He didn’t say anything. The look was enough.
Femi texts:Registration Tuesday. Allan’s driving us. Pray for my knees.Some things don’t change. Others do. Femi and Allan have a flat now—a proper one, not halls. With a kitchen and a door that locks, and a sofa they chose together. The normalcy of it used to make me ache. Now it makes me glad. Glad that someone got it right on the first try, glad that the mirror version of my disaster is a nice boy from Lewisham and a warm boy with a small car.
Laurence has the position. Research fellow, applied mathematics, a department that doesn’t contain any of the corridors where we were almost caught and the storage cupboard where we were almost found. A different campus, a different context.
He walks to work without the terror of seeing his own name on a list of people who’ve lost the right to be trusted.
It’s not what he had. It’s not the teaching, not the lectures, not the two hundred faces looking up at him while he writes elegant proofs on a board.
He misses it. I see the missing in the mornings when he puts on the blazer, and it’s for a research meeting, not a theatre full of students.
But the missing is the scar, not the wound. And scars can be lived with.
Proof that we’re living at our maximum.
His phrase, not mine.
Merton’s office. The shelves bow under decades of thinking. The chairs creak. The window overlooks the same courtyard where I once walked out of a review panel and stood in the rain with nothing to hold onto.
‘You have an unusual mind,’ he says.
He’s said this three times now. Each time the same intonation, the same slight emphasis on theunusual.
‘Pure mathematics,’ he says. ‘The real thing. You’ve been hiding in the wrong department.’
I haven’t been hiding. Except I have. I was sitting in the back row of a lecture I didn’t choose, watching a man I couldn’t stop watching, solving problems I pretended didn’t interest me because interest meant caring, and caring meant?—
‘I’ll transfer,’ I say. ‘For second year.’
‘Good.’
He dunks a biscuit. The biscuit breaks. He regards the mug with betrayal. Forty years of dunking and still no mastery.
‘Don’t waste it, Mr Carrick.’
I tell Laurence over dinner. Pasta. His is improving. Still slightly underdone, but the effort is the thing.
His face when I saypure mathsshifts. Wordless. He doesn’t sayI knew.Doesn’t sayI told you.
He reaches across the table and puts his hand on mine, and the hand is warm, and says everything his academic precision would ruin by articulating.
‘Merton called my proofs elegant,’ I say. ‘Your word.’
He tightens his fingers.
He’s not my teacher anymore. But he’s the person who saw it first. The distinction is the whole point.
I’ve never been more proud of myself.
Happier, too.
Maybe because someone I love is proud of me.
The balcony is too small for two people and too cold for September, and we’re on it anyway because the sky over Manchester is doing the thing it does in early autumn, the light going amber and long, the city below in its end-of-summer dress, the canals catching the last of the light.
‘Greece,’ he says. ‘Next summer.’
‘Spain.’
