She is struggling to get more air into her lungs.
Eyes shining, chest heaving. Yes, Pete can see but he's determined not to look at the swell of Rupa's breasts, rising and falling against the scooped edges of her low-cut top.
So out of breath she must have run up the ramp from the DLR station into the campus, and again up the stairs to his academic office.
New ruling from university managers: lecturers should not have personal nameplates on their doors. Rooms in which lecturers happen to work are to be labeled
‘academic office’.
She knocked but by the time Pete answered she had already opened the door and entered the room.
Crossed his mind to be annoyed. Then Pete saw Rupa's agitated face and in quick succession he invited her to sit down, asked her if she needed a glass of water, directed her, needlessly, to take a deep breath, all the while wondering what on earth had brought her here out of term-time and in such a state.
‘It's Dinky,’ she declares, brushing aside Pete’s solicitude for her. ‘He’s gonna do something stupid.
I just know it, right. You're going to help me find him.
We've got to stop him, right. Please say you will.’
Praise the Lord! Student begins conversation with tutor other than by saying 'I,m confused. Can you tell me what to write?'
Not meaning to belittle Rupa's obvious concerns, thinks Pete with his 'student-facing' face on, at least this is better than being asked to explain yet again an assignment I've already explained half a dozen times before.
‘I’ll do what I can, Rupa. You know I always do what I can for my students’. He’s answering on auto-pilot (with plenty of automatic cheese, clearly), but even before he gets the words out, he knows they’re in the wrong register. Supportive-sounding professional clichés won't do. His first instinct was correct. This is not going to be a question of university procedure, putting in a good word, or coaxing an increasingly impatient administrator into letting passable students remain registered for a module they’ve hardly attended.
No, no, nothing like that. Whatever’s going on here, is of a quite different order.
Thank God.
Ain’t no stopping her now. Words come tumbling out like dice.
Logged on. Dinky tweeting. Crazy. Not at our place, not home with parents. Tweets mention Canary Wharf.
Says explosion, people dying. Dinky not himself.
We’ve got to go and look.
Now she’s on her knees, imploring him. Whoah, there – stop, please! In only a few seconds Pete's veered from interest to empathy to acute embarrassment.
What if somebody saw? Happened to be walking past and looked through the glass slit in the door?
Female student kneeling in front of male academic.
Doesn’t bear thinking about.
Afterwards he will cringe at the thought that this is what it took to get him out of his seat. This is what nudged him into going with Rupa to find Dinky.
Not because he was unreservedly concerned, either for Dinky or for her state of mind. True, he wasn't entirely indifferent, but the main thing was to get this sexy girl out of the kneeling position before someone mistook him for Bill Clinton.
‘There’s something else,’ Rupa is saying. Not only her eyes but her whole body is downcast, dejected. ‘I was so worried about Dinky that I phoned the police.’
Would they act or hardly re-act at all?
She wasn,t sure, but she said she thought she had to try them, at least.
‘They didn’t seem bothered at first. I told them about the tweets and gave them Dinky’s login. The phone operator took it down but I could tell he wasn’t that interested. Then, when I said Dinky’s full name, it was like an alarm went off.’
The urgency of finding her lost lover and rescuing him from danger, is taking over from Rupa's anxiety about having done the wrong thing. The stupidest thing. She braces herself to tell Pete the rest of the story:
‘I was put on hold for a few seconds and then a very cool woman came on. She sounded different. Y’know, authority. And she wanted to know loads about Dinky, but I could tell she already knew quite a lot –
knew too much about him. Then I realised they were already looking for him, chasing him down, and I was just making it easier for them.
‘So I ended the call and started running over here to find you. I thought they might come after me as well, and maybe they could use my phone to trace me, so I binned it. And I really wish I hadn't because it was a present from my mum, and she'll murder me when I go home without it.’
Here she crumples, scrunched up like a piece of waste paper, then unfolds again till she's pumped up and ready to go.
This way and that, collapsed and refurbished in just two ticks. Aaah, the resilience of youth!
But Pete isn’t so supple nowadays. Frowning, he might even be mumbling to himself, he crosses the room, takes his jacket off the hook and puts it on.
From the slabs of sunlight crashing through his office window, he knows he'll be too hot. But without the homely stuff in his jacket pockets, he'd feel even more uncomfortable. There's a photo of Carol and the kids, for example, which he never knowingly goes without.
Moves through the door and turns back, momentarily, to lock it. Rupa is already impatient, like a child who won't go on without her parents and can't wait for them to catch up. But he does catch up, and now the two of them are aligned. Walking smartly along the corridor, side-by-side: the way detectives do on TV.
Down onto the DLR platform, where the train indicator says there'll be one in four minutes. No quicker way of getting to Canary Wharf.
The distance from campus to the Wharf is not much more than the length of two Royal Docks. But the docks were built for big ships and plenty of them: it’s too far to walk. Call a cab and it’s bound to get snarled up in traffic. So they must wait, in this place where they have waited a thousand times before, at the start of a thousand unexceptional journeys.
Today is not one of those days. Rupa can taste catastrophe, she’s convinced of it, and she’s pacing up and down the platform, willing the little red train to be here now. Pete isn’t sure what to think.
In some ways he resents Rupa’s apprehension and the impact it’s having on him. And why did you come to me anyway, when I’m not even your personal tutor? Yet he’s glad to be out of the office, doing something –
anything – that just might be conclusive.
(10) On my way