Come to Harm

eight

Dr. Bryant read with his chin sunk on his chest, his lips pushed forwards and pressed together, making his ginger moustache bristle. From time to time he crunched his mouth up even more, working his glasses up his nose and scraping the moustache hairs against the undersides of his nostrils with a rasping sound.

“That all seems in perfect order,” he said at last, signing the last page. “Your customary efficiency in full swing.”

Keiko stared at him. He had never met her before. Japanese efficiency, did he mean? He stared back. Was she only imagining a bloom of colour on his cheeks?

“Tell me a little about your proposal,” he said.

Keiko nodded and cleared her throat. “The construction of knowledge in social groups,” she said.

“A very well-researched area,” said Dr. Bryant.

“In general,” Keiko said. “But I’ve chosen a focus that’s relatively-”

Dr. Bryant’s eyes had strayed to his computer screen and he was reading something there.

“Food as modern folklore,” said Keiko.

Dr. Bryant touched his mouse and his screen scrolled upwards. “Yes… yes…” he said. He clicked his mouse again.

“I’m thinking about q-methodology perhaps for the profiling, or a Likert line, created stimuli for the feedback into the networks.”

“Good, good.” Click, click.

“And there will be useful insights from anthropology and sociology. From the literature, I mean.” She took a deep breath. She could always claim language problems. “And embroidery and some snowboarding.”

“Yes, I see,” said Dr. Bryant. “Well I’m very glad to hear someone giving proper consideration to a robust theoretical grounding right from the start.”

“Yes, I see,” echoed Keiko and, thanking him in such a soft voice that his attention was not hooked away from his screen by the smallest fraction, she let herself out.

Charismatic teachers are really for undergraduates, she told herself. Or high school English teachers who lend their personal copies of Faulkner; even grade school teachers who take seven-year-olds to their first ballet.

Her studies, her time here-the early blossoming of her career as she would no doubt call it in years to come-would be made up of her own careful probing scholarship, bounced off the other young minds, fresh bright minds, just beginning, like her own.

What she should be doing was meeting her office mates. She checked the floor plan on the wall of the entrance atrium and set off into the dark halls and stairways. Already she could see the three of them sitting in armchairs, or maybe the two of them sitting in armchairs, listening, while Keiko stood on the rug by the fireplace and read a draft of a paper to them, and how they would put down their sherry glasses and stare at her as she finished, how one would whistle and one would clap and they would toast her and tell her to send it straight to the journal. And she would say she couldn’t have done it without their help, and someone would knock at the door and it would be Dr. Bryant, asking her if she wanted to see him and she would say, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ and he would close the door again.

She was in the right corridor now and she shook her head, dispersing the daydreams and told herself to pay attention. She walked slowly, trying to fix the moment, so that later, in the years to come, when she ran along this corridor every day, she would still remember the first time.

And there it was. She paused outside to read the names on the door: Grete Marr, A.L. Ebberwood, Keiko Nishisato. She raised her hand to knock but then instead, tracing her fingers over her own name, she turned the handle and walked in.

It was a smallish room although high-ceilinged. Rather awkward actually, with once-white walls and once-blue carpet, worn dark and shiny over years. There were three desks. The one under the dusty window and the one on the long bare wall were occupied, two students hunched over laptops, both wearing ear buds and typing furiously. Neither of them looked up at her. The third desk, the smallest, was in the darkest corner by the door, half-covered in bales of yellowing paper and clusters of smoked-glass coffee mugs with cold, cloudy dregs in the bottom. On the bookshelf above, a spider plant had died, and dried-up nodules of it had fallen on the bales of paper and the coffee mugs, like little brown squid.

Before picture, Keiko told herself. She stepped into the room. One of the others-the female one (Grete?)-hit the save button twice, plucked out an ear bud and turned to Keiko.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I’ve been working on my thesis for five years”-she turned back to her keyboard and hit the save button again-“I’m nearly finished and I can’t have any disruption. I asked Lynne-the secretary-not to put anyone in here, but there’s no space anywhere else.” She put her ear bud back in, hit the save button yet again, and started typing.

“You’re talking,” said the other student, without turning. His voice was a flat drone. “It’s happening already. She’s here and you’re talking to her.” He turned up the volume on his own ear buds and put his head down.

Keiko stood in the doorway for a moment listening to the midget tsk-tsk of the two iPods, then stepped back into the hallway and let the door close quietly behind her.

Those people with the sherry, she told herself, are literature scholars, not psychologists. Work like mine demands solitude and sobriety. She found the secretary’s office, knocked, and went in. A woman was standing with her coat on reading pieces of paper and throwing them into her waste basket.

“Lynne?” she began. “I’m Keiko Nish-”

“I know who you are,” said the woman.

“I have something to ask you. A big favour.”

“I’ve been to the dentist today, and I’m leaving early,” the secretary replied.

“I hope you’ll say no if it’s too much to ask,” said Keiko. Lynne raised her eyebrows and waited. “I wondered if I might have a change of office.” The eyebrows moved even higher. “When one becomes available. I realise it may be some time.” The woman’s stare had become fixed. “But I would be most grateful if you would put me on the list.”

“Well, we’ll have to see, won’t we?” the secretary said. “There isn’t a list as such. I just allocate rooms first come, first serve. They’re pretty much all the same.”

“Oh yes, yes of course,” said Keiko. “But perhaps there’s a room where all the students are just starting?”

“Yes, well, the thing is that the home students”-she paused-“all arrived on time, last month, at the start of the semester. It’s only ever international students”-careful articulation there-“who keep us waiting and then roll up with a list of demands.”

Keiko took a moment to process this. “Ah yes, I see,” she said. “We have to arrange our visas and funding.”

“Precisely. You need permission to take up a place, and you cast about for money wherever you can.”

“And the overseas fees are so very expensive.”

“But still they keep coming. Floods of them, every year. A deluge.”

She couldn’t face the bus stop, so she hailed a taxi with a surly driver who asked to see cash before he’d start on so long a trip and kept an eye on the meter, ready to stop and pitch her out when it rolled round past twenty pounds, which was what she’d shown him. But he kept the other eye on her, in the rearview mirror, and saw her tip her head back and press her fingers along her lashes, heard her gulp and sniff but refuse to let go. So when the meter hit twenty, he just switched it off and kept driving, all way to the empty street with the shut shops and dark windows. And he waited until he saw a light come inside her flat before he drove away.

Strange place, he thought, looking all around him, up and down the streets, and a phrase of his mother’s came back to him. Not a soul astir, she used to say. He looked at the closed-down petrol station sitting out on its own and shook a sudden knot out of his shoulders. He wasn’t sorry to get to the open road and the sixty-mile limit to put his foot down.