Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

“Ow, ow, ow,” she says and pushes Lawrence up to get him to stop.

  “What? You okay?” he asks, terrified he has hurt her, but she hugs him to reassure him he has not, no, not really … it’s just …

  “Sorry, just a second, let’s … just … Stay there. Don’t move,” she says, “I like that,” and she remembers how to be helpful and how to make it seem like everything is just right and the guy just never has to do anything but the perfect fucking he believes he’s been born to do. She remembers that this is a crucial part of all of this. So she whispers: “Oh God, that feels great,” and in a moment so graceful and swift that it feels like it is enacted by a petite, confident woman half her size and age, she turns over on her stomach and raises her red ass in the air like a baboon and offers it to Larry as the last thing on earth that might save her.

  ROBIN

  The gods are back. This day confirms it. And they are toying with him again. Since the last warm days of October, through the misery of November and his last hurrah of sex with Emma in December, and all through the dark winter, the gods said, you deserve this, you are lost in a grim forest, you are not Kurosawa’s samurai, you are merely a common, irrelevant man. And now today’s sun—the evil light like the cinematography in Rashomon—is their joke on him. Things were easier in the irritating shadows, the itching cold. This light, this warmth on his neck; daffodils, crocuses, a million shades of green: these will hurt without her. And those birds. God. The birds are torture. There is one tree, one supernatural tree that he must pass on his way to the tube, and this tree persecuted him this morning; this tree with branches dressed in white lace petticoat blossom, circled by sparrows calling like fools. And the afterimage of Katrin seared into his brain: her hair, skin, the way she takes him to her. These, along with the ultrasound image of his baby, Emma’s tears, and the fact that he has agreed to her request to move into his flat for the baby’s birth, are torture here in the sunshine.

  Today the river smells nearly like a river should. The sun makes this space behind the library feel nearly like a real shore. Robin looks around him, aware of noises near the derelict spot at the back of the Samuel Johnson building. He sees the broad back of Bayo, her weave of black hair, long down her back, her shoulders hunched over something, and then the flame opens and she drops the thing in her hand and stands back. The essay. He didn’t want to, he tried hard not to, but he had no choice but to fail her. It would never have got by the external examiner, would in no one’s eyes but his own have been worthy of a pass just because she has tried so hard and needs a break so badly. Is he doing them justice—these students who don’t need theory but who, like Bayo, just need a job?

  The inevitability of bad news awaits him in his office. The last round of e-mails from the dean reveal that there will be no hourly paid lecturers for next year, and class sizes will increase accordingly. Even if he keeps his job, he’ll never have time to write another article. Students will consume him, making a film would be out of the question even if he could, and, fact is, without being submitted to the REF he’ll never get further than the lecturer grade. He needs to make a mark in a different way, but his application for his job has been sent to Human Resources; his article on motion capture and animation has been submitted to The Velvet Light Trap, and he now must ensure that he doesn’t botch the interview. The one for his current job is the only interview he hasn’t botched in his life, except maybe the one for a stock boy position at Sainsbury’s when he was sixteen, when he jabbered on about the importance of fresh milk.

  Bayo spots him as she walks away, the blackened leaves of her burnt essay fluttering on the ground beside the cement wall. He nods, but she doesn’t acknowledge his gesture.

  Olivia paces in the corridor; a scowl, eyebrows close together. Robin slows down in his march back to his office. Bayo, Olivia: too much today. But as soon as she is in front of him at his desk, the born teacher in him, the part of him he wishes he could bottle so that he could sip it during other less resourceful moments of his day, arrives to shore them both up.

  “That man who works for the council,” Olivia says. She is ticking inside, something about to give. He puts his hand on the desk.

  “What is it?”

  She rubs her face. “I didn’t tell you this before.”

  He waits, expecting that her bobbing will spin out meaning like cloth.

  “He’s my father.” She looks at him with something akin to a dare.

  “Oh,” he says, and waits for her to explain.

  “So, yes, that’s why, that might be why.”

  He waits, giving her space, not wanting to force her to that place she was last year when she revealed more than he could rightfully handle.

  “I haven’t seen him for … like forever … and he …” She shifts in the chair. He waits for her to finish, but she shakes her head and doesn’t look as though she will.

  “Is there something else?” He lifts his baby finger to the bridge of his glasses and nudges them slightly.

  “He just seemed so pathetic, is all.” The tension in her face slackens.

  “I don’t understand,” Robin says, but really he does, and there is something pathetic about a man who is responsible for heaps of lonely dead people who might lose his job because of budget cuts and shrinking economies and the careless, idiotic way we live.

  “I just had to tell you that, is all. I just thought, oh, I didn’t tell the whole story, and it wasn’t fair, so I had to tell you that.” Olivia picks her satchel up off the floor.

  Now it all makes sense, her tortured, confusing designs disguised as research.

  “Are you worried about him?”

  “He’s just this man; he sounds a bit foreign. I didn’t use to think so, when he was my dad,” she says.

  The boundary that Robin is perched on is a dangerous one, he knows.

  “What do you want to happen?” he says.

  Her eyes are very clear as she looks up. “To do this project with him,” she says, “so he can keep his job, and he can become—” she stops, her confidence spent.

  If there are no rules, there is no game. But what kind of parent will he be if he doesn’t respond with his truest impulse?

  Afterimage: Katrin laughing uncontrollably: you want to be seen as a predator.

  “I could talk to him,” he says, and she is calmed. He is not promising anything; he doesn’t have to commit to action just because that is her way of handling strife. Talking to Olivia’s father would be like breaking the fourth wall in theatre. There might be no worse or better moment in his career to do so. Though coming up with a better way to eulogize over a communal grave will not save Olivia’s father’s job.

  She rests the satchel on the floor again. “Will you? Oh, that’s ace; you will? I’ll set it up.”

  “Yes,” he says with a firm nod. Formaldehyde is a difficult word to spell; Bayo knows this. Yes, he will do this small thing.

  When Olivia has gone he looks at the sky through his office window. The beryl through the atrium’s aperture confirms that the day has not yielded in its outpouring of painful sunlight. Skin, tongue, hips. God. It’s palinopsia.

  OLIVIA

  Jasmine is wearing a cross the size of a door key. She looks like a jailer with it hanging around her neck, and Olivia can’t hold back her smile. Even if Jasmine looked up now from her praying to see Olivia’s face, she wouldn’t get the smirk. Nah, Jaz is gone. Jaz has a dead-man-has-been-inside-me miracle of Christ’s love to distract her from feeling duped, on account of finding out how many girlfriends Dario had at the time of being splattered on the road. Jasmine is straining towards Christ as a way of eliminating the competition.

  “Jaz—we should go out, to the park or something, get some air, innit. It’s stuffy in here. The sun is out—the birds are singing—feels nearly spring,” Olivia says.

  Jasmine looks up and glances out the window. “It won’t last,” she says, “and there’s nowhere to go except to Jesus, Liv.”

  “You know
you don’t believe that. You didn’t even know the guy, Jaz.” Olivia stands and gets her coat on. “I’m off—got a ton of work to do. I’m danged, Jaz, but you just keep praying.” And out she goes into the sunshine that says, cool it, cool it, right.

  But it’s week five of the term already, and she has to get down to it. All she has is an outline on the history of paupers’ graves, a bit of research on poetry, ceremony, and commemorations, and some jacked-up ridiculousness from Jasmine on how souls who don’t get praised don’t go to heaven. She’s bound to fail her degree now. This sunshine is not helping, not one bit. She wants to sprint like mad the way she used to in Parsloes Park on the March days when Miss Temple from Five Elms Primary school took her year-four class to the park and said, “Run wild,” because she knew they’d tire themselves out and be better behaved for the rest of the day. Olivia could outrun Jasmine-who-was-then-Eleanor, Athina, Sally, and even Rufaro, Olu, and Beverly, who were the sporty ones with a lot of speed but too much attitude. There was nothing keeping Olivia back because she knew where to focus. She knew you didn’t look at the finish line; you looked at your own two feet running. Right.

  And now she has to do the same and not look up again until this dissertation is finished. Robin told her that he would meet Ed at his office; Robin is a man who will not let you down. Something will come, and the next time Ed has a funeral and reads a poem for the lonely dead, well, she’ll take Catherine. That will be the moment, and all will be unveiled and all will be right. Suddenly she feels tired.

  Her satchel buzzes.

  She flips up the flap and reaches in for her phone.

  You disappearing from me, but I still try, and hope. Nasar.

  It’s not anger she feels, no. If he’s so determined, he will wait. What’s in her fingers is more like the need to brush the curls away from her eyes.

  Very busy now. How do you know me anyway? You’re amping this don’t you think?

  She keeps walking. The bus will be quiet this time of day. She can read her printouts on participatory rights in international law on the way. Uni food is too expensive and too shite since they dumped all the real dinner ladies, so she’ll get off early and get a sandwich from the shop, and—

  You meet me on the cuts march at SU bus.

  Nasar. That was him. Of course, on the student union march. Of course he isn’t a random stalker. That dude was something different. A tall bloke, a small tingle, and just enough of a wish that this Egyptian will be around when she’s finished her course work and that there will be an Arab Spring in London.

  The 173 stops directly in front of her and the driver takes his sweet time opening the door. She was right, it’s nearly empty, but even though she could without harm take a disabled and elderly seat at the front, she moves to the back, sits, and takes out her notes. As they make their way around corners and through intersections, she feels something in her knickers—a bit of wetness, which makes her uneasy. She looks around to make sure neither of the two women in the seats around her take any notice that there might be something going on inside her.

  ROBIN

  Sydney House, the offices of the Safeguarding Adults Team of the Barking and Dagenham Council, is drab and boxy, with the kitchen-sink realism of Kes, and overhead lighting to match, as though revealed through the lens filter of a cinematographer invoking the 1970s. Robin walks the corridor to the Protection, Funeral and Conference Officers. The door is open and a black man behind one of the three desks in the office stands up when he sees him. “You are Robin,” the man says. “I’m Ed,” and he smiles. His head is balding at the front, closer to a number-two trim elsewhere. “Or Wood,” he adds, zipper teeth towards a laugh. The Caribbean accent is as mild, but present, as Olivia said.

  Robin shakes his hand. “Wood?”

  Ed comes out from behind the desk. He leads Robin to a small room along the corridor, where there is a table, chairs, a coffee machine, cups, and a kettle. A tiny To Sir with Love staff room.

  “Wood is what people call me when they know me,” Ed says. The man pulls out a chair at the table and sits, inviting Robin to do the same.

  “Why Wood?”

  “When my daughter—when Olivia,” he raises his hand in a yes-of-course-you-know-her gesture. “A nickname she gave me. You go ahead, call me Wood. Olivia says you are very good to her.” Ed’s voice is higher when he talks about his daughter. His accent is less controlled. Robin feels both familiarity and freshness on the other side of the boundary he has crossed, and he sits up straight to resist getting too comfortable here. He will find out what Ed thinks of Olivia’s eulogy project and see if he can offer any suggestions. That will be all.

  “So, this must be a demanding job,” he says, and shifts a little in his chair.

  “No, no, not demanding—not in an ordinary way.” Ed turns over a napkin on the table, folds it, opens it again and straightens out the edges.

  “What sort of training do you need?”

  Ed begins to talk quickly, as though he’s being interviewed, and this uneasy dynamic is not what Robin intended.

  “I have a lot of experience,” and Ed rhymes off a range of courses and diplomas. “I wanted to be a teacher myself, once. Teachers are as important as parents,” he says, but he laughs uncomfortably at this. Although he’s fifty-nine, he says, he still thinks he can be a good parent. “Olivia is lovely, isn’t she?” he says.

  Robin nods, wanting to tell him how Olivia seems worried for him, but he will not breach her trust. And mostly what he is not saying is that you are a lucky man and if I get a child who cares about me like this I will be undeserving. He closes his eyes then opens them again quickly.

  “And what about her idea?” Robin asks.

  Ed shakes his head and smiles, big, wide. “Her dissertation, you mean? Oh, yes well, you know, I helped her a bit, but not too much, really, just told her a little about community graves and what goes on through the council … I’m not the best source; she needs to be doing the history, I think, and I—” He pauses and looks serious, nearly unhappy. “But it’s all right, isn’t it? My helping her a bit?”

  Robin takes a deep breath; he has been set up. Olivia has obviously not told Ed about the poetry, and now Ed thinks he’s here to check up on him. “No, no, it’s great; it’s fine.” He shifts in his chair again. “Have you worked with academic researchers before?” Maybe he can salvage this without embarrassing either of them. If there’s a real project here what’s the harm?

  Ed nods his head and begins to answer, his voice dedicated and professional. Directed by the Social Care Institute for Excellence, their work is pan-London, partnered by the police, the NHS, local authorities, and the fire brigade. His job is a small part of a bigger strategy, because, according to Ed, the whole world is going wrong. The things he does, day to day, don’t change much, but there are always strategies for finding more partners, more money. He looks after the elderly, the mentally incapable, people who don’t have family or friends to represent them and can’t make their own decisions. Ed gets them the right help.

  Robin sees the feathery blackened remains of Bayo’s burned essay at the back of the library.

  “Does it get you down?” he asks, looking around the room. The only books in sight are the paperback manuals piled on the table beside the kettle: phone books, regulations, government reports.

  “Ah, no-no,” Ed says, shaking his head. “Just the opposite.”

  That’s the thing, yes; he knows this from teaching: it keeps you in the world. Afterimage: Emma’s tiny mogul of a bump beneath her white T-shirt. “Hope you don’t mind me asking … your accent, where are you from exactly?”

  Ed is reluctant at first when he tells Robin about Guyana, but he slowly opens up and talks about the variety of landscape—sea, rivers, bush. He describes the swell of forest in the middle of the country making it sound like lungs for a hemisphere. Robin breathes in and holds his breath, thinking, yes, yes, there are things I could do to help. As they talk more, across r
andom subjects, Robin finds himself at one point saying, “I fix nearly everything in my flat with duct tape,” at which Ed nods, knowing exactly how important duct tape is.

  “Did you learn to read from young?” Ed asks him.

  “Sure, sure,” Robin says, and they smile at one another, mirroring language as well as smiles. Ed fidgets, and Robin knows he must either take the conversation somewhere new or tell Ed about the poetry. Although the idea seems less absurd in this precise moment than it has all along, he doesn’t have the words right now.

  “Catherine is Olivia’s mum,” Ed says, saving Robin from raising his own random subject. He thinks of his own, Polish Catherine. There’s nothing left to say.

  “I’ll think about possible research projects, a film, perhaps,” and he makes moves to leave, but he doesn’t want to return to the university; he wants to return only to the moment of standing with Katrin in the curve of the eaves in her bedsit, holding tight, only a slight, rocking movement, a dance, a silence.

  “Olivia’s project is good,” Ed says, proud, maybe a bit defensive. They stand.

  “I’m sure it is,” Robin says.

  He shakes Ed’s hand. He doesn’t mind that he has been stitched up by Olivia; he wants to be necessary, like this man.

  FRANCINE

  It might appear like a normal day if you didn’t look too hard—students sitting in lecture halls taking notes, lecturers bitching in the staff room, coffee being drunk, cigarettes smoked out in the square—but London in March is not supposed to have snow crushing the daffodils poking up through the brittle ground, so Francine is shit sure that something is going down today. A few days ago the skies were like oh-hallelujah-it’s-here! But now the skies are pewter, flecked with dandruff. This might be the day she hears that her job is kaput. She decides to call the States. “Scotttttttt …” she says, playing with him, in a way they never did as children. But when he doesn’t rise to the invitation and instead responds matter-of-factly, asking her why she’s phoning him so early on a Monday morning, she speaks plainly.