The longer I stayed in Leeds, the more I understood Einstein’s theory of relativity. Not the entire theorem, more the relative part. How things seemed.
Time sped by at weekends, time almost stopped when I was giving a lecture, from the looks on some of the students’ faces and the way they stared forlornly at their watches, they felt the same. And, for some reason, every day seemed to be the day before Wednesday, or Wednesday. Wednesday was half-day at most universities and colleges so the students could pursue physical activities and play sports. Most uni competitions and matches were held on Wednesday afternoons. This meant I could pursue my favourite activities – cooking, eating, watching television without infringing upon official work or study time.
The relativity of Wednesday to every other day of the week should, then, have been joyous. It was not.
The usual drill for Wednesday pre-lunch, post-morning, was for Gwen, my boss and the head of the psychology department, to come in after giving a cognitive psychology lecture and flop down next to me, offer me a cigarette (I’d always refuse, emphasising how much tobacco smoke bothered me with a reply of ‘I don’t smoke’) and proceed to chain-smoke her way through the entire two-hour lecture. That is, recounting it between long drags of her high-tar fags.
‘I don’t know why I bother, I really don’t,’ she said, searching her handbag for something. Cigarettes I presumed. This was my third Wednesday. She’d assumed the flop beside me position and was now searching for her props before the drama that was lecturing unfolded. I braced myself for a face and body full of the brown stuff people had to use paint stripper to get off pub walls. ‘Do you know what they’ve done now?’
I’d been in Gwen’s office a few times since I started, and discovered it was like walking in to an Ashtray Temple. Ashtrays littered the desk, her bookshelves, there were a couple on the window sill. Each was different in size and colour but her office was clearly a holy place for the things. Drawn here to worship at the fingers of the great, white smoker. Each and every ashtray had some kind of cigarette debris in it, as though she stubbed out her cigarette in whichever ashtray she happened to be passing at the time. Most disturbingly, every cigarette was fully-smoked.
I’d sat opposite her at her desk and studied the cigarettes the first time I’d been in her office. First, I’d looked at the ones in the ashtray by her computer, then at the ones in the ashtrays I could see. Every cigarette was smoked, right to the edge of the filter. No fag escaped her ownership unsmoked or half-smoked. Or even three-quarters smoked. That showed a particular type of dedication. She didn’t simply want a boost of nicotine, she wanted every last drop, every last microgram. Gwen was one step away from injecting nicotine.
‘Do you know what they’ve done now?’ she repeated, her hand still digging around the bag.
Rather conversely to all laws of physics and biology, Gwen spoke with the girliest voice. The kind of voice I used to affect when I wanted to get around someone by pretending to be pathetic and unable to think due to a lack of brain cells. She spoke with an educated squeak that became posher and squeakier the more riled she got. Her voice suited her clothes though: Laura Ashley-style skirts or dresses, pink or powder blue blouses. And, most bizarrely, always, always thick black tights. We’d had a rash of hot, sunny days recently, but still Gwen’s sixty deniers stuck to her legs, and stuck out of her black open-toe sandals. She wore those whether it was sunny or cold or rainy, too.
Gwen found her cigarettes and pulled them out of her big, flowery cloth bag. She flipped the top of the packet open. ‘I really don’t know why I bother,’ she repeated.
‘Why, what’s happened?’ I said, catching on that, unlike previous Wednesdays, I had to work for the information this time. She lit her cigarette with her solid gold lighter, a present from her husband – I’d seen the inscription – and inhaled almost all of the cigarette in one suck. It was bad. It was very bad. I didn’t yet understand just how bad it was, though.
‘Not one of them had done the reading. Not one,’ she squeaked, a notch or two higher than normal. She was very agitated. ‘And then one of them had the audacity to . . .’ huge draw, ‘to say she didn’t know what I was talking about. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Can you believe it?’
My heart sank, my throat tightened and I swallowed hard. Unfortunately, yes, I could believe it. In fact, I could’ve prevented it.
My second lecture with the first group I’d taught as a proper lecturer, I’d relaxed into the role far more. I wasn’t reading straight from the script in front of me. I could ad lib, drop in little quips. I was working up to big detours and anecdotes.
That second lecture, they’d relaxed with me, too. We’d only been in the room for a few minutes when the woman with the tight, blondish perm raised her hand slightly.
‘Er, yeah?’ I asked. ‘Oh, do you mind saying your name before you speak? I still haven’t learnt your names.’
‘Um, I’m Roberta. Can I ask you something?’
‘Yeah, course.’
‘Do you think Gwen’s mad?’
‘Sorry?’ I replied.
Mr Wham-era George Michael raised his hand. ‘I’m Joel, I think what Roberta’s trying to say is, we don’t understand what she’s on about half the time. And none of us are learning anything.’
‘No, Joel,’ Roberta said, ‘I was asking if Ceri thought Gwen was mad. There is a difference, even if you’re too polite to notice.’
‘Right,’ I said. Oh bollocks, I thought.
After that, the flood gates were bust open as a tidal wave of disgruntlement crashed down onto the room. Gwen was boring. Gwen was confusing. ‘She scares the b’jasus out of me with the way she teaches,’ one of them said.
I’d listened to the first wave of discontentment, then said: ‘She speaks very highly of you, too.’
Another tidal wave of disgruntlement crashed down on us then: most of them skipped her lectures, they said. The ones who did go to her lectures were far too scared to point out how little they were learning. Or to even reply to her questions. They all lived in mortal fear of her asking them a question. They simply weren’t learning anything, but were too worried about being given a failing grade to say owt to her.
I wasn’t stupid. Stunned, but not stupid. The general gist of what they were saying was, ‘Could you say something to her for us?, i.e., could you get her to stop being Gwen and be a little human when it comes to her teaching style?
I tried to impress upon them that they were responsible for what they learnt, no one could put it in their heads. But they were having none of it. They merely dragged out more examples of how bad a lecturer Gwen was and how it was practically my duty, as the new, young, trendy lecturer who’d started off by being nice to them, to say something to her. That’ll learn me to try to be cool.
With the burden on my head, I’d meant to say something to Gwen. Really I had. I simply never found the right moment, the right time, the righ— OK, OK, I was scared. She was the head of department. My Boss. She could revoke my position with the stroke of a pen. How was I supposed to tell her, she who had years of teaching experience, compared to my fifty hours’ experience, to stop it. Besides, I’d be trapped in her smoke-filled office while I tried to explain their position to her. I had meant to at least broach the subject. I’d just kept putting it off and putting it off until, well, now. Woman thy name is coward.
I looked at Gwen as she finished off her cigarette. ‘I, er,’ I began, not sure what I was going to say before I opened my mouth. But then, I was rarely sure what I was going to say before I opened my mouth, and it hadn’t stopped me before.
Again, I was saved by Mel. He blew into the Senior Common Room, a mass of papers and folders. Papers slipping, eyes searching the room, he always moved as though someone was chasing him. ‘He could cause a riot in an empty house,’ that was a phrase my mum used and it was so apt for Mel. He approached the low coffee table Gwen and I were sat in front of and I had my feet on, paused – giving me a
silent one-second warning to move my feet, before they were avalanched by his lecturing materials and essays. I pulled my feet away just before he dropped his load. He then reached into his back pocket and pulled out a picture postcard.
‘Guess who I got a postcard from?’ he stated to the room. It’d filled up a little, but not much. Not enough for him to be making such a big-voiced announcement, anyway.
‘Who?’ Gwen replied for the room. Her demon year group forgotten.
‘Eva.’
The name sparked a couple of ‘awwws’ and some interest around the room. A couple of people – mugs in hands – wandered over, others looked up from what they were doing to listen.
‘Listen,’ Mel said, cleared his throat.
Dear Everyone – and Mel. Greetings from Barcelona. Am having the time of my life. Even better than I could have hoped for when I left. It’s warm here and I’m walking around in a lot less than I would in Britain. There’s so much to tell but not much space. Have met a couple of nice people and we’ll be working our way across to Spain’s Atlantic coast and then on to Tangiers. I can tell I’m going to be a travel bore when I get back. Miss you all but don’t miss College. At all.
Love and Peace, Eva.
PS Mel, you waster, you’d better pass this on.
‘Cheeky cow,’ Mel muttered.
A few pleased sighs went around the room. Eva was the woman who’d kindly vacated her position about three days before I wrote to the college.
‘Wish I was travelling,’ Gwen mumbled, a petulant tone in her voice.
‘Have you been travelling before?’ I asked, grateful that we didn’t need to talk about the demon year group any more.
Gwen lit another cigarette with her lighter, breathed it to life, shook her head. ‘No. My husband and I didn’t ever get around to it.’ She snapped her head around to me. ‘We meant to. We simply got tied up in our careers. It’s just, the first ten years were devoted to getting ourselves established in our careers, and then it was too late. But we did mean to.’
I’d avoided asking Gwen much about her family because:
a) I hadn’t forgotten she abandoned me at lunch on the first day
b) I wasn’t allowed to by The Commandments
c) I didn’t want to get into any conversation that would end up with me having to accept an invitation to dinner. (If I’d only narrowly escaped becoming a Jehovah’s Witness, how much more would I be able to turn down an invitation to dinner? It wasn’t in my nature to say no to people when they asked me nicely.)
There were inherent dangers in any Gwen-related dinner invitation: if the chintz her house would surely be decorated in didn’t burn the retinas off my cornea, then the smoke would get me. And if her husband smoked half as much as she did, I’d end the night in an oxygen tent. Of course, there was also the small talk factor. ST had never been my forte. It was pretty unnecessary when most people came out with deeply personal stories from the off. But I didn’t want that with my boss.
You needed a little mystery with the people you worked for. I remember when I’d been a secretary during the summer holidays from uni. I got to know far too much about my bosses. One boss in particular when I temped in a media agency used to take me out for drinks to whinge on about her relationship. She often told me things my fragile mind didn’t ever want to hear. I suppose the bedrock of my unshockability came from that summer, with her. I’d lie for her when her partner called, I arranged her life, I even cleared out her office when she moved floors. And the stuff I unearthed in there unsettled me. Let’s say, I’d never seen things like vibrators or crotchless knickers up close until I worked for her. I came to her a non-virgin innocent. I left knowing too much about sex – like how having a threesome with your partner’s best friend could really mess you up emotionally.
Basically, there was no mystique between us and that’s necessary in a boss-employee relationship. How could you take seriously someone shouting at you for being late when you knew she’d once cried in the street because Shelley’s had sold out of white stilettos?
I did not want to cross that line with Gwen. Having said that, guilt gestated in my conscience. I wanted to go back in time and warn her about the coming student revolution. That they were not going down the coup d’état route – they wanted blood and beheadings. I couldn’t go back though, despite all Star Trek had led me to believe, so I had to be nice to her in the present. ‘What does your husband do?’ I asked, risking the dinner invite.
‘Do? He doesn’t do anything. Whatever do you mean?’
‘You said about your careers . . . I just wondered . . .’ Freako, I thought.
‘Career? He’s a banker. One of the top executives in the City.’
‘Right. Sounds interesting.’ I.e. boring as tooth plaque. Although, I shouldn’t malign tooth plaque – under a microscope it was probably more interesting than her husband’s job.
‘Vernon seems to suit it.’
‘But you’d rather be travelling?’
‘No, no, of course not. It’s just a pipe dream that we, well, I think about. Sometimes. Only sometimes. How can you not when you hear postcards like that? Of course I wouldn’t rather be travelling. I love my life. I love my life.’
Chill baby, you don’t have to convince me of owt. I don’t care if you travel or stay in Leeds. ‘I see,’ I replied, absently. I’d tuned out, fuzzed my brain to Gwen, focused instead across the room on Mel and Claudine.
Claudine and Mel sat alone at the table at the left end of the SCR, while he described something on the front of the postcard to her. He’d obviously been to Barcelona, his right index finger traced something along the postcard, every two microseconds his eyes would go up to her face, keen to ensnare her in his tale. She, while clearly interested, kept her dark eyes focused on the postcard, nodding to show she was following him but studiously avoiding eye contact.
There was something going on there. Yes, she told me that last week, after the gym, but there was something more going on between them. It wasn’t purely body language that gave the game away. Not with them, not with other people.
It was the way people looked at each other in unguarded moments. The way they didn’t look at each other in guarded moments. I’d become a bit of an unintentional expert in nonverbal communication over the years. I’d studied people on the sly, listened to their tales and watched them afterwards. Despite what people pretended, despite what people said to my face, they couldn’t stop those tell-tale signs showing through.
With Mel and Claudine it wasn’t as simple as the picture she painted for me the other night. I’m sure they had ‘got physical’, but how physical was still up for debate. Not that Claudine was a liar, she wanted to believe what she told me, which was why she’d been able to look me in the eye as she said it; you can lie if you want to believe the lie enough. Maybe more had happened, maybe less had happened. The point was: something had happened. And they were both struggling to deal with the consequences of it. Claudine, from the way she was behaving and talking the other night, was clearly racked with guilt over whatever it was. (I’d personally not worked out how anyone could cheat. It was far too much guilt to live with on a day-to-day basis. To look in the mirror day after day, knowing what you’d done . . . that was too much like hard work.) And, like I said to her, she was waiting for the answer to her dilemma to fall into her lap so she could decide what to do.
Then there was Mel. Sitting beside Claudine. Nice guy Mel who’d cheated on his wife with his best friend. Those weren’t the actions of a nice guy. But, as I’d found over the years, nothing was as simple as we all hoped it would be. You could rarely point your finger at the average person in the street and say, ‘All bad.’ ‘Completely evil.’ It was only the people who’d gone out of their way to cause destruction and death and hurt and pain and ignorance who could be classified in such terms. Most people, your average Joanne Public, your next-door neighbour, your lecturer in the common room, had levels of behaviour, levels of badness, reaso
ns for doing the things they did. Even if they did destroy other people’s lives. Mel was one of those people.
Take the way he was with Claudine now. How he was looking at her, how he was talking to her, he cared about her deeply. If he and his wife only split up a few months ago, after his indiscretion with Claudine, then that would mean he couldn’t be feeling rebound love for Claudine. He’d most likely loved her for years. If he’d loved her for years, then why wait until he got married to make a move on her? And then finish with his wife and tell Claudine how he felt. Something more was going on. It was more complicated than love. Love was great. Love was everything as far as a lot of people were concerned, but with Claudine and Mel, it was more complicated than love. They had depth of friendship; years seeing other people; a present that meant working together. For them, love was only a small element of it, a tiny piece of the Mel and Claudine jigsaw. If love was the be all and end all in their case, they’d be together, wouldn’t they?
Mel and Claudine. Claudine and Mel. I really needed to hear his side of the story to get the fuller picture of their jigsaw. However, it was nothing to do with me. At all. It was j—
‘Well, would you?’ Gwen asked, impatiently.
I turned to her, smiled. I trawled my memory for what she’d been saying while I’d been observing Mel and Claude. I’d heard it, but not enough. And Gwen’s face, lined and freckly and obscured by cigarette smoke as it was, hung on a precipice of either pleasure or upset. The guilt that had been gestating earlier was almost ready to come out, kicking and screaming the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I was very close to either telling her I’d known about the students hating her, or I’d invite her to dinner myself.
‘Why not,’ I replied, careful to keep my tone ambiguous so she wouldn’t know I’d completely tuned out.
Gwen’s face broke into an unexpected grin. I’d never seen her grin before, it suited her. She should smile more often. She should probably relax more often, too. ‘Fabulous. I’ll let you know,’ she squeaked. ‘It’ll be within the next month or so. I’ll have to check with Vernon, but I’m sure he’d love having you over for dinner.’