This is a short story influenced by the internet meme "i m in ur base killin ur d00ds" and the lolcats internet phenomenom.I should add, the story actually has nothing to do with teh internetz, which has horribly disappointed my geeky boyfriend. It tells the tale of a university lecturer, sent insane by the pressure of work, who attempts to take control of the academic opinions of the students in her care. It’s about books and madness and the horror of  an academic life. I would like to emphasise that it is in no way prophetic… probably.

“Ignoramuses!” she exclaimed. And then added, “Or should that be ‘ignoramii’? She lay down the pen she had been using to mark the essays with. Green, never red. Red looked too threatening. Too much like school. She couldn’t help thinking that judging by the standard of the work she had just been subjected to, the red pen probably wasn’t employed enough at the schools of some of these fools. Spare the red pen, deal with the consequences. Maybe what they needed was a good dose of the red to show them the error of their ways. Or was it perhaps the errors of their beings. She preferred the latter. Sighing, she swivelled around in her scratchy, black office chair to face her computer desk. She noticed she had an email, an internal, urgent, marked red. There it was again. Why was it acceptable for someone to use red on her? She opened the email and read:

Hi Dr Brown,

I’m in your first year english tutorial but i wasn’t in today. I’m not sure what I’m meant to do about that. I got a doctors note coz i have got an ear infection and been told I need to rest but i thought I should let you now. I will get the work off Amy as she lives in my halls.

Bye.

Ruth Allen.

Offended, she began a reply to this “Ruth” creature. It was filled with the polite understanding that university lecturers are underpaid to demonstrate to the flotsam that washes up the banks of the nearby river calling themselves first year undergraduates. “Hi, I’m Ruth Allen, I’m eighteen and I’m from Nottingham… so, quite far away.” The girl had simpered in the first tutorial meeting, a few weeks previous. “I’m not homesick yet coz I’m actually half Scottish so I’m kinda half home I guess,” she had said in a sickeningly English accent, grinning and giggling as the other tutorial members smiled politely, trying to quell the xenophobia rising in their throats. Shuddering she signed off the email, “All the best, Jane Brown”. She resented having to pander to these half wits. To calm herself, and perhaps as a bit of fun, she tapped print on the screen of the computer. The printer whirred into life, quickly and efficiently reproducing the abhorrence on the screen. The paper came sliding out, and silently slipped into the printer tray. Still warm, and smelling like inkjet cartridges, she slid the paper from the tray and rotated the chair back to the writing desk. The green pen smirked at her from on top of the half marked pile of essays. The benign emerald ink glimmered in the shaft of sunlight that had penetrated the window blind, teasing her, trapping her, forcing her to make permanent this benevolent image as the essays covered in green ink showed her. “No, not this time. You are not who I am.” And with that, she slowly began to open a desk drawer.

              The ancient, wooden drawer squeaked a little. She relished the sound. The brass handle was reassuringly cold on her dry, withered fingers. She closed her eyes and breathed in the odour of the beech; of the old, old drawer. Her head lolled backwards and her tiny body slumped down in her chair, legs slightly apart and her free hand swung down by her side. If she were young, blonde and large breasted, the scene would perhaps have been arousing but the wrinkles and grey hue made it look as though she had finally abandoned this mortal coil, to join another spiral, a bit further south. Ecstasy washed over her and she held on for a moment, imbibing the orgasmic pleasure.

            Inside the drawer was a small, blue notebook, dog-eared with age, and a red pen. Regaining her composure, she reached into the drawer and lifted out the red pen. She caressed the scarlet shaft of the biro, stroking it intimately, as if it were an old flame she’d met for drinks and drinks had turned into coffee and then breakfast. She savoured the tiny “pop” as she removed the lid and the way it elegantly, perfectly fitted onto the end of the pen. She positioned the pen in her right hand, and hovering over Ruth Allen’s email she paused and smiled, lovingly almost, at this everyday, inanimate object. It was, after all, only a pen. But she didn’t see it like that. It was an escape from the turmoil of life at the university. A way out of her horrible existence as a lecturer, benevolent, compassionate, friend of the student. A release from the timid green. Jane Brown and her red pen were ready to ride out on a quest to slay the bad, smug grammar of a certain saccharine undergraduate. “Instantly dislikeable” was the comment she had secretly inscribed next to the girl’s name on the attendance sheet she was forced to fill in. She told the students she was simply marking down a physical attribute she might use to identify them in the first weeks of term and she had pointed at a large boy with red hair and said, “Your hair colour for example”. She had written “Miller”, pleased at the obscure Chaucer reference. The large, ginger boy had, indeed, turned out to be deceitful.

The pen swooped and glided and hacked at the smooth paper, leaving a trail of blood red ink in its wake. She enjoyed each and every mark made by the pen, quietly proud of her bold companion. The un-capitalised first person pronouns were given new and towering heights, transforming them into the phalluses they should have been. “Now” was soon accompanied by its rightful partner, Kicking the mistake into submission. The informal tone of the cretin was commented on in full at the bottom of the page. When she was finished, the page was awash with red. She smiled to herself: a sea of red, the Red Sea if you will, the letters are the remains of the Egyptians after the wrath of God. I am God.  I have drowned you, Ruth Allen, in my anger and righteousness. Delusions of grandeur and evil desires. She felt great.

The end of the day came. For her it was the same as usual; bus home, cook tea for the cat and insipid husband, washing up, revise work and, at ten-thirty, go to bed. Every day. All the time. That is how it was. It was a routine and she was happy to stick to it. It made life much less complicated and sometimes, on rare occasions, she was thankful for it.

The start of the day came. For her it was the same as usual; get up, wash and dress, cook breakfast for the cat and insipid husband, washing up and, at eight o’clock, bus to work. Everyday she would discover herself in her office at university. To begin with, the walls lined with books had delighted her but now she hardly noticed them. They had become background noise. She had become them. And everything about her was background noise. She was going to be great but then some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. She was none of these. She was an “academic”.

In the leather-bound tomb, vertical strips of serious red, green and blue, panelled with knowledge, buried alive in the Classics, she sat. She stared at the pile of unmarked essays on her desk and winced. And then she made a decision. This class of vacuous, vapid, witless students would all leave the first year of their university education with outstanding grades. She knew exactly how it was going to happen. If her plan didn’t blossom as she thought it might, at least it would keep her entertained.

In the library, with the reading list with which she had provided the class, she collected together all the books recommended, and all the multiples of all the books. This would take her a long time but she had nothing else to do. She had treated the remainder of the essays to a verdancy of the loathed pen; all marked within the space of an hour and a half, pushed into the individually named brown envelopes and handed to the faculty office for collection. On the surface she was a sensitive, highly efficient tutor but she had murky hidden depths. Her dirty, little secret friend was hidden in the pocket of her below knee-length, thick black skirt and she had stroked it on her trek across campus to the library. She viewed walking across campus as, at base, the perpetual avoidance of objects of potential annoyance. For instance, she preferred to traverse a steep grassy hill than to have to walk past the bustling student canteen, heaving with morons that she might recognise. Like the bees swarming from the devil’s arse. On this occasion she was fortunate. It was fairly early in the day so campus was still and silent. They only come out at night; demons, vampires, werewolves, students. All the most upstanding members of any community.

She borrowed a book trolley from one of the library minions. There was one woman, hugely obese, who wore tracksuit bottoms and long hair, over the age of fifty. This was enormously distasteful and she lamented the downfall of the library as symbolised by this velour covered beast. It had been great, but of recent years had fallen to degradation. Computers in a library, of all things. And communal study areas? Why not just hire a permanent D.J. and be done with it? She wheeled the trolley into a lift. Really, the lifts were only meant for staff and the disabled patrons but she considered herself severely disabled, what with the trolley and the gargantuan burden of an undergraduate English tutorial.

The plan, she thought, was a stroke of genius, pure genius and she wondered why it had never occurred to her before. In each of the books on the recommended reading list for first year undergraduates she would write extensive annotations. They would contain a million gleaming pearls of wisdom. What was that about swine and pearls? She had forgotten. The half-wits would read the books, and wouldn’t be able to help missing the beautiful, crimson notes, bordering the sides. A thick red gloss. They would snake and climb around the black and white of literary theory, old favourites, anthologies, embellishing these books more than any illustration ever could. Red Peach blossoms and scarlet Oleander of Jane Brown’s wisdom would be cultivated around the dull print. Captivate those ideas. Captivate those students. Should they beware? They would read her rubies of insight and all would be well with the world. The jewels would be distributed and all would be well. Like the changeling child. Much wiser than the human child. They would all do well, all with the same thoughts in their heads but all with the same marks too. A galaxy of star pupils all in her class. At that moment she could think of nothing better. Apart from that tiny malignant delight she held at the back of her head, nothing could be better.

Jane Brown settled down on the upper level of the library. It was rarely disturbed by the species of undergraduate that she loathed. The medical undergraduates that inhabited this place were different. Diligent to the point of monotony. As she began to inscribe her hallucinogenic words onto the shiny pages of the first book, she did not notice the fault-line form at her feet. One of the sensible flat, black court-shoes she had slipped from her wizened, gryphon feet rocked on the edge of the grinning precipice and was almost lost, almost dragged her into sanity. But she did not detect the gaping floor. Neither did she detect the gaping flaw in her plan, her experiment. She remained firmly on the edge, cradled in the madness. If only the penny had dropped. Or even just the flat, black court-shoe. The plan was insane at worst. Not thought through at best. Somewhere in this shroud of snow, she had over-estimated the very students who had lowered her estimations. They did not read. Some of them would flick through the core texts. But in amongst the flashing lights, sweaty bodies, cheap shots and regret of the night before somehow Bill was lost, Tom was too and Geoff was probably somewhere near Canterbury. The hedonism of the Students’ Union drowned out the old boys. Who needs to know? Who really cares? As long as you pass the year. Self-satisfaction was to be found at the bottom of an alcohol filled glass, or sex with a stranger. Not in the gossamer pages of some anthology of English literature. This did not occur to her. She was lost.

When the red ink ran dry, she wasn’t sure how many days she had spent in the library. She looked up from her isolated desk and caught sight of a clock. It was blurred for about half a minute, while her eyes readjusted from the close work she had been engrossed in for… well…. She wasn’t sure how long. The clock’s smile read ten past two but of ante- or post- meridian, she was still unclear. The windows of the library were higher than head height. Checking that she was unobserved, she elegantly gathered her skirt in her hands, and pulled it up, above her knees. Carefully, she climbed onto the chair. She hadn’t been aware before that it was a swivelling office chair. Why couldn’t they just provide people with chairs that don’t move, or turn, or bend and pivot with every little cough or jerk of the wrist? She sighed as she tried to steady herself, flattened against the wood panelled walls. Her skirt was back down, below her knees, just where it should be. The window sill was shallow and cold to touch but thick with dead flies, cobwebs and that something black you find around most windows. Her shrivelled, claw-like fingers, stiff from the hours of continual writing, grasped at the sill. She couldn’t quite see out of the window so on tiptoes, fingers slipping in the muck, she attempted to haul herself an inch or two higher. She needed to glimpse the outside. Dark or light? Shepherd’s warning or delight? She saw but couldn’t tell because with the chair’s violent swing, she fell.

“Yeah, this is where I found her” said the first year medical student. He was a quiet, sensible boy. A good Christian. Excellent grades. Liked long walks. Never drank. Budgeted efficiently. Only the girl next door would talk to him and she wasn’t worth knowing but he’d still kissed her. He was talking to another student. Boasting of his heroic actions early that morning. “Dedication’s what you need” he joked to the other boy. He had been studying hard on the top floor of the library when he decided to take a break. He described how he had gone to the toilet and then opted for a walk around the shelves.

“That’s a bit queer, mate” said the other boy. “Why didn’t you just go to the pub like everyone else?”

 The medical student looked at his companion, smiled and looked away as he continued the story. “Anyway, it was when I was walking around the top floor that I saw this old woman lying on the ground. Her leg was kinda twisted under her. Compound fracture on closer inspection. Her skirt had come right up so I could see everything…”

“Oh, mate. I don’t wanna hear ‘bout old woman pussy. That’s just not right, Scott.”

Scott’s face contorted into a toothy grin, “Alright, alright. But imagine if it was that Vicky from our lecture.”

“Now, that I would like to see” said the other boy, giving Scott a friendly punch on the arm.

Scott had won back the respect of the boy. He continued with the story. “So, I pulled the skirt back down and checked her pulse. She was alive and all that but she’d passed out or something. As far as I could tell, she’d fallen off her chair. Silly old coot. I rang an ambulance and I just sat with her ‘til they came. Oh, I put my coat over her and she woke up for a coupla seconds and mumbled some crap about a red pen, the colour of outside? I dunno. It was weird.”

She had broken her leg. When the library staff came to clear the scene of the accident, they were horrified at what they discovered. Heaps and piles and piles and heaps of books. Enough to build a small fort with. All covered in the same handwriting in the same red ink. She had bled her insanity out onto hundreds of books. All defaced. They’d had to have a meeting about the books and in the end the only option was to re-shelve them. Someone joked; no one really takes them out anymore, anyway. They had all laughed but cut the jollity off short when they remembered the circumstances. Jane Brown. From the English department. They weren’t clear what had happened afterwards. But they had heard the whispers from indiscreet members of staff, and delighted students. The wounded books were returned to their proper homes, amongst the few that she had not defiled, and new books were bought and eventually the ravings of the madwoman were diluted and forgotten. Jane Brown took a “sabbatical” for the rest of that year and returned after the summer; her sanity fully regained, smiling, fresh and ready for the new first years. That malignant thought, however, remained.

Another three years passed and nothing significant changed at the university. There were a few more computers in the library. A few less books. The students metamorphosed into different students, all fundamentally the same, just getting younger and younger. Jane had been surprised by one girl. Ruth Allen had blossomed and become a promising prospect for a life in academic chains. One afternoon, when they had finished discussing Ruth’s looming final year dissertation, Jane said, “Ruth, whatever happens with this piece of work, I will be proud to know that I’ve taught you through all four years of your degree. And what’s more, I will be proud to say it.” Ruth giggled and thanked her mentor. Later, on her way home, Ruth smiled with the pleasure she felt at gaining Dr. Brown’s respect. “I’d love to be like her,” she told her mum on the phone that evening. Her mum had suggested that Ruth go for it. “I think I will” she had said.

The summer came and went and graduation came and went. The city overflowed with proud parents, clucking grandmothers, bored siblings, black robes and a rainbow of hoods. When the flood subsided, Ruth Allen sat in her flat and contemplated her first class honours degree. She didn’t know what to do. Lately, it had all seemed a farce. She had done almost nothing to earn this degree and yet there it was. Blank and useless. She had decided to return to university to continue her studies as a postgraduate. She wasn’t sure she wanted to but there was nothing else to do. She felt trapped. She felt she had learnt the art of essay writing. And not a lot else. Institutionalised, like some tattooed, skinhead in prison. At least Dr. Brown would be there to guide her.

Jane Brown sat in her torture chamber; the computer screen flickered a little as a new email was delivered. It was from Ruth Allen. Oh yes, Ruth Allen. How could she have forgotten? Ruth Allen, who had started to work and read and write and try to get her degree. It had taken two years for the plan to be set in motion but in this small way, it had worked. Ruth had become the model student. Her first class essays were first class. Yes, it had worked. Ruth Allen was coming back. The trap had been sprung. The dull iron teeth were firmly clamped around Ruth Allen’s leg, tearing into the flesh, as yet mostly untainted by the blood of academia. She had no scars. Not yet. Jane Brown smiled the smile of the damned. “If I can get through to that one person”, she thought, “it will all be worthwhile.” She would mould this girl during the next few years. She would be unrecognisable from the cheerful, eighteen year-old she had met, hailing from the Midlands. “You will be me, Ruth Allen and then you’ll see. You will be destroyed and in your place, there I will be. You are green. I am red.”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Short stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.