‘Oh, they realize all right,’ said John.
One of the management posse had positioned himself right in front of the coffee machine, cutting off our lifeline to the one thing that might keep us conscious. He clapped his hands to get our attention.
Not a good start.
His name was Harvey. Apparently he’d been doing this for three years now and had got a lot of positive feedback.
‘Inadequate,’ John whispered. ‘Needs to self-reinforce.’
Harvey launched into a ‘discussion’ of why students should be called customers. He got some audience interaction going with a show of hands – who was for it? McBastard. Who was against it? The plebs voted unanimously. Then he did this sickly smile and said: ‘Well, I’m afraid these days anyone with that way of thinking is completely out of sync with new models of educational theory. It may have been OK thirty years ago but now the terminology is inconsistent with new approaches to learning and changes in funding.’
Harvey continued to bellow: in order to survive in the new market place, every single one of us had to commit ourselves to ‘rethink, reset and reframe’. Just then a ball of paper arced over from the back and got Harvey right on the chin.
McBastard leapt to his feet. ‘Who did that? Come on now!’
Everyone looked at the floor.
Harvey ploughed on.
The room calmed down and we started settling in for a nap, when he repeated his point that we ‘needed to change or become history’.
This was the last straw for the History ‘facilitator’, a quiet guy called Edwin with hair like a toilet brush. He leapt to his feet and shrieked something sarcastic about that not being so terrible as we could learn from history, if ‘learn’ was still a permissible verb, given current educational thinking.
If he’d been more popular there might have been a revolt at this point, but Edwin was a bit of a dick so no one joined in.
Harvey looked embarrassed and back-pedalled to qualify ‘history’.
John bobbed his head in Edwin’s direction, mouthed ‘wanker’ and supplied a pertinent hand gesture.
‘Good point,’ I sighed. ‘I bet he’s added at least another five minutes on.’
He had.
Time slowed.
John fell asleep. Sue’s biro leaked over her chin and onto her polo neck.
I watched McBastard out of the corner of my eye.
For two hours and seven minutes he didn’t once take those fireball eyes off me.
After lunch things worsened. But at 4.30 there was a serious breach of health and safety when the entire staff (plebs) of the Humanities and Arts Department stampeded to the Red Lion.
There was no way I was missing out on a much needed dose of medicine. Luckily I’d got the bus into work this morning so didn’t have to worry about the car.
A quick call to Corinne resulted in Giselle agreeing to pick up Alfie and babysit. Thank God for the empathy of fellow mum friends. Adversity unites.
My pass for the night acquired, I joined the last of the stragglers beating a path to the local.
John was in fine form. The day had supplied him with plenty of ammunition. Especially Harvey’s utterly absurd suggestion that, to help us memorize what we learnt from the session, we could make up our own raps. A natural mime with a wicked sense of humour, his impression of Harvey’s twitches, stammers and idiosyncrasies was cruel, excruciating and magnificently funny.
A charismatic teacher with a background in media law, the students, I mean, customers, loved John. You could understand why when you saw him in this context, holding court; engrossed and animated. His curly brown hair tumbled down past his ears, lending him a naturally cheeky quality that was muted somewhat by serious blue eyes, a clean-shaven face and an insistence on wearing a suit. God knows why he accepted a fifth of what he could be earning, working harder than he would in a small law firm. I liked his intelligence and respected his mind. He’d almost become a good friend.
Later, as the conversation waterfalled into pockets of twos and threes, we found ourselves together.
‘You all right then, Ms Grey?’
I paused and took a slug from my glass. ‘D’you know what? It’s not been the greatest of weeks.’
‘It’s always like this,’ he said. ‘End of term. Shit to do. Shit to teach.’
It wasn’t work, I told him, and was about to relay my medical experience when I remembered that he was a colleague and much as I liked him, there was the possibility that, well-oiled and talkative, he might mention it to one of HR. That might kick-start a sequence of events that I couldn’t afford right now. Not with McBastard on the prowl.
‘What is it then?’ He looked concerned and I felt a bit daft looking at him with my mouth open, so I told him about the cockleshell instead.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You sound like my sister. Marie’s nuts, obsessed with crystals and weirdies and things that go bump in the night. She’s on her own too. Out in California now. Do you know what I reckon?’ He slurred the last part of the question so I had to ask him to repeat it.
‘That,’ he wagged an unsteady finger at me, ‘women on their own tend to imagine stuff. I’m not being sexist here but when you’re living with someone, you talk to them, you know, you share stuff. You talk things through. You don’t let things run away with you. Do you know what I mean?’
As unwilling as I was to let the poke go unchallenged I did know exactly what he was getting at. Especially after that night. But I didn’t think it was a gender thing so instead I said, ‘Are you inferring that us independent ladies become hysterical without a rational male mind, Doctor Freud?’
‘Yes of course, dear,’ he said, and made a big thing of patting my hand. Then Nancy, one of the administrators, swung our way. ‘What are you two talking about?’ Her beady eyes strayed over John.
‘Nothing,’ we chimed together.
She looked at us sceptically but didn’t move. ‘Whatever.’ Her voice always sounded thin and discordant.
John started doing his impressions thing again and having heard it all once, I got up and staggered over to Sue. The subject there was giving up fags so when, inevitably, everyone got up to go for a smoke, I went too.
Outside Edwin was hailing a cab for Leigh, and realizing I was more wrecked than anticipated and that it was only half ten, I joined him. Twenty minutes later I’d paid Giselle and had seen her off in a cab of her own.
Alfie was snoring lightly so I jumped into the shower, ran the water lukewarm and lathered one of my favourite exotic gels over my sticky body. It felt good. In fact, I felt good. Considering the day I’d had, this was something of a miracle.
I closed my eyes and let my mind drift. My hands took the lather and soaped my breasts. I turned the hot tap up and killed the cold, soaked my hair in the shower spray and let the shampoo’s foam glide over my midriff and drip down my thighs.
The hot water ran out. I squealed as a prickly blast of cold hit my belly and reached out to turn it off, cursing the immersion heater. I stepped out of the cubicle and grabbed the nearest towel.
Wrapping it around my body, I felt the weight of the last week enveloping me. I dried myself then cleared the steam from the mirror to apply some face serum.
That’s when I saw it.
As I looked in the mirror I saw my face, but hovering over it there was another – the same shape, but with a firmer chin. Locks of hair blocked out my