Higher Ed (30 page)

Poor Sammy is feeling sad, but this shaking-head is the only way he knows to show it. He hasn’t looked Ed in the eye since they heard the news.

“Sammy,” Ed says, calm fa so. He pauses so that Sammy will stop and turn around, but he doesn’t, just keeps tidying up, putting paper in the shredder. “Sammy, I’m fine, you hear?” And Sammy does hear, but that doesn’t make him stop tidying, and Ed can tell from how Sammy sits down at this desk that his heart is mash-up. Ed will remember to get Sammy a raisin Danish on his break.

He’s not the first one in, but Robin is standing at the door of the Safe and Sorrow office as soon as Ed opens it. He knows him only by the glasses that look bigger on the man’s face now.

“You cut off all your hair!” Ed says, in a tease, but in fact Robin looks better this way, more grown-up, dignified-like. He doesn’t bother to take Robin to the staff room. Sammy and Ralph can overhear anything they want at this point.

“How’s Olivia’s project going then?” he asks. “Haven’t seen her since before Easter. She tried to reach me, but I’ve been busy-busy,” he tells Robin because when guilt is so big, lies come fast and easy. He will ring her back, he will, but what to say? Almost-dad. Not good enough.

“I would like to contribute, to her project, your funerals,” Robin says.

“Doesn’t matter, not now,” Ed says.

“Oh,” Robin says, yet sees nothing like sadness in Ed’s face. Only some small trace of Olivia. “I’m sorry,” he says. He touches his pocket and feels the crunch of the paper there, the ridiculous, irrelevant game of the past fourteen days.

Wood’s face opens up to a smile. “Sorry? What you have to be sorry for?” The man’s accent is strong today. Robin nods.

“I thought I would try, in any case—Olivia’s idea, it might bring some good,” he says.

“Well, it might, but who knows when the next one will be—we can’t predict these things. Maybe Sammy will work with you.” Ed looks over at his friend, who is listening but making a show of ignoring the whole damn scene, probably wondering what the rass is going on over here. These two men like surra and durra on the stage, both wishing they could do a little something, both just sorry-sorry to one another. Olivia missing in between them. The St. Kitts man must have been something. Who gave the girl her sense of right and wrong? Is that something you are born with?

They sit in silence until it becomes uncomfortable. Robin pulls the piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolding it. He reads over it, quickly. Crap, not a poem, but deliberate, like lightning. He gives it to Wood, who takes it but doesn’t look at it. There’s a gritty irritation in Robin’s eyes, as though sand is caught on the underside of his eyelid. His eyes water and he wipes them. In cinema a flash burn is named after the effect of snow blindness, which is akin to a sunburn of the cornea. But a flash-burn effect is too obvious, too simple for now.

Wood holds the piece of paper, still just looking at him. Robin imagines Wood at the head of a coffin, reading his plagiarized nonsense.

“Well, it was good to meet you,” he says.

“And you,” Ed says. Robin stands up and shakes his hand. This man is something good, true-true.

Then Robin has the opposite of an afterimage: a time image that produces space, the finite restoring the infinite; it’s the house where Katrin’s grandmother grew up, beside the river, and his finger on the tiny buzzer alerts its occupants to a visitor. Fact is, Gdansk is only a city. Gdansk cannot be that big.

“An examination of civil rights in death,” Olivia says, and keeps her knee from moving. Holds it there, stone-like, ’cos this is how it’s going to be from now on, steady, like steel, but knowing, like silk. She will not be tricked again by Catherine or anyone else. “My supervisor said I needed something historical, not practical—it’s not practice-based research,” she says. Ed nods, but maybe he’s disappointed that she abandoned the lonely dead. She hasn’t, really, it’s only the appearance of stone there in her leg; there’s no stillness in her heart.

The A13 feels different. Same emptiness, same salt, pepper and brown sauce, but today it looks sparkly bright, as though Mary has been scrubbing and buffing and picking out the grime with a cotton-tipped swab.

“Sounds good,” Ed says, and man, oh man, the girl is clever-for-so, but where once he thought he had something to do with it, now he feels like a rasshole fool. There’s no one here but Mary to see him cry if it comes to that.

“It was possible all on account of you,” she says, and it’s true, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. Catherine is the lifetime liar, and Olivia is taking her sweet time to talk to her mother again, but Wood—Wood is solid fam.

She’s humouring him, of course, he thinks, because he is laughable, lonely, nearly dead himself. He takes a sip of his tea and sneaks a quick look at the evidence of her face, and maybe there is a trace of the St. Kitts man there in the wideness, when all along he thought it was like Auntie Margaret’s face.

While Ed is staring at her Olivia knows there’s stuff for him to get used to, expectations he has to stop having, so she lets him. She lets his eyes wander over her ears, her nose, her chin, like he’s looking to see if maybe Catherine was wrong after all. Olivia hasn’t even wondered what the other bloke might have looked like, doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to have another face or another voice in her head to haunt her. Once she thought she would ask Ed to sing the song again, of the brown girl in the ring, but, hell, no. She doesn’t want any more incantations or ghosts.

“But I still want to do the project with you—it’s still right, still good,” she says. With her dissertation finished, she’s confident of a 2.1, at least, and if she doesn’t get a first, well, she’ll still become a lawyer, will still train further, will still make enough to move out—alone—but there’s no giving up; this she accepts. The questions change. Who will _____ these people? Fill in the blank. Living with Catherine, Nan, Granddad and Eric won’t be as bad, for a while, if she knows at least this much about herself.

“Look, Olivia,” Ed says, and meets her eye. There is no denying that she is beautiful and of course she is nothing like Geoffrey. He pulls apart the paper napkin that came with his tea. “The man Geoffrey killed …” the napkin looks like snowflakes … “I wanted to say …” and there’s a tinkle-like sound from Mary’s bracelets as she wipes the table next to them … “I arrived at the spot where Geoffrey killed him—minutes too late—and he was there, his face in the river. He was dead, I was sure of it, but I
could have done something, maybe. I could have called someone; I could have turned him over. I could even have said something like I was sorry, but I didn’t. I did nothing. I watched Geoffrey run through the bush and I didn’t tell anyone what I saw. I went back to the camp farther down river and I pretended I saw nothing, and no one asked me, and no one expected me to know, so I kept it to myself. I had gone to find Geoffrey, to give him the money he needed, to make sure he wouldn’t get into trouble, and found a whole lot worse.” He looks back at her. Olivia has questions in her face the way some women have desire. She nods. “It’s what I thought you did for family, for a brother.”

“You thought?” she says.

“I don’t know, now. I don’t think so, no,” Ed says. The real story was so much easier than he had imagined for so long.

“So, you’ll let me know when the next one is?” Olivia says, and for a second he thinks she’s referring to Geoffrey, before he realizes.

“I might not have a funeral again before I go—you can’t plan these things. I have only three months.”

“It would be a good thing if you got none in three months, wouldn’t it?” she says. Olivia is mash-up for anyone’s heart. “But if you do, you’ll tell me, right?”

“Yes, I will,” Ed says.

“We could go to the museum again. Or I was thinking, I’ve always wanted to go to the Carnival.”

“Oh?” She’s never jump-up, never played Mas or ever wind-up and fete so. He nods, and his heart is doing a j’ouvert jump-up of its own. “I was doing some research, too—there’s a Guyanese poet … it might be good.”

“Oh?” Same intonation as his, but she is not mocking him.

“Death must not find us thinking that we die.”

“That’s good!” she says with a flourish. They both pick up their teacups at the same time. They sip.

“Wood,” she says, and she sees where the word has landed in how his shoulders relax. This man was the only one who ever picked her up and held her.

At the door to Ronnie Scott’s Patricia doesn’t look unhappy, doesn’t look like a woman whose whole department has been shut down—“Who needs a degree in anthropology when you could get one in marketing?” Patricia said flatly to Francine on the phone. It was Francine’s idea to come out tonight. “It’s fine,” Patricia says to her as they walk up the stairs to the salsa room.

“What will you do?” Francine says.

“Never write a book again,” Patricia says, and Francine is surprised by her equanimity, not believing that she could be as fine as she professes. Upstairs Francine checks their coats, gets them a drink and then the feeling of being in the transporter is back.

Diaphanous men in their twenties: African, Latino, tight jeans. Very tight jeans. Their skin is translucent in Francine’s X-ray vision.

There is a dark Latino dancing salsa with a tiny woman with straight, brown hair whose short flounce skirt splays like a sail when he turns her. The man’s arms are as sculpted as an Oscar trophy.

Patricia raises her glass and sips from a straw. Francine looks at the pad of lines on the skin of Patricia’s knuckles, there
like ancient footprints or dinosaur knees. They are the oldest women in the room. There are one or two middle-aged men, but the rest are in their twenties or thirties, not English. How is it that Patricia has no self-consciousness here?

“You look good,” Patricia shouts over the horns, conga drums, the singer and his repeated
galenga, galenga, galenga
. But Francine is sure she looks like shit and that to see through her you’d have to penetrate her puffy, ricotta-cheese cheeks. But maybe Patricia has seen through her all along.

The instructor turns down the music and she notices for the first time that the men here are checking them both out. When she looks through them, she sees them in a sandbox: dump trucks and spades and diapers full of poo hanging down from their backsides. If she looks harder, she sees them fifty years in the future: their skin loose and iguana-neck-like, their butts gone soft and droopy; their penises bulbous but flopping. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

“Line up, line up. Girls on one side, boys on the other—but some of you will be acting the part of boys,” says the instructor, who is taking into account that the females outnumber the males. Francine does as she’s told and is face to face with the Latino with the Oscar-trophy arms, who couldn’t be older than thirty.

“Now face your partner—girls, stretch out your arms; and boys, take her waist. Girls, hand on shoulders.”

He starts the music again and shouts instructions at them while doing the moves himself, his hand on his tummy, his hips swinging side to side. He does the steps, shouts the ins and outs, the hand holding, the spinning, and Francine follows along with trophy man without a foot wrong. She looks up at him, sees him smiling at her, and he pulls her close, suddenly: “Manuel,” he
says in her ear. She looks down at her feet. His hot breath on her cheek makes her nervous and she misses a step. When he releases her she looks up and says, quietly, “Francine,” but he’s not looking at her any more and will never know her name.

“Now change—cha cha!” the instructor shouts and Manuel moves her forward and back, one-two-three. She searches for Patricia and sees her with one of the middle-aged men. She’s not smiling, but not unhappy either as she concentrates on her steps.

“Rum makes me stupid,” Francine says to Patricia in passing, after they are instructed to switch partners. They dance for hours, and the beat will not give up. When she stops for a rest, Manuel takes the rum and Coke from her hand, places it down on the table and leads her again to the dance floor.

“You are good,” he says, after he twirls her as the music changes, goes slow and thumpy. He brings her in close, and, yep, there it is, his hand on her giant ass like a butcher with a prime cut. She holds her breath. “You are very sexy,” he says in her ear. This is not happening. She says nothing. He pushes her back and holds her at arm’s length, looking her up and down.

She laughs, which he seems to like, and he pulls her close again and gives her a peck on her cheek that feels nearly like a lick. A tingle at her neck, along her arm, to the tips of her fingers and she squeezes his hand. Oh shit. She didn’t mean to do that. She is the opposite of a thirteen-year old, but feels exactly the same. Maybe the thing that love comes with is seasons. She sees Patricia smiling proudly at her from the side of the room.

They close the place, are the last ones out, even after Manuel and the women he gravitated towards at the end of the night, who are
young but do not have Francine’s life raft of a butt, of which she is a tiny bit proud.

“Let’s get something to eat,” Patricia says, and out they head and turn onto Old Compton Street, where Francine smells urine and is convinced she hears bones clacking. She stops and stands on the spot to watch. The black cast-steel bollard, the warped brick of the corner building, the corrugated iron that covers the shop window: she is small and soft beside these.

“That was special, no?” Patricia says, coming close.

Francine tries to smell her but the familiar butter and lavender are lost amongst the piss and beer on the pavement. Iron, rust, fried onions, exhaust fumes, tobacco. She smiles but doesn’t answer, doesn’t say heck, yeah Patty! Because she’s wondering how much a landscape gardening programme might cost her, wondering if she’ll make more than minimum wage in any future job, and she doesn’t want Patricia to look at her with horror when she tells her that she’s quitting her job in QA and going to tell Larry he’s fat. She doesn’t want to worry Patricia or for her to think it’s false solidarity in the face of her redundancy. Instead, she leans in towards Dancefloor Patty and kisses her on the lips, and holds her mouth there. Patricia doesn’t pull back, not first in any case, and when Francine is again aware of how she feels, well, she’s certain it’s only a hot flash.