Higher Ed (17 page)

“It’s not going to be easy going forward, but we have to assume that we’re all in the firing line, so to speak,” Lawrence says, and he sounds like a complete jerk. She finds herself suddenly hot for him.

“Larry,” she says as she adjusts her thighs in her chair. She has no idea why she has collapsed into cute familiarity with him. “How much warning do we get?” She’s perspiring, more
than a hot flash—this is like dripping sweat after running a long race.

“There’s a protocol in the HR guidelines, but I’m told there’ll be more time than usual. It’s now March; the end of our fiscal year is July. Expect some kind of announcement in the next month or so, to take into account due notice.”

Francine wipes some droplets before they slide from her eyebrows and she looks at Lawrence’s tie until its orange colour separates into component yellow and red and everything about him is only the sum of its component parts laid bare.

“Any other business?” he asks. The others mumble a no, and Francine bolts out of her chair, the creases behind her knees soaking wet.

It’s dark, everyone gone home but her. She has finally been productive. After the meeting she patted herself down with paper towel in the ladies’, took off her pantyhose, retreated to her office in bare legs and boots, and stopped asking herself what her mother had said about love. Instead she thought about one of her father’s favourite lines that he had tried on her as a teenager, when she didn’t want a part-time job: “Take Cinderella, for example; she had a good work ethic, and she had a thing for fancy shoes …” She hunkered down and cleared the backlog of reports and specifications that had piled up since the beginning of February and the last breaths of Dario Martinelli.

Now she is starving; her bare legs are splotchy with cold. As she closes her office door she catches sight of Lawrence ahead of her in the corridor.

“Larry!” she calls out. He turns and smiles. His orange tie is loosened, drawn down, rousing. She swallows and thinks of her splotchy legs.

“Working late—that’s not like you, Larry!”

“You don’t know me then,” he says and she’s aware of all the things she doesn’t know, one for sure being how to talk to a man who once told her that his wife never appreciated him in bed; another being how to hide her legs; and the last being why she feels that Lawrence is necessary right now.

“You have plans for dinner?” she asks.

“No, not really. Starving. Shall we?”

And suddenly she is in Philly again, in the hospital room, and her mother’s mouth is dry and her lips are like snakeskin. She’s not at all sure, but she thinks the thing that her mother might have said, the thing that love comes with, might have included shame.

She follows Lawrence towards the parking lot.

His hand is on her waist and she sucks in her gut, not moving a muscle as she gauges what her skin must feel like. The hand moves down, towards her ass, and she grabs it suddenly and does that thing she learned long ago, in another place: she kisses his hand and puts his finger in her mouth slowly, deeply.

Oh shit.

The evening started out obviously enough: the Crown Tavern on the docks, haddock and chips, from which she’d peeled away the batter and ate only the fish, a few chips, but it was the four glasses of wine and her drinking them all like
water and then not feeling safe to get in her car—not knowing if Rajit pleaded not guilty of danger, not guilty of negligence, maybe pleading plain old dumb—that has brought her to this moment. This ever-so-stupid Francine who has Lawrence’s finger in her mouth like a popsicle.

“Oh God,” Lawrence says, and, shit, now she has to live up to the promise of this gesture.

“It’s just head-count, nothing more, nothing less. You can’t take it personally,” Lawrence said at the Crown, well into their second bottle. “It’s better to be seen to be cooperating,” and he held her eyes, staring into them, but looking more like he was trying to see his own reflection.

And now with his finger in her mouth, she is desperate to be seen to be cooperating.

Dario’s nose flashes into her mind. It had been driven flat to his cheeks from the impact on the road and then Ryan leaned his face over bone and blood and pried open his broken teeth and blew himself into a stranger.

“Oh God,” Lawrence says again.

After glass of wine number two, he’d asked her if she would go back to the States if she lost her job. Shit no, she’d said. She didn’t know what she’d do; she had options, she said, with her breath getting caught on the “p” and her mind getting stuck on an image of Scott and Melissa’s spare room: the single bed with the cream-coloured satin comforter and tubular satin throw-cushions like giant butterscotch mints. The crucifix over the bed, the night table with its doily and glass of water. And now she sees that room again, the light from the window that slashes the single bed early in the morning and exposes the fingerprints and lipstick stains on the rim of the water glass.

She takes Lawrence’s finger out of her mouth and licks it, rolling her tongue around it, sliding it back into her mouth.

“God,” he says again.

When everything is off but her bra and underwear, his shirt unbuttoned, only his underwear and socks remaining, she looks at his belly. Then lower, to the tent-like pouch of his briefs.

Shit. She tries to back out by shuffling herself away on the bed towards the pillows, hoping he won’t notice, but she sees her own thighs jiggle, and when she rests them on the duvet, the orangepeel complexion is spotlit in the track lighting overhead.

“The lights?” she says softly as she raises her knees and hugs them.

Lawrence complies then quickly takes off his shirt and whips off his socks, leaving only his briefs that look like they will rip with the force of what’s inside them. Larry is packing.

When he arrives at the bed it’s with a ferocious grunt as though he’s already come, but she lowers her knees and allows him on top of her, and shit, yeah, there it is.

His kiss is wet; she flinches. But a kiss—it’s been a long time coming, so she examines it with every inch of her tongue, tastes its haddocky tang and remembers not to probe too forcefully, to let him do some pushing forth, to allow him access to the depths of her throat, to make him think of other depths. And this seems fair enough. He has been kind to her; he has offered to protect her as best he can from the ravages of the upcoming culling; he has offered to read her job description for her; he has, bless the fat little functionary, said that she’ll be the first he will give a heads-up to if he hears anything significant. And as he takes his somewhat oddly shaped—more impressive in its width than length—cock out and aims it at her, she
remembers all this and starts to help him by taking down her underpants, sorry that she hasn’t shaved or waxed or trimmed, but right now Larry could care less.

While he’s in her she can’t stop worrying if he has something that she might catch and why on earth she hasn’t insisted on a condom. Then it’s there: an image she hadn’t realized had imprinted. The image she had not even known she’d experienced until just this second: Dario’s face as his body flew across her windscreen—his visor open, the only discernible feature his white teeth bared in a silent howl.

“Ow, ow, ow,” she says and pushes Lawrence up to get him to stop.

“What? You okay?” he asks, terrified he has hurt her, but she hugs him to reassure him he has not, no, not really … it’s just …

“Sorry, just a second, let’s … just … Stay there. Don’t move,” she says, “I like that,” and she remembers how to be helpful and how to make it seem like everything is just right and the guy just never has to do anything but the perfect fucking he believes he’s been born to do. She remembers that this is a crucial part of all of this. So she whispers: “Oh God, that feels great,” and in a moment so graceful and swift that it feels like it is enacted by a petite, confident woman half her size and age, she turns over on her stomach and raises her red ass in the air like a baboon and offers it to Larry as the last thing on earth that might save her.

The gods are back. This day confirms it. And they are toying with him again. Since the last warm days of October, through the misery of November and his last hurrah of sex with Emma in December, and all through the dark winter, the gods said, you deserve this, you are lost in a grim forest, you are not Kurosawa’s samurai, you are merely a common, irrelevant man. And now today’s sun—the evil light like the cinematography in Rashomon—is their joke on him. Things were easier in the irritating shadows, the itching cold. This light, this warmth on his neck; daffodils, crocuses, a million shades of green: these will hurt without her. And those birds. God. The birds are torture. There is one tree, one supernatural tree that he must pass on his way to the tube, and this tree persecuted him this morning; this tree with branches dressed in white lace petticoat blossom, circled by sparrows calling like fools. And the afterimage of Katrin seared into his brain: her hair, skin, the way she takes him to her. These, along with the ultrasound image of his baby, Emma’s tears, and the fact that he has agreed to her request to move into his flat for the baby’s birth, are torture here in the sunshine.

Today the river smells nearly like a river should. The sun makes this space behind the library feel nearly like a real shore. Robin looks around him, aware of noises near the derelict spot at the back of the Samuel Johnson building. He sees the broad back of Bayo, her weave of black hair, long down her back, her shoulders hunched over something, and then the flame opens and she drops the thing in her hand and stands back. The essay. He didn’t want to, he tried hard not to, but he had no choice but to fail her. It would never have got by the external examiner, would in no one’s eyes but his own have been worthy of a pass just because she has tried so hard and needs a break so badly. Is he doing them justice—these students who don’t need theory but who, like Bayo, just need a job?

The inevitability of bad news awaits him in his office. The last round of e-mails from the dean reveal that there will be no hourly paid lecturers for next year, and class sizes will increase accordingly. Even if he keeps his job, he’ll never have time to write another article. Students will consume him, making a film would be out of the question even if he could, and, fact is, without being submitted to the REF he’ll never get further than the lecturer grade. He needs to make a mark in a different way, but his application for his job has been sent to Human Resources; his article on motion capture and animation has been submitted to
The Velvet Light Trap
, and he now must ensure that he doesn’t botch the interview. The one for his current job is the only interview he hasn’t botched in his life, except maybe the one for a stock boy position at Sainsbury’s when he was sixteen, when he jabbered on about the importance of fresh milk.

Bayo spots him as she walks away, the blackened leaves of her burnt essay fluttering on the ground beside the cement wall. He nods, but she doesn’t acknowledge his gesture.

Olivia paces in the corridor; a scowl, eyebrows close together. Robin slows down in his march back to his office. Bayo, Olivia: too much today. But as soon as she is in front of him at his desk, the born teacher in him, the part of him he wishes he could bottle so that he could sip it during other less resourceful moments of his day, arrives to shore them both up.

“That man who works for the council,” Olivia says. She is ticking inside, something about to give. He puts his hand on the desk.

“What is it?”

She rubs her face. “I didn’t tell you this before.”

He waits, expecting that her bobbing will spin out meaning like cloth.

“He’s my father.” She looks at him with something akin to a dare.

“Oh,” he says, and waits for her to explain.

“So, yes, that’s why, that might be why.”

He waits, giving her space, not wanting to force her to that place she was last year when she revealed more than he could rightfully handle.

“I haven’t seen him for … like forever … and he …” She shifts in the chair. He waits for her to finish, but she shakes her head and doesn’t look as though she will.