Chapter 1 - Professor Bag


Clouds flitted about the sky on their interminable journeys as yet another day at St Mortimer´s College began.

"Curtis! Why do you wear women´s tights and knickers to class everyday? And you, Stimpkinson, why are you wearing a skirt and bra?" roared Professor Bag.

Curtis squirmed with embarrassment. Stimpkinson (a farmer´s son from Cornwall with a pronounced stammer and a whopping great turnip for a head, green as clover and fresh from a good nigging* the night before) vomited gingerly into the little polythene sick bag he kept under his chair.

"Silence! That´s enough! That´s not the behaviour St Mortimer´s requires! Curtis and Stimpkinson, please go to the toilets. I prefer to talk today about Charles Darwin and his Voyage in the Beagle to the Galapagos Islands."

One day I bumped into Professor Bag in Turnstile Lane. He was carrying a gargantuan flowering cactus under his arm. A little trail of blood peppered the gravel, blood that poured from Professor Bag´s arm.

"Bernard," he said, as he fixed me with his gimlet eye, "Bernard, the rest of the boys, you know, they´re a pack of no hopers, but you….you have real academic promise. I hope that someday, that someday, you too will teach at St Mortimer´s and that you will maintain its fine academic tradition." Professor Bag stammered. I noticed the regulation cuts on his chin administered by his old-fashioned, Victorian strop razer.

I squirmed with embarrassment and hoped he´d let me go, but he squeezed his fingers tightly against my shoulder until I felt real pain.

"Bernard, you know that person, that person you automatically feel deep sympathy or empathy, pity even, that person who never wears the regulation college shirt and tie. That person who´s persistently late for classes, who never has paper or pens. Well Bernard, your not one of those people. I want you to….hold on, there´s Squimdgeon….I´ll tell you more later."

Professor Bag wound on his way through Turnstile Lane. As he walked through the archway to the College, to take the short cut across the rugby pitch, the flowering cactus fell from his hand. In time it began to flower beside the pitch, making it an infernal place to fall after a try.

* immersion in talcum powder



Chapter 2 Howzat!


Dr Threadneedle ran up to the wicket on his tiptoes. His arms and legs cartwheeled, his left arm jerked right then left, his wrists flipped. After some seconds of left and right jerking, a marvellous carrot of a delivery trundled gently down the pitch. Bernard reverse hooked the sudden lifter, and as it lifted bashed himself in the face with the bat. Sinking to the ground, blood spurted from his nose. He grabbed a tuft of grass and wiped everything away, except the blood. Somehow the ball managed to ricochete off the back of the bat for a massive six behind the wicketkeeper. Dr Threadneedle spun round, asked the question.

´Not out,´answered Professor Bag, his massive figure made even more massive by seven or more cricket shirts tied at his waist.

Then he hoisted his arms to the Pavilion. A brief clattering and the numbers spun round. 33 for 2.

Dr Threadneedle paced out his run up again. His foot mangled each loose bit of turf, creating little hills and valleys where there were once seas of grass.

´Stimpkinson, Curtis! What are you doing in the shrubberies?´guldered Professor Bag.

Two small, naked figures began a terrific run to the Pavilion, passed through the wicket gate and disappeared.

Dr Threadneedle began his sudden, looping run up. This time the ball flipped out of the bag of his hand. Dr Threadneedle sank to the ground with a moan, clutching his left leg and began reciting a mantra composed of the Hamlet soliloquy and chanted lines of ´God save the Queen´. Bernard waited, composed himself, took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow. Professor Bag´s extended right leg had been the culprit. Dr Threadneedle ambushed. The ball spun like a live gerbil thrown out of the window of St Morris´ dorm window and at an achingly slow speed. Bernard flipped the ball straight up into the air. Squimidgeon was under it, his gangling arms windmilling. Looking into the sun, his cricket cap reversed baseball style, the ball came down on him like a meteor, missing his outstretched arms and hitting him plump on the forehead. Squimdgeon saluted the Empire and fell to the ground unconscious.

´Good work!´cried Professor Bag ´Over!´

Chapter 3 Dr Threadneedle


Bernard stood before Dr Threadneedle´s door. Putting his ear to the door, he heard the sound of slow whirring, then a concatenation of broken glass. He pushed forward gently against the door and it swung to.

“Yes Bernard, what can I do for you?” asked Dr Threadneedle.

“Dr Threadneedle, your…”

“Banging Nurse Susan.”

“Bernard, you slimey little toad. Close the door and bugger off,” panted nurse Susan.

Dr Threadneedle, grabbing Nurse Susans buttocks and banging her all the harder, shouted:

“Yes fuck off you obsequious little man”

Bernard had read McCauley, Gibbon, Tacitus and Caesar, but not one part of these worthy tomes (that seemed all the more worthless now) had prepared him for this. He couldn´t tell Professor Bag because Dr Threadneedle would blag his way out of it. Somehow blagging had become a way of life at St Morris´College. St Morris´College was all dark underbelly and no shining light. The paint flaked off the walls, flakey old Victorian paint plastered on thickly and quickly. I´ll grasp the Bible in one hand and the latest Harry Potter in the other, thought Bernard, and take the plunge. I´ll write to Mother. Bernard found paper and pen and began to write:

Dear Mother,

I have to tell you about the seeds of a plot. I accidentally discovered Dr Threadneedle having sexual intercourse with Nurse Susan in his office at St Morris´College. No one will believe my story and I daren´t tell Professor Bag or Dean Fitzcoogan. Can you have words with Dean Fitzcoogan or have me transferred into the army. You know that I have such difficulties with academic studies. I simply don´t fit in at St Morris´College.

Your loving son,

Bernard


Some days later a reply clattered into the class pigeon hole.

Dear Bernard Flagelotpeasouper,

Your mother has written to me to ask that you make an appointment with Dr Glandgroin, the college psychologist. She thinks your suffering from a common juvenile delusional malady.

Yours sincerely,

Dean Fitzcoogan

O fuck, thought Bernard. Dr Glandgroin´s notorious laxatives left any boy shitting for days on end. The pages of Livy, Thucydides, Arrian and Plutarch were filled with venal plots of this nature. He thought to read exactly what Hannibal or Caesar might do on such an occasion, but fell asleep on the dorm bunkbed as gentle summer air breathed into the room through an open window slit.

Chapter 4 Dean Fitzcoogan


Dean Fitzcoogan shifted on his hams. Dean Fitzcoogan reached into the drinks cabinet and brought out a bottle of Johnny Walker. Setting two thimble glasses down on the table, he began to pour.

“Have one.” he said.

“I can´t…please, please…”

“Bernard, you must learn to exercise…” Dean Fitzcoogan scratched his temple, thought pleasing thoughts, stared into space. After some moments of disconnectedness, he smiled and fell asleep.

Bernard ran out of the office, into the dorm and hid under his bed.

Serious issues require serious measures, thought Bernard.

Chapter 5 Serious Measures


Bernard searched through his memory bank of possible precedents as a recourse instead of action, because action was a word that, for him, meant pain.

Cassandra, a prophetess of Ancient Greece, whose prophecies were doomed never to be believed but came true nonetheless. Possessed of the mantic gift, she choose to commit suicide.
The supposed black magic of Dr John Dee, his scrying stones.
St Teresa of Avila who possessed a manic doll, keeping her nunnery in subjugation by the will of this thing.

“Stimpkinson?” asked Bernard “Stimpksinson, do you have my copy of Penthouse?”

Swallows flitted around the eaves of St Morris´s College as yet another day of work, study and toil ended.

Chapter 6 Bicycle

"Gemma, can you find the light switch?"
"Bernard, your hurting me. Please can I roll onto my side?"
"The light switch…"
Bernard searched with his one free hand to find the light switch, while he kept Gemma entertained with the other. In the unenlightened days when colleges like St Mortimer´s actually existed, each college had its bicycle* and Gemma Firkin was St Mortimers. Banging Gemma was the hobby of every boy in Bernard´s Form, she even banged the masters too. But not all.
Bernard eventually found the light switch and flicked it on and then off. Gemma was lying there in mid-orgasm, her mouth agape, an idiotic half-grin that Bernard perceived to be fondness. Perhaps what it really signified was love, but that terrified Bernard.
But Bernard was very far from such deeper feelings. In truth Gemma had far more control over him that he felt he needed or even realised, but he conceived it to be folly on his part to care either way.
* ride

Chapter 7 Dr Glandgroin

What had typically been the most pleasurable of days had descended into nightmare and dread, for he was due to have his appointment with Dr Glandgroin. It wasn´t an appointment he had fixed, and he hoped that some magical transformation would reduce St Mortimers to a heap of smoking ashes. If only he, Bernard Flagelotpeasouper, possessed that one elusive quality or principle, namely magic. Bernard had read accounts of McGregor Mather´s Order of the Golden Dawn, of Necromancy, spells, of planchettes, oiuja boards and automatic writing. He knew accounts of mystics like Hermes Trysmigestus, William Blake and Meister Eckhardt. ´Monad beget Monad´, the words of Meister Eckhardt scratched onto that awful tape mother had sent. Bernard had also attempted elbow rubbing (which he hoped would cause precipitation), communication with spirits, Tarot, indeed almost any form of superstitious hokum that young boys inevitably became infatuated with at a certain age before their main interests became sex and big cars. But he could not find a way to blow up St Mortimers without committing arson and arson was illegal and committing illegal acts terrified Bernard. Even though he didn´t consider the destruction of St Mortimers as in any way wrong in a moral sense, he feared the temporal punishment of gaol.
Dr Glandgroin was a purveyor of ´medicine´. He, at least, called it medicine, but was he not merely a superior kind of prison guard or even a torturer or poisoner? Everyone knew that he enjoyed his work and everyone knew that the designation ´medicine´ was an insult to every principle of science.
"Bernard, you´ve been having thought."
"I…"
"Thoughts, Bernard, and thoughts are fickle, dangerous things. You´ve been thinking…"
"But…"
"You´ve been questioning the motives, yes the motives. This leads onto questioning actions and consequences. You´re an odious little toerag, Bernard. Take six of these pills a day for two months."
Dr Glandgroin made Bernard sit and swallow two pills. The water was warm like dish water and had an odour of urine.
"and this for the side effects."
Dr Glandgroin watched as Bernard swallowed another pill and then turned the light off and left the room.