Higher Ed (11 page)

But that could be months from now, you can’t predict these things, and he can’t just wish for someone to die alone so that he can see his daughter. “My job is uncertain; they don’t need three of us. I don’t know when that will happen,” he says because he would prefer to set an earlier date, like tomorrow, or eighteen years ago. But Olivia’s face looks panicked.

“What?” She is bobbing again, at the knee, in her fingers. “You’re going to lose your job?”

“I don’t know for certain, but, you know, this is what is going on across the country,” he says. Rass, man, rass.

“Oh.” She looks at her notebook, picks up the pen and clicks the top over and over. She scribbles something on the page. He has let her down. “Okay, well, I’ll ring you. I’ll ring you,” she says. She stands up and he has to let her go. He follows her to the door. Waits there to see if she will hug him or offer her hand. Is it wrong to kiss her cheek? She nods at him as if to say, yes, man, yes, it’s very wrong. She turns and heads out the door of the café.

Callaloo, pepperpot, Rupununi, arapaima, Karanambu, Essequibo: words he still must say to her.

Ryan Broughton is a slight, bony, young man, slouched on the velvet couch in his living room while his mother hovers just outside the door, listening, sniffing, like a wary sow. When Francine laid eyes on him again for the first time since the accident, as he floated down the stairs of his house to greet her at the door (burnt toast, bacon, toothpaste), he seemed much more slight and bony than on the evening of the accident. How in hell’s name had he turned the dead weight of a body over to try to breathe life back into it? Ryan’s face is pointy and pocked near his temples.

“What about tea?” his mother calls from where she is hovering.

“Mum, nothing,” Ryan says. She had answered the door when Francine arrived without notice and was reluctant to let her in. Francine had paid for their phone number and address on a web directory, and the woman’s Scottish brogue was burdened with suspicion. At the door she described in clipped sentences just how Ryan hadn’t been able to return to his medical studies at King’s College because he thought he was a failure. “He’s not well,” she said. “That accident has changed him.” Oh God, oh God, Francine thought as she clutched the flowers she’d brought in a plastic bag: death tastes like failure.

Now Ryan shifts and pulls the zip of his hoodie up and down beside her on the couch. Francine wants to tell him that what he tried to do was the bravest thing she’s ever seen. She wants to say,
I love your lips, and your breath, and the guts you must have
, but as they sit on the understuffed couch in the overstuffed living room of his mother’s house, a few blocks away from Francine’s flat, she is speechless. She tries though:

“You did all those things, pounding his chest … it was something …”

Ryan looks at her like she’s a dumbass, but she sees the memory of the clotted blood on his lips. They stay silent and his mother pokes her head around from the kitchen again. And then Francine begins to cry. For the first time since the accident.

Ryan sits up straight with a look that says, oh hell. He waits and watches her wipe her eyes.

“He begged me to save him,” he says.

“What?” She sits up as straight as he is.

“The driver, he came over to me and held on to me and begged me to save the guy.” Ryan gives the couch a gentle punch.

“I’m so sorry,” she says as Ryan’s mother comes in and stands, hands on hips like a warning. “I wanted to give you this,” Francine finally manages as Ryan’s mother picks up random objects around the room—a framed photograph of a graduating Ryan, the TV remote—and she’s embarrassed by what she’s brought, but it’s too late now. Ryan deserves a medal, a badge, whatever it is they give to heroes these days.

“Here,” she says and takes the red champion anthurium out of the bag by her feet. She sees in Ryan’s face that this is okay, that a living thing is an antidote to kissing death.

“That’s nice,” he says as he picks up the small pot and examines the waxy, almost fake-looking red petals.

“You’re kind,” he says.

Francine holds on to her composure. “Not anything like you,” she says, and looks over to his mother. What does it take to make a good kid? When John Clarke said he didn’t want children, Francine looked into his face to consider her options. They would move in together, he said, of course they would, not now, but of course they would, and they would travel for their holidays. His face said to her, I’m the best thing that has ever happened to you, kiddo, so don’t push your luck. All the while John-the-liar-from-Lakawanna Clarke was considering his own options for depositing his oh-so-precious genetic coding into a more compelling vessel.

“I feel I should have stayed with you,” she says. “I should have helped you. I’m so sorry.”

Ryan looks up from the anthurium. He is so young, but seems so calm. “They’ll need more witnesses if he doesn’t plead guilty. They’ll need you to testify.”

She hears the trauma now, like steel-wool in his voice. “But he’s not …” She doesn’t know how to define danger. “It was an accident,” she says.

“What are you talking about? Did you see how far he was flung?”

Ryan’s mother sits down on the arm of the couch. She looks at Francine like she dares her to say another word that will upset her son or KAPOW!—she’ll land her one.

Francine clears her throat. “Sometimes they reduce the charge,” she says to Ryan’s mother, but the woman is looking over at the bay window as though someone is climbing through it. The doorbell rings, and it’s a relief when the woman gets up to answer it.

“If they do, they’re wrong,” Ryan says.

God, oh God. She folds up the bag she brought the plant in and pushes it into her coat pocket.

“Maybe if you’d stayed, you’d know that,” he says.

“But he was dead,” she says, and Ryan wrings his hands slowly. “But you still tried,” she adds quickly.

He looks at his hands. “Of course.”

“And that must be awful for you. Very painful.”

His face loses its tension. He tells her that he has Rajit’s phone number and that he’s often thought of ringing to shout at him. And Francine wants to tell Ryan about how as a teenager she planned to become a conservationist, to save all the species and creatures she feared were becoming extinct—tigers, or even the frogs that had started to disappear from the lake that her geography teacher took the class to year after year. But her thoughts get knotted up and instead she says, “Frogs go first if the lake is polluted, so you have to watch for the frogs.”

Ryan looks startled, confused. She picks up her handbag, buttons up her coat. “I’m beginning to think it’s all about watching out for the frogs,” she says, but Ryan’s face stays the same, so she concludes, “We have to be careful.”

Idiot.

“Thanks so much for seeing me,” she says. “You did an amazing thing.” She reaches the front door and squeezes between Ryan’s mother and the
Awake
pamphlet that is being offered up by the black woman wearing a Sunday bonnet who is standing serenely at the door.

At work the next day she deletes the e-mail from Human Resources that contains a checklist of the elements required in the annotated job specification she is supposed to prepare in a few weeks’ time so that the vice-chancellor’s group can make decisions on restructuring and rationalization. She does a quick search in the
Guardian
job section and decides to branch out: environmental jobs, marketing jobs. Nothing.

She opens her deleted items box and retrieves the checklist from HR. She starts a new Word doc:

She exits without saving and reaches for her phone in her bag, to retrieve the number Ryan gave her. Deciding to work at capacity rather than below it today, she picks up the phone and calls the Mahadeo household.

Like Ryan, Rajit won’t come to the door when Francine shows up at his house on Saturday morning three days later. Rajit, his wife tells her, is not talking to anyone, not even his favourite son.
Francine peers in from the threshold and sees someone cross the hallway, a young man, perhaps the favourite son. When the figure returns, it’s back-first, as he drags a wheelchair, and a sari-ed old woman sitting in it, her legs wrapped in a blanket. There is a muscular smell of ghee and garlic. And the sad sound of daytime television.

“He is in the same clothes he was released in,” his wife says.

“But he’s home; he’s released, right?” Francine says, watching the blanketed legs disappear across the hallway.

“Bail, madam. We have family, you know,” and Francine can’t tell if she means that family gave them the money or if, of course he’s out on bail, his family needs him.

“And the charges?” she asks.

“My husband is not dangerous, madam. He is not good at paperwork, that is sure,” Mrs. Mahadeo says, and again Francine is confused but she doesn’t want to push it. She remembers what she’s brought. She holds out the rubber plant. Mrs. Mahadeo stares at it then her head goes into spring-necked shaking mode, back and forth.

“Thank you, but we don’t want this.”

Francine draws the plant closer to her chest in gracious acceptance of the rejection.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she says.

“Don’t be sorry, madam. You were doing what you thought was a good thing. Too much sorry sorry in this country.”

Francine nods at Mrs. Mahadeo, then turns and leaves.

Sayonara.

But she wants more from this visit, wants to do something for Rajit, who might merely have been looking down to check the time or change the radio station. She walks down the Harrow
Road back towards Kilburn without any idea of what doing something for him would look like.

She’s hungry.

Her flat smells green. She walks to the kitchen and opens the fridge door.

Juice, cheese, salad dressing, anchovies, mustard. She pinches an anchovy from its jar and lobs it onto her tongue. She opens the Dijon mustard jar, scoops a dollop with her fingers and smears it on top of the anchovy.

She wants her mom.

“Never spit, baby, never spit—it’s vile,” Mom said. They had been walking down Race Street near Franklin Square in Philly, the trees yellow, red, the leaves kickable at her feet, the fountain making a dome of itself, and a great big horking gob had come out of a fat man standing on the corner of Sixth and Race. Her mother had grabbed her hand, pulled her closer as she declaimed loudly enough for the fat man to overhear her, and they’d quickly moved across the street towards the store where she would buy her daughter a new dress for going back to school. For fifth grade and all its pressures, like knowing the thing that love comes with: the other thing her mother had said to her on that day. They’d bought the dress and her mom had said it, that thing about love, for the first time, and it was less than a year later that she had repeated it, for the last time, in her hospital bed.

Now Francine needs a kind of back-to-school dress again, to wear Monday, to be seen in, because invisible is not the right choice now. She has to keep her job. “Love comes with … not panicking,” she says to the jar of creamy French vinaigrette in her right hand.

He’s not Slow-Moe now. Moe is not molasses today. Too right. Student union leader Moe has his hoodie up, a fag between his fingers, and is walking like for once he hasn’t been blazing all night and is clear-headed in motion towards the M4 bridge where the Bridge Men of Heston will still be sleeping. Olivia feels the swoosh of the traffic on the M4 up above, even this early in the morning darkness. Her knapsack is heavy, filled with water and tins—tuna, beans, soup. Her fingers are falling-off-cold and she shoves her hands into the coat that she’s sick of wearing, sick of patching, sick of pulling on every morning when the end of February is supposed to be the end of winter not the beginning. Everything is arse backwards and, shit, if Ed loses his job like he said he might—shit. She has to think. But her heart is racing beside the mostly racing Moe as they hurry along Heston Road to make it to the bridge and the men of Little Punjab below the M4 flyover before daybreak. Moe has agreed to help her out, even though he really wants her to help him organize #Demo, as it was her emphasis on an ENTIRE GENERATION that was being affected, saying, “E-E-E- entire, Moe,” which he went on to adapt into the
movement’s manifesto: to educate, employ, empower the young people of Britain. But Olivia has too much going on for all that. This visit is different; this is specific, contained, urgent; and she has to get right back to the library. She has to do her project, and all she thought she had to do with Ed was to help him make things pretty, the way Catherine likes them. Catherine and her lacy bras, her underpants that look like they’re supposed to be on a cake. She thought that if Ed just made things a bit more frilly then Catherine would be sure to go for him again. But Catherine will not go in for a jobless bloke. Sod it. Catherine is not going to like all that death shite in any case. Catherine thinks death is for dead people. But the funeral wasn’t so bad—even a few flowers in a glass vase at the front of the chapel, the priest said good stuff, and it’s not like she saw a dead body or anything; it was just a box, not bad for cardboard, not something that someone could fall out of. Death isn’t so scary. Catherine’s got to respect that. Oh, Wood. It was his chin mostly, as he talked about gold and towns that sound like ships—his chin that she stared at because this was the bit of him that she thought she remembered: the feeling of it, the stubble along it when he pressed his face to hers or tickled her belly with it, making her squeal with his raspberries. And then she remembered his song more clearly, and the tra-la of the girl in the ring, over and over in her mind. This is fucked up.