He asks about bounded sequences. A straightforward question, about whether a specific example converges, and the answer isno. Still, it has two convergent subsequences, and everyone else in the room is sitting on their hands because it’s week three and the well of freshers willing to try has run dry. He moves his gaze across the back row. Doesn’t stop. I feel it not stop: tiny exhale, eyes up, the reflex living too close to my surface.
He’s already turned back to the board. I didn’t volunteer. He didn’t ask me. Nothing happened.
Nothing happened so loudly that it rearranged the wiring behind my sternum.
The lecture ends.
People funnel out, I stay seated. My excuse is on standby,dropped my pen, looking for it, sorry, but nobody asks, because nobody cares what a boy in the back row is doing at the end of a nine AM lecture. Femi stands, slings his bag, and hesitates next to my row.
‘Ewan.’
‘Go ahead. I’ll catch up.’
He finds my eyes, then the stage. The decision moves across his face. Say it, don’t say it. He settles on the small curt nod of a friend choosing not to be a problem. He goes.
The theatre empties in ninety seconds. Always faster than it fills.
And there’s me, and him.
He’s at the lectern in no rush, capping his marker, stacking his notes into the canvas bag he brings. The bag is waxed canvas, the strap darkened from wear. A small detail I’ve already mapped. He wipes the board.
He moves with deliberation. Everybody else in this building moves like there’s a bus to catch. He moves like whatever’s next will wait.
I get up. Slow. I take my time stuffing the empty notebook into my bag. I walk down the centre aisle because the side aisles feel furtive, and the centre aisle is a line I can pretend is the shortest route to the door. Seventeen rows, sixteen. Fifteen.
I’m not going to speak to him—that’s the second promise of the day—I’m going to walk past, out the door, back into the corridor, and whatever week three is meant to feel like.
By row five, my legs rebel, and my pace slows.
At row three, I stop altogether and pretend to fix the strap of my bag.
Haldrey doesn’t look up. Doesn’t acknowledge the straggler. He’s cleaning with a cloth the last of the lesson business with a sweep that goes from right to left because he’s left-handed—how have I only just noticed that? The small shift in my stomach is alarming.
‘Did you need something?’
He hasn’t turned round. He’s speaking at the whiteboard. The voice is calm, kind, almost, and theDid you need somethingis aimed exactly at where I’m standing.
My pulse goes stupid.
‘Sorry?’ I say. Buying the half-second. Pretending the question was ambient.
Now he turns, unhurried, cloth in hand. Glasses slightly down his nose from the wiping motion, he pushes them up with his knuckle—a small gesture, utterly domestic—and I want to put my teeth on his jaw.
‘I said, did you need something.’
The voice is the voice—the one from the lecture, but stripped of projection. The Lancashire vowels sit differently without an audience: less performance, more breath. He’s looking at me straight on. Glasses. Eyes behind them—the full professional courtesy of a man asking if a student has a question, nothing underneath.
‘Nah,’ I say. The MLE slips out, too casual, too mine. I catch myself mid-word. ‘I mean, no. No, sir. I was just, the bag.’
I lift the strap slightly as if it’s evidence.
He glances at the strap. Looks at me. Glances at the strap again, briefly, and I canfeelhim clock that the buckle is intact, the strap isn’t twisted, and I’ve been fake-fiddling with a non-problem.
‘Right.’
That’s all he says.Right.A placeholder for a longer sentence he’s chosen not to deliver.
He goes back to the board. Wipes the last arc of residue, sets the cloth down.
