Chapter 26 #2
Femi finds me behind the library, which is where I go when the building itself has become the enemy.
There’s a bench here that faces the car park. Maximum ugliness, zero foot traffic, the place where people go to cry. I’m not crying. I’m doing the thing Carrick men do instead of crying. Face set, breathing through the nose.
‘I’ve been looking everywhere.’ He sits. Doesn’t ask permission. Femi’s never needed permission for proximity—asking would give me the option of saying no, and I’m grateful not to have that choice.
‘It’s out. All of it. You and Dr Haldrey. Everyone’s—’ He stops. ‘It’s everywhere, Ewan. Someone told the department.’
Ron doesn’t slam. He builds. Methodically. The anonymous complaint form is buried three clicks deep. Or a phone call, or an email. Whatever tool the institution provides for turning love into procedure.
And Salgari. Probably. Two pathways converging on a single weekend, because institutions grind until someone hands them a reason to move fast, and I’d handed two people reasons. Ron submitted the form, and Salgari spread the whisper.
‘I’m in love with him, Femi.’
Between us on the bench, in the car park, in the rain. I’ve said it to Ron in a living room and said it to myself in the dark. Saying it to Femi is different. This one doesn’t need to justify anything—just state.
He nods. Slow.
‘I’m with you.’ Three words with no caveats, no but you should’ve told me, or what were you thinking? His hand on my arm, heavy, warm, undoes the knot behind my ribs.
I nod. Don’t speak. Manchester is doing its thing overhead, and my brother, probably, my brother, has—
‘I’m with you,’ Femi says again. Like once wasn’t enough.
Two o’clock. Laurence goes into the Head of Department’s office. I’m sitting in the corridor pretending to read a paper on stochastic processes.
The door closes—just me, the flickering strip light, a mental health poster, and forty minutes.
Forty minutes, the door opens.
Laurence comes out, focusing on the floor. Then he looks up. White. Drained. I can see the tremor in his grip from twelve feet away because I know that touch. He sees me, registers, files, walks past, and brushes against me, and I feel it everywhere.
Later, I learned what it cost him. Recusal from my module, effective immediately.
Offer of academic leave for the rest of the term, which Laurence declined instead of accepting because the Review Panel wants him reachable.
The paper trail now carries his own signature at the top, which was always the point: better to sign your own name than have someone else write it for you.
Wednesday. An email at 11:23. Subject line: Mathematics Review Panel - Initial Assessment. The file opens at 14:51. I know because Femi’s mate knows someone in admin. Two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon: someone’s opened our folder.
By four, they’ve requested transcripts. Course marks, module assessments, and supervision logs. Everything with his name adjacent to mine, pulled into a file with a reference number that turns two people into a case.
Thursday. A different office. A different man behind the desk.
Professor Whitmore, Mathematics Review Panel.
His authority is a cardigan: rumpled, comfortable, non-negotiable.
Wire glasses. There is a tea stain on his tie.
Behind him, a woman I don’t recognise with a laptop and the resigned posture of an involuntary minute-taker.
‘Mr Carrick.’ Whitmore gestures at the chair. Mr hits wrong. Too formal, distance weaponised as procedure. ‘Thank you for coming in.’
I didn’t come in. I was summoned. There’s a difference, but correcting a review panel on semantics seems like a suboptimal strategy, so I sit and press down because the alternative is letting them shake, and I won’t give this room that.
‘We’re conducting a review of your assessed work for the academic year.
’ He opens a folder. My folder. My work, my exams, my solutions.
They’re spread across his desk like evidence.
Which is what they are. ‘Given the circumstances, the university needs to assure itself that your results reflect your own ability without any external influence.’
External influence.
Laurence’s hands on a whiteboard. Laurence’s voice saying you have a rare mind. Elegant. Laurence, who never once told me an answer, never hinted at a question, never did anything except see me and believe what he saw.
‘My results are my own.’ My voice comes out flat at first, but I hear it tightening. ‘I know exactly how this looks. I also know I can sit any exam you put in front of me and get the same results.’
Whitmore watches me over his glasses.
‘We’ve reviewed your A-level results, your admissions data, and your coursework from modules taught by other lecturers.’ He turns a page. ‘Your earlier performance was inconsistent.’
‘Because I wasn’t trying.’ The words come out sharper than I intend. ‘Dr Haldrey is the first person who actually expected something from me.’
Silence.
‘He didn’t give me marks. He made me work for them.’ I lean forward now. ‘Give my papers to anyone in this department. Give me another exam. An oral. A closed-book paper. Anything you want. I can do the maths.’
‘The review is procedural, not punitive.’ Soft voice, firm sentence. ‘Your work will be independently assessed.’
Whitmore closes the folder. The sound lands like a verdict.
‘We’ll be in touch.’
I stand—the chair scrapes. I walk out.
The corridor, strip light, still flickering. The mental health poster has gained a blue moustache since Monday.
Outside. Rain. The asterisk is already forming.
The steps, wet concrete, rain on my face. Hands open at my sides. Not closing.
Saturday. Two days after Whitmore. The phone on my chest buzzes, and I look because the phone is better than the ceiling.
Femi. Samosas incoming. Don’t argue.
The date at the top of the screen. 17 May.
I stare until the number stops being a number.
May the seventeenth. The date on his passport read upside-down the morning he pulled it out. The day lodged without intention, because collecting small data about him had become a habit I hid.
Today.
Thirty-two today.
I sit up too fast. Blood does the wrong thing. I grip the mattress edge.
Thirty-two minus nineteen. Thirteen. The three months are done. He’s thirty-two, and I am not in his kitchen, and nobody is cooking anything, and the pen he gave me in February is zipped inside the bag at the foot of this bed because I haven’t been able to look at it for a week.
I stand up. Wallet.
Piccadilly. Stationer’s on Oldham Street because pens were the vocabulary.
I stand in front of a case of fountain pens for maybe eleven minutes.
Everyone is wrong, too shiny. Too new. Wrong-handed.
The girl behind the counter asks if I need help, and I say no, and she reads my face and stops asking.
Out with nothing.
Secondhand bookshop near the university. Analysis textbooks, he owns them. The dedications inside other people’s copies aren’t his dedications. Nothing fits.
Nothing.
A bakery window with Happy Birthday in blue icing on a round chocolate sponge, and the thought arrives flat: I can’t hand Laurence Haldrey a supermarket cake on his thirty-second.
I walk on.
Back at the tram stop with empty hands and a pocket full of coins I didn’t spend.
Don’t call. Don’t text. Any message today is a message about today, and today is a day he isn’t going to let me touch.
The rain starts.
Thirty-two and I am the stain next to his career, and this is the birthday I am giving him—nothing. A stationer’s, I walked out of. A cake I didn’t buy. A silence that is the most considered thing I have ever tried to offer him.
Fallowfield tram. Halls. I unzip the bag at the foot of the bed and take the pen out for the first time in a long time. He bought it knowing how I hold things—knowing how I move.
I uncap it. The notebook on the desk is open to a proof I was doing eight days ago, the proof now looking like a thing that doesn’t belong to anyone.
One line in the margin. Small.
Happy birthday.
The message stays. There is nowhere to send it.
Cap the pen, put it down.
The stain on the ceiling. The bed, the dark coming in.