Chapter 27 #2
Monday, Tuesday. I think it’s Wednesday. The fairy lights under the connecting wall glow at night and go dark at dawn, and that’s the only clock that works because my phone is face down on the desk where I put it after the fourteenth time I checked.
I don’t eat. Femi texts, Allan texts. Ron texts. I look at Ron’s name on the screen, I turn the phone over. Watch the fairy lights.
The photos are still on my phone. The ones from October, Facebook, his department page, and I saved them.
I scroll through them at 3 am. His face in the blue light. The one from the department webpage where he’s in a blazer and looks utterly professional, untouched, immune.
My dick does nothing.
The body knows. Before the brain, before the tears. It counts the cost: sleep that doesn’t come. Food that doesn’t register. Desire, gone.
I lie in the narrow bed. This emptiness has a shape.
Thursday. Femi.
He doesn’t knock. The door opens, and he’s standing there with a Tesco bag in one hand and three days’ worth of silence on his face.
The same joggers since Monday, hair that’s given up on direction, the pallor of ceiling stains and phone screens. He sees all of it.
‘Right,’ he says. He walks in. Puts the bag on the desk. Sits on the floor next to the bed.
Doesn’t say are you okay. Doesn’t say anything. Just sits. Unpacks the bag: sandwich, crisps, a bottle of water, and a Mars bar. Lines them up on the carpet like an offering.
He is doing this. A knot in my throat. Close enough.
‘Eat,’ he says. ‘Then we’ll talk.’
I eat the sandwich. It tastes of nothing, but I eat it because Femi is watching, and the watching is the only structure my day has had since Monday. Enough.
Then I talk.
The whole thing. This one starts from the lecture theatre, from the hands and the marker, from the warm-up problem I solved before his pen stopped moving, and I didn’t raise my hand.
Femi listens. Doesn’t interrupt. He reacts—surprise when I describe the first office hour. The unreadable expression when I tell him about Vienna and Hugo and the courtyard. He knew some of it.
‘He said he’s the worst thing that ever happened to me.’
I hear my own voice. Flat. Shaped like his because they are his.
Femi doesn’t speak. Long enough that I think maybe he agrees.
‘Is he?’
A question that wants an answer.
I think about it. Properly.
I think about the warm-up challenge I solved in my head and didn’t raise my hand.
I think about the four days I spent in the halls doing nothing. Doing anything would have meant staying, and staying would have meant trying.
I think about every lecture I didn’t pay attention to, every opportunity I didn’t take, every moment where the talent sat dormant like a fire under wet wood.
I think about the man who saw the fire.
‘No.’ My voice. No performance, no deflection, just truth. ‘He’s the first person who made me want to be myself. Maybe even better than what I am.’
Femi’s grip is warm. Solid.
‘Then don’t let him make this decision for you.’
Friday afternoon. An email from the Mathematics Department.
Dear Mr Carrick, pending the outcome of the Review, your supervision allocation for the upcoming term has been transferred to Dr Pemberton.
Please acknowledge receipt. Three lines.
No subject beyond a reference number. A name I’ve never heard because Pemberton teaches financial maths and runs a mile from anything structural.
The email sits open on the laptop while I read it again—a supervisor I didn’t choose. A module path was rewired because two people shared a bed. Acknowledge receipt. The polite verb for your case is live and the machine is moving.
I acknowledge it. Received. One word. Send.
Then the laptop closes, and the ceiling goes back to being the only fixed point in the room.
Three weeks. That’s how long it takes for the Review Panel to reconvene.
Three weeks of corridor silence and postgrads who won’t meet my eye and marks that exist in a kind of institutional limbo, not withdrawn, not confirmed, suspended in the white space of a process that refuses to end.
Three weeks during which Whitmore, it turns out, has made a phone call to a retired Cambridge algebraist who owes him a favour and has nothing left to lose.
The review panel is in the same room. Whitmore is behind the desk.
But there’s a third person this time—older, smaller, white hair that’s decided independently of its owner to go in four directions at once: Professor Merton, pure mathematics.
I’ve never had him as a lecturer, but I’ve read two of his papers.
Clean. No wasted steps, no showing off, just the route from premise to conclusion.
He’s reading my exam papers. Has been reading them for ten minutes while Whitmore shuffles and the laptop woman types. Merton is concentrating.
I sit. Hands on thighs, pressing down.
‘Mr Carrick.’ Whitmore. ‘As you know, this review was initiated to determine the integrity of your academic work.’
‘I know why I’m here.’ Tired. Three weeks ago, the boy was afraid. This one has already lost everything.
‘These solutions.’ Merton. It’s the first time he’s spoken.
Voice like gravel and tea and forty years of Cambridge common rooms. He holds up a page—my page, my handwriting, the proof I wrote at 2 am while the bloke next door maintained his schedule.
‘The approach to the eigenvalue problem in section three.’
I wait.
‘This isn’t taught.’ The glasses slip. The gaze over the rims carries heat. The heat of recognition. ‘Where did you learn this technique?’
‘I didn’t learn it. I saw it in my head.’
‘Most undergraduates brute-force this section.’ Merton taps the paper with one finger. ‘You skipped nearly two pages of standard working.’
Whitmore looks at me like this is the problem. Like omission itself is suspicious.
‘Because they weren’t necessary.’
Silence.
Merton leans back slightly. Interested now in a way that feels dangerous.
‘Explain.’
I look at the proof. My proof. The shape of it settles in my head again immediately, every line connected to the next.
‘The matrix already tells you where it wants to collapse,’ I say. ‘Once you see the symmetry, the intermediate steps are just bookkeeping.’
‘You saw that during the exam?’ Whitmore asks.
‘I saw it before I finished reading the question.’
Merton’s eyes sharpen over the rims of his glasses. Not disbelief. Recognition.
‘And nobody taught you this approach?’
‘No.’ I shrug once. ‘I just knew the proof was wasting motion.’
Merton goes very still.
‘Good God,’ he says quietly.
He stares.
‘These solutions aren’t just correct.’ He puts the page down. ‘This is raw talent. Elegant. Pure.’
Elegant. Laurence’s word.
Whitmore closes the folder. ‘Your results are confirmed, Mr Carrick. No evidence of external influence. Your marks stand.’
I nod. Stand. The chair scrapes, and for once, the sound doesn’t bother me.
‘Mr Carrick.’ Merton. I turn. He’s holding my exam paper like Laurence held the marker; like an instrument, not a prop. ‘Come and see me next term. I’d like to discuss your options.’
Options. A word with doors in it.
Outside. The steps of the maths building. The air is cold, the clean kind. Sharp enough to wake you up.
My phone. I dial Laurence’s number. It rings, voicemail. His voice, recorded, the one for strangers, and I hang up because the thing I need to say can’t be said to a machine.
The campus. Students crossing paths, heading to lectures, carrying coffees, living the ordinary choreography of a Tuesday afternoon. I walk through them. Nobody stops talking when I pass. The whispers have moved on. They always do.
I defended myself today. Defended the fact that my mind works this way, and nobody can take it away—small and old and mine.
The wind picks up. I zip my jacket tight.
My phone screen is dark. No messages.
The proof confirmed, and the one person who’d understand what it means in the mouth of an old professor isn’t—
I put the phone away. Walk. The narrow bed is still waiting.
Feet on concrete. Moving away from the maths building, away from the campus, away from the flat in Chorlton I can’t go back to.
Moving towards Fallowfield and the narrow bed and the girl next door’s fairy lights and the knowledge that I’ve been unmade.