Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  He checks the e-mail. The woman who needs the funeral is from Malvern Estate in Castle Green. She was forty-two, died alone, of an overdose, and the police say there is no one to bury her. So he will do it. This he is better at than knowing what to say to a grown-up daughter he last saw when she was four.

  Now that he thinks of it, returning to Georgetown to attend to his family gave him good training for this very job. In Georgetown he met a man who was real bruk up at the side of the stall where his friend Sanil sold cassava and eddoe and plantain in Bourda Market. The man had been there every day he walked through the market for the five months of money-hunting that Ed had been doing to help his brother, to keep his mother in her house in Berbice because she refused to move, and this man was worse off than Ed. There were a whole lotta them worse off, but this very-very man he felt for: his hair was natty, his feet were torn up, his arms scabby, but in his face was something you could see that was quick-quick. Ed took the man home and gave him a shower and cleaned up his feet and let him sleep in his bed for twelve hours before sending him on his way. And, boy, this was the best Ed had felt since leaving London, missing his woman and his daughter. He wanted to keep the feeling, so he did this time and again with this man and others in Georgetown.

  So, Carol at Rippleside Cemetery will be contacted on behalf of Anna-Marie Hunter, dead at forty-two, and there is the vicar to book, and he has to see about a place in the community plot, or whether she must be cremated. Of all the London jobs he’s done—insurance, accounting, his stint in Housing—this job is the proper place for him.

  And that is another thing he must tell Olivia: that after Catherine moved and told him not ever to try to find them, he learned to feel lucky for the things he didn’t lose. In Guyana plenty people have nothing.

  Olivia is training to be a lawyer, imagine. She already knows these things about life. Could be she got that from him? It’s a notion he keeps in his cheek like a squirrel keeps winter food. When he thinks of the man in the Mazaruni River, Ed knows that the proper teaching like Olivia is getting would have helped him to know how to act, what to do in the face of a crime, no matter who committed it. She will not be like her father who was expelled for truancy and bad grades from Corentyne High School. Even so, there are things she can learn from him: he can tell her about Marabunta Creek where he played as a boy, and about orange hibiscus with red veins, about frangipani, about Gafoors Shopping Complex in Rose Hall, the town where he was born, about Bartica and the wide Essequibo River like a thick vein in his own neck. Okay, yes, he has to stop thinking or tonight he will not sleep either.

  Anna-Marie Hunter is his priority now. But the most important thing about this woman’s death? Man, he is ashamed to admit it, but the abiding boon to this sad event is that it will bring him Olivia again. She wants help with her research, needs it to complete her studies this year, and this, this is what a father must do.

  ROBIN

  These departmental meetings are more frequent, the days for his research less so. His head is filled with jargon: research income; collaborative partners; knowledge transfer; impact. These are the terms that govern all of them these days, and those who rarely showed up for meetings when he first started at this university now attend regularly. “Concepts are centres of vibrations,” says Deleuze, and his more politically astute colleagues are tightly wound to the academy’s tradition of knowledge for its own sake. Until a few days ago and the announcement of his fatherhood, Robin was ready to stand alongside them, to take strike action in support of the principle of excellence. But now, in this meeting called for the film department, he sits at a desk near the back of the room like a third-class student and doodles with the Polish waitress’s pen on the last page of the agenda. Richard, department head, tells them that the dean is implementing the first measure of restructuring ordered by the vice-chancellor’s group. Film Studies and Film and Video Practice will merge, beginning in September.

  “There’s an initiative towards practice-based programmes as the key to our students being better prepared for employment,” Richard says, and Robin doesn’t disagree or make much of this. The other theorists hum with indignation: the closing of courses will mean a streamlining of outlooks, a lack of choice and the return to the values of a polytechnic, further marginalizing the students of this underprivileged borough, when once widening participation—a university graduate in every home—was the key goal. Knowledge for its own sake.

  “And this is what management think students want?” Mark, reader in cultural theory, says. “From their ‘client satisfaction’ surveys?” he adds, his fingers doing air quotes.

  “‘Key performance indicators,’” says Albert, a professor in visual theories, mirroring Mark’s air quotes. They have been here before—the hardcore old guard bemoaning the MBA managementspeak that has permeated the academy. Edu-business stocks, Robin has been told by Mark, have tripled on the global exchange markets over the last five years. The Epicure waitress is called Katrin. Her lips are like Emmanuelle Béart’s in Un Coeur en hiver.

  “As a result, there will be new job roles and titles, and a department structure that reflects the redefinition of how film is studied in the school,” Richard says. This brings grumbling about who will decide what, how will they define “new,” about the lack of consultation. “New job specifications will be posted in the coming weeks, with interviews and decisions before Easter.”

  Interviews? Now the room erupts. Robin resists sitting forward in his chair, the panic too obvious. “Are these new roles advertised externally?” he asks.

  “No,” Richard says, “but they won’t replicate the posts as they currently exist. New job specifications.”

  “But what will distinguish the candidates—among us?” Robin asks, aware that he is the most junior in the room. Richard looks flummoxed, and the others stay silent, underscoring the challenge.

  “You will take the views of the students into account, I assume?” Robin says, and sits back again.

  He pictures what is growing inside Emma. Will his long nose take shape there? Or her blue eyes? He hopes for her hands, not his, but it would be a disaster if the baby were so often as sad and angry as Emma.

  He can’t lose his job.

  “There are key performance measures,” Richard finally says. “Research, teaching, community engagement—you know the deal.”

  “Not everything is measurable,” Robin says without leaning forward, but it’s loud enough to be heard at the front of the room, and Mark slaps the desktop in a right-you-are gesture of agreement, and others offer up “Exactly,” rallying against Richard who was once one of them. Robin wishes he were able to talk like a poet. In school he wanted to write poems, to acknowledge his contradictions, to challenge his own reason. And his own foolishness.

  He hides out in his office at the end of the day again. Image: a child’s booster seat for his piano bench. His groin moves with the wrong kind of excitement. Everything is confused.

  A polite, faint knock on his door. He can’t hide the fact of the light on, so he says, “Come in.” He turns towards the door to find Olivia.

  “Robin, hello, sorry to bother you,” she says.

  It’s her hair and face that make her striking: curls like tangled seaweed, open gaze, features awkwardly set. “No problem,” he tells her and although he hopes desperately that he won’t make her cry this time, he feels grateful for the relief a student always offers. Their needs come first from the moment they sit in the chair beside his desk and, oh, what respite not to be engaged with his own petty thoughts, indecision trying to become action. He pushes his glasses up on his nose.

  “I wanted to ask your advice, or maybe your help,” she says as she sits.

  That was his word. You can always ask for help, he said at the end of last year, and she erupted in sobs. She had come to his office about a missed deadline, apologizing, detailing the facts of her life: the unmanageable workload in her law courses, the fact that her mother supported the whole
extended family, the fact that her mother kept secrets, and, with each disclosure more intimate than the last, with him leaning forward, on the verge of comforting her, finally she said that the young men her age merely wanted her to do more than she was already doing for everyone else, and this she could not stomach. He sat back, shunting his chair a little away to the left. But when she continued about all the things that needed fixing—the university, the gender divide, immigration laws—he began to admire her for the clarity of her sense of obligation, her easy recourse to action.

  “Go ahead. Ask away,” he says. He notices that Olivia is carrying a hardcover book whose spine reads Death in the Nineteenth Century. She surveys his office, up and down the shelves and over towards the window.

  “You have even more books than last year,” she says. He looks up with pride at the shelf piled with film theory, cinema history, books on their sides, books standing, rows and rows of them. Poetry chapbooks and pamphlets line the window sill. He must ask the school office for another shelf.

  “My one bad habit,” he says.

  She looks down to the book in her lap. “I was wondering if you would help me with something … part of my final year law project. I wanted to investigate paupers’ graves,” she says and looks up at him. Her brown eyes are slanted and he sees now that there might be Chinese as well as African and Caucasian blood in her. These eyes go into a squint as though she’s now embarrassed about what she’s just said.

  “Oh yes,” he says and sits forward, wanting to show enthusiasm but not yet knowing where this is going. Parenting will be like teaching—he can do this.

  “Not just about the people who can’t afford a burial, you know, but also about those who have no one,” she says. Her enthusiasm is undercut with anxiety.

  “Yes, okay.”

  “Well, whose responsibility is it?” Her eyes go wide with the question.

  “I suppose the state’s—”

  “I don’t mean for the burial, I mean to honour them,” she says.

  “I don’t know. No one’s, I guess,” he says. His sadness meets hers and waltzes through the room. She shifts and begins to tap her foot. He finds himself wanting to tell her about his baby, about Katrin and his heart.

  “My research isn’t about this, exactly,” she says.

  “Oh?” He holds her gaze, not wanting to press her.

  “But I was just wondering if in films, like, in film history, there is anything that deals with that, with how you can remember the dead, how they can be honoured.”

  He leans back. He is trying to grasp her vision. As a father he will have to entertain ideas more oblique than this. In the Mexican Western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the quest is to honour Melquiades, to find his home, to do right by him. But that is a stretch. Then there is that romantic comedy that rebranded British cinema, but that’s just—but still, yes, here is something to say.

  “Well, poetry is one way it’s been done in film.…” he says, leaning forward. Her face lights up. “‘Fear no more the heat of the sun,’” he says, but sits back; in this territory he is merely an interloper, and Shakespeare is surely not what Olivia has in mind. But her question has him churning now. A song: everyone needs their own song. He is tempted to mention “Brokedown Palace,” his secret signature tune, the song he’d like played at his own funeral. Instead he says, “But my area is really film—I use philosophy to discuss images: movement and time. Sometimes that intersects with concepts from literature, with poetry, but … that’s not the same.”

  She looks disappointed.

  “What are you looking for, Olivia?” he says, thinking that this young woman holds truth as a cup holds water. He himself is a sieve.

  “A link, I suppose,” she says, and her face looks encumbered in a way that has nothing to do with the law project. “I don’t know.…”

  He allows a silence to fall.

  “Yes, well. Maybe it’s something to keep thinking about. It sounds like you need more of a legal angle, for the dissertation,” he says, annoyed at himself for not showing her that he sees where she’s going with this. He is off his game. She looks disappointed again, but nods. She thanks him, and the curls at the back of her head jump as she walks to the door and leaves.

  Deleuze: The shame of being a man—is there any better reason to write?

  FRANCINE

  Lawrence’s tie has bold red stripes. Francine watches him walk through the cafeteria with their colleague, Simon, both of them holding lunch trays loaded with lasagne and bread pudding. But she smells oranges. And lavender. (Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens, for you and for me, from Chef Boyardee …) Across the table from her, Patricia is watching her watch them, waiting for the answer to her question. How the hell can you know why you obsess on one thing and not another? The mother of the motorcyclist keeps coming up, simple, but this has not been enough of an answer for Patricia, who is tracing the path of Francine’s eyes as they jump from Lawrence to the students in the queue who are doing the hokey-pokey on the spot, earphones in, all of them jangling inside themselves. Francine can almost hear the music, can almost feel the tremors in their legs. The orange smell is heightened, peeled—all of it, everything excoriated.

  She looks again at Lawrence, who is not dancing inside or anywhere else. One day last week he wore a bright purple tie. Lawrence thinks he’s outrageous, but Francine can see through his tie to his shirt, through his shirt to his skin, through his skin to his heart to see that it’s big but broken. She knows that last year his wife told him she was having trouble seeing how they could live together in the same house for the rest of their lives. Lawrence, who heads up Quality Assurance and Enhancement, used to talk to Francine on their lunch hours, on away days, when they’d break from the group and walk and he would smoke and she’d pretend she did too. At one point in the past few years Francine thought Lawrence was starting to see her as more than a sympathy buddy, and she even started to find his fat fingers sexy. The gossip is that Lawrence had an affair with a woman at his gym, his wife moved out, and even though he’s single he no longer misses her. But Francine sees through the red stripes, through all of it. Oh Larry. Lawrence is maybe like Mary Tyler Moore’s Mr. Grant (Oh Mr. Graaaaaant). She holds back her smile and turns her attention back to Patricia.

  She answers finally: “Well, what would it be like to get that call from the cops—the English cops, while you’re in Italy and maybe planning to visit your son who moved to London for work?” The cafeteria hums. On his way past, Lawrence beams her a smile, which Francine returns.

  “You’re romanticizing it,” Patricia says, and Francine sits back, wary that Patricia, who doesn’t seem at all like Dancefloor Patty here in the throbbing presence of all these young people, is turning her into one of her anthropological subjects, doing psychoanalysis on the fact that Francine has been constantly sick and disoriented since the sight of Dario’s bent, emptied legs.

  “Explain,” she says, pushing the chicken thigh on her plate through the sauce.

  “You like to think you had a connection to him, because you saw him die, but this is about you, not him,” Patricia says, and maybe this is a step too close to the truth or maybe it isn’t. “Maybe it was yourself you saw lying face down on the road,” she says, and after a pause, “or maybe your son—a son.”

  “What are you talking about?” Francine puts her fork down. The Atkins diet isn’t working for her and Patty should stick to the dance floor. She looks up again as Lawrence laughs with Simon. His gappy teeth look like a ten-year-old’s.

  “I mean,” Patricia catches Francine’s eye. “I mean, you seem traumatized.”

  Francine looks back down at her chicken. Maybe she should try the raw food diet. She could sprout her own sprouts. She won’t tell Patricia that she knows the name of the driver of the red sedan—Rajit Mahadeo—and that he is charged with dangerous driving causing death. Rajit Mahadeo is a name far removed from Francine Johnson. “And how have you been, Pat?”
she says, trying out familiarity.

  “Fine. Busy, but this term is lighter than last, so, fine.”

  “Your book?”

  “Mmmm. I might have lost the lust for it,” Patricia says softly, and Francine wonders how one has lust for a topic like the anthropology of water (“not water itself,” Patricia said when first explaining it, “the necessity of water”) in the first place. At least Patricia has the lust for something.

  “Shame, sounded cool,” Francine says. Patricia would never say cool. Francine is merely trying to keep the kindness floating.

  “I’d rather be in the garden, all year round if it weren’t for winter. I’m trying orchids this year. I’m not very good,” says Patricia.

  This shared interest in plants is not something Francine is willing to acknowledge just yet; besides, lots of middle-aged women like to grow things. She used to grow vegetables when she lived with Auntie T, but hasn’t touched a garden in decades. Dancefloor Patty lives her passions. But there’s also something delicate about her—in a horsey-woman blond-bun kind of way. Those white shirts. And blue … slacks … you’d have to call them. And Oxfords. She comes from academic stock, from a long line of philosophers and mathematicians, but she prefers people science. She writes about people as they walk towards water, as they tilt towards the sun, as they bend in fields. Francine looks at her hands now and sees that despite the desiccated skin, Patricia has girly fingers that played with dolls. Probably made them perform passion plays and tragedies. Patricia would have been a girl who put on shows, who could skip faster than all the other girls, who built ant farms.

  “We’d make a good singing duo,” Francine tells her.

  Patricia’s brow twitches, and a wrinkle at her mouth deepens.

  “I mean the names—Patty and Francine—a bit fifties, don’t you think? Or an ice-cream franchise …” Francine laughs, and this makes Patricia’s face go Times Square bright. Francine looks away, looks around. Lawrence is talking with his mouth full (Well, it’s you girl and you should know it …), the students across from them have plates loaded solely with chips, which she wishes she had instead of this chicken. (Love is all around no need to fake it …).