Higher Ed (29 page)

She stands and begins to walk; he leaps up to follow her. “I know you sent money,” she says. So she is admitting now that she opened the envelopes before marking them Return to Sender. “Whose money was that?” she asks.

Jesus.

“My money; I worked hard for it,” he says. She stops and looks at him. “I wanted Olivia to grow up good, to have everything she needed.”

Catherine tosses her head back, turns and walks faster; they pass the playground at a pace before she stops again and looks at him.

“You never knew what you needed, didn’t know whether to be here or there, always wanting things to be different,” she says.

How to mash-up a heart is easy. “You do any better?”

She starts to walk again, slowly, as they reach the tall trees near the end of the park. “My dad was sure you were involved with Geoffrey.”

“Of course he was,” because Catherine’s father is an ignorant rass and they both know it.

“So was he right?”

“No, no, he wasn’t right.” But there is no way of telling the story that doesn’t make him look bad somehow. “I wasn’t involved in anything that Geoffrey did,” he says, and this seems to calm her if not convince her. And then he is vex. “You just went along with what your dad thought?”

Catherine squints and keeps walking. He knows this is the thing that will bruk them up, right here, once again, but he has no choice. “Why wouldn’t you let me see you?”

“I couldn’t trust you any more,” she says—hard-hard, like she is holding stone in her teeth.

“You didn’t even give me a chance, not a one,” he says.

“It wouldn’t have been good for Olivia.”

“I’m her father.”

There’s a look on her face like she’s sucking a tamarind. Catherine turns to him beneath the branches of the smallest of the oaks in the row. “No,” she says.

He looks in her face, the Marilyn Monroe eyes and pout that have gone droopy with age and probably too much drink, there with her father and brother in front of the television. He waits for her to continue.

“No, you’re not.”

There is a bird making a racket above them in the oak tree. A cawing like it has been set on fire and it’s trapped among the leaves that each catch-a-fire, and it’s like the whole tree is going to burn down. He looks up at the cawing but can’t see the bird. What he can see is the place she lived, the flat on Romford Road where she told him she was pregnant.

“She looks like me.” The fire in the tree is hissing. Catherine shuffles her feet.

“You’re much better looking than he was,” she says.

And now he knows. The man before him, the one from St. Kitts; the one whose photo he saw in her purse: wide-faced, big hands, for so. The one who, three weeks into Ed’s courting of Catherine like she was the last queen of England, was going back to St. Kitts and asked to see her one last time.

When a couple months later she said she was pregnant it wasn’t with a thrill in her voice the way a woman expecting a baby should be. It was him who was chuffed, looking around Catherine’s flat, declaring it was unfit for bringing up a child, and securing them a council house.

“Catherine.” The sound of her name is flat and treacherous.
You knew all this time?
But that is just a waste of words, because of course she knew. A mother knows these things.

“What about Olivia?” he says.

Catherine eases herself down to sit on the grass. “She knows now.”

“Since when?”

“A couple weeks.”

The last time he saw her was at Jonathan Henley’s funeral where she watched Ed sing “Amazing Grace” like a fool.

Christ. The damn bird keeps cawing like a rass. A mad good-fa-nothin’ bird. Not tiyoooh, yooh-yoooh of a toucan; not yeeh, yeeeh of a kiskadee. This bird is caw-caw like it sick.

“You’re the one she remembers—to her you are her father,” Catherine says.

What does someone remember from four years old? His legs are boneless beneath him and he slips down to the grass beside
her, not to sitting, just perched on one knee like a man proposing to a tree.

He’s nobody’s father.

Saltfish, tamarind balls, metagee: he doesn’t need to remember the taste of these now, or to rhyme them off for Olivia. His mother’s bangle in the top drawer of his dresser—her pulling it over her hand and wrist the last time he saw her on the steps of her sister’s house in Rose Hall Town: this too can wait. His auntie Margaret has children who pay attention to mum, but for twenty-two years she has wanted to see her granddaughter. For eighteen years she has been sending small gifts for her, the gold bangle the most precious. Every Guyanese girl must have a bangle, and most fitting if the bangle is from the grandmother whose middle name the child will bear her entire life. Olivia.

Niggeritus, backoo, obeyah, piknee: he need not mention these. If you eat labba and drink creek water you will return to Guyana. None of this matters now.

Catherine does not move or say a word. Sitting, kneeling, the two of them under the tree on fire. He’s surprised by how quickly it seems that the light has gone dimmer and there is a pain in his knee. He gets up and Catherine does the same. They walk together, slowly, to the exit of the park. She wants to say something, he can tell, but no, please don’t. He catches her eye and then turns to walk away to the bus.

Good Friday, flip the bird to you, Jesus, and all she needs is more Maltesers, more coffee from one of those chains, she doesn’t mind which, ’cos principles and politics and parental units are the fuck-up of the tiny bit of herself that once thought she had something significant, special, banging, to be sharing and making a difference with, but all that’s holy in this weekend is the fact that the library is still open. She is the fuck-you-I’m-going-to-crack-it-and-make-something-of-herself Olivia who never did a single thing but look out for everyone else, never had a thought that was solely her own and never did like she’s doing now which is writing with her head trained on the page like it is in a brace, and writing a word at a time, building to a sentence, not looking further than a sentence or thinking about the whole of the sum of the sentences; she’s writing one word like it’s one foot in front of the other, out, out, out of here.

Another ping from the mobile at the bottom of her satchel. These are regular-like now, one every few hours. Pleading. From Jaz. From Catherine. But nothing from Nasar, the most obedient of the lot. She pulls her phone from the satchel.

I saw Wood. Told him everything. Please come home now
.

Her heart goes all dented for Wood but not for Catherine, because a mother who lies to you your whole life will have to do a whole lot more than ask please. She holds tight onto herself in that clench she has perfected. In four thousand more words, one after the other, she will examine legislation that needs to go beyond current rights issues: beyond the disposal of bodies; beyond crimes committed against dead bodies in which there is a tangle of competing rights pitting survivors against the deceased, or the deceased against the police or the powers of the state; beyond cases of harvesting sperm from a corpse; beyond the definition of sex with a dead body as rape; beyond the anatomical gift act that regulates organ donation and follows the wishes of the deceased unless the family vetoes them and gets the last word. And if she gets beyond all these, she will have arrived at something resembling an original idea. There is a case to be made for rights that take into account a proper goodbye.

His side hurts, his calf, his right hand, and there’s a feeling in his ear like someone is twisting the tip. He stands up. If he stays perfectly still he can feel his insides churning, his body’s organs at work as though against one another. He lies back down on the bed. The ceiling of Robin’s bedroom has a brown stain left over from a leak of many years ago, a stain he’s not got round to painting over. He will have to do that, soon, before Emma moves in, before things get crammed with baby paraphernalia, before he forgets that these small things make a difference to a life, that aesthetics are important. These are the kinds of things that people with children forget. The stain looks like the figure of a giraffe. Perhaps he should keep it.

He has been lying on his back now for over twelve hours, the light on throughout the night while he dozed and woke, not sleeping deeply enough, not having changed out of his clothes.

Emma is thrilled with the news of his job. She is planning on bringing him an Easter Sunday lunch to celebrate, to share as a family.

The fact that he waited outside Katrin’s bedsit for an hour until he realized how futile that was, the fact that he returned to
Epicure and Alejandro was able to confirm that she had not left for another job, that Alejandro had received a few texts from her about the possibility of leaving London but nothing more, the fact that Robin’s calls to her phone were answered by the woman who tells you that the number has not been recognized, the fact of Katrin as only an afterimage: his head is somewhere else entirely from his legs, feet, fingernails, groin, heart. The only thing to do is to keep staring at the giraffe.

He looks at the clock and waits until 23:11 before he closes his eyes again.

Emma’s Easter lunch is roast lamb, potatoes and green beans. She is gentle, careful, trying to help him feel better because he’s told her he is ill, has some sort of Asian flu probably, some ghastly thing from his students, not well at all.

“Any old excuse not to wash up,” she said at first, but she must have then taken seriously the anguish in his face, because now she’s clearing up and making the flat comfortable for him. This will be his life. Surely not a bad thing.

“Maybe we should go to Cornwall—you could use a break, and you have two weeks before teaching starts again. The sea, some walking, check in on your folks,” she suggests. But he would be too tempted to slip down one of those cliffs. Too tempted to tell his folks that he doesn’t love this woman and that they should not go thinking it’s all just one big happy family now—that it’s not as simple as that. He will look after his child. He will. He will love, provide for, play with, challenge, educate and be a good, honest role model. But before he can do that he needs to drag all the
pieces of himself together in one spot, to pull in his insides, to gather up his fingers and the strands of his hair. Together.

He goes back to bed when Emma leaves. The giraffe holds its head up high as Robin’s body litters the room. Deleuze: The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering … It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.

What kind of success is it to have saved himself a job where he does nothing but think? He sits, picks up the journal on his bedside table: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. He flips through, but then tosses it aside. He lies back down and stares again at the ceiling. He tries to focus on the feeling of being a dad, but nothing comes but terror. Fact is, fear might just create a new stain. Deleuze: If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.

He picks up the list tucked into the journal. On it are Bernadette Mayer’s suggestions for poetry experiments:

None of these is as structured as chance-operation. He looks at the clock, watches it until 23:11. The first book of poetry he takes from his shelf is
White Egrets
.

“The chess men are rigid on their chess board.” Okay, line one. He turns out the light and tries to sleep.

The stapler is his—he must remember to take it. They give you rass-hole staplers in the council and this one he bought himself, top of the line. Sammy steals it at least once a day, but it’s Ed’s.

“This place,” Sammy says as he opens the office for the day. “This place,” again, and Ed isn’t sure if Sammy means the Safe and Sorrow office or if he’s talking about the local authority, or London, or the whole damn world. It doesn’t matter, because all of them feel like a head-shaking mess to Sammy today, and this you can see in the man’s shoulders, which have gone hunch-up. But what’s to be hunch-up for? When water throw away ah ground yuh can’t pick am up.

“You know, it’s not me they’ve booted out only because they’d have to give me more severance, don’t you? Longer-term service, uninterrupted. You know that, right?” Sammy says. They both look over at Ralph, who looks straight ahead, filling out of a form on his computer.