Higher Ed (5 page)

“Good, good, Sammy, You?”

“Fuck yeah, Hammers winning at last.”

Sammy breathes football night and day and loves it more than his wife, who doesn’t particularly seem to mind. Days are
easier with him around because Sammy is always full of hope—even when there’s nothing better to hope for than a draw.

“Whatever it takes, Sammy, whatever it takes, right? I’m glad you’re happy.”

“Better than the dogs, Wood, that’s all I’m saying.” And it’s true, Ed does succumb to good odds at the track now and then. Ed isn’t big on sport. Besides the dogs, he can get fired up about horse racing, but he has trouble seeing that as a sport, except for what the horse does. If he hadn’t come to London as a young man in 1974 because President Burnham had dreams of being Fidel Castro, he might still be at the betting shop below sea level in Georgetown or at the track a metre above sea level in Berbice, and he might still be just watching them run instead of meeting Catherine, nearly tripping over his own feet for those green eyes, putting up with vexation from her dad, and getting to help Olivia grow to the point when full sentences were coming out of her mouth.

When you tell people you used to live below sea level they think you mad or joking, but true-true, that is where Ed moved to as a young man from Berbice, and where houses are built on stilts, where the whole of the town is pouring out into the sea with the Demerara River, in the effluence of loam, gold and sanity of an entire country. Is that the kind of thing you tell a daughter? And if you start, do you stop? Are there ever things a father should leave out? Olivia will need to know these facts about her father and the kiskadee-kaieteur-foo-foo-garlic-pork trimmings of what makes him.

“You okay, Wood?”

“Yes, Sammy, fine, fine. Just miles away.”

Sammy is forty and fat with lots of hair. But he’s a good man. And that’s another thing Ed has to tell Olivia: that in Guyana
black and Indian men used to have to work together in public but didn’t like each other in private, but that is changing and things are better since the time he had to go back there in ’85 to help his ailing daddy and ended up staying too long, when, man, it was bad and the Guyanese dollar was worthless. Blacks and Indians, like him and Sammy, they are fine-fine now.

Ed sits at his desk and turns on his computer. The requisition order for an Italian family to secure the belongings of a now deceased lodger was drawn up yesterday but the landlord was contacted only late in the evening, so this needs immediate processing. Martinelli: a good name; has its own steel band behind it. Aged twenty-four. Lord. This is the vex-he part of the job, the bad news arrows that get launched across the internet to land in who-knows-whose heart on an otherwise good day. Ed prefers the practical tasks. Before he checks the Safe and Sorrow office e-mails he fights sleep by uploading the photo he sent to himself from his home machine last night, one he found in the box beneath his bed, the one with photos of Catherine and Olivia before life bruk them up. In the scanned photo of the three-year-old Olivia, she wears a white party dress with lace and frills at the shoulders, white ankle socks and black patent leather shoes. Her face is dough-like round and slice-my-heart happy, and she holds up a T-shirt that says
I want my mummy
. Yes, girl, true-true.

“Edward,” Catherine would say, her voice coming from the kitchen. “Edward,” drawing out the last syllable. “Edwaard!” Then she’d tell him all the things that needed doing and fixing. “Wood,” Olivia would say, trying to copy her mummy. “Wooood … open,” as she toddled up to him with her lime-green plastic box that was a toy enough just to open, fill with stones, grass, buttons, pennies, and close again. And Wood he became.

Man, those miracles.

“You have a funeral,” Sammy says, and raises his hand in the air above his keyboard before hitting send to sling the e-mail over. Ed’s heart does a little hiccup; these funerals seem to be coming more regularly, and Sammy has given over most of them to him.

He checks the e-mail. The woman who needs the funeral is from Malvern Estate in Castle Green. She was forty-two, died alone, of an overdose, and the police say there is no one to bury her. So he will do it. This he is better at than knowing what to say to a grown-up daughter he last saw when she was four.

Now that he thinks of it, returning to Georgetown to attend to his family gave him good training for this very job. In Georgetown he met a man who was real bruk up at the side of the stall where his friend Sanil sold cassava and eddoe and plantain in Bourda Market. The man had been there every day he walked through the market for the five months of money-hunting that Ed had been doing to help his brother, to keep his mother in her house in Berbice because she refused to move, and this man was worse off than Ed. There were a whole lotta them worse off, but this very-very man he felt for: his hair was natty, his feet were torn up, his arms scabby, but in his face was something you could see that was quick-quick. Ed took the man home and gave him a shower and cleaned up his feet and let him sleep in his bed for twelve hours before sending him on his way. And, boy, this was the best Ed had felt since leaving London, missing his woman and his daughter. He wanted to keep the feeling, so he did this time and again with this man and others in Georgetown.

So, Carol at Rippleside Cemetery will be contacted on behalf of Anna-Marie Hunter, dead at forty-two, and there is the vicar to book, and he has to see about a place in the community plot,
or whether she must be cremated. Of all the London jobs he’s done—insurance, accounting, his stint in Housing—this job is the proper place for him.

And that is another thing he must tell Olivia: that after Catherine moved and told him not ever to try to find them, he learned to feel lucky for the things he didn’t lose. In Guyana plenty people have nothing.

Olivia is training to be a lawyer, imagine. She already knows these things about life. Could be she got that from him? It’s a notion he keeps in his cheek like a squirrel keeps winter food. When he thinks of the man in the Mazaruni River, Ed knows that the proper teaching like Olivia is getting would have helped him to know how to act, what to do in the face of a crime, no matter who committed it. She will not be like her father who was expelled for truancy and bad grades from Corentyne High School. Even so, there are things she can learn from him: he can tell her about Marabunta Creek where he played as a boy, and about orange hibiscus with red veins, about frangipani, about Gafoors Shopping Complex in Rose Hall, the town where he was born, about Bartica and the wide Essequibo River like a thick vein in his own neck. Okay, yes, he has to stop thinking or tonight he will not sleep either.

Anna-Marie Hunter is his priority now. But the most important thing about this woman’s death? Man, he is ashamed to admit it, but the abiding boon to this sad event is that it will bring him Olivia again. She wants help with her research, needs it to complete her studies this year, and this, this is what a father must do.

These departmental meetings are more frequent, the days for his research less so. His head is filled with jargon:
research income
;
collaborative partners
;
knowledge transfer
;
impact
. These are the terms that govern all of them these days, and those who rarely showed up for meetings when he first started at this university now attend regularly. “Concepts are centres of vibrations,” says Deleuze, and his more politically astute colleagues are tightly wound to the academy’s tradition of knowledge for its own sake. Until a few days ago and the announcement of his fatherhood, Robin was ready to stand alongside them, to take strike action in support of the principle of excellence. But now, in this meeting called for the film department, he sits at a desk near the back of the room like a third-class student and doodles with the Polish waitress’s pen on the last page of the agenda. Richard, department head, tells them that the dean is implementing the first measure of restructuring ordered by the vice-chancellor’s group. Film Studies and Film and Video Practice will merge, beginning in September.

“There’s an initiative towards practice-based programmes as the key to our students being better prepared for employment,” Richard says, and Robin doesn’t disagree or make much
of this. The other theorists hum with indignation: the closing of courses will mean a streamlining of outlooks, a lack of choice and the return to the values of a polytechnic, further marginalizing the students of this underprivileged borough, when once widening participation—a university graduate in every home—was the key goal. Knowledge for its own sake.

“And this is what management think students want?” Mark, reader in cultural theory, says. “From their ‘client satisfaction’ surveys?” he adds, his fingers doing air quotes.

“‘Key performance indicators,’” says Albert, a professor in visual theories, mirroring Mark’s air quotes. They have been here before—the hardcore old guard bemoaning the MBA managementspeak that has permeated the academy. Edu-business stocks, Robin has been told by Mark, have tripled on the global exchange markets over the last five years. The Epicure waitress is called Katrin. Her lips are like Emmanuelle Béart’s in
Un Coeur en hiver
.

“As a result, there will be new job roles and titles, and a department structure that reflects the redefinition of how film is studied in the school,” Richard says. This brings grumbling about who will decide what, how will they define “new,” about the lack of consultation. “New job specifications will be posted in the coming weeks, with interviews and decisions before Easter.”

Interviews? Now the room erupts. Robin resists sitting forward in his chair, the panic too obvious. “Are these new roles advertised externally?” he asks.

“No,” Richard says, “but they won’t replicate the posts as they currently exist. New job specifications.”

“But what will distinguish the candidates—among us?” Robin asks, aware that he is the most junior in the room. Richard looks flummoxed, and the others stay silent, underscoring the challenge.

“You will take the views of the students into account, I assume?” Robin says, and sits back again.

He pictures what is growing inside Emma. Will his long nose take shape there? Or her blue eyes? He hopes for her hands, not his, but it would be a disaster if the baby were so often as sad and angry as Emma.

He can’t lose his job.

“There are key performance measures,” Richard finally says. “Research, teaching, community engagement—you know the deal.”

“Not everything is measurable,” Robin says without leaning forward, but it’s loud enough to be heard at the front of the room, and Mark slaps the desktop in a right-you-are gesture of agreement, and others offer up “Exactly,” rallying against Richard who was once one of them. Robin wishes he were able to talk like a poet. In school he wanted to write poems, to acknowledge his contradictions, to challenge his own reason. And his own foolishness.

He hides out in his office at the end of the day again. Image: a child’s booster seat for his piano bench. His groin moves with the wrong kind of excitement. Everything is confused.

A polite, faint knock on his door. He can’t hide the fact of the light on, so he says, “Come in.” He turns towards the door to find Olivia.

“Robin, hello, sorry to bother you,” she says.

It’s her hair and face that make her striking: curls like tangled seaweed, open gaze, features awkwardly set. “No problem,” he tells her and although he hopes desperately that he won’t make her cry this time, he feels grateful for the relief a student
always offers. Their needs come first from the moment they sit in the chair beside his desk and, oh, what respite not to be engaged with his own petty thoughts, indecision trying to become action. He pushes his glasses up on his nose.

“I wanted to ask your advice, or maybe your help,” she says as she sits.

That was his word. You can always ask for help, he said at the end of last year, and she erupted in sobs. She had come to his office about a missed deadline, apologizing, detailing the facts of her life: the unmanageable workload in her law courses, the fact that her mother supported the whole extended family, the fact that her mother kept secrets, and, with each disclosure more intimate than the last, with him leaning forward, on the verge of comforting her, finally she said that the young men her age merely wanted her to do more than she was already doing for everyone else, and this she could not stomach. He sat back, shunting his chair a little away to the left. But when she continued about all the things that needed fixing—the university, the gender divide, immigration laws—he began to admire her for the clarity of her sense of obligation, her easy recourse to action.

“Go ahead. Ask away,” he says. He notices that Olivia is carrying a hardcover book whose spine reads
Death in the Nineteenth Century
. She surveys his office, up and down the shelves and over towards the window.

“You have even more books than last year,” she says. He looks up with pride at the shelf piled with film theory, cinema history, books on their sides, books standing, rows and rows of them. Poetry chapbooks and pamphlets line the window sill. He must ask the school office for another shelf.