Read The Parasite Person for Free Online

of sugar, it would perhaps stir his torpid faculties just sufficiently to enable him to go to his desk and settle down to a morning’s work on that God-awful thesis.
    This was another somewhat disturbing thing that was happening to him—or, rather, wasn’t happening. His thesis, which was to have been the turning-point in his career, simply wasn’t progressing at all, or hardly. Already, the deadline was barely nine months away, and he’d scarcely completed even the introductory section; while his ideas for the succeeding chapters were still just as unformed—to be honest, just as derivative—as they’d been when he’d first prepared his synopsis. He had hoped—had, indeed, confidently assumed—that once he really got down to it his head would start humming with new and revolutionary ideas, just as it had done in his student days: that some novel and startling hypothesis would spring effortlessly into his mind, complete with inspired notions as to where and how to look for corroborative evidence. And once this had happened, he would then be able to forge ahead, recklessly outstripping that boring old synopsis, breaking new ground, confounding his critics, and blazoning his name in gold across the whole history of his subject.
    But it wasn’t happening. He’d been at it, on and off, for more than a year now, and not one single new or exciting idea had come to him. Every thought that entered his head had already been thought of by a dozen others; every avenue of research seemed to be blocked solid by hundreds of people who’d got there before him.
    Inspiration was dead. His brain hummed not with new and exciting ideas but with an ever-deepening boredom and sense of defeat.
    What had happened to him? What was going wrong?
    The answer, at first, had seemed easy. It was the pressure of his routine work at the Polytechnic that was holding him back. Twelve hours’ lecturing a week had been pushed on to him that year,despite his protests; and what with the preparation for these, and the seminars, and the tutorials, he seemed to have no time left for his own work at all. Also, as part and parcel of all this, there was the relentless persecution by his students, for ever handing in their assignments and expecting him to read them, or else not handing them in and expecting him to listen to their hard-luck stories of how this, that, and the other had prevented them finishing on time, and how none of it was their fault.
    As if he cared. The fewer assignments the better, as far as he was concerned, and whether the omissions were due to laziness, stupidity , or their grandmother being dead, he couldn’t care less, why bother him about it?
    The whole thing was so pointless, anyway. There wasn’t a thing he could teach them that they couldn’t just as well look up in some book. What was the library for? It had cost half a million pounds, or something, to put up, and was supposed to be the pride and glory of the place: but would the students use it? They would not, not so long as they had the option of pestering him instead without moving out of their chairs. That’s what he was paid for, being pestered by them, and the little beasts knew it. A Pestership, that’s how it should have been listed, this job of his….
    Anyway, with all this stacked against him, and the best hours of his day devoured by administrative trivia, it had seemed plausible enough, at the time, to attribute his creative block to pressure of routine work.
    *
    But then, a few months ago, all these long-standing obstacles had been suddenly and almost miraculously removed by the granting of his long-awaited Sabbatical—a whole year, on full pay, during which no teaching duties at all were to be required of him. Instead he was expected to concentrate full-time on what he had always longed to concentrate on—his writing and his research.
    Hooray! A lucky break for Martin Lockwood at last!
    But Martin’s rejoicings were short-lived. No sooner had the