Higher Ed (13 page)

The sunlight in the atrium makes spring feel like a real possibility, even though outside it is five degrees. These rare, crisp days need to be marked. He walks to the student union shop and in the queue for coffee sees the American woman from QA, who stares at him. He wants to tell her it’s rude, that people don’t stare like that in England, and if she wants to talk to him she should do so. Last year he received an e-mail from her informing him that he had not responded adequately to the external examiner’s comments on his course evaluation. The examiner had made a wholly positive statement about his treatment of theory but noted that some of the students hadn’t incorporated it as effectively as others. QA read each of these reports to monitor course improvement, and he was required to create a course improvement plan based on the fact that some students don’t do as well as others. Some students don’t do as well as others, he wants to say to the middle-aged Mae West. They have had one meeting together and she seemed like a pleasant enough woman—shy and yet so constituted of that
shyness for it to seem almost arrogant. But that’s cruel and stereotyping of her Americanness. Sorry, he would say to her if he could bear to say anything to anyone. He pays for his coffee and Kit Kat, and leaves.

Olivia is at his office door when he arrives back upstairs.

“Robin, me again, sorry, sorry …” she says, and throws the long ringlet that covers her right eye back behind her ear and tucks it in there. He opens his office door and lets them both in. As he puts his coffee and chocolate on the desk he notices after she sits down that Olivia’s knee is bobbing up and down like a needle on a sewing machine and that her finger is worrying the top of her pen, back and forth, rubbing it as though for magic.

“You okay?” he says and holds up the Kit Kat, offering her some.

“Yes, yes, really,” she says, declining the offer, straining to smile.

The wideness of Olivia’s face obscures a clear reading of her beauty. She can be hard to look at: there is so much to take in.

“The project,” Robin says, to get her started. “It might be better to approach it in terms of basic social tenets,” and before he knows it, he is saying, “Does everyone have the right to be remembered somehow, and would it be meaningful, after death, to be identified with something specific? I’m not speaking in terms of legalities—that’s your area—but I thought—”

“There’s this man, works for Barking and Dagenham council …” Olivia’s interruption feels like a rejection. “He
looks after paupers’ funerals. You know what people call them, in the papers?”

“No, I don’t.”

“The lonely dead,” she says, her shoulders hunching. “They are mostly people without family, or if they’re foreigners we don’t even know who they are, they have no papers, or they are old people whose family have fucked off—they don’t get funerals, not proper ones. But in my research …” Her knee is bobbing up and down still, her fingers wishing the pen into action. Robin sits back in his chair to try to make her feel more comfortable. “And well, you know how in Amsterdam there’s a lot of drugs ’n’ all?”

He nods.

“They get a lot of lonely deaths—like drug mules, like from Colombia—girls who carry drugs in their stomachs or up inside them and the drugs leak or someone kills them and they don’t have real names on their passports, and nobody can find out who they are … or …” She looks at him with her wide face like an urgent, flashing sign. “And then the city has to bury them. There’s this man there, a civil servant, and he looks after them. He has made it his thing to visit their homes if they had one, and he chooses music to play at their funeral. He puts flowers on the coffin and makes sure each one gets buried. With dignity.”

He sits forward, “I was going to say something about music … in fact, about music at the funeral—” he stops himself, because he shouldn’t be encouraging this tangential thinking when Olivia should be working on her dissertation, “but that’s not something you can legislate; the idea of rights seems to me—”

“That kind of politics doesn’t work,” she says, as though that is all she needs to say to him and he will understand. And he does,
but there’s so much understanding developing between them that he has to draw that line, the one he must draw as a tutor—the line that says I can’t go there, no matter how much I see you and agree with you: this is just my job. So he simply nods.

“This Dutch man,” she says, “decided that they needed praise, like, real eulogies, even if there was no one in their lives.”

Yes, this is the kind of thing he was trying to say at the beginning. “That sounds like a beautiful idea.”

“And that’s what I was thinking …” Both knees start to bob now, and she is a jackhammer to his office floor.

“Okay,” he says calmly. “And coming back to the law project?”

“He got a poet to write poems for them, as their eulogies—a poem for each of the lonely dead. Somebody knows them, even if it’s just in their imaginations.” She sits back in the chair and her bobbing subsides.

“That is a lovely notion, Olivia. But without meaning to undercut it, have you thought about how it will inform your dissertation?”

She sits forward again. “In England’s community graves, it’s the same. So many people. The man at the council, he’s an old man, well, not old, really, but not like you, older—and I think we need to do something.” She hesitates.

“What do you mean?”

“The council is to cut its budget, and he might just be one of the people to go. But …” Her face becomes even wider as she looks him directly in the eyes. “If we started this new project, brought attention to it like they did in Amsterdam. If there was a poem for each of the people who dies alone, who the council has to bury, who this man has to look after, and if the council has to
find the money to pay him because it’s the right thing to do … and … if you could write the poems …”

“What?”

She sits back.

He takes her in. His grandparents died quietly, unceremoniously, his father’s mother going to an early grave when his father was twelve. They were not a family for big events. He doesn’t know the words to hymns; his father was adamant when he was growing up that church was nowhere for boys who needed their minds stimulated not shrunken.

“I am not a poet,” he says, and she straightens up.

“You wrote that poem last year,” she says, and it’s true. He did use a poem of his own last term, in a moment of shameful vanity.

“That was different, that was just to make a point,” he says.

“Exactly,” she says. And he does not know how to respond. “You’re the right person,” she says firmly. “You care.”

He thinks about the impact and knowledge transfer indicators he has been told he has to address in his research, and how projects should extend into the community at large, should demonstrate that there is no longer such a thing as an ivory tower. For a cynical, self-serving moment he considers a practice-based research project that combines cinema poetics and visual eulogies. He stops himself.

“I don’t write poetry, really, Olivia,” he says, and watches her shoulders drop. He would embarrass himself in the eyes of the avant-garde poets he loves—the Language Poets; the New Sentence poets. “Really, really, Olivia. What you’re saying is great, interesting, but not for me. I can’t do that.” She begins to gather her things.

He searches his bookshelf and reaches up to pull out the slim volume. “You might like this,” he says, as he hands it to her.

Olivia takes it and nods. “You used Ginsberg last year,” she says, and nods. He winces and she smiles, thanks him, then leaps up from the chair and leaves his office.

Deleuze: What is an unconscious that no longer does anything but believe, rather than produce?

Zihan restaurant—not as in Lawd bring me to the land of Zion—is Somali and not the one he’s looking for. There’s a restaurant called Pepperpot on Longbridge Road because he is sure he passed it a year back, when he thought, man, he should be going in. But those days he wasn’t too fired up about things Guyanese. He wasn’t looking back at anything that would smell like home, because if home hurts you have to mash it out. But don’t mind how bird vex, it can’t vex with tree. So now he has to find it because Sammy is counting on getting some pepperpot, cassava bread, mauby or guava drink to wash it down with, after all the bragging Ed did in the office.

“You walk fast, mate,” Sammy says, catching up with Ed on the pavement outside the Pepperpot, which is more brukadown than Ed remembers it. “You must be hungry to walk like that,” and Sammy takes a fat bloke’s inhalation on Longbridge Road. Ed breathes in with him. The air is a blend of petrol and … what? What is that smell? Bleakness, if that can be a smell. Petrol and bleakness. “And why is it that you West Indians feel like if you don’t have grog—and that is your word and not mine—with your food it ain’t a meal?”

Sammy has agreed to come along to Pepperpot on the condition that he is not expected to drink rum, which he detests. Ed has brought beer—Cobra, a big bottle that he holds up like a trophy—because Sammy is a one-drink man.

“You people can drink, innit,” Sammy says.

“Let’s go,” Ed says, and he pushes open the door to the restaurant. With a ting and a pang and a parrang braddups and a whole band playing in his head, he is back home inside this bad-lighting plastic-flowers room. Guyana maps and flags, bird of paradise, and pan playing in the tinny speakers hung up in the corners above the counter, below which take-way patties, peas and rice, and rotis are growing crusty behind the display glass. Music happens somewhere in the heart and not in the ears, true-true.

After they have ordered their food and opened the Cobra, split between them, it’s time for him to ask Sammy: “Do you think a daughter should know that her uncle is in jail?” Coming right out with it is the easiest, after batting it around in his head for weeks now since Olivia found him. Straight ahead, at least with Sammy. Sammy looks at him as if to say, man, why on earth you bring this surprise ’pon me when my team is failing, like it’s the worst thing he might have done the day after the Hammers have lost to Spurs.

“What you on about then?” Sammy says.

So Ed starts slowly, because this is the way the details must come while Sammy does the inevitable re-examining of the exhibits A, B, C of his face to find where there is a likeness to criminals. “I told you about Geoffrey, but I never told you he was—is—in jail.”

The food arrives at the table and Sammy looks into his pepperpot like it’s the dark stew of Africans who boil up white
people, and maybe Indians too. He picks up his fork with purpose though, because Sammy is a good bloke.

“What happened?” Sammy asks and it takes a second before Ed realizes he’s asking about Geoffrey.

“He killed a man. On a gold mine. He tried to steal, got caught, killed him: simple. So simple it’s nearly ridiculous, like in a Wild West movie,” Ed says.

Sammy nods and tastes his pepperpot, nods again, pleasantly surprised.

There’s a long silence as Ed watches Sammy slurp up the slimy oxtail and wipe his lips with the back of his hand. Sammy is the best bloke there is, but in the silence Ed sees the man in the river, Geoffrey in the distance, running, running, and the inky blood following the path of the river like it needed a new home. He is not able to describe this to Sammy, or to explain what happened next.

“It’s why Olivia’s mother didn’t want anything to do with me.”

Sammy looks up at him like this is nonsense.

“I went back to Guyana when Geoffrey asked me to help him … begged me like he was dying, and when I saw him he looked so bad, but he was still boasting like a big man, and he asked me for money. How was I to get that money? He said I should borrow it from people I knew in London, from Catherine.” Ed shakes his head and looks to Sammy for confirmation that he was right not to ask Catherine, but Sammy is looking at his food, moving it around on the plate. “Catherine had no money,” Ed says. Nobody he knew had any. “Geoffrey and I had a big row, man, and I told him he was mad as shite. And then he stole the money he needed and he was caught in the act. He killed the man who was chasing after him, just so.
I have never understood that. Never.” He should have found the money for his brother. His brother was in trouble; that’s what family is for. “When I told Catherine, she said she didn’t want me around, thought I had something to do with it.”