Parataxis

Leslie daFox stood at the edge of the road and flapped his hand in a desultory fashion at the traffic.  As befitted London traffic, it ignored him, and a black cab with its orange lamp lit and the back seat vacant drove past him without slowing.  Slightly behind him, two policemen eyed him with suspicion, and further along the street a gaggle of schoolgirls shrieked suddenly with laughter, causing all heads but Leslie’s to turn.  He waved his hand again, and another taxi drove past.

“I say, Sir, are you going deaf?” asked one of the policeman.  Leslie’s face appeared vexed momentarily, but then he forced a rictus of a smile on it and turned slightly to look at the speaker.  As he did so, he held his hand out as though hoping for a bus.

“No,” he said.  “I assume you’re referring to the screeching that has just occurred down the road?”  The policeman nodded, as did his companion.  “That’s commonplace in London when there are children around,” he said.  “I would have expected you to know that.”

“Sounded like someone being murdered to me, Sir,” said the policeman, a smile spreading across his face.  “Seems to me that you’re very familiar with such sounds.”

A taxi pulled up and Leslie’s hand hit the windscreen.  He looked at it, and then at the policemen.  “Cheltenham Road, please,” he said to the driver.  “Do either of you have any money on you?” he asked the policemen.  They looked at one another, shrugged, and finally shook their heads.  “Then you’re making your own way,” said Leslie.  “I’m fed up with you mooching off me and then asking for the receipt so you can claim it back on expenses.”

“Hey, you can’t leave us here!” said the policeman who’d first spoken, his face becoming animated.  “We’re your bodyguards!  In case you try to mur–“  He cut off is a gasp of air as his colleague elbowed him in his ample gut.  “In case you’re attacked,” said the other policeman quickly.  Leslie got into the back of the cab, closed the door and wound the window down.  “I think I’m safe from the driver,” he said.  “I’ve got enough money for the fare, and that’s probably what he cares about.  See you when you get back.”  He wound the window up as the taxi moved off, leaving the policemen stranded behind him.

“Friends of yours, guv?” asked the taxi-driver.  Leslie squinted at the rear-view mirror but couldn’t see enough of the man’s face to tell if he was smiling or not.

“No,” he said.  “Far from it.  Just… the maddening crowd, I think.  People who simply won’t leave you alone.  I’m sure you must get some of them.”

“What, like taxi-groupies?  Nah mate, we don’t get none of them, the job’s not that sexy.  Though, we do get the likes of them what are getting the cab paid for by the better-off, if you get my drift.  I had a lady, well I calls ‘er a lady but there’s not that many that would, if you get my drift, and she was Russian I think.  Couldn’t speak a word of English, but she’s got the address she’s going to written down on this bit of paper, and she shows that to me instead.  Only it’s not just the name of the hotel, but it’s the room number as well, and the name she’s to give to the desk clerk when she gets there, and you can tell from that that she’s going to be pretending to be someone she ain’t, even if she don’t know it.”

“Right,” said Leslie feeling a little lost.  “She’s a prostitute then?”

“I don’t know that she’s like to be called that,” said the driver.  “You know you get some of them, they basically just go to ‘arrods and hang around the posh bags and shoes and wait for foreign gentlemen to come up and accost them.  Then they cost them, if you know what I mean!”

Leslie laughed, annoyed that he didn’t have a notepad with him.  It had been nearly fifteen years since he’s written a sitcom, but the dialogue from the driver was just the kind of stuff he had trouble with, and it would have been good to get it written down, just in case he had an idea for another one.  Well, an idea that didn’t involve the grisly death of two policemen at the start of it.

“I was thinking more of stalkers, actually,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you do get some of them actually,” said the driver.  “My mate Bill, he’s got one.  She’s a right fruitcake from the way he tells it, she comes in on the Runcorn train you see, into Euston – you know your stations, right guv? – and when she comes out she goes along the rank looking for him.  And you can’t do that, right, ‘cos it’s a line, and the guy at the front’s got the job.  So you can’t just take a random fare like, you have to wait your turn.  So she’ll come and find ‘im in the queue, and then she’ll go and stand at the front of the taxi-queue and just keep letting people go in front of her until he pulls up, then in she gets.  And he doesn’t really want to take her, but now it’s the other side of the coin; ‘e’s at the front, see, and ‘e ‘as to take her ‘cos it’s his job now.”

“Right,” said Leslie, feeling a bit bemused.  “His job.  Right.”

“He said she was undressing in his cab a week ago,” said the taxi driver.

“Is she a Harrods’ prostitute too then?”

“Nah mate, she’s a stalker, right?  You’ve got them prostitutes on the brain, ‘aven’t you now?  I shouldn’t’ve said anything, you’re goin’ to be a goer, aren’t you?”

Before Leslie could answer the taxi driver slammed on the brakes, and Leslie was thrown forwards.  Having forgotten to put on his seatbelt, he ended up on his knees on the floor of the cab, one hand stretched out and breaking his fall.

“Sorry about that, guv,” said the taxi driver.  The taxi turned tightly, and Leslie held his ground for as long as he could, and then fell over.  “That’s Bill’s cab there in the side-street –“ the cab lurched and they turned again, “– oh and bloody hell, that’s Bill….”

When Leslie clambered back on to the seat and looked out of the window, he saw that they’d pulled up behind another cab, whose driver was sprawled half-in and half-out of the window, and looked very stabbed.

“Oh no,” he said, with deep feeling.  “Not another murder.”

A bromide with breakfast

“Who are those police-officers, dear?” Angela Mons-de-Lancefoy’s voice was as clear as the peal of church bells on a sunny Sunday morning, so the entire café stopped eating, drinking and gossiping for a moment and stared in the direction she was pointing.  Leslie daFox’s police-guard looked embarrassed, and the fatter of the two tried to conceal his plate of cream-stuffed pastries behind his cup of coffee.

“They’re mine, kind of,” said Leslie.  Angela was an old friend and fellow writer, specialising in sub-genres of crime fiction.  “They think I murdered two of my students and have been following me around every since.  Occasionally they try and pin other murders on me too; a few weeks ago I was in the supermarket and someone a couple of aisles away was murdered.  Despite that they were with me the whole time they accused me of doing it!”

“They don’t sound very competent,” said Angela.  She sliced into her cake and prodded it with her fork.  “Dry and crumbly,” she said.  “Which, curiously, isn’t a bad way of describing my latest sub-genre.”  She picked up the piece of cake and dunked it in her latte.  “Italian-style,” she said, seeing the look on Leslie’s face.  “Just the bits of Italy that you never went to.”

Leslie shrugged; he’d spent some time in the eighties visiting bits and pieces of Italy, Spain and Portugal and had rather liked the mediterranean climate.  “You were always more bohemian than me,” he said.  “Weren’t you shacked up in the commune for six months with whatshisface?”

“Oh yes!” Angela sounded delighted.  “He was fun.  I turned him into a serial killer in one of my books later on.  I don’t think he ever learned to read though, so I doubt he knows.”

“What was that you were saying about dry and crumbly though?  How can that be a sub-genre of anything?”

“Oh, it was my agent’s idea.  Did you know she’s also the agent for Janet O’Steen, by the way?  Anyway, she said that there’s a generation of baby-boomers now who have never looked after themselves and are heading into old age being pretty much decrepit and dependent on their families and the state for handouts.  There’s far too many of them, so the handouts are rather small, so they end up being kind of old and crumbly.  So I’m writing novels where the detective is one of these people.  He’s not that brilliant to begin with, and he’s only on the force still because he can’t afford to retire and the pension isn’t large enough, so he has to keep working.  But his very age and overall miserability makes people underestimate him, and he can talk to his own generation in a very sympathetic way, and because they’re all kind of lonely and mean anyway, they’re nosey and eager to talk about what they’ve spied.  So he starts being able to solve these difficult cases where the evidence is all there, but it’s really hard to gather.  And then the police force start to appreciate him more, so they get special dispensation to extend his working life, and now he can’t retire until he’s 80 anyway, and he starts getting bitter about that.  But he’s too ineffectual to do much about it, and he has to make do with pithy asides and cutting sarcasm.”

“People buy books about that?”  Leslie looked slightly appalled.  “Where’s the feel-good element to it?”

“Oh Leslie,” sighed Angela dunking more cake in her latte.  “You always want to make to people laugh!  Sometimes they just want to wallow in their own misery and leaven it with self-pity.”

“Maybe I should write about my time under police scrutiny,” said Leslie.  “It might appeal to the paranoid masses.”

“You think you’re joking,” said Angela, “but just look at the revelations about the monitoring of communications.  People are starting to wonder how much of it is going on and what’s truly private.  If you’ve got a story about always being under the watchful eye of the system, then you should tell it!”

“I think the panopticon has already been done,” said Leslie.  His eyes twinkled.  “But you’re right you know, it’s been too long since I last did something for me.  I think the last thing I did was contribute two hundred jokes to one of those topical tv news shows.”

“Top Yourself This Week?”

“Something like that, yes.  They used about seventy; they said something about the others having too many long words in them.”

“Hah yes!  Lowest common denominator, Leslie.  Never forget!”

“Doesn’t anyone get to write high-quality, intellectual books these days?”

“Janet does.  And people who don’t want to make a living from writing.”

They fell silent for a moment, drinking their coffees.  Then, three tables away, a woman fell forward and landed face-first in a plate of slightly-sloppy Black Forest Gateau.  For a moment no-one said anything, and then her companion screamed while almost everyone else in the café produced a mobile phone and started snatching pictures to Instagram and post on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

“Did you do that?” asked Leslie and Angela simultaneously, and burst into mischievous laughter.  No-one around them noticed, being pre-occupied with the sudden death.  A knife was now clearly visible between the fallen woman’s shoulder-blades.  Finally Leslie waved at the police-officers.

“Yes Sir?” asked the thinner of the two.

“Aren’t you going to do anything?” said Angela.  “There’s a dead woman there who’s clearly been murdered.”

The policemen exchanged looks.  “Did you happen to see Mr. daFox do it?” asked the fatter.

The language of dogs

Laughter came from the living room, following a couple of moments later by a different voice, heavy and slower, saying “I don’t get it.”  Leslie daFox, who had thirty years earlier scripted the show they were watching now, bowed his head as he used the tin-opener on a can of condensed milk, wondering if he shouldn’t feel more angry than depressed.

“Well, it’s because she’s got a hat on, innit?” said the first voice, still laughing slightly.

“Oh,” said the second voice, sounding uncertain.  “Is that funny?”

“Yes!”

“No,” whispered Leslie to himself.  “They’re laughing because they know she’s the Health Inspector but the guys she’s inspecting are so misogynistic that they think she’s escaped from the community care hostel up the road.”

“Here, where’s the murderer gone then?”

Leslie tipped the milk into a saucer and put it down on the floor.  Two burly policemen, one red-faced and slightly out of breath, burst into the kitchen.  They looked relieved when they saw him.

“Did you sneak out of the room?” demanded the red-faced policeman.

“No,” said Leslie.  “I asked you both if you wanted coffee and then told you I was going to make some.  You both watched me leave the room.”

“That sounds sneaky to me,” said the red-faced policeman.  “Hiding in plain sight, that’s called.”

“Only in your lexicon,” said Leslie, aware that neither officer would know what lexicon meant, or would lose face by asking him for a definition.  They reminded him a lot of his community college class, both in aptitude for study and for the length of time he liked spending with them.

“Here, there’s a saucer of milk on the floor,” said the red-faced policeman.  He picked it up and sniffed it.  “Were you going to drink this, Sir?”

“No,” said Leslie.  He was convinced that one day the red-faced policeman was going to ask for a reminder on how to breathe.

“Oh right then,” said the policeman.  He tipped the saucer up and drank the milk.  “Hey, this is the sweet stuff!”

“That was the cat’s milk,” said Leslie.  “There were cat medicine tablets in there.”

“Aha!  You’ve tried murdering a policeman now!”  The other policeman seemed to spring to life all of a sudden at the prospect of finally being able to arrest Leslie for the murders they were convinced he’d committed, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

“I have not,” said Leslie.  “Your colleague picked a saucer up off the floor and drank from it.  That’s rank stupidity and ought to qualify him for a Darwin award.  My actions were peripheral and had a completely different end in mind.”

“I don’t think so, Sir,” began the second policeman, a gleam appearing in his eye.

“Cyrus!”  Leslie’s voice carried throughout his house, and there was a whimper from the laundry-room.  Both policeman turned towards it instantly.

“What was that?”

“The maid,” said Leslie.  “She hides in the washing when you’re here.  She’s getting very wrinkled and agoraphobic, and I may have to sue you over this.”

“You can’t sue us,” said the red-faced policeman promptly.

“I rather think he can,” said a smooth voice, and Cyrus, Leslie’s twenty-three year old lawyer walked into the room.  Both policeman looked angry, but closed their mouths firmly.  “Is there a problem?”

“Another baseless accusation of murder and an attempt to frame me,” said Leslie.  “This time he picked up the cat’s saucer of milk and drank it and her worming tablets.

“If we incorporate your cat as a business I think I can sue them for theft,” said Cyrus, grinning.  “If we can make it a high-tech firm then I might be able to get them on industrial sabotage, if you like?”

“That sounds very tempting,” said Leslie, “but frighteningly expensive.  Can’t you just send them to their rooms for the evening?”

“Can’t let you out of our sight, Sir,” said the red-faced officer immediately.  He appeared to be sweating profusely all of a sudden.  Cyrus eyed him.

“When was the last time they let you out of their sight?” he asked.

“Less than five minutes ago, while I was getting coffee and sorting out the cat’s medicine,” said Leslie.

“Precedent!” yelled Cyrus.  “Go to your rooms!”

The policemen grumbled and argued, but Cyrus prevailed and sent them off to watch the rooms of the house on CCTV instead.

“You don’t have a cat,” said Cyrus after they’d gone.

“I know,” said Leslie.  “But they don’t, for all they’ve been here five months now.

Dysphemism

Leslie daFox walked into the auditorium at the Camberwick Community Centre with a feeling of trepidation.  Somewhere behind him were two police officers, who he mentally thought of as Comedy policeman #1 and unfunny sidekick, who were steadily getting fitter as Leslie insisted on walking up the four flights of stairs between here and his office every time.  He could hear them labouring along, and waited just inside the doors.  Not because he felt sorry for them, but because there had, in the course of four months, been four murders committed around him and he was getting nervous that he was being stalked by a tediously incompetent killer.  Quite possibly, he mused, one of his students.  They’d shown a remarkable degree of incompetence in their homework and their critical thinking capacity in his lectures, so why not be utterly unable to kill the right person when given the opportunity?

“That must be a record,” he said to Comedy policeman #1 as he reached Leslie.  He was only slightly pink in the face, and he’d already got his breathing back under control, unlike his chubbier colleague who was still wheezing like a leaky pair of bellows.  “I think it only took you four minutes to climb the stairs today.”  The policeman glared at him but said nothing.  They’d been taken aside by their line manager a week earlier after bringing Leslie in for questioning for the fifth time and been ungently reprimanded.  Leslie was fairly certain he wasn’t supposed to know the details, but they’d been shouted at in the interview room next to the one he’d been in, and the walls were quite thin.  Their line manager’s big complaint had been that they’d let a young woman get murdered in the supermarket because they were too busy trying to trick Leslie into confessing in the next aisle.

“Has he murdered anyone yet?” asked the sidekick, leaning against the wall and resting his hands on his broad thighs.  That he had to pause to gasp air between ‘murdered’ and ‘anyone’ made him seem just a little pathetic.

“We’ll have to see,” said Comedy policeman #1.  “Lead the way to the abattoir, Sir.”

“Auditorium,” corrected Leslie, hoping that it was a correction.  “If you were in my class you’d be on the failing list, you know.”

“Along with all the rest of your students, Sir?”

“Hah.”  Leslie said nothing more, but he privately agreed with the policeman.  He sometimes wondered if the Community Centre administrators deliberately set out to mismatch students with courses.

The auditorium was blood- and corpse-free, much to Leslie’s relief, and his students were huddled together in a semicircle of seats in the third and fourth rows.  The students on the outside looked scared, and the ones in the middle looked more confident, based purely on the student-thinking that the lecturer would be like a lion and pick prey off from the outside of the herd rather than risking running into the middle.  Leslie shook his head, unaware that to the students that this looked like the judgement of Caesar before they’d even had a chance to fight.

“Have you heard of slanters?” asked Leslie.  He’d given up bringing up notes to his lectures because by the time he was half-way through the class were hopelessly behind and lost.  He now talked about general topics and set huge reading lists instead.  He knew the class wouldn’t cope, but at least this way he didn’t have to see it.  There was no response from the audience, and there were no astonishingly-educated janitorial staff around to answer for them, so he looked at the policeman.

“Italic text?” guessed Comedy policeman #1.  Leslie’s half-lidded gaze wasn’t clear to him, but he’d actually just stepped up a point in his estimation.

“No, but a very reasonable guess,” said Leslie.  “Add that to your homework list, please, class: make a reasonable guess of an answer to my questions next week.  A slanter is what an American would call many of the rhetorical devices, on the grounds that they are intended to bias, or slant the listener towards the speaker’s point of view.  This, of course, completely misses the point of rhetoric: it is intended to convince the audience of a particular point of view and will necessarily only contain objective statements where they are already aligned with the speaker’s intentions.  So the whole speech is “slanted” if you will, and there are no individuals slanters within it.

“But still.  Some nice simple examples of such slanters are euphemism and dysphemism, which as their names suggest are antonyms.  Now, hands-up anyone who actually understood what I just said.”

No hands raised from the audience.  Leslie looked at his bodyguard, but neither policeman raised their hands either.

“Right,” he said.  “Euphemism derives from the greek root Eu- meaning good.  A euphemism is a good description, in the sense of it describes things as better than they really are.  Have any of you, at all, by any chance, heard of any other words that begin with Eu-?”

Two hands went up in the audience and Leslie wondered if it would be appropriate to die from shock.  He pointed to the first hand.

“Utopia, Mr. Foxy?”  The speaker was a pimply young man called Steve who Leslie thought should have enrolled on a basic comprehension skills course before coming here, so this was graduate level thinking from him.

“Sadly not,” said Leslie.  “The U in Utopia is coincidental.  You?”  He pointed at the other hand.

“Euthanasia, Sir?”  The speaker this time was a middle-aged woman in a camel-print blouse and skirt that made her look a little bovine.

“Yes!”  Leslie’s note of excitement was audible to everyone.  “Yes!  Well done!  Euthanasia, perfect!  Eu- meaning good, and thanasia from thanatos meaning death.”

“Did you just get excited about a word meaning good-death, Sir?” asked the sidekick.  Leslie glared at him.

“I got excited about my class knowing the answer to my question,” he said.  “Now shush.  Class, antonyms are word-pairs that are opposites, like black and white.  So if euphemism and dysphemism are opposites, what would the opposite of euthanasia be?”

Again, Steve’s hand rose, and Leslie, surprised as could be, nodded to him.

“Dysthanasia?  As in, like, bad-death?”

“Exactly!”

“And what kind of death would a bad-death be, then, Sir?” asked Comedy policeman #1.

“Oh I don’t know,” said Leslie.  “It’s hardly something anyone thinks about.  Drowning, I ‘d have thought, that seems pretty horrible.  Or maybe burning to death in a fire.”

“Murder?  Are you a dysthanatic, Sir?”

Supermarket shopping

“What are you intending to use that for, Sir?”  It was Policeman 2 speaking, frowning heavily as Leslie went to put a boxed toaster in his trolley.

“I’m not,” he said.  “But if I were, I expect it would be for making toast.  Toasters are a rather one-trick pony, don’t you think?”

“Is that supposed to be funny, Sir?”

Leslie smiled; this was one of the supermarkets that had been embarrassed by the horse-meat in the beef-burgers stories that had been making the newspapers worth reading lately, but he hadn’t actually intended his comment to be a reference to it.  He had already noted a stack of leaflets near the checkouts proudly proclaiming that the supermarket had learned from this experience and wished to tell their customers about the changes they would effect.  He’d ignored them, mostly because he wouldn’t dream of buying meat from a supermarket.

“No,” he said.  “Though now you draw my attention to it, I believe I can make it funny.  You can expect to see it in about three weeks, if you watch Kirsten and Alice.”  Kirsten and Alice was a topical sketch show he submitted material to, and he’d been quite pleased to get a letter from the script editor asking him to submit more and more frequently.

“We’ll be watching you, Sir,” said Policeman 1, trying to do menacing.  Leslie felt that it came off as dull and lifeless, and it reminded him unpleasantly of his days as a drama coach trying to get wooden students to understand that acting was all about being someone else for five minutes.  He’d finally resigned, telling the head of the school that since most of the students there hadn’t worked out who they were themselves there was no hope of getting them to pretend to be anyone else.

“So why are you buying a toaster you don’t intend to use?” asked Policeman 2, the brighter of the pair.  His notebook and pencil appeared as if by magic.

“To give as a gift,” said Leslie.  He’d given up being astonished by the stupidity of his bodyguard, and although he’d entertained the idea for a while that they were trying to wear him down into a confession, he no longer thought that anyone could be that stubborn.  “My wife left me a note this morning saying that it was the housekeeper’s birthday and that I should get her something.”

“A toaster?”

“Why not?”  Leslie shrugged.  “I barely know the woman, and she only ever serves me with cold toast, so perhaps I can be generous while dropping a hint.”

“How about flowers, Sir?  My wife likes flowers.”  Policeman 1 flushed pink as he said this, and Leslie found himself pitying the man.

“I can’t imagine that my wife would be pleased if I gave the housekeeper flowers, officer,” he said.  “She might feel that it was a rather too intimate gift for the staff.  How would you feel if I gave you flowers?”

“I’ve got hayfever,” said Policeman 1.

“So we’d have to consider the intent behind the flowers,” said Policeman 2 quickly.  “That could constitute an attempt at murder, or threatening behaviour!”

“Everything’s murder with you isn’t it?”  Leslie knew he sounded bitter but couldn’t help it.  The policeman had been following him around for nearly 4 months now, and he was losing hope that the police budget crisis would put an end to it.

“Not us, Sir,” said Policeman 2.  “The only murderer here is you, if you’d only be so kind to admit it.”

There was a squeak from the next aisle and the sound of something glass striking the floor and breaking.

“You did that,” said Leslie without rancour.  “You should go and help.”

“And leave you on your own to murder someone?  You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Sir?”

“I’d love to be left alone, yes,” said Leslie.  “I don’t murder people though, and I never have.”

“It’s just coincidence that people keep dying near you, then, Sir?”

“Yes!  A thousand times yes!  Although…” Leslie eyed Policeman 2 up thoughtfully, “This never used to happen until you two arrived.  If we’re going purely on circumstantial evidence then one of you is clearly the murderer, attempting to pin the crime on me.”

“That seems a bit far-fetched, Sir,” said Policeman 2.  Leslie snorted and turned the corner of the aisle.  Sprawled in the next aisle in an expanding pool of blood was a dead young woman.

“Oh God,” he said weakly.  “How did the pair of you manage that then?”  Policeman 2 shot him a filthy look and radioed in for help.

“Yes, he’s murdered another one while we were watching him… no, he didn’t kill her in front of us… no, he didn’t get away from us… no… no… yes… no, well, we were with him and there’s another murdered body in the next… no… yes… well he’s a murderer isn’t he?”  Finally the conversation stopped and Policeman 2 looked at Leslie.  “You’re going to have to come in for questioning.”

Office hours

Leslie DaFox’s office was strictly on a rental basis.  While he was teaching at the Camberwick Community Centre (easily identifiable from miles away by its ziggurat-style construction and Stalinist design ethic) he was granted an office, but the instant his contract expired the elite security force that he was increasingly suspecting came from the same school as the Okrana would lock him out and refuse him entry.  For the moment though, it was the middle of the term and the office was safely his.

It was astonishingly large.  His desk was three times the size he was used to, and as an experiment once he’d tried laying all of his students’ homework out on it, side by side in a neat paper matrix.  It had covered less than half of the available surface area.  His chair had arms, little extrusions on the rear legs to let you tilt it back safely, cushions (not one, but three!), a cup-holder(!) and an adjustable rear-view mirror on a little angle-arm.  There were five full-size bookcases lining the wall opposite his desk, it was a ten second walk from the door to his desk, and it was another three or four second walk from his desk to the windows.  The windows were the only real disappointment, being essentially glassed-over arrow slits, but the glass was rose-tinted and made the world outside look warm and friendly.  There were four filing cabinets, in one drawer of one of which he kept his students’ homework.  In an effort to make more use of the facilities he put his packed lunch in another drawer, and his satchel in a third, but he still worried that it looked like he wasn’t trying.

“This is impressive, Sir,” said Policeman Number 1, looking around him.  “Who did you murder to get this then, eh?”  He laughed in a heavy way that suggested he was really hoping that the clumsy question would elicit a confession from Leslie.

“Oh stop,” said Policeman Number 2.  “Mr. Fox is far too clever to admit to murdering anyone, aren’t you, Sir?”

Leslie said nothing, knowing that Policeman Number 2 was the more subtle of the pair but would still leap up and down like an excited puppy if he thought Leslie was admitting to not admitting to a crime.

“Sit down,” he said instead.  “My office hour starts in five minutes, so we will be here until that finishes.  Students may wish to come and visit and ask questions.  They will be asking questions of me, not you.  Let me repeat that.  They will be asking questions of me and not you.  You should not answer those questions no matter how tempting it might be.  They are here to learn.  You are here to harass me, make crude and lewd suggestions at inappropriate junctures, and waste tax-payers’ money.”

“Speaking of wasting tax-payers’ money,” said Policeman Number 2, “why do you have such a large office when you’re only teaching at a community college?  You could fit three of our offices in here, and that’s forty-eight officers.”

“I wish I knew,” said Leslie, sighing just a touch.  “There is something very odd about this place that I just can’t put my finger on.”

“What exactly is it you wish to put your finger on?”  Policeman Number 1 looked keen and attentive.

“You mean like employing a man who keeps murdering students in his lecture halls?  You can see why we have to be here in your office now, can’t you Sir?”

“Frankly, no.”  Leslie sat down in his chair and then remembered he needed homework from the filing cabinet.  He considered, briefly, asking one of the officers to get it but then decided that he didn’t want to have to explain how to operate a filing cabinet.  He stood up again.  “I’ve murdered no-one, you’ve never proven that I’ve even attacked someone, let along murdered them, and you persist in dogging me instead of conducting a serious investigation!  Good God, Miss Marple was more effective that your police force!”

“And who is she, please?”  Policeman Number 1 had produced his notebook and was writing the name down.  Leslie opened his mouth, but someone knocked on the door.

“Come in!” he shouted, and hauled the filing cabinet drawer open.

“Mr. daFox?”  He recognised the face of the student stood in the doorway looking scared, but he couldn’t remember his name.  The young man had the beginnings of a moustache, little cuts from shaving on his chin, watery grey eyes and a self-inflicted Justin Bieber haircut.

“Come in,” said Leslie.  “And tell these gentlemen your name so they don’t worry that you’re an accomplice.  Then ignore them as best as you can and sit down.  At my desk.”

“Uh, I’m Nigel,” said the young man.  “Nigel Parks.  Which chair, Sir?”  There were four chairs on the side of the desk opposite Leslie’s, and the policemen were picking from another twelve arrayed around the office.

“Any,” said Leslie, dextrous fingers finding Nigel’s last two submitted homeworks.  Neither had scored higher than a C.  “Now, I’ve got some homework to return to you, but first, do you have any other questions about the material we’re covering in class, the lectures in general, or… well, anything I suppose?”

“Why are there policemen following you around?”

Leslie smiled thinly and sat down.  He desperately wanted to say Because I’m an international playboy and suspected jewel thief but he was certain that both the student and the policemen would take him seriously.  It was like being in a badly-written sitcom – which by definition was not one of the ones he’d successfully written and sold in the seventies.  Three of his were still being re-run in Asia today.  “Apparently tax-payers have been over-paying and there’s a budget surplus,” he said.  “They come with the office.  Just ignore them, I do.”

“Oh,” said Nigel.  “Oh.  Well, in that case… er… I was wondering… when do we get to sleep with girls?”

Leslie took a closer look at Nigel, and in the process realised that the young man smelled of stale sweat and, if he wasn’t mistaken, camel.  Wet camel.

“This is a creative writing course,” he said.  “Sleeping with girls is part of the post-graduate syllabus, when you’ve actually written and sold something.  That class starts with an introduction to hygiene and aftershaves.”

“Oh.  Oh.  Well, is it still ok to sleep with boys in this class?”  Leslie’s jaw dropped before he could catch himself, so he desperately improvised it into a yawn.  “Only, Dave keeps telling me that we have to be sleeping with people if we’re real writers, and I think he’s kind of interested –“

Leslie leaned back in his chair, the extensions catching him and supporting him safely, and listened to a ten minute description of a love-life that would leave rabbits confused and frustrated.  At the end of it he reflected that he now had no idea what Nigel would or wouldn’t sleep with, and if he’d enjoy any of it anyway, and that this in no way made his, Leslie’s, life any better.

“Why don’t you write about this?” he said.  “Look, here’s your last homework.  Dreadful.  If I didn’t know you were paying for this course I’d think you were doing this deliberately to punish me.  Do you see on page two, that–“

“Excuse me?”  Policeman Number 2 held up a hand.

“What?” Leslie glared at him, using the same stare that had reduced his housekeeper to tears and impelled her to hide in the piles of wet laundry.

“Can he repeat everything after the bit about the tortoise, please?  We didn’t get it all down.”

“What?”

“Sure,” said Nigel looking animated.  “Did you get the ketchup bottle–“

“Yes!” said the Policemen in unison.

“That’s kind of why we missed bits after that,” said Policeman Number 2.  “But we have to take notes on everything that’s said around you, Mr. daFox.”

Leslie’s palm slapped audibly against his face.

“Go on,” he said, his voice dull and lifeless.  “Tell them again.” 

Not Columbo

It had probably been the abattoir, thought Leslie daFox, sitting in the back of the police van.  His wrists were handcuffed together and his hands cupped each other in his lap.  Opposite him, sitting on a narrow plastic bench with odds stains along it, was a burly policeman who was glaring at Leslie.  He had little piggy eyes set deep in a fat, florid face, a sparse, mousey-brown moustache that had been waxed into rat-tails at the ends, and acne that ran from under his chin down his neck and disappeared into a shiny, greasy-looking uniform jacket.
"Do you know why you're under arrest?" said the policeman.  This was the first time he'd spoken since he'd heaved his bulk into the van and Leslie had slid slightly along his bench as the van wobbled and tilted.  There's a faint aroma of cinnamon in the air; presumably the policeman had been eating and had had to break off from his lunch so that he could come and talk to Leslie.
"No," said Leslie.  He looked the policeman directly in his eyes, wondering what colour they were.  They were too shadowed to make out, and his eyebrows were sprouting making it harder still.
"Really, Mr. daFox?"  The policeman rolled his r but otherwise sounded rather bored.
"Really," said Leslie pleasantly.  Then, almost as an after-thought, and just when he thought the policeman would be about to speak, he added, "unless you think you're Peter Falk, of course."
"Who?"  The policeman conjured a small notepad and pencil from an inside pocket.  "How do you spell that?"
Leslie obligingly spelled the name and the policeman wrote it down, tore the page off, and clambered to the end of the van to open the doors and pass the paper to someone outside.  Leslie craned his neck but he couldn't see past the policeman.  Then the man returned, breathing a little heavily as though he'd been running to pass off the note.
"Right," he said, sitting back down again and rocking the van alarmingly.  "Why do you think you'd have been arrested if I were Peter Falkland?"
"Peter Falk," said Leslie.  "And if you were he, you wouldn't have arrested me.  But if you thought you were he, you might have arrested me, by way of demonstrating that you were definitely not he."
"...what?"
"Look," said Leslie, still keeping his patience.  "Three months ago two students were found dead in a lecture theatre I was scheduled to teach a class in.  Since then you've been hounding me like you think I know where the doughnut-leprechaun lives; you've had Tweedledum and Tweedledee bodyguarding me, for some risible value of bodyguard, and every so often someone phones me up at 2am and demands to know who I'm going to kill next.  The number they call from matches the one on the business card you gave me when you first found the bodies.  This is police harassment, and I think arresting me is just the latest escalation of it."
"Right," said the policeman.  "Tweedledee and Tweedledum?  Is that an Alice in Wonderland reference?"
"Through the Looking Glass, I think," said Leslie, suddenly appalled with himself that he couldn't remember.  "Not original either, I'm afraid, but it went down rather well with test audiences back in the seventies, so it's a deserved cliché."
"Is that clichet with a 't'?"
"No.  No 'y' either."
"And the doughnut-leprechaun?"
"May be real, but I don't know where he lives," said Leslie.
"Ha.  Ha."
Someone banged on the back-doors of the van and pulled the door open.  A young policeman with a shock of black hair spiked up impossibly high on his head peered in, and spotted the fat policeman.
"Peter Falk?" he shouted, making Leslie flinch.
"Yes?" said the policeman, glaring at Leslie as though daring him to try and make a break for it.
"Dead," said the young policeman.  He pulled his head back and closed the doors of the van.
"Dead," said the fat policeman.  "You're thinking I should be dead, are you, Sir?  And you found coming out of an abattoir and all...."
"Oh dear God," said Leslie hopelessly.

interregnum

Leslie daFox was thinking about ziggurats as he climbed the steps of the Stalinist Camberwick Community Centre.  There was something about the sheer mass of the Community Centre that made him think of an ancient step pyramid whose top was reserved for human sacrifice.  He could, if he tried, imagine a woman with coffee-coloured skin wearing a feathered and beaded headdress holding a bronze dagger aloft, poised above the virgin's navel, ready to descend and elevate the pure young man below to the heavens, to join the gods and bless his former people.
"Bronze is a silly choice for the dagger," he said, mostly to himself.  "It would blunt in no time, probably while you're still trying to get through the rib-cage to reach the heart.  Flint now, that would do the trick.  Or possibly that black glass stuff, that might be available in the South Americas at that time."
"What's that sir?" said Policeman number one, who was huffing and puffing on Leslie's left side.
"He was saying that glass is better than bronze," said Policeman number two helpfully.  He was having no trouble with the steps at all and was actually taking them two at a time.  Both policemen were still dogging Leslie's every move while the death of two students in his class was investigated.  He'd even had to let them bring their sleeping bags into his conservatory so that they could guard him from inside the house, which was tantamount to admitting that they suspected him.  Though their pouncing on him last time he'd made a slightly off-colour remark was better evidence.
"Why... why is glass better than bronze?" gasped Policeman number one.  They reached the top of the steps and he leaned his hands on his knees, bending forward and going puce.
"You can use it to make windows," said Leslie.  "The trouble with bronze for windows is that it's too noisy; every time the wind blows it vibrates and either clatters or gongs, depending on how thin you made the sheets."
"Right," said Policeman number one, his chest heaving like a hyperactive blacksmith's bellows.  "That... that makes... sense!"
No, it doesn't thought Leslie, leading the way to the main doors.  Windows are made of glass because it's transparent, you nitwit.  Bronze would never work for windows.
"Good morning, sir!" said one of the security guards at the towering portals that allowed entrance into the Community Centre.  Leslie smiled, full of false bonhomie, and greeted the guard back.  They were the most frightening clever and well educated body of men he'd ever met, and he was worried that they might actually be cleverer than him.  He was also puzzled that they were exclusively male.
He led the way across the main hallway, initially heading for the lift.  Then, feeling mean, he paused and turned left at a small door and took the spiral staircase up the three floors to the lecture hall he was using.  Policeman number two took the front position, and Policeman number one gave up after about six steps and sat down.  At the top Policeman number two looked puzzled.
"Where's Joe?" he said.
"He sat down," said Leslie.  "He'll catch us up when he's caught his breath."
"There's got to be two of us guarding you at all times!  You're a menace to society!"
"Thanks.  For my script-writing?  My short-story collections?  Some of my novels?"
"For murdering two of your students in broad daylight, actually, sir.  We know you did it, we just have to find the evidence."
"When I wrote police procedurals," said Leslie carefully, "I was told that it was the other way around.  First you find the evidence, and then you hound the culprit.  Not pick a culprit and hound him until he provides you with some evidence."
"You've never watched Columbo, have you sir?" said the Policeman sounding sympathetic.
"Actually I have," said Leslie.  "And I turned down the opportunity to write for it too; I felt that any script with words longer than two syllables would be too far above the target demographic."
"Oh I see!  You had your targets picked out even back then, did you sir?"  The policeman produced a notebook from a pocket and started scribbling in it with a little black pencil.  Leslie sighed and tried to go the lecture hall.
"No, wait there, please sir."  Policeman number two extended a muscular arm and held Leslie in place.  "There have to be two of us guarding you at all times."
"I'll be late for the class," said Leslie.  "What if someone's been murdered by the time we get there?"
"That would be very clever of you, sir," said Policeman number two.  "Murdering someone when I'm here watching you the whole time."
"Yes, wouldn't it?" said Leslie.  He was starting to wish he'd never given up smoking, even though it was nine and a half years ago now.  There was a wheezing noise from below, suggesting that Policeman number one was finally making the ascent.  When he staggered the last couple of steps two minutes later Policeman number two finally let go of Leslie and he could lead them into the lecture hall.
In the middle of the floor, surrounding by aghast and appalled students, was a dead body and a lake of blood.

Epistrophe

Leslie daFox stood at the front of his classroom, flanked by two police officers from the Serious Crimes Squad.  They were both uniformed, obviously wearing bullet-proof vests, had refused to remove their peaked caps while indoors despite Leslie's twenty-two minute rant about the sheer bloody unluckiness of their actions, and were standing to attention with their hands neatly clasped behind their backs.  They were, Leslie felt, rather showing up his students, who were mostly slumped in their seats in the auditorium in various stages of semi-consciousness.  Two seats were conspicuously left empty in the middle of the middle row; in those two seats in his last class two women had been found murdered, which accounted for his police guard right now.  Not that they were worried that he might be the next victim, they were rather more concerned that he might be the murderer.
"WAKE UP!" shouted Leslie, feeling malicious.  That morning he'd caught the maid ironing his socks without turning them inside out first, and he'd shouted at her for fifteen minutes until she'd finally burst into tears and fled into the laundry room, where he could heard her trying to dig into a basket of wet laundry and hide.  Every time he remembered that he felt better about the day, just as every time he caught sight of a police officer out of the corner of his eye he felt angry.
"Today's lesson," he continued, in a slightly lower voice, "is about rhetoric.  Rhetoric, as you would know if any of you could read well enough to read the syllabus and know what books you're supposed to read for each lesson, is traditionally considered part of the art of public speaking.  Despite its links to oratory, the many themes and tropes of rhetoric have their uses in literature as well."
"OI!  YOU!  YOU UNPLEASANT LITTLE WORM YOU!  PAY ATTENTION WHEN THE MURDERER IS SPEAKING!" bellowed Policeman #1.  Leslie cringed, his ears ringing, and his annoyance levels rising that he'd not been able to shout at the student first.
"Alleged murderer," said Policeman #2, looking across at Policeman #1.
"Provisionally," replied Policeman #1, looking back.
"I'm not a murderer," said Leslie firmly to them both, then turned back to his audience, who were watching the show at the front as though it were a soap opera. "Are you all listening now?"  The attentiveness and shiny eyes of the audience suggested that they were.
"Do you reckon it's true that he kills off the ones that get the lowest homework marks?" said Policeman #2 before Leslie could continue.  The audience vibrated with nerves and alertness.
"You're all too thick to know where Greece is," said Leslie, trying to ignore the poorly scripted comedy routine going on behind him, "so you only need to know that our first topic shall be Epistrophe.  No," he said to the rising of a hand from the third row, "it is not an island, nor is it a nightclub.  Epistrophe is the repetition of words at the end of sentences for effect.  If anyone can tell me what the repetition of words at the start of a sentence for effect is, I shall give them a manor house in the Cotswolds, a villa in Spain, and invite them to call me by my first name."
No-one's hand rose, and Leslie sighed, though inwardly he was rather thrilled to have taken a chance and still won his bet with himself.
The door at the back opened, and a Camberwick Green security guard slipped in, looking guilty.
"Perhaps," said Leslie, remembering the sobs coming from the sodden laundry earlier that morning, "you all feel that such questions are too easy for you to answer?  Let me ask a functionary; you there!"
"STAND WHERE YOU ARE YOU HORRIBLE LITTLE FUNCTIONARY!" bellowed Policeman #1, and the security guard stopped and stared at him.
"What is the opposite of epistrophe?" asked Leslie.
"Anaphora, guv," said the security guard, to Leslie's pleased nod.  "Not to be confused with Amphora, which is the wife's sister's name, on account of her not liking being called Jug."
"Really?" said Leslie,  "It takes all sorts I suppose.  I think I'd probably have had something unpleasant happen to my parents if they'd tried to call me Jug."
"STATEMENT OF INTENT!" yelled both policeman simultaneously, and tackled a protesting Leslie to the ground.  As he struggled, his students slipped away, all worrying that their next homework submission was going to result in a death-sentence.

Send in the cavalry

"Classically," said Leslie daFox, "the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are considered to be metaphors.  Each is the personfication of a human condition, and if you were only cleverer I would call this anthropomorphisation and relate it back to the third series of How I murdered your mother, the sitcom I won my first thirty awards for writing."  He looked around the room, hoping against hope that there would be a spark of recognition, if not for what he was saying then at least for the comedy show he'd written single-handedly (and two-fingeredly) for four seasons before the network had given him a staff of writers, a bigger salary, and an ulcer.  Instead there were blank faces (most of the first two rows, all women, all the wrong side of middle age, and judging from their homework, all writers of Harry Potter slash fiction), confused faces (generally people on the edges of the class, though he now knew that Mr. Harrison was just in denial about his deafness), worried faces (mostly students who needed to pass this course as part of their degree program and were scared it was too much like work) and dead faces.
"Can anyone name another example of anthropomorphisation?" he asked wearily.  A door creaked, and he saw one of the Camberwick Green security guards sidling in at the back, clutching a clipboard defensively to his chest.  Leslie felt slightly relieved that he'd managed to ask the question before the guard had arrived, as the guards here were actually very good at answering them, which upset the audience even more.
"No?"  Leslie scanned the faces of the audience, suddenly aware that his mental catalogue last time had included an item that had been wrong.  Let's see, he had the blank faces, the worried faces– a hand had been raised.
"YES?" he shouted, but the room was large and no-one here seemed cowed by it.
"Er, SpongeBob Squarepants?" said a thin man with a pointed nose and rheumy eyes.  His lips were pale and thin, as though he spent a lot of time compressing them tightly against one another.
–worried faces, confused faces– what?
"What?" he said.
"SpongeBob Squarepants.  You know, he lives in a pineapple... under... the sea."  The young man trailed off while Leslie realised that he'd seen the cartoon creation that was being referred to when his grandchildren had come to visit.
"I... Well...," Leslie tried to figure how to say no, given that the answer was actually yes.
–confused faces, dead faces.   Wait, what?
"What?"  He scanned the audience again, and sure enough, there in the middle were two elderly women with blue-grey faces that looked very dead.  "Can someone wake er, thingy, there, in the middle?"  He pointed, and slowly, reluctantly, a neighbour gently shook one of the dead women.  They wobbled a little, and then keeled over, faceplanting the desk in front of them, and revealing a plastic-handled knife sticking out of a large bloodstain in the shirt on their back.  There was a scream, a pause while the room worked out what was happening, and then more screams.
The security guard hurried forward, and Leslie noticed that the skinny young man had put his hand back up and was waving it back and forth with more enthusiasm than anyone had managed in any class previously.
"Yes?" he said, watching as the security guard tried to find a pulse on a corpse.
"Am I right?  About SpongeBob, I mean?"
Leslie nodded, aware that since no-one else was paying any attention he could deny it later.  The security guard had just sat the corpse back up, driving the knife further into its back by the look of things.
"Cool, dude!" said the skinny guy, and turned to his neighbour, presumably to boast about his intellectual capacity.
"I think this one's dead," said the security guard, now dragging the corpse up onto his shoulders.  "I'll just take it out back and tidy it up a little.  We'll need to talk to you later about how it happened."
"What?  How what happened?"
"Well, it's a locked room mystery, isn't it?" said the guard sounding suspiciously happy.  "Like in one of your books.  So it's a test, isn't it, right?"
"No," said Leslie, who'd never written any crime fiction in his life.  "And no, and more no.  That's a dead body, and I don't know how it got in here, but I'd like it taken away and identified.  And crossed off my class-list."
"Right you are, sir," said the guard, winking when he thought only Leslie could see.  "Jolly good!"
"Did that... thing die in here?  While we were in here?"  The speaker, a young girl, looked ghoulishly thrilled, and several of her classmates started jotting things down in their commonplace books.
"Bravo!" said Leslie, suddenly proud of his class for the first time since he'd started teaching again.  "Every event that happens, no matter how tragic, or personally affecting, can be used as the plot for a story, or even just background material.  Now, who can tell me about corpse worms?"
The fastest hand up was the woman whose last Harry Potter fiction had featured some fairly graphic necromancy, so Leslie picked someone else instead.

Leslie daFox

The outside of the Camberwick Commuity Centre was Stalinist: it towered for seventeen stories above the surrounding houses and businesses, emphatically stating that it was watching them.  Windows were recessed by fluted columns of stone, carefully cast into shadow so that people looking out couldn't be seen by people trying to look in, and all the windows on the lower floor were smoked glass or one-way mirrors.  The entrance was reached by climbing seventy stairs, a wide granite staircase that begged for three minis to come roaring down them and zoom off towards central London, laden with stolen gold.  At the top of the stairs, unseeable from the bottom, the entrance doors were two entire stories high and fronted by doormen dressed as early-Soviet KGB men, whose salary apparently came from a singular bequest from an oligarch with a strange sense of humour.  As Leslie daFox, onetime author and sitcom-writer, approached the doors they moved en masse to greet him.  He paused, a fatal error as it allowed the eight of them to surround him and start demanding proof of who he was and what he was doing there.
"I'm delivering a class," he said, unable to get the bad taste out of his mouth caused by knowing that he was resorting to paid employment.  "A twelve week creative writing course, for the Litter Ate."
There was a snigger from his left, and he turned that way, swivelling on the heel of one smartly polished boot, astonished that his condescending little sneer had been recognised.  The sniggerer, a man with a moustache that would have made Stalin proud, was still chuckling under his breath.
"Oh you shouldn't look at us like that, Sir," he said.  "I've got three degrees in various branches of English Literature, and one in Finnish Theological Studies.  This job pays very well and provides you with a lot of time for study: most people give up before they get half-way up the stairs.  If you don't mind, I might sit at the back of your class and audit it for a while."
"Er."  Leslie was nonplussed, and furiously running through his own qualifications trying to find one suitable for a put-down.
"Well, I think we've got you on the guest-list now," said another, a young man with runny eyes and whose breath smelled of oranges.  "There shouldn't be any issues from now on, but just in case –"  He handed Leslie a laminated card with a sickle-and-crescent logo on one side and "ADMIT one" on the other in large letters.
"Er." Leslie was aware that other people would say thank-you at this point, but was still struggling with the idea that a doorman might be better educated than himself.
"That way, Sir," said a third doorman whose face was overshadowed by the outsize peak of his Crimean-issue hat.  "You're in the Kantorovich Chamber.  Seats three-hundred on a good day."
"It does?"  Leslie's jaw dropped, but gentle and firm hands were already pushing him in the direction of the doors – well, the portals – to the Camberwick Community Centre.



*
Twenty minutes later he was joined in a room on the eighth floor that he rather thought should have been an amphitheatre.  His class trooped in, mostly middle-aged though there was one man who was on two crutches and looked to be dying and another girl who might not yet have been eighteen but was dramatically pregnant.  Leslie was sitting on a hard wooden stool at the front of the room looking over the class-list which had been on the stool before him.  Despite the size of the room it appeared that only nineteen people had signed up for the course, which he was still bitter about having to offer.  If it hadn't been for his wife deciding to interrupt their retirement by offering flower-arranging classes he would still be sat at home right now, probably shouting at things in the paper, or at the maid for dusting wrong, or at the gardener for either wearing or not wearing a shirt.  Leslie was secretly very amused that the gardener kept trying to get it right, and had not realised that Leslie was going to shout at him no matter what he wore.
"Sit down, sit down," he said, a little testily.  They all sat at least four rows back from the front, and he was about to motion them all to come forward when he realised that this allowed him to shout.  That thought made him feel a little better.
"Creative writing," he said, not bothering with a formal introduction, "is not something everyone can do.  I expect that over the course of the next twelve weeks we shall discover that none of you are capable of creativity, and that most of you are equally incapable of writing.  However, I shall do my best to leave you with at least an understanding of why you are so utterly worthless.  Are there any questions before I begin?"
A woman in the closest seated row raised he hand timidly.  Leslie stared at her, having expected no-one to be brave enough to respond.  She mistook his astonishment as an invitation to proceed.
"Will we be learning how to write slash?" she said.  "Only I'd like to be able to do that.  No-one really seems to see how naughty that Harry Potter is, and I'd like to set the record straight."
"Slash?  The guitarist with Guns'n'Roses?"
The class giggled, and Leslie glowered; he'd been quite pleased that his knowledge of modern culture extended to musicians and their bands.  He decided to ignore the question.
"Right!  First exercise.  Look around you at this... vast... classroom.  It should be obvious to all of you that this room has been used for more than just teaching over the years, so close your eyes and relax, let yourself soak in the atmosphere of the room.  There will be many overlapping threads here, activities that have happened again and again will resonate strongly, seeking to repeat themselves once more, while things that happened just the once might be faint, dying echoes or loud, desperate clouds of unhappiness.  Find one.  Make it yours.  Share the misery of the room, and then bring it back with you, write it down, in pencil, pen, or blood if that's what it takes.  Show us all the story that you've found, and when you've all written something, no matter how incoherent and shaming, we shall read them out and have a good laugh, and someone, perhaps me, will offer some criticism."
Silence prevailed as the students closed their eyes and sat back, and Leslie promptly sneaked his smartphone from his pocket and started to google slash.  And regretted it.