Chapter 1B

Richard, Friday 5th March, 8:08 a.m.
She's looking at me round the door in this “what do you think you're doing” way. I turn to face her with a sort of embarrassed grin. “Hi,” I say and my voice comes out oddly high and strangled. I'm trembling and sweating profusely, feeling self-conscious to the point of paranoia.
My mind fills with a stream of conjectures concerning what she must think I'm up to – what excuse have I got for hurriedly hiding all the stuff on my table? What excuse have I got for the no doubt comically embarrassed look on my face? As I try to imagine the situation from her point of view it occurs to me she probably thinks I've been having a wank and have just hidden a huge stack of porn mags under the green cloth. I almost lose consciousness and sit back on the long table next to it all.
Zoë squeezes past the door, her supple breasts springing free one after the other – there's something erotic about the way it draws attention to them but it looks slightly comical overall.
She tries to sashay alluringly as she wades through the mess on the floor towards me, and half-whispers “Hello” as she creeps up to me. She lets her left breast brush very gently against my arm, looks inquiringly at me and smiles in a slightly daft simpering way which, it suddenly strikes me, can only mean she's going to suggest we should have sex right here on the table. I'm not sure I can quite cope with that right now, but I am rapidly turning into putty in her hands. No actually, squishy stuff is completely the wrong metaphor.
I pull her closer and start kissing her, somehow unable to stop exploring her slightly freaky tongue piercing with my own tongue, then make a last effort at self-control and whisper “Hey stop, I've got to give a lecture. Later.” For a moment the cold of the February morning and the harsh unfriendly light of the little LED spotlights hanging from the ceiling make the scene of the two of us seem more pathetic than erotic. Then Zoë pushes me back onto the table and sits on my lap, and my body starts making its own decisions about what I can cope with. She's still technically my student, which is all wrong from the professional ethics angle.
As Zoë squirms against me I notice she's staring oddly to my side and I realise she's seen the outline of the gun poking up underneath the dust sheet where the weight of our bodies has pulled it taut, looking like some kind of huge extracorporeal erection. What's going through her mind? He's been playing with an enormous dildo? Or: I wish the real one was that big? Or maybe: that looks like a gun?

Zoë, Friday 5th March, around 10 a.m.
I try to concentrate on the people around me, to see if that will make them real again, bring them out of the movie-like two-dimensional image that seems to have taken the place of the real world. Everyone's acting a bit weird; Jasmine is almost green in spite of her half-Asian complexion and is staring around with nervous moist eyes, Charlie looks comically embarrassed and is gazing at the table to avoid making eye contact with anyone, his ample dark curly hair hanging down over his face. It gradually dawns on me that I'm not the only one to be freaked out by Richard's sudden violent death, even if the others didn't actually find his pulverised brain tissue all over the wall and haven't been snogging him at every opportunity for the last few days.
Did he shoot himself? Why the hell would he do that? Not because of me, surely? No, get real... or could somebody else have shot him?
Suddenly the world starts to sway like a ship in a storm and I stagger to my feet and run unsteadily to the toilet.
I reach the washbasins just in time for the first gush of vomit, it bursts out stinking and sticky as soon as I open my mouth and splatters out of the shallow basin narrowly missing the black velvet hotpants I put on this morning with my head full of mischievous thoughts of getting Richard over-excited...
I shut myself in one of the shit-cubicles for the rest of it, my stomach heaving violently until there's nothing left to come up. Feeling a little better I stumble to the washbasin at the far end from the first one. Some stupid fashion-victim girl walks in and sneers at me in a very deliberate way, all expensive make-up and cheap condescension. I ignore her and wash the sour taste from my mouth and the cold sweat and smeared mascara from my face.
I still feel wobbly as I walk back to my friends and my sweet tea in its helpfully labelled cup, but the world seems a little more solid, more 3D and tangible. I sit down quietly on the garishly orange plastic chair and feel massively relieved to have friends around me again.
Charlie's still looking down at the table. He mutters “I shouldn't have sworn at that copper woman.”
As far as I can remember he not only swore at her but then spent the next half hour apologising profusely and trying to hug her to make up for it, which was probably worse. Could he be stoned already? That was at about half nine in the morning. I wouldn't put it past him.
“She was very nice about it,” Jasmine says in a strangely nervous half-giggle, as if she's scared of sounding inappropriately light-hearted.
We try to reconstruct the event together and I start to realise what a scene we must have caused between us, with Charlie molesting the policewoman and me adamantly refusing treatment from the paramedics in the ambulance which Jasmine had called. Eventually the ambulance staff gave up on me and made Jasmine and Charlie promise to be sure I wasn't left alone, and the policewoman hurried away in relief.
I'm starting to get the power of speech back and I'm feeling quite giggly again. We've been reliving the funny parts of the morning and I'm beginning to feel safe enough to stop ignoring the nastier question of what happened to Richard.
Jasmine and Charlie seem to think the only sensible explanation is that he's committed suicide. For some reason. Apparently there are all kinds of mad conspiracy theories going around already, but – they're keen to reassure me – nobody takes them very seriously. Actually I'm quite curious to hear what they are.
We seem to be in the bar now, and I realise I've somehow lost a few hours. I hazily remember some more crying and more vomiting, and being glad Jasmine was there. I am glad Jasmine's here. I'm also quite glad I can't remember the details. Why on earth am I drinking cider? I never drink cider. Looking at the empties on the table I realise they account for a quite alarming quantity of alcohol. Getting steaming drunk probably isn't the best thing I could be doing right now, but I'm beginning to think it's inevitable. Jasmine's drinking the white wine she usually sips in that pretentiously delicate trying-to-look-sophisticated way, but she's gulping it down like water, and Charlie is on his eighth-or-so pint of some bizarrely-named ale – did he really say it's called Frosty Piddle?
The little blue-tinted shot glasses must have been the tequila, I can vaguely remember that bit. I also remember sneaking out to the spooky back alley for a smoke of Charlie's spliff, and then taking the piss out of Charlie, saying his weed was no good because it made me feel more normal than before. We spent about half an hour giggling hysterically about that, so I was probably wrong.
It's true in a way though – the weed and the alcohol are making me feel normal, a familiar comforting haze of off-my-headness. It's the real world that's gone wrong, and so I feel paradoxically more sober the more I get wasted. Not that I drink or smoke anything like as much as Charlie in the normal course of events, I hasten to add.
I look around the bar. I work here on Thursdays and don't come here much the rest of the time. Too full of wankers. I prefer going somewhere that isn't so studenty – does that make me a hypocrite?
Somehow the bar seems different from a customer's point of view. It's meant to look very cool and sophisticated, and if you don't look too closely it's almost convincing, with the dark blue carpet and the little lamps and so on. It's all done on the cheap though, and the carpet is wearing thin from having the puke cleaned off it so frequently.
I notice Jane Roberts, my personal tutor, hurrying towards us. “At last, that's where you are,” she says and sits down next to me. “Are you all right? Are you sure drinking is quite the right thing to do just at the moment?” And so on – eventually she gets to the point, which is that the police want to talk to me about a letter.
Despite my numbness (is that shock or is it just the booze?) I feel a twinge of excitement: What letter? What's that all about – did he write me a letter? And are real-life detectives like the ones on the telly?
Suddenly my mind is going off on tangents about detectives: there'll be a Detective Sergeant and a Detective Inspector, maybe even a DCI... I'm about to get on to whether I fancy any TV detectives when I realise I'm losing it again. Get a grip!
There seems to be something odd about the way Dr. Roberts is looking at me, or maybe it's just the fact that my head's resting on the table, giving me an unusual perspective on the room. What Richard would call parallax, that's one of his favourite words... was one...
“I really think you'd do well to go home and get some sleep, Zoë,” Dr. Roberts says as she gets up from the table an uncertain amount of time later. “I'm not going to preach at you though.” I smile gratefully. “Goodnight.”
“Glen's band's playing in the Cellar Bar again,” Charlie mutters in a strangely indifferent voice. I feel dizzy as I raise my head off the table. Maybe the drink and weed are having some effect after all. Maybe I'm going to puke again. The room seems to slowly rotate in a diagonal direction, always jerking back to where it started before it gets too far, but enough to make standing up seem a bit of a daunting prospect. I'm becoming less sure I was right in my assessment that this is reality and not a film after all.
What is reality anyway? I giggle quietly as I lay my head back on the table.
“What are you laughing at?” That's Jasmine.
“Glen's band are rubbish!”
I say that quite loudly and without raising my head, and my voice makes the table vibrate in an amusing manner. For a second or two it's the funniest thing I've ever said and I feel strangely euphoric. “Absolute crap!” I beam into the worn Swedish laminate.
Then my thoughts slip back to Richard. Why the hell would he shoot himself?
For the last few days he seemed to be almost fizzing with a kind of nervous excitement. To be honest that puzzled me. Of course he's a bit of an actor – was, I mean – and he was building up to today's lecture, his dernière performance. That's not enough though.
It was also meant to be the last day that I'm technically his student. I'd hoped that would get rid of some of the obstacles to my month-old plan of luring him back to the flat for a night of hot and sticky sex. A little voice of instinct in the back of my mind tells me that still isn't enough. He was up to something I didn't know about, and that has to be connected with his death in some way. Maybe this letter will throw some light on it.
Another little voice of instinct in the back of my mind (or is it the booze and the weed?) tells me that the trippy ideas he was explaining in the course are bound up with it too. He finished his last lecture by asking us to imagine what the world looks like to a cat which is both dead and alive at the same time, and he promised to explain what he was talking about in the lecture he was supposed to give this morning only he couldn't because he was too dead and not at all alive. My nose suddenly feels wet and I realise I'm crying.