Chapter 1C

Richard, Friday 5th March, 8:10 a.m.
“Zoë, please, stop it,” I groan as she squirms again, and then I jump slightly as I catch sight of the multitude of tiny projectile holes in the wall – that won't be easy to explain if she notices.
Suddenly the secretive silence and the sweaty sexual tension are shattered by a great banging and clattering of falling objects. I have one of those shocks that make you tingle all over as I realise the plywood board where I've mounted my little installation has slid off the table onto the floor, and the gun is no longer clothed in the tight dust sheet but brandishing its nakedness at the world.
I try to slip swiftly but gently out from under Zoë to rescue the situation before she sees the weapon, but it has the effect of dumping her on the floor like a bag of laundry. As I hasten under the table to cover the mess up with its olive-green cloth she is getting to her feet and rubbing her bruised coccyx, blushing with embarrassment.
Now I've really done it. I've made it perfectly clear that I'm up to something and into the bargain I've bruised her arse and made her feel rejected and unappreciated. Her face is a kind of outraged scowl and although she says nothing I can almost read the angry words on it. Hell, as we all know, hath no fury...
I have to say something and the best I can think of is “Sorry, I slipped.” That's patently a rather pathetic lie and the thunderclouds on her face darken. What made me think I could get away with a childish fib like that?
She is also looking very curiously at the cloth and the once more unrecognisable shapes under it. I'm not sure how I'm going to get out of this one. Fortunately after today she is no longer my student – I had thought that might mean we could have a discreet affair, but maybe it'll be better if we avoid each other.
There are footsteps in the corridor now, people turning up for nine o'clock lectures. I try to draw Zoë closer and kiss her again. She pulls away, fuming.
“Look, I'm really sorry,” I say, “I got nervous. I'll make it up to you.”
She looks unconvinced but slightly pacified. Can I really just brazen my way out of this? I wish I knew what she was thinking.
I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the glass on the arty framed poster from some gallery in Budapest that Emily gave me last year. I look a state. I'm still shaky and sweating, and there's something scary about my eyes.
“Are you on something?” Zoë asks.
“No, I'll explain.”
There's an awkward silence and I realise she is, reasonably enough, waiting for an explanation.
“Later,” I tell her. I must say I'm immensely relieved to realise she probably thinks my secret under the green cloth consists of some kind of drug paraphernalia. Under normal circumstances, it occurs to me, I would find that quite worrying.
Another tingly shock comes over me as I realise I haven't done anything about that letter I wrote for the other ones of her. I surreptitiously glance down and satisfy myself that it's more or less out of sight. I must remember to shred that, or better still burn it. Why the hell did I write it in the first place?
There's more noise outside now, only minutes to go before I have to go and check if the projector's working. I must try not to terrify the students. I make an ineffectual attempt to comb my hair, looking at my reflection in the glass with the Hungarian art poster superimposed behind it. Zoë makes a snorting noise and leaves. I walk far enough behind her to seem innocent but not far enough to count as avoiding her.
In the Heisenberg lecture theatre I stumble through my prepared talk, trembling and tripping over my words. It feels indescribably strange to be explaining the shotgun shenanigans I got up to in the dawn light today as if it were no more than a thought experiment, always to be as hypothetical as I imagined it until a few weeks ago – arguably until this morning. Zoë is sitting in the front row, and I try to avoid looking at her. I can't help imagining her finding my dead body – I really must stop thinking in those terms.
She's looking at me with an expression I can't quite fathom. It isn't outright hostility, although that would be understandable enough – more like amazement, horror even. She probably thinks I've gone barking mad. I can't be entirely sure she isn't right.
Sitting there with her red-dyed hair almost luminous in the bright lights and her slightly gothic makeup (if gothic is still the right name for it – or did Goths go extinct when the Emos came along?), she looks almost the same as when I first set eyes on her a month ago at part one of Mysteries, apart from the facial expression – that time she kept making eye contact with an ambiguous look that could equally have been a come-on or a subtle form of sarcasm.
The chain of events which led via that day to Tuesday's tongue wrestling and today's failed sexual encounter can trace its roots back to various goings-on during the last academic year in the rather squalid world of departmental politics. The idea of the new course was first floated as part of a devious plot cooked up by Malcolm Green, the Dean of Sciences, to conjure up more funding through some arcane manipulation of student numbers on the pretext of making the sciences more accessible to students of other subjects, and led indirectly to the Prof's odd behaviour which arguably planted the seed of my now slightly obsessive involvement with Zoë. Perhaps in another world with somebody more psychologically normal in charge of our department, nothing would ever have happened between me and her.
What trivial worries I had back then – just a mad boss, the everyday concerns of work in the generally slightly demented surroundings of academia, the no longer smouldering wreckage of my five-year relationship with Emily and the occasional extremely weird dream. In retrospect it seems like a state of idyllic innocence of the kind that might be expected to feature in romantic poetry and authoritarian religions.
To be fair the ulteriorly-motivated desire to correct the department's rather skewed gender ratio wasn't originally Professor Weinmann's suggestion but my own; I should probably never have used the phrase “At least it'll get some fit birds in the building” at the meeting where the course proposal was formally launched. In my defence, it wasn't actually meant as a serious comment; I even expected a few laughs. Apparently I misjudged the situation. Again. Silly old Richard.
In my further defence, it wasn't one of my best days. I had an appalling headache after a bad night's sleep – something that had been happening increasingly often – and a vague intuition that there was more to that than it seemed. I had been woken, suddenly staring wide-eyed at five in the morning, by one of my recurring dreams; this time it was the disturbingly erotic one involving otherwise beautiful girls with grotesquely scrambled bodies fawning over me as if I were some kind of god. Yeah, I know, there are people who would pay for that kind of thing et cetera et cetera. I always wake up at the point when a girl with a hand sticking out of her forehead offers to perform some scarcely-imaginable sex act on me. Porn for mutants.
I hadn't yet gathered up the courage to tell anyone about the dreams; I was secretly worried about them and lay in bed for some time that morning wondering if I was losing the plot. Finally telling myself my health wasn't a laughing matter, I got up feeling vaguely guilty and badly in need of coffee; consequently I wasn't at my brightest in the departmental meeting where the train of events was set in motion which has now led to my standing here nervously lecturing to a girl whom I nearly had sex with a few minutes ago and her hopefully-oblivious classmates.
The meeting itself was dominated by my colleague Silas (a notorious knob-end) mouthing off in one of his irritatingly theatrical spiels, this time on the subject of “the dumbing-down of science,” his faintly ridiculous public-school accent becoming so exaggerated that I found it hard to tell if he was being serious and had to keep reminding myself that the guy has no sense of humour. That was followed by a pointless and tiring row in which I tried to argue the need for better scientific education while Silas came out with gems like “I couldn't really give a toss whether some intellectual lightweights want to pretend they know all about physics as well as postmodernism. They don't, full stop, end of discussion. It's not that easy.”
So that was when I said “at least it'll get some fit birds in the building.” I can't help feeling that this one ill-judged comment set the tone for the weeks and months that followed – the Prof's weird plan to sell the course to my colleagues as a kind of ogling opportunity as well as a continuous barrage of snide comments from Silas. Things like “far be it from me to criticise, Richard. I'm just surprised you're quite happy with teaching your touchy-feely version of quantum mechanics to a bunch of theologians,” and then when he noticed I was momentarily taken aback, “yes, theologians. Oh dear, spoiled your wet dreams, Dickie boy? Don't worry, you know what they say about convent school girls!”
Weinmann's peculiar take on the business came to light a few days or weeks after that first meeting when he collared me in the foyer and began the conversation even more obtusely than usual. “Ah Richard... er... are you on the, as it were, bus, for our Mysteries?” As usual at nine in the morning, I had a splitting headache and a head full of dreamy weirdness – in fact that was the day I decided to bite the bullet and see the doctor about the whole situation.
I turned the sentence around several times in my mind with no success – it simply didn't make sense. “Mysteries?”
“Of physics. For non-scientists. Provisional title for the new... er... interdepartmental, or rather extra-departmental, as it were...” Whenever Weinmann's voice trails off the words seem to sink into the remarkable white beard which juts out under his mouth, and soak into the compact ball of ivory hairs to be lost without trace.
It took a while to decipher Weinmann's gist – what the hell does on the bus mean? Is it hippy slang from his distant and allegedly misspent youth or is it some kind of management jargon he has picked up at one of his endless meetings? In this particular context it apparently meant did I want to teach a kind of visual overview of quantum mechanics as the first third or so of the course, and could I suggest someone who might like to follow it up with another suitably weird and wonderful topic before Weinmann himself wound up the semester with what he described as a “vague, or if you like, er... hand-waving outline of modern cosmology.”
The way in which Weinmann asked for my suggestions on who might teach the middle segment involved becoming comically shy and mumbling something in which I caught the words “young ladies” and “inter-departmental, erm, exchange, nearly said intercourse ha HA!” and eventually “I believe the term these days is eye candy.” After a while it dawned on me that, inspired no doubt by my fit-birds comment, the distinguished professor and head of the physics department really was trying to persuade Dr. Richard Yours Truly Muggins Mortimer to interest my colleagues in the idea of providing a course for students from other departments by advertising it as a new opportunity for eyeing up young girls. I still haven't decided whether he was motivated by secret dirty-old-man ambitions of his own, worried he couldn't get anyone to teach it in the face of Silas's scorn or simply going gaga, but I can't help wondering if this was what set my subconscious off on its trajectory towards Zoë. I said Colin might be prepared to do a piece on the thermodynamic arrow of time and probably wouldn't need persuading in quite such an underhand way.
Anyway, those particular murky waters are far under the proverbial bridge now, and rather less important in view of the still-astonishing result I achieved in the small hours of this morning. I make it to the end of the lecture, and with it the end of my direct involvement in Mysteries, and hurry away unsure whether I'm avoiding Zoë or helping her to avoid me.
For a moment my thoughts turn back to practical considerations like how the hell I'm going to return the gun without arousing suspicion. I can't keep my mind off the more worrying questions for long though. This isn't going to go away, damn it.