2. when there are inkwells

that was during one of your very first encounters with him, when you pledged yourself to the relentless pursuit of truth, and you bowed low as he handed you back your sword and pronounced you a warrior. or rather upon rising you had to bend low to pick up your bag and it was your pen he returned to you, having borrowed it for a moment to record some detail. and yet, a warrior, fit to fight. and you did once call him oggy, with apparent impunity, though it left you feeling strange, not sure whether or not you’d ever do any such thing again – you know, all that starch in his collar and cuffs, and his glittering spectacles? but it’s all right, really, because it is seldom necessary to use a person’s name. a courteous smile tends to suffice, and besides professor ogden o’gugelsuch has never actually addressed more than a very few mostly phatic words at you, or questions requiring lengthy responses from you and few prompts from him, and you’ve never felt that you had a sufficient reason to bother him for more than that. nothing to ask about. postmodernistimysticism is all plain sailing. (you have a right to coin words, and to complicate further the complex). and no, it is not the same as postmodernism. nobody’s actually doing that.

so now as your vision adapts to the eerie magic of the glowlit dimness and fug, there he sits, bent over an enormous leather tome, leaning on one elbow, his sparsely goateed chin propped up on the palm of his hand, his silky silvery fringe of hair frictioned to static electrical attention by the starched collar and his monocle a-dangle while he peers breathily through a hand lens at the faint and fading entries in the ancient – well, it’s a relatively modern – inches-thick wad of 20th century dot matrix, really, which some trick of the light – or of your imagination, be honest now, you know you are prone to hallucinations as your grandmother was and hers before her – made appear like a hide-bound tome. he doesn’t notice you, as usual, as it’s not yet your time, and so you turn to your own pile of tomes, which the snake-skin shoes have just brought to your desk.

you are not turning your back on a cheerful, bustling crowd to dive grimly into the task. there is only one other person there, and although it’s the same person who is there every day, you have no idea who she is because you have never enquired. it has never been necessary to. she is pale, whitish, and alas a bit flaky, possibly old, and not very fit-looking. she sits in her usual place rather far away, in the furthest booth facing the wall, and you have never seen her leave. you sniff a little and arrange a bobby pin or two before you plunge in. grimly. as the morning goes by, a few students do come and go. one even slides into the bench opposite you, fidgets with technology and then stares at the window before sliding back out.

one longish morning passes by, but for you, the historian, the days and nights blink light and dark, centuries pass – backwards; and with each flip of the page, backwards still further through another, and still another thin slice of the spectrum of time. and when you come back, when your body reins you in, when ‘cruel hunger’ comes upon you, you have been perhaps a thousand years into the past, and spent several weeks there, or years even, and yet been away – which is to say, absorbed in your tome – for only three and a half hours. and now it’s lunch time, and time indeed for the liverwurst roll.

there is a chance, always a chance that if you leave an open tome on the desk with a personal pen as a placeholder and a half-drunk cup of water next to the inkwell, other students will read that as a claim to territory and respect it and you’ll still have your place when you get back. so you do that, but you also remember not to leave your tablet lying about so you stand and stare for a moment. because it isn’t there when there’s an inkwell. the inkwells aren’t there when there are tablets, smart phones and laptops. and there as plain as day is the inkwell. and you know that when there are inkwells you know about the oscillations, and the reason for them, and when there are computers you have no inkling of the inkwells and no memory of the oscillations at all.

well, that’s what you’ve been calling them, these shifts between one time and place and another, these scene-shifts that seem to occur when you let yourself become entranced by the chilling, thrilling enchantment of history. oscillations. you’re still young and adventurous enough to succumb to that thrill and, forgetting your tablet, you sit back down just for a moment letting the hunger subside. and your hand goes out to the pen, which has a steel nib, quite like the modern ones from the early 20th century, but this is much older, and you begin writing on the sheet of parchment that has appeared in place of your tablet. professor ogden o’gugelsuch is greyer and eggier here, his head more egg-shaped and his eyes very strange, slightly bulging and rather restless in their sockets. somewhat shadowy, almost insubstantial young men in medieval dress saunter by with books under their arms, and you write. ‘henry viii. the truth.’ and because you have many questions to ask and you want answers, yes, you bend your head over, close your eyes tightly and say under your breath, ‘would the real henry the eighth please step forth?’

and no sooner have you written these words down, enjoying the scratchy pen sounds on the parchment and the shuddery sensations up and down the back of your neck, when a big broad muscly woman, or girl, rather, in several layers of extravagantly fringed tartan, and wild red hair flying about her thickly freckled face and wrestled into thick plaits that reach almost down to her bare knees comes and sits opposite you. you absentmindedly put out a hand to shift your tomes nearer to you and out of her way but she slaps her knuckly great hand down on top of yours and you see green glass glitter on several rings which she wears on both hands. they are brassy and clunky, and you rather like them.

she peers earnestly at you through the smog or mist and says, ‘are you a historian?’ then she turns around and speaks in another language to some people behind her, too shrouded in the mists to be seen. and you can understand that language, not just because it is close to the irish gaelic you know, but much more because of the lay of the time-space continuum, which is multidimensional here, and lets you in on a collective mentality, where you begin to notice the machinations of the pixies and catch glimpses of the girl’s companions, two or three other girls as big-boned and rough and ready as she is. it’s to do with the way your brain manages the data as your senses select it from the matrix, while the pixies are maintaining and manipulating the portals of your mind.

she says, ‘yes, i think it’s another historian.’ and then she sits down and glares at you, gloats, even, power pouring from hard green eyes, and you beam brightly back at her just like a clerk and say, ‘can i help you?’ and the ghost girl says, ‘when are you?’ and you say, ‘21st century.’ but you’re not really insisting on that. when there are inkwells you’re not really sure which layer of reality is the real one. she says, ‘oh, from in then!’

she speaks over her shoulder again, relaying your reply. then she says, ‘we don’t see many of them from then. they’re mostly way off track.’ which is so exactly what you yourself think that you don’t quite trust it.

‘well, where are you then?’ you ask and she says, ‘here’ and looks puzzled. you feel faint with this sudden demand on your depeted energies and you think fleetingly of the liverwurst roll, but the oscillation tugs and you let it keep hold of you. ‘and who,’ you ask, ‘are you?’

‘bardacha,’ she says, cocking her head on one side as if listening to herself. the ‘r’ was trilled like the whirr of a wood-pigeon’s wings and all but obscured the vowel which had almost become a schwa. the ‘ch’ was an explosive guttural that moved a good deal of phlegm, the vowels either side unstressed. you recognise the ‘-acha’ as a goidelic plural ending, extant in modern irish though differently pronounced.  ‘bard-’ could only mean ‘bard’. and ‘bard’ meant… the girl watches you intently, listening hard. then she says it again, with a different accent: ‘bardacha,’ with a belligerent pout. this time the ‘b’ is very broad and the ‘a’ quite strongly diphthongised, gliding from from ‘aw’ to ‘uh’, the voice a little husky. the ‘r’ is not pronounced. the ‘ch’ is between ‘tch’ and ‘tj’, and the first vowel almost an i as in baggage. bards, guards, poets, scholars, adepts in ceremonial magic.

‘it means ‘birds’,’ said bardacha. ‘we’re in the east.’

which is right on topic for you, unexpectedly, which jolts you instantly into denial, which flips the oscillation back into the modern library where there are no inkwells, no big bony girls with hard green eyes staring at you, grinning and gloating and watching you come to terms with the fact of pixies. and no memory of oscillations, just you typing your own seriously heretical etymology of ‘bard’ into your tablet computer[1] .

*birds = bardacha = *b(u)awdacha = baw+ud+acha = *b(u)awdacha = boudigga = boudicca = boadicea where the ce is pronounced tj as in latin. why has nobody else ever noticed this? why do the best informed scholars in the field accept the current etymology that has the queen of the iceni called ‘booty’? but you make a note to yourself that you have to give your reasons for rejecting it in a strictly academic way.

while the portal closes and the grey light is of this day in the 21st century once again. bardacha is merely a fast-fading memory of a fantasy you should not have been wasting your time on. besides, you really are hungry, and positively lusting after that liverwurst roll, and there are several floors and a few leagues of corridors to traverse to get to it. you’re close to the epicentre of a kind of vortex between this time and antiquity in this ancient room and the new refectory is in a little late twentieth century mall that on its own tiny scale corresponds to an outer suburb of a city. your first doorway with a steepish ramp – or you can take the stairs, escalator or lifts – takes you into the medieval section where hang dignitaries from aeons past, coffins with things sticking out, celtically arranged skulls and cloaks, strange wall-hangings and of course, signs telling you where to go. you ignore those, finding yourself head down, bulleting through like a bull at a gate, shoulder bag clutched to your side under your arm, having been caught up in the feng shui and turned magically into a headlong rusher, which you had always suspected it was your destiny to become. and you rush through the cloisters because you know it is not really your reality. it is your body’s and your body needs to be fed. your reality is the array of vistas in your head. the renaissance makeover, sprawling grandiosely and braggingly ornate, with elaborate fabrications hiding gems, flawed ones but precious beyond imagining, about which monstrous lies are told.

‘oh,’ you sigh, with a sort of belligerent pout, almost britannic, and you say, ‘the renaissance was all monstrous lies.’ and the walls stand upright and allow you to pass, thinking to yourself, ‘discuss, with reasons and support your argument with…’ – you are about to say, ‘…skyhooks’ when the laptop under your arm buzzes ominously as it tries to turn into a tome, and you fling a startled glance at the two gryphons which are suddenly there, very close, glaring at you, though still concreted to their plinths beside the portals. it’s not the first time you’ve seen them – they appear more and more often lately. they seem for all the world to be not just haunting your imagination but actually stalking you, their stony bodies seeming to melt a little into something more like flesh. you find this a little intimidating, but reason that surely everyone else is getting the same … guidance… well, like fence-posts being indicated to you, so as to keep us each in our own fields… and on the right track. and were you going beyond the evidence anywhere there? maybe you were. two more staircases connecting two more corridors and at last the refec.

you decide on a jam tart to follow the roll, and coffee, of course, and you carry them all on a little plastic tray with your shoulder bag still under your arm to the table nearest the door. there is only one person at it and she has her back to you as you approach. so you don’t notice until you are sitting opposite her and reaching for the sugar basin that it is she, the burly be-tartaned redhead who had accosted you in the library, bardacha. you feel trapped, but only for an instant because you know that as long as you cling to the tabletop and stare straight ahead, you are earthed, connected to the here and now and cannot be whisked away by hallucinations of putative historical figures who obviously do not belong in this refectory.

so you affect a sulky look, which you know makes you look girlish and then you remember that only the tartan virago in front of you can see you, because she turns round suddenly when you recognise her and moves into the empty chair opposite you. she grabs a couple of sugar lumps and tosses them into her mouth one after the other, smiling more and more widely after each toss, suck, and swallow till she’s actually giggling and staring straight at you until you find yourself grinning helplessly back which you try to curtail by biting down hard on your roll. it is crusty and wholesome and fragrant too.

‘what’s your name then?’ bardacha asks, glowing white from the sugar high.

you tell her your real name but she says, ‘no. the one you go by.’

‘bluestocking the bard?’ you venture, conscious that your voice which you usually feel to be adequate is like a little tinkling cowbell, and you are aware that she thinks you are a sort of fairy. you are also aware of a translation process, as if arthur dent had passed through and slipped a babel fish into your ear. it is scarcely a murmur, or a subdued tumult, wafer thin between the language of now and that of the past. suddenly on impulse, you seize your tablet and open onenote.

‘how do you spell yours,’ you ask.

‘yeuh aw zzz’ suggests your guest, perhaps facetiously.

‘your name.’

‘oh, bardacha. buh aw duh i ccch a!’

‘plural of bard, yes? bard plus “-icccha”. that would be ” -acha”, wouldn’t it? so “bardacha”, hmm? that’s goidelic, isn’t it? “bard-” plus the plural ending “-acha”’. you don’t mind being chatty if there’s something to chat about. finger poised over the keyboard, you wait for the answer.

‘yes,’ she says. ‘we’re the -acha ’uns.’

‘achaeans?’ you gasp.

she smiles a happy affirmative smile. ‘yes, not the -any-ers.’ which she pronounces like ‘aeneas’. you understand she means the ones who use the plural ending which has become in modern irish ”-anna”.  ‘or the atha-any’  atheene…? you take a pull of your coffee and dive back into your tablet.  when you have put down two pages of frenetic etymology, she is still there. she has not gone.

you let your gaze rest on the broad, bony face with the belligerent mouth and that’s how you know she’s in another world, because you can see muddy streets behind her and a bored-looking cart-horse chafing between the shafts just visible over her left shoulder. you can smell blood, sweat and tears. you can perhaps perceive with a sense more subtle than hearing the shouts calls and ruckus of another time and place. and with a little shock you notice that the refectory walls  are looking thin and vaporous and the chair you’re on has turned into a wooden form and your companion is now surrounded by stout bowmen and it seems likely (and you almost hope) that the grinning hoyden before you is not much aware of the 21st century refectory at all.

but she says: ‘and so here we are, and not many have seen us.’

‘many what?’

‘many historians. you said you were one?’

‘well yes, i’m looking into things, of long ago.’

‘well, then, here we are.’ and she and her friends whom you can almost see strike such poses you almost feel compelled to take some photos. but you know nothing ever shows on a photo. and even if it did…

‘yes, but who will believe me?’ you say out loud, though to no one in particular, certainly not to the apparition. in your ‘theatre of the imagination’ you mimic yourself: ‘“i have interviewed the queen of the iceni and here’s a photo to prove it.” they’d think i was nuts.’ and if i didn’t know this old building and its mad building syndrome from many, many lifetimes of suffering in grotty, cold corridors and trying to get a rise out of hoary old professors only to find they’ve been dead for several years and no one has even noticed yet, because they’re no different now as corpses than ever they were as living breathing professors of ancient history… suddenly it occurs to you to ask about, to ask her about boadicea.

‘bo-ah- duh-see-uh?’ she seizes that, like a hawk a rabbit. the clutch of a talon. she almost laughs with pleasure. ‘i already told you. “boad-” like “board-,’ she says. ‘ “-i-” like “-uh-”, “-ce-” like “-cc-” like “-ch-” as in “loch” or “-tch-” as in “catch”, “-a-” as in “-uh”. “boad-icha”, or “bardacha”,’she finished, and then nodded several times as if hammering it into place with her head. she smelt like woodsmoke.

so you nod too, and blink as you do so, feeling like a blinking idiot for doing so, your mouth hanging open as you stare at her, your mind gingerly taking it all in.  “boadicea” is “bardacha” if you don’t say the r and you wear a belligerent pout -as she did – and allow that the “-ce-” is a latin spelling of the goidelic “ch”. as it sometimes is, depending on whose latin you use, from which school, since it varied so much from one school to the next.

you let your mind analyse “boudicca”, “bodice” and “buddig” if the “g” is pronounced “j”, as it could well be, and the “u” is “uh”. by the light of that insight, the red hair looks a little more golden, a little more lustrous; but no, realistically it is a wild, unwashed and dull-looking but well-enough combed head of hair which is curly and irrepressible, voluminous and full of vermin and plaited into thick plaits that hang down over her shoulders and are tucked into her belt. bardacha. not a name but a plural noun. bards.

but this is heresy! right on-topic for you, right off-topic for the gods of academia. in particular professor ogden o’gugelsuch. 

1. the portal

you drive through a wealthy old suburb of broad roads lined with solid and sometimes grandiose old buildings, many of them residences with large gardens around them. plane trees full of birds line the broadest of the broad roads, and in the grassed median strips there are flower beds filled with gay annuals. it is a positive boulevard with stylish cafes spilling out tables and chairs filled with well-heeled matrons and sleek businessmen onto wide sunny pavements. there are lights and a pedestrian crossing where the road turns into the university complex. magnificent is the portal arch: granite with bronze plaques bolted to it, its lofty pillars as tall as two trees – almost as massive as towers – supporting a lacy bronze archway festooned with a sort of winding allegory, a frieze of contorted figures half-human half-bird or -serpent or -fish with hard staring eyes of grimy stone blackened with lichen or soot. it is topped by a fine blazing bronze sunburst that seems to comb you as you go through with a kind of portcullis made of the elongated shadows thrown from its spiky points by its own inspirer the morning sun as it rises this autumn morning almost exactly behind it. raked by the shadow spikes slashing through the sunshiny gold you feel like bits of you are being selected out: the slack, the slovenly, the rebellious, the devil-may-care, the burrs and dags of indolence and self-sabotage. nothing remains but the lustrous resilient fleece of dedication intelligence punctiliousness ambition and respect for tradition. if it is not too meagre you will pass muster; if not …

you are still as impressed as at your first experience of driving through with the winding allegory in bronze whirlygigs at the top of the columns, so engaging that you are always right up to within paw-swipe of the stone gryphons before you remember them. but it’s all right. their heads are angled to stare right through the passing windshields at the driver and you make the obligatory eye contact with the usual little shock of thrill. each of them holds a stone pen in one paw and is writing in a big stone book. there’s an inscription in latin on the pedestal below each gone and although you’ve done a fair bit and know enough to get you through most inscriptions and you feel reasonably sure that you could crack this one in five minutes flat with of course the help of your on-line dictionary you are part of a stream of slow but steady traffic and must keep your eyes on the road. in front of you and behind you cars are moving smoothly forth and you must not break the flow. teachers and privileged students are anxious to get their cars parked in time, and not so far from where their first class is that they’d have to run so you haven’t got five minutes. into the big shady car park you glide and find a park under a pleasant-looking tree not far from a signpost that points you in the direction of the library.

the campus though only a century and a half old seems ancient and brooding and even from here only this far in, it already feels dangerous. it has an unwholesome atmosphere, as if damp timbers are rotting somewhere and about to give and some floor somewhere perhaps in the archaeology department might cave in and they’ll find the remains of prisoners in chains or maybe still living though starving or dying of thirst or disease in appalling conditions being tortured for some heresy or lack of loyalty to something or other or eaten alive by rats. somehow it makes you think of the stone gryphons at the entrance and of the earliest history books in the library and you draw a stiffening breath as you submit to the impression that in these precincts other realities impinge. the wispy breezes seem to carry whispers a bee’s whisker away from audible breaths and mutterings in the old and medieval languages that were spoken back then and which you have studied and sometimes taught for more than two decades and are conscious that you have understood so poorly. indeed you more than suspect they always were and still are poorly understood by those reputed to know them best, the lexicons writhing with fibs. these are rebellious nay even heretical thoughts that you’ve never shared with anyone yet it crosses your mind that whenever they arise in you… the gryphons seem restless somehow.

oh the gryphons, the glowering eyes of those gryphons! they haunt you wherever you go. sometimes your spirit almost fails you. there’s a sense of foreboding like a weight upon you, a pavid expectation of evil that you have to shake away with a toss of your head. but boldly on you go, on you go boldly.

and you reach the library, which has three concentric blank walls with corridors separating them and heavy double glass doors in them that you must pass through to get in, where your eyes latch on to those of the girl at the front desk, a new one you’ve never seen before who looks about fifteen but is probably a post-grad student from somewhere and upon whose asking of your name you absentmindedly give her your on-line user-name by mistake: ‘bluestocking the bard’. you scarcely bare your teeth when she asks if ‘the’ is your middle name. but you notice that she is easily intimidated – or perhaps it’s that you are extraordinarily intimidating when you bare your teeth – and gathering up your books you head for the catacombs.

not that there is anything particularly intimidating about you personally. who would tremble at a tall, tense, pencil-thin spinster with her hair in a tight bun pierced through with a complicated steel sculpture incorporating a hairpin decorated with a large minutely detailed eagle with wings extended, stooping to clutch in its talons a large red garnet that looks like something bleeding. you are surely not fifty, perhaps not forty-five, yet that bun it clutches so rapaciously is already showing some steely threads among the dark, brooding brown. it is pulled tightly back from a pale face with an oddly dewy-eyed glance, or should i say dewey-eyed from long years in the stacks. perhaps it’s the contact lenses you wear, as thick as blisters on both eyeballs. long and pinched is your nose from late formaldehyde evenings at your labours. your thin lips are compressed in quiet determination from sheer habit, even in the absence of anything at all to be quietly determined about. around your not yet scrawny neck is a string of big amber beads. your skinny, flat-chested body is sheathed in an aubergine pinafore over a bottle green skivvy, and you wear navy blue stockings and sensible shoes with low but solid wooden heels that hammer the most sound-resistant floor with a satisfying thud. scarcely the intimidating type. yet you saw that girl quail. quelled her with a look. you almost wonder what you are becoming…

onward you go along the miles of corridor you must traverse to reach your destination, dodging the harassed, hurrying, haunted-looking academics you’ve come to think of as headlong rushers, with their books or laptops under their arms, bulleting along head first at top speed past pairs and groups of students texting or snogging, your gaze grazing the tops of dimly-recognised heads and focused narrowly upon the road ahead, your mind firmly fixed on your destination, your body on automatic pilot. your head goes up and your eyes narrow at intervals, as if earnestly seeking the meaning of the signs above the doors as you sail past. your head goes down again to avoid eye contact as you pass chortling professors and their claques of fawning and flattering favourites, up again as you get past them. straight on you go and let the library staff with their arms full skip past and around you, which they’re good at, or ought to be and soon will be if they aren’t yet. under your breath in time to your foot-falls, you sing some bloody-minded old ballad about ravens feasting in fields. on corpses. the slain in battle. young men. and you even let your lips move. ‘… oh, i’ll pike oot his bonnie blue ee…’

a haze of smoke hangs in the dank, dingy hall. there is a smell of cold coal cinders from fires long dead. the ceiling is low, for this is an older part of the library complex, built in the ancient past by people who were only about three or four feet tall, whom you think of as ‘hobbits’ or elves, or possibly even pixies, and consider worthy of further interest. well, no, not that long ago, and not so magical, but somehow you always get that impression. tiny people only thigh high seem to you to haunt it. and why not? they are well-recorded in folk memory and they are indicated but not much mentioned in the history books, but well-know in literature. wee folk, good folk, trooping all together. fascinating to think that they must have really existed, not as supernatural beings, but as severely inbred until pathologically undersized people, regressed in their monkeyish features, their chirruping or yapping voices, their ears large and set low on their broad, low-browed heads, their noses small and flattish. once common but later disappearing as fertility diminished and finally failed. or  they married out. fairies? the irish word ‘fear’ (pronounced like ‘fair’) is still the word for ‘man’.

and with a reputation for magic? you have a theory about that, based on a lot of meticulous etymology going back a thousand years to the ancient patois of the educated elite, the linguae francae of the silk roads and the myriad transient shipboard creoles of those times. but that is going beyond the bounds of or even flying in the face of current textbook dogma, which still believes in that stark straight-limbed celto-phobic family tree of languages, and barely sidesteps that garden of eden which is the mythic birth-place of all speech to go galloping after the forty thousand year old, or is it twenty five or no,  only twelve thousand,year old venus figurines whose goddess-worshipping makers had surely spoken the purest most laryngeal and densely conjugated and declined pie. flying in the face of such volumes of equally meticulous multitudinously detailed research by impeccable scholars – gosh, you’d weep just to think – and the stony eye of the gryphon may fall upon you if you go too far with anything that does that.

so with a bit of a wince because it doesn’t quite belong there, you let it get shunted into the fantasy fiction category of your mind and entrancing as that may sometimes have been to you in your wildly creative youth, you have no time for it now. you deal in facts, and theories which must be rigorously evidence based, of course and all the evidence is of course, right there in your text-books, not in your general knowledge of the world through reading, listening and experiencing. it’s in the books and the right books at that or it’s not evidence. and the wee folk are in the wrong books, the fantasy fiction books and the ramblings of liars and delusionals. they are not mentioned in the histories of text-books, except as anomolies, or when considering the superstitions of the dark ages, which are not on your radar. so you quell it, this theory you heretically nevertheless have, you crush it, you feel it crumple, there is a sudden despairing collapse of once hopeful dendrites, and almost swooning with a cold damp fit of trembling all of a sudden while reaching for the topmost  tome on your pile, you remember that you have forgotten to have breakfast as you so often do, and wonder if you shouldn’t perhaps go and find the refectory and have a liverwurst roll.

but you have opened the tome and your mind clears as the spasm passes and is soon forgotten. your eyes by now are accustomed to the semi-dark in which the light filtered through the dust on the windows obscures rather than illuminates things in a fuzzy blaze of dust-motes, although you have found your way thus far without any need of a sense of sight, moving among the familiar furniture with ease and grace, manoeuvering within the mental map that you keep in your well-maintained memory. your booth is not taken so without looking about to see if there is any competition, you drive at it with speed and skill, tilting yourself like a lance and lunging for the spongy cushion to claim it for the day. if there had been any competition they’d have been knocked clean out of the way. with almost a little cry or sob of triumph you slide into the seat and disburden yourself of your handwoven albanian shoulder-bag, almost slamming it onto the tabletop, and you take out your tablet and begin your furtive, fearful magic.

because in you things are coming to a head. a postmodern head – well, postmodernistic, all full of minutiae and exquisitudes of nit-picking niggliness. right in. up close. and it is time for you to consider your options and make some new plans. you have spent all this time trying to equip yourself to contribute to history. to work with others on the production , clarification, evolution and maintenance of the narrative of human existence. and to this end you have perfected the art of scrupulous self critique. you give your every thought rigorous scrutiny and apply a veracity rating. and in this state of hermeneutical grace you address yourself to the evidence of history, boldly you do. it is time to get serious about it. history is your career. post-modernism has given you an array of tools and you have beecome skilful in the wielding of them. this is your job. to critique. history. text-book history.

no one contests your right to this intention or is even aware of it. as a postgraduate student you are expected to have swallowed the dogmas whole, digested them, made them comfortably your own, and in passing the necessary exams you have implied in effect that you have done just that, so there’s a tiny qualm of conscience where you have not quite resolved all the intricate issues. of course, no student gets through without encountering instances of irreconcilable difference with the textbooks, with the consensus of academic opinion, but few have time to attempt a resolution, or the audacity; indeed few even dare to admit to a doubt that there is but one opinion in pre-renaissance history, except among cutting-edge scholars whom no-one has ever met. and now, instead of resolving the doubts by a more assiduous attention to the footnotes where better scholars than you have resolved them all to perfection, mostly seriously intimidating 20th century scholars with impeccable phd’s, which they got in their early twenties and to which they are constantly adding post-graduate diplomas and certificates, all the while teaching subjects they know as perfectly well as they know their mother tongue, while you haven’t yet got yours, though you’re starting to bristle with diplomas and you do teach undergraduate classes now and again, you are required to blink at the veracity issues, which you see as simmering like a low level of infection, not serious, nothing to worry about, and perhaps you do wink a little, knowing that you’ll never get through it all if you don’t just plunge into the races along with the rest and get drafted into the elite paddock, scarcely letting it matter because you’re not coming top, not getting the hotly competed for scholarships although you’re always in the running for them, so you’re never going to be cutting edge even with your phd; and then you find you still have that stubborn little cough you can’t quite shake, that never quite clears your throat and upper respiratory tract, and anyway must be repressed because this is after all a library, and then…

…a pair of very high-heeled snake-skin shoes goes past and you are momentarily distracted. momentarily you even forget your palpitatingly potent plan and go into a tiny, misty stupor of nostalgia – and almost remember a time when you, yes, you, might have worn such heels, such sleek, such fashionable shoes – when you were younger, a fashion-conscious girl of nineteen… but no. no! no! not here. not now. you are no longer young. and this is not the habitat of that chic intellectual elite you were running with then. you no longer go to the opera, the ballet and the theatre with that set. they have all graduated and gone, or dropped out and disappeared into the obscurity beyond the academic pale. no not that now. this is the catacombs. this snaky, haunted old tomb. tomb of tomes. tomb of the tomes and dreams and dreary or thrilling careers of generations of scholars old and ancient, neophytic and newborn. outside the gryphons glower, and their stony feathers seem to shiver in the flickering autumnal light.

it is like a club, this room, modern but with the atmosphere of an old, old club where tobacco is offered with pipes to smoke it with, or snuff in elegant boxes, or cigars or marijuana in tiny clay pipes with long curving stems. the wine is a deep secretive burgundy, tasting of old leather, as if it had been bottled in a sack, brought to you in an elegant enough decanter by a ghoulish figure whose joints creak audibly as he walks. or sometimes it feels like an ancient hall of learning. it is l-shaped. there are low shelves along two walls, much wood-paneling and those booths along the shortest wall where you come in at the door. a skeleton or two and some parts of skeletons hang from iron spikes in the walls in rusty chains, along with corpses of foxes, a stag’s head, and a series of stuffed raptors. except there are no pipes, no burgundy, no skeletons, rusty chains or corpses, at least not now, and never were at this university. it is some archetype that haunts this one and perhaps all universities throughout time. of these relics there is only the merest suggestion, a certain odour or subtle ambience, caught accidentally in the architecture, the furniture and the decor, and exuded by the deeply learned ancients and awestruck aspirants who pore over its precious old tomes…

not in a booth, because he is too important to be stuck away like that, no, not in a booth, but rather sitting up at a big heavy wooden table that runs the length of the hall almost, so that students heavily laden with teetering piles of books have to sidle round the top and bottom ends of it, sits professor ogden o’gugelsuch, your doctoral supervisor with whom you have an appointment soon, but not yet. he is busy. light from a window is shed upon that table, and muted as that light is by the dense frosting of dust and smoke on both sides of the window and light dressing of guano on the outside, it lays a light airy eerie beauty upon all it touches. and the fairest palest most poignantly touching things it lays this beauty upon are the thin veiny pink and white blue-veined hands of this aged – we might say ancient – scholar. indeed, we might call him a veritable sage. hoary the fringe of hair at the nape of that high domed shiny bald head. legendary he is in the folk-lore of the university; awe-inspiring enough to warrant it in real life. he has asked you to call him oggy, once, long ago, with one of his sweet smiles that reminded you of a hard boiled egg shell cracking to reveal the sudden whiteness within.