Higher Ed (8 page)

“He’s gentle,” Katrin says, when Martin leaves them to each other. She tells him about her Polish friend, Andrzej, who has a zipper tattoo on his arm, which gives the impression that his flesh could be unlocked if you tugged at it. Like Martin, she tells him, Andrzej is a gentle man. As she describes the rooming house where Andrzej lives with five other men, flashes in Robin’s cerebral cortex convince him he knows this already, that he and Katrin have not only had this conversation before, but that they have featured together in numerous scenes accompanied by their own original soundtrack, in another time-space continuum. In
Matter and Memory
, Bergson pushes further the Cartesian split of mind and body to assert that the body is the abode of the present, while the spirit is anchored in the past, continually arriving, here, now.

“Here,” he says as he offers her more tea. He lifts the petit fleurs porcelain teapot and pours. He tips it too far over, the lid tumbles off, clangs rudely off the tabletop and smashes onto the floor in two embarrassed halves. “Oh hell.” He looks over at Martin who gives him a shrug. He would like to be more like Martin. He picks the two dainty pieces up, holding them together along the fracture line and making it look like nothing at all has
been broken. He returns to the stool, puts the lid on the table, and as it opens again along its fissure, he turns back to her face. She has a look that says he is not a bumbling fool, that she doesn’t mind if he’s nervous. What if hers could be the features of his baby? He’s insane, this is all insane. It’s hot in here. And he is a cliché: Rath consumed by Lola in
The Blue Angel
. He is every poor bloke who ever wrote a sonnet.

“You’re very funny,” she says, smiling, her eyebrow hitched up.

“Funny?”

“Not funny, like the way you laugh. Funny the other way. You know: weird. Weird-funny.

“I wouldn’t use weird if you’re not trying to insult me …”

“Oh no!” She laughs. “No. I like weird.” She touches his hand and he takes a breath, and is now very glad that it is hot in this café, so she won’t know that the temperature of his skin has everything to do with her.

“You said you studied economics,” he says, because economics has facts; facts are hard lines, real.

“Yes, but I don’t like this so much now,” she says.

“Why not?” he asks. She looks at her hands to consider the question, as though she must build him the answer. He knows little about Poland, and mostly through film images and phrases—shipyards; Solidarity.

“We have two kinds of university. In public universities in Poland you have only one way to look at economics. In private you have all ways open to discussion, but in state universities at first cycle—this is what we call BA—they cannot afford to teach you to challenge. Economics is not prescription, I think,” she says and looks to him to see if she’s right, but there could be nothing more perfect than what she has said.

“My grandfather owned a small company that made aluminium panels for prefab houses after the war,” he says. Does she understand the meaning of prefab? “My father was an engineer … so maybe I should have made things instead of watching them.”

“But it is your passion!” she says, and he feels off balance. He’s embarrassed to say the things he wants to about film, but he finds his courage.

“There is a wonderful scene in three of my favourite films—an image of old people trying to recycle bottles. In one film the scene is shot in hues of blue, the other in white, and the last one in red light, for liberté, egalité, fraternité.”

“But he is mocking them,” she says, and of course she knows the work of Kieslowski probably as well as he does, so he nods, can’t stop nodding, because there are images they share, and he is giddy with them.

Robin begins to talk on as though he is continuing the single thought they have shared for years. By the time his phone rings, he has told her everything about the year he was ten and how he built a whole village out of balsa wood, the church being the centre, the church—even though, no, no, he doesn’t believe … it’s not like they were believers—as big as the television in his parents’ front room as they watched
Dad’s Army
and he took strips of balsa wood and fashioned a utopia for … for her—he doesn’t say this, of course; he doesn’t say it was for her, but now that he thinks of it, it must have been for her, for who else but her has he been piecing cusps and zeniths together for all these years?

“Hi, Emma,” he says softly into his mobile, but he should not have said her name, not in front of Katrin, who perhaps has not heard but who nevertheless looks away, unwittingly getting out
of the way of his conversation with the mother of his child. When Emma tells him that she’s done a lot of thinking and she has decided that it would be better if he moved to Cornwall with her, he turns his back on Katrin, not meaning to snub her, not wanting to do anything other than protect her from all the actionimages of his life.

“Can I call you back in an hour?” he says to Emma. He hears her struggle to be gracious—of course, of course—and he rings off, looks back at Katrin, and wishes again to be a lightning bolt.

“Tell me about him,” Olivia says, plonking down on the bed. How can a mother lie in so long even on a Sunday? Ginger. The smell of the bed is like the herbal tea that Jasmine’s mother serves over at hers while they study. The sheet has the uneven feel of her mother. She touches Catherine’s pale cheek, the fold at her eyelid. Catherine doesn’t like it when Olivia calls her by her name, but Catherine has never been Mummy, more like Kat Slater in
EastEnders
, less nasty, less of a slapper, but same-ish looks, same-ish secret ways about her.

“Where is he, Catherine?” Olivia says softly in her mother’s ear. She will tell her she’s met Edward only when she has had an answer. Catherine turns over under the sheets, blinking, looking at her daughter, through her, all the way to somewhere without secrets.

“Baby, I’m not awake.”

The sleepy Catherine is the best. Olivia nuzzles into her mother’s neck; powdery, plump, permanent. “Tell me about Wood.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Catherine says. As she pulls the sheet up over her shoulder, Olivia smells her mother’s ginger breath,
all girly, while deep down Olivia has snakes and snails and puppy-dog tails.

“He didn’t fight for me,” Olivia says, stretching out her legs along her mother’s body; silken. The melty feeling takes over her legs and then her arms. “He left. Or did you kick him out?” Nearly whispered, that last bit, on account of the eggshells in Catherine’s heart.

Catherine turns over on her back and wrests her eyes open to the ceiling. “Why are you asking me this now? What’s up?” she says, and turns her head to Olivia’s face so that their cheeks touch.

“Nothing’s up.” This is whispered too.

“I don’t know where he is,” her mum whispers back, and they lie still; everything is soft.

Until the song Ed used to sing chimes in and there are all the things she needs to put right and, when she does, she and Catherine can move away from Granddad and Eric and take Nan with them. She’ll get a first in her degree, get a job, get a flat—

“Stop shaking your foot,” Catherine says, “it’s shaking the whole bed.”

And one thing that Olivia can’t compute in all of this is how Catherine went and had a baby with a black man when her whole life she must have heard Granddad hollering Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood at the telly. Her whole life she would have been made fearful of the very thing that’s lying pressed up against her right now.

“You need a hubz,” Olivia says.

Catherine turns her head closer and looks directly at her daughter. She brushes the curls away from Olivia’s face and stares in her eyes as an optician would, looking for changes. “Do you have one?” Catherine asks, and oi, of course this is what she’s
wondering because this is the topic her mother loves to raise, softness or not.

“I don’t need one, but you do,” Olivia says sharply, turning her cheek towards her mother’s mouth.

“I’ve got a ‘hubz,’ thanks,” Catherine says, and argh, Catherine is talking about the swag gas man who calls himself an engineer. Even Granddad has seen through him.

“What, once-a-week William?” She feels her mum’s lips swell and hears a little giggle. “He bought you dinner yet?”

“I’m getting up now,” Catherine says and leaves Olivia clutching the imprint of her curves in the bed. “You get back to your studies.”

Olivia pulls the sheet and blanket over her. Ginger, grapefruit and the scratchy cheap sheets her mother can’t afford to toss out. She feels her idea taking shape, and Robin’s role becoming clear.

Epicure is a place to feel proud. It serves French macarons, has specialty in panettone and Brie-wrapped phyllo, and they order from their special chefs the best wedding cake in London. Epicure mixes tart and sweet and bitter: apple and frangipane; lemon and custard; cheese and carrot; coffee and mascarpone. These new words she loves because they are nothing like the ingredients in other jobs, nothing like paper or plastic or metal.

Katrin counts the day’s earnings and rolls the elastic band over the bills, twists it, doubles it over again, and puts the cash in the bag with a lock that Claire leaves for them in the evening. Epicure makes money, Katrin makes tips, and she does not have to scan bar codes like her friend Andrzej, or check that the sports food supplements are packed in each box, eighty hours a week, twelve hours a day, for £5.93 an hour. She is not in a factory. She is on Upper Street and she takes one bus to work. Her father made £400 a month for all of them. She makes this for herself in one week because Epicure gives the service charge to the server. She is proud, even though this England freedom comes with tiredness.

But tonight she is going to meet Robin for dinner. And she is clean. She is not tired.

To arrive. To sit. To smile. These are verbs in the intransitive form. But transitive verbs give her the trouble, because in Polish they do not only have a direct object. He sees her. She is seen by him. In Polish these are both possible. It is this form that she must stop confusing in English. Robin is sipping. He is sipping his wine, but his wine is not being sipped. Before this wine he raised a shot glass and swallowed vodka, her suggestion, because Bison was her father’s drink, and they winced at the same time with the heat in their throats. But now talking in Robin’s language—not only English, but the language of art and film—she is not so confident. This is the space that is opening inside her for words and pictures, and she does not want to be stupid in this. But he is kind. He looks at her as though anything she says will be a poem. She tries not to disappoint him.

“In Poland film is so poor they light it with candles, and this is what made Kieslowski so famous.” She waits. He smiles, and now she can too. She sips her Spanish wine. Plum and vanilla.

“And where will you live when your mother comes?” he asks her, this fact about her remembered from weeks ago as she stood at his table, drawing her out, drawing her in.

“She will live with me, where I am.” The waiter puts paella in front of her.

“It’s a bedsit, right?” he says, with neither judgment nor pity.

“We have been in much smaller, it’s fine.” She doesn’t want to talk about herself any more. “And you,” she says, “you live alone?”

Behind glasses his eyes dart left towards a poster of the Alhambra. She adjusts her hair, runs her finger over her ear, before he looks at her again; something is not the same.

“I might be moving soon,” he says. Her stomach bends.

“I’m coming back,” she says as she stands up, not too fast, so that he will not be worried.

In the toilet she tells her face in the mirror that this is nothing, nothing. That her
matka
is coming, that she has a job in the day, that England is not Poland, that there are many fish in the lake, that this is Robin, named for something that flies, and that she must ignore this
czekam
feeling like she is the pet at the door when he is turning a key to come in.

She washes her hands.

“Are you okay?” he asks when she is back in front of his kind face.

“Yes, fine, thank you,” she says and smiles.

“I’m not avoiding your question. I live alone right now,” he says. The
czekam
swells and she takes a sip of wine. She must not drink too much because she will be stupid with wine.

Galumphing—is that what she’s doing? When she first met John he would tease her, telling her that her walk was a waddle, but then when she gained weight he started to call it a galumph. She feels her hips and tenses her thigh muscles so that she doesn’t galumph along the pavement from the underground, where she has just emerged from Covent Garden tube station. Driving only on completely confident days seems to be working out for her nerves, and all this walking will work for her thighs. But right this moment she is naked in the middle of London’s west end. Naked to the smells. What does soot smell like? Like damp potatoes. Naked to that woman in the hijab who has looked at Francine’s legs in these stretchy trousers that expose every single bulge. Naked to the voice of the man with his head down, mumbling (
Dog Chow makes me very happy
 …). Covent Garden station is a joke of pressing bodies, and she is exposed to them all.