As Simple As Hunger Read online

  As Simple As Hunger

  D Des Anges

  House of D Publications

  2015

  Chapter 1

  The first Gooddoctor Benjon Silverstein really noticed of the wind was not the sudden attack of crisp, new-shed leaves assaulting his ankles in a wave of fragile red and gold, nor the swaying tips of elms, but the end of his heavy woollen scarf flapping up abruptly to slap him in the mouth like a wet hand. It was, coincidentally, also the first that he knew of having draped his scarf in his coffee before leaving his house.

  As he skidded on some wet leaves and flung out his thin, broom-handle-bony arms to keep his balance and none of his dignity, Benjon was sourly sure that the idiots who filled the University would doubtless see the change in wind direction as an omen of some sort. They wouldn’t agree what sort of omen, but they should at least conspire to ignore whatever the Westminsterton weather-watchers had to say on the matter. Of course, the word of the idiots within informed the minds of the idiots without, and everyone ‘knew’ that the change in wind had meaning.

  He slid and slithered too fast for comfort over another patch of wet leaves.

  For their demonstrative Empiricism, Benjon put faith in the findings of the Westminsterton school. It was a constant thorn that, a select group of his non-occultist colleagues and the commendably cautious sailing men aside, no one else did.

  With exaggerated care, he skirted another dangerous stretch of path, tripped on the shoelace which he had as always neglected to tie, and was forced to clutch at a nearby railing like a child at his mother’s skirts.

  “Fuck,” Ben said crossly, straightening up and brushing rust off his palms. There was no need to rush (gentle, irregular coughs of rain and scarf-molesting gusts and their attendance discomfort notwithstanding) for he was not required until ten, and even then he was certain his student would, as was the snot-nosed child’s wont, fail to arrive and instead leave a whining letter in his pigeonhole come examination time.

  Benjon supposed he should be grateful the snot wanted to study the Non-Occult Sciences at all, never a popular choice among the undergraduates, but there was always the chance that the fat redhead with the cow eyes was merely making a point of ‘knowing his enemy’.

  So lost in thought was Benjon that he forgot to nod to the porter and received for his rudeness a sudden obstacle in his progress: to whit, Graves’s boot directly in his way.

  “Say good morning like a civil man, you grumpy bastard,” Graves advised, his hands in his pockets and his long chin tucked into the grey wool of his uniform tunic. “On the Wireless again later, is it?”

  This last was delivered with a kind of poorly-concealed awe, as if being summoned to Edinburgh to squabble with the shrill seagull Pilbrook and whichever Method’s representative he was meant to brawl with this month, for the entertainment and not education of the masses, were somehow a great rarity and honour. This, rather than the humiliating interruption to his studies it almost always ended up as.

  “Good morning,” Benjon said absently, sounding as friendly as a trapped wasp. He had neither the features nor the voice for friendliness, and he was this morning beginning to think that he also had nothing like enough coffee in him to run.

  “Well,” Graves reiterated, “is it? Are you going back on the Wireless with your mad ideas?”

  Knowing perfectly well that the intention was to rile him, Benjon could not help snapping, “There is nothing mad about Empiricism – on the contrary it is these irrational superstitions and untested idiocies which so dominate –”

  He could hear his own voice rising even as the man started up a delighted laugh, as if Graves was a bloody child at a travelling funfair watching some beetle being poked into an aggressive display, and not a grown bloody man charged with the protection of a university building. Benjon ploughed on as if the porter were dumb as well as manifestly unteachable.

  “Ben,” said a firm female voice, from the far side of the door’s frame.

  “Morning, Gooddaughter,” said Graves over his shoulder, polite now.

  “Good morning, Gull,” Hajar said, in the equally polite and rather distant voice she always seemed to use for people who weren’t Benjon. “How are you?”

  “Cold as a scarab’s heart, Gooddaughter,” said not-Graves-but-Gull cheerfully. Benjon did not mention that scarabs, being arthropods, did not have hearts in any way men understood them. “You going to listen to our doctor on the Wireless, then? He’s going to make Mabeline P. swear at him again, is it?” Gull very clearly enjoyed this possibility.

  “She is a foul-mouthed woman,” Hajar agreed, diplomatically avoiding quite what Benjon had said in the first place to make Pilbrook call him a bastard while they were broadcasting. Even he thought it had been beyond the spirit of the debate, but he was poor in the field of apology. “Could you release my colleague, please,” Hajar asked in the same polite, distant voice as before, “I am sure he has readying to make and we have much to discuss.”

  “Just havin’ a chat,” Gull said with a grey-toothed grin – Benjon almost wanted to suggest Edith not take him as a patient, as if men like Gull would see a non-occultist for their toothaches – and withdrew his foot. “Good morning, Doctor Silverstein.”

  He would have to be deaf to ignore the absent prefix.

  Benjon’s uneven, jerky heron stride carried him in time with Hajar’s apparently effortless measured steps away down the cold flag-stoned corridor. As soon as they had turned a corner, Hajar muttered in her more familiar frustrated sigh, “Does he have to do that every time?”

  “They have another Wiltshire Divinator – spokesman, spokesman – tonight,” Benjon said, unsure of what else he should respond with. “The room will stink of entrails.”

  “Your house smells of entrails,” Hajar pointed out with a frown. “The time you spend gazing at guts, the Wiltshirists should really be fond of you, not fighting you.”

  “No, I look for what is there and not what I think people should believe,” Benjon corrected waspishly.

  “I was making a joke.”

  “Sorry,” Benjon said. The word was gummy in his mouth, glutinous-unpleasant. “I shall endeavour not to insult Goodwife Pilbrook so grievously this time.”

  Hajar made a sound of disgusted agreement, an ‘ugh’. “Yes. It undermines us, Ben. People will only remember your foul mouth.”

  “Tssh. At present all they remember is a Semite name and the phrase ‘flogged for insulting the Divinator’,” Benjon hissed, his scars itching with ugly and apposite timing. He pushed open the door to her laboratory and was almost immediately glared down by Magda Whateverhernamewas.

  “Not in there,” Hajar said, tugging him away with her voice alone. She was one of the few who respected his dislike of touch. “She’s convinced I’m trying to woo Erik of Lancs away from her,” Hajar added in a low, disgusted murmur.

  Magda’s romantic delusions altered by the week, but they almost always cast Hajar as the villain in some struggle in which she wanted no part.

  “Hrm,” Hajar added, sniffing. “She’s burnt that.”

  “What?” Benjon backed out of the room and closed the door behind him. Judging only by the frequency with which he too forgot to close his own door, the Non-Occult Engineering School might well have been usefully employed in designing a self-closing door.

  “The smell,” Hajar explained, wafting a hand under her nose. Her headscarf was purple today, he noticed, and looked as old as she if not older.

  “What smell?”

  Hajar rolled her eyes and pointed to the door opposite. “In here, Galladsen is away visiting the mistress he thinks no one knows about.” She pushed on the heavy wooden door and, with a protesting screech, it spilled them both into a d
usty room stacked with unshelved books, and lined with unbooked shelves.

  “How long has he been visiting her for?” Benjon muttered.

  “Have you seen your house recently?” Hajar retorted. She held the curtains back from the window, searching for a tie, but it seemed to be missing.

  “Did you speak to your mother?” he asked, prowling Galladsen’s study with restless footsteps, reading but not wholly noting the titles of the books strewn about the place as in the aftermath of a very literate gale. Dust lay in drifts against their spines, and at least one volume bore the unmistakeable pockmarks of bookwyrm. Hajar was of course accurate in her derision: he dwelt in equal academic clutter, heightened by a certain quantity of mouldering cadavers and poorly-preserved displays of anatomical interest, but Benjon was sure there wasn’t quite this quantity of dust in his home.

  “It’s difficult,” Hajar said, and she had drawn back from the window as if it had bitten her. “She’s busy, she doesn’t want to … to derail … the progress she’s made so far. Difficult.”

  “She has no advice at all?” Benjon groaned, disappointed. It was no use dragging himself to Edinburgh to shout and rail at some Wiltshirist under the auspices of bloody Pilbrook, he was hardly a man made for the Wireless or for the public. He spoke too quickly (students complained), and he was too quick to curse (everyone complained) and he made, they said, assumptions of knowledge others did not have (all but his close colleagues complained).

  Only Hajar and occasionally Katherine would fill in gaps for themselves. Everyone else just expected to be told everything, as if their minds had atrophied like an unused limb.

  “She said,” Hajar said, carefully adjusting the lie of her headscarf until it was flat against her forehead, “’He must take care that he seems to acquiesce, but never gives ground. Agree without agreeing’.”

  “How the fuck do I do that?” barked Benjon, who possessed the unfortunate gift of sounding as if he was inviting a row even when offering a thoroughly sincere compliment.

  “If I knew I would tell you,” Hajar said, her hands behind her back. “Perhaps wait until the Wiltshirist has finished before correcting them?”

  Benjon snorted. “The Overseer has expressly required that we interrupt each other. He says it is more … lively.”

  “It sounds like a wretched cacophony of quarrelling drunks, you tell him that,” Hajar said, seeming quite disgruntled. Benjon recalled, dimly, the first time he had been primed for broadcast thus and his own sense of insulted incredulity. The whip marks on his back had been then so fresh that they oozed when he moved.

  “I am told the plan is to have us discuss this time what the Wiltshire Divination can bring to the treatment of lunacy that non-occult medicine cannot,” Benjon said, unable to repress the urge to spit the words out as if they were poison, “and of course the about-face. Perhaps I should say that the treatment of lunacy by individual non-occult practitioners is at least not so wholly reminiscent of the broadcasts of torture.”

  “This is what my mother warns against,” Hajar said slowly, leaning against the window-frame. She rarely met his or anyone else’s eye, but there was always a watchfulness about her, and Benjon, who was informed that he spent most of his life as blinkered as a cart horse, facing nothing but the problem in front of him, was quite sure that her large, dark eyes took in the opposite of his narrow focus. “We must not appear combative, but conciliatory, remembering that the purpose of such public discourse is not the convincing of our opponent, trapped in his ways –”

  "Her ways," corrected Benjon. He was grateful for this. The Bradlet Divinatory School had sent an athletic young man with a Romish nose and he had strained his usage of bromine keeping his mind on the matter in hand.

  “– In her ways," Hajar repeated, irritably, "but the winning over of the disinterested audience. Which, she says, is not achieved through the mere holding of the correct position, but through guile and charm, and the appeal to the sensibilities of the onlooker – or in this case, listener.”

  She sounded doubtful, which was only to be expected: no one had ever described Benjon Silverstein as possessed of a mere shred of charm. He was ugly, abrasive, and lay across the world at right-angles like, Hajar had once said, a girder dropped across a trainline. She had meant it, apparently, as a compliment – only someone as forthright, she said, as Benjon, only someone as abrupt and direct could throw an entrenched fool off his pre-selected tracks so fully.

  It was a sad discovery for them both the rapid ease with which such an unseated fool could struggle back to his rails after being pushed away from them.

  “She also said,” Hajar said, with a little more hope in her voice, “that to be agreeable is sometimes to treat the opponent as if he agrees with you already, and is only unaware of his collaboration.”

  It wasn’t clear who decided that the conversation was over, or if it had merely petered to a natural end (under these circumstances, Benjon was told, often in anger, he was wont to continue talking), but they moved as if by common consent for the door. Benjon, in the fashion that was common for him, caught his foot on one of the many stacks of leather-bound books that crowded around Galladsen’s reading chair like an escort.

  Memory Eaters by A. Rahman slithered off the pile and dislodged a great cloud of dust, but neither researcher stopped to retrieve it; Galladsen could tidy his own study when he returned from his disloyalty.

  They walked more or less in silence until they reached the junction at which the School of Non-Occult Sciences, a meagre building compared with its sisters, divided into Engineering and Medicine (both Man and Animal, sometimes Plant).

  “Good luck,” Hajar said, when their paths split. “If you must spit at the Wiltshirist, remember to add a second one for me.”

  “I shan’t spit on her,” Benjon assured her, although this time he knew she was joking. “Or hector, or shout. I may bite my tongue to shreds in place of it.”

  They raised hands in departure, and Hajar slipped back along the corridor they had come down, returning to Magda and valve calibration. The building was as empty of life as it usually was before ten, and Ben passed only one student, his head down and scarf high against the chill, on the way to his room.

  The wood-pulp sign beside the door read: “Dr D Rill, Dr K M Waremansdottir, Dr B J Silverstein” and had, in the manner of all paper notices in their School, a scribbly note mocking the entire enterprise of Non-Occult Science – Empiricism, someone had corrected – as a dangerous fallacy. This made a pleasant change from the charge of ‘childish’.

  Ben was gratified to see that Katherine had scrawled, “Get fucked, Willets,” under the original proclamation. It was usually more effective than replacing the sign or asking him to stop behaving like a spoilt undergraduate.

  “Aren't you meant to be on the Wireless?” Rill squawked, almost as soon as Benjon’s nose was visible to him around the door frame. Large and bearded, his long, thinning hair falling in grey cables to the middle of his back, Rill looked the sort of man who should boom or roar, like a crake, but in defiance of his appearance of steadfast Albionman, he sounded always like a hen in varying heights of affront, and even clucked at his students. “Was that today? It's usually today. Shouldn't you be on a train?”

  “Later,” Benjon scowled, trying to shuffle his chest in through the door without opening it into the mound of journals that Katherine was using as an unofficial barricade against either her students or Willets, who was not above leaving angry notes in her desk. “Aren't you meant to be teaching? Shouldn't you be trying to clean out the brain of some stupid half-grown pupae –”

  Rill sucked his teeth in a pretence of horror. “Pupae” was, along with “larvae” and a host of arthropod-related words, superstitiously banned even in the Non-Occult Sciences school, and although Benjon had taken great pains to point out that it was a severe infringement on the work of those studying the forms of the miniature cousins of the Enemy to take away the words they used, the Dean had tak
en greater pains to point out to Benjon (at a volume which rattled the windows) that his pedantry was not appreciated and his position at Durham far from secure.

  “– Oh, fuck off,” Benjon finished, crashing across the crowded carpet of what was little better than a storage cupboard, and colliding with his desk. “It doesn’t take that long.”

  “I have five down with Katherine on you making Pilbrook curse in broadcast again,” Rill continued, swivelling his huge body to follow Benjon around the room, his squawks plucking at Benjon like grasping fingers. “Katherine thinks the wench will have learned her lesson and will keep her cool; I think you're a potent irritant and she won't be able to help herself. So if you wouldn't mind exerting yourself a little further in pursuit of my racing fund –”

  “Louse,” Benjon said, to see Rill contort his ageing, nominally handsome face into a rictus of disgust.

  “I might have another patient for Alfredsen soon,” Rill screeched amiably.

  “Stop fucking your students,” Benjon said, pulling his desk drawer onto the floor. There should have been notes for the broadcast nestling among the bleached bones and torn-out pages from Medizinische, but he had the itchy, nagging horror that he must have left them in his house instead, possibly underneath his coffee. “Wulf will be running low on tansy.”

  Rill pretended not to hear him. “A little bird tells me —”

  “Birds don't talk.”

  “—Indicated—”

  “David, if you make allusion to divination in my office again I will, I will, I will fucking bite you,” Benjon shouted, pulling another desk drawer out. The unmistakeable inky convulsions of his handwriting announced ABB notes from a crumpled sheaf of papers in its deep belly, and he pounced upon them like an owl.

  “Just a figure of speech,” Rill assured him, and although Benjon could not see his face he could make out the affect of hurt feelings in his voice. “I meant, I believe our devoted colleague has conceived.”

  Benjon occasionally remembered that Katherine was married, but the man figured so little in the running of the university and so infrequently in her conversations that he might as well have been one of the portraits hanging in the Dean’s office: irrelevant and un-thought-of until the mind was drawn to him by some outer force. He grunted something that might have been encouragement but certainly was not, and scooped up his notes.