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s College, Cambridge, although I’ve also borrowed indiscriminately from other colleges as well. Sir Isaac Newton was at Trinity College in real life, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at Jesus. The point is that St Cedd’s College is a completely fictitious assemblage, and no correspondence is intended between any institutions or characters in this book and any real institutions or people, living, dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment. This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh Plus computer
It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.
‘Hello, Michael? Yes, it’s Susan. Susan Way. You said I should call you if I was free this evening and I said I’d rather be dead in a ditch, remember? Well, I suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely, completely and utterly free, and there isn’t a decent ditch for miles around. Make your move while you’ve got your chance is my advice to you. I’ll be at the Tangiers Club in half an hour.’
The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from a sack.
’ ‘Now, that I didn’t know,’ said Reg. ‘Your past has murkier things in it than I dreamed possible. A quality, I might add, that it shares with this soup.’
‘I found it in the harbour,’ she said, ‘in the water. While we were waiting for the damn ferry.’ ‘Sarah! I’ve told you . . .’ ‘It’s just what you called it. And worse. You called it words I didn’t think you knew.
Pink valleys, hermaphrodite tables, these were all natural stages through which one had to pass on the path to true enlightenment.
He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to . . . to . . . The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.
He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief?
’ The reader clearly belonged to the school of thought which holds that a sense of the seriousness or greatness of a poem is best imparted by reading it in a silly voice.
Svlad Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, ‘popular’ was hardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too were true. But popular? Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might be popular – everyone slows down to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames. Infamous was more like it, Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.
By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat. What did ‘psychosassic’ mean? It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all.
Gordon Way’s astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing to his astonishment at what happened next.
He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for.
Instinct told him that he was heading in the wrong direction, but he didn’t want to go back the way he’d come for fear of getting sucked back into the gravitational whirlpool of Cambridge’s traffic system.
In the summer, of course, we beat suspects round the head with it.’
Michael usually referred to his mother as an old battleaxe, but if she was fairly to be compared to a battleaxe it would only be to an exquisitely crafted, beautifully balanced battleaxe, with an elegant minimum of fine engraving which stopped just short of its gleaming razored edge. One swipe from such an instrument and you wouldn’t even know you’d been hit until you tried to look at your watch a bit later and discovered that your arm wasn’t on.
If you really wanted to find someone, how would you set about it, what would you do? He tried phoning the police, but they were out too.
He wore a heavy old light-brown suit which looked as if it has been worn extensively for bramble-hacking expeditions in some distant and better past, a red checked shirt which failed entirely to harmonise with the suit, and a green striped tie which refused to speak to either of them. He also wore thick metal-rimmed spectacles, which probably accounted at least in part for his dress sense.
‘The light works,’ he said, indicating the window, ‘the gravity works,’ he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. ‘Anything else we have to take our chances with.’
’ Mason gave him another grim look from a vast repertoire he had developed which ranged from very, very blackly grim indeed at the bottom of the scale, all the way up to tiredly resigned and only faintly grim, which he reserved for his children’s birthdays.
Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
‘Luckily,’ he went on, ‘you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as “impossible” in my dictionary. In fact,’ he added, brandishing the abused book, ‘everything between “herring” and “marmalade” appears to be missing.
The last time he signed a cheque for her he cancelled it before the end of the day, to prevent it, as he explained, ‘falling into the wrong hands’. The wrong hands, presumably, being those of her bank manager.
‘They should all be deported,’ said the taxi driver as they drew to a halt. ‘Er, who should?’ said Richard, who realised he hadn’t been listening to a word the driver said. ‘Er—’ said the driver, who suddenly realised he hadn’t been listening either, ‘er, the whole lot of them. Get rid of the whole bloody lot, that’s what I say. And their bloody newts,’ he added for good measure.
‘There’s not much in the fridge at the moment,’ she said, ‘some yoghurt, I think, and a jar of roll-mop herrings you could open. I’m sure you’ll be able to muck it up if you try, but it’s actually quite straightforward. The main trick is not to throw them all over the floor or get jam on them.’
‘Don’t you listen to anything you say? The whole thing was obvious!’ he exclaimed, thumping the table. ‘So obvious that the only thing which prevented me from seeing the solution was the trifling fact that it was completely impossible. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. Now. Let us go.’
I thanked the little fellow and gave him a shilling for his trouble. He kicked me rather sharply on the shin and went about his business. But he was the one who solved it. My only contribution to the matter was to see that he must be right. He had even saved me the bother of kicking myself.’
Deep in the rain forest it was doing what it usually does in rain forests, which was raining: hence the name.
‘Richard, I commend you on your scepticism, but even the sceptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.’
It’s like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.
