Our Game [antikvár]

ONE LARRY WENT OFFICIALLY missing from the world on the second Monday of October, at ten minutes past eleven, when he failed to deliver his opening lecture of the new academic year. I am able to set the scene exactly because it was not so very long ago, in the same dreary Bath weather, that I had dragged Larry down to see the wretched place for the first time. To this day I have the most accusing memoiy of the brutálist slab barracks closing in on him like the walls of his new confinement. And of Larry's ever youthful back walking reproachfully away from me down the concrete canyon like a man going to his nemesis. If I had had a son, I thought as I stared after him, this was how it would feel to be dumping him at his first boarding school. "Hey, Timbo," he whispers over his shoulder, the way Larry can speak to you from miles away. "Yes, Larry." 'This is it, is it?" 'This is what?" "The future. Where it all ends. Leftover life." "It's a new beginning," I say loyally. But loyal to whom? To him? To me? To the Office? "We have to scale down," I say. "Both of us do." The day of his disappearance was by all accounts equally depressing. A cloying mist envelops the hideous grey university campus and breathes a sticky pall over the alloy-framed windows of Larry's grimy lecture room. Twenty students sit at desks facing the empty lectern, which is of a particularly 1