was so slightly built that at a casual glance he appeared taller than he really was. Perhaps this was why he’d been given enormous polyester slacks that trailed in the seeping sink water. Holding up these circus clown trousers, Spocky stood in his red and white striped uniform, gazing at the swamps of grease beneath the fry station. He studied the polished white walls, the cascading faces of stainless steel, and the mayonnaise-crusted ceiling tiles. Meanwhile, above a stack of defrosted buns, the electric fly trap sparked blue, incinerating another victim with a short fizz-crackle.
3
Listen, the only good thing about Benny’s was the craic you could have with your colleagues. Now, looking back from beyond a train wreck of friendships, I’m nostalgic for this teenage camaraderie. When I think about Dundule, I think about Gordon: Gordon, aged thirteen, swaggering into school with tramlines shaved into his head; Gordon, on his first shift at Benny’s, returning from B&Q having failed to buy a tub of tartan paint; Gordon, in full Highland dress, marrying a girl who was, technically, his sister (I know! I know!); and Gordon, departing on some mad odyssey, leaving me to deal with the police. I think about Kit, too. I met Kit at work, but she soon became my girlfriend. The last time I saw her, she was pregnant with someone else’s child, but at one point, Kit and I thought we were going to get married. I think about Buzz, who could get you any drugs you wanted, and Spocky, whose real name, Owen, I almost never used. But most of all, perhaps, when I think about Dundule, I think about Lucy.
Like me, Lucy only scooped fries part time. During my second year at Benny’s, I was re-sitting my school exams at Dundule College of Further Education, while Lucy was already at university, halfway through a sociology degree. It was Lucy who persuaded me onto the politics course at the University of Central Scotland. At that time, Lucy could have persuaded me to do just about anything.
The first class I ever attended was halfway through my first term. My arm was in a sling (I’d been stabbed the week before), and though I was late, the class hadn’t started. We were in room 7G in James McPherson Tower, Melvyn Macveigh’s room, where, because Melvyn Macveigh taught Marxism, the desk-graffiti said stuff like: “Dyslexics of the world untie”; “Academics of the world unite: you have a world to win and nothing to lose but your chairs.” At ten past the hour, Macveigh strode in without apology and slapped his briefcase on the table nearest the door. “It amazes me that they entrust a train company to a man who considers a hot air balloon a desirable mode of transport. Right, what are we supposed to be doing? Ah, I think I’m supposed to stimulate you with this handout.” In brown cords and salmon shirt, he slithered around the rectangle of desks, placing an A4 sheet before each student. When he reached me, he paused and whispered, “Politics and society?” as if circulating profiteroles. I nodded and he affected surprise, rubbing his head as he returned to his desk. “Miles Austin? No? Ashley Zechstein? Wayne Foster?”
“Aye.”
“Ahhh!” he said, as though a long-standing mystery had been contentedly resolved. “Bene qui latuit bene vixit, I suppose. Shall we have a moment to digest this handout?”
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, revolution in Romania and celebrations in Wenceslas Square, the USSR ceased to exist at midnight on the 31st December 1991. With the categorical refutation of Communism in Eastern Europe, has the spectre of Marxism finally been exorcised? In 1991, the Wall Street Journal was less sure: “Marx’s analysis can be applied to the amazing disintegration of communist regimes built on the foundations of his thought but unfaithful to his prescriptions.”
“Well?”
“...”
“...”
A plump girl in a stripy sweater clutched her Beginner’s Marx; a mature student sighed, rubbed his beard, and squeezed the bridge of his nose; a boy in a rugby shirt thumbed that month’s Economist. With every moment that passed, the chair creaking, heating humming, background noise grew louder, until you imagined you could hear breaths and heartbeats, and you looked at Melvyn Macveigh, who continued to stare out the window, happy to wait for the silence to crescendo.
“...”
“...”
It was a freckly boy who cracked first. “It’s like, it doesn’t really matter, you know ?”
“Really?” said Macveigh, distracted from the world outside.
“It’s like, kind of basic and old fashioned? Like it’s stuck in all this worldly… you know? It’s like we’re all talking capitalism and communism, and none of that matters, none of that’s... Is it? Like Buddhism, you know?”
The older student leant forward. “So are you saying Marxism’s an inherently homogenous doctrine? A modernist metanarrative grounded in Enlightenment epistemological certainties and incompatible with a pluralistic world?”
“No. I’m saying, it’s like… I spent my gap year in Nepal, right—”
“Woah-kay. Thank you,” said Melvyn Macveigh.
The heating changed gears.
“You can get this book from Waterstone’s,” said the plump girl, exhibiting her Beginners Guide, “but I still can’t see how this is relevant to the modern world? Like, which employer’s going to care whether you understand ‘Historical Materialism’?” She mouthed the phrase as though there was a chance the words would give way and plummet her into a valley of ridicule. “Besides,” she continued, “there are definitely easier topics for the exam; I mean, it’s in the same unit as the transformation of the Labour Party, isn’t it?”
Melvyn Macveigh was trying to fix something on his watch.
“And it’s never going to happen again, is it?” said the boy in the rugby shirt.
“Oh no. Not here at least,” said Macveigh. “The climate’s too inclement for marching and demonstrating and all that.” As if to prove his point, a gust of wind shook the pre-fabricated tower, triggering an avalanche of plaster.
“I still think his ideas are important to discuss,” said the mature student, stroking his chin. “I mean Marxism, more than anything else in the philosophical canon, sort of shapes contemporary discourse, doesn’t it? It’s like Derrida says: ‘We are all heirs of Marx.’”
This began a pattern which lasted throughout the academic year: every week, the mature student was distinguished from his classmates, the tutor, and the creaking post-war tower, in that he looked like he wanted to be there. As the only person who had done the reading, or had any interest in discussing the topic, the mature student was often driven to internal debate: he would raise a question, listen to the silence for two minutes, and eventually answer himself. On other occasions, provoked by boredom, perhaps, Macveigh would pick on the person who was trying hardest to avoid eye contact. “Mr. Foster, do you wish to contribute to this vibrant debate?”
“...”
“Prospects for Marxism in the twenty-first century?”
“Well… pretty shabby, I suppose.”
“‘Pretty shabby, I suppose.’ Cadit quaestio. I shall endeavour to include this erudite contribution in the year exam paper: ‘Prospects for Marxism in the twenty-first century are pretty shabby, I suppose. Discuss.’”
It seemed that people got very emotional about this Marx guy. Melvyn Macveigh appeared to consider my disinterest unforgivably rude, as though Marx was in the room and I was refusing to pass him the cashew nuts. On one occasion, in Benny’s staff room, I overheard Lucy and Spocky discussing Marx as if he was an intimate friend who might at any moment arrive with their ice cream sundaes. What was the big deal?
At