I yawn and don't bother to cover my mouth: No one's been up here all morning. I still don't know what Carbo Vegetabilis is, nor what the thousandth potency might be, so I flick through the pile of books on the desk until I eventually find two helpful documents. One is a short biography of Dr. Thomas Skinner, a Scottish homoeopath who visited the United States in 1876 and developed something called the "centesimal fluxion machine" for making what the book describes as "potencies in excess of the thousandth." After a lot more flicking and reading I come across the next helpful document. It's a reproduction of a 1925 catalog entry from the Boericke & Tafel Homoeopathic Pharmacists of Philadelphia, and it explains, in great detail, exactly how homoeopathic medicines are (or were) made. The process sounds crazy. It seems that a substance (cinchona bark, arsenic, sulphur, snake venom, whatever) is steeped in "the finest spirits, made of sound grain," and then the medicine is made by taking one drop of this "mother tincture" and combining it with ninety-nine drops of alcohol, then succussing (shaking or pounding) the mixture ten times; then taking one drop from this new mixture and combining it with ninety-nine new drops of alcohol, and so on. The thirtieth potency, apparently common in homoeopathic prescribing, is made by doing this thirty times. The thousandth potency, therefore (which they call the 1M potency), is made by doing this one thousand times. At least, I think I've got that right. It sounds impossible. I read it again. Yes. That is right.
Shit. Do people even make this stuff anymore? Is there still such a thing as Tafel's High Potencies or the Skinner Machine? Am I going to have to go out and find some charcoal and start messing around with pipettes and slivovitz (does that count as the finest spirits? Probably not). Could my wrists even cope with all that shaking? I don't have bionic arms, and I have absolutely no stamina. Once I rubbed out the pencilled-in marginalia from a hundred pages of a book that I wanted to photocopy (long story) and afterwards it felt like I'd been wanking off a giant for a hundred years.
I'm still thinking about this, and wishing there was a way of finding some sort of Victorian pharmacist to help me, when someone taps me on the shoulder. Even though I thought I was alone in here, I don't jump. In fact I am so absorbed in this new problem that I vaguely shrug the hand away from my shoulder and keep reading. I can already sense that it's Patrick, anyway. I can smell his woodsy aftershave, and the lemony scent of his clean clothes. He touches my shoulder again and this time I have to respond.
"Hi," I say without really looking up.
"Hello," he says, hovering behind my right shoulder. "What are you reading about?"
"Nineteenth-century homoeopathy," I say, turning my hand over so it rests on the book, rather than holding it open. I don't want him to see my wrist.
"Gosh," he says. "Was homoeopathy around then?"
"I think it was its heyday," I say.
There's a long pause. I wish he'd go away.
"Ariel," he says.
"What?"
"Can I buy you a coffee to say sorry?"
I sigh. "I'm quite busy doing this."
"Ariel?"
I don't respond. He stands there behind me silently and I don't know whether to turn and look at him or just to continue with this and hope he'll just get the message and leave. I'm not quite sure exactly what message I want him to get. Something like Leave me out of your fucking family shit. After I've ignored him for a while he comes closer and looks down at the book in front of me, in the same way that people look at photographs in a lonely room.
"OK, I'll leave you to it," he says, without moving. "Hey," he puts his thin finger down on the textbook in front of me. "Phosphorus; I've taken that."
I look up. "You've taken homoeopathic medicine?"
"Yes, of course. I'm not sure it worked, but..."
"Look. Maybe we should have a quick coffee," I tell him. "But you'll have to give me a few minutes to finish up here and check out some of these books. Say outside in five minutes?"
"Wonderful."
Shelley College (named after Mary, not Percy Bysshe) has a Fibonacci staircase, a 1960s chandelier, and a bistro called Monster Munch. Monster Munch is the only bit of the college I don't like. It's all done out in clean orange and pithy white curves and edges, with new-looking pool tables and a plasma screen. I prefer the decrepit little bar in the Russell Building that has stand-up ashtrays and chipped particleboard tables. The students don't like the Russell Bar, which means it's usually empty. Occasionally they'll go in there to revise, or to curl up on one of the stained old sofas with a hangover, but not that often. Anyway, you can't smoke in Monster Munch. You can only do shiny things in Monster Munch; you have to be a shiny, clean person in here: The fluorescent lights and the mirrors on the walls prevent you from being anything else.
I sit on a stool at a small white table by the window and pull the arms of my jumper down to cover my wrists while Patrick gets coffee for both of us: some sort of frothed milk thing for him, and an Americano for me (they call it "black coffee" in Russell). I have my pile of homoeopathy textbooks in front of me, and they look wrong in here, as do I. The mirrors reflect the unhealthy tone of my skin, pale against my red hair, and the fraying on the bottom of my jeans that I didn't think was that noticeable. I put on this black jumper this morning without even thinking about it, but now I can see how thin the wool has become, and how smudged it makes me look. If it wasn't for my hair I'd basically resemble a bad-quality photocopy.
Patrick puts my coffee in front of me and looks out of the window.
"Wow, you can see a long way today," he says, sitting down. The sky is still a hyperreal blue.
"Yeah, but you can't see the cathedral." All you can see from up here are fields with nothing in them and, farther away, strange industrial towers.
"Do you have to be able to see the cathedral?"
"I think so. I mean, it's the only thing to look at, isn't it? From up here."
"Maybe." Patrick digs around in his froth with a thin silver spoon. I notice that his hands are shaking slightly and there's a slight reflection on his forehead from a thin sheen of perspiration. "So."
"So," I say back. "Are you..." What do I say? I was about to ask if he's feeling any better, but then I realize that this is an absurd thing to say, because I don't really care how he's feeling. The ellipses hang in the air for a moment, and then Patrick fills in his own question and answers it.
"Yes. Emma's back. I'm..." He prods his froth some more. "I'm sorry if I seemed to be in a rather strange mood yesterday. I wonder if you'll ever forgive me."
"It's OK," I hear myself saying. "It's not as if I said ... You know, I mean..."
"No, but, I shouldn't..."
"I mean, maybe we should try to avoid ... In future..."
Monster Munch is not the kind of place to have this conversation. This is a post-midnight, post-watershed, jazz-bar conversation, and we're trying to have it in a place that looks like it's already been censored.
"Anyway," I say.