Higher Ed (22 page)

“See you later,” Francine says. Patricia leaves and looks back at her like she’s smelling blotchy skin.

Later is not something Francine understands at the moment. Later is the same as now is the same as then, because time is doing a stupid shuffle. She is sitting in her car with Ryan, who for the first time in the weeks since she’s met him isn’t wearing his hoodie. Hot today, spring nearly here even though she’s only just noticed, and she looks up at the sky behind Ryan’s house. At seven o’clock, twilight, it’s lighter than usual for this drive
through Queen’s Park, up into Willesden, sometimes as far as Wembley. She opens the car window. One thing going for her these days is that she can make a statement to herself like the day smells longer and be proud of how precise it is.

“Where would you go if I weren’t driving you around?” she says, looking back to Ryan’s pointy head like an arrow on his neck.

“Dunno. Just need a break from the books.”

“Anatomy?” A cherry tree in front of the house across the street has purple blossoms that look like a party dress she once wore.

“Pharmacology, genetics.”

“Is it hard?” White blossoms like pompoms, three trees in a row. And there’s a flowering yellow shrub she would like to know the name of—these are the kinds of things she once used to track in springtime.

“No. Just big.”

She smells gum and looks over at Ryan, who is chewing ravenously. Does he really want to be a doctor or is he trying to replace his dad in the household? “Do you like it?” she says.

He stops chewing. “What? You don’t think I’m cut out for it?” he says, and, oh what an idiot she is. Why is it she hasn’t learned to speak to someone Ryan’s age? She could have a kid his age.

“You’ll be fantastic,” she says, signals, and makes a right turn, back towards Queen’s Park, where she’ll drop him off before this turns into the Ryan and Francine sad-ass-losers show.

“Are you trying to be my friend?” he says, as she turns onto his street and slows down towards his house. She stops the car, puts in it park and turns off the engine. She looks at his arrow-like head. They smile at the same time.

“Tell me about the other students. Do you mingle much with them?”

“Sure, of course. Not recently.”

“I’m sleepy,” she says. He undoes his seatbelt, reaches over and touches her hand. He gets out of the car.

“See you tomorrow,” he says before shutting the door.

Her mother cries like a small animal. Katrin has heard this sound all of her life, but tonight the squeal makes Katrin irritated. The sound grates, and her mother’s face is frozen in pain on the screen, because Skype is slow tonight.

“Beata,” she says, because she uses the name when it is her turn to be the mother. She calms Beata and tells her that in London it is not a problem, there are flats enough to rent, but that it might mean not in the centre as she has been before, and it might mean they will share a bed for a while until they can afford more, but it is nothing to be crying about. Please,
mamunia
, please don’t cry. She talks to Beata about weather, about money, about the price of onions and about the Japanese film that Robin took her to see that made her want to eat noodles, so he took her to a Japanese restaurant afterwards. The food of Japan tastes clean and stops at the back of the tongue like a good wine does. In Japan they do not have gas, Katrin has decided. In Japan they have clean systems. Her mother laughs at her and disagrees with her, and the little animal sounds stop.

Her mother will not sleep tonight, Katrin knows, as she clicks on the red end-call icon and Beata’s face disappears from the screen. A bedsit is big enough for them both. She could put a
futon in the cove by the fireplace that does not hold fire and she could sleep there and give her mother the bed. She will have to lie to a new landlord to let her mother share with her; she does not want to move far from Islington or Epicure. Or Robin.

Katrin gets up from the table and pushes the button for her kettle to boil. But tea is not what she wants. She bends down to her fridge and opens the freezer. She takes the bottle of Wyborowa and pours a small level in a glass. This is her father’s drink. She throws it back but promises herself she will not become accustomed to this, like her father. Her father was not reliable, but Robin is reliable, and if she asked him he would help her. Robin is a man whom both she and Beata could trust. This thought makes her scared.

She calls his phone. It rings and rings until his voicemail comes.

“Hello, baby,” she says to his voicemail. She feels silly. She has not called anyone baby before, but this is what she hears lovers say to one another. She doesn’t want to be confusing, with baby and babies and his future, but it has come out of her like this. “Hello … are you free tomorrow in the evening? Can you come here? I will cook a dinner. We can relax here,” she says. “Please call me.”

She pours another small level into the glass and takes a sip. The warmth in her throat takes away the scary feeling of almost trusting someone.

He is facing her, their knees up and touching. Katrin imagines that from above they look like they form a key hole. And into their perfect fit something perfect also fits. Sex with Robin is not only a place where everything is possible, but where nothing is necessary.

“Baby,” she says, trying out this new word again.

“Sweetheart,” he says and strokes her face.

“I think you should stay here,” she says and surprises even herself.

He smiles. But then his eye twitches and she feels a jolt in her stomach.

“Wouldn’t you like this every day?” she says. She looks at his chest and touches the few hairs there; she avoids his face in case there is something she doesn’t want to see.

“Of course I would. I think of nothing else, I tell you,” he says, and she can look up at him now. But his brow is creased like there is pain there.

“But …” she says and nods, yes, of course she knows what comes next.

“I dream of it,” he says, “I do. But there is so much to sort out.”

She lowers her knees and rolls over with her back to him. He pulls her in and his knees now touch the back of hers. Still the perfect fit.

“My mother will not be able to live with me,” she says finally and closes her eyes; she could sleep now.

“I don’t understand.” His body is alert; she has made him worry, but she does not know how to correct it. When she explains about her landlord it is through sleepy lips. She is so tired suddenly that nothing he says will matter to her. “Please could I live with you, just for a little while,” she says. If it was brave she wants a drink of vodka as a reward.

It is possible that she feels his foot twitch then. And now she is alert. She turns her head over her shoulder towards him. He strokes her hair.

“I told Emma that she could move in and deliver the baby
there. She wants a home birth. She has a midwife and she doesn’t want to be alone when the baby comes.”

Oh God. She sits up in the bed but does not face him yet. Oh God, she is so stupid. He has promised another woman to live with him, and Katrin has been taking this man inside her for weeks now. She has been making it easier for him to make promises to someone he does not love.

She gets out of the bed and puts on her dressing gown.

“Please go,” she says very softly. So softly he has not heard. “I want you to go,” she says louder, and she hears that she has said “I” very strongly, and realizes that this emphasis has been missing between them.

“Katrin,” Robin says. “Please, let’s talk.”

Katrin ties her dressing gown tighter around her waist and does not turn around. She walks to the window and examines the
cyklameny
in the flower boxes, with their petals wide and holding on by one thread, their stamens fat and long now laid bare. All the
czekam
she did for the spring and now this is what is here. She opens the fridge. She pours some vodka in a small glass. She does not pour any for Robin.

Everything she does is deliberate: her washing up from their dinner in the sink, the way she places her hand flat on the plate then caresses its underside with the cloth. Katrin’s movements are pointed and fluid at once, and this makes a hole in Robin’s chest as black and deep as something yet undiscovered in science. He watches as she pours herself vodka, waiting for her to pour him one, their nightcap that is now routine. Afterimage: her back turned to him in her bed, curved as she hugged her knees. Please could I live with you just for a little while in the soft skin that runs across her back to her thin shoulders that all he wants to do is kiss.

“Katrin,” he says.

“I want you to go,” she says, her back still turned to him. He should not have succumbed to his guilt, to Emma’s desire to share the birth of the baby with him. He is angry with her, and with himself. But now what?

“It will only be for a little while, until she gets on her feet. She is not my love,” he says, and starts to dress so that he can stand beside her without shame.

She turns towards him but doesn’t move, her certainty
locked in as she watches him put his shoes on. Her cheeks are wet with tears wiped away before he could see.

“You are,” he says, composing himself. “You are.” And he will find a way—he will pay for a flat for her mother, he will give his flat to Emma and will move here. He will do something.

“Please,” she says.

He looks at his watch: 23:11. He gets up, stands in front of her, then turns and leaves her bedsit. His chest is like fraying rope, holding.

The next morning he texts her but there is no response. His sitting room is a tip—his clothes, papers, books for an article he must write on capitalism and schizophrenia in the films of Darren Aronofsky. His bedroom is no better. He throws himself on his bed and watches the clouds through his skylight. No trace of spring here, nothing about babies, nothing about future, just him under a puffy cloud that cannot speak his name. He will give Emma this room and will convert the sitting room. He can sleep and work and work and sleep and make sure he has enough money to feed everyone, to provide the baby with clothes, to send it to school, to football practice or dance rehearsal. God help. He picks up the pad from his bedside table and writes words that come, one at a time, each on its own separate page. Margins. Manure. Manufacturing. Munchies. He hadn’t meant to be in the
Ms. Bring something incomprehensible into the world!
He tosses the notepad aside. In avant-garde poetry one strategy in the method of “chance operation” is to pick a routine that would inspire one line of poetry each day, over fourteen days, to produce a sonnet.
A time of day, a name, an association that is repeated fourteen times by taking the first line from an existing work of poetry and using it in the new sonnet, whatever way it comes out. He looks over at his shelf of books. A dare. But he has only an hour before he needs to leave for the university.

At his desk he checks e-mail, sees that there is one from Olivia thanking him for meeting with her father, asking him his thoughts on the project. He has no thoughts. Afterimage: Katrin’s wet cheeks.