Emotionally Weird Read Online Free PDF

wasn’t as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses – the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle.
    Archie, still spellbound by the sight of Andrea’s knees – and heaven knows what else she was covertly flaunting – seemed to have momentarily lost his train of thought. We all waited for him to re-board. It was one of those tutorial groups where no-one really had an opinion about anything, except for Archie, who had an opinion about everything. We were all relieved when he started up again and absolved us from the trachle of having to think for ourselves –
    ‘ . . . made by several structuralist critics that it is only at the moment that the written word in literature ceases to refer to external “objective” data, that is, to referents in the “real” world, that it can begin to exist as language within the text . . . ’
    Olivia chewed a strand of her long blond hair and looked thoughtful, although it seemed unlikely that she was thinking about anything Archie was saying. Kevin, who was in painful thrall to Olivia, stared aggressively at her feet, which were about the only part of her anatomy that he could look at without blushing. Olivia tended to dress like a down-at-heel medieval princess and today she was clad in a crushed velvet jacket over a secondhand satin nightdress and a pair of knee-high red leather boots that were a fetishist’s dream.
    Olivia had once mildly voiced the opinion to Archie that it was wrong to dissect books as if they were cadavers because you could never put them back together in the same way. ‘Split the lark and so on,’ she murmured, but Archie grew contemptuous and said that the next person to quote Emily Dickinson in his tutorial would be taken out to the Geddes Quadrangle and publicly flogged. (‘Harsh but fair,’ was Andrea’s judgement.)
    ‘ What the new fiction reminds us, ’ Archie yakked on, ‘ is that signs need only refer to imaginary constructs – that perhaps that is all they do refer to, for perhaps it’s not the job of fiction to make sense of the world . . . ’
    We were a hedonistic and self-absorbed group – vague, lop-sided people, not fleshed out with definite beliefs and opinions, for whom the greatest achievement was probably getting out of bed in the morning. We had lost one of our original members – The Boy With No Name, a frail, pallid youth from Wester Ross, so called by the rest of the group because no matter how hard we might (or might not) try, none of us could ever remember his name. Of course, he didn’t help matters much by habitually introducing himself by saying, ‘Hello, I’m nobody, who are you?’
    I was sure his name was something fairly ordinary – a Peter or a Paul – but I could never come up with anything more certain. It was almost as if he was under some kind of strange, existential hex, as though somebody – a tenderfoot witch, for example – had been practising from The Book of Spells (‘a guid cantrip for disappearing’). What happened, I wondered, to someone who couldn’t be named? Did they lose their identity? Did they forget who they were?
    At first it had been a mere glimmering around the edges, a certain lack of definition, but before long he was almost completely erased and was no more than a breath on the air. Very occasionally, there was a certain slant of light that revealed his ectoplasmic form, like half-cooked, poached egg-whites. Perhaps if we could remember his name we could conjure him back.
    ‘Maybe he just got pissed off and went home to Wester Ross?’ Andrea speculated when he finally disappeared.
    The Boy With No Name had been constantly working on a laboriously hand-written, heavily corrected manuscript that proved to be a far-fetched tale of alien invasion, the plot of which