by Sarah Moss
‘Deal.’
It is not possible to go to the University. In strictly physical terms, I mean: in some departments anyone possessed of a bank account and a basic grasp of English grammar is warmly welcome to come and take an MA, and for those paying international fees the grammar is negotiable. Like all universities, it is always building. The percentage of the earth’s surface occupied by universities increases year by year, an arms race of new facilities and more accommodation that will end when they start to have to define borders. The university instead of the nation state: it probably wouldn’t make much difference. In this case, they built over all the green spaces a while ago and are now building over car parks and indeed about to demolish existing buildings in order to build taller ones in their place. The problem with building over car parks is that the car parks were always full before they started to build on them, and now a swarm of angry drivers is permanently circling campus, late and later for teaching and meetings and unable to stop because someone else has already parked on every flat surface, including the middle of the roundabout and the library delivery bay. The size of the swarm varies through the day, as people give up and go away or run out of petrol and are rescued from their insanity by the AA, but it is always there. There are buses, but they are all as full as the trains leaving Pakistan in the hours before Partition long before they get to our end of town.
So mostly I cycle, an act of another kind of faith because there’s no alternative to a five-mile stretch of fast, narrow A-road heavily used by lorries as well as distracted and impatient commuters. One or two students die each year cycling that route. It was night-time, I tell myself, maybe she was drunk, he probably didn’t have good lights, he was undertaking a bus. Not like me. I’ll live to die from the diesel particulates I inhale, but since our car is also diesel there’s some justice in that.
‘We’ll have to drive and then walk across the fields,’ I said. ‘It’s been raining, you’ll need your hiking boots.’
The Authorities, by which I mean, I think, the senior administration of the University and the local council, have not yet realised that it is still possible for ordinary people to park their cars at ordinary times of day in a village less than two miles, as the public right of way goes, from the edges of campus. Then you just follow a nature trail through a wood and pick up the footpath across the fields, where admittedly ploughed earth alternates, in season, with some rather vivacious cows, and you’ll need a torch on winter afternoons and stout footwear in all seasons, but it works. You can get to work.
‘Are the cows there?’ Mimi asked.
I had no idea. Probably not, in December. ‘No.’
‘Good. Because I’m not going through if they are. Have you read Animal Farm?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not as a work of natural history.’
Four years ago, when I first started coming regularly to this campus for my pin-money teaching, there were stretches of grass and mature trees between the low-budget Brutalist buildings, and the construction work was around the edges of campus as the Business School and shiny apartment blocks for international students shyly established themselves barely over the boundary of the green belt. This has never been a beautiful university, not by the fashions of our era although perhaps in fifty years the 1960s concrete buildings will be venerated and the teaching block generally known as the Pigpens will have become the subject of a geolocative media app, but even four years ago you could discern in the shape of central campus the coherent design of a sane mind fifty years before. Students played ballgames in the open spaces and sat under the trees in the summer term. Many of the trees predated the University and one of my colleagues liked to say that there was a left-over acre of the Forest of Arden between car park 29 and the Engineering Department. We were encouraged on Open Days to draw parents’ attention to the bike and running trails along the river, and the institution won awards for putting a bike track half-way across the fields to the city. We were a Sustainable Campus.
And then fees went up, the government’s cap on student numbers was removed and universities, unable for now to compete on price although that day is surely at hand, began to jostle each other for the ‘top students’, or at least those best trained to complete the formulae of A-level exam questions. More buildings. More ‘facilities’. I imagine there is some market research behind universities’ manifest view that what every bright eighteen-year-old craves is more overpriced coffee brought to them as they sit on more red leather sofas under more sepia images of Paris and New York. It’s not even really coffee, just warm sweet frothy milk, caramel lattes and mochaccinos with so much cream and syrup that they now come under C-cup domes. You’d think that what The Youth of Today wants most of all is to recline in a soft red place and suck on the breasts of franchised multinational corporations, but only until you met the students. It is plain that the high-ups do not meet the students.
Mimi and I left the car outside a row of oversized new houses apparently designed by Tesco in collaboration with Prince Charles, showcasing bin sheds and parking spaces because the double garages and paved driveways aren’t enough to accommodate the vehicles of families who require five bathrooms and an eruption of uselessly undersized balconies. We set off through the wood, following the track of the old railway line. Dead leaves clogged the puddles underfoot and the bare trees closed over our heads; the sky was a meek English grey, threatening nothing. She pulled the sleeves of her jumper out from under her coat and balled her hands inside them.
‘Don’t you have your gloves?’ I asked.
‘The epipen’s in my pocket.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant. I don’t want you to be cold.’
‘You don’t want me to show symptoms of that cold allergy thing and it was what you meant.’
‘Sorry. But I will leave you in the library while I go to the meeting.’
In the library where it’s warm, there are plenty of people to witness a collapse and the opportunities for exertion are limited.
‘Can’t I go to a café?’
Full of potential allergens. ‘They’re all owned by evil multinational corporations, fuelling sugar addiction and profiting from the declining health of your generation.’
‘Yeah, but I like hanging out there. What if I go to the Union bar?’
‘Maybe. We’ll see. I don’t think the meeting’s going to go on that long anyway.’
We came out into the fields, where there were no cows and the hedgerows were festooned with old-man’s-beard, still in places beaded with dew. Too late for even the last, north-facing blackberries, even the rosehips wrinkled and dry. A pair of kites circled high over the bare trees, as if in a holding pattern, as if passing the time until something changed.
‘How are you feeling about going back to school?’ I asked.
She went ahead of me through a gate, handing me the chain to loop back over the post, metal-on-metal loud under the grey silence of the day.
‘OK.’
‘It’ll be good to be back?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s school, Dad. I have to go.’
Is it better, I wanted to ask, than my school, is it worth your limited time on this earth, is it good enough for the hours of your life that we make you give it? If you die, should I forgive myself for sending you there?
‘We’re switching back to packed lunches,’ I said. ‘So at least you’ll know what you’re eating.’
If it happens again, we’ll have a list of ingredients, names for what’s out to get you.
‘Whatever.’
From the top of the rise, we could see campus spread out like the roadworks-and-diggers set at playgroup. Three red cranes dwarfed everything, dizzying to look at their cabs and surely the University couldn’t be building anything so tall. Six or seven skeleton buildings were being articulated, and between them the ground crawled with large yellow vehicles, each one spraying a cloud of mud.
‘Are people taking exams in the middle of all that?’ Mimi asked.
Whic
h term is it, I thought, what is the date, where is the rest of the world, where time didn’t begin anew with the crack of the defibrillator?
‘Not yet. There aren’t many at the end of this term anyway. But people are trying to give lectures. And, presumably, read.’
We reached the edge of the works, where they surge beyond the confines of the university buildings, swallow a stream and embark on the fallow field.
‘Oh look,’ she said. ‘The Imagining’s spread.’
‘I fear it was always meant to become endemic.’
The first signs of Imagining were observed a few weeks after the latest, wholesale sack of campus began almost two years ago, signalling the death throes of the retiring Vice-Chancellor’s literally earth-shaking vanity. First they filled in the Wetland Corridor, unfortunately before taking down the signs explaining to visitors and prospective students that it represented the University’s commitment to biodiversity and sustainability with particular reference to the wading birds who have found on campus a safe refuge from the surrounding cities and traffic. Then diggers crashed through the Nature Reserve, leaving trees killed in the act of blossoming lying brittle and trembling in the side-wind of passing cars. The obliteration of what had seemed permanent was surprisingly fast, and then for weeks we all walked past the decaying bodies of wild plum trees and oaks under which Cromwell’s troops had allegedly massed until one morning they had put up palings, as if concealing the excavation of a mass grave, some indecency more categorical than the one they had in fact committed, and the next morning the first set of slogans had appeared on the palings under inflated pictures of smiling students looking serious but pretty in laboratories and happy but responsible in gowns and mortar boards: Imagine You Are Walking Past the Future. Imagine You Make Every Day Count. It’s part of the new University Brand, which is all about Possibilities.
Mimi pointed. ‘The students must have got hold of the stuff to make one themselves.’
I looked. Imagine the Fridge Said No.
I looked more closely. ‘They’ve done a very good job. But the slogan’s too silly, it’s like the Chomsky meaningless sentence. You know, colourless green ideas. I suppose it shows that the PR machine’s gone beyond parody now, quite an achievement.’
‘Dad? I think it might be real.’
‘They’re not that stupid.’
She sighed. ‘It’s one of the problems of you not being on social media, you persistently underestimate the stupidity of everyone else.’
‘Sounds like quite a good reason for staying off it to me.’
‘Makes you naïve. I bet they mean it.’
‘I bet they don’t.’
‘OK, ten pounds.’
‘Coffee at the Portuguese café.’
‘If I lose you’ll have to restart my allowance or I can’t pay anyway.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘sounds like a poor deal.’
And I, I thought, am a total shit for taking away your allowance when you’re traumatised and brave and clever and your heart and breathing stopped barely a month ago, and I am sorry and I wish I had not done it.
‘Tell you what, Mim. If you leave the house every day for the rest of the week within ten minutes of being asked, I’ll restart your allowance. Whether you have to buy me a coffee or not.’
‘Bribery.’
‘Behaviour modification, otherwise known as parenthood.’
‘OK.’
if I could stop light
It’s only, it had turned out, meetings involving people from outside the University – I don’t count – that take place in the carpeted room with free coffee and biscuits. Today’s was in the department, in a teaching room still in use as the hour approached. I leant against the wall, reading the notices on people’s doors; they have a famous trouble-making professor whose fame derives from his public assaults on the University for which he works, demagoguery carried out under the name of ‘research’, and his office door was pasted with newspaper clippings recounting his latest declamations. ‘Prof says universities “run like prisons”’. ‘Universities “deny freedom of speech”’, and a picture of him addressing a multitude, fist raised. It is rumoured that the Troublemaker takes a salary second only to the Vice-Chancellor’s from the institution he has publicly compared to the Stasi; all the Marxist freedom fighters around here are men in jobs for life earning four times the national average wage and owning more than one house.
I saw Jenny coming down the corridor and waved. Jenny is a Teaching Fellow, which is to say someone who does five times the teaching of a tenured professor for about a fifth of the pay. She finished a Cambridge PhD three years ago and is now on her third temporary, hourly-paid contract. If she’s not careful she’ll turn into me when she grows up. She was carrying a pile of brown paper packages, which is usual because she lives in Oslo and gets all her online shopping delivered to the department to avoid Norwegian import taxes.
‘Hello. That looks like a good haul.’
She nodded. ‘Not sure they’ll all fit in my case. It’s Matthias’ birthday next week.’
‘Weren’t you being a toy mule last week as well?’
Matthias is her four-year-old. Her partner is a Norwegian artist. It’s cheaper for them all to live in Oslo, pay her weekly return airfare and send Matthias to the free forest nursery, staffed by people who hold post-graduate qualifications in child development, than it was for them to live in England, commute by train and pay hundreds of pounds a week for a nursery staffed by people who failed their GCSEs and had to settle for the minimum wage. Every English family with pre-school children should move to the civilised world and put the breadwinner on a plane once a week.
‘Yes. But these are more creative presents. Anyway, I’m here over the weekend for the Open Day and feeling guilty.’
I caught a package that was sliding off her pile. ‘If you posted those to yourself from work, would you still have to pay import tax?’
‘Probably. Anyway, Hannah would never let me and quite right too. I can manage on the plane. Did I tell you about the light sabre?’
Hannah is the departmental secretary, up to all our tricks.
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘about the light sabre.’
She leant against the wall and hugged her parcels. ‘So, we had this long discussion about whether it was OK for Matthias to have a light sabre, whether it counted as a weapon—’
‘Yes.’
‘And decided that he really, really wanted it, and it’s not a gun, and we don’t try to stop him making toy swords out of sticks. Stop looking at me like that. Anyway, so it came last week and I couldn’t get it in my case so I just carried it.’
‘Through the airport?’
‘And when I got to check-in, I answered all the questions and the woman said, what’s that? and I said it’s a light sabre and she said well, you can’t take that on the plane and I said well, can you check, because it’s my son’s birthday present and I really don’t want to disappoint him and she said yes, but it’s not safe, is it? and I said it’s perfectly safe, it’s meant for young children and she said I suppose if you say it’s a toy. It looks like a real one, that’s all. I’ll have to ask.’
‘A real light sabre? Handy.’
‘And I started to say look, if I could stop light I probably wouldn’t need your aeroplane in the first place, would I, but then I thought no, Jenny, just shut up and board your damn plane. With your damn light sabre. So I did. And then I sat on the train with it all the way home.’
‘Shame,’ I said. ‘We could have used it in the meeting.’
‘We could always order some more. For meetings.’
Talking broke out behind the door, chairs scraped, and a lecturer emerged, closely followed by three or four students getting under his feet like ducklings. Do you have just a minute, please? I’m really worried about my essay. I think I might need an extension. I’m lecturing now, he said, office hours at five. The less anxious ones were taking their time, chatting, checking phones.
‘Let’s go in,’ said Jenny.
We stepped into a warm miasma of coffee, sweat and the pear-drop breath of people with colds. There were used tissues on the floor around the bin and paper coffee-cups on the tables. Jenny began to shove the desks around to make a central meeting table, which made the remaining students leave; I dragged chairs across the scarred lino floor. The windows, single-glazed, had misted over, and I tugged on the wobbly steel handles to let some of the airborne viruses out into the winter afternoon.
‘Careful,’ said Jenny. ‘We had a window fall off when someone tried to open it the other day.’
I peered down five storeys onto the courtyard below, where the usual huddle of smokers gathered under umbrellas beside the sign saying No Smoking within 15 metres of this Building. ‘Did it fall onto anyone?’
‘No, but the glass went a long way.’
‘Adam?’
Simon Godnestone-pronounced-Gunston and some other people, the kind of people who don’t get to meetings until someone else has arranged the furniture, had come into the room to see my rear end sticking out of the window. I turned round. My fingers had picked up something sticky from the window handles but it was too late not to shake hands. The head of department, who is a man in a tweed jacket with a face like a startled horse and the air of being liable to bolt at any moment; a nice woman from the Architecture Department whose life’s work is the history and politics of English planned towns; a secretary to take the minutes, and James McClary, otherwise James Contrary, a sidekick of the Troublemaker.
We sat down. James McClary objected that the minutes of the previous meeting misrepresented the view of someone who wasn’t present today and implied that the misrepresentation was more conspiracy than cock-up. James McClary objected that a decision taken by the previous meeting with regard to the provision of tea and coffee during a proposed half-day workshop was unconstitutional and risked the misuse of departmental funds. James McClary further ventured to suggest that the students would not be at all happy when they learnt that, despite their petition, the department was continuing to accept catering provision using paper cups whose lids, while biodegradable, may include material sourced by the displacement of food crops in Central America; he ventured to suggest that, were students to learn of the scorn with which their views on the lids of paper cups were received by certain members of staff, they would be understandably angry and that this anger might be manifest in the annual Student Survey, which is used to compile national rankings of departments. He ventured to suggest that the presence of such lids at a workshop bearing the name of our project would merely confirm to interested observers the head of department’s failure to oppose the University’s interest in profit before education and the student experience. Jenny nudged me. Under the table, she had opened her package and was offering me a Playmobil knight in armour, with a sword in his hand, a bow slung over his shoulder and a quiver of arrows on his back.