any event, according to his students, he had simply walked in with his head down and started to read from the text, “sort of shouting” as one student put it. Sometimes he read a short story, sometimes two. He never looked at them. Towards the end of the week one student asked him what he was doing and he said he was acquainting them with the text.
It was a breakdown, of course; we’ve seen them before and we should have realised it, so we felt a bit guilty about him.
When he disappeared, some of us did penance by offering to teach a bit of his course, including our chairman, who stays out of the classroom if he can. Now, finally, we had a replacement.
“Have you met a class yet?” I asked Masaka, as I already thought of her, without losing the feeling of weird-ness at finding myself the colleague and roommate of Madame Butterfly and realizing why Pinkerton got hooked.
“This will be my first one.” She looked at her watch. “At ten,” she said.
“What do you plan to do?” I asked.
She took her time, knitting her brows at me slightly, then gave a small shrug. “Teach them,” she said, and picked up her stack of paper and left.
chapter six
Did I say something wrong?” I enquired of Ginger.
“I’d say that your last question was paternalistic, at least, which you might have got away with, but also possibly, to her e ar, chauvinistic, and quite likely racist.”
“Oh, fuck off. How come?”
“Would you have asked me that on my first day?” He went into a parody of how I looked when I asked the question, leaning forward nearly hunch-backed, open-mouthed, wet-lipped, a soppy smile on my face. “If you had asked me, I’d have told you to stuff it up your jacksie. As she did.”
I sighed. I do my best to rid myself of all the prejudices and attitudes I was brought up with, but it’s not easy to stop feeling protective when a pretty creature like Masaka flies too close to the flame, and to remember that “protective” these days is spelt “chauvinist”.
The door opened. The psychologist across the corridor put his head in. “Hambone,” he said.
I was puzzled. This man used to enjoy testing us on literary or grammatical matters—Richard Costril had theorized that he yearned to be regarded as an honorary member of the department—but we had not heard from him for a long time.
Feeling a trick, but having a go anyway, I began “You mean the bone ...”
Ginger cut me off. “Mr. Bones,” he said. “A hambone’s a white comedian, working in blackface and with an accent like Jack Benny’s Rochester. I played the part once in a variety show in grammar school. You couldn’t do it now, even in Scunthorpe.”
“Who are you?”
I introduced him to Ginger, realizing that probably that was what he wanted.
“Well done,” I said to Ginger, when the psychologist had disappeared. “That true?”
“As I sit here,” Ginger said. “Now, what do you think of the new roommate.” He got up and closed the door.
“You have your eye on her?”
“Don’t be silly. I had coffee with her yesterday, when she first arrived.”
Why was that silly? Had he finally met a pretty girl he didn’t like? She seemed to me a perfect quarry, for him. Me, I am naturally monogamous. I’m not puffed-up about it; maybe it’s just that I have a fairly low libido, compared to Ginger, at least. So why was I being silly? Did just asking the question show how silly or naïve I am?
I pondered the possibility that it was obvious to Ginger that Masaka was bespoke, or utterly celibate, or a Japanese nun, and decided that maybe Ginger was just saying that you don’t make passes at office mates because of the impossibility, especially for the other office mates, of living an ordinary day-to-day existence afterwards. I said, “You mean it would create an atmosphere?”
He looked at me, then at his hands on the desk, then, in apparent mild despair at his inability to find the language for what was so obvious, looked away from me, waiting for the coin to drop, then said, after another pleading look, “Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?” Then he changed the subject. “You’ve heard the news?” he asked.
I could tell by the way he lowered his voice and glanced at the door he didn’t mean the news from Beirut or even Ottawa. Department news, possibly even college news. I shook my head. “I just walked in,” I said. “I saw the crowds running along the halls, but I just assumed the dam had broken. No?”
“Sarky fooker,” he said. “I’ll tell yer: Fred’s been made Dean. We’re lewkin’ for a new chairman. Temporary, I would think.”
I’m doing my best here to indicate that Ginger slips into dialect occasionally, especially when he’s savouring a piece of news and wants to put a ribbon round his words.
“What happened to Peer Gynt?”
The dean’s name is Peder Gaunt and he’s Swedish by descent not Norwegian, but he had once been nicknamed Peer Gynt by a sophisticated security guard and it had stuck. Nobody bore him any malice; it was just a crude mnemonic.
“He’s become Associate Vice-President.”
“Christ! That makes three of the buggers.” When I came to Hambleton there was just one assistant vice-president; now there are about ten of them, associates and assistants.
“No, no. He’s replacing someone called Sam Coombs.”
“Who’s become a full vice-president?”
“I understand he’s been called to The Buildings. That’s what I heard. ’He’s been called to The Buildings,’ Nell said.” Nell is the department secretary. “What does that mean?”
“It means the government wants Coombs as an assistant deputy or some such because the Ministry of Education is screwing up again. When someone is ’called to The Buildings’ he has to go right away. So we need a new chairman.”
“That’s reet, laddie,” Ginger crowed, his chair legs crashing down. “Now you’ve got it. So who shall we have?”
I felt a mild impulse to administer a small snub. Ginger was a new boy and to put himself eye-to-eye with someone very much his senior, without asking, was presumptuous, and then I remembered in plenty of time that tenured people felt exactly that way about me. And Ginger was only saying that he and I were equal in one respect: neither of us would get to vote for the new chairman.
“This is going to be fun to watch,” I said. “Who is applying?”
“No one so far that I’ve heard. Who is eligible?”
“Everybody.”
“You?”
“No. I’m Nobody, like you, remember?”
“Ah,
