Essendon, you’re joking? A single malt?
They look at each other, then at the bottle. Jasmin laughs.
It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s not bad. In fact it’s better than not bad.
Good enough for a minor celebration, she adds, as Jill’s eyes widen. But I’ll have to nick some of that ice I saw in the staff fridge. Just a bit.
She walks outside and after looking along both reaches of the corridor she sneaks into the tiny staff room where a fridge and kettle are set up.
When she comes back she closes her office door.
Don’t want anyone watching this, she grins, not at 11.30. My expert status will be shot and I don’t want that.
Expert?
As an academic she gives public talks whenever the suggestion comes up. She loves being part of the University’s ‘Expert on call’ campaign, not because the Uni is flogging its staff as a community resource, which it is, but from a desire to make her field more widely understood. This term ‘expert’ loaded with University authority and male power now also means flunky (no public capital letter) of the Institution, and this duty is obligatory.
Give me a break! she explains to Jill… I tell them what I have is expertise. As for what I am…? Jesus, who knows what I am?
She pours them both a shot and then takes a sip.
Of course, one of my male colleagues told me not to rock the boat. They always say that.
And what did you say?
I said I’m not in the bloody boat.
Jasmin invites herself around beside Jill and pulls up a second chair to consult the pages of notes her thesis might pursue.
They talk for half an hour and Jasmin swings her arms about and points and laughs and cannot hold back one jot from her own field of mockery to the field of genuine objectivity. Already there is forming an idea she might put to Angus, the man of public spaces. The party gardener.
Jill’s new thesis isn’t formed fully and she needs a case study… As usual, Jasmin says too much, shoots off a monologue of opinion backed by theory which, in better balance, Jill should be discovering for herself. Even so, Jasmin will return to re-writing her first lecture – on football – within seconds of the student leaving and forget the content if not the context of what she has been saying.
Jasmin is overwhelming. She gets passionate. She is impossible, and impossibly generous; when so many academics guard their thoughts, she supervises like an open aorta.
When she closes her door after this session she stands there dumb with fecundity. Briefly. Jill, on the other side, stands in a daze stronger than anything brought on by single malt.
Then the door opens and Jasmin walks out, locks it and says:
I’m coming downstairs with you. She holds up a cigarette and lighter.
I didn’t know you smoked.
I don’t. Just feel like the occasional ciggie.
That night, as she watches the TV news, Jasmin is more subdued: no interaction for an interaction maniac means silence, even faintly calm. The 7.30 Report and some right-wing prick of a leader comes on to infuriate her again. And when water and land-use interviews begin and some patronising dill rants on… It all gets too much for her and the weather changes in a flash. Talk talk talk.
Stretched across her lap is her black Burmese, sleepy beyond purring. Moss. If she moves, Moss holds onto her with his claws extended, to let her know getting up isn’t allowed. Even her cat talks too much.
She is so thoroughly used to being alone now that Richard the partner (that dull word) has all but faded from the rooms. She has laboured past the waking at night stage, wondering if he has another woman over in England. His reluctant (sounding) phone calls are prose rather than poetry these days, well, nights. Beside her stands a long-stemmed glass half full of wine and the remains of her Hainanese chicken rice. If Richard doesn’t return, then what? Will she even want to keep up the rent by herself? Though she can afford to, just. She looks around. Her small table is a hand-span high with essays, papers, files and newspapers, magazines, books, tissues, at least two apple cores…
There’s a pile of washing by the door, the washing she never got around to doing on the weekend plainly visible from the dining table. All girl habits, all show and tell, including bras and crunchy knickers. She is more than a bit relaxed in these habits and Moss has a smooching affair with all her smalls. Cats.
Just in time John Clarke appears beaming and bald and crazily channeling Tony Abbott still being the CarbonTaxDestroyer or BigNewLyingSomething but so very earnestly, which is better than Christopher Pyne being serious because ex-Jesuits are funnier than uptight goodytwoshoes fullygrown school prefects and no one is funnier than the droll and mischievous John Clarke.
Breakfast is her usual prevarication between toast and honey, and a choice of fruit or oats (fruit bats, she associates), and yoghurt if her teeth aren’t bothering her, or puffed millet the floaty and lightweight healthfood of fairies – and a choice of fruit. Honey and milk, that sharp wet combination of possibly healthy intake, or is fructose intolerance the unpredictable bogie eating her heart muscles? Why is eating so difficult in the morning? After 12 hours of fasting, why does the stomach resist its own desire to eat again?
Bare arms on the table. She presses down onto the vaguest thoughts of her tutorial plans. Improvise! Always works best. She walks to the sink with her empty bowl and washes it out by hand rather than let the muesli harden impossibly (why is that?) on the ceramic. Every day she does this she hears her reason in her head and as unstoppably as thinking fruit bats after fruit ‘n’ oats.
Sometimes she thinks she is trapped by trivia of her own devising. As for her lectures, yes, improvise. Know your stuff and it will come. Trust your game of the intellect. Good luck everyone.
What cannot be trusted is a publisher. Why is she still waiting nearly two years after they gave her the nod? Publishers are full of fire and stinky smoke: we know what the public want and this is not a commercial proposition and now go away. And yet Andrew bloody Hutton has written an unreadable book-as-insult on post-colonial post-modernist readings of novelists who those same novelists now want to kill him for. Because if they can read more than a para or two of the sections based on their books he seems to be crucifying them, with more spit and vinegar than nails, for crimes they never committed, for sins they never acted out and for structures not fascist, sexist, racist and backward, but merely for what the publishers call ‘readable’ ‘what the public want’ ‘exciting’, breathtaking, artful ‘works of greatness’. And these same publishers have published him.
And the publishers think it’s a cracker. Head of School. His fellow academics spew over its second-hand Derridean deconstructions, its last-word-being-said of Edward Said; its only good bits the shredding and insulting of all writers, including Nobel Prize winners (all academics hate them). Et al. But essentially they bite at his success.
Unless they want a promotion. So they all read him, hating him every Friday night while slumped in their beer at the Club. Yes, OK. We know what the public want and this is not a commercial proposition and now go away.
She really must take her tablets.
She had almost been a goody-two-shoes. Bright at school, conservative parents, father who was quiet enough to want quiet in a girl but maybe not loud enough to insist. A mother who was a bit fey but never eccentric enough to take risks. They even went to church sometimes. But Jasmin was never quite stable enough to get the goody-goody thing right. Even when she tried. She questioned teachers when she thought they were wrong, holding her hand up and speaking in her loud voice, instead of arguing her concern in her homework assignments.
She mistook girls’ friendships and vocal excess for wild approval of her personality, not as sign of barely