Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  “It could have been me,” Francine blurts out, turning back to Patricia.

  “What?” Patricia asks in a way that sounds like she already knows.

  “Not me, on the road, but me in the car. I could have been the one who hit him,” Francine says, but feels stupid so she also laughs and a small bit of snot runs from her nostril to her top lip. She wipes it off and holds Patricia’s gaze long enough to blush.

  “I see,” Patricia says softly.

  “People get hit, all the time, all the time, you know, by buses, scaffolding, by lightning. It’s all over the place, you know?” And Francine is surprising herself now (You can have the town why don’t you take it …). The hair on Patricia’s arm is like the peach-fuzzy down on Virginia Cooper’s top lip when they were ten years old. Virginia Cooper, veterinarian’s daughter, saver of fallen baby birds, who lived on her street in Philly.

  “Have you spoken to your brother?” Patricia asks. Scott is the opposite of a motorcyclist—a rich, high-flying financial manager with his own driver, in NYC.

  “Why would I?” Francine says, her lip starting to tremble.

  Patricia doesn’t shake her head at her in that way that Aunt T would when met with the same tone of voice, time after time through Francine’s orphan adolescence. What was it her mother would say to her? What was it? That thing her mother said to the eleven-year-old Francine about love? That final speech she always tries to grasp the tiny thread of—to hold on to what her mother left her with. About how “love comes with …”? What was it that love came with? Patricia looks at her.

  “My brother isn’t a phone guy,” Francine says.

  “Do you ever wish he was?” Patricia says. Francine can’t stand the compassion, the wise tone of concern, and she puts her knife and fork together on her plate, scrunches up her napkin and places it on top.

  “I’ve got tons of work,” she says before standing. “I really should get going.”

  Her office smells of banana. She clears her desk and awakens her computer.

  There’s a message about the restructuring plans: “Have your say” forums are to be held throughout the rest of the term. Please, God. The wide streets of Philly will feel too big, the Julys too dry and hot. Please, God. She really needs to keep this job.

  She checks other mail, but can’t concentrate. She clicks on to Soulmates. There’s a message from bringmesunshine:

  I like your profile and pic. Would love to know more about life stateside. If you’re interested, please e-mail me at matthughes794@hotmail.com.

  She clicks on to bringmesunshine’s profile. Oh man. She tries to be gracious. Matt is fifty-nine, describes himself as a genuine kind of guy with a childish sense of humour. He would like to find an attractive, intelligent, and sophisticated woman “because underneath the quiet, unassuming exterior lies a wheelbarrow of surprises. (OK, I’ve nicked that line from AA Milne, but there is some substance to it.)”

  Help.

  She goes back to Dario Martinelli’s Facebook page. Someone has posted a YouTube video called “My friend Dario.” She plays it. A jumpsuited woman, backed by bikini-ed girls in American football helmets and silver high-heeled boots dance to “my friend Dario, drives, too fast, drives, too flash.… doesn’t care about to crash.” The video has been posted by Roberto Martinelli. Such ease that a brother has with crashing and dying?

  She clicks off.

  Good God.

  OLIVIA

  Fog gone; air rusty; time tight.

  Right.

  She’s cold. The sheepskin bits of her jacket are tattered now, the hide ripped for shite. How to afford new clothes is anybody’s guess. Olivia pulls her collar up, grips her leather bag, lets her curls fall over her right eye in the very second that she spots a dark male across the square watching her walk towards the Templeton Building. Clenching her legs, she holds herself in at the place no one has entered yet—sure, yeah, the fingers of Mark from year 10, but nothing like what that bloke might have in mind. Can’t be Nasar. Nasar’s texts don’t make her feel like she has to fend off invaders. If Jasmine knew this is what happened to her when some peng bloke took a look at her, she’d send out the fam and make some kinda virgin intervention. Olivia speeds up and heads to the doors of the atrium but stops short of going inside, waits. For what?

  “Fire,” she whispers.

  She will try hard to get through the me-me-me of the Student Union meeting, try to remember that the May ’68 geezers were really something, that some things did really change, even though a bunch of them became Tories, and then she will go home to her room, to her sites and her books. She’ll never have the guts to join Anonymous, but saved on her desktop, the shortcuts to Hactivisimo, Ninja Strike Force, and Cult of the Dead Cow remind her that there are people who are not asleep at the wheel.

  “Olivia, y’all right?”

  She jumps; shit.

  “You coming to the meeting?” It’s Moe, like molasses, Moe the slowest talker in the SU or maybe the world. His face is pale, his eyes circled by shadows that might have come from once being a kid who had a lot of pressure on him to be something other than just a kid. Moe for president, Moe for a bit of caffeine, more like. Moe’s American and changed his name from Moses to Moe-nearly-like-Joe when he was thirteen.

  “Moe, we gotta do something with the Heston Bridge people,” she says, because Moe is good with things outside of uni life, Moe is fired up internationally even if it is a slow burn, and the illegals sleeping under the bridge are bound to be rounded up soon. Slow-Moe looks at her like he’s making a political calculation.

  “Sure, sure, let’s bring it up at the meeting,” he says.

  Moe is sleep-inducing, but she needs to be more like him. She should’ve chosen refugee law for her dissertation instead of dead people. “See you there,” she says and starts to open her satchel so that he thinks she’s got something important to attend to. Moe turns and plods inside. She rummages for chewing gum and waits for him to reach the automatic doors and disappear into the atrium.

  She moves off; the pebble inside her Ugg boot rubs her big toe. The strumming of a guitar comes from across the square. The busker sings. She wants to stay and listen, but what if the hoodie over there is Nasar? She walks slowly. The singer hits a note that makes the hair on her arms stand up. She knows now how Robin might help.

  THE TASTE

  OF MARMALADE

  KATRIN

  This morning she has no paper for the toilet. Forgotten yesterday, no time, too tired, passed the shop, to bed. To sleep. She washes herself in the basin, on tiptoes, thigh on the sink, water splashing on the floor. Washes her hands a second, third time. Glances out of the window at the flower box, the frost that didn’t come, and feels again the waiting inside. The tick-tocking of morning, watching. But she must go to work. Work takes her away from the window boxes, the waiting on the shoots in the soil, but in the café there is the man who comes every day now, to smile at her. He will never love her if she cannot even have paper for the toilet.

  Outside: the crocuses, purple, white, maybe, the ones she saw last year and named Beata one, two and three, for her mamunia, but cannot remember which is which, along with the toilet paper. The tips, there, just beneath the dirt around the tree. This makes the hair on her arm stand up. This England sight, this not-Poland sight, this evidence that she is making her life on her own and for her matka when she will come in May. February in Gdansk is snow. February in London is the poking heads of purple and white.

  Katrin swallows. The taste of marmalade.

  In the coffee shop there is angry Claire from Tottenham and Alejandro from Madrid and she is Katrin not from anywhere now, not from Gdansk, not from her father who left, not even from her mother who sleeps at the edge of the big bed where the pillow beside her is still dirty with her husband’s hair oil.

  “You take your time,” Alejandro says, as she walks in, and she looks up at the clock to see that she is not yet late.

  “You take the piss,” s
he says, and they smile, because this is a sentence he himself has taught her. “Second person singular, showing improvement,” he says, and her day will go well, now, here on Upper Street where the man might come back and Alejandro will make her laugh.

  But Alejandro is not fun today, having a fight with his girlfriend by text, and there is a sourness from Claire: “This country is fucked. They are ripping us off.” And when police sirens sound in the street: “It’s all kicking off.” These words make Katrin go curly inside. Claire throws slitted eyes at her and complains that Katrin is not doing enough refilling of the coffee machine. And when the man comes to the Epicure Café at the end of her shift she tries not to look unhappy.

  “You need a pastry, too, sir,” she tells him, holding the smile in her mouth and his coffee in her hand.

  “You must call me Robin,” he says, and she looks away, not because she is shy but because she loves this name. This man is one of the birds, the early morning bird, she has learned in English.

  “Robin,” she says and waits to see if he will take up her suggestion, but she thinks he is not really a pastry man. He has long eyelashes under his glasses. He is a man who lives through his eyes not his mouth.

  “Nothing else, thanks. This is fine,” he says and his long fingers, the fingers of someone who plays the piano, take hold of his coffee cup. “Did you see that film?” She does not remember the name of the German-Turkish director of this film, but its title in English, Head-on, is a way of speaking in this language that she must practise.

  “Not yet, I will, I will,” she tells him, and wishes she was not so tired at night. And there is Claire with a look like there is a snake in her throat, watching her, so Katrin moves to clean the table beside him, even though there is not dirt there, but there is the ribbon of the sun. When London first loved her it was always night time, Soho, films to help her English, and quiet bars on nights off from the loud one where she worked with Ania who went back to Poland, Ania who could not love these English men. Ania said, you are educated, they think you are cheap because you work in this bar, and they will never treat you as you deserve. Katrin would loosen the pony tail of her straight blonde hair, letting it fall towards her face to make it look less angular, more oval and English, but Ania said she would never fit in. Ania went back to Gdansk, where she is working in an office for less than one quarter of what Katrin makes in the café. Okay, so it is not anymore a bar; things are better: she works in the day.

  A tall woman with a pink scarf wrapped high around her neck, covering her chin, enters Epicure. She walks like a soldier towards another woman at the back table, who stands in time for the pink woman to fall towards her and into her arms crying, like she is remembering what children do. The friend holds her tight, while the pink-scarfed woman cries and says not a word. They stand like that for a long time. Katrin watches until both of them sit down. When she looks back over at Robin he is staring at the women, before he looks at her. He nods at Katrin with a face that says, yes, sometimes things are exactly so.

  Ania told Katrin’s mother a lie. A lie that Ania knew was the only thing to say to her best friend’s mother, because mothers are all the same. She told Beata that by the time May came and she was ready to move to her daughter in Islington, England, that the twenty-six-year-old Katrin would be married to an Englishman who would help her to find a job suited to the economics degree her daughter achieved at the University of Gdansk.

  No matter. This is Robin, who teaches at a university and said her English is perfect, and this is a job in the day, and the crocuses are coming up.

  FRANCINE

  Almost nothing. After a whole pizza and some Doritos—a proper Saturday night feast—all that comes is a sore throat. Francine pushes at the tiny window in her bathroom, the paint chipping on the frame as she shoves it open to the cold air. She should move. This flat has done its time with her: six years, beginning with the early wailing—the wasted tears over Fuck-head on the rented bed—through the more hopeful middle period of repainting the bedroom walls, of forcing the landlord to replace the boiler, to this last stage of plumping the comfy cushions, lighting scented candles, dimming the lights: the patient waiting for someone who would change everything.

  She breathes in the bronze-smelling air from outside. Traffic noises scratch the night.

  Mom—what was it she’d said? Love is … blah blah, Francine. Love comes with … blah blah. She must remember. She walks to her living room and the couch is barely solid. Everything in the room is in Star Trek’s transporter room. She can’t sit down.

  She picks up the phone and dials.

  When Scott answers his cell phone he’s got his I’m-an-important-and-busy-man voice on. It’s Saturday, for Christ’s sake.

  “Just checking in,” she says.

  “Hey, surprise, surprise. Whassup?” he says and oh Christ—whassup? Maybe he’s just shocked that she has called again so soon after Christmas.

  “Do you remember,” she says, “something that Mom used to say—”

  “God, Fran, really?”

  Scott hasn’t had a moment for their mom since she died when he was nine. Scott claims basically not to remember her, not to miss her, not to need to talk about her. But Francine knows there was something their beautiful, cancer-ridden mother said on her bed as she wheezed away her last few days in their bungalow on Minerva Street, a bed brought home by their kind-hearted dad, who is the one Francine must have got the tending plants thing from, because what she remembers most about him is the dirt on his knees from kneeling in the garden. He tended to her mother like she was the last orchid on the planet. The thing her mother said about love was said in that bungalow, and it felt like a chiming in Francine’s ears, but the chiming gradually stopped, because the pulp of a teenage brain is porous. It was something that should have stayed forever. But now she can’t find it, can’t get back to it somehow.

  “How’s the winter treating you guys over there?” he says.

  “Relentless, totally relentless. You?”

  “Same, but at least it’s sunny here—and not so goddam damp. You should come back.” This is Scott’s thing: to find a way to make Francine feel there’s always something she’s missing out on or not got quite right. And so she must stay in London if it kills her, even if, as Scott has told her time and again, the US will always be the future and England will always be the past. And damp.

  She searches for something else they have in common, given that their dad, who raised them on his own for eight years, seeing her through high school and Scott through to his driver’s licence, had a heart attack and left them to join his wife.

  “Melissa okay?” she asks.

  “Been laid off,” Scott chirps, as though he’s somehow pleased. Poor Melissa: no job and no kids, because her dickhead of a husband didn’t want them. Ten years ago Melissa replaced a longing for children with a love for Jesus and has perpetually tried to get Francine to join her in the promise of rapture.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear it. Any prospects?”

  “Sure, sure, though the job market’s tough. But, you know, she doesn’t really need to work anyway. I do just fine.”

  Okay, that’s enough. (Death tastes like Dr. Pepper.)

  “She might get into charity work,” he continues.

  As Scott chirps on about charity being more and more important in times like these, Francine wonders whether he would be a beam-me-up Scotty if he were in this room. Would she be able to see through her little brother, or would he be an odourless, opaque mass of Scottness?

  They sign off formally—Well, brother … Well, sister—and Francine doesn’t put the phone back in its cradle properly. A few minutes later she picks it up again and books an evening out with Patricia.

  ROBIN

  On his route home from the tube station Epicure is a short diversion. Katrin is coming towards him as he enters, but she has her coat on, her knapsack slung over one shoulder.

  “You’re leaving. I was just stopping in
for tea.”

  “It’s the end of my shift—Alejandro is closing,” she says and looks towards the dark-haired man at the counter who gives her a sly smile. Jealousy sketches a shape in Robin’s chest.

  “Are you going home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have time for tea then? We could go somewhere else.”

  She smiles. “Tea is not my drink, but I am learning to be English.”

  Her proficient English humbles his pathetic French, his effete attempts at German and Spanish. He wants to take her hand. They walk down Upper Street, something he tells himself he’s doing every time he’s doing it, but today he doesn’t bother with the joke. Today he has the sensation of going down a tunnel. The lane behind Camden Square snakes off to a cobblestone alleyway where Moment Café is squeezed between a dress shop and an antiques dealer. The owner, Martin, has been selling records for twenty years; he added the coffee, tea, hot chocolate and pastries five years ago in order to address the rising rent, and he sells more of them now than he does records.

  “This is something,” Katrin says as she pulls out the barstool to sit at the high table next to the Decca wind-up gramophone. Her voice comes straight from her belly; he’s never heard anything so clear. He orders tea from Martin, who brings it over to them and chats about the recording of Bach partitas that he suggested for Robin the last time he was in. Robin tries hard not to look too much at Katrin as she pours tea from the pot.

  “He’s gentle,” Katrin says, when Martin leaves them to each other. She tells him about her Polish friend, Andrzej, who has a zipper tattoo on his arm, which gives the impression that his flesh could be unlocked if you tugged at it. Like Martin, she tells him, Andrzej is a gentle man. As she describes the rooming house where Andrzej lives with five other men, flashes in Robin’s cerebral cortex convince him he knows this already, that he and Katrin have not only had this conversation before, but that they have featured together in numerous scenes accompanied by their own original soundtrack, in another time-space continuum. In Matter and Memory, Bergson pushes further the Cartesian split of mind and body to assert that the body is the abode of the present, while the spirit is anchored in the past, continually arriving, here, now.