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mobile? Bed, I think. Then home. But Mary is still puzzling away at Salvatore.
    â€˜In the end,’ she says, ‘isn’t he just another sad case? – I mean, look at him now. Does he look well? Even though he’s surrounded by avid disciples, does he look happy? You know what Plato says? – love is lack. Rhys is starved and nothing he swallows sustains him.’
    â€˜And me?’
    â€˜You’ve got a bit more going for you, Seb dear. The guy’s probably after your ostraca. Wants to relate them to his potty theories of Camelot and – I don’t know – Viking chessmen. God, these conferences,’ she says and yawns extravagantly. Mary doesn’t mind who hears and her voice is carrying. Heads swivel; her serial yawns start others off. The yawns go round and the paroxysmic speaker at the top table passes his hand over his gaping mouth and drones on.
    â€˜Why do we do it, Seb? Tell me that! Your face feels like rubber at the end of any conference. Your mind has gone, you’re moronic for weeks, it comes over you to drown yourself in a handy lake. What’s that? A memory stick? You want to open it?’
    She plugs it into her tablet. ‘ Your Father Wore a Wooden Collar, by Rhys Iwan Salvatore . Catchy title! After Thucydides. Good grief, four hundred pages of bullshit.’
    She scrolls through an immense document freighted with half-page footnotes – and the footnotes have spawned footnotes of their own. There are endnotes to the secondary footnotes. ‘ The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret? Oh boy,’ she says and hoots. ‘I am so trembling in secret here, Seb! Hey, what about this: I do not teach truth as such; I do not transform myself into a diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy. Yeah, that’s me, diaphanous, goggling. A whole chapter to the aporia. Do I really want to know what that is? But you’re going to tell me, Seb, I can see that. Do so in no more than three words.’
    â€˜It’s a hole,’ I say.
    â€˜Right. Shall we drink up and sidle off?’
    *
    The room bucks, a deck in a swell. Now it slowly sinks, for we’re the men who went to sea in a sieve, in spite of all their friends could say. Am I about to throw up? Swallow some water. Glad Jesse isn’t here to see me pissed.
    I find myself in the power-shower. Fuck me if I know how I got here but the hot water is tonic as it hammers the nape of my neck. It possesses thumbs and the thumbs understand the art of massaging deep into your muscles and kneading your scalp in a frankly voluptuous way. How many guys have wanked under this state-of-the-art shower? The pipes bang. No, it’s the door. Fuck off, it’s one in the morning. Or even two. I slick back my hair, shambling from the bathroom with a towel round my waist.
    The rapping again. Jesus Christ, I can hear breathing. Through the door. Is it the old guy with a wooden collar round his neck?
    If I lie down, there’s a distinct danger of throwing up. Tea might help? En route to the kettle, I seem to have detoured in a surprising arc, to find myself at the door. I squint through the peephole.
    There he stands, head bent in an attitude of thoughtful waiting. Panic: I step back. It’s alright: he can’t see you. (Can he?) I plump down on the end of the bed, which tilts.
    I should just go and punch the bugger’s lights out. Obvious answer. A real man would do just that. But I’m not. A real man. Am I? What is a real man? Big conundrum. A bit like logarithms. What is a logarithm, I asked Sir. Where is it? What does it look like? It is not a solid body, Sir informed the mathematical dunce. You won’t find one under your bed, Messenger. There was a braying of classroom mirth.
    Don’t be like your father, Seb, she said: