Mary's eye was caught by the sight of a piece of white plastic bag lying in the clump of bushes. Late as she was, Mary was affronted by this. She looked around at the groups of students who passed. None of these youngsters would bother to pick it up of course. Exasperated, Mary stopped and sought a way into the clump which would allow her to get at the bag without getting up to her ankles in muck. She became even more irritated.

Mary walked around the back of the bushes and bent to get into the bag. Bent over, she poked at it with her umbrella, pinning it to the earth. Then she tried to flick it back toward her. She couldn't. The bag was full of something. Mary became angry. She inched in further and looked down at it. It was full of bits of paper. It had to have been some student blind drunk last night who had thrown his notes away. Probably one of them engineers, she surmised, dealing out justice to the anonymous culprit.

Mary picked up the bag. She noticed the sleeve of a coat some six feet away. She hadn't seen it from where she had stood before. She looked at the shrubs nearby. Some of the stalks and branches were showing spots of white where they had been broken. There must have been drink taken last night, she decided. Mary made her way over, her anger now tempered by anxiety and the embarrassment at being in the middle of a bed of shrubs, late for work.

A group of Modern Language students had stepped out of the library to have a smoke and a sit-down in the chairs facing College Park. One of them was ridiculing a psychoanalytic reading of the character of Hamlet when a scream came across the air from behind them. Then another scream.