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Higher Ed

Page 1

by Tessa McWatt




  ALSO BY TESSA McWATT

  Out of My Skin

  Dragons Cry

  There’s No Place Like …

  This Body

  Step Closer

  Vital Signs

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2015 Tessa McWatt

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2015 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  A portion of this novel, titled “A Taste of Marmalade,” was published as a Kindle Single in September 2013.

  Excerpt of six lines from “Howl” from Collected Poems 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1955 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McWatt, Tessa,

  Higher Ed / Tessa McWatt.

  ISBN 978-0-345-81476-0

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81478-4

  I. Title.

  PS8575.W37H53 2015 C813′.54 C2014-906353-9

  Cover images: (hand) © Wolfgang Kraus, (letters) © Kmitu, both Dreamstime.com

  Interior images: (hands) © Sergey Sikov / Dreamstime.com

  v3.1

  For the students

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Opposite of Thirteen

  Francine

  Robin

  Francine

  Robin

  Francine

  Olivia

  Ed

  Robin

  Francine

  Olivia

  The Taste of Marmalade

  Katrin

  Francine

  Robin

  Olivia

  Katrin

  Francine

  Olivia

  Ed

  Francine

  Olivia

  Katrin

  Ned Time of Marmalade

  Robin

  Ed

  Olivia

  Katrin

  Olivia

  Katrin

  Robin

  Francine

  Robin

  Olivia

  Robin

  Francine

  Katrin

  But Now I’m Found

  Ed

  Katrin

  Francine

  Katrin

  Robin

  Ed

  Olivia

  Ed

  Katrin

  Robin

  Francine

  Cold Blue Steel

  Olivia

  Robin

  Katrin

  Francine

  Olivia

  Francine

  Robin

  Francine

  Ed

  Olivia

  Robin

  Ed and Robin

  Olivia and Ed

  Francine

  Olivia

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  CAST

  (in order of appearance)

  The Administrator—Francine

  The Film Professor—Robin

  The Law Student—Olivia

  The Civil Servant—Ed

  The Waitress—Katrin

  SUPPORTING PLAYERS

  The Anthropology Professor—Patricia

  The Film Student—Bayo

  The Motorcyclist—Dario

  The Driver—Rajit

  The Driver’s Wife—Mrs. Mahadeo

  The Medical Student—Ryan

  The Admirer—Nasar

  The Civil Servant’s Colleague—Sammy

  The Civil Servant’s Brother—Geoffrey

  The Student Union President—Moe

  The Waiter—Alejandro

  The Café Manager—Claire

  The BFF—Jasmine

  The BFF’s Mum—Jasmine’s mum

  The Law Student’s Mum—Catherine

  The Head of Quality Assurance—Lawrence

  The Administrator’s Brother—Scott

  The Film Professor’s Ex-girlfriend—Emma

  The Administrator’s Ex-boyfriend—John Clarke

  The Law Student’s Granddad —Granddad

  The Law Student’s Uncle—Eric

  The Waitress’s Mum—Beata

  The Med Student’s Mum—Mrs. Broughton

  The Film Department Head—Richard

  The Philosopher—Gilles Deleuze (as himself)

  The Deceased—Anna-Maria Hunter, Keith Meyers, Jonathan

  Henley, Diyanat Bayar

  … who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

  who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

  who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall …

  —Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

  THE OPPOSITE

  OF THIRTEEN

  FRANCINE

  Sayonara, sucker! Francine swipes the back of her hand across her mouth, pushes the handle, straightens up, and watches the water swirl in the bowl. Air alone will do; she can live on air. Sometimes breath puffs her up so much that she feels like she will explode.

  She pushes the handle once more so that there is not a shred of pizza left in the bowl, leaves the staff washroom and returns to her office, the door clicking open but needing a hip shove before it budges. Everything in this building is swelling. She smells barf. She picks up the cup of cold tea from her desk and sips, washing it over her teeth. There are fifteen course specifications and twenty external examiners’ reports on her desk, which need to be checked by her and passed back to programme leaders before she leaves today. She sits. Buck up, get yer ass in gear; pull yer finger out, as they say in this country. It’s unlikely that the whole department will go, isn’t it? Surely Quality Assurance and Enhancement is key to any university. She has to admit, though, that her department, like her, is a little fat. There are times when, if she wanted to, she could spend the rest of the afternoon sitting blankly in front of her screen and still get her job done.

  She sees her reflection in the screen saver’s swirling shapes, which dice up her features and blend them back again in hexagonals of eye, nose, mouth.

  A raisin Danish and some Mentos before lunch are also now gone. It’s only two in the afternoon, 1400 hours, and she’s thrown up everything she’s eaten so far. Excellent. She sits up straighter, pleased with herself for her conversion to the twenty-four-hour clock. Time stretches out with the higher numbers. Calories, they say, should be consumed in the early hours.

  She is beautiful today.

  Running her hand over her belly (okay, but …), her hips (a bit, sure), and along her thighs (yes, still!) doesn’t change her mind. All her friends back in Philly regularly told her she had a pretty face, after all. And it’s not that she doesn’t want to hold on to this confidence that normally scurries off like a startled mouse; it’s just that at fifty-three this big ass and slackening skin are not about to disappear.

  “Men like big butts,” Cindy from Philly always says, but Cindy has a black girl’s perfect ramp of a rump, which me
n like to rest their heads on after fucking. Stop. Francine Johnson (good, honest name) will feel beautiful today, all day, she promises, or she will expire in the trying.

  She does one last Google search for John Clarke. Stupid name. John-ordinary-everybody Clarke. There’s the one who is the minister, there’s the poet, the trader, the actor, the leader of the Church of Latter Day Saints. There’s even a marathon runner named John Clarke. But there’s no IT director who by now has surely procreated with the young IT star at his office, who was oh so smart and jaunty and you-would-really-like-her too—she’s kind of like a guy; we talk about sports—while Francine went to England for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for her accounting firm in its new British office. There’s no John-the-prick Clarke who led her on for eleven years, past the last days of her fertility, into the promise of a peaceful, childless life where adventures like the English one were just the beginning. And since the accounting firm’s European demise, there has been no John Clarke, supreme asshole, cuntface, cocksucking bastard, with the guts to upload an internet page that would explain himself or just say a simple, fucking sorry.

  “Sayonara, sucker,” she says as she clicks onto the Guardian Soulmates icon on the desktop, entering her log-in name, ReallyYouandMe, and her password: Isoam.

  No one has viewed her since her last log-in.

  She has no fans.

  She has five favourites.

  She has no new messages.

  She clicks through the favourites.

  “Hear, hear!” she says, raising her mug to the screen at the fifty-five-year-old widower who describes himself as “wanting to feel beloved again.” The rest are all too young for her, and they will never contact her. But their presence there, beside her profile, is better even than feeling hunger. Hunky single guys with lots of hair and good teeth—she primps her hair with her fingers, feeling the soft straightness, her most reliable feature.

  She shuts down the site and turns towards the reports.

  Give a damn, she urges herself, trying to waken her family’s work ethic, to keep her duties from slipping. She feels suddenly sick—barfed perhaps too soon—at the idea of losing her job. Returning to the States would be one failure too many. But the announcements have made it clear: there will be a round of redundancies. They will affect every sector of the university, and every department will be scrutinized. She tries to focus on the programme report for the BA in Multimedia Studies, which her colleagues call the Mickey Mouse degree. Appreciating the historical impact of Mickey Mouse is right up her alley and she would like to see the programme stay open, but with low retention rates it seems unlikely. And the data on employability is even more damning.

  How did she end up on this side of the divide? Back in the States she marched in campus demonstrations at Penn State against the local nuclear power plant. Okay, she was never arrested, but she’d been willing to be. Now she’s the lock-’em-up voice of right and wrong in this university where senior managers look to her to tell them whether people a whole lot smarter than she is are teaching to regulation. She should have finished her master’s and applied to the PhD programme in Landscape Ecology at Duke as she’d planned, but cranky John Clarke told her that studying more would be a waste of time and money. And she let his crankiness get to her and took a financial management diploma to be practical. But she knows what good learning is. She could teach her own programme, one that fits with national quality guidelines to boot. And her students would get jobs; they’d be relevant in tough times. She’d call her programme Environmental Containment, or a BA (Honours) in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

  She needs another cup of tea. Brushing her hips to smooth down her skirt, she leaves the office.

  She’s beautiful today, all day, even if the atrium smells like cheese, even if the students irritate the shit out of her with the way they clump together. She waits behind a boy clump in the line-up for food.

  “Alright then, Francine?” says Patricia over Francine’s shoulder. She turns. Oh Patricia. Pat to friends and colleagues, Patty on the dancefloor, no doubt. Patty in front of the mirror going “Oooh, I feel love, I feel love …” Always asking Francine to go out with her to salsa at Ronnie Scott’s on a Saturday night when they give you lessons. Patricia is late fifties, slim but buxom, with unplucked eyebrows and big hands, all of which she pulls off with enviable moxie. And she has a big smile and nice, straight teeth, which is something for an English woman her age, so Francine doesn’t mind her, really.

  “What do you think that smell is?” Francine asks Dancefloor Patty, who lectures in anthropology (because this gal never hid her brains so that some half-pint would love her). Francine nudges Patricia, who sparks at the touch and leans in, so that Francine has to step back.

  “There’s a hint of vanilla, I think,” says Patricia, and, oh shit, Patricia has just sniffed her.

  “I mean …” she waves her hand in the direction of the atrium, “out here,” Francine says, and she retreats to the tight corner of her I-am-beautiful day.

  “What, you mean the Starbucks smell? It’s a disgrace,” and Patricia shifts side to side, as though the topic has revved her engine. “The choice of this or Costa—brilliant—at twice the price of last term, to a company that pays no tax in Britain, to a company—”

  “That’s not what I meant …” Francine says. She takes another step back. Patricia comes across stern and composed, but on the right topic she’s a struck match of opinion. “What are you up to these days?” Francine asks her. Wood, metal, plastic, cloth: each distinct smell comes wafting in, one after the other.

  Patricia looks down at her feet and this seems to stop her hips from swaying, delivering her back to perfect composure. “It’s always hectic at the beginning of a term,” she says, raises a shoulder, and tilts her chin to it like a cat cleaning whiskers. The hair on Francine’s arm rises: Colgate toothpaste, Dove deodorant, Aussie shampoo. There’s more of this every day: the “change”—she’s still goddamn changing.

  “Seen anything good recently?” she asks, forcing her eyes away from Patricia’s shoulder, wondering if she should ask Patricia if she thinks there will even be an anthropology department next year.

  “No time,” Patricia says. “Anything in mind?”

  Damn it. Francine always falls into this trap, this feeling of being the one who has to follow through. “I’ll see what’s out there, and, yeah, we could”—she doesn’t have the guts to stop there—“get together.”

  “Excellent,” Patricia says. “Friday?”

  “Yeah.”

  Shit.

  Francine finds herself doing the thing with her silky hair that John Shitface Clarke used to tell her made his heart melt—that pulling down of her fringe in an attempt to cover her eyes. She doesn’t mean to do it; it just happens. She smiles nervously as Patricia takes her in, and Patricia responds with a smile so full and ripe that the little part of Francine that keeps being the sucker is warmed.

  ROBIN

  He doesn’t want to go mad. If this is madness he can’t have it. The wind whips off the river in front of him and slaps his cheek. Robin counts the ways madness might bear down on a man: 1) he could be born mad; 2) he could slowly, over the course of years, lose the capacity to see that actions and thoughts are separate; or 3) the self might become only a threshold, a door to multiplicities. This final point is from Deleuze, whose critical theory Robin has mined for the article he must write on motion capture and animation. Deleuze has hypnotized him with A Thousand Plateaus, but in truth Robin is most worried about number 2.

  He downs his double espresso in the Styrofoam cup, his regular mug left behind in his office this morning. This forgetfulness is surely a sign. He picks up his briefcase and makes ready to face the lecture room. He has to remember to keep his glasses high up on his nose, because Emma told him that he looks like an old man when they slide down towards the tip. Thirty-eight is the edge of old. He stands and braces himself for this second-year class in Cinema Poetics. Where
is the poetry? Where are the stressed syllables and open vowels? The wind stings his chin. Father does not rhyme with much.

  The river whips up again and only facts remain. Fact is, in 1963 this river froze, the Beatles sang “Please Please Me,” and Fellini released 8 ½. These are thoughts that don’t require action, and this is what he’s more used to, what he’s certain, almost certain, he would still prefer.

  In the atrium he nudges the glasses up further before he enters the lecture room. One, two, three … only four students are there ahead of him. Not a promising sign so early in the term. Bayo is in her seat in the front row, ready to take him on. Formaldehyde, he wants to say to her. Formaldehyde is not an easy word to spell—it was she who challenged his typo on the PowerPoint last week. In that need to act on her thought, Bayo revealed her madness. A mature student from Nigeria, her bosom broad, her hair long and straight from extensions—a swath of it wrapping over her forehead and across one eye like a pirate’s patch—Bayo’s madness is a slow-burning constant. Last term Robin caught her behind the Samuel Johnson Building setting fire to the essay he had handed back to her minutes before. Jake, Dan, and Miles also set fire to theirs, but it wasn’t lunacy; they did it together in full view in the university square. Jake is from a small northern town where a bloke is not allowed to like film and art; Miles is a thin Afro-Caribbean DJ wanna-be, and so shy that he talks into his hand as though the hand were clutching a microphone; Dan used to sell drugs to celebrities: these young men aren’t mad. Their actions were pure performance.

  He walks to the lectern and places his briefcase on the table beside it. He takes out the pen—I’m the pen your lover writes with—stolen from the Epicure Café. More students stream in, and they are loud. He looks down at his Doc Martens and starts to hum.

  He’s fucking going to be a father.

  A sheet of paper slips from his notes and floats down like a leaf. At this portent of chaos, he rushes out of the room, gripping the stolen pen, and crosses the atrium to the student union shop.

  The chocolate is along the back row with bags of Haribo, Basset’s Mint Imperials, Fruit Gums, Starbursts, Minstrels, and Jelly Aliens. Kit Kat is the one sane choice. He reaches for one and catches sight of familiar curly hair and wide cheekbones. Olivia is a third-year law student who took Cinema Poetics last year as an option and was the best student in the class. Her face is like Cleopatra’s, her hair like Shirley Temple’s, her confidence as thin but as certain as cellophane. In the second week of classes she towered over him as she asked if poets wrote only about things that are impermanent. He considered the question so thoroughly that he lost track of time, right there in front of her. Love, and water over stones, she said and brought him back. Yes. Yes, they do, he said.

 

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