The End Of Mr. Y (11 page)

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Soon I find the beginning of the pathway up to the campus. Weather-beaten gates stop cyclists from zooming straight upwards, not that anyone would be zooming up here: it’s virtually a forty-five- degree angle. Tired though I am, I do feel a bit like running, just to get this hyped feeling out of my system. But I don’t run. I walk through two sets of these gates and then past a patch of woodland on my left, where I’m hidden from the pale sky under the thin fingers of the winter trees. As I near the top of the hill, it starts to rain a little, and in the distance I can see yellow construction vehicles trundling around the collapsed Newton Building like toys in a nursery. I get to my building and the crazy feeling starts to seep away. I realise that the walk has taken more than half an hour. I wish I could liberate my car for the way back, but I was going to put petrol in it on the way home on Friday and I can’t afford to do that now.

The English and American Studies Building is still standing, and isn’t locked. That means someone must be in. Mind you, someone usually is. Even on Sundays I rarely have to unlock the door myself, although I did have to when I came here on Boxing Day. Even though there must be someone here, I can’t sense anyone as I walk down the long corridor. It’s not just that I can’t hear the hum of electricity, or the monotonous sound of stressed-out fingers hitting cheap keyboards. I just can’t feel the presence of anyone down here. I go into my office and find that the heating is on, although I am actually too hot from walking up the hill. I go to open the window and I see that the rain has hit the pane in these spattered patterns: broken diagonal lines that look somehow deliberate, and remind me of the pictures in my books of photographs from particle accelerators. I start up my computer and go up the stairs to the office to check my post.

Mary is in there, talking to the secretary, Yvonne.

‘I suppose most people don’t check their e-mail at home,’ Yvonne is saying. ‘I mean, on Friday they were talking about shutting down campus for a week. I’d be surprised if you saw people in here before next Monday. I suppose some might come in on Friday, out of curiosity. But of course the academics don’t all come in during the vacation period, anyway.’

The department used to be run by senior academics, who rotated the role among them. Now it, like most other departments in the university, is controlled by a manager brought in specifically to run the budget. Mary has somehow adopted the air of an academic, perhaps hoping this will make us trust her. But she doesn’t really know much about academic life, and I often overhear Yvonne filling her in on what sort of things the academics traditionally do.

Mary looks pissed off. ‘So who is here?’ ‘Max is in. Oh, hello, Ariel. Ariel’s in.’

Mary and I both know that my being here is of importance to nobody. I’m teaching one evening class this term and that’s it. I don’t have any admin responsibilities and I am not a member of any committees. I’m simply a PhD student, and I don’t even have a supervisor any more. So I’m surprised when Mary looks at me as if I’m someone she needs to see.

‘Ah, Ariel,’ she says. ‘My office, if you’ve got a moment.’

I wait for her to walk past me into the corridor and then I follow her around the corner to her office. She unlocks the door and holds it open for me while I walk in. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been in Mary’s office before. She’s got two of what they call the ‘comfortable’ chairs set up facing a low, pale coffee table, so I sit in one of these and she sits in the other. I’m glad the days of having to face your boss across a desk are over. You can’t do that kind of thing with computers in the way.

Everyone faces walls or screens in offices now. Mary doesn’t say anything.

‘Did you have a nice weekend?’ I ask her.

‘What? Oh, yes, thanks. Now.’ She goes silent again, but I assume that she’s about to say whatever

it is, so I don’t attempt any more small talk. ‘Now,’ she says again. ‘You’re in quite a big office on your own, aren’t you?’

Damn. I knew this would come up one day.

‘It’s Saul Burlem’s office,’ I say. ‘I’ve just got a corner of it, really.’

This is a lie. Once Burlem had been gone for a couple of months, I cleared the surface of his desk, moved his computer to the coffee table and made myself a large L-shaped arrangement out of his desk and mine. I’ve filled all the shelf space with my books, in case I ever have to do a runner from the flat in town, and generally populated the office with mouldy coffee cups and all my research notes. I have a whole drawer full of things I believe might come in useful one day. There are three small bars of bitter chocolate, a Phillips screwdriver, a flathead screwdriver, a socket set, a spanner, a pair of binoculars, some random pieces of metal, several plastic bags and, most worryingly, a vibrator that Patrick sent me through the internal post as a risqué present.

‘Well, it’s quite clear that Saul isn’t coming back to us for the foreseeable future, so that means that a large portion of your space is unused.’

I can’t do anything else but agree with this, at least as a theory.

‘Right,’ says Mary. ‘Look. All heads of department have agreed to provide temporary office accommodation for the members of staff who have had to leave the Newton Building. It’s going to be a squash for most of us but still, it has to be done. We’ve agreed to take four. Two are going to share the Interview Room and two are going to come in with you. OK?’

‘OK,’ I say. But I must look horrified. I love my office. It’s the only really warm and comfortable space I’ve got in the whole world.

‘Come on, Ariel, I’m not asking you to leave your office or anything like that. Just to share it for a while. You’d be sharing it anyway, if Saul was around.’

‘I know. Don’t worry. I’m not complaining or –’ ‘And we all have a responsibility for refugees.’

‘Yes, I know. As I said, it’s fine.’ I bite my lip. ‘So … who are they? Do we know yet? I mean, do I know who I’m going to be sharing with?’

‘Well.’ Mary gets up and picks up a sheet of paper from her desk. ‘You can choose, if you want. There’s … Let’s see. There’s a theology lecturer, a post-doctoral fellow in evolutionary biology, a professor of bacteriology and an administrative assistant.’

Well, I’m not having a bacteriologist in my office, although he or she would probably find a lot in there to study. And I fear an admin assistant might take the same view of my office as a bacteriologist.

‘Um,’ I say. ‘Can I have the theology person and the evolutionary biologist?’

Mary writes something on her sheet of paper and smiles at me. ‘There. That’s not so bad, is it?’

I leave Mary’s office, wondering if she speaks to everyone as if they are children. I do try to like her, but she makes it difficult. I think she’s been to some management training that tells you how to ‘empower’ staff and let them feel that they’ve made the terrible decision that, after all, they’re going to have to live with. Oh, well. I still haven’t even checked my post, so I go into the office to do that. Yvonne already knows about the new office arrangements.

‘I’ll come down later and help arrange the desks,’ she says to me. ‘And Roger will be in with another desk as well, and some more shelving. We’re going to put Professor Burlem’s computer into storage, and any bits and pieces from his desk, so if you could maybe start sorting those out … ?’

There is no post for me, in the end.

When’s ‘later’? Whenever it is, it leaves me less time to get into Burlem’s computer than I’d thought, especially now they’re going to put it in storage. I lift it back up onto the desk and plug it in and switch it on. This won’t be the first time I’ve tried to get into it, although the first time was really just

a half-hearted attempt to see if there was any clue to where he’d gone. Then, as now, I was confronted with the log-in screen that asks for your user name and password. I know his user name: it’s sabu2. But I have no way of knowing his password. The last time I did this I pretended I was in a film and confidently typed in several guesses before realising that it was a stupid idea. This time I am going to use a more sophisticated hacking technique. And I learned in a book last year that the most sophisticated hacking technique doesn’t involve guesses, algorithms, logarithms, dictionary files or letter-scrambling software. The most sophisticated hacking technique is where you simply convince someone to give you the password.

Who knows our passwords? Computing Services definitely do, but does Yvonne? I think for a minute. Yvonne can’t have our passwords, but what if she needed to get one for some reason? Presumably she’d just get in touch with Computing Services. It can’t be that big a deal: everything here officially belongs to the university anyway, including all the files on our computers. And Burlem has disappeared, so … Could I just ring up Computing Services and pretend to be Yvonne? Probably not. She probably rings them all the time. They’ll know her voice. Um. I think for a minute; then I run my fingers through my tangled hair a couple of times, set my expression to ‘very worried’ and go back upstairs.

‘Ah,’ I say, as soon as I walk in. ‘Yvonne?’

She’s drinking tea. ‘Yes, Ariel? What can I do for you?’

‘Um, I’m having a bit of a problem. A huge problem, actually, and I don’t quite know what to do about it.’

‘Oh. Anything I can help with?’

‘I don’t know.’ I frown, and look down at the brown carpet. ‘I think it might be hopeless, actually. But …’ I sigh, and run my fingers through my hair again. ‘Well, you know how Saul’s computer is going into storage later on today?’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, it’s got a document on it that I need, and I don’t know how to get it. I don’t think I can. Saul’s not here, and I don’t have the password any more. I used to have it, of course, but I’ve forgotten it and … Oh. How can I explain this? Basically there’s this anthology that someone at Warwick’s putting together, and I was supposed to finish the, er, bibliography for Saul and e-mail the document over to them. It doesn’t have to be there for another month, which is why I wasn’t too worried about it. But I was just starting to pack the things away for storage, like you asked, and then it just came to me.’ I shrug. ‘I suppose I really need some sort of miracle or something. I don’t suppose you’d know how to get a document from a computer with no password, would you? I mean, you’re not by any chance an experienced hacker in your spare time?’ I laugh. As if any of us would ever hack into a computer.

Yvonne sips her tea. ‘Well, you have got a problem, haven’t you?’

‘I know. I think I was just putting the whole thing off until I could just get in touch with Saul. I thought maybe he’d get in contact nearer the deadline, but of course he won’t know that his computer’s going to go into storage and … God. Sorry to bother you with this, but I thought if anyone would know what to do, it would be you.’

I’m being careful not to mention the word ‘password’ too much. I have a feeling that if I make this the problem it will sound a lot more dodgy than simply ‘I need a document and I don’t know how to get it.’ And I think joking about hacking helps, but it is a risk.

‘Have you tried Computing Services?’ she asks.

‘Not yet. I just thought they’d basically tell me to go away. I mean, to them I could be anybody. And it is a bit of a weird thing to ask for. I mean, obviously you understand, but I’m not sure they would.’

‘Do you want me to give them a call?’

‘Oh, would you? Thanks so much, Yvonne.’

‘I’ll authorise the new password request and get one of them over to sort it all out for you. When Professor Burlem comes back he’ll need to set a new password, but his old one will have expired, anyway. I don’t know when they’ll be able to get over to you, but do you want to let me know when they’ve been and we’ll come and do the desks then?’

By twelve o’clock the technician still hasn’t come and I’m beginning to feel hungry. If I could get hold of a bread roll, I could make a chocolate sandwich (which wouldn’t be the worst lunch I’ve ever had), but who knows if the canteen is even open. I try to open the university website so I can log on to the intranet and see which of the various restaurants and cafeterias are open, but all I get is an Error 404 message instead of the front page. No wonder no one’s here. Anyone who’d logged on to the university site to see whether it was open again would surely have feared the worst from this. I sigh. Even chocolate on its own wouldn’t be the worst lunch I’ve ever had – in fact, it’s practically gourmet – but some bread to go with it would be great, and the rolls in the canteen are only ten pence. I write a note for my door and pin it up. Back in five minutes. I just hope he doesn’t come and go away again.

The Russell Building is, like the Stevenson Building on the west of the campus, built in the shape of a four-petalled cyber-flower with a small set of cloisters in the middle. I haven’t spent much time in the Stevenson Building, because the students all say that it is exactly the same as the Russell Building but ‘the other way around’, which sounds impossibly confusing, especially considering that the Russell Building is confusing enough on its own. I only seem to get lost in the Russell Building at the beginning of the academic year, when all the new students are around and everybody seems confused, and it’s as if the confusion leaks out of everyone’s minds and infects everyone else.

Now I go out of the English Building through the side door and under the walkway that leads to one of the Russell side doors. I go up some concrete steps, and then down some more, until I come to the mouth of a long, white corridor with a worn tiled floor and whitewashed walls. When the students are around, this space seems almost normal, but now it feels like the medical wing of an abandoned 1960s space station, or someone’s idea of one. They keep broken university furniture in one of the rooms along here. I can hear my footsteps as I walk, and for the first time ever I get the sensation that there could be no one in the whole building apart from me.

The tables in the dining hall are laid out in a geometric pattern that seems accidental until you go up to the Senior Common Room and look down. From up there you realise that the long tables all point towards the cathedral, which is itself framed in the large windows at the back of the hall. It all makes sense, from up there, the whole thing, and you feel as if you are part of one picture, and nothing on the perfect line joining you with the cathedral really exists.