Then she’d yanked me in closer.But you have ridden her coattails into a job you do not deserve, she’d said, kicking me face-first into the pit of guilt with steel-capped boots.And if you do one single thing to drag her down – if you hold her back, even a little – I will ruin you.
I had tried kindness. It had worked a little, but not a lot. Too much, perhaps, would smother Sadie, at a time when she could not afford to be smothered.
What she might actually need was not a pillow but a punching bag, somewhere to put all those pent-up feelings.
And much as I did not want to fight anymore – I had to give my wife what she needed.
I owed her that much.
Unlike being married, Ihadimagined having a permanent academic position. Many times.
One of my favourite things to do, if I was neck deep in marking or needed to head off an anxiety spiral about my ongoing insecure employment, was to decorate my dream office, the one I would have one day when I reached the promised land.
My dream office, like my dad’s real one at ESU, would be lined with bookshelves, so full they looked a bit dangerous. Unlike his, though, my office would also be comfortable, welcoming, inviting. Instead of the confrontational lone chair he had in front of his desk to interrogate people, I’d have a couple of comfortable, cosy chairs in a corner, perfect for conversation. Maybe even a couch, with a blanket, in case I or someone else needed to take a nap. A bottle of some kind of dark liquor in my desk drawer – that was my dad again – but two glasses instead of one, drinks shared collegially or compassionately where necessary.
‘Well,’ Sadie said faintly, as we stared into the sixth-floor cupboard we were apparently going to be sharing.
‘Well,’ I echoed.
I traced a finger over the nameplate. All the other nameplates in the corridor were engraved metal, but ours was paper:Dr Sadie Shawtyped in a sans serif font,Dr Jonah Fisherscribbled underneath in blue pen.
All the other doors in the Literary Studies corridor were locked. We’d followed the directions in the first-day email we’d both received and had encountered a lot of people in our first couple of hours of gainful employment at Lyons University – the people in faculty services who had taken our photos for our new staff cards, the IT people who’d given us the work laptops we both had under our arms, the security people who’d handed us the envelope with our office keys inside – but we had not encountered a single one of our new academic colleagues.
The lights in the corridor were on motion sensors. They’dwinked on as we exited the lift. As we stood there, staring into the tiny space we were supposed to share, they winked off again.
‘This is worse than the bed,’ I said, at the same time as Sadie said, ‘This is going to be really awkward when we get divorced.’
We glanced at each other. ‘First day and you’re already fucking up, Shaw,’ I said.
She arched an eyebrow. ‘I’mfucking up?’
‘The only d-word you should be uttering at work,’ I said, nudging her lightly with my elbow, ‘isdarling.’
She rolled her eyes.
We entered our office, something which should have felt like a huge metaphorical leap taking barely a single step. There was hardly enough room for us to stand side by side.
Most academic offices had the desk facing the door, so the occupant could look up from their work and see who was there. To orient a desk that way in this office, though, would require the occupant to vault over it to get to their chair, because there would be no room to walk around it.
Instead, our desks were against the perpendicular walls – although ‘desk’ and ‘against’ were imprecise ways of putting it. They were more white laminate planks than desks, long and narrow, attached to the walls by metal frames.
Sadie put her laptop and her handbag down on the left plank, which was only just wide enough to hold them, and experimented with the winder on the metal frame. ‘At least they go up and down, I guess,’ she said, glancing over at me. ‘That’s something.’
I held her gaze for one beat. Two.
Then we both started laughing.
‘I never thought I’d ever be nostalgic for hot-desking,’ I said, setting my laptop and satchel down on the right plank and trying to wedge myself into my desk chair, ‘but at least that involved actual desks.’
She chuckled again, but then her expression got more serious as she tried to sit down and our chair wheels immediately got tangled. ‘How are we going to get any work done when we’re practically sitting in each other’s laps?’
‘Not a fucking clue,’ I said, forcing teenage Jonah – summoned by the phrasesitting in each other’s laps– back down, lest Project Control enter a new level of disastrous failure. ‘What if one of us needs to have a confidential consultation with a student? What are they supposed to do, stand awkwardly in the doorway while the other one of us puts headphones on and pretends they can’t hear?’
Sadie exhaled. ‘We’re going to have to scope out the campus cafés before semester starts. We’ll have to hold all our office hours there, so we might as well do it at whichever one has the best coffee.’
‘Do you want to start now?’ I asked, half-rising from my chair. ‘It’s not like there’s anyone else here to notice if we go on a coffee—’
‘Oh, there you both are!’
