Higher Ed

by Tessa McWatt

  The interview commences and he tells them about his research, about the notion that contemporary independent cinema can be analyzed alongside avant-garde poetry by interrogating the idea that all motion produces space, produces the time-image, and the time-image presents movement as a multiplicity of relations. Cinema, like poetry, wants to create the finite that restores the infinite.

  He finishes and realizes he has barely taken a breath. He launches back in. “And these are the same principles I apply to teaching, that this teaching in turn feeds back, via student response, to concepts and ideas, making an interplay between theory and practice that is crucial in contemporary culture.” Each week he is renewed by his interaction with the students; the results he has helped them to achieve in their coursework confirm this crucial exchange. Since his arrival at Thames Gateway University, over twenty of his students have achieved first-class honours degrees. He takes a second breath and looks at the faces of his parole board. He can read nothing, but he has done all he can.

  The interview ends after he tactfully answers questions about how he would approach teaching larger groups of students. Richard thanks him for his cooperation in this round of restructuring and assures him of their intention to be among the finest film departments in London. Afterimage: the white shadow of bones like tiny pins, translucent fingernails, baby fingers.

  He has had a dreamless, undisturbed night. No images, sounds, sensations of any sort. Outside: sun for Easter weekend. Friday is a holiday, he has finished classes for this week, and all he has to do now is wait. Christ.

  He orders an espresso from a young man, twenty-two at best, whose hair has been cut in a number two, his stud earrings tiny diamante, making a trophy of the shape of his head. If he doesn’t get the job, Robin will get a number two. He will not go as far as the earring, but the hair will have to go.

  This café has nothing on Epicure, a few streets up Upper Street. But it’s safe here, while he has nothing constructive to say to Katrin. His hand wants her. His mouth hallucinates her taste. He is like a man away at war, deprived of everything that feels like home.

  His phone rings. Richard. He doesn’t even bother to take a breath, like you’re supposed to do on the verge of bad news.

  “Richard.” Robin is calm. He asked a barber for a number two, years ago, when he thought he would fail his PhD viva, but the barber told him to be optimistic and come back only if he had. He listens to Richard’s voice at a remove, as though Richard, or he—one of them—is under water and the other is above it. The way Richard tells him that he has the job makes Robin feel like he’s sinking—a backwards elation that he wasn’t expecting. The job allows him the responsibility he must take on in any case. There’s no turning back.

  “We wanted to invest in your position as an early career researcher,” Richard says. Robin knows enough about the finances of the university and budget cuts to translate this as, You’re the cheapest of the lot.

  “Thank you, Richard. Yes. Have a good holiday,” he says and hangs up.

  He pays for his coffee and walks up Upper Street. He takes out his phone, to call Emma, but rings off, and continues north. By the time he’s at the door of Epicure, the sun is so hot on his forehead that he is seeing spots before his eyes. He will tell her that with the job he can give Emma money to live elsewhere with the baby. They will find a solution for her mother. Aren’t all solutions as obvious as the feeling of this sun?

  He doesn’t see her at first, but never mind, she must be in the back. He sits at a table near the counter, not the window, ready to resist if she asks him to leave. He doesn’t want to disrupt, just to tell her there is hope.

  Alejandro comes to his table. He’s not as tall as he remembers him and this is another good moment in the day. He pushes his glasses up higher on his nose.

  “Is Katrin here?”

  “No, she’s not,” Alejandro says.

  The man has sideburns but seems harmless, so what has Robin been all in a knot about? “Ah, I was hoping—I thought her day off was Sunday.”

  “She’s not here any more,” Alejandro says, and his eyes show some sort of compassion. Robin senses a throbbing in his shin.

  “Since when?” It was only a little over a week ago that he was here. They walked; she said you tell me when.

  “Last week,” Alejandro says. Too many thoughts to have them here. He thanks the man, stands up and leaves the café.

  The 38 bus takes forever to bring him to Katrin’s bedsit. He rings the buzzer. Again. One last time. She might have found another job. He didn’t even think to ask. Fool.

  FRANCINE

  Thursdays smell like pickles. Francine takes her sweet time to walk from the parking lot through the atrium, past Starbucks, the student union shop, the main reception, out the door to the university square, across the square with a little wave at the river, then to the Watson Building, past the Costa’s, up the lift, slow, slow, slow, no rush on this day that will be her last. If they give her a few months’ notice will she bother coming in again at all? Nah, a few long weeks of sleeping in and eating chocolate until she smells of it is more likely.

  “Hello, Simon,” she says when the elevator opens and he moves towards her, looking like the marked man he is, depleted and thinner thanks to the shingles.

  “Francine,” he says, nodding. Simon is the kind of guy you could stand in the elevator with and not notice.

  The day ticks over as she sorts out things on her desk, in the shelves, in her files. Years of files to clean out. Sayonara. She starts a pile for shredding; she will destroy each and every report so that no one can follow the trail of six years of her not giving a shit, of her pushing papers around for the real academics, of sitting on her butt growing fat on slice after slice of cheap pizza. What is the sound of one hand clapping? It’s a riddle she learned in eighth grade from Mr. Sullivan when they studied World Religions. The smell of melting snow in spring, earth and dog shit rising from beneath it. Nail polish on the nails she’d bitten down far below her finger’s soft pads. Ivory soap wafting up from the crook of her arm as she slouched at her classroom desk, listening to Mr. Sullivan but staring at Trice Hopkins’ chin. She’s not until now understood the answer to the riddle, which is “yes.” Yes, she says, yes, to nothing, to all of this nothing, to the fact that living on air was never a possibility; the airless creases in Dario’s twisted trouser legs. Nothing.

  Yes.

  Towards 5 p.m. her stomach rumbles, not with hunger, not even with fear. There’s a light knock at her door. Lawrence is there, looking as pale as she feels.

  “We’re in the clear,” he says, his face expressionless.

  Larry, you’re a fat ass, she thinks, and has not taken in his words. Larry, Larry, you need to get off your fat ass.

  “All of us?” she finally says, her stomach churning.

  “All of us,” he says, but without a smile, as though he regrets that this is the news he has for her. When he closes the door she is aware that the curdling in her stomach has not subsided, that her stomach is, in fact, a little disappointed about the outcome of the day.

  Spittle on the windshield is not something she’s taking personally tonight. No, it doesn’t all happen to her. Someone got fired and she didn’t. Someone teaching history or a non-viable foreign language, or maybe even anthropology. She didn’t wait for Lawrence to give her names. And now Ryan is running towards her car, hoodie up through the rain. He opens the door and throws himself into the passenger seat like cargo into a hull. He is jittery, can’t settle.

  “He got thirty-six days plus community service for the rest … lost his licence permanently.” He says it all through his teeth, hot spittle hissing.

  “His family will suffer,” she says.

  He looks at her and snorts, shakes his head. Looks back at his hands, where he’s picked at the cuticles around his nails. He shakes his head again but doesn’t say anything yet.

  “You shouldn’t have left the scene before giving all your evidenc
e,” is what finally comes out. There’s a scalding, like steam, on her skin. His fingers picking, picking.

  “You couldn’t have saved him,” she says. He shakes his head again.

  “You need to leave me alone now,” he says to the dashboard, not daring to turn his head. His hand reaches for the door handle.

  What is the sound of one hand clapping?

  She drives down Salusbury Road past the mosque. The sky mewls. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plane. On the plain? She has never known which. She pulls over in front of the Sainsbury’s, parks, goes in.

  The self-service check-out voice tells her to take her items and thanks her. The flowers are shabby and predictable, but she is pleased with them. Tulips and freesia: two bunches. She walks up Salusbury Road in the spitting rain; the smell of wet asphalt is like cake. She crosses the road to the middle, waits for a northbound lorry to pass and heads towards the other side, where dried bunches of roses, lilies, and a few fresh tulips hang from a rope around the oak tree a few inches from where Dario’s head lay face down. She wonders who it is that keeps replenishing this shrine, but likes the fact that they’ve both thought of tulips. She slides the freesia in the string ring and stands back to examine their effect. Just right. She walks to the other side of the tree where there are no bouquets. She pulls on the string to slide in the tulips.

  “These are from Rajit,” she says.

  ED

  Catherine never liked a pub. Nor any other public places to eat or drink; she did all her drinking and eating in their tiny house in Bow. And things don’t change in all of the years you think it tek to change a woman. The thought of her was in his head like paper close to fire, day in and out since Olivia put it there, causing him to do sit-ups and push-ups in his flat, stopping the grog for two weeks. Then Catherine called him. She wanted things in broad daylight, where everything is real and true, she said. So they are in Parsloes park, on a bench like old people in the afternoon and this is exactly how he used to imagine them—sitting and watching people walk past, knowing Olivia was good and in school. Except that now in front of them is a wall with a painting of a head like a mad hatter, grey streak in black hair, and letters that spell something about the mad-ass graffiti artist who made it with a can of paint. Above it is another drawing—a green man, the Incredible Hulk, busting out of his clothes. Not romantic, but not dull either.

  Catherine looks old for a woman not yet fifty, but he’s not looking there, he’s looking into her eyes that are not looking at him, and he’s trying to find the tiny Marilyn Monroe in her and to get those years back. She has talked, breathless-like, filling in every silence with something that means nothing. She always did that, always the one to guide him towards the feelings they were both having, and it seems today, according to her talk of nothing—about the work she does, the place she lives, and the state of things now that things are tight all round—he thinks that the feelings she is having have something to do with money. But, true-true, the looks of the pudding is not the taste.

  “Olivia is coming up good,” he says, to give them something they can share, but Catherine’s face goes sour and he is sorry he said it because he can’t take any credit for that.

  “You helping with her project?” Catherine is holding back now, he can tell.

  “As much as I can, of course.”

  She stands and begins to walk; he leaps up to follow her. “I know you sent money,” she says. So she is admitting now that she opened the envelopes before marking them Return to Sender. “Whose money was that?” she asks.

  Jesus.

  “My money; I worked hard for it,” he says. She stops and looks at him. “I wanted Olivia to grow up good, to have everything she needed.”

  Catherine tosses her head back, turns and walks faster; they pass the playground at a pace before she stops again and looks at him.

  “You never knew what you needed, didn’t know whether to be here or there, always wanting things to be different,” she says.

  How to mash-up a heart is easy. “You do any better?”

  She starts to walk again, slowly, as they reach the tall trees near the end of the park. “My dad was sure you were involved with Geoffrey.”

  “Of course he was,” because Catherine’s father is an ignorant rass and they both know it.

  “So was he right?”

  “No, no, he wasn’t right.” But there is no way of telling the story that doesn’t make him look bad somehow. “I wasn’t involved in anything that Geoffrey did,” he says, and this seems to calm her if not convince her. And then he is vex. “You just went along with what your dad thought?”

  Catherine squints and keeps walking. He knows this is the thing that will bruk them up, right here, once again, but he has no choice. “Why wouldn’t you let me see you?”

  “I couldn’t trust you any more,” she says—hard-hard, like she is holding stone in her teeth.

  “You didn’t even give me a chance, not a one,” he says.

  “It wouldn’t have been good for Olivia.”

  “I’m her father.”

  There’s a look on her face like she’s sucking a tamarind. Catherine turns to him beneath the branches of the smallest of the oaks in the row. “No,” she says.

  He looks in her face, the Marilyn Monroe eyes and pout that have gone droopy with age and probably too much drink, there with her father and brother in front of the television. He waits for her to continue.

  “No, you’re not.”

  There is a bird making a racket above them in the oak tree. A cawing like it has been set on fire and it’s trapped among the leaves that each catch-a-fire, and it’s like the whole tree is going to burn down. He looks up at the cawing but can’t see the bird. What he can see is the place she lived, the flat on Romford Road where she told him she was pregnant.

  “She looks like me.” The fire in the tree is hissing. Catherine shuffles her feet.

  “You’re much better looking than he was,” she says.

  And now he knows. The man before him, the one from St. Kitts; the one whose photo he saw in her purse: wide-faced, big hands, for so. The one who, three weeks into Ed’s courting of Catherine like she was the last queen of England, was going back to St. Kitts and asked to see her one last time.

  When a couple months later she said she was pregnant it wasn’t with a thrill in her voice the way a woman expecting a baby should be. It was him who was chuffed, looking around Catherine’s flat, declaring it was unfit for bringing up a child, and securing them a council house.

  “Catherine.” The sound of her name is flat and treacherous. You knew all this time? But that is just a waste of words, because of course she knew. A mother knows these things.

  “What about Olivia?” he says.

  Catherine eases herself down to sit on the grass. “She knows now.”

  “Since when?”

  “A couple weeks.”

  The last time he saw her was at Jonathan Henley’s funeral where she watched Ed sing “Amazing Grace” like a fool.

  Christ. The damn bird keeps cawing like a rass. A mad good-fa-nothin’ bird. Not tiyoooh, yooh-yoooh of a toucan; not yeeh, yeeeh of a kiskadee. This bird is caw-caw like it sick.

  “You’re the one she remembers—to her you are her father,” Catherine says.

  What does someone remember from four years old? His legs are boneless beneath him and he slips down to the grass beside her, not to sitting, just perched on one knee like a man proposing to a tree.

  He’s nobody’s father.

  Saltfish, tamarind balls, metagee: he doesn’t need to remember the taste of these now, or to rhyme them off for Olivia. His mother’s bangle in the top drawer of his dresser—her pulling it over her hand and wrist the last time he saw her on the steps of her sister’s house in Rose Hall Town: this too can wait. His auntie Margaret has children who pay attention to mum, but for twenty-two years she has wanted to see her granddaughter. For eighteen years she has been sending small gifts for her, th
e gold bangle the most precious. Every Guyanese girl must have a bangle, and most fitting if the bangle is from the grandmother whose middle name the child will bear her entire life. Olivia.

  Niggeritus, backoo, obeyah, piknee: he need not mention these. If you eat labba and drink creek water you will return to Guyana. None of this matters now.

  Catherine does not move or say a word. Sitting, kneeling, the two of them under the tree on fire. He’s surprised by how quickly it seems that the light has gone dimmer and there is a pain in his knee. He gets up and Catherine does the same. They walk together, slowly, to the exit of the park. She wants to say something, he can tell, but no, please don’t. He catches her eye and then turns to walk away to the bus.

  OLIVIA

  Good Friday, flip the bird to you, Jesus, and all she needs is more Maltesers, more coffee from one of those chains, she doesn’t mind which, ’cos principles and politics and parental units are the fuck-up of the tiny bit of herself that once thought she had something significant, special, banging, to be sharing and making a difference with, but all that’s holy in this weekend is the fact that the library is still open. She is the fuck-you-I’m-going-to-crack-it-and-make-something-of-herself Olivia who never did a single thing but look out for everyone else, never had a thought that was solely her own and never did like she’s doing now which is writing with her head trained on the page like it is in a brace, and writing a word at a time, building to a sentence, not looking further than a sentence or thinking about the whole of the sum of the sentences; she’s writing one word like it’s one foot in front of the other, out, out, out of here.

  Another ping from the mobile at the bottom of her satchel. These are regular-like now, one every few hours. Pleading. From Jaz. From Catherine. But nothing from Nasar, the most obedient of the lot. She pulls her phone from the satchel.