Higher Ed (20 page)

When Robin is with her everything is in the right place. Before in England she did not always know where to put herself. He is where to put herself. Today everything is in the right place, like this
wata cukrowa
tree.

Ania says that Beata is in panic. That Gdansk is her home, but that Gdansk is impossible without her daughter. These two things are not lying well together inside Beata’s heart. Katrin will make sure that London is home for Beata and that they will not need impossible Gdansk. When they are together more things will be in their right place.

He has her hand in both of his and rubs it in a gentle way. This rubbing makes her head feel light and maybe she is sick, or maybe
she is pregnant already after taking chances before taking the pill, or maybe Beata forgot to tell her that love can feel like illness.

“If I don’t get it, I’ll have to move out of London,” Robin says, and this stops the lightness and brings a heavy feeling. She rests her elbow on the small table that is her dining table, desk, and ironing board. Robin must reapply for his own job. At the university they are restructuring and deciding who they will keep and who they will remove, and Robin for the first time in his life is worried about money, because no matter what will happen with Katrin, Robin will be a father.

“But why?” She returns the rubbing and plays with his fingers.

“There are no academic jobs in London,” he says. He stares at her. “I feel calm with you.”

She can only smile, because he is being so serious and looks like a sad cartoon of himself. “You are teasing me. I am the least calm person, but I fool people because my face doesn’t move much.” Now he is smiling and they laugh.

“It’s true, except when you sleep: your face dances around when you sleep, as though you’re watching a circus,” he says.

She breathes in. He watches her in her sleep, he sees her; he, more than anyone else, knows her.

“There’s this student,” he says, and Katrin gets nervous again. She hates this about herself. She does not want everything to feel like a threat. “She wants me to help her father.” But Katrin can barely hear the rest because she wants him to help her, maybe too many people want Robin’s help, maybe Robin is like an angel and she must remember that angels do not belong to one person alone. She wants to ask him about the council tax and how things work in the council and whether her mother will be
allowed to live with her without telling her landlord. She will not ask him because maybe he will think she is trying to take advantage of his country. But it is not that. It is not.

She takes a sip from her vodka that he poured for her before he took her hand. His hands fall away and he leans back in his chair. Katrin wonders if it is this chair where her mother will sit when they eat dinner, or if her mother will prefer the one she is in, which faces the street and from where she can see the window boxes that now have tulips and
cyklameny
. The bedsit has room for only this table and a small dresser. She will need to buy a television for her mother to watch in the evenings. Where will she put that?

“He buries the unknown dead,” Robin says. He is still talking about the student’s father.

There is a feeling in her chest from his words, but it is not pain. It is like pain, though. “They do this in the councils?”

“All the people who have no families—the foreigners, or the people without friends who die in Dagenham, and who need funerals.”

“And how will you help him?” She will try not to feel jealous. Try very hard. And she will not ask him about the council tax. She will not be in need like this student.

“I don’t know,” Robin says, and he looks down at his feet—his leather shoes have scuffs on the toes and the laces are frayed. Maybe he is thinking he needs to shine them, maybe he is not thinking about his shoes at all, but when Robin concentrates he is very beautiful. “Let’s go to bed,” he says.

And everything is in its right place.

BUT NOW I’M FOUND

Long hair; smart-Beatle glasses: is this in truth how a professor looks these days? Robin’s open face is not unlike Sammy’s. Ed sits in front of Olivia and Robin in the staff room of the Safe and Sorrow office and feels proud. The first time the man was here Ed was worried he’d said something wrong, but the professor is back. And Olivia too. And his Olivia is something else. She’s full of the things he was as a youth—Resistance! Revolution!—but she doesn’t need to holler in the streets like he and his friends did when the ballot boxes got stuffed and boys in Tiger Bay got shot. She is a tread-softly warrior.

“Wood, maybe you could explain what you have to do, exactly,” Olivia says to him. And, man, she’s calling him Wood.

“Well, I was explaining last time—”

“But you didn’t talk about funerals, not exactly,” Olivia says, interrupting him like there is something urgent to organize. He looks at Robin to see if this is what the man really wants to hear. He stands up and clicks on the kettle, searches the rack for cups that aren’t too stained, rinses them out, takes two tea bags from the box of Clipper beside the kettle, and drops them into the yellow teapot. “Busy here today,” he says, and
wipes his forehead, hot as rass with trying not to make a mess of this meeting. For her.

“You know, we see a lot of elderly,” he says over his shoulder, then turns towards them. “Family left them long ago and they didn’t know they were unwell, you see. And …” he looks at Olivia whose eyes prompt him to continue. “And some illegals … we don’t know where they’ve come from—sometimes women, mostly men. A young woman—as young as you—” he says to Olivia, “nobody found her for a long time. She had nobody. That’s bad, man.” He shakes his head and places their cups in front of them. He goes to the small fridge for the milk. The open fridge is cool, and he stands there longer than he needs to. He picks up the packet of Hobnobs and places them on the table before he sits down again.

“And worst is the babies. Yeah, we’ve had some babies.”

“Where from, though? Their mothers, surely …” Robin says, looking bruk-up inside.

“You don’t know it, but some mothers walk away and leave them. You don’t think so, but that’s a fact.” Olivia is looking at him like he’s saying the wrong things. “Stillbirths have to be registered if they take place after twenty-four weeks …” What does she want him to say? The poor man’s glasses are slid down towards the tip of his nose. “We had one a few weeks ago, was found in the rubbish …” He looks in their faces again. “The police had custody of the body and they needed to organize a cremation. Normally there’s no funeral under these circumstances, but Olivia has me,” and the thing that’s been there in the room all along catches him and he can’t shake it, “thinking different,” he says and pours the tea.

He tells them about the mandatory autopsy. The police have to treat it as a crime and the morgue has arrangements with the
crematorium for this kind of thing. He knows the coroner who signs the death certificate in this case, a good bloke who talks to him a lot about his cases, and maybe they should work together, because, as Olivia says, a life is a life after all. He burns out on this last sentence and looks to her, but she is looking at Robin who pushes his hair behind his ear, making him look like a girl.

“But what’s there to say at a funeral like this? How could there be anything to say?” Robin’s voice is tortured, like bacoo stuck in a bottle.

“True-true,” Ed says, and he won’t tell them about Keith Meyers. Five years ago it was the fact of Keith that made Ed go out more often, made him keep up with his friends better, call his mum more regularly, because he wanted to leave a trace of himself, didn’t want to end up like Keith Meyers, early sixties, whose corpse was discovered only after his rent had gone unpaid for more than a year and his landlords at the Housing Society began proceedings to have him evicted. No one was going to evict Keith because he had already done so himself, thirteen months previously, dead on the sofa in front of the TV which, when the body was found, had one remaining beam of light coming from the centre, like a cataract eye.

“What do you think would make it better?” Olivia asks him, and he knows what she has in mind—this feeling she has that every human being deserves something good. He can tell this in the throng-bang-parrap of her body. She is a girl who feels so much she will bust open. Things don’t always work out, he will have to tell her—part of his duty as father. Nah every crab hole get crab.

“Just something honourable,” Ed says. “To give a bit of dignity.”

Robin is nodding and fidgeting, like he’s caught it from Olivia.

“Okay, okay, I see,” Robin says. “Look … I don’t know, I really don’t. It’s beyond me, really …”

Ed is confused by this modern education system—with the lecturer sitting beside the student while she’s doing the research. Robin takes his leave—formal-like and polite—like a man whose own folks have just passed, and Ed is sorry for bringing this pain on him.

“He is the most caring teaching I ever met, Olivia.” He will say her name until he dies of it.

“I haven’t told you the whole thing yet,” Olivia says.

“Oh?”

She tells him her plan, her crazy, beautiful plan, in the A13 café. He is more comfortable with her in the dull thud of the place that says, man, this is real, this is not a dream you once had. Now he needs to follow this through like a father.

“And what has poetry got to do with the law?”

“Nothing,” she says. He waits, because she is a girl who has more, the way a river does after rain. “I don’t always know if I’m in the right field.”

“It’s a good thing to know the law,” he says. She nods then shakes her head. He has much to do in the shoring up of this daughter of his.

“Yeah, but the law gets changed, and I have this friend—president of the SU—and he says you don’t wait, you don’t sit it out; by the time there’s a law it’s way too late.”

This he cannot argue with. What a father can do is encourage her every step of the way. He lets silence fall for a beat before he speaks again. “When you said everyone needs a poem, what about you? Someone writing you poems?”

“Noooo,” Olivia says, like what a ridiculous question, but there is a puncture of relief in his chest.

“Why not?” He is pushing it now.

“Too busy, too busy,” she says and that’s that.

“What about your mum—she have a boyfriend?” Jeez and rice, now he’s done it.

Olivia’s eyes duck behind her curls. She shakes her head as if to say, man, he has no idea. He’s a stupid rass. Of course Catherine’s got a million boyfriends. Catherine was a beauty. Curvy, blonde, a Marilyn Monroe even though her face was not what everybody would call attractive. But she was sexy, with skin like cream. Jesus. Why she went for a man like him he can only put down to the fact that he tried so hard, while the blokes she knew treated her with no respect.

“Have you told her about us meeting?” he asks.

Olivia exhales. “No, no, she wouldn’t be happy.”

“But, darling”—yeah, he’s allowed to say that, and Olivia doesn’t flinch—“she should know. Lying is bad.” He hears the hypocrite-rasshole-worthless nothing of a man he is by saying that, picturing the man in the Mazaruni river, face down in the halo of blood. But Olivia looks at him like it is right. Like, just maybe, he has said the right thing for a father to say.