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I get through the rest of the class and then walk quickly to the staff room. I grab my tuna and egg salad from the fridge so that I can pretend to eat it back at my desk. I say pretend, because I don’t touch it. I can’t eat anything, let alone tuna and egg, but I tell myself that that’s what I would be doing normally. So that’s what I’m doing. I pull the lid off the Tupperware, poke at the food with my fork, close it again and shove it in the trash, container and all.
I go through my tasks during the rest of the day like I’m in suspended animation—I almost have to physically jerk myself forward at regular intervals just to keep moving. At one stage Geoff pops his head in and I think,This isreallyit. He says the name,Alex, but he doesn’t say,dead, and I blink in confusion.
“What did you say?”
“I was asking if Alex is doing a presentation next Tuesday for the panel…?”
I picture him lying behind the dumpster. Why hasn’t he been found yet? How long is it going to take? Or maybe he has, but no one will tell us. Could that happen? Should I say something soon? Something like,I was expecting to hear from Alex, he’s not answering my calls. I wonder if he’s all right?
“Is he?” Geoff asks again.
Post-graduate students are asked to do a presentation every three months to evaluate their progress. They’re not compulsory, but you’d have to have a good reason not to attend. Alex didn’t do the last two because by then he’d decided to switch his topic and he wasn’t ready to disclose that. We’d discussed this one, coming up, just last week.
“I can’t get you another dispensation. It’s getting awkward, but I’ll think of something,” I said at the time.
“No, let’s do it.”
“Really? Okay, but I’m surprised. I thought you didn’t want to discuss it publicly?”
He’d grinned. “I’ll present on the theta and zeta functions. That’s what everyone thinks I’m working on, anyway.”
“Oh.” I’d nodded, not hugely comfortable about this. It’s one thing to keep your work under wraps, it’s quite another to deliberately mislead the entire department.
“Do you have something new to present?”
“No.”
“So how’s that going to work?”
He paused, then he turned to me, his face bright, like he’d just thought of something. “Youcould do it. You could write up something in no time! It’s your field, right?”
He hadn’tjust thought of itobviously. He’d known he was going to ask me. But I told him, no. In no uncertain terms. Even worse than lying to the department, it’s downright cheating. “Categorically out of the question,” I said. “And you may not have noticed this, but I’m kinda busy, Alex.”
“But don’t you see? That way, they’ll leave me alone! Otherwise they’ll start to ask questions! They’ll suspect something. Or maybe they’ll drop me from the program!”
“No, they won’t. I’m your supervisor. Only I get to drop you.” Which wasn’t strictly true. But saying no to Alex is like arguing with a particularly willful three year old. He begged, he sulked, he got angry, he pleaded, he threatened, he sulked again, and, in the end, I said yes because I just wanted the conversation to end. So I did the work. I stayed up until four in the morning to do it. I would have given myself an A+ for it, too.
Geoff clears his throat.
“Sorry. Yes. He’s confirmed that to me. He’ll be there.”
He nods. “Good. I look forward to it.” He’s about to leave but stops, turns around. “You okay?”
“Sure, why?”
“You just seem a long way away.”
“Sorry. Just tired.”
“You look tired. You’re not upset about the promotion, are you?” And it occurs to me then that he didn’t even bother to tell me himself. Nobody told me, except for Mila, and that doesn’t count. She was just gloating.
“No, I’m not upset about the promotion.”
I wait until I am back in my car to have a cry. Then I drive home, and when I walk in the door, into the noise of my kids preparing Carla’s play, there’s a moment where I almost convince myself it never happened.
“Hello?” I say, as I move towards the living room.
“No!” they shout. “Don’t come in!”
