Unseen Academicals (Discworld 37)

'What?' said Trev, frowning.

'Wot?' said Nutt, his voice a little muffled. There was a lot of scarf. It was almost covering his mouth.

'Are you pulling my chuff, Gobbo?' said Trev, handing him an ancient sweater, faded and saggy with age.

'Please, Mister Trev, I don't know! There appears to be so much I might inadvertently pull!' He tugged on the big woolly hat with the pink pompom on it. 'They are so very pink, Mister Trev. We must be bursting with machismo!'

'I don't know what you person'ly are bursting with, Gobbo, but here's somethin' to learn. "Come on if you think you're hard enough." Now you say it.'

'Come on if you think you're hard enough,' said Nutt obediently.

'Well, okay,' said Trev, inspecting him. 'Just remember, if anyone starts pushing you around during the game, and givin' you grief, just you say that to 'em and they'll see you're wearing the Dimmer colours and they'll think twice. Got it?'

Nutt, somewhere in the space between the big bobbly hat and the boa constrictor of a scarf, nodded.

'Wow, there you are, Gobbo, a complete... fan. Your own mother wouldn't recognize you!'

There was a pause before a voice emerged from inside the mound of ancient woollens, which looked very much like a nursery layette made by a couple of giants who weren't sure what to expect.

'I believe you are accurate.'

'Yeah? Well, that's good, innit? Now let's go and meet the lads. Move fast, stay close.'

'Now remember, this is a pre-season friendly between the Angels and the Whoppers, right?' said Trev, as they stepped out into a fine rain which, because of Ankh-Morpork's standing cloud of pollution, was morphing gently into smog. 'They're both pretty crap, they'll never amount to anythin', but the Dimmers shout for the Angels, right?' It took some explaining, but the core of it, as far as Nutt could understand it, was this: All football teams in the city were rated by Dimwell in proportion to their closeness, physical, psychological or general gut feeling, to the hated Dolly Sisters. It had just evolved that way. If you went to a match between two other teams, you automatically, according to some complex and ever-changing ready-reckoner of love and hate, cheered the team most nearly allied to your native turf or, more accurately, cobbles.

'Do you see what I mean?' Trev finished.

'I have committed what you said to memory, Mister Trev.'

'Oh Brutha, an' I'll bet you 'ave, at that. And it's just Trev when we're not at work, right? We shout together, right?' He punched Nutt playfully on the arm.

'Why did you do that, Mister Trev?' said Nutt. His eyes, almost the only part of him visible, looked hurt. 'You struck me!'

'That wasn't me hitting you, Gobbo! That was just a friendly punch! Big difference! Don't you know that? It's a little tap on the arm, to show we're mates. Go on, do it to me. Go on.' Trev winked.

... You will be polite and, most of all, you will never raise your hand in anger to anyone...

But this wasn't like that, was it? Nutt asked himself. Trev was his friend. This was friendly. A friend thing. He punched the friendly arm.

'That was a punch?' said Trev. 'You call that a punch? A girl could punch better'n that! How come you're still alive with a weedy punch like that? Go on, try a proper punch!'

Nutt did.

Be one of the crowd? It went against everything a wizard stood for, and a wizard would not stand for anything if he could sit down for it, but even sitting down, you had to stand out. There were, of course, times when a robe got in the way, especially when a wizard was working in his forge, creating a magic metal or mobiloid glass or any of those other little exercises in practical magic where not setting fire to yourself is a happy bonus, so every wizard had some leather trousers and a stained, rotted-by-acid shirt. It was the shared dirty little secret, not very secret, but ingrained with deep-down dirt.

Ridcully sighed. His colleagues had aimed for the look of the common man, but had only a hazy grasp of what the common man looked like these days, and now they were sniggering and looking at one another and saying things like 'Cor blimey, don't you scrub down well, as it were, my ol' mate.' Beside them, and looking extremely embarrassed, were two of the university's bledlows, not knowing what to do with their feet and wishing that they were having a quiet smoke somewhere in the warm.

'Gentlemen,' Ridcully began, and then with a gleam in his eye added, 'or should I say, fellow workers by hand and brain, this afternoon we - Yes, Senior Wrangler?'

'Are we, in point of fact, workers? This is a university, after all,' said the Senior Wrangler.

'I agree with the Senior Wrangler,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'Under university statute we are specifically forbidden to engage, other than within college precincts, in any magic above level four, unless specifically asked to do so by the civil power or, under clause three, we really want to. We are acting as place holders, and as such, forbidden from working.'

'Would you accept "slackers by hand and brain"?' said Ridcully, always happy to see how far he could go.

'Slackers by hand and brain by statute,' said the Senior Wrangler primly.

Ridcully gave up. He could do this all day, but life couldn't be all fun.