Higher Ed (23 page)

He writes back to Olivia, suggesting she come to talk to him later today. He holds tight to the pen in his imagination; the pen that was Katrin’s.

The atrium is quiet. Robin takes the stairs slowly, calmly, to Richard’s office. Richard’s e-mail had a red exclamation tag: urgent. He slows down, one step, the next.

“Your student,” Richard says when Robin in seated in the comfy chair beside the desk. Richard stole this chair from the staff lounge, Robin knows. “Bayo Esima …” he says. Oh God. “She’s lodged a complaint with the Dean.”

Fucking hell. “What?” he says, keeping his cool.

“Says your marking is biased, and that you are picking on her.”

“Excuse me, but this is outrageous. Her essay was double marked. Miriam agreed with me; it had to fail.”

“I know, and there’s nothing to be done about it, and you’re not in any trouble whatsoever, but I thought I’d let you know, before you see her again. There’s definitely some instability
there,” he says. At least Richard has confirmed that it’s not he who is losing it, but Richard is also holding something back, he can tell, as though there’s ammunition now which could be used against him at any moment.

Robin stands at the lectern waiting for the lecture hall to fill up. No sign of Bayo. Not in the front row, nor in the back. Miles comes to the front of the room. Miles, his DJ demeanour in full force, holds up the phantom microphone in his hand, dips his chin and turns his nearly black eyes up towards Robin. “I missed the last lecture—and I don’t understand the slides on the website. Can I book a tutorial?”

“Of course, of course. Let’s talk after class.”

“Great, Robin, thanks.” Miles is all bones and bad skin. A decent bloke who is a relief to talk to when he comes to his office, even with the phantom mic. A decent bloke who wants to know things, to do well, to pull his weight. Robin checks his notes and starts the powerpoint.

“On the day the world ends, a bee circles a clover …” He pauses. This hasn’t worked; he hasn’t got their attention. He looks up and sees Bayo, snuck in by the back door. He has to pull this off, has to rehearse his presence and power so that next week’s interview will not be a complete shambles. “The depiction of the process of art within another work of art—a film for our purposes—liberates the event for all time.” He needs confidence, deliberateness. Afterimage: the look on Katrin’s face when he said snake.

Resistance? For some mad reason the light in this Great Court of the British Museum makes him feel a child again, playing games in the yard: Dog and de bone, One Two Tree Red Light, and Bun Down House. He is running wild and one of the mothers of his playmates is cussing them for pulling the sheets off the clothesline and telling them not to tek they eye and pass she. Crisscross lines from the skylight in the Great Court make a shadow on the wall of the reading room that catches them in all the clotheslines of all the childhoods of all the world. Resistance has no force here.

Ed hasn’t been to the British Museum since before there was a Great Court. It is like morning in the Iwokrama Forest—without the screeches from howler monkeys, and except for the fact that it’s still rass cold as far as he is concerned, never mind how others are saying it’s spring. He will tell Olivia about the forest, about the trees as big as this reading room, about the cock-of-the-rock bird, the macaws and the electric-blue butterflies.

“You want to get a drink?” he asks her. He doesn’t want to break the mood of this special outing—he has not thought to ask about Catherine, and Olivia has not talked much about her project, the reason they have come here in the first place. They have
floated along beside one another, through China, India, Egypt, like real father and daughter on an adventure. But she has to leave by four o’clock, and there is so much to say. She nods and touches his arm to guide him to the café at the edge of Enlightenment.

“I like this,” he says, when they are sitting with their tea. She smiles, the museum her idea after the nearly two weeks since she brought Robin to his office. She is different today, not electric, not treading-threading, not crease-up in her face, just smooth-like. Something has changed.

“I can’t believe you never come here,” she says.

“Not for a long time, no.”

“Mum said you used to like museums and stuff.”

“When did she say that?”

“A few days ago.”

In her face is something like defiance more than resistance—a little smirk as if she has done something bad. She has talked to her mother about him, and from what he can tell it seems that whatever Catherine said has not fouled the image of Wood in the girl’s eyes.

“And does she know you’re here?”

She shakes her head, no. He rubs his hand across the top of his head in search of a part of himself. Catherine has said his name, Catherine has told their daughter about the museums that he liked to take her to when they first met. Catherine has probably mentioned how bad his learning was, how he didn’t read books. He hopes she also told her how he taught himself and made himself better.

“We aren’t telling each other things at the moment.” Her thrumming has been given a poke and resumes while she sips her tea.

“Why not?”

She looks up into the canopy of the Great Court. “We had a giant row the other day because I want us to move,” and she looks back into his face.

Jesus. “But you mustn’t fight with your mum,” he says. Feeble.

“It’s fine, happens all the time. She thinks the world is against her.”

Of course, this is what it feels like to her. Catherine was happy before she met him.

“Listen, darling,” but this time it doesn’t sound right. “Did she ever tell you about my brother, about Geoffrey?”

Olivia frowns. “Not that I can recall, no.”

And so here goes. Olivia is too clever for the slowly-slowly approach. “My brother, Geoffrey, he is in jail for killing a man.” It’s not so bad. It doesn’t sound so echoey in this hall as a man might think, and doesn’t make him feel corrupt and small in his own skin; it just is. Olivia nods her head as if she has known all along.

The details come out at a good pace—how everyone suffered, especially his daddy, how his mummy still watches out for Geoffrey along the road every day, how Ed sends his brother letters and packages once in a while.

Olivia is quiet through the details, but suddenly she sits forward, then back, then forward again, her face a balloon. “She’s insane!”

“Well, darling,” he says, only after realizing she’s talking about her mum.

“Did you do something too? Did you help him? Did you kill anyone?” She is angry at them both now.

“Of course not,” he says, slumping back into his chair the way he slumped into the sand by the river, frightened now, as he
was then, by what to do with death lying before him like that and a brother running, running, running in the distance.

“Well, that’s crump …” Olivia says, but he doesn’t know whether to agree or disagree. “Didn’t she love you?”

Now here’s a question. This one and what is a brother to do? Both of them buzzing like a marabunta, for the last eighteen years. Ed and Olivia look into the continental exhibits—Africa, China, South America—of each other’s faces. The answers lie somewhere there. They stay silent.

“Will you ask her if she’ll meet me?” he says, finally, taking strength now from her face, because he has to know once and for all—needs to know why.

“I will,” Olivia says, with pepper in her tone.

They throw away the rubbish—tea bags, napkins, a part-eaten brownie, a piece of lemon cake—put their trays in the rack, and walk through the Great Court towards the exit, passing by an exhibition about the horse: in stone reliefs, gold and clay models, horse tack, paintings, trophies. The thoroughbreds that his daddy looked after at the racetrack in Berbice were Arabians, but skinny for so: hungry horses that raced too much, that foamed at the bit out of vexation. By the time they leave he is nearly used to not telling her the things he really wants her to know: how dredging for gold does make you hungry all the time, how the Mazaruni River drops like a waterfall, how black electric eels, piry, haimara, and baiara fish in the Mazaruni don’t measure up to anything like the lau-lau, the half-ton fish which is the next thing down the scary scale from the kamundi snake. But even with all of that, the Mazaruni does bear diamonds like a pawpaw does bear seeds.

At the buzz in her pocket, Olivia puts down her fork to slip the phone out and read the text, even though she knows this is mega rude at the dinner table. Jasmine watches her with a sly smile.

In media lect showed film of chomsky. You see it?

For two weeks he has been texting her and receiving one word answers in response. It’s now a little game they have set up. He asks her questions—
what is name of your mother? where is your favorit place for dancing? do you think government will bring EMA back if there is rioting?
—and she writes back simple answers:
Catherine. Nowhere. Never
.

For two weeks she has eaten crisps, Maltesers, with granola bars to keep things balanced, while she stayed late at the library and did everything her studies demanded of her, and more, even taking Ed to the British Museum to check out death in other times, burials and rituals throughout civilizations. She felt more at ease with Ed. Having a brother who killed a man is surely not enough of a reason for Catherine to refuse to see him. She will find the right moment and find out the real story.

She is at Jasmine’s for dinner because, turns out, Jasmine is not as religious as she thought she could be, on account of it
meaning you can’t be letting new boys put their hands in you up so far that you become their ventriloquist dummy.

“How is your granddad, then?” Jasmine’s mother asks as she spoons a tiny bit of mash onto Olivia’s plate and then a ton on Jasmine’s like she wants her daughter to get fat. The sausages in the centre of the plate spin and slide left, making room.

He’s the same old bastard he was the last time you asked a month ago, but Olivia doesn’t need to say this, because Jasmine’s mother is being polite and all Christian-like, all the while knowing that Granddad hates her and her Christian ways as much as he hates the rubbish bin thieves.

So, “Same old, you know,” is all she says, and now that everyone’s plate is full they can eat.

“Bless,” Jasmine’s mother says.

“Mum, I’ll say grace and then Liv and me are going to take our plates up to my room, ’cos we have so much, like so much reading to do we don’t have time to take a break, really, really,” Jasmine says.

Her mother looks at her as though Jasmine has told her that the next man she’s going to shag is the devil himself.

“Olivia, I’m sure you are very respectful of your mum,” she says.

Olivia isn’t fast enough with the right words to slip in here between mother and daughter. Jasmine’s mother bows her head.

“Peak,” Olivia says quietly, but only Jasmine hears, and in any case, Jasmine’s mum wouldn’t understand their language and how there’re some really fucking sad times going on here. Jasmine’s mum bows her head, not giving over that bit, at least, to her gnarly daughter. She mumbles a little prayer over the bounty they are about to receive. Amen.