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in my pocket for an apple or a dog biscuit.
    Suddenly, spying the empty chair next to me, he teetered over and sat down, squeezing his bag of bones behind the little wooden table from where he smiled benignly at us, raising his hand in a papal kind of gesture. ‘Do go on,’ he said amiably to Archie. ‘I’ll be out of the way here.’
    Archie, after visibly struggling over how to deal with this bewildering behaviour, finally seemed to decide to simply ignore it and set off again. ‘ By asserting itself as a piece of fiction, the non-mimetic novel is in a position to negate both Sontag’s vision of an aesthetics of silence and John Barth’s prescription for formal regeneration. What do you think? Someone?’
    ‘Well, it’s got me flummoxed, Archie,’ Professor Cousins laughed. Archie glared at him. Professor Cousins was an old-fashioned Shakespearean by trade and somewhat baffled by Archie’s approach to literature. As we all were.
    The new question was batted silently around the room, a room that was growing increasingly hot and airless. We all found different ways of distracting ourselves – I looked out of the third-floor window as if I’d just seen something interesting (which I had actually, but I’ll come to that later) while Kevin stared at Olivia’s feet and made little goldfish moues of distress with his fat blown-rose mouth and Olivia herself inspected her fingernails, one by one, very carefully. At first I thought Andrea was incanting a spell to ward off Archie but then I realized she was quietly humming a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, which probably had much the same effect. Terri, meanwhile, as enigmatic as an egg, maintained an eerie silence, apparently occupying some mental space denied to the rest of us.
    The door opened and Shug strolled into the room, carrying a purple velvet shoulder-bag embroidered with tiny mirrors and eclectically dressed in a pair of jeans which were composed almost entirely of patches, a black and white Palestinian shawl round his neck and an Afghan coat. Shug – who was our vertical neighbour in Paton’s Lane – claimed to have bought this coat, which was considerably superior to the dirty, matted fleeces possessed by most students, in the ‘Amir Kabir’ in downtown Tehran.
    Shug, lithe and lanky amongst a stunted population, liked to think he was the epitome of cool. He was one of the few native Dundonians at a university awash with English drop-outs. The first time I encountered Shug he was walking along the Nethergate, with Bob bob bobbing along beside him, holding a haddock in his hand like a lollipop – ‘Arbroath Smokie,’ he explained in his own kippered voice. I thought he was talking about some kind of hashish – although many people, of course, consider it to be a kind of red herring.
    He sat in his usual place – on the floor with his back against the wall, facing Archie. Archie looked at his watch and said, ‘Why bother, Mr Scobie?’ and Shug raised an eyebrow and said gruffly, ‘You tell me, Archie.’ An enigmatic sort of an encounter but nonetheless containing the emotional charge of two rutting stags clacking antlers.
    ‘You never know, you might learn something,’ Professor Cousins said, smiling encouragingly at Shug and then, to no-one in particular, ‘Dr McCue knows all kinds of things that no-one else does.’
    Shug was older than everyone else in the tutorial group. He had already been thrown out of Duncan of Jordanstone Art College (something that was previously thought to be impossible) and had worked on several real jobs in between times – as a road mender, a bus conductor, even in a chicken factory (‘Where the chickens are made,’ Terri told Bob who believed her for all of a minute). Shug had also ‘taken off’ to India and all points east to ‘find himself’, not that I could imagine Shug being particularly lost to begin with. If only Bob would go away and find himself. What would he find? Essence of Bob,