‘About that, yes.’ Sadie put her own bonnet on.
Then, to my surprise, her expression softened a little. ‘I like that a doctorate isn’t really something you can beat someone at, though,’ she said. ‘There’s no, like, super-doctorate. No ultimate academic championship belt. Not today. There’s just this.’
Her eyes met mine in the mirror as she gestured to our regalia. ‘Today might be the first day in our whole careers that neither of us needs to try to win.’
Speak for yourself,the part of me that had grown up around the Fisher family dinner table wanted to say.Don’t get complacent.
But I was an adult now.
‘Congratulations, Dr Shaw,’ I said.
Sadie smiled at me.
It wasn’t the first time she had smiled at me. She had done that plenty of times, a predatory smile that said,I have set a trap and you have fallen right into it, fool.
It was the first time she had smiled at me like this, though – open, unguarded, warm.
‘Congratulations, Dr Fisher.’
The tassel of her PhD bonnet was tangled in her hair. What might happen, I wondered, flexing my fingers, if I reached over and untangled it?
After the ceremony, when we had our testamurs in hand, my eyes met those of the newly minted Dr Sadie Shaw across the wine reception.
She raised her glass to me. I raised mine to her.
‘Jonah, pay attention!’ my dad snapped. ‘I’m trying to help you network!’
He’d pulled over the Head of Humanities from one of the other Sydney-based universities, a man with immense power over staff hiring.
I saw the expression on Sadie’s face change.
Her sister came up behind her and said something in her ear. Sadie replied. Chess’s eyes flicked to me, and the venom in them was unmistakable.Entitled prick from a line of entitled pricks,I heard her snarl again.
I looked away.
And the next day, when Sadie and I ran into each other in the share house kitchen, everything was the same as it had always been, except now it was Dr Shaw and Dr Fisher fighting instead of Ms and Mr.
Ceasefire #5 – English 101Two years ago
Here’s a piece of advice about academia: if you’re interested in secure and stable employment with career progression that pays you a living wage, don’t go into it.11The year Sadie and I graduated, a grand total of five full-time permanent academic jobs in Literary Studies were advertised across the entire country. The next year, it was three. The year after that, four.
Between applying feverishly for these jobs, Sadie and I were working hard in the huge, amorphous body of scholars called the precariat.12We were cobbling together our respective livings through casual teaching gigs at as many universities as would have us, frequently competing for the same meagre hours, reapplying for the same work semester after semester. Before graduation, our PhD scholarships had provided a safety net.13Afterwards, getting casual work was quite literally a matter of survival.
At ESU, our reputations preceded us, so we were only ever hired to teach into different units. Other Sydney-based universities, though, had no knowledge of our lengthy feud – which was how Bass University accidentally hired us to co-teach their big first-year core literary studies unit.
It was a huge deal. Casual staff didn’t often get the opportunity to lecture, especially not to this many students, but the unit chair had got some big grant and all his teaching had been bought out for a few years. Sadie and I were hired to teach three seminars each and split the lecturing fifty-fifty.
‘This is too big a payday for us to ruin by fighting,’ I said, as we sat down at the share house kitchen table to plan our approach. ‘Can we agree to be professional about this?’
‘Firstly, don’t patronise me,’ Sadie said. ‘Secondly, I’m always professional. You’re the one who starts the fights.’
‘That’s not true and you know it.’
‘Keep telling yourself that, Fisher. Let’s just alternate lecture weeks. I’ll take odds, you take evens.’
‘Fine.’
That plan might have worked if we hadn’t had to attend each other’s lectures in order to maintain the continuity of the content. Sadie didn’t like the way I framed Aeschylus’sPrometheus Boundin my week two lecture, so at the beginning of her week three lecture, which was supposed to be onFrankenstein, she had a section entitledPrometheus Bound: An Alternate Perspective.I retaliated in week four, withAnother Look At Frankenstein, and so it went on, the fifth ceasefire broken, week after week.
