Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Kris Alexandros: The President

I first heard about Mr Hook's Box during a lecture by Professor Grimauld. He was a teacher of the old school, with a tendency to go on about the aspects of mathematics he found interesting at great length, but without the infectious fervour that some teachers have to arouse that same interest in their students. So his lectures might seem a little dry, but they were filled with all kinds of interesting facts once you looked past the tone.

The lecture theatre was also in a style that was going out of fashion at the time. The audience seats were arranged in a half cone around the lecturer and his chalkboards, making it feel like every person was looking down on him. The steps were quite steep, and the seat backs inclined slightly forward in order to give the row behind enough desk space for a notebook. This also meant that it was difficult to speak to the people in front or behind, so any side conversations had to be between students in adjacent seats, passing messages along the row if a larger group of friends was seated together. The seats were also narrow, with a base that folded up against the back to allow people from farther along the row to exit. So if you saw your friends elsewhere in the room, there was no way to join them for the sharing of observations without causing a significant fuss.

In this case, the lecture hall was filled with students of many different disciplines, the common factor that we all had some reliance on mathematics. This means that we could talk to others about the work, and probably find a completely different insight. That was why I'd originally tried to make friends among the tutorial groups, before my good friend Dwayne had introduced me to non-academic social groups where I felt distinctively welcomed. Today, however, seating myself beside my friend Dwayne would mean first relocating another friend, by the name of Martin Cheese. The three of us were all adept at mathematics, but from a very different grounding. I was a theoretician, with also some skills in computing and logic. Dwayne was primarily an electrical engineer, but widening his specialisation with other kinds of engineering and of course the arithmetic theory to support such a bridge of knowledge. And Martin was an economist, with a sound understanding of statistics and projections I am sure, but often having problems with more abstract or concrete problems.

This day, Martin wasn't giving the Professor a median share of his attention. Instead, he regaled me with a story of his morning meeting of the Societies Steering Group. They had spoken with an external adjudicator, he said, and chosen a society to be responsible for storing and maintaining a historical curiosity.

"There was this old geezer, right?" he continued. I did my best to take in what he was saying for the sake of our friendship while still studying the figures that Professor Grimauld had inscribed in yellow and white chalks on the board. "Mr Hook. Always 'Mister', we never knew his real name. It was before my time on the Committee anyway. But he gave some money to the college to refit some labs, you know the scientists are always after new stuff. Money for societies too, enough that they made up a new subcommittee just to deal with which clubs get it. Some of the sports clubs need new goalposts or whatever almost every year, and that extra cash made it a bit easier. But then the cash came close to running out, and the fund is just a little top up now, and some folks think we could do better without. But the lawyers for the trust, or whoever it was, said if we stop following the rules set out in Mr Hook's will, we have to pay all the money back, and we can't do that. So there's this dumb thing, probably a joke, that the college has to follow no matter what."

He carried on talking. At that point I would have been quite happy to give him my full attention if the subject of the lecture were anything but pure mathematics. My other modules, I was confident enough that I could catch up after missing a lecture. But this course was right at the heart of all kinds of mathematics, close enough to my major concentration that I couldn't proceed without it, but far enough from my natural talent that it was a challenge to follow.

"I mean," Martin continued, himself intelligent enough to not notice the difficulty I was having with the subject of the lecture, "There's plenty that thinks it was all a big joke, Mr Hook never even existed. Maybe they put it into the constitution to test if anyone read the thing before voting to approve it, but once the rules are in the constitution all societies are bound to follow it. And this time it's your turn to carry the hot potato. The subcommittee picked out the LUSARS this time round." Of course, he pronounced the society name as if he were saying 'losers', but I knew straight away what he meant.

"So what is this joke assignment?" I finally responded. If some obscure legislation was going to be affecting the LUSARS this year, while I was the new leader of the society, then the advice of a member of Societies Steering Group who had seen this happen before was sure to be worth missing a few moments of a mathematics lecture.

"It's a box," he explained, with a huge grin on his face, "Mister Hook's Big Black Box. They say it contains a load of cash that he couldn't leave to anyone because of the taxes he hadn't paid, or a fortune in Nazi gold. Maybe it's the bones of some woman he killed, or maybe he'd had himself pickled and put in there as a joke. Like I said, nobody knows what's in Mr Hook's Box, but nobody wants to be the one looking after it. But the losers got it this time. Some time this week, maybe even today, you're going to go into that little shed you call a club room and find the Box on the table. Mr Hook's Box. I don't know what it looks like, I've been smart enough to avoid carrying the can, but I guess it's big and black, else why would they call it that, you know? But the rule is you've got to store it for a month, or a term, or a year. Until the date they give you, basically. You're not allowed to open the Box, if you even peek inside the society gets disbanded and banned from meeting on campus. They say they'd even ban you from talking to each other if it looked like the club was trying to keep going as an unofficial thing, maybe even kick your leaders out of university entirely."

The pencil snapped between my fist at that last thought. I couldn't stand being kicked out of college again, I couldn't take going back to tell my family that I had failed. Uncle Sal had helped me last time, to reapply to a different college without having to inform my parents, but I suspected I would have earned no such lenience in this case.

"The tough thing is, sometimes there's other societies trying to get in the Box. They might try sneaking into your room and open it, just to see you fail. Who knows, maybe there's an alarm on it or something, so the Societies Council would know right away. I hope you guys haven't got anyone who hates you that much. Made any enemies in the serious clubs?" That was when I finally started filtering out what he was saying, just as easily as I was not taking in Professor Grimauld's words. Somewhere in the Memory Lane of my head, I was going over how I'd got to this point, and trying to think what I could do if I had to go back and start again.