Oddly enough though, our repeated shattering of the ceasefire led to incredible student satisfaction ratings. Students could be cruel in end-of-unit surveys, but we got raves across the board.Is it weirdto say that I learnt more from Dr Shaw and Dr Fisher disagreeing with each other than anything else?one student wrote.
My favourite thing was watching Sadie during Jonah’s lectures, another wrote.She was practically vibrating with how badly she wanted to fight him. I kept waiting for her entrance music to hit, professional-wrestling style.
We got hired back to co-teach English 10114for the next two years while the unit chair was on research leave – a very lucrative opportunity in the cut-throat world of the precariat. My dad had warned me multiple times that my feud with Sadie could be career-limiting – “you don’t want your name associated in any way withthatkind of scholar,” he kept infuriatingly telling me – but it turned out he did not, in fact, know everything.
Ceasefire #6Now
We were wrapping up our third and final year of teaching English 101 – and were thus about to be flung back headfirst into the endless knife-fight for teaching work that was casual academia – when the sixth ceasefire occurred.
It was the last day of October, which meant it was my thirty-second birthday. My father had called me earlier and told me15that he and my mother would be picking me up at seven and we would be going to dinner. ‘And I mean seven, Jonah,’ he said sharply. ‘We don’t have time for you to be late.’
I was supposed to be at a pretty crucial union meeting, but there was no point arguing with the man who had taught me how to argue. ‘Yes Dad.’
I was ready and waiting in the living room by six forty-five, adjusting the cuffs of my shirt, when Sadie got home. ‘Where are you off to?’ she asked, glancing at me as she hung her keys on the hook marked ‘S’ by the door. ‘You look like you’re about to elbow some peasants aside to get into the last lifeboat on the Titanic.’
‘Not your best insult. Low-hanging fruit. What happened at the union meeting?’
‘If you’d bothered to turn up instead of getting all dressed up to go and grind the faces of the poor, you’d know.’
‘Shaw.’
‘What we all knew was going to happen.’ Her tone was light, but I could see the tension in her jaw. ‘More budget cuts. Casual jobs the first on the chopping block. A wonderfully bright future of unemployment for us all that the union probably won’t be able to do shit about. What’s so important that you couldn’t come and hear the good news for yourself?’ She gestured at my suit. ‘Hot date?’
‘Ha ha. Birthday dinner with my parents.’
Sadie rolled her eyes – possibly at my reason for not attending the union meeting, possibly a reflex at the invocation of my dad, probably both. ‘Happy birthday.’
Before I could parse that there was a nice sentiment underneath the facial expression, she’d already disappeared down the hallway.
And let’s be honest: it wasn’tthatnice. ‘Happy birthday’ is not the kind of phrase you have to put any effort into. It’s inherently citational. It’s always a quotation, reliant on such a distant echo of meaning that it practically means nothing.
It was still the nicest thing anyone said to me all night.
‘Jonah?’
I looked up from where I was slumped over the kitchen table in the dark. I’d taken my glasses off, so the figure of Sadie standing in the doorway was blurry. She was backlit by the hall light, wearing pyjamas,16hair tied up in a topknot that was listing to the left, and she was holding her comically enormous tea mug, the one with the C.S. Lewis quote on the side that said, ‘You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.’
‘Ignore me.’ I went back to resting my forehead on my folded arms.
Her footsteps shuffled across the kitchen. Water ran. There was a click as she flicked the kettle on, a rustle as she found herself a teabag.
‘You know you have a bedroom, right?’
I made a vague noise.
‘Unless you’re so broke you’re subletting it. In which case, the rest of us have to sign off on that.’
The kettle started to boil, softly bubbling.
‘And if you’re that broke, surely your parents—’
‘Don’t.’
My tone was sharp, bordering on aggressive, but when I looked up, Sadie just raised an eyebrow. ‘Birthday dinner went that well, huh?’
I put my head down again.
There was a gentle susurrus as she poured water into her mug, then a heavy clunk as she set it down on the kitchen table. ‘Are you all right?’
