Higher Ed (2 page)

“Sayonara, sucker,” she says as she clicks onto the Guardian Soulmates icon on the desktop, entering her log-in name, ReallyYouandMe, and her password: Isoam.

No one has viewed her since her last log-in.

She has no fans.

She has five favourites.

She has no new messages.

She clicks through the favourites.

“Hear, hear!” she says, raising her mug to the screen at the fifty-five-year-old widower who describes himself as “wanting to feel beloved again.” The rest are all too young for her, and they will never contact her. But their presence there, beside her profile, is better even than feeling hunger. Hunky single guys with lots of hair and good teeth—she primps her hair with her fingers, feeling the soft straightness, her most reliable feature.

She shuts down the site and turns towards the reports.

Give a damn, she urges herself, trying to waken her family’s work ethic, to keep her duties from slipping. She feels suddenly sick—barfed perhaps too soon—at the idea of losing her job. Returning to the States would be one failure too many. But the
announcements have made it clear: there will be a round of redundancies. They will affect every sector of the university, and every department will be scrutinized. She tries to focus on the programme report for the BA in Multimedia Studies, which her colleagues call the Mickey Mouse degree. Appreciating the historical impact of Mickey Mouse is right up her alley and she would like to see the programme stay open, but with low retention rates it seems unlikely. And the data on employability is even more damning.

How did she end up on this side of the divide? Back in the States she marched in campus demonstrations at Penn State against the local nuclear power plant. Okay, she was never arrested, but she’d been willing to be. Now she’s the lock-’em-up voice of right and wrong in this university where senior managers look to her to tell them whether people a whole lot smarter than she is are teaching to regulation. She should have finished her master’s and applied to the PhD programme in Landscape Ecology at Duke as she’d planned, but cranky John Clarke told her that studying more would be a waste of time and money. And she let his crankiness get to her and took a financial management diploma to be practical. But she knows what good learning is. She could teach her own programme, one that fits with national quality guidelines to boot. And her students would get jobs; they’d be relevant in tough times. She’d call her programme Environmental Containment, or a BA (Honours) in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

She needs another cup of tea. Brushing her hips to smooth down her skirt, she leaves the office.

She’s beautiful today, all day, even if the atrium smells like cheese, even if the students irritate the shit out of her with the
way they clump together. She waits behind a boy clump in the line-up for food.

“Alright then, Francine?” says Patricia over Francine’s shoulder. She turns. Oh Patricia. Pat to friends and colleagues, Patty on the dancefloor, no doubt. Patty in front of the mirror going “Oooh, I feel love, I feel love …” Always asking Francine to go out with her to salsa at Ronnie Scott’s on a Saturday night when they give you lessons. Patricia is late fifties, slim but buxom, with unplucked eyebrows and big hands, all of which she pulls off with enviable moxie. And she has a big smile and nice, straight teeth, which is something for an English woman her age, so Francine doesn’t mind her, really.

“What do you think that smell is?” Francine asks Dancefloor Patty, who lectures in anthropology (because this gal never hid her brains so that some half-pint would love her). Francine nudges Patricia, who sparks at the touch and leans in, so that Francine has to step back.

“There’s a hint of vanilla, I think,” says Patricia, and, oh shit, Patricia has just sniffed her.

“I mean …” she waves her hand in the direction of the atrium, “out here,” Francine says, and she retreats to the tight corner of her I-am-beautiful day.

“What, you mean the Starbucks smell? It’s a disgrace,” and Patricia shifts side to side, as though the topic has revved her engine. “The choice of this or Costa—brilliant—at twice the price of last term, to a company that pays no tax in Britain, to a company—”

“That’s not what I meant …” Francine says. She takes another step back. Patricia comes across stern and composed, but on the right topic she’s a struck match of opinion. “What are
you up to these days?” Francine asks her. Wood, metal, plastic, cloth: each distinct smell comes wafting in, one after the other.

Patricia looks down at her feet and this seems to stop her hips from swaying, delivering her back to perfect composure. “It’s always hectic at the beginning of a term,” she says, raises a shoulder, and tilts her chin to it like a cat cleaning whiskers. The hair on Francine’s arm rises: Colgate toothpaste, Dove deodorant, Aussie shampoo. There’s more of this every day: the “change”—she’s still goddamn changing.

“Seen anything good recently?” she asks, forcing her eyes away from Patricia’s shoulder, wondering if she should ask Patricia if she thinks there will even be an anthropology department next year.

“No time,” Patricia says. “Anything in mind?”

Damn it. Francine always falls into this trap, this feeling of being the one who has to follow through. “I’ll see what’s out there, and, yeah, we could”—she doesn’t have the guts to stop there—“get together.”

“Excellent,” Patricia says. “Friday?”

“Yeah.”

Shit.

Francine finds herself doing the thing with her silky hair that John Shitface Clarke used to tell her made his heart melt—that pulling down of her fringe in an attempt to cover her eyes. She doesn’t mean to do it; it just happens. She smiles nervously as Patricia takes her in, and Patricia responds with a smile so full and ripe that the little part of Francine that keeps being the sucker is warmed.

He doesn’t want to go mad. If this is madness he can’t have it. The wind whips off the river in front of him and slaps his cheek. Robin counts the ways madness might bear down on a man: 1) he could be born mad; 2) he could slowly, over the course of years, lose the capacity to see that actions and thoughts are separate; or 3) the self might become only a threshold, a door to multiplicities. This final point is from Deleuze, whose critical theory Robin has mined for the article he must write on motion capture and animation. Deleuze has hypnotized him with
A Thousand Plateaus
, but in truth Robin is most worried about number 2.

He downs his double espresso in the Styrofoam cup, his regular mug left behind in his office this morning. This forgetfulness is surely a sign. He picks up his briefcase and makes ready to face the lecture room. He has to remember to keep his glasses high up on his nose, because Emma told him that he looks like an old man when they slide down towards the tip. Thirty-eight is the edge of old. He stands and braces himself for this second-year class in Cinema Poetics. Where is the poetry? Where are the stressed syllables and open vowels? The wind stings his chin. Father does not rhyme with much.

The river whips up again and only facts remain. Fact is, in 1963 this river froze, the Beatles sang “Please Please Me,” and Fellini released
8 ½
. These are thoughts that don’t require action, and this is what he’s more used to, what he’s certain, almost certain, he would still prefer.

In the atrium he nudges the glasses up further before he enters the lecture room. One, two, three … only four students are there ahead of him. Not a promising sign so early in the term. Bayo is in her seat in the front row, ready to take him on. Formaldehyde, he wants to say to her.
Formaldehyde
is not an easy word to spell—it was she who challenged his typo on the PowerPoint last week. In that need to act on her thought, Bayo revealed her madness. A mature student from Nigeria, her bosom broad, her hair long and straight from extensions—a swath of it wrapping over her forehead and across one eye like a pirate’s patch—Bayo’s madness is a slow-burning constant. Last term Robin caught her behind the Samuel Johnson Building setting fire to the essay he had handed back to her minutes before. Jake, Dan, and Miles also set fire to theirs, but it wasn’t lunacy; they did it together in full view in the university square. Jake is from a small northern town where a bloke is not allowed to like film and art; Miles is a thin Afro-Caribbean DJ wanna-be, and so shy that he talks into his hand as though the hand were clutching a microphone; Dan used to sell drugs to celebrities: these young men aren’t mad. Their actions were pure performance.

He walks to the lectern and places his briefcase on the table beside it. He takes out the pen—
I’m the pen your lover writes with
—stolen from the Epicure Café. More students stream in, and they are loud. He looks down at his Doc Martens and starts to hum.

He’s fucking going to be a father.

A sheet of paper slips from his notes and floats down like a leaf. At this portent of chaos, he rushes out of the room, gripping the stolen pen, and crosses the atrium to the student union shop.

The chocolate is along the back row with bags of Haribo, Basset’s Mint Imperials, Fruit Gums, Starbursts, Minstrels, and Jelly Aliens. Kit Kat is the one sane choice. He reaches for one and catches sight of familiar curly hair and wide cheekbones. Olivia is a third-year law student who took Cinema Poetics last year as an option and was the best student in the class. Her face is like Cleopatra’s, her hair like Shirley Temple’s, her confidence as thin but as certain as cellophane. In the second week of classes she towered over him as she asked if poets wrote only about things that are impermanent. He considered the question so thoroughly that he lost track of time, right there in front of her. Love, and water over stones, she said and brought him back. Yes. Yes, they do, he said.

Olivia catches his eye from across the aisle, but on remembering their final meeting last year, he bows his head and ducks behind the rack of greeting cards, pretending to look for a suitable card for the now confirmed autumn event.
Happy Birthday
:
Son, Daughter
? Oh God. He doesn’t want to be a man. He wants to be a lightning bolt.

He returns to the lecture room with the Kit Kat in his breast pocket. Bayo is sitting straight, like an actor ready for a cue. She stares at him, but he bends down to pick up his notes from the floor. Image: the hands of the woman from the Epicure Café on Upper Street, the way she holds his cup as she walks towards him, the way her thumb releases the saucer as she places it before him. He arranges his notes, turns on the computer and projector, and opens the PowerPoint presentation.

“I celebrate myself and sing myself,” he says, and the room goes quiet. This worked on him as an undergraduate at Warwick, and he knows it will work now. He looks over at Bayo, who appears agitated. “And what I assume, you shall assume …” he continues, and when the students realize he’s quoting they will relax, but for now he is content to unsettle them, to confound them with the possibility that he might be saying something real. Except that Bayo has begun to wring her hands so he breaks out of his performance sooner than planned.

“Whitman refers to his book
Leaves of Grass
and the American Civil War as though they are one, making a link between them to the democratic soul, and the struggle for unification.” He sees Bayo look down into her lap. “Not dissimilarly, Elsaesser and Hagener explore the reflective and reflexive potential of cinema, using the mirror and the face as a motif for understanding the self and the other …”

Bayo looks up again. Robin cannot push away the face of the woman in the Epicure Café, which beams like his grandmother’s in a photo of her at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. A tiny stranger who smiles at him in a way that makes all things seem possible.

Living on air is harder in the drizzled dullness of February, chilling at six, when Francine leaves the university. Hungry. Trying to stay that way. But sleepy as she drives west across London and the radio repeats the news of Gaza violence she heard at lunchtime. Her flat is too far away at this hour of the day. She presses the dashboard button for Kiss FM and sings along behind the wheel, because it’s true, everybody wants to rule the world.

It’s an hour before she nears home, turning towards Kilburn Park, then up Salusbury Road towards Willesden Lane. John Clarke would have hated Kilburn, hated its pound shops, cheap garments and kebabs. The dark brick, the crowded-front-teeth of a road that leads onto hers. John fucking Clarke would–

There’s a sliding, screeching, wet bang. A body flies above the car in front of hers and glass hits her windshield. Her car smacks the back bumper of the small red sedan. Now only one sound: a low pumping vibration all around. She puts the car in park. Fuck, fuck, fuck. And opens the car door. Near the oak tree at the side of the road is a small, contorted body, face down. She has trouble breathing. She trains her eyes on the jeans, twisted
around impossibly bent legs, the black leather jacket, the motorcycle helmet, tilted up just enough to have broken the neck. The clothes are emptied, breath having wrinkled them in its leaving. The pumping vibe deepens: a bass line that moves up the back of her own neck.

“I think it’s a girl …” a voice says, and cinnamon wafts through the fugue of voices. “Ooh, look at the legs.” Francine looks at the legs again to try to see this girl, but she is sure this pile of clothing belongs to a man (beer, cigarettes, stale cologne). She walks towards it: or just a boy. His bent leg shimmers like it’s going to dissolve, like particles are separating to show her the skin, twisted tendons, broken bones within. Thank God his mother isn’t here to see. Thank God it’s she who witnesses this, not his mother, who will next see him when a sheet is pulled down to reveal a face, scrubbed and bloodless, in the morgue.

The driver of the red sedan, over which the boy flew, is slumped at his steering wheel, window open, his body uninjured and his face a stiff mask. Francine stands among the strewn motorcycle parts. Someone is asking for an ambulance on 999. Someone else whimpers, “He wasn’t going fast.” And the driver slowly gets out of the red car. Mum, she thinks, but doesn’t know why all this mummy, mummy for the shattered boy by the oak tree.