Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  “That was different, that was just to make a point,” he says.

  “Exactly,” she says. And he does not know how to respond. “You’re the right person,” she says firmly. “You care.”

  He thinks about the impact and knowledge transfer indicators he has been told he has to address in his research, and how projects should extend into the community at large, should demonstrate that there is no longer such a thing as an ivory tower. For a cynical, self-serving moment he considers a practice-based research project that combines cinema poetics and visual eulogies. He stops himself.

  “I don’t write poetry, really, Olivia,” he says, and watches her shoulders drop. He would embarrass himself in the eyes of the avant-garde poets he loves—the Language Poets; the New Sentence poets. “Really, really, Olivia. What you’re saying is great, interesting, but not for me. I can’t do that.” She begins to gather her things.

  He searches his bookshelf and reaches up to pull out the slim volume. “You might like this,” he says, as he hands it to her.

  Olivia takes it and nods. “You used Ginsberg last year,” she says, and nods. He winces and she smiles, thanks him, then leaps up from the chair and leaves his office.

  Deleuze: What is an unconscious that no longer does anything but believe, rather than produce?

  ED

  Zihan restaurant—not as in Lawd bring me to the land of Zion—is Somali and not the one he’s looking for. There’s a restaurant called Pepperpot on Longbridge Road because he is sure he passed it a year back, when he thought, man, he should be going in. But those days he wasn’t too fired up about things Guyanese. He wasn’t looking back at anything that would smell like home, because if home hurts you have to mash it out. But don’t mind how bird vex, it can’t vex with tree. So now he has to find it because Sammy is counting on getting some pepperpot, cassava bread, mauby or guava drink to wash it down with, after all the bragging Ed did in the office.

  “You walk fast, mate,” Sammy says, catching up with Ed on the pavement outside the Pepperpot, which is more brukadown than Ed remembers it. “You must be hungry to walk like that,” and Sammy takes a fat bloke’s inhalation on Longbridge Road. Ed breathes in with him. The air is a blend of petrol and … what? What is that smell? Bleakness, if that can be a smell. Petrol and bleakness. “And why is it that you West Indians feel like if you don’t have grog—and that is your word and not mine—with your food it ain’t a meal?”

  Sammy has agreed to come along to Pepperpot on the condition that he is not expected to drink rum, which he detests. Ed has brought beer—Cobra, a big bottle that he holds up like a trophy—because Sammy is a one-drink man.

  “You people can drink, innit,” Sammy says.

  “Let’s go,” Ed says, and he pushes open the door to the restaurant. With a ting and a pang and a parrang braddups and a whole band playing in his head, he is back home inside this bad-lighting plastic-flowers room. Guyana maps and flags, bird of paradise, and pan playing in the tinny speakers hung up in the corners above the counter, below which take-way patties, peas and rice, and rotis are growing crusty behind the display glass. Music happens somewhere in the heart and not in the ears, true-true.

  After they have ordered their food and opened the Cobra, split between them, it’s time for him to ask Sammy: “Do you think a daughter should know that her uncle is in jail?” Coming right out with it is the easiest, after batting it around in his head for weeks now since Olivia found him. Straight ahead, at least with Sammy. Sammy looks at him as if to say, man, why on earth you bring this surprise ’pon me when my team is failing, like it’s the worst thing he might have done the day after the Hammers have lost to Spurs.

  “What you on about then?” Sammy says.

  So Ed starts slowly, because this is the way the details must come while Sammy does the inevitable re-examining of the exhibits A, B, C of his face to find where there is a likeness to criminals. “I told you about Geoffrey, but I never told you he was—is—in jail.”

  The food arrives at the table and Sammy looks into his pepperpot like it’s the dark stew of Africans who boil up white people, and maybe Indians too. He picks up his fork with purpose though, because Sammy is a good bloke.

  “What happened?” Sammy asks and it takes a second before Ed realizes he’s asking about Geoffrey.

  “He killed a man. On a gold mine. He tried to steal, got caught, killed him: simple. So simple it’s nearly ridiculous, like in a Wild West movie,” Ed says.

  Sammy nods and tastes his pepperpot, nods again, pleasantly surprised.

  There’s a long silence as Ed watches Sammy slurp up the slimy oxtail and wipe his lips with the back of his hand. Sammy is the best bloke there is, but in the silence Ed sees the man in the river, Geoffrey in the distance, running, running, and the inky blood following the path of the river like it needed a new home. He is not able to describe this to Sammy, or to explain what happened next.

  “It’s why Olivia’s mother didn’t want anything to do with me.”

  Sammy looks up at him like this is nonsense.

  “I went back to Guyana when Geoffrey asked me to help him … begged me like he was dying, and when I saw him he looked so bad, but he was still boasting like a big man, and he asked me for money. How was I to get that money? He said I should borrow it from people I knew in London, from Catherine.” Ed shakes his head and looks to Sammy for confirmation that he was right not to ask Catherine, but Sammy is looking at his food, moving it around on the plate. “Catherine had no money,” Ed says. Nobody he knew had any. “Geoffrey and I had a big row, man, and I told him he was mad as shite. And then he stole the money he needed and he was caught in the act. He killed the man who was chasing after him, just so. I have never understood that. Never.” He should have found the money for his brother. His brother was in trouble; that’s what family is for. “When I told Catherine, she said she didn’t want me around, thought I had something to do with it.”

  “And did you?” Sammy asks him, his face as open as a net. And of course that’s the question. The only reason you don’t let a man see his daughter is because you think he did something wrong and because you believe all the seh-seh from other people like your knack-about father and brother.

  “I followed Geoffrey that day, it’s true, but I had no part in it, no part.” Even to Sammy he can’t tell the whole truth, because what Ed did that day—or rather didn’t do—was witnessed only in his own heart, and that was the place where Catherine lived, so she might have felt it too.

  “I had to pay for lawyers, help move my mum, pay her bills because it was Geoffrey who had been doing that all along —and I had no way of getting back to London. Catherine said, you stay there then.”

  Sammy is shaking his head now, and Ed can’t tell if it’s at the food or at what he’s saying.

  “She was wrong, too hard …” Sammy says. And Sammy starts with his fork and is eating at a pace, man, and Ed wants to tell him to slow down, but he watches, waiting for what is to come next, as it seems Sammy has something more to say; he just needs to fill his belly first. And then the rice and pepperpot are all gone, a swig of Cobra to wash it down, and Sammy wipes his mouth.

  “When I was a teenager, my cousin burned down the community centre because they took away the sports club on Saturday afternoons. Right nutter, he was, and brought shame to the family, but you know, he was pissed, and I didn’t blame him.” Sammy releases a whoosh of air in a silent burp, covers his mouth too late.

  “But Catherine has never told Olivia about my side of the family,” Ed says.

  “The past is the past, Wood.”

  “You think she shouldn’t know?”

  “Of course she should know, of course … but she doesn’t need to know now, not yet. You’re just getting reacquainted. You take your time on that.”

  Sammy has a point, but the hell in Ed’s belly rumbles. And Ed knows that while a young man wants freedom, an old man wants only peace.

  OLIVIA

&
nbsp; Maybe it’s not going to work out fine after all. She stares out of the window of the number 364 bus. Parsloes Avenue is chocka with people who must do decent jobs, what? Offices, restaurants, shops. Everyone needs an electrician, for example, like Catherine’s Once-a-Week William. Everyone needs a plumber; everyone needs a barber or a salon for the weave. All of it there, necessary. And stale as shite. It’s not real poetry she’s looking for; it’s something that will make a man seem special, the way Robin was special when he gave those lectures, the way even a small dude like him can make a whole room of barely awake wankers go oh wooo he’s talking good shite here that’s meaning something, like the time he did that Holy, Holy, Holy riff last year. Poetry for Ed to make a point with, even if it’s just for nobody but the dead. If Ed can do that, that hushed voice thing that Robin does at the beginning of the class when no one knows he’s starting the lecture, when people just think he’s talking about himself, well.

  What if Nasar has some of that? What if Nasar appears in front of her and has that riffing thing that makes her feel like all the world is joined up by the wind on her skin?

  The 364 stops just near Jasmine’s on Osborne Road. Jasmine will be a good diversion. Her house on the square is bang opposite the Dagenham Evangelical Congregational Church, which is dench for Jasmine’s mum and a horror for Jaz herself.

  At the door, though, she’s never seen her gal so cranked. Jasmine lets her in and turns around, expecting Olivia to follow. Jaz’s arms are long, her head big for the rest of her, and she walks back and forth in her living room holding that head between her flattened palms, her elbows stuck up and out like bat ears. Olivia sits on the sofa and wraps up in Jasmine’s mother’s pink-and-brown knitted blanket that gives her that baby-love feeling.

  “He had a crash,” Jaz says and it takes one, two, three long WTF moments to figure out that Jaz is talking about Dario from Bologna. Jasmine starts to explain, but Olivia can’t follow, because, hell, this is something. This is one thing too much in a month that is way over much. And Jasmine is talking too fast.

  “Jaz, you gotta chill.”

  Jasmine’s pacing picks up speed. “Chill? Do you get this? He’s dead, Liv, he’s dead.”

  Olivia nods.

  “He coulda been the one,” Jasmine adds. And this is where Olivia has to get her head out of Jaz’s wonderland, because this is the line Jaz has for every dude who rides her once and never shows up again. “It was real, this one, and now he’s gone,” Jasmine says with her elbows still up in the air beside her head. Olivia takes out her phone and while Jasmine paces the room she searches, finds it, and types a short but simple reply that is at least ten days late, but maybe not too late.

  It’s “heart sing,” not “singing.” Thanks.

  And with that she feels lighter, what with making sure that Nasar is still alive and all. By the time she leaves Jasmine to herself to pace and be administered to by her mother with the Bible, Olivia is wondering how many more things can get in the way.

  Eric has the TV turned up to garage-house decibels because if he fills the entire sitting room with the sound of Man United in their home stadium on a Wednesday night, then he can pretend that he’s alive, and that his life is not worthless. Uncle Eric is a waster who has been living off his sister and their parents’ pension for the last five years. Eric is a no-show in the game of life, let alone football. Olivia closes the door to the sitting room and heads to the kitchen with her heavy satchel. Two essays due and one exam in three weeks and nowhere to study now that staying late at uni feels like she’s being caught on hidden camera footage that Nasar gets to see. She should never have texted him back. First rule of harassment cases: don’t engage. Something tells her that Nasar is legit and different, but she shouldn’t have. She has to be careful not to turn soft.

  “Honey, it’s late, have you eaten?” Catherine says, looking up from her magazine.

  “Not bothered,” Olivia says, but tries to control sounding cheesed off. It hasn’t worked on Catherine. Her mum closes the magazine, puts her elbows on the table and her chin between her hands.

  “What?” Catherine says.

  When Catherine has nothing to do, no worries about bringing food home for everyone and keeping Eric full up in beer and cigarettes, nothing to dream about in her magazines, and no Once-a-Week William to be giggling for, she is a mother. Olivia has tried to resist it before, but it’s tough when Catherine puts on that soft voice.

  “Nothing. Got shitloads of pressure, is all,” Olivia says, not looking at the big green eyes of her mother that make her look like an old version of Adele and that also make Olivia want to be picked up, even though she’s taller than Catherine now. She sits down at the table. “If you ran into Wood, would you just ignore him?” She looks up at Catherine, whose eyes go squinty.

  “What are you getting at?” Catherine asks.

  “Nothing, just, would you?”

  Olivia can tell that her mother wants to open the magazine now, her fingers itching to turn those pages so that she won’t have to talk. But this time she’s not going to run, maybe this time.

  Olivia hears shuffling—the sound that makes the hair on her neck stand up, and if Granddad would just buy proper slippers instead of wearing the paper ones Nan got in hospital when she was ill, the shuffling would not grate on her nerves so much, but he is a stubborn old git and here he comes just as Catherine is struggling with her instinct to run, just as there might be a moment when something becomes clear.

  “Olivia love, our bin was stolen again. You call the council—I’m sure it’s over the road behind. They paint them over, sell them, must be.” Right. Granddad hasn’t combed his hair, and what’s left of it is sticking up like a troll’s.

  “Who would they sell the bins to?” Olivia says. Catherine is back at her magazine and Granddad has won. Again. She can feel her pulse. There’s thunder at her neck.

  “Tendril,” she says. It comes out a lot louder here at home. Because at home everyone is their own Jack-in-the-box, springing up, nattering, when the pressure is too much. Granddad’s the worst, the things he has to say getting front and centre most of the time, whether they’re trivial, ignorant, bigoted, or plain obnoxious. She knows that her very presence makes him the Grand Jack-in-the-box, and that her being his so-called half-caste winds him up and spins him out. Granddad also loves her, and it is this confusion in his very own cells that makes him so unpredictable, makes him blame everything and everyone else in the world instead. It’s not that Granddad is such a bad man; it’s just that he is the most scared of them all. He’s the kind of geezer who fools you, who is clever and doesn’t raise his voice except at the telly, talks like he has schooling, talks like he reads books, but deep down Granddad’s ignorance is as deep as his unknowing of his own soul. Nan meanwhile has stopped hearing. Nan has taken to being sick all the time, needing to stay in bed, needing, even, to be in hospital for big bouts of delirious time when she’s coughing so bad and yelling a lot and she can’t hear how loud she has become. She can’t hear how much she just wants Granddad to shut the fuck up and leave everybody alone and give her some peace so that she can pay attention to something other than him. Ed is not in any way like Granddad, and maybe Catherine just wasn’t used to having air time of her own, so she couldn’t handle it. Maybe Catherine’s magazines are like Nan’s deafness.

  “What’s everyone on about here, then?” Eric says as he enters, his belt and top button undone like he’s just come out of the loo but forgot, like the stupid baby git he is. Granddad launches in about the bins, and he and Eric go on about who’s stealing what, until the topics switches to Man United, because Uncle Eric is nearly as bad as Granddad when it comes to needing to say what’s on his mind.

  This is where she’s from; it is not who she is. She does not have to stay here. Nan is small, doesn’t take up too much room when she’s well, and Ed and Catherine will give each other space so that no one has to fold up inside and disappear.

  Who will bu
ry these people? God bloody help her.

  Her phone pings. Catherine looks up at her like she should be told who that is. Olivia gets up from the table with her satchel and heads upstairs.

  Thnk you for writing me. My heart sing to read you. Maybe you meet me?

  Now she’s gone and done it. But a little part of her is relieved, and maybe even more chuffed than before, to hear from him.

  KATRIN

  A promenade: the English have stolen this word, but it is right. “At my university,” Katrin says to Robin as they take this slow walk along the canal leaving Camden Market, “each day we met at the main fountain in the square, some classmates and I, and we would stand or sit, winter or summer, and discuss our reading. We had big, waving-arm debates, loud arguments about Malthus and market politics.” She does not dare to try to translate the concepts because she will be stupid in these. And Robin knows them better than she does, but she is happy that when she talks he nods like she is not boring.

  “My students meet to get high and to talk about how they can pass without doing any work,” Robin says. He shakes his head. “That’s not true, no, I am being harsh. Some of them are among the most inspiring people I have ever met,” he says and looks at her, smiles. “But it’s not like you describe. They don’t have the luxury of so much debate.” He takes her hand. His is warm in this not warm air and she looks at the faces of others on the canal path to see if they notice how her breathing is shallow.

  It is the second time he has touched her. The first time was her chin. And that touch said I’m so surprised by you. And for real he said, “I had given up.” They had been sitting on a bench on the canal like the one they are passing now where another couple are sitting, not talking, not touching. When she asked him what he was meaning about giving up he said there were things he’d like to tell her, but she became worried about time because she was on a break and Claire was more and more angry, and she said, no, don’t tell me, not today. She has not yet found out what he had given up.