Higher Ed (3 page)

Sitting down on the curb, dizzy, as the others keep talking—“It’s not a girl, look”—she spots a young man running towards them.

“Don’t touch him; leave him, let me do it,” the young man yells. He tells them he’s a medical student and will try to help. His accent is Scottish. She watches his curly head as he turns the
body over and lifts the helmet’s visor, then tilts and blows, one, two, three, again, one, two, three, through the broken, bloody face. Once more, harder.

The driver of the red sedan leans down to say something to the Scottish doctor. One car later and it would have been she who hit the boy. One car later and it would have been Francine who had to see his mum’s face in court. Her knee begins to tremor. Fuck, fuck. She takes a deep breath. (Rubber, asphalt, and a burst of aftershave.)

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the med student says as he stands up. His eye is in a wink, sealed partially shut by the blood from the motorcyclist’s face. Francine stands up, retches, then throws up and, from habit, stares down at it on the pavement.

She looks again at the med student’s face as he wipes blood from his mouth. He catches her eye.
Cry. Cry
, she thinks. But he doesn’t. It’s the driver of the red sedan who begins weeping.

“I only saw him fly through the air,” she’s able to say to the police when they finally arrive. “I have to go,” she says, adamantly, and her tongue touches a fleck of vomit on her lip. But one officer keeps asking her questions, while another questions a Filipino nanny who is worried about being deported. The med student whose name—Ryan Broughton—she listens carefully for, speaks to the third officer on the scene. The driver of the red sedan is led to the back seat of the second police vehicle. “I have to go,” she says again and heads to her car before the paramedics have lifted the body into the ambulance.

Ryan Broughton catches her eye just before she climbs behind the wheel. At which stage of medical school do doctors become impassive to dead bodies? How is Ryan Broughton digesting the taste of the crushed face he sucked on? How
respectfully he had turned over the ruined body. Takes just a little to be decent.

At home she dreams that every wall in her flat is painted yellow. In the middle of the night she wakes to a gush between her legs and throws back the duvet to reveal a blood-soaked mattress.

It’s safe to leave. The atrium is in darkness; the drizzle outside will set the tone for his evening. Robin walks out of the building. The usual few students, the security guard. He looks around for the curvaceous American woman who works in QA—the body of the mature Mae West, the face of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara. She is always staring at him, always on the verge of chatting him up, but she must have left already. Fact is that rain can fall as fast as twenty-two miles an hour, so this drizzle isn’t the worst it could be, but home would be a better place just now. He takes the path towards the bus stop and waits.

Emma left two messages on his voicemail while he was teaching. She doesn’t trust his reaction to the news about their baby. So she shouldn’t. It’s a beautiful thing, she says; it is for me, is it for you?

Deleuze: Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

In his kitchen he wipes down the white subway tiles behind the gas hob, dotted with bolognese sauce from last night. Emma’s news came just after dinner; he would never normally have missed these spots. He scours the stainless steel hob itself, the
wood counter, scrubs the corners, presses hard against the rings from cups, enjoying this cleaning more than anything else today. Fact is that tomatoes are not as benign as we consider them. Their Latin name means “wolf peach.” Cleaning takes over from reading some days, and then he allows himself to go to bed. But he has to make two phone calls this evening, before he falls asleep with the BBC World Service at his ear. Today, the third of February, is his mother’s birthday and she will have been wondering all day what might be taking him so long to call. His father will have taken her to lunch in Falmouth, possibly to Rick Stein’s Fish, and now they will be reading in front of the fire, toasting each other for another day of a long, relatively happy relationship in a predominantly happy life. His brothers will have already called, from New York, from Manchester, and Robin will be the only missing element of his mother’s measured happiness.

The other call will also be to Cornwall. Emma’s move was right for her, and when he tells his parents the news his father will secretly wish for a granddaughter and will offer to build them a summer house in their garden that extends towards a cliff over the sea.

He turns the volume down on Emil Gilels who is playing the Beethoven piano sonata that his mother tried to learn throughout his entire childhood, her failure to do so remaining one of her only regrets. He dials Emma’s number first.

“Hi, hi,” he says, and listens for the right thing to say next. “Not bad, tired,” he says, which is obviously wrong. “Long day, you?”

Emma describes her mother’s reaction to the pregnancy in such detail that he cannot keep his eyes open. Then her sister’s, then the fact of driving to the sea and walking the cliff path, the
path he himself showed her. At this he perks up. He has a twinge of panic for her safety, but then the thought of his child growing up in Cornwall brings pleasure. Gorse, heather, pyramid orchids in the rolling dunes, golden samphire in the cliffs, salt marshes, slanted rain, flavoured air.

The day he and Emma broke up he said, I wish you love in the sea cliffs; I wish you everything you want. She had wanted a baby, but neither of them had really wanted each other.

“And the news from your end? How has that gone over?” she asks him. He hasn’t told a soul. Emma hears this in his hesitation. Her silence shames him further.

The phone tucked under his chin, he starts to buff the stainless steel kettle, heightening the double-arched reflection of the kitchen window within it. They had come together out of inertia. Friends for years, they had turned to one another after the breakup of far more necessary and romantic connections, she to him for comfort, both of them for sex, and even that wasn’t necessary. His relief at her decision to quit her job in dentistry and move from London to the southwest to teach yoga was manifest in his saying, blithely, I love you, before having sex one last time in an effort to marry theory and practice.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, wanting to take the morning sickness away for her, to make everything good for her, wanting at the same time to bury his face in the straight blond hair of the Polish waitress at Epicure and to tell her how her lack of awareness of her own beauty has loosened the tiles of his sanity.

“Still woozy in the mornings, but a bit better. Skin looks great.” Her voice invites him to intimacy.

“Oh, good,” is all he can say.

Francine is bent over the toilet basin for the third time today, fingers deep in her throat and the omelette and toast high up in her belly, and for the third time unable to coax anything out.

This has happened before, through the years, when it stops working, when she has to find another way. Damn. She straightens up. The phone rings and makes her jump. She has already made her excuses for her third day of absence from work. There is no one else who would call.

“Patricia,” she says to the woman’s voice. And because Patricia has a gift for extraction, she finds herself telling her everything, from the wet bang to the crinkled jeans and finally the young doctor’s face. What she doesn’t tell Patricia about is the flood in the middle of the night and the disappearance of her craving for sugar. She doesn’t say, that’s it, last friggin’ hurrah, a final shove towards change. But this change feels like a reversing, back to age thirteen, when things swirled like this, were scary like this.

“Ronnie Scott’s,” Patricia commands, “tonight, come on.” Francine looks out her window. The plane tree’s branches have recently been pruned and the knotty limbs are clothed only in
translucent bark, like gauze over veins. She can see into her neighbour’s front room. He has no shirt on. Nothing is opaque anymore.

“Sorry, no, can’t … really not feeling up to it,” she says, standing firm against Patricia’s persistence. And to her surprise Patricia lets her off the hook with a warm wish to see her at work soon and an offer to bring around food and magazines. Francine promises she’ll be back at work tomorrow and will check in with Patricia around lunchtime.

“Sure, sure,” Patricia says. Yeah, like there is anything that is.

The next morning the atrium smells different—like Dr. Pepper in the summer. When they were teens her brother told her that Dr. Pepper was for losers. Scott knew who the losers and winners were, being so popular with other kids that he spent weekends at their homes or cottages. She’d take those opportunities to order Dr. Pepper at the A&W, her father’s treat to make up for his desperate widower cooking and her loneliness without her brother at home. It was around this time that she learned the trick—the two-fingered flick on that flap at the back of the throat and whoosh—gone was the strawberry ice-cream sundae, the hot dog and French fries, the Dr. Pepper. Scott, whose annual Christmas conversation on the telephone consists of lecturing her on how she needs to think about her long-term security, will never know just how right he had been about Dr. Pepper. Maybe she should try the Atkins diet again. All that meat. She checks her butt with her hand, making a show of brushing something off her skirt—another little trick.
Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is
.

She asks for a skinny hazelnut latte, rhyming off the order comfortably now that Starbucks is on campus. She feels students behind her, their pushiness, like she’s taking too much time. One of the two dark brunettes behind her glares at her and Francine finds the face hard, blunt, the first opaque thing she’s seen in days. She touches her throat, sore from the failed barfing.

“Order me a cappuccino,” the other woman says to her friend who says something back in a private language, then they giggle and Francine feels a lurch in her gut like she’s going to release air. Nothing is solid; now even the hard mask of the woman’s spite seems porous.

As she leaves with her latte, she spots that guy, the young lecturer. Robin joins the queue and Francine reaches for a napkin, a small delaying tactic. Ten years younger and she’d be following him around like a stray pet; Robin is the kind of guy she should have gone for instead of John Cuntface Clarke. Robin has eyes that squint when he’s thinking, and he’s always thinking when she sees him. It’s not his looks—fine, but nothing special—it’s something else, maybe in the way he walks. Can kindness show in a walk? Teacher of film studies and befriender of students, Robin would know the real her. He walks like he’d be a good kisser.
Annie Hall
, she wants to ask? Does he teach it? She follows him out of the atrium, leaves him behind in the square and heads back to her office.

Three days = 198 unopened e-mails.

Google is the only tolerable option.

There are three news articles for “motorcycle accident Queen’s Park,” and now she knows his name: Dario Martinelli, 24, of Barking. A boy. She also reads the name of the driver of the red sedan, but she can’t hold it in her sights, skips over it
to find that he has been charged with dangerous driving causing death.

She searches Facebook, where Dario Martinelli’s timeline has photos, postings in Italian, and recent posts in English about how much he loves riding his motorcycle and how the horrendous London winter has kept him off it and wouldn’t it be great to be back in Bologna and going fast, with you, friend. Her throat tightens. The most recent post is from Roberto Martinelli—brother? cousin?—in Italian, but she can make out enough to know that la famiglia grieves the loss and that the (airless, shrunken) body will be brought home for interment. She clicks off quickly. His wrinkled clothes. He is Dario. He has a family. Dario will have an interment, and Dario’s Facebook page will remain forever, his beloved motorbike preserved there in mint condition.

Dario is dead. People die every minute of every day. What’s going on with her?

She seeks the young doctor, Ryan Broughton. Finding Ryan will help. Ryan knows what death tastes like. But she can’t find him, so she returns to Google and asks it a question. There are countless answers: “Death tastes like blackened carbon”; “death tastes like almonds and spoiled fruit”; “death tastes like McGriddles”, and her favourite: “it tastes like feet.”

Sayonara.

“Robin?” Olivia mumbles. Oi. But he won’t hear; he’s got those wanna-hide shoulders hunched over the row of chocolate in the far aisle. Robin. If she could steal Robin, right, she’d give him to her mum, she would, because he would make her lighten up; his words would open her. Instead there’s Ed, and what is she to do with him? Right. Six days now, six days it’s been since finding him. Edward of the lonely dead. Edward like a rabbit in a high-beam when he first saw her; Edward whose life’s work has been to bury the unknown, unloved, unmoneyed people of Barking and Dagenham. Ed. Her dad.