Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  Olivia catches his eye from across the aisle, but on remembering their final meeting last year, he bows his head and ducks behind the rack of greeting cards, pretending to look for a suitable card for the now confirmed autumn event. Happy Birthday: Son, Daughter? Oh God. He doesn’t want to be a man. He wants to be a lightning bolt.

  He returns to the lecture room with the Kit Kat in his breast pocket. Bayo is sitting straight, like an actor ready for a cue. She stares at him, but he bends down to pick up his notes from the floor. Image: the hands of the woman from the Epicure Café on Upper Street, the way she holds his cup as she walks towards him, the way her thumb releases the saucer as she places it before him. He arranges his notes, turns on the computer and projector, and opens the PowerPoint presentation.

  “I celebrate myself and sing myself,” he says, and the room goes quiet. This worked on him as an undergraduate at Warwick, and he knows it will work now. He looks over at Bayo, who appears agitated. “And what I assume, you shall assume …” he continues, and when the students realize he’s quoting they will relax, but for now he is content to unsettle them, to confound them with the possibility that he might be saying something real. Except that Bayo has begun to wring her hands so he breaks out of his performance sooner than planned.

  “Whitman refers to his book Leaves of Grass and the American Civil War as though they are one, making a link between them to the democratic soul, and the struggle for unification.” He sees Bayo look down into her lap. “Not dissimilarly, Elsaesser and Hagener explore the reflective and reflexive potential of cinema, using the mirror and the face as a motif for understanding the self and the other …”

  Bayo looks up again. Robin cannot push away the face of the woman in the Epicure Café, which beams like his grandmother’s in a photo of her at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. A tiny stranger who smiles at him in a way that makes all things seem possible.

  FRANCINE

  Living on air is harder in the drizzled dullness of February, chilling at six, when Francine leaves the university. Hungry. Trying to stay that way. But sleepy as she drives west across London and the radio repeats the news of Gaza violence she heard at lunchtime. Her flat is too far away at this hour of the day. She presses the dashboard button for Kiss FM and sings along behind the wheel, because it’s true, everybody wants to rule the world.

  It’s an hour before she nears home, turning towards Kilburn Park, then up Salusbury Road towards Willesden Lane. John Clarke would have hated Kilburn, hated its pound shops, cheap garments and kebabs. The dark brick, the crowded-front-teeth of a road that leads onto hers. John fucking Clarke would–

  There’s a sliding, screeching, wet bang. A body flies above the car in front of hers and glass hits her windshield. Her car smacks the back bumper of the small red sedan. Now only one sound: a low pumping vibration all around. She puts the car in park. Fuck, fuck, fuck. And opens the car door. Near the oak tree at the side of the road is a small, contorted body, face down. She has trouble breathing. She trains her eyes on the jeans, twisted around impossibly bent legs, the black leather jacket, the motorcycle helmet, tilted up just enough to have broken the neck. The clothes are emptied, breath having wrinkled them in its leaving. The pumping vibe deepens: a bass line that moves up the back of her own neck.

  “I think it’s a girl …” a voice says, and cinnamon wafts through the fugue of voices. “Ooh, look at the legs.” Francine looks at the legs again to try to see this girl, but she is sure this pile of clothing belongs to a man (beer, cigarettes, stale cologne). She walks towards it: or just a boy. His bent leg shimmers like it’s going to dissolve, like particles are separating to show her the skin, twisted tendons, broken bones within. Thank God his mother isn’t here to see. Thank God it’s she who witnesses this, not his mother, who will next see him when a sheet is pulled down to reveal a face, scrubbed and bloodless, in the morgue.

  The driver of the red sedan, over which the boy flew, is slumped at his steering wheel, window open, his body uninjured and his face a stiff mask. Francine stands among the strewn motorcycle parts. Someone is asking for an ambulance on 999. Someone else whimpers, “He wasn’t going fast.” And the driver slowly gets out of the red car. Mum, she thinks, but doesn’t know why all this mummy, mummy for the shattered boy by the oak tree.

  Sitting down on the curb, dizzy, as the others keep talking—“It’s not a girl, look”—she spots a young man running towards them.

  “Don’t touch him; leave him, let me do it,” the young man yells. He tells them he’s a medical student and will try to help. His accent is Scottish. She watches his curly head as he turns the body over and lifts the helmet’s visor, then tilts and blows, one, two, three, again, one, two, three, through the broken, bloody face. Once more, harder.

  The driver of the red sedan leans down to say something to the Scottish doctor. One car later and it would have been she who hit the boy. One car later and it would have been Francine who had to see his mum’s face in court. Her knee begins to tremor. Fuck, fuck. She takes a deep breath. (Rubber, asphalt, and a burst of aftershave.)

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the med student says as he stands up. His eye is in a wink, sealed partially shut by the blood from the motorcyclist’s face. Francine stands up, retches, then throws up and, from habit, stares down at it on the pavement.

  She looks again at the med student’s face as he wipes blood from his mouth. He catches her eye. Cry. Cry, she thinks. But he doesn’t. It’s the driver of the red sedan who begins weeping.

  “I only saw him fly through the air,” she’s able to say to the police when they finally arrive. “I have to go,” she says, adamantly, and her tongue touches a fleck of vomit on her lip. But one officer keeps asking her questions, while another questions a Filipino nanny who is worried about being deported. The med student whose name—Ryan Broughton—she listens carefully for, speaks to the third officer on the scene. The driver of the red sedan is led to the back seat of the second police vehicle. “I have to go,” she says again and heads to her car before the paramedics have lifted the body into the ambulance.

  Ryan Broughton catches her eye just before she climbs behind the wheel. At which stage of medical school do doctors become impassive to dead bodies? How is Ryan Broughton digesting the taste of the crushed face he sucked on? How respectfully he had turned over the ruined body. Takes just a little to be decent.

  At home she dreams that every wall in her flat is painted yellow. In the middle of the night she wakes to a gush between her legs and throws back the duvet to reveal a blood-soaked mattress.

  ROBIN

  It’s safe to leave. The atrium is in darkness; the drizzle outside will set the tone for his evening. Robin walks out of the building. The usual few students, the security guard. He looks around for the curvaceous American woman who works in QA—the body of the mature Mae West, the face of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara. She is always staring at him, always on the verge of chatting him up, but she must have left already. Fact is that rain can fall as fast as twenty-two miles an hour, so this drizzle isn’t the worst it could be, but home would be a better place just now. He takes the path towards the bus stop and waits.

  Emma left two messages on his voicemail while he was teaching. She doesn’t trust his reaction to the news about their baby. So she shouldn’t. It’s a beautiful thing, she says; it is for me, is it for you?

  Deleuze: Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

  In his kitchen he wipes down the white subway tiles behind the gas hob, dotted with bolognese sauce from last night. Emma’s news came just after dinner; he would never normally have missed these spots. He scours the stainless steel hob itself, the wood counter, scrubs the corners, presses hard against the rings from cups, enjoying this cleaning more than anything else today. Fact is that tomatoes are not as benign as we consider them. Their Latin name means “wolf peach.” Cleaning takes over from reading some days, and then he allows himself to go to bed. But he has to make two phon
e calls this evening, before he falls asleep with the BBC World Service at his ear. Today, the third of February, is his mother’s birthday and she will have been wondering all day what might be taking him so long to call. His father will have taken her to lunch in Falmouth, possibly to Rick Stein’s Fish, and now they will be reading in front of the fire, toasting each other for another day of a long, relatively happy relationship in a predominantly happy life. His brothers will have already called, from New York, from Manchester, and Robin will be the only missing element of his mother’s measured happiness.

  The other call will also be to Cornwall. Emma’s move was right for her, and when he tells his parents the news his father will secretly wish for a granddaughter and will offer to build them a summer house in their garden that extends towards a cliff over the sea.

  He turns the volume down on Emil Gilels who is playing the Beethoven piano sonata that his mother tried to learn throughout his entire childhood, her failure to do so remaining one of her only regrets. He dials Emma’s number first.

  “Hi, hi,” he says, and listens for the right thing to say next. “Not bad, tired,” he says, which is obviously wrong. “Long day, you?”

  Emma describes her mother’s reaction to the pregnancy in such detail that he cannot keep his eyes open. Then her sister’s, then the fact of driving to the sea and walking the cliff path, the path he himself showed her. At this he perks up. He has a twinge of panic for her safety, but then the thought of his child growing up in Cornwall brings pleasure. Gorse, heather, pyramid orchids in the rolling dunes, golden samphire in the cliffs, salt marshes, slanted rain, flavoured air.

  The day he and Emma broke up he said, I wish you love in the sea cliffs; I wish you everything you want. She had wanted a baby, but neither of them had really wanted each other.

  “And the news from your end? How has that gone over?” she asks him. He hasn’t told a soul. Emma hears this in his hesitation. Her silence shames him further.

  The phone tucked under his chin, he starts to buff the stainless steel kettle, heightening the double-arched reflection of the kitchen window within it. They had come together out of inertia. Friends for years, they had turned to one another after the breakup of far more necessary and romantic connections, she to him for comfort, both of them for sex, and even that wasn’t necessary. His relief at her decision to quit her job in dentistry and move from London to the southwest to teach yoga was manifest in his saying, blithely, I love you, before having sex one last time in an effort to marry theory and practice.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks, wanting to take the morning sickness away for her, to make everything good for her, wanting at the same time to bury his face in the straight blond hair of the Polish waitress at Epicure and to tell her how her lack of awareness of her own beauty has loosened the tiles of his sanity.

  “Still woozy in the mornings, but a bit better. Skin looks great.” Her voice invites him to intimacy.

  “Oh, good,” is all he can say.

  FRANCINE

  Francine is bent over the toilet basin for the third time today, fingers deep in her throat and the omelette and toast high up in her belly, and for the third time unable to coax anything out.

  This has happened before, through the years, when it stops working, when she has to find another way. Damn. She straightens up. The phone rings and makes her jump. She has already made her excuses for her third day of absence from work. There is no one else who would call.

  “Patricia,” she says to the woman’s voice. And because Patricia has a gift for extraction, she finds herself telling her everything, from the wet bang to the crinkled jeans and finally the young doctor’s face. What she doesn’t tell Patricia about is the flood in the middle of the night and the disappearance of her craving for sugar. She doesn’t say, that’s it, last friggin’ hurrah, a final shove towards change. But this change feels like a reversing, back to age thirteen, when things swirled like this, were scary like this.

  “Ronnie Scott’s,” Patricia commands, “tonight, come on.” Francine looks out her window. The plane tree’s branches have recently been pruned and the knotty limbs are clothed only in translucent bark, like gauze over veins. She can see into her neighbour’s front room. He has no shirt on. Nothing is opaque anymore.

  “Sorry, no, can’t … really not feeling up to it,” she says, standing firm against Patricia’s persistence. And to her surprise Patricia lets her off the hook with a warm wish to see her at work soon and an offer to bring around food and magazines. Francine promises she’ll be back at work tomorrow and will check in with Patricia around lunchtime.

  “Sure, sure,” Patricia says. Yeah, like there is anything that is.

  The next morning the atrium smells different—like Dr. Pepper in the summer. When they were teens her brother told her that Dr. Pepper was for losers. Scott knew who the losers and winners were, being so popular with other kids that he spent weekends at their homes or cottages. She’d take those opportunities to order Dr. Pepper at the A&W, her father’s treat to make up for his desperate widower cooking and her loneliness without her brother at home. It was around this time that she learned the trick—the two-fingered flick on that flap at the back of the throat and whoosh—gone was the strawberry ice-cream sundae, the hot dog and French fries, the Dr. Pepper. Scott, whose annual Christmas conversation on the telephone consists of lecturing her on how she needs to think about her long-term security, will never know just how right he had been about Dr. Pepper. Maybe she should try the Atkins diet again. All that meat. She checks her butt with her hand, making a show of brushing something off her skirt—another little trick. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is.

  She asks for a skinny hazelnut latte, rhyming off the order comfortably now that Starbucks is on campus. She feels students behind her, their pushiness, like she’s taking too much time. One of the two dark brunettes behind her glares at her and Francine finds the face hard, blunt, the first opaque thing she’s seen in days. She touches her throat, sore from the failed barfing.

  “Order me a cappuccino,” the other woman says to her friend who says something back in a private language, then they giggle and Francine feels a lurch in her gut like she’s going to release air. Nothing is solid; now even the hard mask of the woman’s spite seems porous.

  As she leaves with her latte, she spots that guy, the young lecturer. Robin joins the queue and Francine reaches for a napkin, a small delaying tactic. Ten years younger and she’d be following him around like a stray pet; Robin is the kind of guy she should have gone for instead of John Cuntface Clarke. Robin has eyes that squint when he’s thinking, and he’s always thinking when she sees him. It’s not his looks—fine, but nothing special—it’s something else, maybe in the way he walks. Can kindness show in a walk? Teacher of film studies and befriender of students, Robin would know the real her. He walks like he’d be a good kisser. Annie Hall, she wants to ask? Does he teach it? She follows him out of the atrium, leaves him behind in the square and heads back to her office.

  Three days = 198 unopened e-mails.

  Google is the only tolerable option.

  There are three news articles for “motorcycle accident Queen’s Park,” and now she knows his name: Dario Martinelli, 24, of Barking. A boy. She also reads the name of the driver of the red sedan, but she can’t hold it in her sights, skips over it to find that he has been charged with dangerous driving causing death.

  She searches Facebook, where Dario Martinelli’s timeline has photos, postings in Italian, and recent posts in English about how much he loves riding his motorcycle and how the horrendous London winter has kept him off it and wouldn’t it be great to be back in Bologna and going fast, with you, friend. Her throat tightens. The most recent post is from Roberto Martinelli—brother? cousin?—in Italian, but she can make out enough to know that la famiglia grieves the loss and that the (airless, shrunken) body will be brought home for interment. She clicks off quickly. His wrinkled clothes. He is Dario. He
has a family. Dario will have an interment, and Dario’s Facebook page will remain forever, his beloved motorbike preserved there in mint condition.

  Dario is dead. People die every minute of every day. What’s going on with her?

  She seeks the young doctor, Ryan Broughton. Finding Ryan will help. Ryan knows what death tastes like. But she can’t find him, so she returns to Google and asks it a question. There are countless answers: “Death tastes like blackened carbon”; “death tastes like almonds and spoiled fruit”; “death tastes like McGriddles”, and her favourite: “it tastes like feet.”

  Sayonara.

  OLIVIA

  “Robin?” Olivia mumbles. Oi. But he won’t hear; he’s got those wanna-hide shoulders hunched over the row of chocolate in the far aisle. Robin. If she could steal Robin, right, she’d give him to her mum, she would, because he would make her lighten up; his words would open her. Instead there’s Ed, and what is she to do with him? Right. Six days now, six days it’s been since finding him. Edward of the lonely dead. Edward like a rabbit in a high-beam when he first saw her; Edward whose life’s work has been to bury the unknown, unloved, unmoneyed people of Barking and Dagenham. Ed. Her dad.