Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  Olivia makes a sound with her tongue. It’s cicada-like, not the sucking of teeth that her mate Jasmine has perfected in wishing she’d been born a Jamaican. This sound is not hip, not hop. It’s a sigh in reverse.

  “May I have some aspirin?” she asks the cashier. One foot, then the next, back and forth, gotta slow everything down. Right. The spindly woman, who looks like she is already a mum of many even though maybe only twenty-five years old, turns to the shelves behind her and reaches for the yellow Anadin pack, turns back, slides it on the counter and waits—like a mother would—for Olivia to sort through her change for £1.20.

  “Spindly,” Olivia says, under her breath. The woman looks up at her with don’t-mess-with-me eyes like rectangles. Olivia holds on to other words—tattoo, milk, nicotine—takes the box of aspirin and leaves the shop. She sees Robin retreat down the atrium. Robin’s walk is like a bird’s, even though she’s never seen a robin walking, but he bops like something that is used to flying instead. Robin is a bebop bird. And Robin is the only bloke on the planet who has seen her cry.

  Right. She weaves through the people in the atrium—the fat, the small, the smelly, the limping, the arrogant—every one of them in last-minute coffee-and-sweets-buying mode to keep them awake through class. Their choice is limited; Thames Gateway U has been branded. The dinner ladies from last year look sad in their new brown uniforms and baseball caps. The new cafeteria food is sadder than they are. Sad and Sadder: a Netflix blockbuster. Olivia is on the student union committee that has been lobbying the governors against outsourcing to corporations for months now, but times such as they are is all she hears. Does no one see what’s happening here? Right. She lowers her eyes to avoid the faces, the sadder than sad, dumber than dumb, bleaker than bleak. Don’t take it all on yourself, Robin had said. How not to? She weaves through the bodies, weaves like that girl’s hair, like that man’s jacket, like this boy’s lies he’s telling his girlfriend, and like that boy’s flying Paralympic-style wheelchair. She heads towards the finance office. Maybe today the panting, pink-faced man will tell her when the last loan instalment will appear in her account. Her debt is already five times what she planned when all of this started. You can always ask for help, Robin said. If and when she becomes a solicitor will she really have chosen correctly over becoming Lara Croft instead? Right, but the law, really? The wheelchair boy is stuck—another thing she has to get sorted, so that being at this uni in a wheelchair gets easier than being a tuna in a can.

  Sorry. Right. She speeds up.

  Who will bury these people?

  Two and a half years of law school but there are questions they have not taught her to answer. All these questions she’s now in the habit of asking. She adjusts the satchel on her shoulder—books, court decisions—and pushes through. Who will bury them?

  “Lonely,” she says, slipped out like all the other words these days, like fish from a hand. She is going to be a rubbish lawyer.

  One foot in front of the other heading out of the atrium. There’s fog. Something clangs against metal, like a stay against a mast. She dips her chin into her scarf. In the square she searches for Robin. There’s a man with wild hair like his, but that one walks like a zombie. Students stand in clusters in front of the Watson Building where she’s headed. Smokers, listeners, worriers, huddlers. One of them could be Nasar.

  Nasar’s last message said: hop u r fine. When I meet u first time it was like a dream. I like to have a friend like u trust me if u agree to start good friendship pleas text me. I really like you …!!! Nasar.

  The first text had been short, sharp, friendly—hi how r u?—but when she asked who it was and got only his name, well, what’s up with that? The next two were check-ins, how are you today? This latest one is swag. Who is he and how did he get her number? The bloke she met in the student bar? The one in the kebab shop with Jasmine last week? The skinny, floppy emo from Robin’s class? Skinny, floppy emo boys are not called Nasar. Jasmine thinks Olivia should have taken the Italian boy up on his offer—the short, funny man who chirpsed them up at Nico’s bar. He wanted her to get on the back of his motorcycle in order to Moto and Guzzi to Bologna. Jasmine egged him on. Jasmine placed his hand on Olivia’s lap. Jasmine knows shite about anything except shagging. But for Olivia shagging has been put on hold for so long, while there was shite to sort out, that even if she is secretly chuffed by being Nasar’s dream to meet, oh crikey. She will ask Robin—and plan not to blubber like the last time—why, oh why love feels like a threat.

  She could probably take out an injunction against Nasar, charge him with harassment under the 1998 Malicious Communications Act, because she’s entitled to protection from indecent, offensive or threatening electronic communication. But, only the lonely: Nasar might just need a friend.

  It’s her father’s fault. Six days of having to hold her tongue at home in front of Catherine, six days of thinking so much her head will burst, the image of Ed standing behind that desk, all strawless scarecrow-like and them talking all casual-like until she could see from his face that both of them were putting two and two together to make the twenty-two years of age that his daughter would be. If it hadn’t been for her father she wouldn’t be needing to enlist Robin, give Nasar a second thought, or do anything other than study because she needs to get a first.

  Her final-year project was meant to be a simple route to a first-class degree, on account of it being straightforward while the rest of life wasn’t. The law is the law, after all, and not a Tomb Raider game. But now even that has come unravelled, and it’s like she’s dubstepping to Unkle’s “Only the Lonely.” It started simply enough: getting more details on paupers’ graves—like depth, how many, how much, how weird—and on how the council was dealing with the foxes, because this whole idea came about when she heard that foxes were ravaging paupers’ graves. She got hooked and started to research the rights of untraceable, unknown deceased residents to a funeral. When Olivia called the council, the clerk corrected her use of “paupers’ graves” and transferred her call to the Safeguarding Adults Team. The next day, out of nowhere, no-how, no-possible-way, she was standing in front of the funeral officer who looked too weak to do a job that might entail a bit of digging and lifting coffins. And then he started to look at her all funny, like the fall-down-on-his-knees scarecrow of Oz. When she asked Edward Reynolds if he knew a certain Catherine Mason, one time of Romford Road, the look on his face made the whole entire room a Rubik’s cube, the colours lining up, like for the first time ever.

  Her friend Jasmine says “Ah, Jeezus” when things like this happen. Jasmine’s mother is a born-again, on account of her husband moving out seven years ago, but when Jasmine says Jeezus it sounds more like something from the devil, because Jasmine is bent on showing her mother that her dad was justified. Jasmine’s not her real name. Eleanor is only Jasmine because in secondary school, when her dad left and the ground dropped out of her life, she had to find something different to hold on to. So Jasmine loves this kind of thing that bonds blud and happens regular-like in their ends. “That’s extra …” Jasmine said, first thing, when Olivia told her about the Rubik’s cube moment, and she touched the side of Olivia’s head. “Why did your dad leave again?” she added, now coiling the end of her own long hair around her index finger, as though the leaving of dads could be measured like curls.

  “Jaz,” Olivia said, “my father is a caring man,” and that shut her up, but truth is that’s what Olivia’s mother said, over and over, “Your father is a caring man,” when Olivia’s questions at the age of thirteen turned to why Catherine was letting different blokes kiss her in the sitting room of the house they share with Granddad and Nan, and why there was never a bloke who stayed, and where, after all, was the one who was responsible for Olivia? Wouldn’t you save kissing for someone who wouldn’t be leaving? And maybe he left because you were giving it away so easily? And wouldn’t it make sense to avoid that ever happening, ever?

  Catherine keeps the secret of E
dward the way a girl in Olivia’s primary school kept a snake in a terrarium. The girl loved that snake, tended it like she could do anything the boys did, but one morning when they went into the classroom the snake was gone from the glass tank: only a circle of moulted skin was left; snake-shaped lace draped over the large rock at the far right of the terrarium. From that day on the girl was terrified of all snakes, but mostly scared that the one that got away would show up at any moment, larger, slimier, wild. When Catherine talks about Edward at a distance, she says things like this—“he cared”—but when the question of why he left crops up there’s the girl-with-the-snake sound in her voice. And for Olivia there’s a once-upon-a-time of a father who sang a song to himself, over and over. A simple, spiralling song that Olivia hears sometimes out of nowhere. When Catherine says these things about him and then returns to her fashion magazines and makes deadpan comments like Innit a nightmare that some women of her age wear short shorts, the song comes back. Tra-la-la-la-la.

  Olivia walks faster.

  “Robin,” she says again.

  Robin let her sit there and cry, not asking her to stop, not asking her to do anything, just telling her that you don’t have to fix everything all by yourself.

  Right.

  When she arrives at the finance department, she is hot and opens her jacket. She leans over the counter trying to catch the attention of the pink-faced man she usually talks to. Her jumper rides up, her waist rubs the melamine rind of the countertop, and ahh, she catches the eye of the black-haired woman with glasses, who, oh please, this time, will not say that these things take time.

  ED

  It sounds like the earth’s turning too fast, the planet louder than last week, and the traffic on Ripple Road hungry-hungry for getting to work, when work is the last place anybody really wants to be. Ed waits, waits, waits for the traffic that does not cease. He should go farther up to the zebra crossing near Sleepwell Bedroom Furniture, but man he’d be tempted to stop in for a lie-down rather than head to work. His toe is throbbing, stubbed last night on the damn ledge that juts up outta the floor towards his bathroom, because he was too fired up, too buzzy to stand still: there is so much to tell her.

  He is going to be late, and even when he gets there he won’t be able to concentrate, with only two hours’ sleep last night thanks to—all night—practising there in his kitchen how to say it. A car comes close up to his foot and he has to pay attention now or he’ll be mash-up to slop and never get to tell her a thing.

  He hurries towards the crossing, his shoes pinching his toes, and he takes it at a pace. If she’s willing to meet him again, if her mother hasn’t poison-up her mind, then he will tell her that in Guyana there is fair and there is unfair, and some people does resist their coexistence and they will resist and resist until something changes or explodes, yes man. Yes, this is one of the tiny amount of the things he will tell her. Even a child who is a grown-up now needs to know things about where she is from. And who she is from, never mind the jumbies of the past. He cannot lose her again.

  Miracles happen, man, miracles happen. In she walked to his offices six days ago, and there in her face was something he knew like his hand. Funny, funny feeling, that: when you know a face as a baby then all of a sudden it’s there, same face, but a woman face. He has to tread softly-softly in this new world, to expect nothing, and to mention Catherine only when it feels safe to do so. How he loved that name, loved it so much he has barely said it for eighteen years. To anyone he met later called Catherine he would say, hey Cathy, or all right Kate, but never Catherine. He rubs the bald part of his head first, then runs his hand over the short dog-like pelt at the back. Man, there are miracles.

  Inside Sydney House the hall is smelling better than yesterday, when that limping, overcoat-and-sandals man who sleeps on George Street in cardboard came in especially to piss and shit, as if to say, here, look after that, Safeguarding Adults Team, and he left a trail of he foulness, piss running all along the floor for so. The cleaners have done good.

  What is the price of miracles?

  If he loses his job just as he regains his daughter, he will consider himself one giant step ahead of the Barking and Dagenham Council, so never mind. Out of the three Protection, Funeral and Conference Officers, he is the least educated but the oldest. Sammy has the most experience and seniority, and Ralph is a specialized social work graduate, so he knows he’s the one most likely for the chop, if it comes. But never mind, because even though he’s losing bulk except in the belly, he’s still a man with arms that could wrestle a cow like daddy did when the cow in Berbice had her foot caught up in wire and thought daddy was trying to kill she. That cow fought hard-hard, and his daddy took the cow head by the horns and bent it so, and the beast twist up and fall down to let the men hold she there and unwrap the wire slowly, slowly, for her to be released.

  “Alright, Wood,” says Sammy when Ed enters the Safe and Sorrow room as the two of them like to call their office. Ralph is too serious to make fun of their work and the kind of people they have to watch out for, but Sammy’s all for lightening things up a little. Sammy is the real thing, though, and takes on his job like these people are family, goes into their homes and bears the smells and the sights always with a smile. Sammy is a damn good fella. Sometimes when there’s not much happening in the way of advice-giving to the public or securing council flats that have been abandoned or making sure pets get sent to the shelter if the resident has died or is in hospital, or when there are no care homes needing recalibrating or help with the basics, Sammy likes to lime and watch football on his brand new iPad. Sammy might be younger than Ed is, but Sammy is the main man. The two of them alone held things together for the longest time, but with the previous government their budget was increased and they were allowed to hire Ralph. The three of them get along fine, never mind Ralph’s damn seriousness. But now it looks like one of them is going to get shafted. And it won’t be Sammy, because he’s too good.

  “Good, good, Sammy, You?”

  “Fuck yeah, Hammers winning at last.”

  Sammy breathes football night and day and loves it more than his wife, who doesn’t particularly seem to mind. Days are easier with him around because Sammy is always full of hope—even when there’s nothing better to hope for than a draw.

  “Whatever it takes, Sammy, whatever it takes, right? I’m glad you’re happy.”

  “Better than the dogs, Wood, that’s all I’m saying.” And it’s true, Ed does succumb to good odds at the track now and then. Ed isn’t big on sport. Besides the dogs, he can get fired up about horse racing, but he has trouble seeing that as a sport, except for what the horse does. If he hadn’t come to London as a young man in 1974 because President Burnham had dreams of being Fidel Castro, he might still be at the betting shop below sea level in Georgetown or at the track a metre above sea level in Berbice, and he might still be just watching them run instead of meeting Catherine, nearly tripping over his own feet for those green eyes, putting up with vexation from her dad, and getting to help Olivia grow to the point when full sentences were coming out of her mouth.

  When you tell people you used to live below sea level they think you mad or joking, but true-true, that is where Ed moved to as a young man from Berbice, and where houses are built on stilts, where the whole of the town is pouring out into the sea with the Demerara River, in the effluence of loam, gold and sanity of an entire country. Is that the kind of thing you tell a daughter? And if you start, do you stop? Are there ever things a father should leave out? Olivia will need to know these facts about her father and the kiskadee-kaieteur-foo-foo-garlic-pork trimmings of what makes him.

  “You okay, Wood?”

  “Yes, Sammy, fine, fine. Just miles away.”

  Sammy is forty and fat with lots of hair. But he’s a good man. And that’s another thing Ed has to tell Olivia: that in Guyana black and Indian men used to have to work together in public but didn’t like each other in private, but that is changing and thing
s are better since the time he had to go back there in ’85 to help his ailing daddy and ended up staying too long, when, man, it was bad and the Guyanese dollar was worthless. Blacks and Indians, like him and Sammy, they are fine-fine now.

  Ed sits at his desk and turns on his computer. The requisition order for an Italian family to secure the belongings of a now deceased lodger was drawn up yesterday but the landlord was contacted only late in the evening, so this needs immediate processing. Martinelli: a good name; has its own steel band behind it. Aged twenty-four. Lord. This is the vex-he part of the job, the bad news arrows that get launched across the internet to land in who-knows-whose heart on an otherwise good day. Ed prefers the practical tasks. Before he checks the Safe and Sorrow office e-mails he fights sleep by uploading the photo he sent to himself from his home machine last night, one he found in the box beneath his bed, the one with photos of Catherine and Olivia before life bruk them up. In the scanned photo of the three-year-old Olivia, she wears a white party dress with lace and frills at the shoulders, white ankle socks and black patent leather shoes. Her face is dough-like round and slice-my-heart happy, and she holds up a T-shirt that says I want my mummy. Yes, girl, true-true.

  “Edward,” Catherine would say, her voice coming from the kitchen. “Edward,” drawing out the last syllable. “Edwaard!” Then she’d tell him all the things that needed doing and fixing. “Wood,” Olivia would say, trying to copy her mummy. “Wooood … open,” as she toddled up to him with her lime-green plastic box that was a toy enough just to open, fill with stones, grass, buttons, pennies, and close again. And Wood he became.

  Man, those miracles.

  “You have a funeral,” Sammy says, and raises his hand in the air above his keyboard before hitting send to sling the e-mail over. Ed’s heart does a little hiccup; these funerals seem to be coming more regularly, and Sammy has given over most of them to him.