Chapter 31
31
It had started slowly. A drip that became a deluge. The first email was from one of my Highgate mothers, saying her son didn’t need tutoring anymore. Then, two weeks ago, a Hampstead student texted to say her parents had found her a different tutor, no more explanation than that. The third email, last week, was from the counselor at the Highgate School. She said the headmistress had reevaluated after-school programming, and they no longer had funding for my SAT study group. When I reminded her that the students paid cash for the study group, not the school, I got no reply.
Rumors about me had obviously found their way to the headmistress. I slammed my laptop shut, thinking again of Faye’s Facebook blast. There were only a handful of years between the Highgate friends I’d had and the Highgate students I tutored. This place was small; people had always talked. Probably, I was the talk now.
Liv’s roommates had agreed that I could stay on their living room couch, with the understanding that it would be temporary, and that I would keep all my things in her room. Being gone during the day was my own rule. If I was hardly there, if I was just someone who dragged wrinkled bedding into the living room every night, maybe they wouldn’t notice that it had already been six weeks.
Every day I woke in the dark to shower, so I wouldn’t interrupt anyone’s morning routine. Liv said I was vastly overestimating their personal hygiene, but I knew she was glad I tried to be scarce. She liked her house and her roommates, and I didn’t want to endanger that for her.
I tried to leave by eight at the latest, and I always came home late. My manager at the Garage had graciously taken me back, so I was bartending nights again, on top of teaching and tutoring my remaining students.
In between jobs, my daytime home was the British Library—where I was today, where Tess had taken me, all those months ago. My dissertation advisor, Professor Randolph, had helped me get approved to use the reading rooms: large, white, glass-walled, monitored by an attendant who would allow in nothing but books, pencils, laptop, and water, all in a clear plastic bag. Everything else, your regular life, had to be left in a locker room in the basement. I could be nothing but a scholar and a reader here. I loved it. I would’ve slept here if they let me.
I was done with research, just writing now. Distilling the thoughts and quotes and connections I’d put together from months of slow, methodical reading: all of Austen’s novels, and then the much-later authors who’d also used that plot of a young woman traveling or transplanted as a lens to examine class, money, and belonging in society. Whenever I had a quote or reference that felt incomplete or out of context, a quick search in the library’s online catalog would offer up a biography, criticism, or social history. I could request it, and within the hour, the book would be delivered to my reading room. I could close that open loop right away. Like the library itself was part of my process, an active assistant whenever I needed it.
Every day, when I came and went, I envied the library staff; I envied their permanence here. My dissertation was due at the end of August, just two months from now. If I succeeded, got my visa to stay, I might stop by here occasionally to see a new exhibit, but my time as a small cell in this beating heart would be over.
Whenever I thought about this, it was Tess I wanted to tell. She would understand: the spirit of the place, the depth of the work, the desire to make a life in it, somehow. It hadn’t been hard to see how dearly she wanted back into that world, when we talked. Was it a wound I’d reopened, or, maybe, had helped to heal? She had never replied to my text, or to the apology letter I’d sent a few weeks ago, but I understood that. I hadn’t expected her to. That wasn’t why I’d written.
At two, I got my things from the locker room and went out onto the library’s brick plaza to eat the crumpled sandwich I’d made at home. It had rained that morning, but the sun was out now, and it was warm, so I found a dry spot to sit on the low wall. The sun felt healing. End of June, a year since I’d arrived. At least I was still here.
My phone vibrated—Professor Randolph. We’d only emailed.
“Anna, I’ve just had a call from the bursar’s office,” he said. “About your tuition.”
My stomach plummeted. I put the sandwich back in my bag.
“I’ve been sending them money,” I said, the dry edge of panic obvious in my voice. “Every week. As much as I can.”
Silence on the line.
I stood, started to pace. Every paycheck I got went straight to Queen Mary. It had been the only thing I could think to do—a way to show them I was committed to paying, committed to staying. And Professor Randolph was calling to tell me it wasn’t enough.
Finally, he said, “They say they’ll drop you from the program unless you pay the whole of your balance this month.”
All the air left my lungs. I could not answer.
“Am I correct in thinking that will not be possible?”
He suspected, then, how dire my situation was. He’d given me high marks on an essay for his class on writing from the East End—the historically working-class, immigrant part of London. Books and stories of people struggling and striving. Now he knew for certain why those books had resonated with me. I’d had to ask him for an extension, back in May, admit I’d lost my housing suddenly.
I scraped together the air to speak. “I work as a tutor and a teacher. I have regular, good income. I just can’t make one large payment. It’s impossible.”
“Can your parents help?”
“My mother’s dead,” I said, too tired to put any spin on it. “My father can’t support me financially. Or in any other way. I’m on my own here.”
“I was afraid that might be the case,” Professor Randolph said with another heavy sigh. This was all far outside his job description. “Is there anyone who would lend you the money? If you could just make one big payment—even if it wasn’t the whole balance—I think that might help.”
Theo would do it, of course. Even though I wasn’t speaking to him, he would. Gladly. I would never ask him.
“Maybe I could if— There’s a private school in North London. They owe me thousands of pounds.” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. “But they’ve been giving me the runaround for months. I’m not sure they’ll ever pay me.” I laughed harshly. “Actually, I’m not sure they ever intended to.” No wonder they’d been happy to grant such a high fee for my class. I’d emailed and called endlessly, stopped by every week to try to corner the headmaster. Last week I’d had a particularly chilly brush-off from the secretary; she said I was taking up too much of her time. I told her they’d been wasting my time for months.
Professor Randolph hummed into the mouthpiece, weighing our options. “Well, that doesn’t sound terribly promising, but I know you’re a smart young woman. You see what you can do about that school, and I’ll see what I can do about this one.”
“Is there a process for something like this?”
“Well, no, but I can make some calls around the department, make some noise up the ladder, provost and so on. Make clear that the English department believes you should be allowed to continue in the program, as long as you’re keeping up with a regular payment plan. They’ll have some sway with the bursar.”
I knew I should say thank you, profusely, many times, but those weren’t the words that came out. “You would do all that?”
I was not his best student, not the hardest working, nor the smartest, nor the most insightful in class. Apart from that East End essay, which had hit close to home, I hadn’t excelled beyond my classmates.
Randolph paused, and I could picture him as he was in class—gathering his thoughts, carefully, for a solemn pronouncement. “Anna, your recent work has been a reminder to me. How important it is to have a broad mix of students in a classroom like mine, where people arrive with their own individual readings of texts, readings impacted so powerfully by their backgrounds and experiences.” Another thoughtful pause. “Not having your voice in those conversations harms all of us, not just you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you. I appreciate whatever you can do. I won’t miss a payment.”
“Good. That’s essential. Now, am I right in assuming you hope to stay in the UK after you graduate? You’re hoping for the post-study work visa?”
Maybe I wasn’t the first desperate international student he’d helped. “That was my plan, yes.”
“Then you’d better make sure this dissertation of yours is solid stuff. That visa requires a degree in good standing,” he said gravely. “And we won’t be able to talk our way out of that one.”
I tried to eat my sandwich on the Tube, but it just caught in my throat. I was humming with nerves, going to shake down the secretary at Muswell Hill Academy one last time. I could not leave there without a check. I had an after-school class to teach at St. Aloysius’ in two hours, but that wasn’t far from Muswell Hill.
The Academy was conspicuously exclusive, surrounded by a high, century-old stone wall. A moss-covered archway formed the entrance, complete with an imposing gate that opened if you were staff, or if your name was on the gateman’s list. At the guardhouse, I handed over my ID and he ran it down the page, once and then twice.
“I know you’re on here somewhere,” he said. “Seen you before.”
“I taught here a few months ago.” I nodded. And stopped by every week for a month asking to be paid for it.
“Let me make a call then, who knows. Back in a mo,” he said, disappearing inside the stone guardhouse.
After a minute, I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket. Hoping it was Randolph with good news already, I answered without looking.
It was not Randolph. It was not good news.
It was Grant, my supervisor at Kramer, calling to fire me.
He’d received a tip from a school—probably Highgate—warning that I’d been involved in some kind of con. Grant, I knew, couldn’t care less about morality. But the call revealed that I’d been teaching on my own, poaching clients that could have been Kramer’s, in violation of their noncompete clause. In order to collect damages, they’d be “retaining” my final paycheck.
I ended the call, but my mouth hung open, ready to retort, my anger hot and liquid and pulsing through each limb. I knew I’d broken my contract by taking on my own students. What choice had I had, though, living on what Kramer paid me? I could still feel the pinpricks of nervous sweat on the train to Brighton, desperately hoping my trick with the train ticket would get me to my class at Roedean. It felt like all of this, everything that had happened, had started that morning.
I was still shaking when the man returned and handed me my ID. “I’m very sorry, miss,” he said. “Can’t let you in.”
“But you know me.”
“Secretary says you’re barred.”
“I’m barred? ” I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. “Why?”
He shook his head apologetically. “It’s all above my paygrade, you know. What they do in the headmaster’s office.”
I thought I would burst into tears, but a harsh laugh was all that came out. “Above my paygrade, too, I guess, since they won’t pay me anything at all.”
“Still, best you go on now, before they make trouble. Good afternoon, miss.” He ducked back into his guardhouse, shutting the door with a click.
In a sort of daze, I turned and walked to the end of the street. A bus stop; I sat. Dropped my book bag on the bench next to me. My body felt strange. I wasn’t flesh and blood and bone; I was fury and indignation and desperate, all-consuming panic.
This was not a clerical error. I was being disposed of. This, just like my Kramer firing, was punitive, for my hubris: the system cleansing itself of me. I’d been writing about it earlier, in my dissertation. Henry James. So many of his fish-out-of-water women ended belly-up, punished for stepping outside the order of things, or thinking the order might not apply to them.
This was how the world worked. There was a hierarchy. I’d served my purpose to the system, used up my usefulness. Kramer would keep my paycheck; Muswell Hill Academy would not pay me. I’d need a miracle to get what I was owed here. They knew I had no power. They knew I sat miles below them, down here at rock bottom.
I’d never be able to pay my tuition without my Kramer students, without this payment. Bartending barely covered food and Tube fare. The dissertation I was so proud of would not be read. I would not get my degree. My visa expired in four months.
Things had gone badly here. There was no denying it. Probably it would be smart to leave, settle somewhere less expensive, less disastrous. That’s what my father would say. Probably Henry James would agree. It’s what I’d done last year—left when I couldn’t see a way forward.
With a low rumble of complaint, a bus crested the hill and pulled up to my stop. Two people got off at the back, but the driver slid the front door open anyway and looked at me.
The bell rang back at the Academy, faintly, and I turned toward the sound. It was profoundly familiar to me, after a year of classes, of teaching the hundreds of teenagers who had passed into and out of my days—bright-eyed or bored, doing what they had to do to escape to America. But I couldn’t imagine leaving behind this beautiful, brutal, manic city that had printed itself on the inside of my soul from my first day up on Parliament Hill, the whole of it unfurled below me like a road map.
“Well, are you going?” the driver called out.
And I laughed. What else could I do? Even in terms of metaphors, it was a little heavy-handed. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not going.” The bus was off in a gush of exhaust before I could finish my sentence.
London was mine, and I wasn’t going to give it up. Not because I couldn’t go home, but because I couldn’t give in. Not to this system designed to use me up, then throw me out like yesterday’s Evening Standard.
I wanted to wake up here every day, even if it was on Liv’s tiger-striped couch. Descend the grimy stairs of Finsbury Park station, down into the airless tunnels, while the fruit seller outside sang the day’s inventory to an invented tune. I wanted to finish out my long, exhausting, wonderful days at the British Library. And then come home and pay the man at Woody’s for his mandatory baklava. And on Sundays, sit on the damp grass with my friends, warmed by the setting sun and the canned gin and tonics.
If I wanted to stay, I needed help. I needed that payment. I couldn’t afford a lawyer, and I also couldn’t afford to wait for a lengthy civil process, but maybe there were other ways. Maybe I knew someone who could tell me what my options were. Not a lawyer yet, but close to it.
It wasn’t a miracle I needed. It was Callum.