God, he says, the shadow of his fist obscuring my notes, I’m bored.

He sits down before he asks if I want company. He is doing everything backwards. Even in today’s sun he’s wearing his shin-length leather coat. When he takes it off I see he’s shrouded in black.

He tells me how great A Clockwork Orange is, and reels off a long list of the Russian words he’s picked up watching it. He tells me the Russian word for milk. He tells me his presentation would have featured himself standing with the whiteboard pointer in one hand, glass of milk in the other. Only he got up too late, and he’s shit at things like remembering. He laughs for a disproportionately long time.

I wish I could read your mind, he says. I hope he’s joking. I assure him he would not like to read my mind. This conversation is a bizarre reflection of one I had several days ago.

I say, I revel in being a glass maze. He looks at me like I’m crazy. Crazy crazy. So, castration… he starts. And I’m crazy?? So he holds forth about castration and its merits, and how he would like to kill quite a large number of people. Before assuring me I am not on his hit list. Clockwork Orange is amazing, he says again when he runs out of things to talk about.

When he says, sweetie, you’d be wasting your life, I get up to leave, very suddenly. My study notes blow themselves into the bushes. I get the feeling that even my inanimate things are desperately trying to escape him. My water bottle falls with a plastic clunk from the picnic bench, rolls quite a distance before he stoops his enormous evasive self towards the ground to pick it up.

I have to go, I tell him, as if it isn’t glaringly obvious anyway. He takes that as an invitation to stride along next to me with his coat flapping at his ankles until I pointedly say good bye.