Higher Ed (9 page)

It begins to rain.

She pulls her scarf tight around her, dips her chin, raises her shoulders, and looks out for the restaurant as she heads towards the Royal Opera House.

Patricia loves opera. Patricia can
Così-fan-tutte
with the best
of them, and tonight they are seeing
Rigoletto
, and, when Francine asked to be briefed on the basic story and if there’d be tunes she’d recognize, Patricia corrected, “Not tunes, arias.”

Of course Patricia is already at the restaurant when she arrives and this, Francine knows, is what women her age do now, what it means to be past the pause, with no time for pausing, no time to be late. You’ve gone all meno, Cindy used to say to her mother when she and Francine were teenagers. She never got to pause, Francine would say of her own mother. Meno-pause: the lying in wait … for what?

The restaurant Patricia has chosen is French, and Francine feels uneasy about the tablecloths and soft lighting because flickering up through the romantic chroma is Dario’s bent leg. She pulls her chair out to take her seat across from Patricia. The knife, spoon, fork are a quivering silver (one of Dario’s arms was tucked under him, the other bent back, almost curled). The plates on the table are matte white, which makes them appear almost solid, but she’s not fooled, she knows that none of this really exists, and that molecules and breath and sympathy are an illusion.

“I used to come here with my ex,” Patricia says, lifting up the wine list. Francine wants to block Patricia’s radar, so she lifts her menu too, in front of her face. This is the first time Patricia has ever mentioned a partner, and Francine waits for a pronoun.

“We’d argue about whether it was right to eat foie gras and veal; of course, it was not what we were really arguing about. It was my way of telling him he was thoughtless, his way of telling me I thought too much.”

Francine lowers her menu, feeling safer now, and looks at Patricia. “How long were you together?”

“Five years, not that long, in the scheme of things, but he was the first person I’d ever lived with. I was a late bloomer.” Patricia puts the wine list down. “I’d never pinned myself down before that.”

Francine would not in a million years eat foie gras, but she briefly considers it now.

“I travelled a lot—on field research trips, and he was just there, happy when I got home.”

Francine might order escargots—she used to love them in her twenties when eating French food was exotic and showed you knew a thing or two about love and garlic. Love comes with … blah blah.

“So did you only argue when you came home?” she asks.

Patricia doesn’t answer. She looks for the waiter, signals to him, and orders a bottle of Chablis. Then she looks at Francine so sternly that Francine feels she is in school again, in trouble for forgetting her gym shorts. Patricia’s mouth twitches like it doesn’t know what to do next. And then her face softens. The tears that might have flowed aren’t coming after all. The English: they know how to do that.

“I think I just needed him to resist me, somehow, resist just being there and happy. I don’t know. I’m not easy.”

And in Patricia’s voice is that little girl who tortured dolls, collected butterflies, made life difficult for others because it was hell to be Patricia. Francine looks down at her menu, but she has begun to perspire and has to wipe her brow.

“How about you and John. Did you fight?” Patricia asks.

I’m speaking for myself and you’re perfectly welcome to speak for yourself. I take full responsibility for my own feelings and am not blaming you, but I feel angry when you don’t respect my space
, said John, in his gobbledy-gook, self-help jargon, so that whatever anger she
might have had about him not calling her for two days was redirected back at herself and her so-called responsibility for her own feelings, which she knows now was just the Fuckface’s way of shutting her out, shutting her down. So that when the day came—when she finally was able to raise her voice and yell: “Why is it always about you?”—well, he slammed a door and she ended up foetal on the floor. Only when he declared that he would never have children, even though he claimed regularly how great he’d be at it, did she finally twig that John Clarke was not the man she had imagined him to be; twig that she had known this all along; twig that John Clarke was a fuckwit. But he was her fuckwit, and she believed in sticking with things.

“No, John didn’t like to fight.”

“Like to fight? That’s not what I asked,” Patricia says with a smirk. And suddenly Francine can see through Patricia’s skin, through to the blood in her veins, through to her bones. It makes her tummy rumble with hunger and makes the Chablis smell like vinegar. She sits forward in her chair, her elbows on the table, and clears her throat.

“Patricia. What is it, exactly, that you would like to hear from me?” She holds this forward tilt for two, three, four seconds, then sits back and picks up her menu, but she can feel her lip starting to tremble. Peeking over the menu she sees that Patricia is smiling, that Patricia has enjoyed Francine’s defiance, and now, oh shit, she’s really done it now.

The cup lights that line the balconies—their shimmering make the Royal Opera House appear to be on the verge of being beamed
up. And it smells of … what? Nina Ricci, that’s it. She has to hold her nose, but a little cough comes, just beneath the soft music, an aria not a tune, into the second half of
Rigoletto
. She has been struggling to stick with it and has been lulled along by the arias she recognized from Bugs Bunny cartoons, and by her memories of working on the high school production of
Oklahoma
, doing costume and makeup, sewing petticoats and bonnets, and going home singing about how the cowboys and the farmers should be friends and the elephant-eye height of the corn.

But she’s sleepy. Her eyes are sliding shut. Okla, Okla, homa, homa … O.K.L.A.H.O.M.A. She rubs her eyes, keeps her eyebrows raised.

When she jolts awake it’s the hand she feels first—Patricia’s on her arm—but then she realizes that her head has dropped in Patricia’s general direction, looking to be patted. Straightening up, she flushes, sweat welling like tears, and the baritone is singing like he is crying too. Patricia’s face is fixed in concentration. On what? The words? Does she know Italian? The notes are sad. Patricia glances over, gives a little smile and rubs Francine’s forearm just before Francine moves it away.

The next day at work, and all that week, Francine makes tea in her office and brings parcels of protein—tuna, ham, even roast beef—for lunch so that she doesn’t have to appear at the Starbucks in the atrium or the Costa’s in the Watson building. She doesn’t answer her phone when she sees Patricia’s number come up on the screen, and when Patricia leaves a voicemail message wondering how she is, Francine writes a polite text back telling her that she’s incredibly busy and that all the work is keeping her mind off troubling things. She doesn’t tell Patricia that it
actually felt good to be tilted towards her at the opera or that she has found out that the man who killed Dario—Rajit Mahadeo—is a fifty-five-year-old night shift Quality manager at Kandhu Ltd., supplier of branded and own-labelled snack food to major UK retail centres. Rajit Mahadeo lives in Harlesden with his wife, mother-in-law, and four children aged between ten and nineteen. He was released on bail the night of the accident, having been charged with dangerous driving causing death.

The charge continues to be the disconcerting fact in the case. She saw no dangerous driving from the red sedan on that night. The others must have seen something more terrible. She should have stayed longer. Slumped over his steering wheel in tears, Rajit had not been dangerous in any way.

It could have been her.

Olivia, you make heart singing. Nasar

He’s probably in the queue. That’s well-dred. Has he seen her? She looks behind her but sees the wheelie bloke in his Paralympic vehicle, whose name she knows for sure is Christopher. Who the fuck is Nasar? She throws the phone into her satchel. She wouldn’t get in that queue in any case; she can get water from the tap in the caff and pick up a regular coffee there too. It’s hard to keep her eyes open on account of how much reading she did last night so that when her tutor, Stan, looks at her and asks which EU statutes apply to jurisdiction and immunity in international law, she’ll have something to say. But she’s done with answering people’s questions, really. All those answers have exposed her, and Nasar might be a phony name for Clive or Richard or Amir, trying to humiliate her. She’s answered enough questions for a whole degree, and all it’s given her is—what? No, what she needs now is continue her boycott of Costa and Starbucks, get a first on her dissertation project, and find a way to persuade Robin about her idea.

She heads down the atrium, passing another queue. How can they afford this shite, anyway? The cost of coffee in this
uni has doubled since last year. Brand me with your beans. If Nasar is among these sheep, she’ll never find him. And she wouldn’t want to.

Head down, hands in pockets, Olivia is a panther up the stairs—oh oh oh oh, talk to me some more, Robin. But at his office on the first floor the lights are off, computer shut down.

Jasmine is smug-arsed and floaty. Olivia wants to pull Jasmine’s hair until it comes loose at the roots. “It’s fine,” she says, instead of tugging. It’s fine: the fact that it’s been weeks since Jasmine shagged the Italian dude they met together and is only now telling Olivia about it, on account of thinking that Olivia would have been merked to know earlier.

“I know you had your eye on him,” Jasmine says as she gathers up her long brown curls and makes a pile on her head, pouts like a model. Eleanor-turned-Jasmine works hard at her curls, wears Rihanna tops, and too much lipstick to make her lips look thick, all the while them being thin as shite, because Jasmine was cheated at birth, should have been born something more sexy than an Eleanor. Olivia has known her since primary school, when Eleanor was the quiet, slim but dim girl that Olivia made friends with because no one else would. Eleanor was generous, always doing things for other people, always bringing treats for Olivia, who grew to depend on her kindness, depend on her house as an escape on the days when Granddad would beer-up and go off on one. Then something happened to Eleanor in year 10, when her father started staying out all night and her mother became a Christian. Eleanor started having sex like it was her
own Jesus. Her generosity turned to giving head, and giving up the inside of her, night after night, like it would change her into someone else. And so Jasmine emerged.

Jasmine sucks her teeth.

“You’re always playing so hard to get, so I figured he was fair game,” she says, but what does Jasmine know about fair and what does Olivia know about any game. The Italian biker would have made everything shut up for her like the seaside in winter, because she’s not going to end up like Catherine with some guy riding off into the horizon, so he’s better off having done Jasmine if that’s what he wanted.

“He’s bang tidy,” Jasmine says, “and he lips like a prince.” Jasmine would know. Jasmine has kissed a prince from Benin, even though both of them know that the Nigerian dude said he was from the Royal Edo people as a way to get Jasmine to open her legs. “I’m sorry,” she adds, “he would have been a good one to add to your list.”

Olivia nods and looks disappointed as she plays the girl with a list who might want to add yet another hubz. Jasmine admires Olivia for her brains, but also because Olivia is nearly black and surely has had it—like, lots—surely. A misconception Olivia has never tried to correct.

“We texted after, for, like, days. He called me, and once we even did it over the phone,” Jasmine says. But her face goes mincy all of a sudden.

Olivia can tell there will be no studying tonight. And she is not going to get a word in about how she’s going to her first funeral ever tomorrow to meet Edward Reynolds, or about how paupers’ graves were a thing that people thought had disappeared with plagues and horse-drawn carriages, but that her
thesis will show … dang, what will her thesis show? That she has a father, that her father buries these people, that maybe her father left on account of her or the shite he had to put up with in the very household she is dying to leave. And she will try to make it all better again. And then?