Higher Ed (26 page)

“Please,” slips from Olivia’s lips, but Catherine is still asleep. Olivia slides her legs alongside her mother’s and feels how hot Catherine’s skin is. Her mother is hot a lot these days—throws the duvet off violently in the morning, tugs off jumpers and scarves like they are strangling her. Catherine won’t admit that it’s the menopause, and Olivia sometimes feels embarrassed watching the sweat pour down her mother’s forehead, but there’s no doubt there’s something going on. “I don’t want the summer to come,” Catherine said to her last week, “The summer will kill me.” But Olivia doesn’t want the summer for completely different reasons: her dissertation project will have to be finished before that; she will still be a virgin; and, worse, she will have had the conversation she’s about to tackle with her sweating mum. “Mistakes,” she whispers, but it is intentional. “Mistakes, Mum … everybody makes ’em.” She presses her face into her mother’s back and rubs her cheek along the moist skin, smelling Catherine’s tanginess and stale Calvin Klein, Obsession. “Mum,” she says again, into the skin, “Mum,” and hears the catch in her own throat.

Catherine turns over gently. “Baby, what is it?”

“I’ve found my dad.” Right.

Catherine’s jolting shoulder is almost like a punch to Olivia’s jaw. “Ow,” she says, and lifts her head. “Ow!”

Catherine sits up and takes Olivia’s head in her hands. “Sorry, baby, sorry … What are you talking about?”

Olivia rubs her chin, and bloody hell she could just haul off on one at Catherine right now, but she has to handle this carefully; she can’t blow it.

“Wood. I’ve met him; we’ve met. Again.” She looks into Catherine’s face to see the effect.

“Where?”

“At the council office, where he works.”

“And what were you doing there?”

She should have rehearsed this, should have made him the knight coming to the rescue, should have known her mother would need it to be mighty-like.

“My project. I was doing research; he was there.” Simple.

“You remembered him?” Catherine is sitting up straight now, the duvet pulled up around her like she’s suddenly cold.

“Not exactly,” Olivia says and takes hold of the duvet where Catherine is clutching it and slides closer, slipping down beneath the cover, her head resting on Catherine’s forearm. “I figured it out.”

Olivia runs her tongue along the roof of her mouth and feels the canker where she burned herself on a microwaved pizza pocket. She uses her tongue to count the teeth along the upper row and to steady her breathing. There’s no talking about Wood. No seeing, no hearing from. She’s broken all the rules. She waits inside their breath, which is now in tandem. Catherine’s skin is not powdery now, but more like steel, hardened but hot, like the hot-water pipe. “Mummy,” she says to soften things, but nothing yields in Catherine’s adamant arm.

“What have you done?” Catherine says.

Olivia sits up. “I haven’t done anything. We talk, he’s helping me with my project—”

“He’s doing what?”

“My research … he’s giving me information.” But it’s hot as shite under this duvet and Olivia kicks it off now. “We talk. And he wants to meet up with you.”

Catherine leaps out of bed and puts on the blue Scottie-dog dressing gown that the twelve-year-old Olivia gave her for Christmas, which she still wears, faithfully, every day.

“You don’t know what you’ve got yourself into,” Catherine says.

“I do so.”

“No, you don’t … you really don’t. Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

Olivia gets up and is standing beside Catherine, but Catherine doesn’t want to be standing at all; she wants to be getting out of here. She closes the bedroom door so that there’s no chance her mother will leave.

“I knew you had your shite with it all, that’s why,” Olivia says. Catherine begins to pace.

“You just have no right—”

“Excuse me?” Now it’s so fucking hot in here. Olivia’s voice makes Catherine stand still. “
You
have no right to keep me from him.” Olivia is amazed by her own swagging. “For years you lied to me; you told me you didn’t know where he was—”

“I didn’t!”

“But you made it sound like he was in Afghanistan or some shite like that, not like he was just around the fucking corner, Catherine.”

Her tongue goes back to her teeth, this time the bottom row: three, four, five. Catherine’s green Kat Slater eyes get smaller as her breath gets quicker, and she’s like a kettle on boil; she takes off her fleecy Scottie-dog dressing gown and it falls to the floor, leaving her all fleshy in her nightie.

“Edward is not your dad,” Catherine says.

Olivia laughs because this is what Catherine has been trying to get at for all these years, this fact that if a dad is a dad he would actually be there, raising you, and not off somewhere else with maybe a whole other family or maybe not even knowing that every morning you wake up and it hurts in your stomach because he’s gone. Catherine has been trying to drive this point home, gently, since Olivia was thirteen, but it’s not going to work now. There is biology. End of.

“Catherine, all your shite about a man not being a father if he’s not around—what, like Granddad is such a shining example?”

“You’re not his … you’re someone else’s.” Catherine’s eyes are wide now, gone all glassy-like.

And it takes a few more taps of the teeth with her tongue before Olivia actually hears what it was that Catherine said. Like there is a lip-synch problem in this movie and the sound comes after the movement of the mouth. Catherine steps closer to Olivia and puts her arms around her. And everything is there in her skin. Not powdery. No longer hot. There’s only one sensation, like cold blue steel.

He arrives at the door of Epicure and sees her standing at the counter beside Alejandro as though in an afterglow—of sex, or jokes, or just spring air. He hesitates, then enters; Katrin sees him, is jolted out of her reverie, rushes towards him.

“I can’t talk now,” she says, blocking his way, and a bolt of shame passes through him. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Just not now.” Oh God, what a fool he is.

“When?” Now she will pity him; he will see it on her face.

“Come,” she says and takes his arm.

Her hand. Her hair. The perfect rhythm of the way they walk beside one another. She tugs him harder, then moves slightly ahead.

“I love you,” she says. But she’s crying. He pulls her sleeve.

“And I love you,” he says, but she doesn’t stop. It hasn’t been enough to make her stop, and he scrambles to find what will be. “Where are we going?”

She keeps walking quickly, but slows in front of a furniture shop. She stops to stare through the glass. Eames chairs, Cornell desks, Mondrian coffee tables. This is the kind of home he’d make for her. How did he get to this place where furniture tortures him?

“What will you do?”

He doesn’t understand. He follows her eyes to a white Eames chair. Then he realizes.

“I can’t do anything. Not yet. I promise I will, though, after the baby is born.”

Katrin moves off from the shop window to the next one. Within her, though, she’s not budging. Her deliberateness is set in gear. The thing you love someone for is the same thing that will kill you in the end. The next shop has clothing. He wants furniture: a loft; he will build her a loft in his flat. This will work, if he gets the job. When the baby …

“You can’t do anything yet,” she says and nods. “You tell me when you can,” and thank God, she has given him some reprieve. There is possibility here, even if he knows of no way to manage it. Possibility and madness are not the same.

Epicure is quiet, the sun has come out, and something has changed today in London. The feeling of wanting Robin is in her chest, her stomach, her arms, her legs, and between them. There is not a part of her that does not miss him. The day is too slow. She will apologize for hurting him with her silence.

“Claire says we can clean the freezer because it is so slow today.” Alejandro has come out from the back room and he stands beside her at the counter. Like her he does not want to do this work. They stare out into the sunlight and Katrin notices particles darting between them. She wants to tell him how frightened she is about Claire’s calm face in the last two days, and how she has lost the flat in Walthamstow, but she does not want to pierce this moment.

But suddenly it is pierced, and he is there.

“I can’t talk now,” she says to Robin and hurries to the door of the shop to stop him from coming in. His smile disappears. “I’m sorry. Just not now.”

“When?” His face looks like she has hit him.

She cannot stop her throat from being tight, her tears from rolling. “Come,” she says, and she leaves the shop and takes his
arm to pull him with her. “I love you,” she says beneath the rolling tears. And she is stupid for letting him see that she is weak.

“And I love you,” Robin says, and tries to stop her from walking fast, but she keeps going. “Where are we going?”

She does not have a destination.

They pass the furniture shop with a chair that is one piece of moulded fibreglass, the arms curving out from the seat like wings of a gull. She has wished she could buy this chair for months, but now this wish is pointless.

“What will you do?” she asks.

He looks puzzled for a moment. “I can’t do anything. Not yet. I promise I will, though, after the baby is born.”

She stops in front of the next shop that has shoes and vintage clothing. There is a hat that has embroidery that would make it camouflage among butterflies. It is difficult to breathe now on Upper Street. It is difficult to breath anywhere in this England. There is nothing here that makes her free.

“You can’t do anything, yet,” she says, nodding, and she hears how so quickly she has forgotten to live in the first person. “You will tell me when you can,” she adds, but she is really saying, I was wrong. She has been doing English all wrong.

She turns around and heads back to Epicure. Robin follows her, but at the door she tells him he cannot enter or she will be in trouble. “Later,” she tells him. But as soon as she walks through the door and sees Claire she knows about where she will be later. Orange blossom marmalade, bittersweet chocolate flurries, sweetened cream-cheese frosting—these she knows in the present participle: spreading, stirring, pouring, baking, working. The verbs are in the continuous form, but too they are verbs of movement and position. Katrin sees in Claire’s face what she
must do. She walks to the back room, collects her coat and bag and makes a signal to Alejandro that she will call him. She is steady as she walks through the coffee shop and out the door.

She is Katrin from Gdansk again, because to be from nowhere is impossible. “I” … she says, as she walks to the 38 bus, “I,” to remind herself that this is correct … I am coming home,
mamunia
. I will not make you worry.

The next time Francine is outside of Ryan’s house it’s 7 p.m. and darkness is more than an hour away, spring having come, the clocks moved forward, making the day feel like it’s got some heft.

“Hey.” She waves out of the open window of her car. “Hey.” More friendly the second time. Spring. She’s wary of feeling happy just yet.

Francine and Ryan drive with the windows down.

“Rajit gets sentenced soon … Thursday—they might …”

“They might?” She looks over, fast and stern. This is not the way a young man should be thinking. A young man should have more resilience than Ryan has been showing in wanting another man to suffer. Thursday is also when she’ll know if she’s sacked or not.

“Then we’ll see,” Ryan says.

“See what?”

He puts his hood up, like on a colder day. “Just see …” Anger like mud. She sits back and concentrates on the road.

“So, nearly finished your term? An Easter break coming …” she says as she decides to take a different route. She heads towards Finchley Road.

“Yep, yep.” He’s nodding inside his hoodie. “Where are we going?”

“No idea,” she says but is thinking of maybe driving up and around Hampstead Heath. She wants the smell of spring.

“What, we on a date now?”

She laughs.

He smiles.

She would never have made a kid as good as Ryan.

A coat, some makeup, a twenty-quid note. She rushes down the stairs with everything she needs, and what she needs most is to get out of here. The television is blaring with
Deal or No Deal
and there is TV drum rolling and TV telephone ringing and her head is going to bust open if she has to hear another second of it.

“Livi!” Eric shouts from the sitting room. Christ no. She pokes her head in the door of the sitting room. The contestant has said “No deal,” and there’s loud applause.

“Idiot!” Granddad says to the contestant.

“Which way you headed?” Eric asks her.

Way far away, but she merely shrugs.

“Pick us up a Chinese for tea, will ya? Dad … give her dosh,” Eric says. And there’s a one-, two-, three-second wait while Noel Edmonds says we’ll find out after this break, and Olivia turns, runs back up the stairs and fetches her satchel. Running back down the stairs she’s not-soon-enough out of there.