New Kid on the Breeze Block

Mel Gibson’s face stared out of a poster over the foyer of the MacRobert Centre, at the University of Stirling. The would-be Guardian of Scotland’s expression did not alter as a slightly-built girl fought her way through the large, stiff doors at the entrance, one of them catching her shoulder as she went through. She winced and rubbed it, her bag slipping from her shoulder to the floor. She bent to pick it up, thinking sour thoughts of the architect.

     Heather made her way through the car park outside towards her first English lecture in the Cottrell Building. She sat up at the back of the modern theatre, as she did at the cinema, an independent figure, chewing a pen and looking around her at the multitude. ‘You don’t want to go to Oxford,’ said the lecturer when she had started discussing Peter and the Wolf. Heather smiled and agreed for her own reasons.

     After the lecture, she left the same solitary figure who arrived: little contact with others, but always watching them, inferring, calculating, believing. It had started to rain. Her arms folded, she crossed over beneath the walkway over the carpark, smiling at the sign warning drivers about ducks. The student newspaper had been quick to point out, tongue in cheek, this implied ducks were more important than students. As if on cue, there came the sound of quacking from the direction of Airthrey Pond. Heather walked through the building, past the on-campus bookshop, travel agent, chemist and newsagent then outside to the bridge spanning Airthrey Pond.

     It was officially designated a man-made loch, but she defined it as a large pond. She always had her own definitions. The rain splashed gently on the water below. She had heard tales of the things lurking below the surface, relics of student parties and other less cheerful occasions. She strained her eyes to see if there were a trace of the Mini Cooper a friend of a relative had told her about, but if it was there, or had ever been, she could not see. She walked on, the floodlights at either end of the bridge illuminating the dull afternoon. The halls of residence loomed ever closer, their design reminding her of a shoebox city of Jericho she had once made in Sunday School. She took a left turn after the bridge to get to her hall, known by the acronym ASH.

      She appreciated the warmth on entering the foyer, rubbing her arms briefly. Walking down the corridor, the Wallace Monument was strongly visible through the window, lit up in orange like a rocket. Heather paused to wipe her steamed-up glasses with the cuff of her sleeve. Now she could make out the finer details of the building. Long ago she had visited it, aged seven.

     Down the five flights of steps to her room on the first floor. A sigh of relief as she was free of the pressures of others, their expectations of conversation, their ideas, their behaviour. She told no-one about her medication, or the meaning of her visits to the psychology block when she did not study science. Sometimes she still felt a false guilt.

     Heather’s room was furnished simply. The large breeze blocks comprising the walls seemed white and uncompromising. She had started to reform the starkness, a picture of a Volkswagen Beetle in psychedelic colours on one wall, the Blues Brothers on another. She lay back on the bed and thought about her English essay, an ‘attempt at a sympathetic explanation’ of a Gertrude Stein story. Farmers and eggs and cows, oh my. Philosophy was taught so badly, she vowed to ditch it as soon as possible.

     Tea was a simple matter of some pasta, or would have been had she been able to access the kitchen with a single cooker to share between fourteen people, the first and second floors combined. Sometimes it wasn’t possible to eat before ten o’clock at night. She improvised with a Mars Bar, and the associated guilt.

     Heather went home for her twenty-first birthday. She celebrated it quietly over a weekend, came back and got on with her studies. The days shortened. She did not read newspapers often, but enjoyed an article on Noah Webster’s first dictionary of American English, published in 1836. Some day her own poetry would be recognised. She happily devoured the novel a week required for her English tutorials. The nine weeks’ Christmas holidays were coming soon.

                                                          ***

     Tuesday, 12^th March 1996. Heather smiled at some of her hallmates, preparing for a pyjama party. The snow had fallen between her English and History classes. Snowmen were being built outside the MacRobert Centre, and the halls. She had recently been to see a performance of Animal Farm in the former, and had especially enjoyed the bagpipes when the windmill collapsed. Her friends sounded happy, making plans for flat sharing in second year. She made no such commitment, but was glad to be better, off the medication.

     The following morning, she was off campus in town, shopping, and came back on the number 53 bus around 12 noon. There was a great stillness in the air as she got off the bus. The University flag was flying at half mast. Heather went towards the bookshop, changed her mind and walked to the Chaplaincy, placed incongruously close to the student bars. She had never been there before, but she knew some students who went there regularly, and it seemed a likely place from which to get news.

      No-one seemed inclined to talk when she entered, a reporter’s voice on the radio in the corner doing so instead, trying to impart compassion to a terrible event. It was not so far away, Heather thought, just three miles, so she had heard. She did not know what to feel. She learned the essentials of what had happened, and left. She walked out into the snow, now beginning to melt. The ice on the pond was cracking.

     She talked to the ducks, to tell them what was wrong. They quacked and spread their wings and ignored her. One of the surviving snowmen was half melted, his smile lop-sided. She wished he were as intact as the day before. She returned to ASH, and scribbled frantically in her notebook until the point of her pencil broke.

     After the numbness wore off, there were repercussions. She began to go back into the old downward spiral. The need to punish herself, thinking of standing in the pond.

Hold on, she thought. To the next cup of tea. One step at a time. English classes were still quite enjoyable: she read the part of Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest, and discovered Emily Dickinson’s comforting morbidity. She returned to the doctors’ on-site general practice. But the medicine wasn’t working as before, firing the synapses. Like building a fire in an igloo in her head.

     Life grew less real. She was uncertain as to whether to return next year. Heather felt afraid, claustrophobic, lacking co-ordination. She gave up on the effort involved in preparing pasta, and ate sandwiches. She went on holiday with her parents to Pitlochry for a week at Easter, eating chocolate and watching repeats of The Avengers. She explained it to her mother as ‘a very psychological drama’.

     The lengthening days and warmer weather as April passed seemed undeserved at Stirling, as if time should have stopped in mid-March. Heather saw dark things under the bed, like when she was a wee child in the north, with wolves at the back of her wardrobe. She looked up to Jake and Elwood in every sense. ‘You know what?’ she whispered to them on the night before her English exam. There was no putting it off, no denying it, even with a doctor’s note: the authorities were implacable. ‘I’m putting the band back together.’ She put on a pair of sunglasses, and laughed hysterically at herself in a mirror. Heather looked at the pills by her bedside. She squeezed her eyes tight shut. She sat on the edge of her bed, rocking back and forth. From a distance, down a tunnel far away, she heard the urgent voice of James Brown, so full of energy. ‘Do you see the light?’