Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  Katrin moves off from the shop window to the next one. Within her, though, she’s not budging. Her deliberateness is set in gear. The thing you love someone for is the same thing that will kill you in the end. The next shop has clothing. He wants furniture: a loft; he will build her a loft in his flat. This will work, if he gets the job. When the baby …

  “You can’t do anything yet,” she says and nods. “You tell me when you can,” and thank God, she has given him some reprieve. There is possibility here, even if he knows of no way to manage it. Possibility and madness are not the same.

  KATRIN

  Epicure is quiet, the sun has come out, and something has changed today in London. The feeling of wanting Robin is in her chest, her stomach, her arms, her legs, and between them. There is not a part of her that does not miss him. The day is too slow. She will apologize for hurting him with her silence.

  “Claire says we can clean the freezer because it is so slow today.” Alejandro has come out from the back room and he stands beside her at the counter. Like her he does not want to do this work. They stare out into the sunlight and Katrin notices particles darting between them. She wants to tell him how frightened she is about Claire’s calm face in the last two days, and how she has lost the flat in Walthamstow, but she does not want to pierce this moment.

  But suddenly it is pierced, and he is there.

  “I can’t talk now,” she says to Robin and hurries to the door of the shop to stop him from coming in. His smile disappears. “I’m sorry. Just not now.”

  “When?” His face looks like she has hit him.

  She cannot stop her throat from being tight, her tears from rolling. “Come,” she says, and she leaves the shop and takes his arm to pull him with her. “I love you,” she says beneath the rolling tears. And she is stupid for letting him see that she is weak.

  “And I love you,” Robin says, and tries to stop her from walking fast, but she keeps going. “Where are we going?”

  She does not have a destination.

  They pass the furniture shop with a chair that is one piece of moulded fibreglass, the arms curving out from the seat like wings of a gull. She has wished she could buy this chair for months, but now this wish is pointless.

  “What will you do?” she asks.

  He looks puzzled for a moment. “I can’t do anything. Not yet. I promise I will, though, after the baby is born.”

  She stops in front of the next shop that has shoes and vintage clothing. There is a hat that has embroidery that would make it camouflage among butterflies. It is difficult to breathe now on Upper Street. It is difficult to breath anywhere in this England. There is nothing here that makes her free.

  “You can’t do anything, yet,” she says, nodding, and she hears how so quickly she has forgotten to live in the first person. “You will tell me when you can,” she adds, but she is really saying, I was wrong. She has been doing English all wrong.

  She turns around and heads back to Epicure. Robin follows her, but at the door she tells him he cannot enter or she will be in trouble. “Later,” she tells him. But as soon as she walks through the door and sees Claire she knows about where she will be later. Orange blossom marmalade, bittersweet chocolate flurries, sweetened cream-cheese frosting—these she knows in the present participle: spreading, stirring, pouring, baking, working. The verbs are in the continuous form, but too they are verbs of movement and position. Katrin sees in Claire’s face what she must do. She walks to the back room, collects her coat and bag and makes a signal to Alejandro that she will call him. She is steady as she walks through the coffee shop and out the door.

  She is Katrin from Gdansk again, because to be from nowhere is impossible. “I” … she says, as she walks to the 38 bus, “I,” to remind herself that this is correct … I am coming home, mamunia. I will not make you worry.

  FRANCINE

  The next time Francine is outside of Ryan’s house it’s 7 p.m. and darkness is more than an hour away, spring having come, the clocks moved forward, making the day feel like it’s got some heft.

  “Hey.” She waves out of the open window of her car. “Hey.” More friendly the second time. Spring. She’s wary of feeling happy just yet.

  Francine and Ryan drive with the windows down.

  “Rajit gets sentenced soon … Thursday—they might …”

  “They might?” She looks over, fast and stern. This is not the way a young man should be thinking. A young man should have more resilience than Ryan has been showing in wanting another man to suffer. Thursday is also when she’ll know if she’s sacked or not.

  “Then we’ll see,” Ryan says.

  “See what?”

  He puts his hood up, like on a colder day. “Just see …” Anger like mud. She sits back and concentrates on the road.

  “So, nearly finished your term? An Easter break coming …” she says as she decides to take a different route. She heads towards Finchley Road.

  “Yep, yep.” He’s nodding inside his hoodie. “Where are we going?”

  “No idea,” she says but is thinking of maybe driving up and around Hampstead Heath. She wants the smell of spring.

  “What, we on a date now?”

  She laughs.

  He smiles.

  She would never have made a kid as good as Ryan.

  OLIVIA

  A coat, some makeup, a twenty-quid note. She rushes down the stairs with everything she needs, and what she needs most is to get out of here. The television is blaring with Deal or No Deal and there is TV drum rolling and TV telephone ringing and her head is going to bust open if she has to hear another second of it.

  “Livi!” Eric shouts from the sitting room. Christ no. She pokes her head in the door of the sitting room. The contestant has said “No deal,” and there’s loud applause.

  “Idiot!” Granddad says to the contestant.

  “Which way you headed?” Eric asks her.

  Way far away, but she merely shrugs.

  “Pick us up a Chinese for tea, will ya? Dad … give her dosh,” Eric says. And there’s a one-, two-, three-second wait while Noel Edmonds says we’ll find out after this break, and Olivia turns, runs back up the stairs and fetches her satchel. Running back down the stairs she’s not-soon-enough out of there.

  “I want to party,” she says, and Jaz’s face lights up like Olivia is her very own brand new baby.

  “Well-sick!” Jasmine squeals and launches into how her Grenada DJ hubz is doing a gig in that basement on Romford Road and they will go there tonight. Jaz is talking at a wicked speed and asking her what they should wear but Olivia doesn’t want to talk, or think, for fuck’s sake. She just wants to be out.

  Jasmine goes out to pick up things she says she needs, and Olivia circles Jasmine’s bed for nearly an hour before it takes her down, and she falls asleep there. Two hours later when Jaz returns she can’t remember where she is or why, but she’s told that it’s late enough to start getting ready.

  She puts makeup around her eyes, following the outline of her lids with charcoal liner, slowly, trying not to poke herself in the eye, ’cause she’s not used to this shite that most girls do on a daily basis. But this shading, this bandit mask, feels right because: fuck.

  “You look hot,” Jaz says when Olivia appears in the hallway ready to go, and Olivia wants to scratch Jasmine’s eyes out. “Here …” Jaz adds, and hands Olivia a small white capsule. Oh.

  “Meow meow,” Jaz says, “my treat.”

  Olivia knows that Jaz is new to this, that she tried “MDMA-zing” once last year which made her in love with her media studies buddies for a whole week but that Mcat is cheap and nearly the same and easy as shite to get and why not. Why not?

  “Not sure,” Olivia says, but takes the pill and slips it into her coat pocket. “Let’s get going.” Her body is already humming, thumping, twitching, and she needs to dance.

  The dubstep is in her chest. And she is strapped up like a suicide bomber with this bass beat between her breas
ts. She bounces on the spot, then moves through the bodies. Jaz is chomping on her teeth like there’s something she should be eating but can’t find, and she smells like fish. Jas is in meow-meow heaven and has her hands all over the boy wearing the wife-beater who smells less like fish and more like a dead whale. Olivia has the meow meow in her hand and could take it now if she wanted, could take it and touch the dead whale, touch herself, touch the sky, because there’s nowhere else to touch when everything is a lie.

  “Errybody hands up, errybody hands up …”

  She does as she’s told by the thumping singer in the speakers, fisting her right hand with the meow meow, the left hand open like a hallelujah and errybody hands up, errybody hands up, she bops to the centre of the dance floor.

  An arm comes from behind her and wraps around her waist. The whale smell comes too, and she looks over her shoulder, around his smooth sculpted arm, to where Jaz is standing, waving, all gift-giving and full of promises, having sent the cornrows dude in the wife-beater over to her.

  The bomb strapped to Olivia’s chest beats harder as the music gets louder, speeds up, and jump, jump ya, jump, come on na, and the whale dude has his other hand on her arse and it’s like he’s propping her up from tummy to bum, like he’s trying to hold her all in, the way she’s doing too, so she lets go a little and they jump like they are told to, and then move over to the wall, and he holds her in some more and then puts her back to the wall, and she opens her eyes and his face is right there, all sweaty and lippy, his bulgy eyes closed, his hands moving over her hips and bum now, but her hands are still in the air, one clutching the meow meow, so she lowers this one and opens her palm, pokes his shoulder with her fingers, his eyes open and move fast-like to the capsule in her hand, and his smile is bright white, and the bomb at her chest ticks louder while she fingers the capsule and holds it up, knocks on his big white teeth to be let into the tongue that is as dark as a plum, a thick-wide disc that laps up the capsule like a starving mollusc, and while he’s swallowing he is pressing his chest into hers and moving his hands between her legs and farther up, up, his hand, just there, is still, like the second before a bomb goes off, then she moves, just an inch forward, which says sure, yes, and he goes to the top of her jeans and down with his whole big hand, flicking away the top of her pants and passing through the bush, all matted with sweat, and then his finger makes a j and up he goes, and the other one too, both way up and she is barely breathing, and now that he has swallowed the pill the purple tongue presses her lips and she opens up and the mollusc dives in, but it does not taste good, does not feel good, but the breathing and the fingers and the oh way up higher in her than is possible and there’s nowhere she can go now, nowhere that isn’t into the dynamite strapped to her chest.…

  But still no.

  Olivia turns her head, shoving the whale dude’s mouth out of the way. She pushes on his chest and grabs his arm, lifting with all her might to drag his hand out of her pants. He is strong, doesn’t let her, but she pushes him, lifts her knee and presses him back with it. He takes his hand back, smells his fingers, licks them, and she ducks under his arm and hauls her arse out of the basement without her coat, into the iron-orange wind on Romford Road.

  When she opens her eyes the next morning to the sound of a knock, she looks to her left and she is in the bed alone. Jasmine isn’t home. When Jasmine’s mum opens the door she closes her eyes again and deep-breathes so that she won’t have to tell her that she has no fucking idea where her daughter is. The door closes with a creak, or maybe a cry.

  She checks her phone. There are text messages, but none from Jasmine.

  Again you disappear. SU demonstration Fri. Will you meet me? Nasar

  There’s a fire in her face and she wants to aim it at him and set him and everyone else alight so that they burn, burn, burn. The whole world should fuck off right about now.

  Stop contacting me. I will never meet you. Leave me alone.

  That ought to do it.

  A similar one goes to her mother who is oh so worried she doesn’t know what to do. Well, should have thought about what to do at the beginning of all the fucking lies.

  Jaz, where the fuck are you? Can I live at yours for a while?

  She throws her phone to the bottom of the bed and curls up under the duvet that is not hers, in the bed that is not hers, in the house with a mother that is not hers, in the city where she is nothing.

  When she wakes up again Jasmine is sleeping beside her, smelling from Mcat, bloody hell, like Billingsgate market. She gets up, puts on Unkle’s “Sunday Song,” loud as shite because she knows Jasmine won’t hear it and that her mum will be at church. She stands at the foot of Jasmine’s bed and feels that thing like dynamite in her chest again, as Unkle sing You can be so imaginary, nobody knows or seems to see, I’ve reason enough to keep from you, the consequences I can’t undo.

  It’s one of those moments when someone like Robin would say she has choices, would tell her she could make something of it or she could let it all take her down. Fuck, she could burn them all, him too.

  The next tune is “Only the Lonely.” Dub version. She rushes to the iPod deck and switches off the player. There’s nothing to be done. She picks up her satchel and heads out, with a remaining shred of gratitude for the university library that is open 24/7.

  FRANCINE

  It’s like being in a damn projector, that’s it. As the tube leaves Baker Street station, she nearly has it, is on the brink of figuring it out—this thing that is going on with the smells, with the veins and bones behind people’s skin: the suited guy’s hand on the top rail; the skinny leather-pants woman shaking her foot up and down and around as she chews gum; the seventy-year-old woman that no one has given their seat to, Francine included, because she feels fat and pinned sitting, as the carriage lurches along the Bakerloo line towards home. This way of seeing things is like being the projector itself, like life has a movie and she’s showing it. All these people and their bodies: celluloid. And when life checks out, when it clicks off, it stays in other places, like in her hand, like in her finger. Like in her jaw. Sayonara!

  She doesn’t leave the tube at her normal stop. She stays to watch a woman with a small makeup mirror putting on her mascara, and she wonders how the woman hasn’t poked herself in the eye. The woman stops, having found a zit, which she squeezes, and Francine will never get over the things people do on the tube not knowing or caring if anyone watches. Two more stops and Francine gets off at Willesden Junction. Outside she walks quickly because she knows there is a window between six and seven that might work: Rajit’s wife will be busy making supper, and Rajit will answer the door, will talk to her, and she will … what?

  Flowers—big puffy hydrangea. Blue flowers are only a little bit ridiculous. They say something strong. She holds these behind her back.

  “What do you want with us?” Rajit’s wife says in the doorway, the door wide open, not as an invitation, more like a gesture of defeat: take all of this now; you want it too? Francine looks through to the kitchen and sees Rajit at the stove. She got this all wrong.

  “I just wanted to give you my support,” she says but holds the flowers by her side, tilted down to the steps; blue is ridiculous.

  “Support? You are a funny lady,” Rajit’s wife says. “You want to support us. He has no licence to go to his job every day. You will support us now?” She doesn’t quite laugh but very nearly. Francine sees Rajit put down a large ladle. He turns and shuffles towards the front door. He looks old, his hair matted, and still in his pyjamas like a ward patient.

  “Who is this?” he asks his wife.

  “She came before, remember?” his wife says.

  Francine has never seen a less dangerous-looking man.

  “I was there,” she says.

  Rajit looks accused, not at all what she meant.

  “I was right behind you.” What an idiot. Rajit starts to turn and walk away. Mrs. Mahadeo comes closer like she’s going to hit her.
/>
  “He’s a very proud man, Miss,” Rajit’s wife whispers as she bends towards her. The woman’s thin shoulder touches hers, and Francine wants to have been more proud in her life. Don’t ever spit, baby. Her mother had been proud, but it has bypassed her.

  “I know the sentencing is soon—Thursday, right?” she says, and Rajit turns back towards her. “I just wanted to wish you …” What is it that you wish a guy who might go to jail? “… fairness.” But that’s as stupid as the blue flowers.

  Rajit stares at her and in his stare she sees legs, arms, a crushed face, a broken helmet: the recurring content of his thoughts—and these comfort her for being like her own, and for a split second they dissolve together in the transporter, beamed up by Scotty.

  “I’m sorry,” she says and turns, only hoping that they don’t despise her.

  ROBIN

  There are three on the hiring panel; he sits before them like a felon in front of a parole board: the dean, the head of health sciences as the external, and his line manager, Richard, who looks sheepish. Has he told them about the Bayo business, and will they take into account her complaint? To have passed her because she has paid fees, because she will carry debt, because she is a young person who needs to be encouraged: is this what the world demands of him now?

  “Robin, welcome. Do you have any questions about the process or the post before we begin?” The dean has opened the meeting and it’s too late to back out now.

  “No, no thank you,” he says, clearing his mind of everything but what he rehearsed: the stinging, precise rhetoric of form over function; the knife-edge of reason over intuition. If he stays in the place he can trust—the place where minutiae create kingdoms, where the facts he possesses can be trained onto the subject of film like a dazzler in the green electromagnetic spectrum—if he can have no after- or future-images, he will get through this.