Sydney Greatorex lived a long while in the past. Too early for checking out in any sense historical or fictitious. But the expectations lived on.

Expectations that he would return like a lost messiah and tell us why.





"Any idea why?"

The speaker nodded as if answering his own question. His student—a female one—blushed. She thought she was here for yet another Dickens seminar, but Dr Rebock managed to make any atmosphere seem dirty; despite there being insufficient salaciousness in Pip or Magwitch to warrant such leering from a crusty old don towards an attractive young lady from St Osyth. The non sequitur of his question—fired from between thin yellow lips and splattering his huge frayed waistcoat with a thin spray of saliva—threw her momentarily off balance.

But then: "I feel, Dr Rebock, that the symbolism of the escaped convict purely represents Dickens' self-denial regarding his own soul, keeping it locked away as one would any evil, only for it to suddenly emerge, unbidden, to taint the innocent Pip..."

Dr Rebock, with a lurch, which in turned threatened to topple him from his seat, began to laugh.

"My dear Miss Jay, I know the 'flu epidemic has prevented the two gentlemen to attend this seminar so, please, please, let me say what I think that at least one of them would have said. Too many symbols clog the story, they'd say, and why does Magwitch need to represent anything?"

Myra Jay just stared ahead of her. She wondered if Pip was just another word for core or heart or soul. She had been taught to analyse fiction to the nth degree, wringing sense from the slightest innuendo of semantics or accident of syntax or coincidence of expression or sound of a word's phonetics or just the look of a word as opposed to its meaning. Dr Rebock was no doubt acting as Devil's Advocate in this argument, putting himself in the place of the absent students, those unimaginative idiots whom he'd often seen leaning against the college bar. In her heart, Myra knew that she was in danger. One-to-one was never easy at the best of times.





Sydney Greatorex looked down from a great height. He thought he was God. He could see that Rebock was indeed a reincarnation of Magwitch; in certain universes, you see, even fictitious characters could come back to life as real people, whilst real people, in turn, could later reassemble themseves as fictitious characters; real person-to-person reincarnation was also possible, Sydney being a throwback from Dickens himself or, perhaps, even a precursor of that bear-headed gentleman with the roar of a reading-voice and pen of many colours (including Victorian grey)...

Sydney suddenly turned round on his Grecian plinth to see himself being watched by someone who wanted to become Sydney Greatorex or wanted Sydney Greatorex to become him.

"Stop staring."

Both said this at the same time.





Myra Jay left Dr Rebock's study, glad that she had protected her honour with a swift response to his increasingly garbled repartee.

"I feel something working round me, Dr Rebock, so please excuse me," she had said, grabbing her brief case and essay notes. She had implied it was the 'flu.

"Think nothing of it," he had roared at her parting figure.

She felt whatever-it-was stirring in her stomach, a new consciousness aiming to invade her brain, in the mistaken belief that the brain housed the mind, if not the soul.





Magwitch crouched behind the gravestone, breathing hard, as he followed, with his eyes, the small figure.

"There'll be a fire one day, boy, a fire that'll leap across the festive table...", he whispered to himself. He knew the plot was failing to follow the correct channels laid down for it. The boy was fleeing up the sodden lane, having sensed the whisper of Magwitch on the air like a spray of saliva.





Sydney fiddled with his harp. It needed re-stringing. There was no tightness there. Each pluck was a twang.

He looked down again. He saw the one big WHY painted in the air below, as if it were plumes of white smoke left there by passing aeroplanes. Then through the ghostiness of even lower clouds, he spotted the humped shape of Dr Rebock churning, with furled umbrella, through the college quadrangle, his blimp of a bulk wobbling in uncharacteristic haste. Sydney clucked, recognising the route, sensing that even this don could thread an eye of a needle better than the lollopping camel he would otherwise have resembled. In short, Rebock was heading towards the high-rise student digs. Whether Rebock was out to stir those blockhead absentees from their 'flu-ridden beds or intent on deflowering Miss Jay whilst she was still dozy with Lemsip, Sydney was not yet sufficiently omniscient to judge.





Pip snuggled in his bed, trying to sweat out the fever by natural means. You see, Boots had not yet opened.

Not even a twinkle in its founder's eye.

But, then, of course, Pip dreamed fitfully of a girl called Myra. She would have to change her name for her face to fit, however. He smiled. There were many women he would cross, in times to come. Fictitious as well as real ones. He wouldn't be kind to any of them, given the chance to survive the dose of the hot rots that fed to the very bottom bone of his soul ... no doubt a dire dank disease caught in the graveyard from the rancid air given off by a mouth too big to close. It'd consume a flitch of bacon in one fell swoop soon as swallowing was within its power. The fetid room. The feeding frenzy. The rank ripeness of an apple. Pip thickening into a chuck-steak stew.





Dickens swore he was still alive. As if he were the world itself. A Pantheism of all things real and unreal, true and fictitious. A god of gods. A heavenly feaster-with-panthers. A progenitor of every soul, good and bad.

So even Sydney Greatorex must be one of his creations.

"No I'm not!" abruptly claimed the said Sydney from his plinth.

"Am I your creation, then?" Dickens asked.

Sydney glumly shook his head.

"Perhaps, there is a creator greater than us both," said one of them; it is uncertain which.

"And if it is not one of us?" said the other.

"Rebock, then. Perhaps it's Rebock who controls us all?"

"Surely not that damned cemetery toad!"

"Who then?"

"And why?"

There was silence, there being very little expectation of reply.