by Luke Horton
Ollie was giddy with joy, giggling and growling like a monster as he ripped into the skin of his chicken. He talked nonstop. Told them stories of everything he had seen during the day, some of which they had all seen, and some of which they had not. How much was imagined was hard to tell. Boys his age zooming past on motorbikes, a girl surfing the waves while they played frisbee, whom neither Tom nor Jeremy had seen. Clara encouraged him, wanting more details, which he never tired of furnishing. By the time the girl got on her motorbike, put on silver goggles, and drove off in a cloud of smoke with her surfboard under one arm, they were clapping.
After Ollie was asleep, Madeleine and Jeremy crept back out for another drink. It was the first time they had done this, but everyone was caught up in the mood, and they were nearing the end of their time together. In two days they would part ways — Madeleine, Ollie, and Jeremy to the Gili Islands, Tom and Clara on to Ubud.
At tables on the sand, under the warm glow of the bamboo lamps and candles on white tablecloths, they ordered beers — although in the end Clara declined, said she was too tired, alcohol would put her to sleep, and ordered a soda water — and they toasted to themselves, to having a successful holiday, having any sort of holiday. They joked about coming back next year, coming back every year.
And we’ll be introduced to your little bébé, Madeleine said. A boy, too, I think it will be, and they’ll become the best of friends, and we’ll see each other every July, and they can play together while we sit by the pool and drink. Yes? Or you both get jobs in Paris, or Europe somewhere, and we see you there instead, take research trips to Greek islands?
Tom and Clara laughed along, deflected the kids thing by making self-deprecating comments about how they’d never get jobs in European universities, they hadn’t published enough, but they agreed to it — Oh fine, they said, we’ll do it — although Tom noticed that Clara would not meet his eye.
9
It was one of those nights when everything felt more vivid. There was no chance of sleep because everything, including him, was monstrously, throbbingly alive. Maybe it was that the moon was full. The room was mostly dark, but he could tell the moon was full because, through the shutters, it cast six bright bands of pale-blue light against the bed and the walls.
He turned onto his other side, faced the air conditioner. The unit was loud, but he could still hear things above it: crickets, frogs, the shrieking of other creatures, birds of some kind, monkeys maybe. Something big scampering across the roof of a nearby bungalow.
He got up. Tiptoed to the door and found the iron ring-pull. The porch was in darkness, but beyond that everything was bathed in the same bright, but kind of washed-out blue. Short, bare trees and tropical flowers were motionless and finely detailed against the grey sand. He wanted to lie down on that neatly raked sand, so soft and cool-looking, but he dared not do this — who knew what was crawling around there at night — so he stepped out barefoot onto the path and looked up at the sky. Looked for the moon, but now it was hidden. The upper reaches of the tallest trees above him moved a little in some higher breeze, and he looked around for the monkeys, but there was no sign of them.
He followed the path towards the beach. The restaurant was dark and still, the boardwalk was dark and still, all the signs and all the people packed up for the night. The beach was cooler, the merest breeze, but it was not inviting. He worried about rubbish, about stepping on a needle that had yet to be raked under the sand.
He turned back and went the other way, all the way back through the grounds to the entrance of the hotel and the curving white-pebble driveway. There, outside a row of low-lying buildings set off from the entrance to the hotel by a knee-high rope fence — they had peeked into these buildings one day when a door was left open to see a mess of mattresses, sheets, and towels in plastic — a woman was getting onto the back of a motorcycle. He recognised her from the hotel. She had served him breakfast at least once, brought drinks over to the pool. She was in jeans and a T-shirt now. Her traditional clothes — her uniform — were hanging in the room with the mattresses maybe. If she saw him, there was no acknowledgement. She got on the back of the motorbike, folded her arms in front of her, and rested gently against the man’s back, and they drove off.
He went back to the room. Pushed open the little cupboard-sized doors that led to their secret room with the daybeds. He picked one, lay down, and looked out at the wall of green that shielded the room from other guests. He thought of taking a look at one of the job ads Madeleine had sent through to him, but he didn’t have the energy left to get his phone from the other room. He didn’t really want a job, anyway. A permanent job. Being an uncontracted sessional was a nightmare in many ways, but it was his nightmare, and he had found his place in it. He could do without a whole new set of things to worry about.
The whole thing was too depressing. All the hope people like Madeleine had for them and their ‘careers’. The word career itself was exhausting. The reality was that he had no great love for his field, no real interest in pursuing it, no projects he was excited about embarking upon, no ideas for a book proposal. He wasn’t angry about the whole thing, not anymore; he was simply jaded. And ashamed. All the effort, all those years of research and writing, and peer assessment by experts and editors of journals no one had heard of. All of it going into something whose only real justification was the perpetuation of itself. The need to publish. To have published. So you could support a claim to a contract, which in turn helped the funding cause of the faculty and the university. But not, primarily, so your work would be read. So you could contribute anything real. No.
He wasn’t an architect, a builder, a planner, a designer — someone who had any influence on the built environment or our negotiation of it, now or in the future. He was someone who wrote about these things. Someone who, if he ever wrote a book, which was less likely with every passing year, would write one that no one would read. Possibly almost literally, no one would read his book. Surely there was something more worthy of his time, what was left of his energy.
In light of this, Clara’s attempts to get out of it, to find something else to do besides being an academic, a writer of books that were not read, a worker in an industry that had fewer jobs every year, seemed sensible. But she had never found the right thing. Organic gardening, landscaping, a ranger for the national parks … she’d had many ideas, some of which were accompanied by short bursts of enthusiasm that inevitably petered out. It didn’t dishearten her. She knew she wasn’t without talent; that it had never been honed strongly in one direction or another seemed to be okay by her. Sometimes he wondered if one of her greatest talents was to be so magnanimous in the face of all of that. To be basically untroubled by not having one great calling or whatever, however silly the idea sounded when you said it out loud. She tried things, they ran their course, and she moved on to the next one. She had downgraded these ideas for alternative careers as time went on, and as she found more work teaching and more success getting her work published — found herself to be, after all, a talented academic who wrote things people, in fact, wanted to read. And, rather than escape hatches, they became hobbies that ran alongside her research: pottery, after his mother had taught her some things; photography; sewing. Things that made her precarious work and her interminable doctorate bearable. While he stuck to his one thing, his only thing, terrified that it might not work out because he had no idea what else he would do if it didn’t. He didn’t have anything else, but even if he did ever think of pursuing other things — once there were musical aspirations, but nothing ever got off the ground — he knew he would be too scared to actually go through with it, to switch so late in the game.
But he liked teaching. Or he did now. The first time he thought he wasn’t going to make it through the semester.
That first class was an introductory, survey subject on urban history, which he had taken himself four years earlier, but barely remembered a thing
about. He was given a week’s notice. He took beta-blockers and Valium before every one of those twelve classes.
It was made worse by the fact he had a difficult student that first time. A tall, fleshy, vaguely unkempt twenty-year-old called Brendan, who carried around with him an apparently empty backpack and a scuffed-up notepad full of scrawled notes and doodles. His presence in the room was disruptive from the beginning; everything about his demeanour suggested boredom and hostility. The way he arrived late and shuffled noisily through the tables to his one friend, Shella, an alert and sly-looking young woman who smirked at Tom nastily through class. The way he then sat slumped in his chair with his hands in his pockets most of the hour, staring at the ceiling, the notepad sitting untouched in front of him on the table — when he wasn’t passing it back and forth with Shella and sniggering.
Each week, Brendan’s attitude would be an undeniable yet silent presence in the room until close to the end of class, when he would snap out of it as if from a nap, or as if, suddenly, he had reached the absolute limit he could take of all this inane bullshit. He would take over completely then, and, while still staring at the ceiling or the door, drone out a long diatribe on some very minor technical point of contention — the efficacy of early modern bastion forts against cannon fire, for example — or on something big and discursive and obliquely insulting, like the hopelessly romanticised version of Jane Jacobs v Robert Moses that was being taught in the class.
Tom was repeatedly caught out of his depth on these subjects, his knowledge not extending far beyond the readings and, if he was lucky, a few other, half-remembered points he had picked up over the years in other subjects — he had forgotten so much, it seemed. But he managed to keep up with Brendan intellectually at least, he thought. He managed to hold his own, and sometimes he was able to successfully mount counterarguments, or, better yet, use Brendan’s rants as the basis of class discussion, assigning to sections of the room opposing positions, which sometimes, miraculously, seemed to go well. As far as he was concerned, anything that got them talking, for even a few minutes, was a win; making it through the hour each week was such a task. But Brendan never softened up. He remained as begrudging and mute and suddenly overbearing as ever.
Brendan was late with assignments. He feigned surprise when they came up, and when he got them back and was marked down for his lateness, his lapses in expression, his grammatical errors, the lack of referencing — although Tom was too scared to mark him down too strictly — he waved away the marks, claimed to have done the assignments in an afternoon.
In the second half of semester, the students gave talks on their research essay. Nothing too formal. Tom wasn’t going to force them to put together PowerPoint slideshows or even, if they didn’t want to, get up in front of the class. His increasing desperation to get them to like him, to get them onside, made him wildly flexible with most assessments — and this one was worth so little, he couldn’t care less how they approached it, although getting to ten minutes was important to him because it was time off the clock.
When it was Brendan’s turn to speak, he looked around the room, like always, as if he’d just woken up.
Oh, that was today? he said, although they had been going through the roll alphabetically, and Tom didn’t really think this was lost on him. He dismissed Tom’s offer to move his talk to the following week, however, and got up from his desk.
I don’t have anything ready, but I’ll do it now anyway, I guess, he said, and he ambled through the tables to the front of the room.
May I? he said, gesturing to the whiteboard, and he uncapped a marker pen and began drawing on the board. It was a complex diagram, and messy. Tom noticed that he held the marker in his fist, like a child. The class sat in silence for several minutes while he finished. During that time — Tom pretended not to notice — Shella was watching him with something like malicious glee.
Brendan’s talk was rambling and convoluted, but Tom could not deny that it showed an impressive depth of knowledge and an ability to connect disparate facts across centuries and disciplines (in a talk on the contemporary town hall, there was something about wheat-eating as one of the causes of sewage problems in the Late Middle Ages, which Tom wanted to stop him to explain but didn’t dare). He used the entire whiteboard to illustrate his points, drawing several diagrams of alternative street layouts in Australian country towns, and then roamed the room authoritatively while he spoke, occasionally rubbing his temples or grumpily pushing his fringe out from his eyes — the only signs he was more nervous in front of the class than he let on. He even stared out the window for a portion of it, thoughtfully, as he tried to pull it all together at the end, which he struggled to do, stammering a few times through his closing remarks.
When he finally finished, after almost twenty minutes — Tom had raised eyebrows at him a few times at twelve minutes, then fifteen, but was ignored — Shella led the class with an ovation, while holding Tom’s gaze meaningfully, as if to say, See? That’s how it is done. Tom remembered trying to return to her a similarly meaningful smile, an indulgent smile, hoping to convey to her that the kid had been a touch over the top, of course, but sure, it was entertaining, and, not to worry, he was not threatened by him — in fact, he found the whole thing mildly amusing. And he could see how this infuriated her.
At the end of the second-last class for the semester, as the students filed out of the room, Tom wished them well on the final essay and felt an overwhelming sense of relief. He was elated. It was finally nearly over. In the break, he would sleep twelve hours a night and not leave the house for a week. Then he would snap out of it and mark everyone’s work.
He gathered his things, moved through the chairs and around the large tables that crowded the room, and saw something underneath one of the tables on the floor. It was Brendan’s notepad. Brendan had left early, like he always did, with Shella following him — by this point Tom wondered if they were romantically involved — so there was no use chasing after them, they were long gone. He pocketed it. But not before looking inside. He almost didn’t, but he couldn’t help himself. He reasoned he had to be sure whose it was, although he knew that notepad well. There were very few actual notes, of course — mostly pages of doodles and several pages of chat with Shella. Several of these chats mentioned Tom and the class, as he suspected they might. This class is stupid, Brendan had written. Ugh, I know, she’d replied. He doesn’t know anything; the guy’s an idiot; so annnooyyying; you should be teaching this class; I should be; ha ha.
Tom wondered if he should just bin the notebook — surely Brendan attached very little importance to it himself and would not miss it — but in the end, he didn’t, because he relished too much the opportunity of presenting it back to Brendan the following week.
You left this behind last week? he said, as diffidently as possible, although his hand was visibly shaking. And Brendan, blushing, not meeting his eye, took it off him without a word. It was everything Tom had hoped for. He was the grown-up here, and he had claimed the moral high ground by overlooking Brendan’s badmouthing of him and the class, by being gracious and mature about it, and also by giving Brendan a break by maintaining the pretence — which Brendan clearly knew to be a pretence; after all, his name was not on the pad — of not seeing what was written inside it.
Brendan’s major essay for the class, worth 50 per cent of the subject’s overall mark, was, like his earlier reports and his talk, an undisciplined polemic that roamed freely from topic to topic and made, in the end, no coherent argument. Or not one Tom could easily fathom. Tom was at a loss with how to mark it. He was privately glad it was a mess, and thus probably couldn’t be given a high mark, even a mediocre one, but he also feared Brendan might dispute the mark, or complain about him if he didn’t reward him for being the smartest person in the class. He might expose Tom as the fraud he was as a teacher, or at the very least give him a scathing student evaluation — although that was proba
bly coming either way. In the end, he passed it on to the coordinator of the subject to mark, his supervisor, Henry Ales.
Henry smiled when Tom told him about Brendan and, when he read the essay, agreed with Tom’s assessment of it — that while this was obviously an impressive mind, he had a long way to go with his academic writing, and what he had handed in could not really be called a research essay at all. There was so little proper referencing, and it would have to be marked accordingly. Henry told him not to worry, he would deal with it, and that Brendan would be given the option of failing or rewriting the essay for a pass. Inside, Tom rejoiced. He never did find out which option Brendan had taken.
It wasn’t a good start, and the next few semesters were almost as bad. Beta-blockers and Valium before class, frequent trips to the bathroom during the hour to guzzle water, wipe himself down, and huge relief and drinking too much once it was over. Unshakable exhaustion. Sometimes, at home, he caught Clara looking at him with something that was probably concern. But over time, he no longer needed the beta-blockers or the Valium, and, eventually, teaching became his favourite part of the week.
He was lucky for a few years to have the same subjects each semester. This built his confidence; he knew the material well and needed little preparation. And he began to establish a good rapport with his students. He increasingly received positive, even glowing, student evaluations — he was still a pushover — and he enjoyed the feeling of being an authority that was appealed to, of having an opinion that was taken seriously. More seriously, usually, than the students’ own.
