Oh, it was a joke. Quaid was being witty. Steve attempted a laugh, but Quaid’s face remained unmoved by his own attempt at humour.
“You should be in Old Norse,” he said again. “Who needs Bishop Berkeley anyhow. Or Plato. Or —”
“Or?”
“It’s all shit.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve watched you, in the Philosophy Class —”
Steve began to wonder about Quaid.
“— You never take notes do you?”
“No.”
“I thought you were either sublimely confident, or you simply couldn’t care less.”
“Neither. I’m just completely lost.”
Quaid grunted, and pulled out a pack of cheap cigarettes. Again, that was not the done thing. You either smoked Gauloises, Camel or nothing at all.
“It’s not true philosophy they teach you here,” said Quaid, with unmistakable contempt.
“Oh?”
“We get spoon-fed a bit of Plato, or a bit of Bentham —no real analysis. It’s got all the right markings of course. It looks like the beast: it even smells a bit like the beast to the uninitiated.”
“What beast?”
“Philosophy. True Philosophy. It’s a beast, Stephen. Don’t you think?”
“I hadn’t -”
“It’s wild. It bites.”
He grinned, suddenly vulpine. “Yes. It bites,” he replied. Oh, that pleased him. Again, for luck: “Bites.”
Stephen nodded. The metaphor was beyond him. “I think we should feel mauled by our subject.” Quaid was warming to the whole subject of mutilation by education. “We should be frightened to juggle the ideas we should talk about.”
“Why?”
“Because if we were philosophers we wouldn’t be exchanging academic pleasantries. We wouldn’t be talking semantics; using linguistic trickery to cover the real concerns.”
“What would we be doing?”
Steve was beginning to feel like Quaid’s straight man. except that Quaid wasn’t in a joking mood. His face was set: his pinprick irises had closed down to tiny dots
We should be walking close to the beast, Steve, don’t you think? Reaching out to stroke it, pet it, milk it—”
“What . . . er . . . what is the beast?”
Quaid was clearly a little exasperated by the pragmatism of the enquiry.
“It’s the subject of any worthwhile philosophy, Stephen. It’s the things we fear, because we don’t understand them. It’s the dark behind the door.”
Steve thought of a door. Thought of the dark. He began to see what Quaid was driving at in his labyrinthine fashion. Philosophy was a way to talk about fear.
“We should discuss what’s intimate to our psyches,” said Quaid. “If we don’t.. . we risk…”
Quaid’s loquaciousness deserted him suddenly.
“What?”
Quaid was staring at his empty brandy glass, seeming to will it to be full again.
“Want another?” said Steve, praying that the answer would be no.
“What do we risk?” Quaid repeated the question. “Well, I think if we don’t go out and find the beast —”
Steve could see the punchline coming.
“- sooner or later the beast will come and find us.”
There is no delight the equal of dread. As long as it’s someone else’s.
Casually, in the following week or two, Steve made some enquiries about the curious Mr Quaid.
Nobody knew his first name.
Nobody was certain of his age; but one of the secretaries thought he was over thirty, which came as a surprise.
His parents, Cheryl had heard him say, were dead. Killed, they thought.
That appeared to be the sum of human knowledge where Quaid was concerned.
“I owe you a drink,” said Steve, touching Quaid on the shoulder.
He looked as though he’d been bitten.
“Brandy?”
“Thank you.” Steve ordered the drinks. “Did I startle you?”
“I was thinking.”
“No philosopher should be without one.”
“One what?”
“Brain.”
They fell to talking. Steve didn’t know why he’d approached Quaid again. The man was ten years his senior and in a different intellectual league. He probably intimidated Steve, if he was to be honest about it. Quaid’s relentless talk of beasts confused him. Yet he wanted more of the same: more metaphors: more of that humourless voice telling him how useless the tutors were, how weak the students.
In Quaid’s world there were no certainties. He had no secular gurus and certainly no religion. He seemed incapable of viewing any system, whether it was political or philosophical, without cynicism.