Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  A siren chirps into the underpass and now there’s all kinds of stirring and moving and mumbling from beneath the blankets. A police car parks beside the camp and two officers get out and slam their doors, all TV-like, and Moe walks towards them. Moe is well-sick when it comes to talking to police, on account of his Americanness and the fact that nothing scares him. Moe would take someone like Granddad and say, Sir, with all due respect, anti-miscegenation laws in the US were repealed on the 12th of June 1967 by Loving v. Virginia. The British created what your daughter tells me you call half-castes in every port that a cargo ship docked in across the colonized world. And to extend the point of this long continuum of inter-everything, Moe would say, Sir, gay marriage is becoming legal in one territory after the other. What in Abraham Lincoln’s name is your problem? Moe would point out to Granddad that his very own flesh and blood was really, I mean, really, sir, as you can obviously see, a very simple emblem of the future.

  “You need to be moving along now, please,” the officer who is barely older than Moe says to him, shooing his arms towards Moe who has gone into slow motion now, nodding and pausing with something on his mind, and taking up all the officer’s patience before he says, “We’re British citizens, sir, and we’re helping out some people here.” Moe turns to Olivia and nods, which she takes as her cue to make sure the tins and the water are handed out. She digs deeper into her sack and takes some beans, peas, and sweetcorn tins and begins to walk towards the sleeping bags.

  “Miss,” the other officer says. This officer is older, with one dark fucker of a unibrow. She turns towards him. “That’s enough. You have to leave,” and his voice is not as polite as the young dude’s. She looks at Moe, but Moe is nearly smiling. She realizes that maybe Moe doesn’t blaze as much as she imagined; maybe Moe appears stoned when he’s in his highest power. She turns towards the men at the sleeping bags who have all been watching this as the sun comes up behind them under the lip of the bridge. She sees only heads in silhouette, at different standing, sitting, squatting heights, like a city’s skyline. She looks back at the unibrow officer and starts to move towards the sleeping bags.

  “Miss!” he says, his voice closer now.

  That was the truth of it right there: no one had ever picked her up but Ed, his stubble against her face as he carried her. “Pumice,” she whispers and delivers the cans to the first man she reaches.

  KATRIN

  The snake in Claire’s throat is bulging this morning. All the sunshine that Katrin collected on her shoulders from walking and not taking the 38 bus is useless now in the chill of Epicure, where Claire is filling the coffee machine and fuck-fucking at every knob or lid that resists her.

  “Today is beautiful,” Katrin says, to charm the snake.

  “Don’t get used to it—March is brutal,” Claire says.

  The twist in Katrin’s stomach has been getting worse over the last two months. At first Claire was her friend, was her guardian against the men who came into Epicure and were not like Robin, and she was fair between Katrin and Alejandro. But now there is nothing Katrin can do right and Alejandro can do wrong.

  “You didn’t put the chairs up at closing. How do you expect the cleaner to do her job, for fuck’s sake?” Claire says.

  “I put them up,” Katrin lies. The simple past tense means that the lie is not so big. She once did; she was not always doing. She walks to the back office and ties on her apron and changes her shoes to be ready for when the café opens. The exact moment that Claire started to hate her: when was it? It has something to do with Robin, so she has told Robin not to meet her in the café; they meet at Angel tube station, or in the Green, where for one day or two this week the sun was pointed and white.

  They walk; they do not sit much these days. Along the canal, through the streets around Upper Street and under trees that make her gulp at the sight of sweet white flowers over delicate green branches, and pink petals on the high bows of others. On these walks she is rewarded for czekam.

  “I love how you smell,” Robin said one day, and so she is trying every day to smell the same.

  Claire wins against the machine and the coffee becomes ground. Alejandro is the one who is late today, but Claire only stands in front of him with her hands on her hips like a cowboy. He walks around her.

  “Does she give breakfast at least?” Katrin says to Alejandro with eyebrows up.

  “Breakfast of champions,” he says, eyebrows also high. She is relieved he is here now.

  “She hates me,” she whispers to him and nods towards Claire now at the front table doing the accounts.

  “She does,” Alejandro says as he takes off his jacket and puts on the apron she holds up for him.

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “I met her sister one time; she is very beautiful.”

  Claire laughs and they both look over to the window where she is sitting. Outside there is a man with chains looped along the bottom of his leather jacket. The man is holding a beer bottle towards his German shepherd, who is licking the opening while the man tips the beer into the dog’s mouth. The dog is thirsty; it drinks and drinks. The man then lifts the bottle to his own lips and drains the remaining beer from the bottle.

  “HA!” Claire says and laughs more.

  Katrin runs to the door and is suddenly outside. When the man sees her, he smiles, which takes away all the words—words she might have had to express her thought that to make a dog drunk is to kill it. The man holds his beer bottle up to her like he is saying Na zdrowie, a cheers to the things that Katrin is not entitled to say. She goes back inside, not catching Claire’s eye, but returning to the counter beside Alejandro, where she wipes the top again, going over the same spot to make it shine.

  “For her sister, things probably come easy,” Alejandro says.

  This makes no sense. Claire goes outside to talk to the man with the German shepherd and their laughter seeps through the glass. Katrin looks at Alejandro who shrugs again, and in his shoulders he is saying, look, see, she is competing with you. Katrin carefully sets up the sugar and the stirring sticks on the small table beside the counter. In English to talk about something is very different from to talk on or at or in something. She must remember that English freedom is like the prepositions that she has difficulty to always put in the right place.

  NED TIME

  OF MARMALADE

  ROBIN

  Anita Ekberg in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita: splashing about in the Trevi Fountain, casting her spell over Marcello Mastroianni. Ekberg and Mastroianni engage in sexual foreplay to the point of eruption, the fountain showering them and then suddenly shutting off, as though spent. Deleuze cites this film as exemplary of the crystal image: the power of art through mirroring to create a moment both virtual and actual, the here and now of life. Deleuze doesn’t discuss hormones, but Robin has been reading up on them and contemplating the limitations of academic discussions of art. How can poetry and science, for example, help him to understand the hormones reigning over him right now? He has snuck into his office again, third time this week, so early that no one has seen him arrive. He has read about the chemical components of the hormones possessed by a clownfish. Fact is, clownfish schools contain a hierarchy, at the top of which is the female, and when she dies the most dominant male changes sex and takes her place.

  Emma arrived at his flat last night, having apologized for her unreasonable phone calls, for forcing him to think about moving to Cornwall, saying she will stay only as long as it takes for them to figure out what they will do, insisting that he is under no obligation but that they will discuss this like adults, like the friends they really are. But her mood is more fierce than before she left London—the effect of the wilds of Cornwall, the feral muliebrity of pregnancy, or merely the fact of her knowing the contents of his heart better than he does.

  The knock startles him. He turns to the door. Rarely is anyone else here by 8 a.m., but when Bayo enters, her ebony face shining from perspiration as though she has ru
n here, he is reminded that early mornings are for people whose thoughts need to be let out first thing and walked like a dog.

  “Robin, this is not a bad time, is it?” she says.

  “Come in.”

  She sits and immediately takes out papers from her large cloth bag in which she seems to carry the contents of her entire day. “I was wondering if you could look at my essay and tell me whether I’m on the right track.” She hands him a sheaf of papers.

  “Of course, later today, maybe. We can have a word after class.” He glances at the first page: “The aim of this essay is discussing theories and films like french new wave and criticisms like textuality and spectatorship, I personally will go through the films to have the groundwork’s of the theories and how the films are made in these groundwork’s.”

  “It needs editing,” she says, noting the look on his face. “I’ve been having a bit of trouble. Lost my disability benefit.”

  He looks at her with concern.

  “If I go off the medication they don’t give my money to me, but I have trouble to focus when I’m on it. I’m taking it again, but it takes time for the money to be put back in place, so my landlord is not happy. I have no one in this country. I’ve had to move twice since August. I’m not sleeping. I am sorry.”

  His chest goes heavy. Bayo has thoughts, actions, regrets that require medication. And this heavy feeling in his chest confirms, every time, why he teaches here, still, after three years of frustration that he has no A students—this feeling of being nothing if he’s not at the centre of a real and honest struggle. Cornwall, toffs, jobs, correct grammar. And then there is this place.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll work it out. I’ll have a look, and you go and get some rest, or at least some coffee before class,” he says.

  When he’s finished preparing for the Cinema Poetics lecture, deciding to show a clip from The Blue Angel, he checks his e-mail.

  The job specifications have been posted on the HR website and have been e-mailed to the film lecturers. He scans the positions. There are five of them for the seven lecturers currently in the department. His shin starts to feel sore—a hiking accident in his twenties, a hairline fracture. He skims the titles: practitioner, practitioner, practitioner, technician, theorist. He reaches down and rubs his shin. They have allowed for one theorist from the three currently in his programme. The other two are more senior than he is.

  Robin’s father lost his first engineering job, he told all his boys when they were young, because he wasn’t fierce enough to fight. But he learned from it, got a better job, and was promoted time and again, landing him at the head of the company. If Robin doesn’t move to Cornwall, if Emma doesn’t stay in London, if he has nothing more to do with her than send a cheque every month he is still fucked. And Katrin will not want to be with an unemployed theorist who if he had to do anything else would be writing useless poetry for her eyes only.

  Their next date will be their third, so he is hesitant to ask her out. Do the Poles acknowledge the third date as pivotal? Does every Polish woman expect sex on the third date like English women do? He will tell her about the baby. She will hate him and refuse to see him again, but he will be nothing if he doesn’t tell her.

  Until then he will not go mad, will keep his thoughts from being actions except for those thoughts that will result in a successful application for the job he already performs.

  The sunlight in the atrium makes spring feel like a real possibility, even though outside it is five degrees. These rare, crisp days need to be marked. He walks to the student union shop and in the queue for coffee sees the American woman from QA, who stares at him. He wants to tell her it’s rude, that people don’t stare like that in England, and if she wants to talk to him she should do so. Last year he received an e-mail from her informing him that he had not responded adequately to the external examiner’s comments on his course evaluation. The examiner had made a wholly positive statement about his treatment of theory but noted that some of the students hadn’t incorporated it as effectively as others. QA read each of these reports to monitor course improvement, and he was required to create a course improvement plan based on the fact that some students don’t do as well as others. Some students don’t do as well as others, he wants to say to the middle-aged Mae West. They have had one meeting together and she seemed like a pleasant enough woman—shy and yet so constituted of that shyness for it to seem almost arrogant. But that’s cruel and stereotyping of her Americanness. Sorry, he would say to her if he could bear to say anything to anyone. He pays for his coffee and Kit Kat, and leaves.

  Olivia is at his office door when he arrives back upstairs.

  “Robin, me again, sorry, sorry …” she says, and throws the long ringlet that covers her right eye back behind her ear and tucks it in there. He opens his office door and lets them both in. As he puts his coffee and chocolate on the desk he notices after she sits down that Olivia’s knee is bobbing up and down like a needle on a sewing machine and that her finger is worrying the top of her pen, back and forth, rubbing it as though for magic.

  “You okay?” he says and holds up the Kit Kat, offering her some.

  “Yes, yes, really,” she says, declining the offer, straining to smile.

  The wideness of Olivia’s face obscures a clear reading of her beauty. She can be hard to look at: there is so much to take in.

  “The project,” Robin says, to get her started. “It might be better to approach it in terms of basic social tenets,” and before he knows it, he is saying, “Does everyone have the right to be remembered somehow, and would it be meaningful, after death, to be identified with something specific? I’m not speaking in terms of legalities—that’s your area—but I thought—”

  “There’s this man, works for Barking and Dagenham council …” Olivia’s interruption feels like a rejection. “He looks after paupers’ funerals. You know what people call them, in the papers?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “The lonely dead,” she says, her shoulders hunching. “They are mostly people without family, or if they’re foreigners we don’t even know who they are, they have no papers, or they are old people whose family have fucked off—they don’t get funerals, not proper ones. But in my research …” Her knee is bobbing up and down still, her fingers wishing the pen into action. Robin sits back in his chair to try to make her feel more comfortable. “And well, you know how in Amsterdam there’s a lot of drugs ’n’ all?”

  He nods.

  “They get a lot of lonely deaths—like drug mules, like from Colombia—girls who carry drugs in their stomachs or up inside them and the drugs leak or someone kills them and they don’t have real names on their passports, and nobody can find out who they are … or …” She looks at him with her wide face like an urgent, flashing sign. “And then the city has to bury them. There’s this man there, a civil servant, and he looks after them. He has made it his thing to visit their homes if they had one, and he chooses music to play at their funeral. He puts flowers on the coffin and makes sure each one gets buried. With dignity.”

  He sits forward, “I was going to say something about music … in fact, about music at the funeral—” he stops himself, because he shouldn’t be encouraging this tangential thinking when Olivia should be working on her dissertation, “but that’s not something you can legislate; the idea of rights seems to me—”

  “That kind of politics doesn’t work,” she says, as though that is all she needs to say to him and he will understand. And he does, but there’s so much understanding developing between them that he has to draw that line, the one he must draw as a tutor—the line that says I can’t go there, no matter how much I see you and agree with you: this is just my job. So he simply nods.

  “This Dutch man,” she says, “decided that they needed praise, like, real eulogies, even if there was no one in their lives.”

  Yes, this is the kind of thing he was trying to say at the beginning. “That sounds like a beautiful idea.
”

  “And that’s what I was thinking …” Both knees start to bob now, and she is a jackhammer to his office floor.

  “Okay,” he says calmly. “And coming back to the law project?”

  “He got a poet to write poems for them, as their eulogies—a poem for each of the lonely dead. Somebody knows them, even if it’s just in their imaginations.” She sits back in the chair and her bobbing subsides.

  “That is a lovely notion, Olivia. But without meaning to undercut it, have you thought about how it will inform your dissertation?”

  She sits forward again. “In England’s community graves, it’s the same. So many people. The man at the council, he’s an old man, well, not old, really, but not like you, older—and I think we need to do something.” She hesitates.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The council is to cut its budget, and he might just be one of the people to go. But …” Her face becomes even wider as she looks him directly in the eyes. “If we started this new project, brought attention to it like they did in Amsterdam. If there was a poem for each of the people who dies alone, who the council has to bury, who this man has to look after, and if the council has to find the money to pay him because it’s the right thing to do … and … if you could write the poems …”

  “What?”

  She sits back.

  He takes her in. His grandparents died quietly, unceremoniously, his father’s mother going to an early grave when his father was twelve. They were not a family for big events. He doesn’t know the words to hymns; his father was adamant when he was growing up that church was nowhere for boys who needed their minds stimulated not shrunken.

  “I am not a poet,” he says, and she straightens up.

  “You wrote that poem last year,” she says, and it’s true. He did use a poem of his own last term, in a moment of shameful vanity.