The Body Lies

by Jo Baker

  Patrick was in the back sitting room, lighting the wood-burner, when I came down.

  “Thank you for today,” I said.

  “I was going to say the same to you.”

  “Sammy’s spark out. He had a great time.”

  “I had a great time too. I loved how he ate his chips.” He got to his feet and dusted his palms. He handed me a glass of wine.

  “Thank you.” I glanced round for somewhere to set it down. “But—uh—I don’t, so…” I handed it back to him. He took it off me with a puzzled frown.

  “I just—don’t. Any more. No biggie.”

  “I guess you’ve got enough to do without having to do it all hung-over.”

  “Yeah, there is that. And I wanted to ask you, because work. We’ll be, you know. Discreet?”

  He tilted his head, equivocal.

  “What?”

  “Might be a wee bit late for discretion. ‘Shameless flirting.’ That’s what I was told.”

  I put my hands to my face. “Oh God. Who said that?”

  “Mina.”

  “Oh God. God.”

  “Me, not you.”

  “That was flirting?”

  “That’s how good I am at it. You don’t even notice when it’s happening…” He reached an arm out along the back of the sofa, with a quizzical expression, offering a hug.

  I sank in against him, and breathed his scent of oranges and malt. His chin grazed my hair. His arm was warm around me. I found myself thinking of that bit of thistledown preserved in Karen’s pendant. That you couldn’t properly look at a thing like that until it was captured in resin. That in its natural state it would collapse between your fingertips or blow away, or be glimpsed on a summer’s day, drifting against a blue sky.

  * * *

  —

  I slipped in beside Sammy a little after midnight, and slept until my alarm woke us both. He snuggled up to me and smiled against my skin. We pottered downstairs, to the kitchen, where Patrick was making breakfast.

  With that new shared consciousness of each other’s bodies, Patrick and I brushed by each other, caught smiles off each other. He drove us to work; he dropped me and Sam at nursery. Sam skipped in, chatting to Jenni first then bolting off to join his friends.

  Then I had to go straight into that rescheduled third-year class, and from that to my usual Wednesday mid-morning sessions. I had the MA in the afternoon but between one and the other, I’d look up the local police station’s number and I’d call them. Once that was done I’d go straight and tell Patrick, before he heard it anywhere else.

  I was just on my way to my office to make the call. I wanted coffee and a bun, but would leave that till afterwards, as a small reward for doing what I had to do. But as I was passing his office, Professor Scaife lunged out and stopped me dead.

  “Uh, that meeting?”

  “Hi, yeah, sorry—I was ill; didn’t Lisa let you know? Can we reschedule? I’m running to catch up with myself at the moment.” I gestured as though going to slip past him but he lifted a hand to fill the gap.

  “I’d rather we do this now.”

  “I’ve got so much on.”

  “Nonetheless.” He gestured back into his office.

  Just get it over with. Then there might still be time for me to make the call before afternoon teaching began. He still held his office door open, waiting for me to slide past.

  “After you,” I said.

  “No, after you,” he insisted.

  I smiled fixedly, stood my ground. He blinked and went in. I followed him. I perched on the edge of his green Parker Knoll. It was a sinking kind of seat.

  “I suppose you already know what this is about?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not even a guess?”

  “Does Professor Lynch want me to write up all of last year’s student feedback for him?”

  He looked baffled. “I don’t think so…”

  “You want someone to redesign the entire creative writing programme from scratch and I’m the woman for the job?”

  He narrowed his already narrow eyes, puzzled. “Not immediately, no.”

  “Maybe the windows need cleaning?”

  “I see. You’re being facetious.”

  “Not really,” I said. “They’re looking rather grubby.”

  “I’ve received a complaint about your conduct,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Well I have, so, yes.”

  I thought of Steven, aggrieved by my mishandling of the conflict between him and Nicholas. I thought of Richard, offended because I’d laughed at that quip about pies. I thought of Tim, who I’d allowed to tank completely, and whose request to read extra work out of term-time I’d refused. And now I was reading Nicholas’s extra work at all hours; though presumably Tim didn’t know about that. I said, “Complaint?”

  “I received this from one of your students,” Scaife said.

  He reached for a folder on his desk, and selected a document carefully from its contents.

  “It makes for interesting reading, even if she does go on a bit.”

  MERYL SHARRATT

  Complaint Cont.

  But I wouldn’t have said a thing. I wouldn’t have breathed a word. I wouldn’t be considering this action at all if Nicholas had been happy, and the rest of the class had been taken care of.

  I knew relationships between faculty and students were frowned upon, but I also knew they happened; I’m not a total innocent. If Nicholas had been continuing with his classes and thriving and getting the work done, and particularly if he had been open with me about it—openness and honesty being so very important to me—I would’ve left them to it: let him sleep his way to the middle if that was what he wanted. After all, I had bigger plans, and I’d revert to their original version: I could still be Simone de Beauvoir; I didn’t need a Jean-Paul Sartre. Or I could always find myself another one.

  But Nicholas wasn’t happy. He went quiet. He shut down. All that vacation he didn’t answer any of my texts or phone calls, and then the next term he didn’t show up for class.

  And then I thought, maybe it wasn’t cynical on his part. Maybe he really liked her, loved her even, and things went wrong between them. Maybe she’d used him and cast him aside. Maybe that’s the kind of person she was. It happens.

  Then her teaching dropped off too. I knew from the get-go that second term that she was keeping something from us. You could see it in her, the twitchy self-consciousness; the distractedness. He might have been absent, but she was barely there herself. You’d think with him gone we’d all get more individual attention, but no. You pay nine thousand “quid” and come halfway around the world to present your work only to be asked Well, what do you think? Well, what I think is that it just isn’t good enough.

  And also, you see: Nicholas was vulnerable. Anyone who’d been in that classroom knew this. She knew this. So when he disappeared I was worried about him. I didn’t expect or by then even want us to get back together, but I was worried about him. He wasn’t replying to texts, and phone calls went straight to voicemail, so I had no choice but to go to his home. I took the bus out there. I wasn’t going to ask Karen to drive; it would be just too awkward. And I knew there was a good chance of this being a wild-goose chase—that I’d get there and there’d be no one around or he wouldn’t answer the door or they would’ve moved out or left the country or something crazy like that. But what else could I do?

  The house, in spring daylight, looked unpromising and gloomy. I stood on the street awhile, nervous, not knowing now how to proceed. The front door hadn’t been opened last time, and going around the side of the house to the kitchen door seemed presumptuous. I looked up at the top window, to what I guessed was his bedroom. The curtains were closed as if someone was asleep in there. Was he sick, I wondered,
with a little leap of hope; was he in fact desperately ill? My mind spun a little fantasy, in which I was allowed, first as a visitor, and then soon thereafter as a nurse, into the intimacy of his bedroom, and the rift between us was healed as he got better and grew strong again. I think I’d probably read that somewhere…maybe Shirley. Anyway, it didn’t happen. Someone came out of the front door and across the gravel towards me; it wasn’t Nicholas. It was a heavy-set man in a sweater and shirt and chinos. He moved like he had a bad hip, stiff and wincing. He had those same silver-blue eyes, but his were dim and bloodshot. He looked like a coarsened, fattened version of his son.

  “Hallo there. Hallo. Can I help you?”

  He came up to the gate. He was red and he smelled like liquor.

  “I’m here to see Nicholas.”

  I offered a hand to be shaken. He looked at me narrowly. I lowered my hand.

  “I’m Meryl. I’m from his class. Is he home?”

  The man—Mr. Palmer senior, I presumed—spoke briskly. “You’ve missed him, I’m afraid. He’s just gone in to class.”

  “We don’t have class today. He hasn’t been coming to class all term.”

  His jaw worked. He cast around him, then he said, “You’d better come in.”

  We crunched over the gravel and I followed him into the hall. He bawled out his wife’s name up the stairs. “Jan-ET!”

  She came in a fluster of draped clothes and long limbs. “Don’t shout at me, Andrew.” Seeing me there, she adjusted her expression. She had the hyper-carefulness of a daytime drinker. I’ve seen it before.

  “Who’s this?”

  “You need to hear it from the horse’s mouth,” he said. “Go on, tell her.”

  I told her about Nicholas’s absence from class, that I was worried about him. She seemed as surprised as her husband had been, and seemed to eye me with equal suspicion. I felt very uncomfortable. This was not what I’d intended. I’d come to support Nicholas, to offer an honest hand of friendship. And here I was, snitching on him to his parents.

  “Not again,” she said.

  “Just pissing it away,” he said. “Just pissing it away.”

  “What’ll we do now,” she said. “What on earth are we going to do now…?”

  He gave her a look; she went quiet.

  “First things first, eh. I’ll drive you back to the university,” and he gave me a smile. It was a strange smile, fixed and uneasy. He got his keys out of a side-table drawer and jingled them.

  “I have a round-trip ticket, so I’m good, thanks.”

  “What time’s your bus?”

  I glanced at my watch, puzzled. “A while yet.”

  “Well, you’d better go and wait at the stop,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “You can find your way back there, can you? Or shall I walk you?”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll manage.”

  “Well then,” he said. “Safe home.”

  Outside again, the cool spring day was just as it had been, a blackbird hopping across the border and the breeze in my face and a little shrub all in frilly yellow flowers already, and I thought, I’ve opened a can of worms, and I didn’t even know there was a can of worms, and now it’s split and the contents wriggling all over the floor. I could hear their voices still behind me; they were loud, disinhibited by alcohol: they couldn’t see me so they assumed I couldn’t hear them. To tell the truth, I couldn’t hear individual words, but I could hear perfectly well the way that they were spoken. It was ugly.

  I was worried for him; things were bad for him already, and now I’d alerted his drunk and potentially abusive parents to behavior which they clearly disapproved of. I walked away, my cheeks burning, ashamed and afraid of what I’d done. At the gate I paused and glanced back at that high bedroom window. The curtains had been drawn back, and I glimpsed movement, and it might have been him, hidden away up there, alone and maybe needing me. But what could I do? I felt like I’d just rushed in where angels fear to tread and started rearranging the furniture.

  I didn’t have any options left, but this. I decided to write up everything that had happened, beat by beat. I’d name names. I’d tell the story straight. I’d make an official complaint. Because it’s important to me that the right people are held to account.

  Everyone’s free to make their own decisions. I acknowledge that. We’re all adults here. But when the effects of these decisions ripple out and put at risk everything a young person has worked for all her life, all the sacrifices she has made, all expenses she has gone to, then that must be recognized; that requires redress.

  “Let me see that.” I lunged forwards, jangling the chair springs. He handed Meryl’s statement to me and my eyes dashed over it.

  “A tad histrionic, and like I said, it does go on a bit. But that’s Creative Writers for you, eh?”

  I snapped it out straight, tried to focus.

  “You can keep that copy.”

  “But she’s got it all wrong.”

  “You mean you didn’t sleep with this student, or that you haven’t shown him any favouritism, or that your teaching hasn’t been below par?”

  I just looked at him.

  “These things do happen,” he said. “These…entanglements. That’s precisely why we have protocols, so that nobody gets their nose put out of joint.”

  My mouth was dry. “I know the protocols.”

  He leaned in confidentially, rubbing his palms together, then meshing his long fingers and sliding them back and forth. “Look, we’ll make some redress to the young woman, show goodwill, offer her some extra tuition perhaps. People rarely object to favouritism if they’re the object of it.”

  “You want me to give her catch-up classes?”

  “That’s just one idea. But before we start soft-soaping her, the bigger issue here is the boy. You’d better let me know exactly what happened with him, so we’re all on the same page.” He slid his hands apart, rested them on his own knees. “Then I’ll pop a note on his file—we can backdate it actually, to avoid any awkwardness; no one need know—and then I’ll make all the necessary adjustments. If you could just tell me what really happened.”

  I suppose he was being kind; he was certainly offering me a way out.

  “And of course I’ll have to write it up for your file too.”

  “My permanent record?”

  “I’m afraid that’s how it works. You tell me, as your Head of Department, I write it up; it goes on your record. Job done.”

  I swallowed.

  “It’s best we get this sorted now, quash it all for good. Otherwise it all gets rather complicated and official and, well, noticeable. I’d be obliged to pass Ms. Sharratt’s complaint on to the Faculty Disciplinary Committee. You’ll have to submit a statement and go before the panel to answer questions. Her account is pretty persuasive, and in the current climate I don’t fancy your chances much with the panel. So I strongly advise we sort this out between us now, rather than risk a much more…exposing…situation.”

  “And it has to be you?” I asked.

  “Hey?”

  “It has to be you?”

  “Well, yes it does, actually.”

  “It can’t be Mina or Kate that I talk to?”

  He gave me a look then, and there was an edge there of real hostility. It was as though he was seeing me for the first time as a person, and not just a convenience.

  “I think we’re past that,” he said. “Past the time for you to pick and choose a confidante. The Palmer boy is in a secure psychiatric unit. He’s been sectioned. You do know he’s had a complete breakdown?”

  “Since when?”

  “His attendance has been patchy, his behaviour erratic, for some time, hasn’t it? But you didn’t report that, or refer him. Which matches what Ms
. Sharratt says. And is a potential whole other kettle of fish; should he choose to make a complaint, or his family…”

  I nodded. I rubbed my arms. Scaife talked on; I barely heard him.

  “I don’t think he’s had a breakdown,” I said across him.

  “Are you his psychiatrist?”

  “No.”

  “Well then.” He sat back, and crossed his legs, and folded his arms, bundling himself up like a pile of sticks. It made me feel less ill-at-ease, knowing that I was disliked by him.

  “Who’s on the panel?” I asked.

  He reeled off a list of half a dozen names. I recognised one or two, but didn’t know any of them personally.

  “Okay.”

  “You won’t resolve this now?”

  I shook my head.

  He tucked himself up still tighter, legs hooked under his chair. “I don’t understand you. I really don’t. What is your problem?”

  That he had never had my best interests at heart. That he felt entitled to put his hands on me. That if I told him the story of that night, I wasn’t certain that he wouldn’t enjoy it.

  I shrugged.

  “Well then, I’m sorry to say that you’re suspended, effective immediately. You’re not to contact your students. Stay away from the department. The dean will be in touch, as will your union rep.”

  “That’s it then? Can I go?”

  He nodded, and I left.

  This, I think, is a major flaw in my character. I don’t complain, I don’t explain. I just strike a match, and torch the bridge, and walk away, my back warmed by the flames. I am too much like my mother.

  * * *

  —

  I glimpsed Patrick through his office door before I knocked. He was reading student work; there was a chunk of computer print-out face down on his desk, an open Jiffy bag lying on the floor. I tapped. He looked up from the sheaf of paper. I went in. And everything was different.

  “What is it?” I asked, but I already knew.

  He lifted the pages from the desk, to show me the title page. I went to take it off him, as though gaining possession of it could change anything. He moved it out of reach, put the whole thing back down on his desk.