Foot Soldiers

By Paddy Bostock

Outraged at the market economic policies adopted by their university, the Podiatry department kidnap a senior academic in protest. The chance coincidence of the interests of the gutter press, Welsh Freedom Fighters, and a Prime Minister struggling for re-election ensures a minor campus story escalates into cataclysmic national proportions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781613091562

Book preview

To Tom. Lots of luck on your new road!

One

Professor Marvyn Clyde Zinkin was furious, an increasingly frequent phenomenon since his move to the UK, and one that was starting to cause him concern. Stateside, his blood-pressure had been consistently described by doctors as that of a resting athlete, but now he reckoned it closely resembled that of a kangaroo ice-dancing.

"Whaddya mean the Podricyclists ain’t buying it?" he spat at Dr. Malcolm Moon, the bearer of bad tidings, who was teetering at the edge of the Presidential-style cherrywood desk, his bony, blanched knuckles pressed into the gleaming surface for support, wondering how long he would be able to hold onto his breakfast.

The hell they ain’t. The other damn Ps bought it and so will they, Clyde bellowed, jerking his tanned quarterback frame forwards from its high-backed, black-leather swivel so the Charlton Heston torso beneath his white button-down shirt covered the major part of the desktop, and the ice-blue eyes above the remoulded nose and the cosmetic Rock Hudson cleft chin were only withering inches away from Dr. Moon’s watery yellow irises.

"An’ you better believe it, Mal. Toe-pickers?" he said, springing from his chair, grabbing a remote from the back pocket of his specially imported Lee jeans—the ones that built America—and marching across to his full-wall, Power Point display on which, alphabetically arranged, were all the subjects he had already axed from the university’s once wide-ranging offer.

Philosophics bought it, he told the cringing don, who had begun to gulp much in the manner of a haddock out of water. Psychiatrosis bought it. Psychologomy bought it. Pekingese bought it...

"Cantonese, Professor Zinkin," Malcolm corrected, pedantry surfacing even in his current anguish.

"Political Studies bought it. Practically all the goddammed Ps bought it. An’ now you’re here to tell me Podricyclists ain’t buying it?" Clyde fumed, oblivious to the intervention and zapping at the remote to indicate the spaces where once seminal subjects featured as death masks and PODIATRY was lit up in red with a skull and crossbones flashing over it in black.

They are very reluctant, Professor, given the potential financial benefits they claim to be inherent in the treatment of feet, and also the principle of the matter, Moon said before his knees gave way and he collapsed onto the single wooden stool Zinkin allowed for petitioners on the opposite side of the Presidential cherrywood number.

The As bought it…Angly Saxonics, Anthropologism, Archaeologics…all those guys went for the deal big ways. The Bs...the Cs...the Ds, all the way through to the goddam Ps, Clyde said, whipping the remote along the defunct subject line of his projection-analysis screen. So why not the goddam Podricyclicists? he barked, returning to his swivel, appraising his computer briefly before hitting the auto-piss-off button on a series of e-mails, and then staring down at Malcolm Moon.

Did I say you could sit, Mal?

I felt I needed to, sir.

"’Nother weak-kneed Brit, huh? You guys gonna be the death of me. Okay, so, Mal, hear this and hear it good. You don’t deliver me these feet guys’ heads on a platter by this time next week—because that’s your job, Mal, the job you signed up for, am I right or am I right?—and you know where I am gonna be shoving your performance-related-pay?"

Up my bottom, sir?

Which was where the professor had threatened to shove Malcolm’s pay during the last of these enervating conversations.

Up your ass, is right, Mal. So far up your ass, you’re gonna be chewin’ on it. I’ll give you this, you’re a fast learner. So you figure you can get with the programme?

I’ll do my best, sir.

"Sure, you will, Mal. You wanna go on earning a crust, then sure you will. So get the hell outta my office and stick it to those bozos PRONTO IF NOT SOONER," Clyde roared, dismissing the enfeebled academic with a wave of his hairy right hand, whilst, with his equally hairy left hand, punching the button on his CD player which would crank up his favourite Beach Boys’ song of all time and ease his hurting mind.

The song was: I Get Around. Which Clyde had. A lot.

~ * ~

Maisie? he then hollered into his intercom as he watched Malcolm Moon lurching towards the door, you wanna bring the Havanas in here? I need a smoke.

University policy says no smoking anywhere in the building, Professor Zinkin, Maisie reminded her new boss for maybe the thousandth time.

"Honey, how often I gotta tell ya? You are talking here with a guy who has smoked all over the state of California. And if a guy can smoke all over the state of California with the Governor’s personal permission, he can smoke any damn place he likes, okay? So don’t give me no more of that health-nazi crap."

No, Professor, just as you say, Maisie whispered, making a mental note to tender her resignation first thing the following morning. Maisie had about had it with this barbarian. Nonetheless, today was still today, and she wasn’t about to sully her two decades of steadfast service to the university just because of some moment of petulance. She’d think matters over. That was Maisie’s way.

So it was that Clyde Zinkin was soon biting the head off a big one and preparing the Zippo for blast-off.

Limp-dick limeys, he muttered to himself, leaning back in his chair to exhale a pungent plume of smoke at the ceiling while shaking his huge head in memory of his predecessor, Professor Harold Griffin, who had so abysmally failed to rein in the university’s expenditure, axe all unprofitable or breakeven courses, and attract to the institution only those students whose fathers, mothers and grandparents were certified holders of untraceable accounts in the Cayman Islands that he’d been hauled before the Court of Governors and given his cards for prosecuting arguments described as: Criminally Insane.

Griffin’s crime had been to argue against the expansion of Masters in Business Administration courses to include a special one for the sons and daughters of a newly emergent, oil-rich, Islamic state bankrolled by the U.S. State Department in the interests of what it termed peace in the region on the grounds of the ethical and educational qualms he harboured concerning the value of the exercise, given only one of the previous year’s graduates had been able to read, which had entailed an academically indefensible reduction of the pass mark to three per cent.

And furthermore, he’d had the audacity to propose the university might instead consider a drastic reduction of its overseas MBA intake in order to sponsor a fast-track Under-to-Postgraduate programme for A-level students from London’s East End qualified in subjects as apparently unrelated to the economy as English Literature. Such children, Griffin counselled, might benefit enormously from Higher Education and thus—by beefing up what he termed their mental muscles—become the next economic backbone of the nation in the manner of previous generations of Classics graduates from Oxbridge who, despite their ignorance of even basic mathematics, had nonetheless for centuries gone on to become Chancellors of the Exchequer.

Such a move, Griffin had opined, would have the effect of not only exponentially enhancing the university’s national standing once its graduates became government ministers, but also providing a rigorous challenge to all other New Universities in the Higher Education sector—which was the argument that proved to be the final nail in his coffin.

Piffle. Ideological tripe, he’d been told by the assembled Governors at his hearing. Unless, of course, you have some insight into the government’s latest funding strategy we don’t know about, they’d added, tittering at each other. "In which case, of course, you would be promoted and not fired. If, for example, HMG—in some arcane wisdom all its own to which only you are privy—were able to pull in one million pounds per capita on these underdeveloped poor people, then your prospects, Professor Griffin, would be exponentially enhanced. Otherwise, you’re fired."

Well, needless to say, Griffin could neither confirm nor deny this scenario, seeing as none of the parliamentarians whose advice he’d sought had deigned to answer a single request for audience. Hence the P45 slung unceremoniously at him across the desk.

Clyde Zinkin, by contrast, during only his first two weeks in office, had schmoozed with so many Downing Street junior ministers, the Governors had granted him a single-line budget to schmooze some more.

They had demurred to begin with, of course they had. Not the British way and all that. But what with so many of their Algarve and Chiantishire second mortgages on the line, they’d caved in pretty quickly once the initial protests had been minuted. After that—plus a stern lecture from Zinkin about the crucialicity [sic] of market economics when it came to Higher Education—they too had been eating out of his hands.

~ * ~

Some dweeb, reflected Clyde, now six months into post, having been head-hunted after a successfully completed economico-institutional-repositioning exercise at a comparable university in the north of England, and prior to that—although his CV had cleverly camouflaged the issue—a series of illegal dealings with the rhino-horn industry in the state of Florida.

So keen had the Governors been to lure Clyde to London they had offered him an on-the-spot professorship, a title he had accepted with alacrity seeing as his only other claim to academic prowess was a UCLA football scholarship which hadn’t worked out too well because of the loss of a testicle to the jaws of a linebacker named Billy-Jo Butch Cassidy during the first play of his sophomore pro try-out with the Oakland Raiders. No quid pro quo football dollars for UCLA and no major-league career for Clyde therefore. No further university career either, because he’d subsequently entered a deep depression and flunked all the courses he wasn’t qualified for in the first place, and was thus given the boot.

All he had going for him after that were the several years of psychoanalysis designed to convince him that a Uni-testicular could still be an American hero, and then his ballsy appointment to the Chevrolet plant in Detroit where he made his name by downsizing the workforce to a quarter of its former strength and increasing company profitability by a third. After that there had been a late-nineties dot-com spell on Wall Street, which brought in the greenbacks spectacularly.

But poor use of those paper millions—plus several outstanding fraud allegations in Michigan—meant there had been no way back into such enterprises north of the Mason-Dixon line, which was when Clyde had begun to look south for inspiration.

And bingo, when he looked, there were all kinds of strapped-for-cash, emergent universities in and around Texas looking for expertise such as his, and, when they were done and dusted, there was the interesting prospect of the rhino-horn industry over in Florida, where he would have likely stayed and made further millions had he not ill-advisedly branched out into the importation of even less licit substances from Colombia and run into unpleasantness with the FBI.

Where to run?

Allegations in Michigan. Backstabbing in New York City. Indictments in Florida.

Anywhere had been Clyde’s first instinct. The Amazon Basin, maybe? Nicaragua, where there were even now meant to be rich pickings. Mexico?

And then the credit crunch hit. The mother of all disasters!

But, ever resourceful and displaying what he thought of as true American grit, he had cast his net wider, and to even weirder places: specifically the UK, where he discovered universities falling over themselves to be repositioned as the result of decades of being told by successive governments to educate more and more students for less and less taxpayers’ money—and then recently having been ordered to make up the shortfall by charging students previously unheard-of fees.

Nothing such universities had valued more than the kinds of ruthless street cred Clyde could offer. Okay, the bucks weren’t great but, with his background, Clyde could live with a £150,000 p.a. salary and a Merc Sports thrown in, plus tax breaks fiddled through the mother of parliaments. And when the offer of a Professorship came with the package, well...

"King-sized dweeb," he muttered, trashing the half-smoked Havana.

Like how many sandwiches short of a picnic did a person have to be to be as dweeby as Griffin? A whole heap of sandwiches, that was how many. Practically an entire deli-ful of freaking sandwiches.

Two

So, how’s our boy Zipkin doing so far, Charlie, would you say? Sir Bertram Spratt, Chair of the university’s Court of Governors and sometime captain of industry asked fellow Governor with Special Responsibility for Finance, Lord Charles Drinkwater, over port and cigars in the lock-down Smoking Room at their club in St. James’s after a lunch of Harrods’ tomato soup followed by bangers and mash with all the trimmings, and apple tart for afters.

Zinkin? Doing pretty well actually, Bertie.

Care to refine? Sir Bertram queried, arching one of his famous, hirsute, white eyebrows over a second glass of port.

"Refine, Bertie?"

Clarify. Elaborate.

Ah. Glad to, old boy. But before I do, any thoughts about two down?

"Two down, Charlie?"

Crossword. Normally have a crack at it, don’t you? Tricky bugger today, Lord Charles said, donning a pair of pince nez and rummaging in his briefcase for his folded copy of The Times.

Clue?

Um...hold on a mo’. Yes, yes, here we have it. ‘Some Spaniards are at a family gathering.’ In seven.

Letters?

C blank, T blank, L blank, N.

Hrumph, Sir Bertram muttered after several minutes of ineffectual thought-provoking sucks on his panatella. Definition?

‘Family gathering,’ wouldn’t you think?

Prob’ly not, old boy. More likely ‘Spaniards.’ Crossword johnnies prone to foreign names and so on? Give up. You got any suggestions?

Catherine. Married to Henry the Eighth. She was a Spic, wasn’t she?

"Too many letters, old boy. No L. Never were the brightest bulb in the...um...thingy, were you, Charlie? To hell with it, a miffed Sir Bertram said. So, tell me about our friend, Zaplick. Cousin from across the Atlantic bringing home the bacon, is he? Special relationship working to our advantage and so on?"

You could put it that way, Bertie, Lord Charles grunted, still peering at his paper. Catalan, p’raps?

Thought he was American.

"No, Bertie, the answer to two down. Catalan, possibly? Types from Barcelona, if I am not mistaken. Like that little waiter chappie on the telly."

"Waiter chappie on the telly, Charlie?"

Programme about a hotel. Jolly funny. Little waiter fellow from Barcelona called Manuel who...

But Lord Charles’s reminiscences of his favourite Fawlty Towers reruns were quickly cut short by Sir Bertram’s meaningful glare.

Just fill the blighter in, he growled. Doesn’t make any damn difference to the other clues, does it?

No.

So fill it in. And when you’ve finished, tell me about Zitlock.

Given the excellence of the luncheon and the accompanying normal and then fortified wines, it took Lord Charles several minutes to locate his Mont Blanc biro from its resting place in the inside pocket of his Savile Row three-piece and add in the extra letters, after which he said: Hope it’s right, Bertie, that’s all I can say.

Right, wrong, who the bloody hell cares? Just tell me about Splitskin, would you?

Doing pretty well, Bertie, as I said.

Which means exactly?

That the chappie is well on the way with what he calls his ‘game plan,’ Lord Charles replied, twiddling the Mont Blanc between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and turning his attention to six across.

"Which is, Charlie? And would you mind putting that damned paper away? I am Chair of the Governors, am I not? I have a public duty to perform."

No need to get shirty, Bertie, the peer complained, irritated at the crossword impasse and surprised at his colleague’s sudden interest in public responsibilities.

Well? Sir Bertram wanted to know when The Times had finally been stowed back in its briefcase. "Game plan, you say? And what game would that be, Charlie? Not rugger, eh? Or cricket. Cove is a foreigner, isn’t he?"

Indeed he is, Bertie. And you’re quite right. Not rugger or cricket. The things he told us about in his interview—the things about money. As I said, what he calls his game plan.

Mmm, damn peculiar, if you ask me, Sir Bertram said, fingering his dewlaps. Monop’ly p’raps? More like Monop’ly, eh? Used to like that game.

"Possibly more like Monopoly, yes, Bertie. You do remember the interview, don’t you?"

’Course I damn well do, Charlie, Sir Bertram claimed, although in truth his short-term memory was a less than reliable instrument, and even the distant past was becoming something of a blur. To such an extent he was beginning to encounter problems with the names of not only his wife and six children, but also his dog—the latter being a matter of some concern. Sir Bertram loved his spaniel, Peter, but kept calling him Pewter which meant the animal obeyed no commands at all. The nitty gritty of the Zinkin interview was thus hazy at best.

"Details, Charlie. Facts. That’s all I ask. Minister on the blower and so on," he therefore continued.

Shuff-le-Bottóm?

"Pardon?’

Minister’s name, old boy.

Could be, Charlie. Could very well be. Look, would you mind coming to the point and quickly? I have another meeting this afternoon, the Chair of Governors said while swiping up his sleeve for a glance at his Rolex, which was telling him it was one thirty-two p.m.

At what time?

Four fifteen. Possibly four forty-five. Some number with fours and fives in it. Banker chappie of some sort. Secretary’s got it in the diary.

Not exactly in a hurry then, are we, Bertie?

"Possibly not. But tempus fugit nonetheless, eh? So, just tell me what the Zonkin man’s doing at the godforsaken university so I can report some progress to this Shufflyarse person. Is that too much to ask? Heaven’s sake, man, we were at school together, weren’t we?...Weren’t we?"

Indeed we were, Bertie. And the pranks we got up to in the dorm, eh?

"Pranks, Charlie? In the dorm, you say?"

Lord Drinkwater sighed and then did his best to explain Zinkin’s strategy to his Old Etonian pal.

Well, he’s made jolly good progress with axing the courses that aren’t making us any money, he started. Which is practically all the courses. So far he’s got to the Ps as I understand it.

Peas, Charlie?

Subjects at the university starting with the letter P.

Ah. And the other letters? Q, R, S and so on?

He’s coming to those. The ones he’s abolished so far are A, B, C, D, E, F, G...

All right, all right, So Biology buggered, French fucked, German jettisoned...that the picture, Charlie?

Eps’lutely. Got it in one, Bertie. Those subjects: ‘Bought the deal big ways,’ to quote our boy.

Deal?

"The one we offered to all the staff we made redundant, if you recall? The severance package with a tasty zero-point-five percentage bonus on appointment-level salary, but minus all pension rights. And if the unions started whingeing, we’d sue the pants off them. That deal. Had to dig into the coffers a bit, but think of the money we’d be saving and so on. Remember that?"

Quite so. Serves the blighters right for failing to recruit foreign postgraduate students with the requisite bank balance. LSD up to the gunnels with ’em from what I hear.

"Suspect it’s the LSE you’re thinking of, Bertie, but yes, something of the sort. Anyway, Zinkin has proved himself a master of the process. Not always entirely conventionally, it has to be said. There remains, for example, the thorny issue of how the entire English department disappeared without a trace during a Bard bash in Kabul, and whether Zinkin had anything to do with sending them there...but apart from that the only outstanding problem so far is Podiatry."

"Podiatry, Charlie?"

Feet, Bertie.

"Feet?"

Dropped arches and so on. Not terribly sure what else. Toes possibly.

"We teach feet at the university?"

Hangover from the Polytechnic days, old boy. Practical skills and so on. Obviously no place for them in the current structure. Expensive things, feet.

"Obviously not. Feet indeed. Hope Pumpkin’s got them on the run."

Don’t we all, old fellow, but they’re proving damnably difficult. Not buying into the game plan at all.

How many of them are there?

Feet?

No, for God’s sake. People in the department.

Three staff and the same number of students.

Pretty bloody uneconomic then, what?

Quite. Only they’re led by a Professor Vincent McVittie who, I have to say, is proving something of a match even for Zinkin. Fellow used to be the welders’ union convenor on the Clyde.

"Clyde? Thought they made boats on the Clyde, Charlie. What’s the bounder doing in feet?"

Nineteen eighties’ redundancy package including a second bite of the educational cherry as compensation. And comrade Vincent took full advantage. First degree north of the border somewhere, research down here, appointed to the Poly, and, hey presto, when we turned ourselves into a university—a professorship.

Good Lord!

You must remember, Bertie, the days we were dishing out professorships to every Tom, Dick and Harry who could write his name unassisted. Even to some who couldn’t. Proper universities had them so we had to have them too.

We employ in the capacity of Professor of Feet a person who was once a welder in Glasgow? And we can’t make him leave?

Apparently not. Union savvy and so on. McVittie is a fierce person who has become even fiercer as a result of Zinkin’s appointment. So much so he’s designed his e-mail signature to include two fingers raised to correspondents his server has been configured to detect as potential foes.

Mmm. Difficult news to have to impart to the minister, Charlie.

Thought Shuff-le-Bottóm was a lefty himself.

Who?

The minister.

"Ah. Possibly, Charlie. Very possibly. But damned hard these days to tell lefties from righties, eh? Old lefties, new righties, middle-of-the-road lefties and righties. Hard to tell the blighters apart," Sir Bertram complained while signalling to Henry, the butler, he would care for another port before rushing off to his crucial meeting in the city.

So much simpler in the old days when Margie was in charge, eh? Knew where you were with Margie.

Margie?

"Thatcher! Easier to separate the men from the boys when Margie was in charge, eh? Let alone the girls. Any girls in Podiatry, are there?"

One, Lord Charles replied. A lesbian.

"Lesbian, Charlie? Dearie me. Rum set-up, eh?" Sir Bertram answered, cupping his brow in a faintly shaking right hand.

Three

Dr. Malcolm Moon was kept waiting over an hour for his hastily scheduled meeting with the Podiatrists, an hour he was later to deem the intermission between his past life and his future one—a sort of existential limbo.

The reason for the delay was the meeting being held in Professor Vinnie McVittie’s office, behind the closed door of which Vinnie, Dr. Harriette Anderson, their junior colleague George Humphreys, and their three students were locked in the final round of strategic discussions.

Think they’ll be much longer? Malcolm asked Agnes, the department’s steel-bunned secretary, after forty-five minutes of writhing on his chair.

As long as it takes, Doctor Moon.

No chance of a cup of tea, I suppose?

None.

Right, Malcolm said, returning to his detailed inspection of the wall opposite which was plastered with diagrams of bunions, ingrown toenails, hammer toes, and neuroma, plus a large poster with hints of a Gdansk provenance showing a massive and clearly diseased foot planted firmly on the face of Clyde Zinkin, who appeared to be suffocating. The drawing was childlike in design, but the message was clear enough for Malcolm’s bowels to begin churning. And with good reason, for behind the ominous wall, Professor McVittie was stomping up and down in front of his assembled department jerking on the larger of his earpiercings—the one depicting Laocoön’s painful skirmish with snakes—and shouting: "Fuckerrs, fuckerrs, fucking FUCKerrs," his shoulder-length, black-with-a-hint-of silver locks falling over his eyes with each expletive, and thus having to be combed back with a gnarled left hand to enable him to see the document he was holding before his eyes with his right.

"Listen tae this bollocks, boys and girls," he invited his grim-faced colleagues and students as he stomped, his six-foot-three, fifteen-stone frame shaking the floor with every footfall.

Before becoming a welder, Vinnie, like his adversary Clyde, had also had football trials—albeit for Celtic FC and with a differently shaped ball—and had maintained into his fifties much of the athletic commitment that had led him to be known on the soccer field as the brick shitehouse. Still pressed iron. Still ran six miles a day.

In this respect, Clyde and Vinnie had much in common. In others—politics and dress, for example—their divergence was absolute. Vinnie, wearing his Marxism on his body, opted for billowing red shirts worn outside red flared jeans, while Clyde the Capitalist stuck to his Marlboro Man image except on the days he sported his double-breasted, grey Armani with the silver-buckle belt and the blue Gucci shirt with the blue and silver striped tie.

Vinnie never wore a tie. Or a suit. Didn’t own one. Wouldn’t. On principle.

‘We,’ he quoted from the organ causing him so much animus—namely the university’s monthly staff newsletter—‘are now headed into clearer waters as the result of the excellent work being conducted by Professor Clyde Zinkin and can expect a budget surplus of one million pounds in the next financial year. Good news for everybody’!

"Gud news fer everybody, my ARRse, Vinnie spat. Everybody who’s still got a job, that is. Like Clyde Zinkin and his cronies. And guess who wrote this self-congratulatory shite, brothers and sisters? Go on, guess... George?"

Zinkin? George guessed.

Right, George. Clydey baby, Vinnie shouted, mincing meaningfully: Our very own rough, tough, cream-puff cowboy, he said, before stopping himself in mid-mince, smacking himself on the brow with the heel of a rueful hand, and adding: Och, Harriette, hen, I didny mean...

It’s okay, Vinnie. There are more important matters on the agenda just now, Dr. Anderson replied, palming air.

As things stood, Vinnie’s occasional lapses on the gay issue were the least of Harriette’s concerns. What bothered her most was how she and her partner, Alice, were going to be able to keep up the payments on their Streatham maisonette if she were to lose her job, and anyway Vinnie was trying hard to put his homophobic past behind him. She knew that. Sometimes he just couldn’t help himself that was all. That his heart was in the right place, Harriette had no doubt.

So what do you want to do? What are you proposing? she asked, as Vinnie slumped his large frame onto a small chair and began fiddling with the split ends of his silvering mane. Protest marches, sit-ins?

Nae, lassie, said Vinnie, pulling from the breast pocket of his crimson shirt a packet of long-green Rizla papers, a pouch of Golden Virginia, and a small cellophane envelope, tried all that in the old days, but those days are long gone. No, if we are tae survive, then it has tae be a much more radical strategy we’ll be looking at.

Such as, Professor? asked an emboldened student called Linda.

Hostage-taking, Vinnie replied, after he had thoughtfully rolled the joint and then fired it up with a Celtic FC Zippo, thereby filling the room with fragrant aromas.

"Hostage-taking, Vinnie? George Humphreys said, his eyebrows shooting up to his hairline. Bit risky, I’d have thought. Could get us into all sorts of trouble."

Aye, laddie, but nae pain, nae gain, would ye not say?

Possibly, Vinnie. But I’m really not awfully sure I could put my name to such a drastic...

But then words failed the young man.

Generally speaking, Vinnie appreciated the skills of the very last lecturer he had managed to wangle for his ailing department, there being so few academic podiatrists on the market these days and so little money to pay them, but he still had his doubts about George. What did an ex-Surrey Junior squash champion know about risk-taking in the real world, for example? What did he know about the false consciousness of the bourgeoisie? Less than a hill of beans, Vinnie reckoned.

And what would we do with a hostage once we’ve caught him, professor? Linda wanted to know.

"Or her, Vinnie grinned, winking at Harriette. Use the person tae negotiate our position, he then added. What the hell else are hostages for?"

"You don’t think, Vincent, that this may be, as indicated, a tad rash? George said. Other avenues to explore first, I should have thought. Legitimate complaints through the usual channels, petitions to the VC and so on?"

Laddie, do ye know what’s been happening around this university for the last six months or do ye not?

Of course I do, Vincent.

And did ye see any of the legitimate complaints working? Did ye see tears other than crocodile ones in the VC’s eyes as the sorry-arsed petitioners filed past collecting their P45s? Ye’ve the makings of a damn fine podiatrist, my son, but I’m afraid there’s more to life than bone spurs. We all protested our backsides off in Glasgow and what did it achieve? Nae more ships and nae more jobs, that’s what, he said, sucking hard on the spliff and passing it along to Harriette.

What sort of negotiation do you have in mind, Vinnie? she asked, returning the doobie after further offers around the room had been rejected. You do realise this would constitute a criminal act.

Well, Vinnie drawled, "before we negotiate a damn thing, mebbe sending body parts and a serious message through the internal mail to Zinkin just to show we mean business? For starters, like. Tae set out our stall, so tae speak. How would that be?"

God! a student called Jenny said. "Sounds like Silence of the Lambs or something. Oh God."