Читать книгу Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall - Suzette Mayr - Страница 6

The washing machine dings in its tiny closet.

The washing machine dings a second time, clunks, sounds out three half spurts, then clunks one more time. Edith pushes herself away from her desk, slings open the washing machine door. Her clothes slump into a soggy pile, scattered with chunks of undissolved laundry soap.

She needs a new washing machine. She has no time to buy a new washing machine. She wonders how anyone ever finds the time to make a major purchase like a washing machine, and how she can become one of these people. So serene, so capable. She has so much work to do: her Academic Achievement Overview, course outlines, a unit assessment report, emails. She slams closed the washing machine, wedges herself back into her desk chair. The washing machine simmers, clicks. Sick and resentful. She hoists herself up from her nest of books and papers and presses every single button one after the other on the control panel. She clicks every button exactly ten more times. The machine pings, clinks, thumps, but the clothes refuse to move, the water refuses to gush.

She pads back to her office. A crooked stack of papers on her desk slides, fans, flutters to the floor.

Screw it.

She scoops up her car keys and screeches off in her cracked-up red Ford Taurus to Bull Head Shopping Centre to buy a new machine. Her car buzzes past the University of Inivea campus, but she refuses to look in that direction, Crawley Hall crouched near the edge of the highway, its boxy presence chiding her like an un-fun aunt.

Fifteen minutes later, Edith bypasses the endless escalator chain that leads to the household appliances floor, seduced instead by the starburst of perfumes and jewellery on the main floor. The perfume sample on her left wrist smells like vanilla pudding, her right wrist wooden petunias. She adores them both but cannot make up her mind. A pearl bracelet burbles at her in its blue velvet bowl. So refined. So Jackie O. So much money.

She jams her purse into her armpit, bullets for the escalator and the washing machines.

At the very last microsecond, she swerves.

Eighty-nine minutes later, Edith’s feet whine in their strapped loafers. Her shoulders slump. She stands, sixth in line, at the glass-and-white-quartz counter in P. T. Madden, the new women’s clothing store to the left of the caramel popcorn stand at the south end of the shopping mall. To the right of the faux-Victorian lotion shop that sells hand lotion for $125 a tube. A part of the mall she never visits, but her mother’s birthday looms. Edith wants to buy hand lotion made from avocado, goat’s milk, and Bali sea foam to spoil her mother, her mother’s hands rough as Brillo pads from so many years as a hairdresser, and her mother agrees once a year at her birthday to indulge in a bucket of caramel corn even though she has to take out her three false teeth to do so. Edith noticed a professor from the School of Drama and Philosophy in Edith’s university was browsing in P. T. Madden, so she zoomed in, sorted through hangers and geometrically folded stacks of clothing, then settled on three new blouses and a stiff cardigan. She knows the patterns are wrong; her mother’s always reminding her she doesn’t have the body type for patterns. – Your boobs turn patterns into porridge, Edith Lynn, her mother reminds her. Frequently.

When she was a teenager and she’d show off her new clothes to her father, he would tsk and down another cognac. – I’m not sure why, he’d say, – you gravitate to clothes that make you look like … a dining room table.

His daughter a porridgy, furniture-shaped disappointment.

Her parents’ wardrobes always so natty, so on point and properly symmetrical.

She shouldn’t be spilling money on clothes. She should be planted in front of her desk at home. Or in her Crawley Hall office, burrowing into her books and papers for her next conference, her next peer-reviewed article, like a proper professor. Or at the very least filling out her Academic Achievement Overview.

But Vivianne said she could shop. Said Edith should shop, as a reward to herself. One blouse has tiny navy-blue flowers clustered all over, like in a rock garden in a murder mystery where someone is about to get smacked from behind with a rusty, dirt-crusted shovel. But you can’t tell they’re flowers unless you’re extremely close. She loves their tediousness, the repetitiveness of their petals, stamens, leaves. She strokes the collar. The dry, textile fragrance. She deserves these clothes. For she is finally the author of a bona fide book.

Her heart flutters, like the pages of a discarded paperback. It took her nineteen years to write Taber Corn Follies: The Western Canadian Life Story of Beulah Crump-Withers, soon to be published by University of Okotoks Press, a William Kurelek prairie painting reproduction on the cover. Twelve years as a PhD student, seven as a professor, and just in time for this year’s Academic Achievement Overview. The giant diamond that will sit in the platinum, Times New Roman setting of her AAO. The pages being folded and glued likely at this very second on a massive printing press. She can’t wait for the buzz of the intercom in her condominium lobby, the mail carrier in his or her smart uniform asking her to sign for the cardboard package, her slicing open the package to copies of her very own book with her very own name on it, the pages smelling of coastal forest and binding glue, the covers shiny and perfect, then moistened with her tears of elation and success. Her discovery and revival of the lost work of Beulah Crump-Withers, former sporting girl, then housewife, prairie poet, maven memoirist, and all-round African-Canadian literary genius, finally complete.

She hugs the new clothes to her chest. Beulah.

The cardigan will drape long, like a cape with sleeves. An author’s cardigan.

Edith wonders if maybe she could somehow reboot her washing machine by unplugging it, then plugging it back in? If she runs a cycle without detergent or clothes, just hot water, maybe the machine will resurrect and return to her? She strokes the new clothes in her arms, their uncomplicated cleanness. It’s too bad she can’t phone Coral for washing machine repair advice. Coral would know.

The professor from Drama and Philosophy left the store almost forty-eight minutes ago, and Edith has no idea what she bought, but she estimates that all the other female professors who have published books wear long cardigans like this, or unstructured blazers that drop past the hips, or skirts that fall below the knee. Patterned blouses. She has never managed to dress au courant. She imagines she would be happier in the 1920s housewife clothes Beulah wore. Dresses recycled from sturdy, sprightly patterned flour sacks. A single, Sunday-best dress for special occasions. Her outfits always morph into ill-fitting costumes once she rolls her car up to the university campus, sits through meetings, pontificates in classrooms. But this year will be different. This year she will look like everyone else. With a book, she will be like everyone else. And finally Beulah will get her due and eventually settle into her place in the Canadian literary canon. This year will be perfect.

She tugs a credit card from her wallet, deposits the ironed folds on the counter, their buttons ticking on the glass. Her watch bangs the glass too: 3:03 p.m. This afternoon is drifting away from her.

A pair of fake pearl earrings, each pearl the size of a knuckle, perches on an oily faux-satin ball under the glass of the counter.

– I’ll need those too, she says. She taps her credit card on the glass. – And this scarf. Please.

She twitches a scarf from a stand on the counter, it waterfalls into her hands. She smiles at the clerk. The clerk shows Edith her teeth.

She could perhaps wear the scarf, an airy tulle thing with harlequin diamonds, around her neck. The pattern moves her, the cloudiness. But she never wears scarves. At best she might twirl around with it exactly once in her bedroom, pretending she’s Josephine Baker. But then it will likely just go in a drawer. Or she’ll tie it around the handle of the small suitcase she takes to conferences.

She needs the proper clothes to start the academic new year right. Her new psychologist told her to try it. – They don’t call it retail therapy for nothing, said Vivianne. – Back-to-school shopping isn’t just beneficial for children, she said, her voice rich and nutritious as an avocado on the other end of the line.

Edith has never met Vivianne in person, but she imagines her as an older black woman, with elaborate grey braids, round and wise as a fir tree. An older version of Beulah, but contemporary. Silver drop earrings. Or old Roman coins. A stuffed owl on a perch in the background.

Edith will continue filling out her Academic Achievement Overview and finish her third course outline tonight. Also write the first draft of an abstract for a conference she should attend next year.

Next Edith will buy shoes from Hangaku even though they don’t look that comfortable, verging on too architectural for human feet. All the fashionable female professors wear Hangakus. The distinctive hourglass-shaped heels. Edith learned about them last year when she finally broke down and asked a history professor in line at the IT help desk what they were. She scribbled the name down on the edge of a student’s essay, ripped the corner off the paper, and stuck it with a magnet to the fridge.

– Clothing is how you want the world to see you, said Vivianne. – See me, your clothes say. Look at who I am.

Edith will tighten up her marshmallow body too; she’s signed up for a Wednesday night Ballet for Beginners class at a ballet studio near her house, and she will do some kind of exercise at least once a week. Vivianne suggested she try a scheduled, regular fitness class to encourage her to balance her work and life. When Edith told Vivianne she enrolled in a hatha yoga class some years ago, bought a mat and everything, but thought it made her too twitchy and worried about inadvertently farting, Vivianne told her to try a class that didn’t seem like exercise and didn’t happen in a gym. Like a ballet class with the Inivea City Ballet Company. Or scuba diving.

Edith said, – I like watching ballet. I like to swim.

Vivianne said, – Excellent! So swim your heart out. The negative ions in the water will stimulate your happiness centre. The University of Inivea has an Olympic-calibre swimming pool, so you could slip in a swim before or after your day.

– But there’s never any time.

Vivianne cleared her throat, turned pages. No doubt in a notebook she uses to write down assessments of her patients. No doubt Vivianne’s fingers starred with silver rings and turquoise rectangles. A hippie earth goddess with multiple PhDs who begins each morning with a hundred fervent sun salutations.

– There’s time for anything if you make time, said Vivianne. – Time is an illusion. Think about the metaphors. Time spent, lost, wasted, behind the times, passing, keeping time. Time being made. What’s something you like to make, Edith?

– I like to … when I was a teenager I used to like making … matrimonial squares.

– Make your time the way you would make matrimonial squares. Time is your tool. Delicious.

– Time is my tool, Edith repeated. – Delicious.

– Time doesn’t own you. You own time.

– I own time.

– Yes!

– Yes.

– Make the time. Eat the time.

– Make the time. Eat the time … like matrimonial squares.

– You own yourself.

– I own myself.

Once upon a time, Edith’s PhD supervisor, Lesley Hughes, said, I own you. But that was a long time ago. And of course Lesley lied. Edith blots out the thought.

Vivianne always told Edith to forget about Lesley. Edith would fret about Lesley becoming an Endowed Chair at the university, worrying about how she would cope with being in the same room, the same building, as Lesley, day after day.

– That’s a history best left interred, Vivianne’s voice would cluck from the phone. – Move on with your life. Let Lesley move on with hers. You are a Philosophiae Doctor. You have tenure. You are not her puppet. She is not your puppet master. Bulldoze away that room. There. We’ve bulldozed it.

In her brand-new Hangakus with their hourglass heels, Edith stilt-walks past the Victorian lotion and the caramel corn shops without stopping, wobbles past the escalator leading up to the rows and boring rows of white and stainless steel refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, and dryers, her hand swinging a cloth bag with its P. T. Madden logo, another bag with the Hangaku brand swirl holding her old loafers, her wrists smelling like imaginary gardens. She bought a bottle of the perfume that smells like vanilla pudding too, so her neck smells new. She attempts to stride, swinging her bags, like a proud professor, about to swing into a new academic year. Bold, brilliant, and fresh as a girl in a tampon commercial.

The shoes still stiff, she admits, the odd heels like walking with spurs. But all shoes need some breaking in, right?

She piles her bags into the Taurus.

Riding a wave of self-congratulation, she tops up the gas tank at the Novacrest station at the east end of the mall parking lot, the clicks of the litre indicator matching the clicks of happy retail-therapy self-righteousness. Her credit card bloats just a little bit.

She revs around the concrete silos of the shopping centre parking lot to the ramp leading onto the highway, her right Hangaku heel digging in, her car bullying its way into belligerent traffic. She motors past the campus, past Crawley Hall, barely registering its brutalist gloom. She drives five more minutes, then clicks to turn left toward the thicket of brand-new condominiums where she lives.

On her quilted bedspread at home, the P. T. Madden bag crinkles as she slides out the clothes in their tissue paper envelopes. She unfolds the first envelope. She holds the navy-blue flowers up to the fading afternoon light through the window.

Sweet william. Or … lobelias.

She peels off the P. T. Madden sticker on the second envelope. Black sweet williams or lobelias.

The third envelope. Olive-green lobelias or sweet williams.

She slides her hands into the armholes of the navy-blue blouse. Buttons it closed one by one from her throat to her lower belly.

The mirrored closet door reflects the petals back at her. She smooths her hands down the sides. Strange little florets. No one will pierce this armour.

Not Lesley, her old supervisor.

Not even Coral. Her former, now returning, colleague. Her sometime ex-inamorata. Her friend.

Whom Vivianne told her to stay away from. – Sometimes, Vivianne told her, her earrings tinkling, – sometimes too much passion is not good for a person. Occasionally, said Vivianne, – in certain circumstances, a person’s unchecked imagination, her misdirected intelligence as it were, can lead her on a journey into an unhealthy place.

– But then maybe I should try to help her?

– Or you could just stay away from her, said Vivianne, sounding like she was smacking her lips. – Not let her speculations and imaginings splash onto you and distract you, jeopardize your reputation as a scholar heading into mid-career under a newer, more energized headship. This next round of your Academic Achievement Overview. You’re not … ah … the most prolific academic, Edith.

Edith’s right eyelid had twitched so hard she’d clapped her hand to her eye. The eyelid bucked twice again under her fingers. Vivianne paused.

– You have a book coming out soon, and kudos for that. But you can’t afford distractions. So that means you have to excel at many things, which you certainly do, I assure you. You just have to excel at a few other things too.

Edith could hear Vivianne’s likely Madeira Wine lipstick smile on the other end of the phone. Why was Vivianne being so cruel?

– But if you watch your p’s and q’s, maintain your work-life balance, stay out of the company of troublemakers like Coral, well, that definitely helps in the long run. Avoid negativity. Correction: flee negativity. I’ve witnessed the positive effects with other clients from the university.

– You really think so?

– I know so. Say this with me: I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select its furniture.

Edith had closed her eyes. She would do this right. She would make Vivianne proud of her.

– I am the architect of my own life, Edith said. – I build its foundations and select its fixtures.

– Furniture, said Vivianne.

– Furniture, repeated Edith.

– You, said Vivianne, – you, Edith, are the architect of your life. You don’t have to invite anyone into your house if you don’t want her there.

– You’re right. Thanks, Vivianne.

– You’re welcome, Edith. We’re at the end of our time now. Goodbye.

The phone clicked before Edith had the chance to say goodbye. Her appointments with Vivianne always end like this. The only disappointing thing about Vivianne.

She sits alone in her shiny condo. New clothes, new shoes, new smell, new tank of gas, but barricaded on every side by paper stacks, reports and reviews and letters she doesn’t want to write but should. Must.

She empties crusted clothes from inside the washing machine. Slams the door closed. Unplugs the washing machine cord, then plugs it back in. She programs an extrahot, extralong cycle on the control panel.

Water rushes into the empty machine, and Edith shoots her fists into the air in triumph.

She rustles back into sitting behind her desk. Clicks on the Academic Achievement Overview webpage button.

Oops! This page does not exist, the computer barfs.

Her email pings. An email from Coral. She remembers how bumpily they kissed that one time, their lips refusing to match.

Edith needs to find a new friend.

She unbuttons the top button of her new blouse.

The very next morning, the sun still stretching itself awake, Edith pulls her car into the parking lot by Crawley Hall, refusing to let the frowny building guilt her for working from home yesterday. She’d like to park by the Kinesiology building, but her expensive university parking pass applies only to her assigned space next to Crawley Hall. Unless she wants to pay the parking fee at the Kinesiology parking lot. Ten dollars and fifty-five cents when she’s already paid for a pass! Forget it. She would rather take the seven-minute shortcut through Crawley Hall to get to the pool.

She’ll scoot through Crawley Hall and be side-stroking through invigorating waters in no time. She shuts her eyes and, clutching her duffle bag of swim gear, dashes through the tight hallways, dives past empty classrooms with gaping, vacant student desks, turns corner after corner in the mini-labyrinth, doors groaning as she tugs them open, hissing as they ooze closed behind her. Left, left, right, then left, then left again, then a short flight of stairs, then a final right, then straight through. No direct routes in this building ever, but she’s memorized them all. She avoids the main lobby, determined that the building will not entice her up to her office, to the piles of unopened envelopes and the unread stack of journals she left on her desk two days ago, and the phony satisfaction that comes with shuffling through paper in her office so early in the morning. She’s not teaching yet; she doesn’t have to be here.

She wipes her nose with a disintegrating Kleenex as she run-walks, her nose suddenly dripping for no reason. She dumps the tissue in one of the overflowing garbage bins lined up in an already tight hallway and climbs the last short set of stairs to a tiny landing.

But this door’s stuck or locked, even though it has no keyhole. She tugs and heaves, pushes, and tugs again at the door, slaps it, huffs. Like the door resents her wanting to exercise and improve her life. She has psychic furnishings to buy for her psychic foundation. She contemplates the door, trying to ignore the odour emanating from the walls, the ceiling: dust, mould, or fossilized compost in a recycling bin. She sneezes. Pulls out a nearly fresh Kleenex from her bag. Maybe a mouse got trapped in a nearby vent and expired. She wonders if she should call Security to unlock the door. If she circles back out the building and takes the long way, she’ll miss the first ten minutes of lane swimming. If she phones Security, she’ll also miss the first ten minutes of lane swimming. She can’t let Vivianne down this way, this very first real day of being the architect of her life. She kicks the door with her runner.

Edith jumps when the door thuds open. Shoot! Maybe she broke the door. She hesitates in the doorway. The ceiling lights appear spotty with dust, as though they haven’t been cleaned in years, the insides of the light panels clotted with grime.

And in front of her a matchbox-sized landing, and yet another set of stairs, this time three steps leading down. She doesn’t recognize the landing. Or remember these stairs.

She’s travelled through every part of Crawley Hall since she started her job seven years ago, but this hallway looks unfamiliar, the stairs redundant – what kind of pointless architecture is this? Three steps leading up to a doorway with a tiny nothing of a landing, just to go three steps down again? She’s sure this design must violate some kind of building code. The lights grim, the corridor even narrower, if possible. Maybe it’s the eerily early hour? No matter, she’s late for swimming, and as she steps through the doorway, the door bangs closed hard into her shoulder.

She yelps in alarm, in pain. She rubs her shoulder as she steps carefully down the stairs. At the bottom, empty study carrels line the walls to the right and left of her, a single chair neatly tucked into each cubicle. She registers a flicker of movement at the end of the line of carrels, hears skittering, the far-off scrape of a chair. Probably students necking in the dark. But so early in the morning? Probably the same dorkmeisters who jammed the door closed so they could have their sex; she knows how sex ruins logic.

She starts to swing her bag to work the ache out of her shoulder as she walks, but swings too high once and almost slips, catches herself before she falls on the sparkly clean floor. The janitorial staff always polishes Crawley Hall’s floors until they glisten at the beginning of the school year. They must have already started for the fall semester. Last time she checked, the floor in her office still held last year’s scuffs and leftover grit from snow, now evaporated. No one’s emptied her office garbage can all summer, not since the spring Liberal Arts budget cut announcement, and her wastebasket brims with used bubble envelopes, old Cup-a-Soup containers, cellophane wrappers from journals, and cardboard coffee cups. But soon her wastebasket will be fresh and empty, perhaps it already is. The overcast light notwithstanding, this hallway gleams.

Silence has dropped like snowfall. She hears none of the white noise that insinuates itself everywhere else in the building: air vents, buzzy fluorescent lights, the distant ding of an elevator, the hum of a photocopy machine. Her sneaker squeaks violate the silence, as though she’s accidentally trespassed into a medieval chapel. Or a dungeon. The shiny silence makes her want to tiptoe. She peers every so often under the cubicles to see if she can unearth the student lovers.

Nothing but skinny metal chair legs. No sound but the memory of sound.

She jogs toward the dawning sunlight slanting through the window in the exit door. It says Push.

But the door pushes back. Locked.

Through the wire-meshed glass in the door, a jackrabbit on the lawn pulls at grass tufts with its teeth. Crawley Hall’s dawn shadow lies thick on the quad. The Kinesiology building twinkles only a hundred metres away.

She piles herself into the door, pushes and grunts, her bag clumping to the floor. She refuses to acknowledge this door’s refusal.

She spins and rams her back into the door, but this door is so locked it’s really just wall. She wipes her nose on the back of her hand. Rests her back on the door.

The hallway unspools ahead of her; her earlier rubber-soled footsteps are matte splotches dotting the floor’s oily and unrelenting cleanness.

She slings her bag over her shoulder and walks slowly back down the hallway, her sneaker soles squelching.

Her sneakers stop squeaking in the gloomy light. She stops. Hairs prickle awake on the back of her neck, her shoulders, her forearms.

Where is she?

The tidy carrels with their neat, tucked chairs are no longer neat. The chairs scatter themselves in her way, every one pulled askew and turned around willy-nilly from their cubicles.

Who moved the chairs? Without making a single sound?

She just wants to go for a damn swim. Why is exercising always so damn complicated? Now she has to deal with supernatural bullshit too? She’s always suspected something was off about this building. Coral used to say so too.

Time to leave, shortcut or no.

She wades between the parallel lines of study cubicles and their disordered chairs. She pushes and scrapes the flimsy chairs out of her way, rams herself through them. She refuses to register misplaced clusters of shadows under the cubicles, shadows that weren’t there earlier, shadows too small and numerous to be a single pair of mischievous or desperate lovers. A shining red eye – she swears it’s an eye – mirrors at her from a shadow under a cubicle.

She barrels toward the very first door – the door with the needless steps leading up only to stairs down the other side. But the steps on this side of the door, those steps that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, have disappeared. The floor all the way to the door gleams clear and flat and wide and shining.

She pushes away a cold drip of fear.

Fed up, she violently shoves herself into the door, ready for it to stick. The door whooshes open and she stumbles forward, panicked that she’ll tumble down the other set of stairs and snap her skull in half, shatter her knees. She stretches out her hands, lands on her palms – her hands and feet staggered on the steps – her bag thumping as it rolls down the steps. Excellent save. Her knees intact.

She stays crouched, panting, then gathers up her bag in her arms.

She scurries away toward a side door she knows leads to some outdoor nowheresville, but that hopefully will take her out. She turns a perfectly oiled handle, and the door bursts open.

A jackrabbit abruptly leaps away.

She gasps in fresh air.

A rush of dusty, dead-mousey air billows around her, announcing her to the outside world.

The door lolls open behind her.

The door yawns, moist air from inside the building soughing out the doorway. An inappropriately human sound.

She sways a little, her wrists still shocked, her shoulder bruised and aching, a new crick in the small of her back. Her synapses frizzled.

She has a feral desire to flee – hightail it for her Taurus, hurtle home, and collapse into bed wrapped inside two comforters. But she hasn’t swum for three years. Vivianne told her to choose her furnishings. She will not let anyone or anything else, some grumpy, sticky-doored building with a half-assed paranormal hallway, choose her furnishings.

Illogical. Irritating. Time-consuming. Her time consumed. A small black marble sticks to her left palm. A jackrabbit turd. She flicks at it until it unsticks, bounces, thocks into the grass. She looks back at the Crawley Hall door swinging listlessly, like a tooth, in the dim, grim doorway. She needs to call Vivianne.

No. She needs to make Vivianne proud.

She plods heavily, warily, the long way around Crawley Hall’s giant, protruding concreteness, past normal pine trees, along normal sidewalks past the library, past the students’ union building to the Novacrest School of Kinesiology building. The electronic front doors slide open and wait for her, like gentle, non-racist butlers. She enters the glamorous, state-of-the-art building, its brand-new, open-concept loveliness, and pool-chlorine and squash-ball smells enfold and embrace her.

Edith curls her toes on the pool’s edge, thirty-one minutes late for lane swimming. She snaps on her goggles and eases herself into the freezing chlorine soup. She thrashes out a single lap in the pool, then halts midway through the next lap, panting, choking for air. She paddles her arms and legs, floating in place, water sloshing in her earholes, waiting for her lungs to pump less frantically. Is she traumatizing her lungs by leaping into exercise so quickly? Shouldn’t she go home and rest after being gaslit by Crawley Hall and nearly assaulted by rows of chairs? She is not frightened, but so many jammed and locked doors certainly rattled her; obviously, witnessing possible paranormal phenomena is a distressing way to start the day. She doesn’t like having to believe in the supernatural, especially so early in the school year, and so early in the morning. She is a scholar, an intellectual. There has been no peer-reviewed, conclusive article published about the existence of the supernatural, but she also understands that some things can be unknown, some explanations still percolating and awaiting discovery. The first European scientists to examine a platypus thought it was fake, for goodness’ sake. Edith ducks her mouth under the water and blows bubbles.

The teenaged lifeguard busily texts, grimacing at something on her phone. The clock at the far end of the pool reads 7:01 a.m.

I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select its fixtures.

She bobs in the water, remembers her back-to-school shopping from the day before. So what if there’s a supernaturally contaminated hallway. The building’s old and contaminated with all sorts of things. Maybe she’s special and that’s why the hallway rearranged itself for her. She should have tried to communicate with whatever mysterious entity it was instead of running away like a goose. The tiny balloon of elation still hasn’t popped from the three new blouses hung side by side in her closet, the new cardigan tucked back into its tissue paper, and the new pair of Hangakus yin-and-yanged back into their cardboard box. She’s launching into a new academic year.

Edith inhales a giant breath and plops her face into the pool water, begins side-stroking slowly, softly bumping up and down in the ripples and waves of the swimmers in the adjoining lanes. An old man’s pale belly and spaghetti arms dipping in and out of the water with the breast stroke, his swimming trunks obscenely red and tiny. She thinks it’s Angus Fella, her colleague, but she’s not 100 percent sure. A woman in black with the body of a 1940s pinup girl shoots past like a penguin. Pimple-like protuberances nestle in the mint-coloured concrete of the pool floor. An acned landscape for the floating scraps of Band-Aids, an errant pair of swim goggles. Dark jellyfish made of hair.

Edith makes time. She bakes metaphorical matrimonial squares. She wraps them in metaphorical gold-and-silver paper and sends them as a metaphorical Just Because gift to her parents, to Vivianne, to Beulah.

She lurches her face through the water. Seven-thirteen a.m. Her goggles starting to fog.

She has no time for swimming. The semester starts in one week, September 4. She has course outlines and syllabi to prepare, essay questions and lecture notes to write and insert into PPT slides, monographs to decipher, a graduate student’s thesis chapter to red-pen, articles to cobble together, a conference presentation 6,000 words too long to jury-rig as best she can, a forty-three-page agenda and appendix about the CASC strategy to absorb for the next faculty meeting. Her next book to start drafting. Her AAO to fill out so she can prove her relevance for the next two years and avoid that awful circumstance of being refreshed by the dean.

When the jolly previous dean, with his waxed moustache and cowboy hat, awarded her tenure two years and seventy-five days ago, she believed that finally every day at her job would be Christmas Day, with spontaneously carolling students and her professor colleagues smiling at her and bestowing upon her bouquets of red and white flowers and pearly-bowed presents for no reason at all as she sailed down the halls, her healthy new self-possession shining a crystal-ball light. She wouldn’t have to worry about job security anymore, she could intellectually and even literally wear pyjamas to work every day and no one would care: she would be free! But post-tenure Elysium was a rabbit on a greyhound racetrack. This new dean, Dr. Phillip Vermeulen, with his extraordinarily hairy fingers and origami-crisp silk ties, brought in one and a half years ago, is part of the new EnhanceUs university plan. He was brought in to refresh the Faculty of Liberal Arts. He wanted to refresh Edith the moment he met with her for the first time and opened her file on his desk. Refresh the heck out of her, just like he refreshed Coral and the tinier departments, the same way he refreshed sections of Crawley Hall’s operational budget. He is white South African, which makes her nervous. What if he hates her because, well, because she’s a brown woman with prematurely drooping body and face parts? Although her roommate in graduate school was a white South African girl, and they regularly guzzled too many zombie cocktails together, holding each other’s hair back when they puked three times a weekend, every weekend. Misty sure could hold her booze. Really, the dean with his small, catlike head and fancy clothes just reminds Edith a bit too much of her father. Whom she loves, of course. You can’t not love your dad.

– I see here, Edith, Dean Vermeulen had said in their first meeting, his hairy fingers slithering through her file, his elbows on his desk and his cuffs rucked up so she could see his thick hairy wrists too, – that for two cycles in a row you’ve received only four Value Increments on your AAO.

She nodded. Her right eyelid spasmed. She pretended to scratch her eyebrow but really gave her twitching eyelid a poke. Edith had thought his accent was English the first time she heard him; he did not immediately correct people who mistook him for British.

– One more AAO cycle with a four VI would confirm your eligibility for the EnhanceUs Refreshment Strategy, said the dean, his index fingers parked in the middle of a page.

His back was to the window. The sun bleated from behind a knot of clouds, and the leather of the punching bag planted in the corner of his office glistened.

– I’ve been writing my book, she said, jamming her finger into her eyelid. – I’ve been trying to complete my book, and that’s why my publication record has appeared to slow down the past few years …

– You’re going to have to write that book and future books a lot harder, I’m afraid. This university is on track to be in the top 1 percent in the country in terms of excellence and globalization, but to do that we’re going to have to shed those who diverge from the EnhanceUs strategic plan. You understand, eh, Edith?

He cocked his head.

She spilled out of his office, her head a tumbleweed, her eyelid dancing a tarantella no matter how insistently she pressed it with the palm of her hand. How could she explain to him, explain properly, that her book, her tribute, her temple erected to Beulah Crump-Withers, had to be flawless? No one could rush this book. Not even her. Tears dribbled out from under her palm.

On her way out of the dean’s office she whammed her shoulder into Angus Fella, with his vodka-and-Vegemite breath. His hat jumped off his head and rolled partway down the hall. Combed-over strands of grey hair flopped in the wrong direction. She chased after his hat while he smoothed his hair. He resettled his fedora on his head.

– I’m sorry, she blubbered, her fingers over her nose, trying to stem the tears.

– Looks like you need a tissue, he said, and began patting the pockets of his blazer. – Aha! Found one!

He brandished a mangled shred of Kleenex. – I only blew my nose in it once, he said. – In this corner. You can use any of the other three corners. Go ahead. Looks like you need it.

She dabbed her eyes and wiped her nose. Handed the tissue back. She took a deep breath.

– I don’t want to hear about your problems, he said. – Sorry, but I must be frank.

He scuttled away through the door leading to the stairs.

Edith claws through the chlorinated water in the university’s Olympic-sized swimming pool. She squints though her goggles. Seven-thirty-five a.m. Soon it will be 8 a.m. and her day basically gone. Wasted!

Because her book will come out just in time to list it on this year’s AAO, a published book the holy grail for a high VI, at least ten VI, or maybe even eleven VI, and Dean Vermeulen and his punching bag will not refresh her. Her book will unfresh her.

She pushes silver bubbles out of her nose. Her hands droop toward the pool floor.

She wishes she could drunk dial and weep and rave on the phone to Coral like she used to. But that would be dysfunctional. And Vivianne says no. And Coral’s been away.

Coral’s coming back. Coral might already be back. Coral is a passionate person. Edith worries that Coral’s returning passion might affect Edith’s AAO score. The dean grades on a curve.

That murky, bumping sound of water spilling into Edith’s ears.

She should be catching up on her critical theory, not frolicking in pools in the middle of the day. Like she’s a Lady Who Lunches. A Lady Who Laps.

She pulls herself up the metal stairs from the water up onto the pool deck, water streaming from her ears, her goggled eyes foggy.

She raises her arms like she’s just won a race. She exercised!