on and reach my ears.
Once she had calmed down she explained herself. ‘No, I mean, are you here permanently or do you just come in for the day? Like me? A “voluntary commitment” job.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I will be leaving soon. I am not mad, you see. I have just been a little confused about things. I have a lot to get on with. Things to do. Things to finish off.’
‘I recognise you from somewhere,’ said Zoë.
‘Do you? From where?’
I scanned the room. I was starting to feel uncomfortable. There were seventy-six patients and eighteen members of staff. I needed privacy. I needed, really, to get out of there.
‘Have you been on the telly?’
‘I don’t know.’
She laughed. ‘We might be Facebook friends.’
‘Yeah.’
She scratched her horrible face. I wondered what was underneath. It couldn’t have been any worse. And then her eyes widened with a realisation. ‘No. I know. I’ve seen you at uni. You’re Professor Martin, aren’t you? You’re something of a legend. I’m at Fitzwilliam. I’ve seen you around the place. Better food in Hall than here, isn’t it?’
‘Are you one of my students?’
She laughed again. ‘No. No. GCSE maths was enough for me. I hated it.’
This angered me. ‘Hated it? How can you hate mathematics? Mathematics is everything.’
‘Well, I didn’t see it like that. I mean, Pythagoras sounded like a bit of a dude, but, no, I’m not really über-big on numbers. I’m philosophy. That’s probably why I’m in here. OD’d on Schopenhauer.’
‘Schopenhauer?’
‘He wrote a book called The World as Will and Representation. I’m meant to be doing an essay on it. Basically it says that the world is what we recognise in our own will. Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain, because our desires make us crave things from the world but the world is nothing but representation. Because those same cravings shape what we see we end up feeding from ourselves, until we go mad. And end up in here.’
‘Do you like it in here?’
She laughed again, but I noticed her kind of laughing somehow made her look sadder. ‘No. This place is a whirlpool. It sucks you deeper. You want out of this place, man. Everyone in here is off the charts, I tell you.’ She pointed at various people in the room, and told me what was wrong with them. She started with an over-sized, red-faced female at the nearest table to us. ‘That’s Fat Anna. She steals everything. Look at her with the fork. Straight up her sleeve . . . Oh, and that’s Scott. He thinks he’s the third in line to the throne . . . And Sarah, who is totally normal for most of the day and then at a quarter past four starts screaming for no reason. Got to have a screamer . . . and that’s Crying Chris . . . and there’s Bridget the Fidget who’s always moving around at the speed of thought . . .’
‘The speed of thought,’ I said. ‘That slow?’
‘. . . and . . . Lying Lisa . . . and Rocking Rajesh. Oh, oh yeah, and you see that guy over there, with the sideburns? The tall one, mumbling to his tray?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he’s gone the full K-Pax.’
‘What?’
‘He’s so cracked he thinks he’s from another planet.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Trust me. In this canteen we’re just one mute Native American away from a full cuckoo’s nest.’
I had no idea what she was talking about.
She looked at my plate. ‘Are you not eating that?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could.’ And then, thinking I might get some information out of her, I asked, ‘If I had done something, achieved something remarkable, do you think I would have told a lot of people? I mean, we humans are proud aren’t we? We like to show off about things.’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
I nodded. Felt panic rising as I wondered how many people knew about Professor Andrew Martin’s discovery. Then I decided to broaden my enquiry. To act like a human I would after all need to understand them, so I asked her the biggest question I could think of. ‘What do you think the meaning of life is, then? Did you discover it?’
‘Ha! The meaning of life. The meaning of life. There is none. People search for external values and meaning in a world which not only can’t provide it but is also indifferent to their quest. That’s not really Schopenhauer. That’s more Kierkegaard via Camus. I’m with them. Trouble is, if you study philosophy and stop believing in a meaning you start to need medical help.’
‘What about love? What is love all about? I read about it. In Cosmopolitan.’
Another laugh. ‘Cosmopolitan? Are you joking?’
‘No. Not at all. I want to understand these things.’
‘You’re definitely asking the wrong person here. See, that’s one of my problems.’ She lowered her voice by at least two octaves, stared darkly. ‘I like violent men. I don’t know why. It’s a kind of self-harm thing. I go to Peterborough a lot. Rich pickings.’
‘Oh,’ I said, realising it was right I had been sent here. The humans were as weird as I had been told, and as in love with violence. ‘So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘That doesn’t make sense.’
‘“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” That was . . . someone.’
There was a silence. I wanted to leave. Not knowing the etiquette, I just stood up and left.
She released a little whine. And then laughed again. Laughter, like madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.
I went over optimistically to the man mumbling to his tray. The apparent extraterrestrial. I spoke to him for a while. I asked him, with considerable hope, where he was from. He said Tatooine. A place I had never heard of. He said he lived near the Great Pit of Carkoon, a short drive from Jabba’s Palace. He used to live with the Skywalkers, on their farm, but it burned down.
‘How far away is your planet? From Earth, I mean.’
‘Very far.’
‘How far?’
‘Fifty thousand miles,’ he said, crushing my hope, and making me wish I’d never diverted my attention away from the plant with the lush green leaves.
I looked
