Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

‘Sims? No way.’

‘You can’t put Sims in front of students, Thomas. Not even our students.’

‘Excuse-’

‘Not at all right for this department. In the last analysis, it’s about the right kind of person.’

‘What’s wrong with him? It’s a pretty convincing application.’

‘Like for a start he’s got this totally anachronistic great works fetish. You know, courses on…’ Anthea appeared to be groping after a dim recollection. ‘Things like Shakespeare,’ she said fi nally.

‘Think of a fog, Thomas. An industrious one.’

‘He chaired my paper on “The Limits of Poetry”. Claimed I’d run out of time when I’d barely started.’ Dodd said, ‘He was quite impertinent about it. Definitely the wrong kind of person.’

There followed minutes of satisfying gossip about the applicant. (Vernon: ‘… of course Sims swears he was only tucking in his shirt.’)

‘Excuse me, Professor.’ For Tosh was not without heroism. ‘If a candidate meets the selection criteria, HR would defi nitely advocate interviewing him. Or her.’

Cheered by the prospect of snubbing an enemy, Dodd was no worse than avuncular. ‘At the end of the day, Tosh, it’s more than a matter of a level playing field. Or, to put it less poetically, we can’t let mere regulations constrain our-’

‘Originality?’

‘Freedom. Academic freedom,’ said Dodd, with meaningful emphasis. He leaned back in his chair, knees wide. (Vernon: ‘It’s the kind of crotch that follows you about the room.’) On the superior side of the chasm separating academic from administrative mind, professorial teeth came together with a hard little snap.

‘There’s Helen, of course,’ said Anthea.

This entirely predictable turn provoked the usual spasm of disquiet. Vernon murmured, ‘Again?’ But it lacked conviction.

There were two grave impediments to Helen Neill’s career: she was a conscientious, gifted teacher, and she was bringing up two young children on her own. Years after enrolling in a PhD, she had yet to complete her thesis. Her scholarship had long run out. She lived on the contract teaching that came her way from tenured staff using research grants to buy themselves out of classroom hours and marking. Their careers prospered; hers did not.

Collective guilt about Helen ran high. It was assuaged by interviewing her for every entry-level lectureship that came up in the department. Afterwards, Anthea would take her out to lunch and explain that the panel had been compelled to appoint a candidate with publications and a doctoral degree.

‘She’s made excellent progress recently.’ Anthea spoke in the bright, determined tone she reserved for Helen. ‘I’m sure she’ll have a complete draft by the end of summer.’ It was a topic on which she was a practised liar.

There hung in her colleagues’ minds an image of Helen Neill: shaggy, overweight, fatally mild. She interviewed badly, lacking sleep and the necessary confidence in her genius.

‘We’re not obliged to interview her,’ said Dodd. ‘ Applicants must have completed a doctoral degree . There’s your bottom line. No reason to start shifting the goalposts.’

‘Excuse me-’

‘It would be grossly inconsiderate not to interview her. Tom, Vernon?’

Tosh said in a rush, ‘Within context-sensitive parameters, HR strongly advises against unsuccessing in-house candidates.’ His hair had shaken free in two shining wings. He was an angel who did not fear to tread.

Kevin Dodd would have done very well as a goldfish; it was something about the set of his ears. ‘Well, if we’re pushing the envelope… The young English lass, what’s her name now- Felton?’

Tom looked up. Rebecca Finton was the DPhil on his list.

‘Becky Finton, that’s it. She was at the Modern Times conference in Zürich.’ Dodd cleared his throat. ‘Very, ah, striking.’

Vernon angled his pad towards Tom. ‘SHAGADELIC! PHWOAR!!’

The meeting went on being progressed.

Anthea held the lift for him.‘Can you believe Kevin?’ She thrust out her lower lip and blew a little puff of air upwards. The springy red curls on her forehead shook.

A poster beside them warned of a graduate forum on ‘Performing Masculinity’. Bruce Lee’s body, taught with fury…

Anthea said, ‘It’s OK for you to laugh. That’s one of my students.’ Then she laughed anyway. ‘Lunch?’

‘Love to, but I’ve got to dash.’

The door pinged open.‘We’re having a party. I’ll email you.’ Thirty seconds later she called, ‘Bring your girlfriend.’

When he turned, she was smiling. ‘So it’s true.’

He thought, then said, ‘Esther.’

‘Three degrees of separation in this town, Tommo.’

‘Really, that many?’

That Nelly and he were coupled in gossip pleased him. He walked to the car park through light strokes of rain. From the dome of an umbrella going the other way a voice said, ‘Yeah, but will I like philosophy?’

In talk at least he lay enlaced with Nelly. Tom’s fi ngers curved in his pocket, assuming the round weight of her breast.

On the way to the Preserve, his mood darkened. The premonition of failure returned and spread its wings. Stuck in traffi c he stared past his wipers, seeing his book unpublished, his career stagnating. The pursuit of knowledge: as a young man he had thought it honourable, a twentieth-century way to be good.

His faith had wilted when exposed to departmental realpolitik; had shrivelled before the academy’s whole-hearted adoption of corporate values and the pursuit of profi t over larger aims. Yet a trace of his original reverence had endured, as a phial of scent perfumes a drawer long after the last subtle drops have evaporated. The constant element in a life is usually the product of illusion, dreams directing history with surer cunning than any charter. Perfection of the life, or of the work . Tom had never hesitated; never imagined he might botch both.

There came to him, with graphic intensity, a memory from his first year of teaching. Lecturing on Dubliners , he had looked up from his notes and seen a student slip from the theatre: silhouetted against a bright oblong before the door swung shut behind her. Tom found himself controlling an impulse to shout encouragement, urging her to flee while there was time. Only weeks earlier his appointment had filled him with elation. Now he gripped the lectern and saw the track on which his days would run.

He pressed the button that lowered the car window. Despite the gloom, the air no longer pinched. The mild, rainy afternoon, scented with exhaust, might have been Indian. Another self flickered at the edge of Tom’s vision: short-sleeved, subtitled in Hindi. He climbed a grimy stairway, through waftings of urine and mustard seed. On a bus bulging with bodies, he reached past layers of hands that matched his own.

For a period in Tom’s adolescence this parallel life had been very real to him. He could still call up a repertoire of scenes rehearsed to perfection. They were not nostalgic, not a revisiting of childish haunts, but sustained visions of an Indian existence. Their function was propitiatory. If he set himself to imagine an Indian life, he would not be returned to one. This bargain with fate involved dropping down the social scale, so that every element of his fictional existence-the clothes he wore, the food he ate, the language he spoke-was borrowed from lives remote from his own. Thus, at the sight of a Friday night treat of fish and chips, Tom pictured himself squatting over a tin plate of spiced pulses. He strolled between the laden shelves of a supermarket while serving glasses of germ-ridden water in a squalid teashop.