Alchemy. Maureen Duffy

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      I found it hard to believe the triads had moved in on carriers of egg fried rice and bean curd but if Mr Gao thought so it was enough. They were a quiet close family, apart from Tommy who got away. Mr and Mrs Gao cook in the steaming, succulent kitchen behind, with a clashing of woks and metal pans. Mary takes the orders in the shop and over the phone. She’s shy and plain. Probably she would have liked to marry and have children but who is there for her to meet in Streatham Hill, unless a visiting cousin? I flirt with her a little when I call for my orders but I don’t think she understands. She ducks her head and smiles at me under her deep fringe, shadowing the liquorice pupils which are her only claim to attraction. As a young girl she must have had acne that’s left her skin lumpy and pitted. Sometimes I imagine putting my lips to it and saying: ‘It’s okay; you’re beautiful.’ At the end of my stint she hands me my brown paper carrier with the little silver oblong dishes under their cardboard caps that hold my freebie supper. Every night there’s something different so that I’m never sated. Mary always remembers what I’ve had the night before.

      I didn’t mean to put all this in, even for my eyes only. The program asks me if I want to save it when I try to shut down. The ghost in the machine prompts us all the time to consider our own motives, our needs, our desires. If you don’t save, all will be lost. And yet it can always be found. Confiscated by the police, the computer gives up its secrets like any prisoner singing under the lash, rack, thumbscrew, electric prod, Chinese water torture. So why shouldn’t I save it just for myself? What have I got to hide?

      Dr Gilbert buzzes the intercom on the dot of ten, before I’ve even got my feet up. My office is home as well as workplace but he isn’t to know that yet. Behind the desk is a partition with a door in it that leads to the kitchen, shower room and my student-style bedsit. Originally a warehouse, it was converted at the end of the nineties, leaving exposed minimalist steel girders and yellow London Brick walls. In its own way it’s related to the Wessex campus. Gilbert should feel at home. I tell him to come up. As yet there’s no lift, only stone steps and iron banisters.

      When he puts his head round the door I see he’s a youngish Dr Who, collar-length brown hair, bow tie and granny glasses. As I get up he comes forward putting out a hand of slim manicured fingers.

      ‘I’m very grateful to you for seeing me so soon.’

      ‘Have a chair. Would you like a coffee?’

      ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

      ‘Not at all.’ I go over to the filter machine where the glass goldfish bowl is gently seething. ‘Milk, sugar?’

      ‘Just milk thank you.’

      I turn back from my coffee maker with our steaming cups. I can see he’s ‘all of a twitch’, as my mother would say. I’m afraid he might drop the cup and scald himself but he gets it safely down on my desk. ‘Did you find me easily, the office I mean?’ I’m trying to reassure him, to give him time to gather his wits. I guess he’s not used to the paraphernalia of the law.

      ‘I looked it up in the A-Z. I used to know London quite well but you get out of the habit…’

      I open the top drawer of my desk and take out pad and pen. ‘I’ll need to make some notes.’

      ‘Of course. Where shall I begin?’

      ‘Tell me first about you. Date of birth, full name, address.’

      The recitation of these simple facts steadies him. I could put them straight into my laptop of course but this sometimes frightens people, especially older people and Gilbert comes into that category though he’s only forty-nine. It’s more a cast of mind.

      He takes me methodically through his degree and previous employment, before we get to Wessex and the immediate problem.

      ‘I have been accused by a small group of students of trying to corrupt their minds by teaching Satanism and perversion.’

      Long ago when I started in independent practice I wanted to put up a favourite cartoon of mine showing the inside of a confessional box, with a monk leaning forward to listen to the supplicant on the other side of the grille and a sign above the monk’s head which reads: ‘Do not sound too surprised.’

      ‘Dangerous allegations.’

      ‘Very dangerous. I was summoned before the dean and disciplinary council. It was the students’ word against mine. They were believed. I was suspended and sacked.’

      ‘Sacked?’

      ‘I was on a short-term contract. When my first suspension ran out I expected to return to college, and my teaching, but a second suspension was slapped on, that took me to the end of my contract. I was told it would not be renewed.’

      ‘Why should the dean and council have believed them rather than you? Couldn’t you get other students to testify in your favour?’

      ‘They were too frightened. Ms Green…’ Gilbert hesitates, ‘you may find this hard to believe. You may even think it is mere paranoia on my part, but the college has been taken over by a sect, a fundamentalist group.’

      ‘What sort of sect?’ Far from suspecting him of paranoia, I see shades of the Rushdie fatwa rushing towards me, and find myself less than enthralled at letting loose a whole farrago of death threats, riot and arson. Still, a job is a job.

      ‘Extreme evangelical Christian.’

      ‘Creationist, Happy-Clappy?’ I’m showing off a bit.

      ‘Neither. This is something new. From America. The mother church, as they call it, has put money into the University of Wessex. The dean is their appointee. Many of the students are American.’

      ‘In these days of the internet, sects tend to be global. Didn’t the last immolation take place in Switzerland?’

      ‘There was a later one, in Zambia I seem to remember, but in both cases the cult originated in the States or had US links.’

      ‘Those students who accused you, are they American?’

      ‘Some of them. Not all. What would be their position in English law? Would it make a difference that they aren’t British subjects?’

      ‘The college must abide by UK employment law if it’s within the UK.’

      ‘So I can take them to an industrial tribunal?’

      ‘Employment tribunal. Yes, at this preliminary stage, as far as I can see. But I should warn you, Dr Gilbert, that going to law is often at the very least a disappointment, if not a down-right mistake. Think of Oscar Wilde, not to mention others in our own time. What exactly did the students allege?’

      ‘There were many things, among them that I distributed pornographic material to them.’

      ‘And did you?’

      ‘One person’s pornography is another’s truth. For example there was a poem about an erotic relationship between a Roman soldier and Christ on the cross which was prosecuted as an “obscene libel”. I think that was the term. You are too young to remember the case.’

      ‘But not too young to have studied it, if only for its rarity. Did the material you СКАЧАТЬ