‘The trip. Do you think my marks are high enough?’
I look at him. At the genuine hope there. At the notebook where he’s already written VIENNA in capital letters and underlined it twice.
‘Your marks are fine,’ I say. Because they are. Femi studies like breathing depends on it.
The words don’t come out. My marks look impossible for an eighteen-year-old who never studies. Anyone looking too hard will either call me a genius or assume coaching, and both paths lead to disaster.
Vienna is the one place the man I’m sleeping with could touch me in daylight, and that’s everything.
‘Applications by Friday,’ Deakin says. ‘Email my office.’
Friday. Two days.
I look at Laurence again.
This time, he’s looking back—half a second. A wire pulled taut across the room.
Then he turns to the colleague beside him, logistics, and he’s professional, and I’m sitting in the back row with my blood doing things that have nothing to do with applied mathematics.
I’m probably the first student to apply for Vienna, so I get in. The confirmation lands in my inbox at six.
There’s the programme. A PDF. Forty-two pages. Speakers, panels, schedules, a map of the venue, hotel information, and a section about Viennese coffee that sounds written in a dead language.
I scroll.
Speakers. Panel A, Panel B.
The name is on page eleven.
Dr Hugo Lockhart, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge.
Keynote: ‘Topological Invariants in Non-Linear Dynamic Systems.’
I stop scrolling.
Hugo Lockhart, at the conference. In Vienna. Where Laurence and I will be.
My thumb hovers over the screen.
Everything narrows; only page eleven matters.
Hugo.
Photographs boxed under towels, never discarded because that would mean they mattered.
Will be presenting in Panel B on day two, while I sit in the audience in my Lewisham hoodie and eyeliner, wondering if this is what it feels like to be a rough draft.
I put the phone down. Pick it up, put it down.
The desk at Cambridge, the grin. The frame.
I’m not stupid. I saw the photo. The office, the leaded glass, the younger man on the desk. A thing I wasn’t ready for.
Now it has a keynote.
Laurence hasn’t mentioned it.
Laurence checks his email like other people check pulses. He’s read Hugo’s name. He knows Hugo will be there.
