Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  “You know, we see a lot of elderly,” he says over his shoulder, then turns towards them. “Family left them long ago and they didn’t know they were unwell, you see. And …” he looks at Olivia whose eyes prompt him to continue. “And some illegals … we don’t know where they’ve come from—sometimes women, mostly men. A young woman—as young as you—” he says to Olivia, “nobody found her for a long time. She had nobody. That’s bad, man.” He shakes his head and places their cups in front of them. He goes to the small fridge for the milk. The open fridge is cool, and he stands there longer than he needs to. He picks up the packet of Hobnobs and places them on the table before he sits down again.

  “And worst is the babies. Yeah, we’ve had some babies.”

  “Where from, though? Their mothers, surely …” Robin says, looking bruk-up inside.

  “You don’t know it, but some mothers walk away and leave them. You don’t think so, but that’s a fact.” Olivia is looking at him like he’s saying the wrong things. “Stillbirths have to be registered if they take place after twenty-four weeks …” What does she want him to say? The poor man’s glasses are slid down towards the tip of his nose. “We had one a few weeks ago, was found in the rubbish …” He looks in their faces again. “The police had custody of the body and they needed to organize a cremation. Normally there’s no funeral under these circumstances, but Olivia has me,” and the thing that’s been there in the room all along catches him and he can’t shake it, “thinking different,” he says and pours the tea.

  He tells them about the mandatory autopsy. The police have to treat it as a crime and the morgue has arrangements with the crematorium for this kind of thing. He knows the coroner who signs the death certificate in this case, a good bloke who talks to him a lot about his cases, and maybe they should work together, because, as Olivia says, a life is a life after all. He burns out on this last sentence and looks to her, but she is looking at Robin who pushes his hair behind his ear, making him look like a girl.

  “But what’s there to say at a funeral like this? How could there be anything to say?” Robin’s voice is tortured, like bacoo stuck in a bottle.

  “True-true,” Ed says, and he won’t tell them about Keith Meyers. Five years ago it was the fact of Keith that made Ed go out more often, made him keep up with his friends better, call his mum more regularly, because he wanted to leave a trace of himself, didn’t want to end up like Keith Meyers, early sixties, whose corpse was discovered only after his rent had gone unpaid for more than a year and his landlords at the Housing Society began proceedings to have him evicted. No one was going to evict Keith because he had already done so himself, thirteen months previously, dead on the sofa in front of the TV which, when the body was found, had one remaining beam of light coming from the centre, like a cataract eye.

  “What do you think would make it better?” Olivia asks him, and he knows what she has in mind—this feeling she has that every human being deserves something good. He can tell this in the throng-bang-parrap of her body. She is a girl who feels so much she will bust open. Things don’t always work out, he will have to tell her—part of his duty as father. Nah every crab hole get crab.

  “Just something honourable,” Ed says. “To give a bit of dignity.”

  Robin is nodding and fidgeting, like he’s caught it from Olivia.

  “Okay, okay, I see,” Robin says. “Look … I don’t know, I really don’t. It’s beyond me, really …”

  Ed is confused by this modern education system—with the lecturer sitting beside the student while she’s doing the research. Robin takes his leave—formal-like and polite—like a man whose own folks have just passed, and Ed is sorry for bringing this pain on him.

  “He is the most caring teaching I ever met, Olivia.” He will say her name until he dies of it.

  “I haven’t told you the whole thing yet,” Olivia says.

  “Oh?”

  She tells him her plan, her crazy, beautiful plan, in the A13 café. He is more comfortable with her in the dull thud of the place that says, man, this is real, this is not a dream you once had. Now he needs to follow this through like a father.

  “And what has poetry got to do with the law?”

  “Nothing,” she says. He waits, because she is a girl who has more, the way a river does after rain. “I don’t always know if I’m in the right field.”

  “It’s a good thing to know the law,” he says. She nods then shakes her head. He has much to do in the shoring up of this daughter of his.

  “Yeah, but the law gets changed, and I have this friend—president of the SU—and he says you don’t wait, you don’t sit it out; by the time there’s a law it’s way too late.”

  This he cannot argue with. What a father can do is encourage her every step of the way. He lets silence fall for a beat before he speaks again. “When you said everyone needs a poem, what about you? Someone writing you poems?”

  “Noooo,” Olivia says, like what a ridiculous question, but there is a puncture of relief in his chest.

  “Why not?” He is pushing it now.

  “Too busy, too busy,” she says and that’s that.

  “What about your mum—she have a boyfriend?” Jeez and rice, now he’s done it.

  Olivia’s eyes duck behind her curls. She shakes her head as if to say, man, he has no idea. He’s a stupid rass. Of course Catherine’s got a million boyfriends. Catherine was a beauty. Curvy, blonde, a Marilyn Monroe even though her face was not what everybody would call attractive. But she was sexy, with skin like cream. Jesus. Why she went for a man like him he can only put down to the fact that he tried so hard, while the blokes she knew treated her with no respect.

  “Have you told her about us meeting?” he asks.

  Olivia exhales. “No, no, she wouldn’t be happy.”

  “But, darling”—yeah, he’s allowed to say that, and Olivia doesn’t flinch—“she should know. Lying is bad.” He hears the hypocrite-rasshole-worthless nothing of a man he is by saying that, picturing the man in the Mazaruni river, face down in the halo of blood. But Olivia looks at him like it is right. Like, just maybe, he has said the right thing for a father to say.

  KATRIN

  There is a blond child hitting a plate with a spoon, and his mother does nothing. The noise is getting louder and other people in Epicure look at Katrin like she must do something instead, but she cannot and she must finish talking to Alejandro who is not teasing when he says, “You should have told me that was what you said to her.” And he’s right, he could not have known, and she is stupid not to have warned him. “You should have told me,” he says. But it is too late and Claire knows about Katrin having gone to the doctor and not the council, and now Katrin is trying not to feel sick and not to need the Indian doctor more than before, because of the clanging spoon along with what Claire will now hold over her. Alejandro talked to Claire and by mistake said doctor and not council. And now Claire is being so friendly to her, talking in a little voice, that Katrin is more frightened than ever. Claire’s tone of voice has made Katrin feel the same size as this blond boy.

  “She will get me,” she says to Alejandro.

  “How? She cannot fire you. You don’t have to tell her where you go. You asked for the time. It’s not her business. You did nothing wrong.”

  “She will tell my landlord that my mother is coming.”

  “She doesn’t know how to find him. And why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know.” The clanging of the spoon on the plate finishes but the child has begun to cry. The mother is asking the child if it is okay with him if they go home now. The child is crying stronger and louder. Is it okay with him that they go home now? Why is the mother asking him? Katrin feels dizzy. “She’ll find a way to get me,” she says and now she must do it first; she must tell her landlord that her mother is coming to live with her before Claire tells him, and she will have to find more hours to pay the extra tax.

  It’s fine. It will be fine; if she can s
top Claire from making it worse it will be fine.

  She is walking too fast along the canal in the rain as the day is ending, but she can feel Robin dragging, wanting to slow down, wanting to walk like it is an hour for fun, even in this weather. But Katrin needs to walk fast. She is the opposite of Robin today, and this worries her. There is a time in all the loves she has had when one person becomes faster or slower than the other person in the way love is working in their heart. Robin has not been talking this last week about the coming of his baby. He has not talked about the mother of his baby. He has talked only about this student, Olivia, and her father Ed, whom he wants to help, but she still is not sure why this must be so.

  “I can’t join you for the movie,” she says, and then spots drooping white blossoms that make her mouth water. The rain has made tiny rivers in between paving stones. She breathes in. “I have to look after some things.”

  He tugs on the hem of her jacket and this slows her so that now she is at his side. “What kind of things?” he says. And he pulls her to him and puts his arm around her shoulder. “What?” he asks.

  When Katrin accepted her place at Gdansk university and told her matka that she would study economics, Beata was very angry. Beata wanted her to study music, to be a beautiful and free artist, but Katrin wanted to be part of the world, not separate. She wanted to be inside the things that make it go around. But she also knew one important thing that her classmates whose mothers were not sad did not know yet: that you do not rely on others.

  “Things for my mother, when she will come,” she says. Because it was not fine when she called her landlord Gary, who told her that she must move if her mother will be with her. She must not have two people in this bedsit; he will not allow this in his property and let it become like the Third World. Gary will come and make sure her mother isn’t there. He will come every week if he has to. She will find a new flat that she and her mother can share, not too far from work or Robin. She will not make a new pressure for Robin who will have a baby and who has students asking him to help dead people.

  “But that’s weeks away,” he says and holds her tighter, knowing that there is more than she is saying.

  “And how will you help this Ed?” she asks, stepping back, making his arms fall.

  They both know that the things they talk about now are not the things they need to talk about. “It’s a crazy idea, but his daughter believes it will help him to keep his job. I don’t know if that’s true,” Robin says. “Probably not. Probably it won’t make any difference. But there is something that—I don’t know. I feel moved by it.”

  “And how will you write for people that no one knows?” she says, trying again not to feel jealous of this student.

  “Well … how do you know anyone? Maybe it doesn’t matter,” he says. But this does not sit right in the place of simple love and she lowers her eyes. She is so stupid to be touchy and moody and swinging from feeling to feeling.

  “Come to the movie with me,” he says, taking her face and holding it, like he has read her mind. “Come. You’ll like it; I promise.”

  When will she visit the flats she has written down from Loot, which are too far out, or from the Islington Gazette, which she cannot afford. She cannot put this off, but standing with him like this reminds her that whatever is not possible now is possible in Ned Time.

  “Okay,” she says and kisses him on his lips.

  FRANCINE

  In the annual audit of the QAE processes in the Health and Biosciences School, Francine can’t keep her eyes off Lawrence’s tie: bright yellow. Like a TV news presenter sending a secret message. She wonders what Lawrence is trying to say and checks out his socks: black. Lawrence is not inventive or subversive. Larry might just be a knob.

  In the corridor after the meeting, when the rest have dispersed, he catches her eye and jerks his head in the direction of his office, as if she should know this little secret signal of his; as if she should feel privileged to have secret signals with him. She follows him into his office.

  “You caused me great embarrassment,” he says as he sits down at his desk.

  “What?” Her cheek tingles.

  “Your QA document for the restructuring.” Larry’s eyebrows are like dirt smudged across his forehead.

  “I put it on your desk.”

  “I know, but it was wrong.”

  “How?” Her cheek twitches. He sighs, annoyed at her for being so thick and stupid and not knowing what he’s talking about. Larry is acting like a jerk.

  “Look …” He walks towards his desk and takes the document from a pile near the corner. Hands it to her.

  She knows at first glance what happened, what this is, and where her head was when she printed off this track-changes version with the red editing in the margins. She might even remember seeing the red ink as she put the document on his desk, thinking that red was the swamp smell in Larry’s office. It’s as stupid as someone could possibly be (oh Mr. Graaaant).

  “Some of those comments would have got us both some bad attention,” he says.

  “Oh God.” She flips through the document and sees his marginal comment at “difficult decisions” where he has added, “glad you didn’t use the word hard, I’m very prone to suggestion,” and she winces with more disgust than the first time she read it. There are no mistakes: isn’t that what people say? Somewhere deep down, didn’t she want to expose flabby Larry? She rubs her own waist, her hand coming across her tummy. Bloated and tender.

  “I’d already forwarded the electronic version to printing before really having a good look. Then I called Sally and cancelled the print job. We were out of time, so I fixed it myself.”

  “Shit.” The window behind Larry frames him and, if she squints, he is a portrait in an abstract painting.

  “Luckily they didn’t have it for long, and they’re far too busy to read these things,” he says, holding this fact of his doing her job over her like a banana over a baboon. The VC group decides who goes and who stays and there is talk everywhere. You can bet that Larry has mentioned her error to Sally and covered his own ass.

  “I’m sorry. I have no idea how that happened.”

  “I do. You’re distracted.”

  “I am?” The abstract portrait of Fat Larry goes into the transporter and starts to lose its solid lines.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No, no, I’m fine. Really. Everyone’s stressed. Simon has shingles—”

  Larry moves closer to her and she nearly coughs. “You shouldn’t be stressed …” he says and reaches for her hand. She doesn’t realize what he’s doing in time to pull away. They stand there near his desk, his tiny purple lips like a skinny worm, his hand now on her hip. “A drink at the end of the day?” he asks, his hand not quite moving, but not quite still either. “We should have dinner, yes?”

  “Oh, I …” she says, stalling. “I have to check … there’s a friend, a young guy, I think I might have told you … we witnessed the same accident. He’s been having a rough time and I told him we would meet up.” She steps to the side just enough so that his hand falls from her waist.

  “There’s a new chef at the Crown, could be good,” he says. He looks at her like he wants to eat her, and Francine remembers that she is supposed to want this, that there’s this man who wants to eat her and she’s somehow supposed to be grateful. And besides, he has just saved her butt. Shouldn’t she be showing her gratitude?

  “Thanks, Lawrence,” she says formally, “thanks, that sounds really good. Dinner sounds good.”

  He licks his skinny lips and her tummy rumbles.

  “I’ll stop by at the end of the day, then. We can drive over convoy style,” he says.

  “Convoy style,” she says and nods. Shipshape, yep, shipshape. “But I’m really sorry,” it comes out more shipshape and peppy and snide than she means it to. “I mean, sorry,” she says again, more gently and genuinely, “but I shouldn’t let him down, I really shouldn’t; we made a plan.
Sorry.”

  Lawrence doesn’t look hurt, exactly, but she notices that his face has tightened.

  “Another time,” he says and walks back to his office.

  She marches out of the building in search of chocolate. She crosses the square and touches her tummy (smaller), her thighs (wow), her butt, just for a second (hey) and will buy both a Kit Kat and a Dairy Milk bar. She enters the atrium, and there is that film lecturer. She follows him to the student union shop (When the red, red Robin comes bob, bob bobbin’ along …) where she watches him hover over the chocolate bars. She knows his choice will be a Kit Kat. It’s destiny. Hello! Hello! She wants to yell across the aisle to him. Hello, she wants to say, really loudly, because they just look at each other this way, regularly, and neither says a word. In a village they’d be pals by now. She watches him leave as she pays for the chocolate.

  In the atrium she joins the line at Starbucks, and she arrives at the same moment as a powerful waft of lavender-croissant. Patricia.

  “How’s it going? How are you?” she says more eagerly than sounds right for an atrium reunion, but since she’s been avoiding Patricia the days have become longer and the spring light is creeping up on them.

  “Not too bad. You?” Patricia has her guard up.

  “Here,” Francine says, and holds out her Kit Kat. “I got you one of these,” and she pushes it into Patricia’s hand.

  “What? Why?” Patricia’s unplucked eyebrows slide towards one another.

  “Just did, that’s all.” Francine wants to tell her things. Instead she looks at the age spots on Patricia’s hands. Her mouth goes dry. “I think it’s hormones,” she sputters.

  “What is?” Patricia says. There’s a loud crash at the end of the atrium and Patricia turns around, while Francine keeps looking at her hands.