Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fifteen minutes early. No strategy in it, just a body that’s stopped pretending it has anywhere else to be.
Three doors down, a postgrad is typing with the commitment of the soon-to-be-rejected.
Haldrey’s door is open.
A foot wide, maybe. Enough to show the slice of carpet between his desk and the wall and the back of a student’s head—blonde, a ponytail, a red hoodie with the sleeves pushed up.
She’s leaning forward, speaking in the clear, unbothered voice of a girl who has no idea she’s standing in the room I’d fight a dog to sit in.
‘And the second term,’ she’s saying, ‘is where I lost it.’
‘Here.’ His voice. Public pitch. Warmer than I’ve ever heard it. ‘Look. If you rearrange this.’
The scratch of his pen. Her small grunt. The door was open the whole time. Corridor light spilling onto the lino between us. Anyone could walk past, anyone could see. This is what office hours are meant to look like: an open door, a lecturer being exactly what the job description says.
I position myself close enough to hear, far enough that he can’t see me from his chair. The fire extinguisher is inches from my hip, and I lean into it like a prop.
‘Oh,’ the girl says. ‘Oh. Oh that’s so obvious. Sorry. Thank you.’
‘Don’t apologise.’ Amused. Warm. ‘That’s what this hour is for.’
She laughs. He laughs back, a short one, real but strained. Haldrey laughs for other people. Data point I could have lived without.
This is the Haldrey that a normal first-year gets.
The don’t apologise, that’s what this hour is for, Haldrey.
The one who helps. The one a department puts on the website, the one the mothers of the blonde students in red hoodies would approve of from across a kitchen in Cheshire, the one I am at no point going to experience in this lifetime because I am not a normal first-year.
He is not giving me a normal office hour, and we both know that.
Chair scrape. She stands, gathers her things, the swish of a puffer jacket, the zip of a bag, and walks out of his office into the corridor and past me with a smile aimed at nothing in particular. Happy. A student who has been helped.
Stillness holds me, three beats pass. The door is still open.
Then I walk to it and raise my hand to knock on the frame, and before my knuckles have touched wood, he looks up from the paper he’s writing on, and everything shifts in ways I’ve never seen in public.
The mouth tightens, the pen stops. The hand, the left one, flattens against the desk like he’s pushing down something that’s trying to rise.
He holds my gaze for one second. Two.
Then he stands. Walks past me, close enough that I can smell the detergent on his collar and feel the static off his sleeve, and reaches behind me for the door handle.
The door closes.
The click is very small. The building holds its breath. My heart is very loud.
He walks back to his desk like he hasn’t just rewritten the entire grammar of office hours in the space of four seconds.
The blonde girl in the red hoodie: open door. Me: closed, her laugh was safe. Mine will not be.
In university misconduct panels—I will not allow myself to Google this later, I will absolutely Google this later—a closed door during student-staff contact is either a protective measure or an aggravating factor depending on who’s asking.
A closed door is evidence. A closed door is the thing a lawyer points at and says you see.
And he has closed it. Not to kiss me, not to touch me, not to do any of the things the closed door would suggest to a panel.
He’s closed it because, with the door open, our knees touching is data.
His reaction to that is data. And neither of us can afford either.
I sit in the chair I sat in last week. Today, my ribs don’t fit right inside my shirt.
Four seconds.
The posture, the compressed mouth, reveal it before he speaks. The shirt buttoned to the neck; it was one down, the week before two, and now it’s fully buttoned like he’s sewn armour out of Oxford cotton.
‘Mr Carrick.’ The careful surname, not the first name that had slipped out of him last week like a confession. Carrick. Surname. Firewall restored.
So that’s how it’s going to be.
‘Dr Haldrey.’
The man is rearranged. Himself, not the furniture, papers stacked. Marking pen capped, fresh coffee. He’s tidied like you’d tidy before something you’re pretending doesn’t matter, except the effort shows exactly how much it does.
‘Your problem set.’ He reaches for it. Steady. Impressive.
I unzip my bag and take out the pages. Hand them over. Our fingers don’t touch. He’s measured the distance. I let him have it.
Today I am the best student he’s ever had.
That’s the decision. I made it on the bus this morning.
I’ve run the escalating-provocation pattern three weeks running, and it has bought me a closed door and a name in his mouth and a man who has started buttoning his shirt to the throat like it’s armour.
The next obvious move on the escalator is a kind of move I am not ready to make, and he is not ready to receive, and the move after that, if I picked it, would go past the point where any of this could plausibly be deniable.
So. Today. The inversion.
No provocation, no leaning in. No manufactured skin.
No knee drifting under the desk, no lip-biting, no turning my head to show the angle of my neck that does enough.
Just the work, clean, correct, three solutions I’m proud of, and one I stayed up till 2 am perfecting because the problem’s elegance mirrored his work on the board, and I wanted him to know I’d been paying attention.
That’s all.
Listening.
Let him see the version of me that won’t get him sacked. Let him find out it’s the same person. Let him live with the fact that the version of me that won’t get him sacked is, somehow, the version he wants even more.
He reads. His eyes move left to right. Obviously, everyone does. But he does it with a focus that makes me want to put my face in his way.
Don’t.
I sit back. Cross my ankle over my knee. My t-shirt rides up on one side, hip bone, the elastic of my boxers, a strip of skin that the October air from the window touches and tightens.
He’s not looking. He’s reading my problem set with the dedication of a man marking his way out of purgatory.
He looks. A flick, quarter of a second. Down, across, the trajectory from page to hip to exposed skin and back to page.
I say nothing. My face says nothing.
Then I stretch before I can stop myself, arms overhead, and the hem lifts another centimetre. The air finds my skin.
So much for no provocation.
‘This is strong work,’ he says to the page. ‘That’s not the textbook approach.’
‘Didn’t use the textbook.’
‘Evidently.’
He’s talking about maths. The rest of him isn’t listening. He hasn’t looked away from the paper since the hip. I could uncross my legs and let my knee drift and watch him lose it.
The moment passes.
I lean forward, elbows on the desk. ‘Can I ask you something about the convergence criteria? In problem three I wasn’t sure if the bound holds for the general case or just the specific.’
He looks up, surprised. I’m being a student—an actual student asking an actual question about actual mathematics.
‘The bound holds generally,’ he says, cautiously. ‘But the proof requires an additional step. Here.’
He turns the page. Adds a note in the margin. The pen moves across the paper. I’ve seen this before. It’s the same thing I do.
We spend forty minutes on mathematics.
I ask questions with known answers and questions without. He explains clearly, patiently, and somewhere around minute twenty, the wall starts to develop hairline cracks, not because I’m pushing but because he’s teaching and teaching is where he lives.
I learn things, in those forty minutes. A neat trick for bounding an integral from below when the upper bound’s stuck.
A way of thinking about convergence that is not in the textbook he wrote and taught from, because he has moved on from it since and never updated the text.
A one-line aside about a problem in number theory, he says, was the reason he applied to Cambridge, which is more biographical information than he has given me in six weeks, and which he gives me because we are discussing the relevant function.
He has forgotten, for three seconds, who he is sitting across from.
He remembers. I watch him remember. He fixes his eyes on the paper, and the next sentence comes back in the teaching voice.
But the forty minutes were mine.
I bend my head over problem four, writing. Peripheral vision is his favourite blind spot. His attention drifts downward. To the chain at my neck, the collar of my t-shirt, my skin. He thinks I can’t see.
He rolls his left sleeve up. The writing side.
One fold. Two.
The freckle near the wrist I haven’t earned the right to know about. I look at the whiteboard.
‘So if the epsilon condition fails,’ I say, ‘the whole proof collapses?’
‘Exactly. Which is why you need a contradiction.’
‘I need a contradiction.’ I finish it before he does. Just the thought arrives, and my mouth follows, and his expression does that thing again. The recognition. Last week’s look, before the wall went up, the same look, now from behind it. Trying to get through.
‘Yes,’ he says. Quiet. ‘Proof by contradiction.’
We sit with that for a second. Two.
Smiling would break it, pushing would shatter it. I let the mathematics do what my body’s been doing for four weeks, and the mathematics is worse because the mathematics is honest, and he can’t dismiss it as a student with a crush and tight jeans.
‘Right.’ He shuffles the pages. Stacks them. The gesture of a session ending, except the session has ten minutes left, and he’s cutting it short, and we both know why.