Higher Ed (10 page)

Olivia plants her face in the pillow on Jasmine’s mother’s sofa. She’s always thought of this as the Born Again pillow; it’s silky, packed with eiderdown. It takes the weight of her chin so tenderly—like it loves her—that she bolts up.

Right.

“I have to do some revising,” she says and takes up her notebook. Jasmine gives her that look saying don’t be jealous of me, it’s not my fault blokes like me, but Olivia starts to make pretend notes and ignores her.

Back in the day, workhouse poor had paupers’ burials, even if they had family. Coffins made of cheap wood would crack with the weight or be too small, but it’s all they had. Families wanting to make coffins special put ribbon or hair or cloth over the box, and there was no affording a cart or horse; only lifting and walking would get the coffin to the plot. Olivia has sifted through letter after letter from family members asking for bodies to be exhumed from paupers’ graves after the family had saved enough for a private burial. People care about these things. But do we still have rights in death? And what about a lonely death with no relatives to come claim you?

“I think I’m going now,” she says to Jasmine as she closes her book.

“Look, Liv, I’m sorry, okay?” The pity in Jasmine’s face is confusing because, without her knowing what for, there’s lots of pity that could be heaped on a girl who hasn’t got time to be touched.

“Jaz, I’m gettin’ it plenty other places,” Olivia says and makes a black-girl zigzag with her neck that she knows gets Jasmine’s blood racing. “See you soon.”

Cannon-ball tree, kufa, yellow allamanda, soldier’s cap, parrot beak, stinky toe: they are the flowers a child should know, would know if she was to visit she grandmother in Rose Hall. These flowers Ed’s mother taught him to say when he was a child, she thinking that learning was about reciting things one after the other. But here in the chapel entrance, Olivia has her eyes on the lilies in the vase he himself bought this morning to make an impression on her, and he hopes she’s thinking it is proppa good. Ed cannot take his eyes off Olivia’s face because if he does it will be like losing her again, and Catherine too because Catherine is there in the girl’s cat-eyes, in her straight-straight but gappy teeth. Olivia is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

“Please take your seats,” the vicar says.

Ed is standing at the front of the chapel next to the coffin of Anna-Marie Hunter, known for her quiet and polite demeanour. Her neighbours say they didn’t see much of her outside her flat for the two years she lived there: no trouble at all, just quiet and polite. Anna-Marie has no known next of kin. Anna-Marie will be cremated at 13:30. Ed will make sure this happens smoothly and quickly because he is meeting up with Olivia after. When
Neil—the vicar he regularly calls on for these funerals—is finished his few words about how life brief fa so, Ed will swing into action. It is action he was missing, back home on the river, standing doing nothing while blood spread out in the water like octopus ink. He could have said a word or two, then and there. He could have.

“‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies,’ says the Lord (John 11:25),” Neil says and he continues quickly, because he knows this will be the short version. Even God is going along with Anna-Marie being quiet and polite.

There are only three people, other than Ed, Neil and Olivia, to bid goodbye to this woman, and they are neighbours who have not prepared anything to say about her. The ceremony is over in no time and the neighbours leave quickly, not even talking to one another, and this is another thing that Ed must tell Olivia: that West Indian people talk to one another, even if they are strangers.
Wha gwan, gal? When last we see ya
? He wishes Olivia would talk to one of Anna-Marie’s neighbours, but the girl puts her head down and looks sad when they leave the chapel.

“Wait for me in the A13—it’s a caff down Ripple Road,” he tells her outside when the wind blows, cold-cold, burning up he cheeks and making him hold tight to his flimsy jacket, which is the only good one he has that fits him, now that he has a paunch. He must attend to the business of Anna-Marie’s remains but he desperately wants to speak to this beautiful daughter standing right here. The first time he talked to her in the staff room at the Safe and Sorrow office he was so schupity that she had to do all the talking. This time he wants to talk—to talk to her like a father.

“Will you be long?” Olivia asks, her voice like the one he has heard in his sleep.

He tells her to meet him at two o’clock, and that he hopes that is not too long for her. And it is relief like cooling rain when she agrees.

The A13 caff is a pitiful sight and, blast, not right for Olivia. He should have known better: this outdated box with six tables covered in plastic cloth, salt and pepper in cheap old-fashioned shakers, brown sauce for egg and chips, the signs old, the waitress old, the chairs old-old. Man, he mess up with this one. He sits down in front of her. Olivia looks up from her book.

“Hi, hi,” she says and smiles, uncomfortable, but a smile in any case, so his chest fills up. “This place is nang,” she says.

“Nang?”

Her face says, oh God, dotish old man.

“It’s good!” she says and her fingers start tapping the table as though current is going through them at high voltage. Is
nang
a cuss word? When he was young he could cuss for Guyana. He was rass this, mudda skunthole that. If he tells her these perhaps she will be impressed, but this is wrong, not what he really wants to tell her at all.

“So, the law,” he says, feeble, man, feeble, but this is where they left off first time.

“Yes, yes.” Her eyes go on a tour, starting at his balding head and moving from exhibit A to B to C like she is cross-examining her origins. He lets her do her tour because it lets him do his. “How did you end up doing this job?” she says.

Nothing has been deliberate since the love that produced her. Nothing at all, so what is there to say? It’s all been chaos since that day with Geoffrey at the river’s edge, leading to losing Catherine and ending up just trying to keep up, a broken but decent man. One small moment in all the moments of a man’s life should not stand in the way of some kind of hard-won decency.

“You know, Olivia.” Okay, so that’s better, saying her name is good, the name he himself chose for her. “I wasn’t good at my studies, not like you. I got expelled from school …” He pauses to give her a moment to feel ashamed of him, but in her face there is nothing like judgment. “And, you know, when you told me you were studying law, man, that was something, and I said to myself”—he is about to say, I bring my pigs to fine market, but it’s not he who has brought her up, not brought her to any market at all. “I said to myself, man, Catherine is a wonderful mum.”

There, he has said it, said the name.

She nods.

His insides are twisting.

“And you know, as to how I’ve ended up in this job, well, it’s because of lots of disruption in my past. You know I went back to Guyana, right?”

“No, I didn’t. She doesn’t talk about it. She just said that you had to leave us but that I was not to hate you.”

Oh Jesus. She has been taught not to hate him; so she doesn’t know. He takes a big breath.

“When I was about your age I came to London because I felt I was clever—more clever than I really was, mind you.” The look on her face humours him, and the truth is that he doesn’t know what more to say to her. Should he tell her about the politics? About how Burnham was telling people that all labour was now
part of the state, along with the Berbice Bauxite Company where he got his first job when he left school? About how suddenly after independence the government couldn’t afford its own labour? And the same austerity slogans the politicians shout now are what Burnham shouted then? Should he tell her that when he lost his job he was raging vex and thought he was more clever than Burnham so he and his brother left bauxite and went to the Mazaruni river where, man, there was gold, and he worked on a dredge like a real porkknocker? Would she have sympathy for him if he told her he got malaria, was too lonely, and quit gold, and while the country was starting to topple he arranged to stay with his cousin in London? And that he never had any intention of going back?

He has to simplify it. “Guyana was a place that faced a lot of hardship, after independence; a lot of hope, but a lot of trouble too.” And maybe that is enough to say at this point. How much of a Guyana-lesson does the girl really need, after all? About fast money, gold, and the benefits of having a jungle to hide it? About how Geoffrey ran, and he just stood and watched? About how a whole place can go mad?

“I came to London and I had no training; it was hard then, hard for black people,” he says.

Olivia nods her head; she is an educated girl.

“Then why did you stay?”

“Well …” Good question, good question. “I had hope for good work, Olivia.” And saying her name again is another thrill. She fidgets; her hand taps the table and beneath it her leg is shaking. This girl is wound right round, and certain things set her spinning. She is like Geoffrey. Oh Jesus, she is like Geoffrey.

“I worked in different places—in the docks, but also in some shops. And I took some classes—City and Guilds,” and
looks at her to see if she knows about this. She nods. “And I learned accounting, then office management … so you see, it’s still a bit of that.”

“Accounting?”

“Well …” He laughs, and man that feels good.

“But then you went back,” she says.

That’s the problem, he never should have left, never should have listened to Geoffrey’s nonsense. “I was cold all the time!” he says, but he knows that the girl doesn’t want foolishness. “My brother had a scheme—in Bartica with a gold mine, and he was making money for so.” This is enough about Geoffrey. “So I went back home. And shortly after that, my daddy died, and I had things to look after, and my mummy … and Guyana was harder than London, because the government bankrupt us.” And he doesn’t say that it’s because of Burnham and Geoffrey that his daddy died, that the man’s heart gave out because Burnham was stealing the country’s money and Geoffrey was scheming-scheming and making bad deals and stealing money from the gold dredge on the Mazaruni River, and telling lies, making and spending so much money that one day he was driving a Jag and the next day he was taking a bus—all of that just a hint of what would happen years later, that April he left when Olivia was four.

“I stayed for three years,” he says, “then I came back to London, but it was even harder to find a good job.” He was older—and still black. “I did a night-time diploma in health and social care at the Barking and Dagenham College, a different kind of accounting …”

Olivia smiles and picks up the pen beside her notebook as if she’s going to write something, but she just holds the pen and rubs the top of it. “When did you meet Mum?”

“Catherine,” just to say it, because he is allowed, “came into the council office—I worked in housing then. She was so beautiful.” He takes a breath. “Like you,” and oh Jesus. He waits.

She smiles again. The girl is good at smiling. “Love at first sight?”

“You can be sure of that … for sure …” He nods, but even he is not convinced by the gesture. “Maybe not for her … Her folks didn’t like black people so much.”

“Still don’t,” Olivia says, and he wants to catch the hurt that falls from her voice. “Granddad is an angry geezer,” she says, and she goes on to tell him about his former in-laws, how Catherine’s brother is much the same. “Nan is ace. Mum … keeps to herself.”

Christ. How can life come to this? Catherine had wanted to be a dancer before he went and made her pregnant and caused her to lose her shape. Now Olivia tells him how Catherine works in the box office of the Theatre Royale so she can still be close to people on the stage.

By the time they have to leave—because he has to get back to work and she has to get back to classes—he hasn’t told her anything near enough. “Guyana’s money is still in some Swiss bank account in the ex-president’s grandchildren’s name,” he says. But he’s left out so many of the good things—like Christmas in Rose Hall when all of the neighbours make the rounds, visit every single house of every single person they know and drink punch de crème and dance like Mother Sally, just dance, dance, dance.

“Will you ask your mother if she will see me?” he says. Olivia’s cat face goes broad to bursting and maybe she thinks this is a fine idea. But then he sees different.

“Sorry, sorry. Never mind.” Is that pity in his daughter’s eyes? “You have so much studying to do, and your project—did this help, today?”

She studies him further, like there is an exhibit she overlooked on the first tour. Like she knows that every rope got two ends.

“I want to come to another one, to find out more—like what happens for refugees. Do you know about the men at Heston Bridge?”

He does not, and shakes his head.

“In any case, I have more research to do before I write, so will you tell me when there’s another one?”