My knees ached from sitting so long as I got up. Jonah gave me an awkward half-smile as we walked to the front of the room. I didn’t reciprocate.
‘Most of you will already know about Sadie Shaw joining us, from the email that went round a few weeks ago,’ Petrovski said. ‘I’m delighted to tell you all, though, that with some elbow grease and begging to the budgetary gods, we’ve also managed to hire her husband.’
He clapped Jonah hard on the shoulder. ‘I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to have Dr Jonah Fisher joining our department. He’s a Shakespearean scholar of the highest calibre – and those of us who have been around the traps for a while will be very well acquainted with his father, Professor Christian Fisher, a titan of literary studies scholarship in this country.’
Oh, absolutely fuck this.
I looked for Julia in the audience – surely she would have a hot take on what complete bullshit this was – but she was gazing at Jonah, eyes wide, lips parted, looking slightly stunned.
And that didnotmake me feel a combination of possessive and jealous amid all my disquiet, and didnotremind me of the whole ‘we could be the Sartre and de Beauvoir of Literary Studies’ thing I’d said to Jonah when I’d pitched him on the concept of getting married at all.
Jonah and I didn’t have a chance to talk after the meeting. When it concluded, no one seemed to have any appetite to get back to work, lingering instead over the tea and coffee and soggy sandwiches. A host of people came and introduced themselves to us, a sea of names and faces I definitely would not remember, pulling us in different directions.
I didn’t get to talk to Julia either. ‘I have to head off,’ she told me as soon the meeting ended, ‘but I’ll send you an email about the love studies research network, okay?’
She was gone before I could tell her she should send one to Jonah too – given his work centred on relationships, he’d probably be interested – but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
It was nearly five by the time Jonah and I extricated ourselves from a long conversation with Petrovski – a conversation which I’d really only been part of on a technicality, given he addressed everything he said to Jonah. ‘Our first rental inspection is at five fifteen,’ Jonah said, when we were by ourselves at last. ‘Do you want to head off?’
I nodded.
He shouldered his satchel. I picked up my handbag. As we started walking, I began an irritated mental countdown. He would pick the next stupid fight in five, four, three, two…
But he didn’t say anything.
Jonah Fisher was not, in my experience, a brooder. It was one of the few ways he deviated from the dark academia aesthetic to which he was otherwise so wedded. He could bequiet, yes – I couldn’t count the number of times I’d seen him settled in a corner of the couch in the share house, reading, oblivious to everything going on around him – but he didn’t really brood.
Maybe I didn’t know him that well, though, because the man inspecting these properties with me clearly had some kind of higher degree in brooding.
He uttered approximately four syllables during our first two inspections. Two of them were ‘no’, flatly stated. I didn’t like the places either so I didn’t argue, but when we got to our third and final inspection of the evening, I tried turning his own tactic against him. ‘We could make this place work,’ I told him, standing in the middle of the horrible kitchen of a horribly expensive tumbledown house.
‘You wanted green space for your garden. There isn’t any.’
‘I could figure something out. Maybe there’s a community garden nearby.’
He sighed. ‘If you want it, fine. Let’s put in an application.’ Having already decided I would rather live in our prison cell office on campus, I promptly had to backpedal.
‘Okay, out with it,’ I snapped, when my second attempt to start an argument – suggesting we take an Uber to Fiona’s place in Bellerive, which was only a few minutes’ walk away – resulted in Jonah simply taking out his phone. ‘What’s up your arse, Fisher?’
He just looked at me.
‘You’ve spent the last day and a half picking the pettiest fights you can think of and now you’re like a fucking limp noodle.’ Why had I phrased it aswhat’s up your arse? His arse was the last thing I needed to be thinking about. ‘Out with it. Why are you sulking?’
His expression changed, morphing into a classic Tweed JonahYou fool, Sadie Shaw, I can’t believe you can’t see the massive flaw in the argument you just presentedface. ‘Why do you think?! You were at the meeting.’
‘The one where they were like, “Oh yes, we hired this woman, but let’s talk about the really important thing: WE HIRED THIS MAN!”? I was indeed there, watching you sit elbow to elbow with every power player in the room.’
‘They sat down next to me! Because of my fucking dad!’
He ran his hand through his hair, tugging hard at the ends. ‘For my entire life, the only way anyone has ever perceived me is as an accessory to some fucking better scholar. Christian Fisher’s son. Elias Fisher’s brother. Sadie Shaw’s husband.’
I rolled my eyes.
‘And I can’t escape it!’ He tugged at his hair again. ‘No matter what I do, I can’t get away from it! I’m never just Jonah Fisher, scholar. I’m permanently stuck in other people’s orbits.’
‘Grow up.’
‘What?!’
