Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  Now, more than a week after waiting for him to come into Epicure – his absence like rejection – she is content on this walk. He has asked to meet during the daytime, not evening, and this is not how she understands English men. By now they are expecting much more that Robin has asked for.

  In Camden they ate lamb and spinach stew from the African stall, also sweet chocolate banana crepes, and she is a snail on this promenade, while Robin is alert with talk about his university and his wish to be more useful. “Film studies,” he says, “is not what students want. They want to make movies, not interrogate how they work or what they mean; I don’t make films, I’m from the old school, in which you need to know things deeply, first, before doing anything that is decent.” In this sentence there is a darkness like stepping inside a cupboard. Katrin does not hold tighter to his hand, but she is more aware of its strength.

  He keeps talking. Where does he want to take her with this talk?

  “There’s this woman,” he says, and her hand loosens. Her mother will arrive in two months. She has things she must prepare. She has to get back. He holds her hand tighter and looks at her now. “I was with her, yes,” he says.

  “Oh, good, that’s good,” she says, releasing her hand, looking down at the holes on the front of her Converse trainers.

  “But this is what I need to tell you.”

  Katrin holds the hem of his jacket and tugs him towards a bench. She has had enough walking now.

  “You loved her,” she says before he is even sat beside her. His face looks surprised.

  “I didn’t,” he says, sits, pauses, then, “but I wanted to believe I could.”

  He is perfect in his words, always precise, and this makes her weak in front of him.

  “And now?” she asks and watches as his eyes in his glasses go towards the canal, to find the right words there, in water.

  “And now,” he says like in a show where they are going to announce a winner and they repeat the question and make you wait, “now she is expecting a child.”

  She is surprised how alert she feels; her shoulders straighten; she pictures her grandmother’s house by the river in Gdansk. His forehead creases with worry that she will run, so she doesn’t; she doesn’t want to hurt him. She wants to whisper something to him, but doesn’t know what she would say.

  “I want to explain it to you,” he says.

  She nods.

  “We were friends first, and then we got together for about a year. We were never right for one another, but we stayed on, as friends, mostly. She’s a year older than me, thirty-nine, and she asked me to get her pregnant. I said no, but then, when she was moving away, we had sex. I’m an idiot. I felt like nothing would ever happen for me again, so I didn’t care. I’m an idiot.”

  The white blossoms of the tree behind Robin’s head remind her how far time has come since the first days of him coming into Epicure, when shoots of daffodils had a promise. How long has he known about this baby? She is all of a sudden tired. She has worked two times her normal hours this week; she has bought a duvet for her mother. She wants to lie down with Robin, whisper to him, and fall asleep.

  “Well,” she says. There is nothing to say. He will be a father and fathers will live with their children, no matter what. Fathers will not leave the mothers of their children to sleep on one side of the bed forever more.

  “I don’t want to be with her. I want to be with you,” Robin says.

  She looks at his face and knows he is saying the truth. “We are very different in age.” It’s all she can think of—that and the fact that her matka will bring trinkets and books in her suitcase—unnecessary things for which there will be no space in the bedsit. She must remember to send Beata a list of things she should bring and things that should stay in Gdansk.

  “No, it’s nothing, the difference between us. We are exactly the same,” Robin says, but stops and merely looks at her. “You’re far away,” he says, and this is true.

  “I should go,” she says. “We will talk tomorrow.” She stands and puts her hand on his face. His eyes fall shut, then open wide again. “I will see you tomorrow,” she assures him.

  But the next day she is not sure of anything. And even though Alejandro has been kind as always, his joke today is about a Mexican, and it has made her uncomfortable because she is learning how racist she was in Poland. She needs London even more for all the things she has learned, for all the fingers it has pointed to her stupid ways of thinking. What will her mother do when she sees this place?

  Claire is busy in the back room with accounts and supply orders, but all morning she has had her eyes on her as though someone has told her how Katrin as a child used to make monkey sounds with her friends when they saw black people on television. Katrin has a headache and her throat has become sore. Claire knows all the things she has thought and all the things she has said.

  “So, it’s simple: he tells her she cannot have it,” Alejandro says of Robin’s story with the baby, because that’s what Alejandro does: finds solutions to the problems of all the people in the world. Alejandro should be a counsellor, or a judge. He has so many answers for everything. He wipes the top of the counter and straightens the napkins, moves straws to the edge of the glass top, and turns the basket of almond biscuits towards the front. Alejandro is the tidiest man Katrin has ever met. Robin, too, she has noticed, is tidy. His clothes are neat and ironed and in place; his taste is for clean lines and white spaces. The furniture shop she passes every day on Upper Street has things for Robin’s kind of home. She loves this so much about him that she has to stop thinking about it. She slides the basket of almond biscuits back from the edge where Alejandro placed it.

  “What?” he says.

  “I don’t know,” she says. A customer who has finished an espresso and croissant holds her finger up for Katrin’s attention. Katrin moves towards her just as Claire comes out of the back room and catches her eye. “Can we have a word?” Claire says. Katrin hunches and becomes small like a bad dog. Claire turns and walks back into the office, expecting her to follow, but Katrin must bring the customer’s bill and ask Alejandro to cover while she’s in the back room. When she goes into the room, Claire is already red-faced.

  “I had a customer,” Katrin says, and this stops Claire from saying what she had wanted to, even though she has stood up to talk.

  “I thought you had more hours on your timetable than what appears to be there,” Claire says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you look at the number of hours you worked in the last three weeks, it doesn’t add up to what we really needed coverage for, does it?” Claire says, trying but failing in her intonation to sound kind. “We’re really busy, more busy as the weather gets better, so we actually need more not less from people. You need to be able to work when we need you.”

  “What do you mean? I worked double hours last week.”

  “You covered for Alejandro’s hours, but we need coverage on Sundays,” Claire says, “and then at the end of the day, the early evening shift,” and Claire’s face is very close to Katrin’s. Not angry or threatening, just close. “The business is doing well; we are opening a branch in Soho.”

  “I asked you for the maximum hours. You told me that was all you could give me,” Katrin says. She does not know about laws in this country, how much is too much, but when Andrzej scans bar codes for too many hours the laser machine makes a stinging take place around his eyes.

  “The owner might be interested in hiring another person to help.”

  “What does that mean?” Andrzej sends all his money back to Gdansk; he is not lucky like Katrin who can live in her own bedsit. When he visits her on Sundays his face is cold and pale.

  “What do you mean what does that mean?”

  “Why are you telling me that?” Heat walks up Katrin’s neck.

  “I just noticed, that’s all. You’re working fewer hours and you told me you needed hours. Times are hard but this place is doing well �
� go figure.”

  “I need hours.” Next Sunday she has invited Andrzej to eat lunch with her, but she could work at Epicure instead.

  “Then you should be working them,” Claire says, one step back on her right foot.

  “Is that what you wanted to say?”

  Claire plays with the gold chain on her wrist, twists it, and looks back at Katrin, which brings the curling in her stomach, and the failed-exam feeling across her chest. She turns quickly and walks out of the room.

  Claire will hold this too against her.

  Behind the counter Alejandro is busy, with many customers before him in a queue and maybe Claire is right, she is not working enough, she is letting him down and making customers angry, but they do not look angry. He nods his head to the left, telling her to serve the customer in the front.

  She makes all the coffees and rings in all the pastries and bread and salad for the next two hours and barely says a word to anyone except for very kind and helpful phrases to each of the customers. Espresso, macchiato, latte, chocolate marquis, Chantilly cream, tiramisu: English is not in so many things at Epicure. She smiles at Alejandro and he shows her with his own smile that all is fine between them.

  At 8 p.m., Claire has been gone for three hours—her early day when she drives her teenager to football practice—and for three hours it is safe to believe again that Epicure is a place to feel proud. If Katrin can hold on for one year, her mother will get used to London, her savings will grow, and she can look for a job that is not with coffee.

  “I have never had this kind of relation with anyone in my life,” she says to Alejandro as he sweeps beneath the chairs that she lifts onto the tables. “What is wrong with me?” She wants him to tell her the truth.

  “There is nothing wrong with you,” he says. “She needs a good shag, that’s all.” Katrin doesn’t like it when people say this kind of thing, but a small part of her is grateful for it.

  “Maybe you could help out,” she says, smiling. He gives a face like he has swallowed vinegar. “My mother will not come if I do not have a job,” she adds.

  When they have closed the café she feels heavy, and her tongue feels coated in butter. Her feet drag along Upper Street. Her shoulder has a pain where it meets her neck. It is not good to think too much. She takes her phone from her bag and taps a message.

  Two, three, five, ten minutes and nothing from him, and the failed-exam feeling in her chest is there again. Stupid. Of course he is with the mother of his baby. You stupid. She rereads what she has said to him.

  I am sorry to take so long to reply to you. I can cook you dinner so maybe we have more time to speak, and I will listen better. I will work on that for Ned time. x

  Ned time? The phone she uses is not smart like it is called. It pretends to know what she wants to say, but it is as stupid as she is. She thumbs it to obey.

  I mean next time.x

  Before she gets to her bus stop a simple ping makes everything good again.

  I like the idea of Ned time very much. Maybe that’s a place where everything is as we want it to be. What about Saturday for dinner? xxx

  She thumbs the screen impatiently.

  Saturday is good. xxx

  OLIVIA

  “Darling, you used to be a child who never cried. And I used to worry that there was something wrong with you, that I had done something bad …” Wood says and Olivia feels all tremor-like sat here at the melamine table at the A13, on account of the fact that this man knows she’s a baby who never cried and the fact that when he says bad Wood is like a sheep crying in the dark. This man – who is kind-hearted but a little feeble, if she is allowed to think these things about her father – held her when she fell and didn’t cry, and wondered if he had done something wrong.

  The A13 is familiar now, but it’s like a caff out of time, all bacon grease and sticky-topped.

  “Do you cry?” Right. This is a lot to ask a geezer you barely know any more. “I mean, at the funerals, ever?” What she really wants to say is please let my oddness come from somewhere legit, directly from a particular chromosome on a particular bit of sperm that created me; otherwise, I’m just a weirdo living among white people who don’t get me one little bit.

  Wood looks over his shoulder, Olivia turns round to follow, and there is Mary the waitress who sits and does sudoku while her punters eat their toast and drink their builders’ tea. “Condensed,” Olivia says softly. Ed doesn’t hear her or doesn’t let on he does, and maybe he does this kind of slippery thing too, and maybe for Ed this is normal. After a few seconds of staring at Mary, Ed looks back at Olivia.

  “I used to cry a lot,” he says and then smiles, “used to … when I couldn’t get to see you. Funerals are not the same. They remind me I’m a lucky man.”

  Right. Right. Alice Sampson. Ed has been telling Olivia about Alice Sampson, eighty-three years old, who has just gone into a care home. Ed has been put in charge of her property, to make sure it is cleared out, to secure it and dispose of things that need disposing of. Alice. Ed says it’s important to hold their names, to keep naming them, like you know them. Olivia pictures all the stuff at home—Granddad’s fantasy junk that makes him believe he is better than everyone else. Right.

  “What do you believe then, Wood?”

  Ed’s shoulder twitches like she has tickled him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean …” when she was ten she found a secret shoebox in Catherine’s cupboard with small scraps of paper with a few words on each, in Catherine’s handwriting, as though she’d jotted down wishes and allowed them to pile up in the box instead of making them come true, “… what it’s all about,” and she waves out at the wide world.

  If she tells him her idea now, makes it seem all about her project, impresses him, Barking and Dagenham Council will think he’s a saint, he’ll secure his job, get a promotion, Catherine will see what a man he really is.

  “You all right, Olivia?” Ed asks her and touches her hand. A quick, father’s touch. “You’re shaking,” he says.

  “No, no, I’m fine, I’m thinking is all.” She breathes in deeply. “Maybe we could work together. You could help me,” she says, appealing to his instincts, “we could help each other,” she adds, looking around and, yep, right, all melty here in the what-you-want-will-never-come café.

  “Okay,” Ed says, simply. “Okay,” again.

  Holy the solitudes of hospitals and malls! Holy the casinos filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious whispers of doubt beneath the sheets! She needs to chill. She can’t tell him her plan just yet.

  KATRIN

  He kisses her like it’s the last thing he will do in his life. Maybe she has not known kissing before. This is how they kiss in English. This is why everyone is here. He tastes of fried onions and sauerkraut from perogies she cooked for him, but there is also vodka, and one small thought comes that maybe he has drunk too much. But this kissing like the end of the world is too good to stop. His body moves if she moves. One leg for one leg, one hand for one hand, on top of her and then still if she is still. She cannot find where she ends and he begins.

  And so she cries.

  He pauses, caresses her cheek. “Are you all right?”

  She has no words.

  He slides to her side and holds her tight. She turns and he gathers her into a spoon and this feels like something that God has done.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, but she does not want to ask what he is sorry for in case it is something that will end this. So she makes believe and pushes everything out of the room that God did not mean to happen.

  “You sing,” she says, not asking but telling because he has before named Bach and Beethoven, then Bartok and Berlioz, and all the music he could think of when she played the game at dinner. Name all the music you love, she said, and only after Bartok did they notice the Bs. She slides from his arm—“Wait for me”—gets up and on her toes, crosses the cold floor, and is happy for once that the room is small. She br
ings the guitar.

  “I sing one; you sing one.” And she sits; her fingers clutch for C, then D, G—as she has learned from the book. Pick and strum. It is this song that Beata taught her on the dulcimer, but in London a guitar was £40 in Brick Lane. And she can give this kind of music to him because her mother was a girl in Warsaw and learned Czerwone Gitary’s “Biały krzyż” to sing to her baby. “The translation is ‘White Cross,’” she says and closes her eyes to sing to him. When she is finished she opens them and his face is like grace.

  She passes him the guitar and smells their bodies in her sheets. “Do you sing?”

  His fingers curl over the guitar neck and make her wet again.

  He picks the strings like he knows how. And she knows this song because her mother was a girl in Warsaw when Czerwone Gitary was merely a copy of this band, and so when he sings “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings …” she does not understand how he can know her like this, or how this other B music will not make her die, right here in her own bed.

  There are two more songs, more elaborate, more foreign, before he stops and looks at his wrist, but the watch was taken off in Ned time, so he picks it up from the floor and makes a face that has pain.

  “I should go,” he says, and the pain is now in her chest.

  “Why?”

  He draws her to him, pulling her down and spooning again as God decreed.

  “I promised. I promised I would be there for her,” he says. She does not ask then why are you here for me; she slides out from the spoon and sits up, pretends that everything is okay.

  “Of course, of course,” and she tells herself that she is doing this for a baby, and so it is fine. “Go quickly.”

  ROBIN

  Her bedsit has been made beautiful. Robin touches the silk cushions on Katrin’s only comfortable chair. She has dessert for their return from the Spanish restaurant, their regular now, several nights in a row.