else. And now here he was: it was happening. Some of it had happened already. And he wasn’t up to it. He knew that already, with terrible clarity. He quite simply wasn’t up to it. Already he found himself hoping, disgracefully, that it would end very soon.

“He said you’re a sleazy sexist who treats women like dirt.”

Fenton looked at her in consternation. He opened his mouth to rebut this ridiculous lie – and realised that he felt unwell. Not just odd, or slightly below par, but really, distinctly unwell. Her nose was sprinkled with freckles so faint that they seemed to lie under her skin rather than on it, and quite suddenly there was a more than even chance he was going to vomit. She smelt of bubblegum, which wasn’t helping. He swallowed, and tasted something resembling the end of an old battery. “I’ve never,” he sort of croaked, “treated dirt very badly.” It was the best he could do.

“Look at you: you’ve gone all pale! Don’t worry – that’s just the kind of thing he says. Anyway, if I did everything he told me to, I’d have to live in a cardboard box or something. He thinks everyone’s after me. Even girls! Let me guess: I bet he told you to start growing that beard, didn’t he?”

Fenton merely nodded.

“Don’t you want to know how I knew that?” she chastised him.

Again he answered non-verbally, with judicious flexings of his mouth and face. He had resolved not to speak now unless he absolutely had to. Each speech act was making him feel decidedly iller. But he still stood a fair chance of averting outright disaster, as long as he didn’t try anything too fancy. He swallowed again, and regretted it at once.

“He knows I don’t like guys with beards, right? But he doesn’t want to shave his one off. So instead he just makes all the other Maoists grow one too!”

“What?” Fenton cried. This, he perceived vaguely, was a scandal, an outrage! If only he felt well enough to strike back, to deliver the five-minute, tightly reasoned denunciation of Gus that the moment so richly demanded. But the eloquent stuff would have to wait till later. Much later. One fine day when he was in the peak of health he would sit down with her and give her the works: the laid-back wit, the seamless repartee, the subtle enumeration of Gus’s salient character flaws, the cool showcasing of his own credentials. But not now. Not now. Right now the mere thought of saying something daring or virtuosic made a panicked rope of nausea slither thickly up the back of his throat.

“Don’t be mad at him,” she said. “ And don’t tell him I told you that, whatever you do. If he knew that, we’d both be in trouble. But you can keep a secret, can’t you?”

He nodded and worked his eyebrows, and wished like hell that she’d cut down on the frisky innuendo. Every gleam in her eye was fresh heat for the stew in his guts. He wasn’t proud of it, but already he was thinking very seriously about the location of the nearest toilets. There were some on this floor, but he couldn’t very well be convulsively ill in there. That would be too close. The sound of his animal heavings might drift back out here, to her. He’d have to return to the ones on the top floor then: which meant getting back to the stairwell first. One edge of this was just visible over her right shoulder. It lay about fifteen strides beyond her, a lime-green and carpetless Shangrila. He eyed it with yearning.

“You are mad at him, aren’t you? Don’t be. He’s not out to get you or anything. He just … well, he’s bound to be a bit suspicious of you, isn’t he? Look at it from his point of view. No one’s ever actually joined the Maoists before. Plenty of guys have dropped out, but nobody’s ever joined. Not since the death of communism, anyway. So he’s bound to wonder what you’re up to, isn’t he?”

“I’m not,” said Fenton, “up to anything.”

“Well that’s the other thing he’s afraid of. I mean, if you joined up because you actually believe in it …”

“Of course I believe in it.” It cost him a lot to string these words together, to utter such a great many syllables all at once. And strangely enough, he immediately got the feeling that it had been the wrong thing to say. “Why?” he made himself add. “Doesn’t Gus?”

“Oh he does now. Of course he does now. But you have to understand, he is fairly new to it. He only really got into it because he was … well, he wasn’t quite fast enough to make it in the rugby team. The coach always left him on the bench. I hated that man. Poor Gussy, it used to depress him so much. His self-esteem can get pretty low sometimes, you know. He might not show it, but it can. Anyway, that’s when he decided to give the Maoist thing a try instead. Of course it’s all a load of rubbish if you ask me. I just do the paper.”

“But … why Maoism? Why did he choose that?” Fenton was drifting in and out of his body now, and was well beyond being able to remember why such questions mattered. But he knew in the abstract that they probably did, somehow, that their answers might well be of use to him later on. Anyway, he had to say something. He couldn’t, as much as he wanted to, just not say anything at all.

“You mean, as opposed to being an Anarchist or whatever? Well, I suppose to start with it was because nobody else had taken it. You know, there weren’t any other Maoist groups on campus. But he’s totally committed to it now. Don’t let me give you the wrong impression. And you definitely never heard any of this from me, right? All I’m saying is, he’s still catching up on some parts of it. Some of the theory and that. So he’s bound to be a little defensive when a properly dressed guy like you comes along and joins up. If he knew you could read Russian,” she added mischievously, tapping the book that he’d forgotten he was holding, “he’d really freak out!”

Gently lowering his head, Fenton let his gaze fall for the first time on the randomly grabbed, blindly opened volume in his hands. It indeed proved to be full of some strange foreign script. Russian? He’d have to take her word for that. Looking down at it made him feel a lot worse, but so did looking at everything else.

“But don’t worry,” she reassured him. “I can keep a secret too.”

She placed her hand on his wrist as she said this. A wave of protest reared violently up from the churning cesspit of his innards. He clenched his teeth and prayed that she would remove her hand from him without delay. He knew dimly that he would look back on all this later and weep at the unfairness of it: having her hand on him and wanting it off, having her next to him and wanting her gone. But the look of her, the sound of her voice, her smell, kept spurring him ruthlessly on towards massive liquid catastrophe. Maybe after this wretched performance his chances of getting her would be gone forever. Maybe it was all ending here, this very minute. But right now that felt like a good thing, if it meant never having to feel this way again. Maybe he just wasn’t cut out for this, for stealing somebody else’s girlfriend. Again that was something to contemplate later. His sole task now was to get out of her presence as gracefully as possible and into the sweet solitude of those cans. What an underrated environment the public toilet was! The thick sheltering walls, the soothing white tiles. All that cool and edgeless and infinitely tolerant porcelain …

Finally she took her hand off him. But just before she did, she gave his forearm a last tiny squeeze – and that was it. From that second the die was cast. He was absolutely going to be hideously sick now, no question about it, and in the very near future too. He gave himself maybe a minute. He had to get out of here immediately. Doing it gracefully no longer mattered. He just had to do it. But how? How was he going to get past her? He couldn’t verbally ask her to step aside: a transaction of that magnitude would almost certainly push him over the edge. Nor could he just squeeze wordlessly past her: their bodies would inevitably touch, and that too would be more than he could bear. Just thinking about it forced him to close his eyes for a moment and just stand very very still, with his jaw clamped adamantly shut. He vowed to any deity who might be listening that he would gladly renounce every nefarious intention he’d ever had, if he could only get out of this without her seeing him regurgitate.

“Gosh,” she said, examining his troubled face. “You really don’t want me to tell him, do you?”

He shrugged and vaguely whimpered.

“You don’t say much, do you?”

He shrugged again, shaking his head. Oh Christ, the whole conversation was a dismal shambles now, a great flaming zeppelin! But so what? If it ended without his spewing all over her shoes he would account it a searing triumph, an epoch-making success.

“Well,” she said with a blessed air of finality, “I’ve got a lecture to get to. Hey, you do Lego Studies don’t you? So you’ve got a lecture too. Should we walk there together?”

Firmly he shook his head. “No. I’ve got to …” He ceased speaking. He made a curt gesture towards the floor above.

“Oh. Okay,” she said, looking disappointed and mystified in equal measure.

That look was too much for him. He made a lurching drunkard’s attempt to get past her. She held her ground. Worse, she actively stopped him, by placing a firm hand on his rioting chest. And for an obscene moment he thought it was all over. He really did think he would have to spin away from her, clutch his knees, and bury the floor, right here and now, under an unspeakable steaming tangerine deluge. Instead he stepped very carefully back, riveted his eyes on one particular book spine, and with a profound Tantric effort rode the moment out. But even as the wave subsided, he knew beyond doubt that the next one would be it, the catastrophe itself. He had pushed his luck quite fucking far enough.

“You’re not getting away that easy,” she said with a grin, still touchingly unaware of the gravity of the situation. “You,” she said, raising a didactic forefinger, “ have got to tell me something. What’s going on tonight? At two in the morning? What’s going on?”

He wanted to swallow. He also wanted not to swallow. His tonsils were steeped in gathering spit.

“Come on, don’t try and cover for him. I’m not stupid, I heard him ringing all of you up. What is it, a – ”

“There’s a secret meeting,” Fenton said concisely, like a spy passing on vital information with his last breath.

“I knew it!” she cried, slapping his poor chest for emphasis. “He tried to tell me you had a game of indoor cricket! As if – ”

“I’ll keep you posted,” Fenton abruptly said, and with that he barged unceremoniously past her, head down, feeling in passing the brush of some strangely resilient part of her that could only be a breast, and this electric touch of firm (but at the same time unfirm) tit was a veritable starter’s pistol that sent him resolutely on his way along the book-lined lane with his mouth shut tight and his face aimed straight ahead and his body moving with the jerky yet curiously upright and dignified gait of a disgraced politician striding without comment past a rabid media pack until finally he hit the stairwell where it was safe to break into a frantic sprint which he wasted no time in doing in order to take the stairs two, three, four at a time until he surged through the toilet’s outer door and then through its inner one and finally through the door of the cubicle itself, where without a second to spare he snapped forward over the welcoming bowl.